HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: A Cash Crisis and Collapse: Saint Joseph’s will suspend operations, saying it lacks funds to continue without an overhaul. Many faculty members, students and alumni question how things got so dire.
If only someone had offered some sort of warning.
GREAT MOMENTS IN SELF-PITY: Meryl Streep Pledges To Stand Up To ‘Brownshirts’ In Tirade Against Trump:
Ms. Streep, in New York City accepting an award from the Human Rights Campaign, referred to the backlash she received after the Golden Globes in January, when she gave a speech denouncing Mr. Trump.
“It’s terrifying to put the target on your forehead, and it sets you up for all sorts of attacks and armies of brownshirts and bots and worse, and the only way you can do it is to feel you have to,” Ms. Streep said. “You have to. You don’t have an option. You have to.”
It was not immediately clear to whom Ms. Streep was referring in using the loaded term “brownshirts,” which was originally applied to a paramilitary group that assisted the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany.
Her customers?
IT’S COME TO THIS: J.K. Rowling Mocks Piers Morgan for Refusing to Compare Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler.
When everybody is Hitler, nobody is.
WE HAD BEEN WARNED TO ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE: NASA hopes to drill into Jupiter’s moon Europa.
According to Tech Times, the lander would analyze Europa’s chemical composition to identify whether microbial life or the building blocks of life are present on the frozen moon.
Many scientists point to Europa as one of the most likely places in the solar system for being able to sustain life. Europa seems to sport a salty ocean beneath its crust, and evidence collected so far points to a strong likelihood that the subsurface water would be able to support life.
Furthermore, Europa seems capable of producing hydrogen and oxygen, further indicating that the moon may be hospitable to living organisms.
A new proposal for a mission to Europa suggests launching a probe by 2030. The lander would be able to drill into Europa’s crust far above its possible life-friendly subsurface ocean.
Sooner, please.
I’M GLAD HE HAS THE COURAGE TO STAND UP AGAINST BIGOTRY: I’m a gay New Yorker — and I’m coming out as a conservative.
SACRAMENTO’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: CA State Senator admits half of family under deportation threat:
A Los Angeles lawmaker leading the fight to make California a so-called “sanctuary state” has suggested half of his family would be deported for using falsified Social Security cards and other fake identification.
California Senate Leader Kevin de Leon made the claims during testimony before the Senate’s Public Safety Committee for SB54, a bill introduced by De Leon that would create a statewide sanctuary for immigrants living in the country illegally.
Responding to President Trump’s suggestion of “withholding federal funding” from California, de Leon said: “Half of my family would be eligible for deportation under the executive order, because they got a false social security card, they got a false identification, they got a false driver’s license prior to us passing AB 60, they got a false green card, and anyone who has family members who are undocumented knows that almost entirely everybody has secured some sort of false identification.”
“That’s what you need to survive, to work,” he added. “They are eligible for massive deportation.”
Most Americans want to make a living, Leslie Eastman of Legal Insurrection responds. “However, they don’t commit crimes to do so. The senator’s admission has not inspired the kind of sympathy from the nation’s law-abiding taxpayers he may have been expecting.”
As California resident Victor Davis Hanson has noted in various formulations in recent years, “In California, the neglect of the felony requires the rigid prosecution of the misdemeanor.” No state regulates its small businesses more. No state is more obsessed with recycling and banning common goods, down to shopping bag bans, and in some regions, mandatory composting. No state is more obsessed with banning guns from legal owners. But illegal immigration and its related crimes such as potential voter fraud, and false drivers’ licenses and Social Security cards? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Which of course is why Sacramento has to deal with Donald Trump these days. Speaking of their “Enemies: A Love Story” like relationship, the addicts may loathe the new dealer, but they still want their fix: “California rebukes Trump’s orders but wants $100B in federal infrastructure funds.”
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THERE ARE SOME SECTIONS OF MAINE I WOULD NOT ADVISE YOU TO INVADE: Al-Shabaab Magazine: ‘We’ll Keep Marching Till We Reach the State of Maine.’
BLACK LIVES MATTER AND THE TRUMP ELECTION: A Truth So Glaring Even Vox Can See It.
Over at Vox, Matt Yglesias highlights a polling trend we first noted in October: Just as the Black Lives Matter movement hit its stride last year, the American public—whites and non-whites alike—became far more supportive of law enforcement, with the share of Americans who say they have “a great deal” of respect for police officers shooting up from 64 to 76 percent. . . .
It’s worth considering the possibility that the BLM movement and the publicity it received just might have played a decisive role in tipping the 2016 presidential election to the law and order candidate—that, as Glenn Reynolds puts it, “this is how you get more Trump.”
That doesn’t mean that we don’t have a policing problem in this country or that we don’t need to be constantly rethinking the way our social institutions (including the judicial and the educational systems) address the needs and problems of African Americans, especially though not only young men. But it does mean that today’s would-be Civil Rights heroes need to think a bit harder about how to build majority support for changes that would help. Martin Luther King was sometimes an angry man, and with just cause, but we owe his lasting impact on American life to his wisdom rather than to his rage.
The difference is, the people behind Black Lives Matter don’t want to solve the problem. They want to exploit the problem.
Also, the “do you want more Trump?” line originates with Sean Davis, though to be fair, he was riffing off Archer.
RETAIL BLUES: Sears, Kmart Join Other Retailers in Dropping Trump-Branded Merchandise.
Just in case you needed another reminder that Sears has forgotten who its customers are.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: UMass-Amherst’s Mandatory Social Justice Classes Denounce ‘White Privilege’, ‘Cultural Imperialism.’ “Students were further instructed to create a mock campaign to make the university more inviting to a hypothetical low-income black lesbian majoring in engineering. Meanwhile, a ‘Man Box’ assignment taught students the dangers of asserting masculine values. The student told The College Fix that the professor, Benita Barnes, taught students that the United States was a nation overrun by sexism and racism, and that she believed the university was an extension of the country’s problems.” Well, she’s right about that, though maybe not in the way she thinks.
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MEGAN MCARDLE: The Democrats’ Immigration Problem(s).
Briefly: Democratic arguments about immigration mostly aren’t arguments. The party has relied on opposing Trump’s more outrageously exaggerated claims about the criminality and all-around character flaws of immigrants. That’s fine, as far as it goes — but as November showed, it doesn’t go far enough.
The core problem is that Democrats didn’t really make an affirmative argument for an overhaul to U.S. immigration policy that might appeal to voters. Instead, they talked a lot about what great people immigrants are, and how much they benefit from migration. Unfortunately, the clearest group of beneficiaries from this policy — people who want to migrate, but haven’t yet gotten a green card — can’t vote.
Of course there are spillover benefits to immigration, but they are somewhat nebulous compared to the direct benefit to the would-be migrants. It’s easy to explain how immigrants benefit from an open door. Explanations of how the rest of us benefit tend to rely on the trivial or on abstract economic arguments that most people don’t find particularly intuitive or convincing. Those arguments look even more suspicious because they are generally made by the one group that visibly does benefit from a lot of low-skilled immigration, which provides the nannies, lawn-care, and food services that high-skilled professionals rely on to allow them to work longer hours. . . .
Distrust of strangers is a universal human phenomenon, tapping into some pretty deep evolutionary instincts. Once those instincts are aroused, you need very powerful emotional arguments as to why it’s worth taking the risk. “They’re really nice people” is not it. Nor is “It will be great for them” or “Look at this regression analysis.”
Democrats seem to appreciate that this is a problem. You saw this at the convention, where the hours before 6 p.m. — when most people weren’t watching — were heavy on praise for immigration and appearances by illegal immigrants who spoke movingly of their plight. But at the hour when the nation turned its eyes to the television, the paeans in favor of illegal migrants became dramatically more restrained.
Yet instead of solving this problem, Democrats opted to mostly speak in vague generalities and to avoid concrete questions: What percentage of our society should be foreign born? How should we choose the people we allow to migrate? Instead of formulating a clear policy, they relied on institutional inertia and lax enforcement to swell the foreign-born population to nearly 15 percent of the country. And Republicans, whose donor class likes generous immigration rules, were happy to go along.
That was fine as long as those groups were in charge of the status quo. Once Trump took over, however, that became infeasible.
Well, to be fair, Trump took over in no small part because a lot of voters wanted to make that infeasible.
When I posted this earlier, a reader commented: “Donald Trump should televise this Bill Clinton speech from 1995 and then simply state ‘I’m Donald Trump and I approve this message.'”
LAWS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Boston City Councillor Tito Jackson’s car fines since 2010 total more than $4G.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Syracuse Law Dean, Raised By Adoptive White Parents, Had To Learn To Be Black; He Foresaw Legal Ed Crisis ‘Long Before Other Deans Knew What Hit Them.’
The fact that Boise actually was black didn’t help. Up till then, he didn’t know it. At birth, he was adopted by white parents who thought he was Native American. …
Boise, Syracuse University’s new law school dean, grew up in a white family, in an all-white farming community, unaware he was black. His unique experience of having lived in two worlds makes him a better dean, he said.
Boise jokes that his upbringing was akin to that of Steve Martin’s character in the movie “The Jerk.” “I was the opposite,” he said. “I grew up a poor white boy.”
He’s also ‘The Only Harley-Riding, Piano-Playing, Calf-Roping Law Dean In The Country.’
EIGHT YEARS AGO, ON INSTAPUNDIT:
TOM BLUMER on when the recession started, and why. “What Mr. Obama ‘somehow’ forgot to tell us is that almost 1.8 million of those seasonally adjusted job losses have occurred since his election, when his non-stop economic no-confidence game went into high gear, and that 2.8 million jobs have gone away during the seven months that began in July 2008, the first full month of the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) economy.” Hmm. I don’t think that Obama’s doomsaying — designed to gin up fear to pass the pork-laden “stimulus” bill — did any good, but the economic downturn seems to be a global phenomenon, one that’s actually worse elsewhere than here. But look at the numbers and make up your own mind.
Indeed.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Here’s what to do when the next big plague hits humanity. And note this:
If you don’t allow for investigative journalism, people die. There’s no clearer time to witness this fact than during 1918 when the Spanish Flu broke out.
The Spanish Flu was no ordinary illness. While most flu viruses attack the elderly and the very young, the Spanish Flu produced a reaction called a cytokine storm that essentially turned healthy immune systems against themselves. The stronger the immune system response, the worse the illness, so the flu was deadliest to the healthiest in the prime of their lives. In under two years, it would kill somewhere between 20 million to 50 million people worldwide. But if you’ve never heard of it, don’t worry — that’s because journalists were afraid to report on it.
The plague broke out during WWI after a morale law had been put in place in 1917. The law dictated that journalists shouldn’t report anything negative about the US government that might demoralize the populace — for instance, that a disease was spreading through the populace that they had no idea how to combat. If you defied the law, you could go to jail for up to 20 years. The epidemic was called the Spanish Flu not because it originated there (it most likely came from Kansas) but because Spanish newspapers, who had no such laws, reported on it with great frequency as early as May 1918.
Gosh, how did that media blackout happen in America, land of the First Amendment, and why the subsequent near-blackout of that decade in American pop culture and academia?
A REMINDER FROM MATTHEW CONTINETTI: Nobody Knows Anything.
The other night Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell rebuked her for impugning colleague Jeff Sessions. Exercising a little-known rule, the Senate revoked Warren’s floor privileges for 24 hours. Now, says the Times, “Ms. Warren is considered a very early frontrunner for 2020, should she run.”
I’m sorry. I just can’t. We are three weeks into the presidency of Donald J. Trump, the most unusual and unconventional man to inhabit the White House in a century, possibly ever, and the New York Times is already naming the frontrunner to replace him? The same media and consultant class that assumed Hillary Clinton would win the presidency in 2008 and again in 2016 presumes to declare how a Senate kerfuffle in February 2017 will affect Iowa caucus-goers in 2020? Who are these people? Where did they come from? What makes them so obtuse, so beholden to gossip, so given to wish-casting, so certain that their momentary impressions of trivial matters carry cosmic weight? Was it college that inflated their sense of self-worth? Is that what $50k a year buys you—a degree in smug? We may never know.
Let me make a confession. I have no idea who the Democratic nominee will be in 2020. Nor am I completely sure, since we are being honest, who the Republican nominee will be. (Trump, I guess?) McConnell’s decision to cut off Warren may have been a disaster of epic proportions for the GOP. Or it could have been a brilliant strategic move, elevating an unlikable Massachusetts liberal to the top of her party. McConnell himself is probably ambivalent.
I do suspect, however, that if Harry Reid had cut off Ted Cruz’s microphone in 2013 the Nevada Democrat would have been hailed as a hero and genius. Even so: The shoe-on-the-other-foot argument may not count for much any more. Nothing may count for much any more. If the last year and a half has taught us anything, it is that what we think is supposed to happen does not. Brexit was not supposed to happen. Trump was not supposed to happen. The Patriots’ comeback was not supposed to happen. Yet here we are.
And no one seems to be drawing lessons from any of this.
One of the great things about being a pundit is that they don’t dock your pay for being wrong.
HOUSE DEMOCRATS WANT TO CHANGE THE WAY THEY TALK TO VOTERS, BUT THEY’RE NOT SURE HOW:
House Democrats are walking away from a soul-searching retreat in Baltimore without having answered the question that has loomed over them since the election: Whether the party should be content with changing its communication strategy or whether the party needs to undergo deeper changes.
“We lost, so either our programs need to be retooled or our communication needs to be retooled. Now which do you think is easier for us to focus on?” California Rep. Brad Sherman said. “I wish we could just print our message on a different color of paper and suddenly win, but I think it’s going to be harder than that.”
Shades of Bertolt Brecht’s famous line that “Some party hack decreed that the people had lost the government’s confidence and could only regain it with redoubled effort. If that is the case, would it not be simpler, If the government simply dissolved the people And elected another?”
Linking to the above article at DNC house organ BuzzFeed, Varad Mehta of the Federalist tweets “Trump’s election was a repudiation of cultural progressivism. Until the left admits it, they’re just wasting time.” But even if Democrats somehow manage to change their tone, after their earlier false-flag operation in 2006, voters would be very wise not to believe them this time around.
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