YES. ALSO OTHER MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS. AND OTHER PROFESSIONALS. Physicians Should Be Allowed To Practice Across State Lines—and Not Just During a Pandemic.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: The World Health Organization Wants to Restrict Access to Adult Beverages and I May Become Violent. “There are any number of reasons to tell the WHO brain trust what to do with their suggestion, chief among them being that they are a bumbling bunch of idiots who really dropped the ball when the virus began to spread. It’s safe to say that their advice is suspect, especially in matters of life, death, and important quarantine recreation matters.”

YOUR AWFUL MEDIA AT WORK:

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Harsh, but fair:

OUT ON A LIMB: MIT study: Subways a ‘major disseminator’ of coronavirus in NYC.

Earlier: Left’s Pet Issues Like Mass Transit, Reusable Bags Prove Deadly During Coronavirus Crisis.

CORONAVIRUS UPDATE: US Virus Numbers Now Include Probable Cases Without Tests.

MICHAEL BARONE: Colleges and universities threatened by COVID-19.

American higher education has been in serious trouble for the past two decades. Yes, it’s true that American universities science and technology departments lead the world, and the (increasingly unscientific) social sciences and (often inhumane) humanities departments can still boast some brilliant scholars. But at some point, too much of a good thing stops being a good thing. People have observed for years that college graduates make more money over their lifetimes than non-college graduates. But it doesn’t follow that people not headed to college will make more money if they go there.

A dismaying number of American freshman college students never end up graduating — not after four or six or 20 years. And an even more dismaying number of non-graduates and graduates end up with daunting amounts of college loan debt, nondischargeable in bankruptcy, which reduces or prevents significant wealth accumulation. Americans today have more college debt than credit card debt.

And for what? In his new book, The Breakdown of Higher Education, John M. Ellis, an emeritus professor at the notoriously left-wing University of California at Santa Cruz, cites multiple studies showing that half of graduates make no intellectual gains — “no statistically significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning or writing skills,” as one study puts it. As the American Council of Trustees and Alumni surveys have shown, many schools don’t teach the basics of American history or government. College degrees are not so much evidence of learning as of plodding persistence.

And a willingness to put up with left-wing agitprop, force-fed by “tenured radicals,” in Roger Kimball’s phrase, in traditional academic disciplines as well as grievance studies departments. American universities keep grinding out more Ph.D.s (and more theses no one may ever read) than they have tenure-track teaching jobs, so that an increasing number accept hourly wages as adjuncts and look forward increases in the minimum wage.

Meanwhile, administrators now outnumber teachers at American colleges and universities. Many spend their time in meetings and conferences promoting “equity, inclusivity, and diversity.” Some spend time enforcing speech codes prohibiting free expression that colleges and universities at one time fostered. Others are occupied in regulating adult students’ social behavior, conducting kangaroo courts in which those accused of sexual harassment or assault are denied any presumption of innocence, the ability to call witnesses, or knowledge of any charges.

The notion that adults, who are eligible to vote and serve in the military, need such guidance is rooted in the Latin phrase in loco parentis, the notion that students at residential colleges need something like parental supervision — even if that supervision is irksome and increasingly expensive.

The fact is that the residential college, the model of American higher education since its 17th century foundations, is the exception rather than the rule in most of the world. University students live typically in parental homes or with roommates in cheap nearby apartments. That’s true of most undergraduates in Britain, where Cambridge and Oxford and their beautiful quads were the models for Harvard and William & Mary.

The Higher Education Bubble was kept inflated in no small part by inertia. Now we’re seeing what’s likely to be a transformative change in attitudes.

JOHN BURTKA: How To Build A New Leadership Class.

The biggest difference between the old aristocratic cultures and our own is how they raise children. And it’s in the home where the hopes of establishing a new, more virtuous leadership class go to die at a very young age. For today’s elites, guilt has replaced obligation as the organizing principle of family life. Instead of seeing society as “a partnership of the dead, the living, and the unborn,” as Edmund Burke aptly put it, they reject the concept of stewardship all together. Nature and tradition are repressive or at least passé, and children are aided by an army of counselors, consultants, and programs in the hope of a lifetime of self-actualization.

In order to justify such a selfish existence, they attempt to atone for the guilt of their privilege by ritual participation in the new religion of identity politics and its accompanying liturgical feasts. The high holy days of the past have been replaced with festivals and parades honoring various marginalized groups or identities. Anxious city managers and corporate boards offer pinches of incense to the new gods by modifying their branding guidelines and official communications to include the symbols of the new liturgical cult. Families themselves display these symbols from in their yards and on their cars. While their sense of guilt will not go away (there is no such thing as forgiveness for oppressors), they can learn to mitigate its effects and come to terms with their own narcissism so long as they pay lip service to the latest trends in social justice.

Read the whole thing.

HERE WE GO: Germany to relax coronavirus lockdown measures. “Germany will reopen many of its shops next Monday and some of its schools from May 4, as it joins other European countries in relaxing the draconian shutdown measures adopted last month to slow down the coronavirus pandemic. Shops with a retail space of up to 800 square meters will be allowed to reopen to the public. But strict curbs on social contact will remain in place and Germans will be encouraged to wear masks in shops and on public transport…Germany has managed to contain coronavirus more effectively than other European countries, partly thanks to a comprehensive testing regime that allowed authorities to identify and isolate those infected with the virus at an early stage. It has the capacity to run 650,000 tests a week.”

WHY DO DEMOCRATS HATE SMALL BUSINESS? Small Business Bailout Fund Set to Run Dry Amid Democrat-Driven Standoff.

IF I MUST: Police department reminds residents to wear pants while checking mailbox.

WORLD NOT HOLDING ITS BREATH, THOUGH: World turns to Wuhan and China to come clean on coronavirus.

KINSLEY GAFFE: New Jersey governor tells Tucker Carlson he ‘wasn’t thinking of the Bill of Rights’ when he banned religious services.

K.C. JOHNSON: Joe Biden’s Double Standard: Confronting a sexual-harassment allegation, will the former vice president demand the due-process protections that he previously denied to others?

BILL FRIST, MD: A Storm for Which We Were Unprepared.

HE’S CERTAINLY NOT ABOVE IT, BECAUSE HE’S NOT ABOVE ANYTHING: Did Xi Jinping Deliberately Sicken the World? PRC moral turpitude forces us to consider the unthinkable.

NEVER LET A PANDEMIC GO TO WASTE: Eric Holder: Coronavirus ‘An Opportunity’ to Permanently Change America’s Voting System.

What could go wrong?

JOURNALISM: New York Times Allowed Biden Team to Edit Story on Sexual Assault Allegation.

I AGREE: Legal Education Will Never Be The Same After COVID-19: Online Is Here To Stay.

I HAVE A STORY IN THIS WRITTEN WITH MY FRIEND LAURA MONTGOMERY (of Ground Based Space Matters, a space law and policy blog.):  Overruled.

ORDER IN THE COURT! A new anthology of science fiction stories that explores what the future of jurisprudence might well be like, with thrilling, hilarious, and downright entertaining results! So much fun, it oughta be illegal! Stories by Robert A. Heinlein, Clifford D. Simak, Sarah A. Hoyt, and more.

Lawyers—pardon me, attorneys—may be portrayed in fiction as the good guys (and gals) or as greedy conniving shysters.

In mundane fiction, the former are represented ably by Earle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason and by Harper Lee’s Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (we’ll pass over her other novel, Go Set a Watchman, with a less inspiring portrait—consider it obviously set in a parallel world). The less favorable view was expressed by Edgar Rice Burroughs in his SF classic, A Princess of Mars, in which his doubly immortal John Carter observes that the Martians are very fortunate in that, while they may behave with savage cruelty, and are constantly at war, at least they have no lawyers.

Both views of the legal profession have been explored in science fiction and fantasy since John Carter set foot on the Red Planet, as well as looking into possible ways that future punishment for crimes may change, not necessarily for the better. Some of science fiction’s greatest talents are included in this book, including classics by Robert A. Heinlein, Larry Niven, Clifford D. Simak, Robert Silverberg, and more, and newer stories by Sarah A. Hoyt, Alex Shvartsman, and Alvaro Zinos-Amaros, and still other stellar talents bringing down the judge’s gavel with a verdict of excellent entertainment.

REMEMBER DAVID BROCK? One of the cogs in his Democratic attack machine received more than $100K of stock in a Chinese tech giant that exists because the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) allows it to exist. Brock’s group refuses to answer questions about the gift because you’re a bigot/racist/climate denier/homophobe/oppressor/etc./etc.

THE THING THEY DON’T UNDERSTAND IS THAT WE’RE NOT LOCKED IN HERE WITH THEM. THEY’RE LOCKED IN HERE WITH US:  State governments announce demands before releasing citizens from house arrest.

We’re Americans. Millions for defense, not a cent for tribute. And that includes to enemies domestic.  I can sense the time coming and it’s not very far when Americans will have obeyed their last irrational order.

I think I’ve said this before: I’ve lived through lock downs and curfews before. Not once was the reason given the real reason.  The real reason was always “fear of the governed.”  Now you know. Proceed accordingly.

BEHOLD, MY SHOCKED FACE:  NYC Officials Now Counting Deaths of Those Who ‘Never Tested Positive’ in Coronavirus Totals.