Archive for 2020
July 10, 2020
ARGUMENTS THAT SHOULDN’T NEED TO BE MADE: In defense of Lincoln: Why the University of Wisconsin should keep its famous Abraham Lincoln statue.
ONCE AGAIN, THE MEDIA IS LYING: I’ve seen countless stories about ICE’s “new” student visa requirement barring student visas for students who would be taking only online classes. The idea that this is “new” is false. Foreign students are required to take a “full course of study” to fulfill visa requirements. The longstanding rule is that a study may take only one online class per semester as part of the full course of study. ICE *may* allow a student to take more than one online course, but any additional course must be taken in the physical presence of a university instructor. Here is the DHS webpage from 2012, in the Obama years:
An F-1 student may only count one online or distance education course without the physical oversight of a school employee (or the equivalent of three credits) toward a full-course of study per academic term. F-1 students may be eligible to take more than one online class to maintain their status as long as the class is physically proctored or monitored by a school employee.
ICE waived the rule for the Spring and Summer 2020 semesters due the Covid emergency. Given that Congress has now had four months to address the issue but has not, it’s not clear what the “emergency” would be that would allow ICE to ignore a binding regulation.
In any event, given that the regulation is clear that foreign students may not stay in the U.S. on student visas if they are taking online only classes, and given that universities knew they may have to go all online this Fall, why are so many university “leaders” acting like the government actually enforcing the rule once the immediate emergency has passed is a complete surprise? Surely it was *possible* that ICE would agree to continue to not enforce a rule, but surely any decent university lawyer would have understood that it was not a certainty, and would have been advising the provost to make contingency plans for foreign students. And, though the answer here is obvious, why are so many reporters stating that this is a “new” rule?
GOING AFTER OLD LADIES NOW: Retired prof says she was doxed, threatened for opposing cancel culture.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: ‘Please Scream Inside Your Heart’—2020 Gives Us the Greatest Emotional Request Ever. “Thinking about it, screaming inside one’s heart may be a healthy occasional substitute for day-drinking, especially now that it looks like we might be shut down for the rest of the year. That scream you hear inside your heart might just be saving your liver.”
I thought the scream inside me was my liver.
PARANOIA CENTRAL: A detailed post discussing North Korea’s new three-year long intelligence course for international information warfare specialists. Indeed, an Information Warfare major for North Korean spies offered by the Mangyongdae Revolutionary Academy.
The post also discusses specialized training for agents operating in foreign countries:
These agents are trained to hunt down high-level defectors in foreign countries and either arrange to kill the defector or at least find out how the defector is doing, how many secrets they have divulged and, if possible, persuade the defector to shut up or even return to North Korea.
To accomplish this “defector remediation” task the Mangyongdae students are taught the latest hacking techniques and what tools and mercenary hackers are available in the hacker underground and how to deal with the tools, and the mercs, to put together specialized efforts to track down defectors and monitor them.
The entire post’s worth reading.
HERITAGE FLIGHT PRACTICE: An A-10 Thunderbolt II, F-35 Lightning II and a P-51 Mustang, practice formation flying for a heritage flight during the upcoming Cedar Creek Lake Air Show. The air show took place July 3 at Cedar Creek Lake, Texas.
THAT MEANS IT’S WORKING: Vote-by-mail would create chaos and distrust in November.
Stealing elections isn’t the point to mail-in voting, although that is for its proponents a desirable side effect.
The point is to discredit the system.
BUT OF COURSE: RealClearInvestigations: FBI Man at the Heart of Surveillance Abuses Is a Professor of Spying Ethics.
Ethicists, in my experience, tend to be a bit dodgy.
HEATHER MAC DONALD: I Cited Their Study, So They Disavowed It: If scientists retract research that challenges reigning orthodoxies, politics will drive scholarship.
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is a peer-reviewed journal that claims to publish “only the highest quality scientific research.” Now, the authors of a 2019 PNAS article are disowning their research simply because I cited it.
Psychologists Joseph Cesario of Michigan State and David Johnson of the University of Maryland analyzed 917 fatal police shootings of civilians from 2015 to test whether the race of the officer or the civilian predicted fatal police shootings. Neither did. Once “race specific rates of violent crime” are taken into account, the authors found, there are no disparities among those fatally shot by the police. These findings accord with decades of research showing that civilian behavior is the greatest influence on police behavior.
In September 2019, I cited the article’s finding in congressional testimony. I also referred to it in a City Journal article, in which I noted that two Princeton political scientists, Dean Knox and Jonathan Mummolo, had challenged the study design. Messrs. Cesario and Johnson stood by their findings. Even under the study design proposed by Messrs. Knox and Mummolo, they wrote, there is again “no significant evidence of anti-black disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by the police.”
My June 3 Journal op-ed quoted the PNAS article’s conclusion verbatim. It set off a firestorm at Michigan State. The university’s Graduate Employees Union pressured the MSU press office to apologize for the “harm it caused” by mentioning my article in a newsletter. The union targeted physicist Steve Hsu, who had approved funding for Mr. Cesario’s research. MSU sacked Mr. Hsu from his administrative position. PNAS editorialized that Messrs. Cesario and Johnson had “poorly framed” their article—the one that got through the journal’s three levels of editorial and peer review.
Mr. Cesario told this page that Mr. Hsu’s dismissal could narrow the “kinds of topics people can talk about, or what kinds of conclusions people can come to.” Now he and Mr. Johnson have themselves jeopardized the possibility of politically neutral scholarship. On Monday they retracted their paper. They say they stand behind its conclusion and statistical approach but complain about its “misuse,” specifically mentioning my op-eds.
The authors don’t say how I misused their work. Instead, they attribute to me a position I have never taken: that the “probability of being shot by police did not differ between Black and White Americans.” To the contrary, I have, like them, stressed that racial disparities in policing reflect differences in violent crime rates. The only thing wrong with their article, and my citation of it, is that its conclusion is unacceptable in our current political climate.
This retraction bodes ill for the development of knowledge.
To be fair, the people pushing this stuff aren’t interested in the development of knowledge.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Don’t Force Schools to Reopen, but Don’t Force Families To Pay for Closed Schools Either. “We should fund students instead of systems.”
Yes.
THE RULING CLASS HAS ITS FAVORITES, WHO ARE ALLOWED TO OPERATE OUTSIDE THE LAW WITHOUT PENALTIES: NYC Black Lives Matter marches can continue despite large-event ban, de Blasio says.
CORONAVIRUS CAN APPARENTLY DISTINGUISH BETWEEN THE WOKE AND NON-WOKE: Black Lives Matter marches can continue despite NYC’s large-event ban: de Blasio.
LIFE IN THE CRAZY YEARS:
21ST CENTURY ECONOMICS: Barbados is planning to let people stay and work remotely for a year.
Working from home could be about to get a major upgrade, as Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley has said her government is considering letting visitors stay and work remotely from the island for a year.
Mottley said lawmakers were looking at introducing the 12-month “Barbados Welcome Stamp,” noting that restrictions due to the coronavirus pandemic had made short-term travel more difficult because of the testing now required.
“You don’t need to work in Europe, or the U.S. or Latin America if you can come here and work for a couple months at a time; go back and come back,” she said in a speech last week, according to the Barbados Government Information Service website. She added that it would allow “persons to come and work from here overseas, digitally so, so that persons don’t need to remain in the countries in which they are.”
Nice.
