“WHO CARES” TO THE FORMER, “RARELY THESE DAYS” TO THE LATTER: Are homeschoolers weird? Do the experts know best?
August 4, 2026
NO. NEXT QUESTION? Will mortarboards roll after the Jason Arday allegations?
I am reminded of two examples of showing the threat to the university’s core tenets. One involves a famous little book by philosopher Harry Frankfurt, entitled On Bullshit. There he explored the idea that more harmful than liars to the intellectual health of a nation, or its subdivisions, are ‘those who are almost entirely unconcerned with the truth’. Liars are at least actively aware that the truth exists and are trying to conceal its whereabouts. Bullshitters just don’t care.
Everyone loved that little book and knew exactly the sort of thing Frankfurt was talking about. Yet like intellectual knotweed, this indifference to the truth has proved not only resilient but anti-fragile. It has a few dauntless foes, but from every bloody stump of neck, two or three new heads seem to spring every day.
The second is a quote from 2022 attributed to Katherine Maher, the CEO of NPR and former head of the Wikimedia Foundation: ‘Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.’ I say attributed to – I saw her say it and you can, too. It’s from her TED Talk and she seems to be in no hurry to distance herself from it. She might, of course, argue that the context was important, and she was not talking about the criteria by which we appoint professors to one of the great seats of learning in the history of the world. And maybe she’s right. But honestly, why should I care?
Stay focussed. Demand action in our universities. If not heads, then mortarboards at least must surely roll. And if that suggests an impossibility, given their geometrical properties – well, then I think we know just the man for the job.
As Gareth Roberts writes at the London Spectator on “Why progressives were desperate to believe Jason Arday,” “Such scandals can often be mistaken optimistically for an end to the whole shebang of progressive nonsense – for who could ever take them seriously again? But the roots of progressivism are too deeply embedded in the soil of public life. These hilarious exposures – see also Jussie Smollett – are not strong enough to dislodge them. The daring young man on the flying trapeze may fall to the ground with a splat, but the progressive circus is so big that it just moves on.”
HE’S A PLAGIARIST AND A FABULIST, AND NEEDS TO BE FIRED. END OF DISCUSSION:
"We have a situation where the right is demonstrably 100% correct and the left is 100% wrong, so really there's no way to have a sensible discussion."
Interesting analysis in @nytimes pic.twitter.com/Q3GOcN0Ny1
— Nathan Cofnas (@nathancofnas) August 4, 2026
Either academia is for academics, or it’s a DEI jobs program for the otherwise untrustworthy and unemployable. But it can’t be both.
TRUMP’S WORST ENEMY – HIMSELF: This by Patriot Post’s Nate Jackson captures the why using two very recent illustrations.
DO WOMEN KNOW ABOUT SHRINKAGE? ‘Gym penis’ is real, says nurse — why it happens and when to see a professional.
Two big questions drive the mission. The first is dark energy, the name given to whatever is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. Roman will survey something on the order of a billion galaxies, measuring how they are distributed and subtly distorted, to trace how that expansion has changed across the history of the universe. It is not designed to explain dark energy so much as to measure its effects far more precisely than we can now.
The second is planets. Roman will stare at the crowded star fields toward the centre of our galaxy and watch for gravitational microlensing, the brief brightening that happens when one star, and any planets around it, passes in front of another and bends its light. Monitoring something like 200 million stars, it is expected to find well over a thousand planets this way, including cold, distant worlds far from their stars that other techniques tend to miss.
But have patience: “After the 30 August launch, Roman faces the same outbound trip as Webb did, out to the second Lagrange point about 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, followed by months of commissioning before any science begins in earnest.”
SPEAKING POWER TO TRUTH OR SOMETHING:
Journalists are aggressively defending Fauci, despite his diaries showing that he repeatedly lied to the public. The reason is that, after years of dehumanizing Covid dissidents based on his lies, media elites can’t cope with the enormity of their failure. By @GalexyBrane pic.twitter.com/pvjqzQd2X2
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) August 4, 2026
DISPATCHES FROM THE OCCUPIED ZONES: Mamdani’s War on New York Business Is a Double-Header.
BE PREPARED: The Preparation: How To Become Competent, Confident, and Dangerous. #CommissionEarned
THE LEFT IS NOT ONLY MORE ABSURD THAN YOU IMAGINE, IT IS MORE ABSURD THAN YOU CAN IMAGINE:
The vice president started raising chickens, so the Washington Post:
-called the city of DC on him and tried to get him cited for a zoning infraction
-they called a "chicken expert": a they/them who has a chicken as an emotional support animal because of long COVID pic.twitter.com/eCRIE9qTym— Luke Rosiak (@lukerosiak) August 3, 2026
Kafka today reads like a news report, back when you could still trust news reports.
HOOKERS AND BLOW AIN’T CHEAP, FOLKS: From Influence Peddler to Starving Artist: Hunter Biden Claims Family is Broke in Defaulting on $17 Million Bill.
In a deposition in ongoing litigation with the law firm Winston Taylor, Hunter claimed an inability to pay the $17 million he owes his lawyers for representing him in criminal prosecutions, congressional investigations, and civil lawsuits.
Hunter claimed under oath that “I don’t own anything of any value other than — and I don’t know the value of it — my paintings which I painted myself. So that’s it. And I don’t even have any other assets at all, stocks, bonds, anything like that, savings accounts.” He also added, “My family doesn’t have any money, and it’s not their debt anyway.”
The statement about his family is curious, since Joe and Jill Biden recently received numerous book contracts and were thought to be worth millions. However, the Wall Street Journal recently reported that Joe Biden is struggling with $800,000 in debt and, ironically, increased property taxes in his blue state of Delaware on his $2.7 million home. (Moving to Florida like many fleeing blue state taxes is not a viable option for the Bidens).
Worse yet, no one wants Biden to do speeches and appearances, cutting off a lucrative post-presidency income. Not only is Biden obviously diminished in his ability to give a speech, but many Democrats blame him for the reelection of Trump by clinging to power despite his obvious deteriorating mental and physical condition.
That’s a sad state of affairs for Joe Biden, but it’s also an accurate reflection of what his cabal did to the nation.
SCIENCE: Penn professor claims ‘cisness’ is unnatural, ‘sex isn’t real’ in new book.
If you think sex isn’t real, you’re doing it wrong.
YES:
This is brilliant:
“The Constitution was not written as a suggestion for calm weather. It was written to restrain power precisely when fear is highest and the people in charge are most certain they know better.” https://t.co/w141KLhMhN
— Cynical Publius (@CynicalPublius) August 4, 2026
A DISASTER IN THE MAKING: Scamdani and the Truth About City-Owned Grocery Stores.
BE PREPARED: Prepared Hero Emergency Fire Blanket. #CommissionEarned
MASSIVE RESISTANCE: WVU closed DEI office, but faculty DEI toolkit remains online.
FROM SUICIDAL EMPATHY TO SUICIDAL ANTIPATHY:
This sounds like a typical "Irish" joke, but it's true:
The Irish Government bought a new €53m jet.
And insisted on removing an Israeli-made navigational system.
Now it can't land in the fog 🤣🤣🤣https://t.co/wgeBO3pfRW
— Eylon Levy (@EylonALevy) August 4, 2026
I’m sure it’s fine — not much fog in Ireland, after all.
MAGA: U.S. Manufacturing Surges to Four‑Year High as Economy Expands Under Trump. “U.S. manufacturing activity surged to a four‑year high in July, with the ISM PMI rising to 55.6, the strongest reading since May 2022 [1]. The surge is driven by record order growth, AI investment, and a rebound in factory employment, with the employment index at 52.8, the highest since August 2022 [1]. Treasury officials say the economy remains robust, with real GDP growing 1.5% in Q2 2026 and business investment up 8.4%.”
Quarterly growth wasn’t great, but manufacturing signals confidence in the future.
COLLEGES HAVE SPENT DECADES WRITING RULES THAT MAKE FREE SPEECH OPTIONAL: The good news is that the worst campus speech codes are finally retreating. FIRE’s “green light” schools have climbed from 8 in 2006 to 76 today, while “red light” schools have hit a record low. But nearly 70% still earn a “yellow light.” Progress, yes. Mission accomplished, no.
THIS ISN’T ABOUT A PARTICULAR ISSUE, BUT A TOXIC MEDIA AND AN UNWILLINGNESS OR INABILITY TO THINK CRITICALLY:
Everyone should read this. I don’t think there’s a bigger political/societal issue in 2026 than social media and America’s cognitive health. https://t.co/72vj4AuT7K
— David Reaboi, Late Republic Nonsense (@davereaboi) August 3, 2026
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Fauci’s follies — time to toss the ‘science is settled’ groupthink.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: I Prefer That My Groceries Not Taste Like Commie Terrorist. “Even if the government could own anything, the thought of it is repulsive. Bureaucracy never brings anything good to the table. The bigger the bureaucracy, the worse it makes things. New York City’s population is greater than the populations of three-quarters of the states in this country, so its bureaucracy is the wrong kind of robust.”
AMERICA’S FIRST PRESIDENT UNDERSTOOD THAT POWER MEANS KNOWING WHEN TO GIVE IT UP: H.W. Brands discusses George Washington’s character, his defense of national unity, and why the republic depended on a leader who put duty above ambition.
