Archive for 2023
December 12, 2023
BUNKER TIME: Harvard Board Announces President Claudine Gay Will Stay in Role amid Backlash to Antisemitism Hearing.
During a congressional hearing last week, Representative Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) confronted Gay over the chants of “intifada” that can be heard on Harvard’s campus, Gay said that such speech does not breach the university’s code of conduct.
“At Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment?” Stefanik asked.
“It can be, depending on the context,” Gay responded. She later said, “Antisemitic rhetoric when it crosses into conduct that amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation — that is actionable conduct and we do take action.”
After her congressional testimony, Gay apologized for her comments.
“I am sorry,” Gay said in an interview with the Harvard student-run publication, The Crimson. “Words matter.”
They matter enough that they can be cut and pasted into a doctoral thesis without attribution: Harvard Board: Gay’s Plagiarism Is a Concern. Also, We’re Keeping Her.
And they matter enough to look away the enormous financial loss they’ve helped fuel: Harvard confirms Claudine Gay will remain prez— despite reported $1B loss over antisemitism scandal.
JOANNE JACOBS: The young and the senseless.
Only 7 percent of Americans agree the Holocaust never happened, according to a new Economist/YouGov poll. But the number soars for those ages 18-29: Eight percent “strongly agree” and 12 percent “tend to agree” it’s a myth.
Young Americans also are more likely (23 percent) than their elders to say the Holocaust was “exaggerated,” and that Jews have “too much power in America” (28 percent).
Somin thinks people who aren’t sure what “Holocaust” refers to might choose “tend to agree” on the theory that they’d know about it if it really happened. And young people know a lot less history, politics and economics than their elders.
Previously: Man, These White House Interns Really Blow.
“We, the undersigned Fall 2023 White House and Executive Office of the President interns, will no longer remain silent on the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people…”
Oh, do shut up.
“We heed the voices of the American people and call on the Administration to demand a permanent ceasefire…”
Seriously, “shut up and get coffee, intern,” as Caleb Howe quipped.
What really curdles my cream is how proud NBC News seems to be about having nabbed this non-story. The website had to tell readers twice that the letter was “first shared with NBC News” in this “exclusive” report. “Run along now, children,” would have been the proper response — not a big-name, Jonathan Allen report with EXCLUSIVE blazoned above the headline in an ALL CAPS red flag.
This juxtaposition is beautiful — and almost certainly unintentional. “We are not the decision makers of today,” they wrote in a moment that caused me to shout “No s***?” loud enough to frighten my Golden, “but we aspire to be the leaders of tomorrow.”
The would-be leaders of tomorrow don’t know very much, including the fact that they don’t know very much.
THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT IT IS, ENDLESS COMPLAINTS ABOUT TRUMP’S THREAT TO “MUH DEMOCRACY” NOTWITHSTANDING: ‘Election Interference’: Lawyer Bashes Jack Smith’s Plea to SCOTUS on Trump Immunity.
LESS THAN MEETS THE EYE: Just One More Hyped Up Jobs Report.
Peter [Schiff] pointed out that the ADP private payroll data released earlier in the week came out worse than expected. So, who are you going to believe?
The estimate for the ADP report was 123,000 new private sector jobs and the number came in at 103,000. Inside that number, the economy lost 15,000 manufacturing jobs.
Those are good jobs.Those are the productive jobs that we need, and they have higher pay. Probably, the people who lost those manufacturing jobs, well, maybe they got a couple of part-time jobs working in a restaurant or in a hotel, or doing something to replace the paycheck that they lost. But they need two or three jobs, and that’s the story of this so-called strong labor market — people replacing good jobs with multiple bad jobs.”
The ADP report also showed a drop in leisure and hospitality jobs. That sector has driven recent job growth.
Plus: “Of the 199,000 jobs the BLS claims the economy created, about 24% were auto workers and motion picture workers returning to their jobs after strikes.”
I BLAME ALL THOSE INTERSTELLAR CHEVROLET TAHOES: Hole the size of 60 Earths opens on sun.
The size of the void is unfathomable for some, equating to about 60 Earths, Space.com reported.
It is called a coronal hole and it started to form on Dec. 2, hitting its maximum width of about 497,000 miles in 24 hours.
NASA shared a video loop of the massive hole on its Solar Dynamics Observatory website on Saturday. By Wednesday, the hole was no longer pointing toward Earth.
The good news is, the hole is temporary, according to Space.com. But it could have caused some issues until it closed including creating a geomagnetic storm that could disrupt radio signals and produce strong auroral displays.
Of course, we all know what will be found on the other side of the hole:
NOW THERE’S A SHOCK: Columbia students call Hillary Clinton class huge disappointment.
See, I wouldn’t have been disappointed because I would have known what to expect.
THE UN HAS NO SHAME: ‘Shame on the UN’: Israeli Ambassador Bashes Hypocrisy on Human Rights Day.
THE ROT RUNS DEEP: Claudine Gay gets show of support from Harvard Alumni Association, faculty.
CAN’T LET A TRUMP ACHIEVEMENT STAND: Biden Administration Destabilized Middle East Peace.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Dumb and Drunker — Team Biden Wants Hillary’s Help. “This week, I really didn’t think that I would read anything more ridiculous than the story about Vivek Ramaswamy bringing a hot mic into the Little Republican’s room while he did his business. Then Matt wrote a story about just how desperate Joe Biden’s handlers are.”
A SMALL SIGNIFIER, at Gold’s Gym.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Voters are ‘feeling horrible’ about Biden economy, confusing some political experts.
Voters are “feeling horrible” about the economy under President Biden as the 2024 presidential election nears, confusing some experts, according to a new report.
“Things are getting better and people think things are going to get worse — and that’s the most dangerous piece of this,” Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told the Associated Press.
Lake also said that voters want prices to fall, not just inflation. “Honestly, I’m kind of mystified by it,” she said.
Maybe she could try reading the Wall Street Journal: The Math for Buying a Home No Longer Works. These Charts Show You Why.
It is now less affordable than any time in recent history to buy a home, and the math isn’t changing any time soon. Home prices aren’t expected to go back to prepandemic levels. The Federal Reserve, which started raising rates aggressively early last year to curb inflation, hasn’t shown much interest in cutting them. Mortgage rates slipped to about 7% last week, the lowest in several months, but they are still more than double what they were two years ago.
Typically, high mortgage rates slow down home sales, and home prices should soften as a result. Not this time. Home sales are certainly falling, but prices are still rising—there just aren’t enough homes to go around. The national median existing-home price rose to about $392,000 in October, the highest ever for that month in data that goes back to 1999.
Or the friendlier Washington Post: New cars, once part of the American Dream, now out of reach for many.
Under Bidenomics, the median income no longer buys the median home or the median new car. The middle class as we’ve known it for 75 years is fading fast — while the White House assures things are better than ever.
THERE ARE A LOT OF CO-CONSPIRATORS IN THIS ADMINISTRATION: Regulations czar: Biden turns OMB into ‘Co-conspirator in over-regulation.’ “Scrapping promises of transparency, President Joe Biden has begun to hide the costs of his most expensive rules and red tape and turned his top regulations watchdog into a lap dog for federal agencies, according to a top independent expert.”
WHY IS THE LEFT SUCH A CESSPIT OF SEXISM? Judge Allows 9,000 Women to Sue Disney for Pay Disparity.
No wonder Bob Iger is so obsessed with Elon Musk these days.
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Harvard University president Claudine Gay plagiarized numerous academics over the course of her academic career, at times airlifting entire paragraphs and claiming them as her own work, according to reviews by several scholars.
In four papers published between 1993 and 2017, including her doctoral dissertation, Gay, a political scientist, paraphrased or quoted nearly 20 authors—including two of her colleagues in Harvard University’s department of government—without proper attribution, according to a Washington Free Beacon analysis. Other examples of possible plagiarism, all from Gay’s dissertation, were publicized Sunday by the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo and Karlstack’s Chris Brunet.
The Free Beacon worked with nearly a dozen scholars to analyze 29 potential cases of plagiarism. Most of them said that Gay had violated a core principle of academic integrity as well as Harvard’s own anti-plagiarism policies, which state that “it’s not enough to change a few words here and there.”
Rather, scholars are expected to cite the sources of their work, including when paraphrasing, and to use quotation marks when quoting directly from others. But in at least 10 instances, Gay lifted full sentences—even entire paragraphs—with just a word or two tweaked.
I don’t know if Gay has visions of being the next Woodrow Wilson or Barack Obama and parlaying a career in higher learning into a seat in the Oval Office, but both Joe Biden and Neil Kinnock assure me that no person legitimately accused of plagiarism has ever made it to the US presidency.
In the interim, as America’s Newspaper of Record notes: Harvard President Claudine Gay In Hot Water For Plagiarizing Large Sections Of Mein Kampf.
IT’S LIKELY EITHER THAT OR WATCH INFLATION COME ROARING BACK STRONGER THAN BEFORE: The Fed watcher who called the 2007 housing bubble expects interest rates to stay high for ‘much, much, much longer.’ It’s payback for the unsustainable ‘free money era.’
In order to help the economy recover after the GFC, the Fed held interest rates near zero and instituted a policy called quantitative easing (QE)—where it bought government bonds and mortgage-backed securities in hopes of spurring lending and investment. Together, these policies created what is now known colloquially as the ”free money” era, pumping trillions of dollars into the economy in the form of low-interest-rate debt.
Grant has long argued the Fed’s post-GFC policies helped blow up an “everything bubble” in stocks, real estate, and, well, everything. And even after equities’ rough year in 2022, real estate’s two-year slowdown, and a regional banking crisis this March, he still fears that that bubble has only partially deflated.
While the banking and commercial real estate sectors have been hit hard by rising interest rates, Grant’s biggest fear involves credit markets.
Washington having to re-fi ZIRP-era debt at much higher rates is juicing federal spending that was crazy to begin with.
In 1927 the French philosopher Julien Benda published La trahison des clercs—“The Treason of the Intellectuals”—which condemned the descent of European intellectuals into extreme nationalism and racism. By that point, although Benito Mussolini had been in power in Italy for five years, Adolf Hitler was still six years away from power in Germany and 13 years away from victory over France. But already Benda could see the pernicious role that many European academics were playing in politics.
Those who were meant to pursue the life of the mind, he wrote, had ushered in “the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds.” And those hatreds were already moving from the realm of the ideas into the realm of violence—with results that would be catastrophic for all of Europe.
A century later, American academia has gone in the opposite political direction—leftward instead of rightward—but has ended up in much the same place. The question is whether we—unlike the Germans—can do something about it.
We already are, as we strip higher education of its now-undeserved status. Next, the money.