HOLIDAY DEAL: Hamilton Beach Portable 7 Quart Programmable Slow Cooker. #CommissionEarned
Archive for 2023
December 9, 2023
TO BE FAIR, IT WAS THE ONLY PLAN HE HAD ANYWHERE, AND IT’S GENERALLY WORKED FOR HIM: Matt Taibbi: Lying Was the Only Plan Biden, U.S. Ever Had in Ukraine.
On the other hand, if the plan was to bleed Putin dry without losing any American soldiers, it wasn’t so bad.
VDH: How Were the Universities Lost?
After October 7, the public was shocked at what they saw and heard on America’s campuses.
Americans knew previously they were intolerant, leftwing, and increasingly non-meritocratic.
But immediately after October 7 — and even before the response of the Israeli Defense Forces — the sheer student delight on news of the mass murdering of Israeli victims seemed akin more to 1930s Germany than contemporary America.
Indeed, not a day goes by when a university professor or student group has not spouted antisemitic hatred. Often, they threaten and attack Jewish students, or engage in mass demonstrations calling for the extinction of Israel.
Why and how did purportedly enlightened universities become incubators of such primordial hatred?
* * * * * * * *
The Ivy league and their kindred so-called elite campuses may soon go the way of Disney and Bud Light.
They think such a crash in their reputations is impossible given centuries of accustomed stature.
But the erosion is already occurring — and accelerating.
At the present rate, a Stanford law degree, a Harvard political science major, or a Yale social science BA will soon scare off employers and the general public at large.
These certificates will signify not proof of humility, knowledge, and decency, but rather undeserved self-importance, vacuousness, and fanaticism — and all to be avoided rather than courted.
I don’t know about that — you may not be interested in the Gleichschaltung, but many corporatist CEOs and their human resources departments will be for some time to come.
As the backlash grew into an uproar, Gay issued a statement through Harvard’s official social media channels on Wednesday in an attempt to clarify her response to Stefanik’s line of questioning.
“There are some who have confused a right to free expression with the idea that Harvard will condone calls for violence against Jewish students,” Gay said. “Let me be clear: Calls for violence or genocide against the Jewish community, or any religious or ethnic group are vile, they have no place at Harvard, and those who threaten our Jewish students will be held to account.”
But the damage had been done, an error Gay acknowledged on Thursday as the fallout continued. The House Committee on Education and the Workforce announced an official congressional investigation into antisemitism at Harvard. Hours later, Rabbi David Wolpe resigned from an advisory group to combat antisemitism on campus that Gay established only weeks earlier, citing her congressional testimony.
“I got caught up in what had become at that point, an extended, combative exchange about policies and procedures,” Gay said in the interview. “What I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community — threats to our Jewish students — have no place at Harvard, and will never go unchallenged.”
“Substantively, I failed to convey what is my truth,” Gay added.
“My truth,” huh? As Mark Steyn wrote in 2005 after then-NJ Gov. Jim McGreevey first brought that phrase into national prominence:
When Governor Jim McGreevey announced last year he was stepping down, he told the people of New Jersey something very modern. He said, “My truth is that I am a gay American.” That’s a very contemporary formulation: “my” truth. To John Paul II, there was only “the” truth. To the moral relativists, everyone’s entitled to his own – or, as the Governor continued, warming to his theme, “one has to look deeply into the mirror of one’s soul and decide one’s unique truth in the world.” That sappy narcissism is what the New York Times boilerplate boils down to: “abortion, homosexuality and contraception” is an alternative Holy Trinity for the church of the self.
In any case, it’s a nice tell by Gay that Harvard’s postmodernism, and its related syndromes, postcolonialism and postnationalism, aren’t going to change anytime too soon:
No, Dr. Gay.
You were given an opportunity to speak your truth. And you did.
Not once.
Not twice
Not 5x.
Not 10xI asked you 17x(!!!) in the hearing about whether calling for the genocide of Jews violates @Harvard code of conduct.
You spoke your truth under oath 17x. And…
— Elise Stefanik (@EliseStefanik) December 8, 2023
Something or someone is killing shape shifters in the small mountain town of Goldport, Colorado. Kyrie Smith, a server at a local diner, is the last person to solve the mystery. Except of course for the fact that she changes into a panther and that her co-worker, Tom Ormson, who changes into a dragon, thinks he might have killed someone. Add in a policeman who shape-shifts into a lion, a father who is suffering from remorse about how he raised his son, and a triad of dragon shape shifters on the trail of a magical object known as The Pearl of Heaven and the adventure is bound to get very exciting indeed. Solving the crime is difficult enough, but so is — for our characters — trusting someone with secrets long-held. Originally published by Baen Books.
ANDREW SULLIVAN: The Day The Empress’ Clothes Fell Off: Did the Congressional hearings finally expose the scandal of the Ivy League?
It may be too much to expect that the Congressional hearings this week, starring the three presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn, will wake people up to the toxic collapse of America’s once-great Ivy League. But I can hope, can’t I? In the immortal words of Hitch (peace be upon him), as you listen to these people, “You see how far the termites have spread, and how long and well they have dined.”
The mediocrities smirked, finessed, condescended, and stonewalled. Take a good look at them. These are the people who now select our elites. And they select them, as they select every single member of the faculty, and every student, by actively discriminating against members of certain “privileged” groups and aggressively favoring other “marginalized” ones. They were themselves appointed in exactly the same way, from DEI-approved pools of candidates. As a Harvard dean, Claudine Gay’s top priority was “making more progress on diversity,” i.e. intensifying the already systemic race, sex and gender discrimination that defines the place.
In our society, we consistently get bad people at the top. That’s not an accident, that’s what the system selects for. Plus:
In the hearings, President Gay actually said, with a straight face, that “we embrace a commitment to free expression even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful.” This is the president whose university mandates all students attend a Title IX training session where they are told that “fatphobia” and “cisheterosexism” are forms of “violence,” and that “using the wrong pronouns” constitutes “abuse.” This is the same president who engineered the ouster of a law professor, Ronald Sullivan, simply because he represented a client, of whom Gay and students (rightly but irrelevantly) disapproved, Harvey Weinstein.
This is the same president who watched a brilliant and popular professor, Carole Hooven, be effectively hounded out of her position after a public shaming campaign by one of her department’s DEI enforcers, and a mob of teaching fellows, because Hooven dared to state on television that biological sex is binary.
Plus:
Freedom of speech in the Ivy League extends exclusively to the voices of the oppressed; they are also permitted to disrupt classes, deplatform or shout down controversial speakers, hurl obscenities, force members of oppressor groups — i.e. Jewish students and teachers in the latest case — into locked libraries and offices during protests, and blocked from classrooms. Jewish students have even been assaulted — at Harvard, at Columbia, at UMass Amherst, at Tulane. Assaults by woke students used to be rare, such as the 2017 mob at Middlebury that put Allison Stanger in a neck brace — but since 10/7, they’re intensifying.
If a member of an oppressor class says something edgy, it is a form of violence. If a member of an oppressed class commits actual violence, it’s speech. That’s why many Harvard students instantly supported a fundamentalist terror cult that killed, tortured, systematically raped and kidnapped Jews just for being Jews in their own country. Because they have been taught it’s the only moral position to take.
Abolish the Ivy League.
THEY’VE LOST ALL CREDIBILITY: The Liberal Media’s Desperate New ‘Trump Will be a Dictator’ Narrative.
I’M SO OLD I REMEMBER WHEN THE AMERICAN MILITARY ONLY TURNED THE OTHER CHEEK FOR THE SOVIETS: Iran-backed militias strike US Embassy in Baghdad, Middle East military bases: ‘Cannot be justified’.
WHO BOBBY WAS IN BED WITH CONCERNS ME LESS THAN WHO JOE & HUNTER WERE WITH: Newly revealed 1994 photo of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with Jeffrey Epstein raises new questions about relationship between politician and the pedophile.
Leaking this stuff, like the photo with Trump that meant nothing, is just an attempt by the left to use the Epstein scandal without releasing the list. Release the list, and we’ll all know, uh?
IT’S OVERDUE BUT MAKE SURE THE JOB IS COMPLETE: Hamas ‘beginning to break’ as tense video shows IDF facing off with terrorists in ruins of Gaza City school.
MOSTLY SHE FEELS REGRET SHE EXPOSED HERSELF: Harvard president apologizes, says she feels ‘regret’ following antisemitism testimony before Congress.
Throw them out, knaves all three.
MIND THAT DOOR AS YOU GO: ‘One down’: UPenn reportedly asking president Liz Magill to step down Friday over outrage at antisemitism testimony.
AND YET, I BET HE WON’T CHANGE HIS VOTING. THERE ARE NONE SO BLIND: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was ‘totally wrong’ about antisemitism ‘on the American left’.
BLASPHEMY IS THE RIGHT WORD: The blasphemy of pay-as-you-pray.
IT REMOVED THE SCALES FROM A LOT OF PEOPLE’S EYES (AND MOST OF THOSE IT DIDN’T ARE CLINGING MORE TIGHTLY THAN EVER): Corruption, corruption everywhere – how the Covid debacle made the scales fall from my eyes.
BUT… HOW DOES THAT GIN UP CLIMATE PANIC? The climate scaremongers: Hurricanes aren’t getting more frequent . . .
WHAT, DID Y’ALL OUT THERE NOT HEAR ME ON KEEPING THE STUPID DOWN TO A DULL ROAR? Today’s blacklisted American: The University of Washington proudly says “no whites need apply!”.
COULD WE KEEP THE STUPID DOWN TO A DULL ROAR, MAYBE? West Knox neighborhood wakes up with anti-Semitic fliers in their driveways.
December 8, 2023
IF YOU HAVEN’T GOT YOUR LONG-HAIRED LOVED ONE SOME WEAPONS TO GO INTO THOSE GUN FREE ZONES, WHY NOT? Hairborne Defenses.
READ THIS REVIEW BY LAWDOG: Hair Stabbies.
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OPEN THREAD: Because I want you to keep busy.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Bob Zubrin: Rethink the Mars Program.
AI RESEARCHERS WHO’VE NEVER HEARD OF THE THREE LAWS? Must’ve gone to Harvard, Penn, or MIT. No, really, a friend who drives an Uber in a major city sent this:
Dunno if I told you. Had a Microsoft ChatGPT guy in the vehicle a few weeks back. He didn’t know Asimov’s Laws. Like, wtf.
He agreed when I noted that the people developing AI think humans are the problem, ergo AI likely will think humans are the problem.
I also gave him a quick version of my dark vision of the future. When vast multitudes, to include a lot of white collars with expensive degrees, are unemployed and living off the state thanks to AI, they’ll be looking for a reason to live.
The state might not like the answer they come up with.
ChatGPT guy got out at his restaurant, said he wished it was a longer ride.
Hey, I’m an influencer. Like Dylan Mulvaney!
Well, not exactly like Dylan Mulvaney. And that last point about the unemployed white collars, brings to mind this from Eric Hoffer: “Nothing is so unsettling to a social order as the presence of a mass of scribes without suitable employment and an acknowledged status.”
I had some related thoughts here.
SO I GUESS CRAZY CAT LADIES AREN’T JUST A CLICHÉ: Mysterious Link Between Owning Cats And Schizophrenia Is Real, Study Says.