IT’S COME TO THIS: Catalytic converter stolen from Oscar Mayer Wienermobile in Las Vegas.
Earlier: What’s driving the rise of catalytic converter theft? “In 2018, the New York City Police Department said 200 catalytic converters were reported stolen. Last year, the number spiked to nearly 4,000.“
DEAL OF THE DAY: JEKAOYI Button Down Short Sleeve Linen Shirts. #CommissionEarned
DESPITE? Despite massive DEI efforts, UMich students report feeling worse about themselves.
That stuff is designed to make them feel worse about themselves.
NOBODY GOES THERE ANYMORE; IT’S TOO CROWDED: Taliban fighters who moved to Kabul are ‘bored’ and fed up with traffic.
HOW TO MAKE WAR ARTILLERY UPDATE: The longer range Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System arrives in Ukraine. A Jim Dunnigan update. Here’s a photo of a British MLRS launcher firing a single guided rocket — a sniper round. A 2nd Infantry Division launcher fires a rocket in Rocket Valley, South Korea.
RAVING AND DROOLING: Roger Waters: The Dark Side of the Moron Strikes Again.
Not news: Roger Waters is a nasty narcissist.
Roger Waters has revealed that he re-recorded Pink Floyd‘s classic The Dark Side of the Moon album in advance of the record’s 50th anniversary this March. And he did it without involving any of the active members of Pink Floyd.
The 79-year-old musician disclosed the news in an interview with The Daily Telegraph, in which he exclaims, “I wrote The Dark Side of the Moon. Let’s get rid of all this ‘we’ crap! Of course we were a band, there were four of us, we all contributed – but it’s my project and I wrote it. So… blah!”
To kick off the promotion for the 50th anniversary edition of Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd (Dave Gilmour and Nick Mason) released a remastered version of “The Great Gig in the Sky.” As one of the top commenters at its YouTube page sarcastically wrote, “Roger Waters has such a great vocal and his piano playing and steel guitar playing are fantastic on The Great Gig In The Sky.”
BLAST FROM THE PAST: So while gathering links for a Substack post, I ran across this ancient Meryl Yourish piece on the dating potential of various superheroes. Still hilarious.
Related: Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex.
MAYBE. Will the boycott actually strengthen the U.S. News rankings?
Personally, I think a more adversarial relationship between USNWR and the schools it rates would probably suggest more reliability. But at the top the rankings are useless, because they are designed to reinforce existing prejudices. The one year that CalTech wound up #1 on the college rankings, they immediately rejiggered the criteria to make sure the Ivy League ruled again.
#JOURNALISM: WaPo Hit Piece on Anna Paulina Luna Completely Falls Apart, Major Corrections Made. “What I’m most disappointed in, though, are those on the right who ran with this trash just because Luna is a firebrand in the GOP (she was part of the gang of 20 who forced Kevin McCarthy’s hand during his Speaker fight). That should not be the standard by which conservatives believe or disbelieve the mainstream press. Anytime the Post or its peer outlets report on anything, it should be taken with a grain of salt.”
And when the reporting is on a Republican, a whole truckload.
WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY: Democrat congressman calls Florida’s latest expansion of freedom ‘fascism.’
Do words mean anything anymore? That’s the question prompted by Rep. Maxwell Frost’s most recent unhinged statement on MSNBC, where he decried an expansion of civil liberties as “fascism.”
The first-term Florida congressman, a progressive Democrat, was asked by host Joy Reid about Florida Republicans’ ongoing move to expand gun rights. They’re considering enacting “constitutional carry,” allowing citizens to concealed carry handguns without a permit. This isn’t actually anything outlandish or novel. People such as violent felons would still be legally prohibited from carrying guns and Florida would join 25 other states that have a similar “constitutional carry” regiment.
But we can’t let those pesky facts get in the way of some partisan fearmongering.
“What we’re seeing in Florida is scary, and I’m blunt about it, it’s fascism,” Frost said. “This is legislation that will result in death. People will die if this bill passes.”
Because the Nazis were all about letting civilians own guns.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Send this guy a copy of Gun Control in the Third Reich.
SABRE RATTLING: US Conducts Nuclear Missile Test Launch. “The U.S. launched an unarmed but nuclear-capable Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) Thursday night in what the Pentagon characterized as a display of the U.S.’ effective nuclear deterrent against hostile foreign powers.”
ARE YOU EVEN ALLOWED TO SAY THAT? Idris Elba On Why He No Longer Describes Himself As A ‘Black Actor’: ‘It’s Just Skin.’ “If we spent half the time not talking about the differences but the similarities between us, the entire planet would have a shift in the way we deal with each other.”
Yeah, but that produces too little in the way of graft and political leverage.
SCIENTISTS BAFFLED! Most young people aren’t getting latest Covid-19 booster, but they’re not filling hospital beds at three large health care systems. “Uptake of the bivalent booster, which has been available since September, has been low. Nationally, only about 16% of the population has gotten it, and the rates are especially low for people under 65, according to CDC data.”
OF COURSE THEY DID, HE WORKS FOR THEM: In 2020, China Privately Told Biden Ally They Wanted Joe To Win.
BILL QUICK HAS thoughts on workplace demographics.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell.
In a recent book, John McWhorter asserts that anti-racism is a new religion. It was an idea I quickly dismissed. Last summer, I found anti-racism to be a perversion of religion: I found a cult. From Wild Wild Country to the Nxivm shows to Scientology exposés, the features of cults have become familiar in popular culture. There is sleep deprivation. Ties to the outside world are severed. The sense of time collapses, with everything cult-related feeling extremely urgent. Participants are emotionally battered. In this weakened state, participants learn about and cling to dogmatic beliefs. Any outsider becomes a threat.
The dozen participants in this summer program were spending almost every hour of every day together, I was almost the only outsider they were encountering, and I was marked as a threat.
The feature of a cult that seems to be missing from this story is a charismatic leader, enforcing the separation of followers from the world, creating emotional vulnerability, and implanting dogma. Enter Keisha. A recent graduate of an Ivy League university, mentored by a television-celebrity black intellectual, Keisha introduced herself as a black woman who grew up poor and “housing vulnerable,” whose grandmother’s limbs had been broken by white supremacists, and who had just spent four years of college teaching in prisons and advocating for prison abolition. She told the class that she had majored in black studies, had been nurtured by black feminists (though her famous mentor is a man), and she was planning to devote her life to transforming the academy in the direction of black justice.
Keisha was tasked by Telluride with serving as a teaching assistant in my class and organizing workshops for the students in the afternoon. I welcomed Keisha into the class, suggesting that we find some days when she could lead discussion or share her own research. Instead, she largely remained silent during class for the first three weeks, counter-programming the seminar in the afternoons. During a week on the racist background of the US immigration system, Keisha found one of our texts, the foundational Asian-American memoir Nisei Daughter, insufficiently radical, so she lectured to the students that afternoon about the supposedly more radical Yuri Kochiyama. Keisha was frustrated that our week on incarceration began with George Jackson and not a black feminist, so she lectured on Angela Davis that afternoon. I talked at length with both Keisha and the class about learning unfolding over time, about the need to wrestle with an idea before moving on to the next one, and about the overall direction of the course, but for her (and soon for the students), everything had to happen now.
Keisha and I were supposed to meet weekly, but she told me she couldn’t schedule in advance, and she would let me know when she had availability. She never did. But Keisha did find time to intervene when a student was “harmed.” During one class, when we discussed Brown v. Board of Education, my co-instructor explained what the “doll test” was that provided a psychological basis for the Supreme Court’s decision: It involved showing children black and white dolls and asking what language they would use to describe them, “colored,” “white,” or “negro.” During the seminar break, a student had reported this to Keisha, and she rushed in to tell us that a student had been harmed by hearing the word “negro.”
She’d get the vapors reading the late Stanley Crouch. Or watching Pulp Fiction.
LIGHTNING DEAL: Multitool Knife. #CommissionEarned
THIS STUDY COULD BE ‘SCIENTIFIC NAIL IN THE COFFIN’ FOR MASKS:
One of the largest and most comprehensive studies on the effectiveness of masks found they do almost nothing to reduce the spread of respiratory viruses.
The study reviewed 78 randomized control trials—experiments that have long been considered “the gold standard” for medicine—which assessed the effectiveness of face masks against flu, COVID-19, and similar illnesses. It found that wearing masks “probably makes little or no difference” for the general public, no matter what kind of mask is used. Even N95 masks, considered the most effective at filtering airborne particles, showed no clear benefit for health care workers.
The study was published on January 30 by the Cochrane Library, a world-renowned medical database that is famous for its high-quality evidence reviews. It comes as a battering ram to the recommendations of the U.S. public health establishment, which urged children as young as two to wear masks throughout the pandemic.
“This amounts to the scientific nail in the coffin for mask mandates,” said Kristen Walsh, a clinical professor of pediatrics in Morristown, New Jersey. “I just can’t wrap my mind around the fact that some schools are still actively forcing children to wear masks, much less children who need to see faces to learn.”
One would hope, but as Jennifer Sey, the former brand president of Levi Strauss, who was forced out for being insufficiently woke, writes:
What seems clear is that the enthusiastic, religious devotion to the dogma — “masks work” — signified adherence to a set of beliefs: I mask therefore I am good. I mask my children therefore I am loyal to the Democratic Party and public health diktats. I mask therefore I care. I am a loyal follower of “the Science.” My faith is unwavering.
Those who claim to be on the side of “the Science” will continue to push unscientific policies in order to prove that they were right all along. This is the sunk cost fallacy writ large. Don’t admit mistakes. Ignore the actual science in favor of “the Science.” And continue to punish those who challenge. As well as those most vulnerable who simply aren’t in a position to challenge at all.
“Science” has apparently been rebranded by the left. It is now a slogan — a tagline — shouted at heretics to signify one’s moral superiority and loyalty to the party. What we have now is “science” that ignores the scientific method, which means “the science” is a cult. And a dangerous one at that.
Indeed.
JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: Imagine an America with steep billionaire taxes — and without Amazon, Pixar, SpaceX, and Tesla: I shudder at the thought! And you should, too!
I think my concerns are reasonable. Take the case of the Biden administration’s version of “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named” — or named only rarely — Elon Musk. Remember, he’s not just an uberbillionaire with dodgy Twitter behavior. He’s also an immigrant who both resurrected the American space industry and grew an electric auto company that makes him, as his Time magazine Person of the Year profile puts it, “arguably the biggest private contributor to the fight against climate change.”
But would SpaceX and Tesla — combined value of an estimated $1.2 trillion — exist in a world of sharply higher investment taxes and a fat new levy on wealth? Maybe not. At least not both of them.
University of Chicago economist Steven Kaplan has run the numbers. To begin: Musk was one of the “PayPal Mafia,” the founders and early employees of the financial technology company. When PayPal was bought by eBay in 2002, Musk, the largest shareholder, walked away with $250 million before taxes, leaving him with $180 million after taxes.
What did Musk do with that cash? Well, he didn’t buy some monstrous Bel-Air mansion or pricey Picasso painting. Instead, he started SpaceX in 2002, putting in $100 million, and Tesla in 2003, putting in $80 million. Musk: “I thought the probability of success was so low that I provided all of the money. All of the money just came from me personally. I didn’t want to ask people, other investors for money if I thought we were going to die because I thought we were.”
Of course, it’s hardly been a smooth ride getting from there to here. In 2008, during the Global Financial Crisis, both companies almost went bankrupt. Musk calls it “definitely the worst year of my life.” Tesla closed a financing round on Christmas Eve 2008. “It was the last hour of the last day that it was possible,” he recalled in 2015. “Even then, we only narrowly survived.”
SpaceX was touch-and-go too. No committee would have taken these risks, and most corporations are run by committee. Committees, generally, are engines for mediocrity. Tycoons are not.
In the 1960s it was possible to imagine government space programs taking us out into the solar system, but those programs quickly failed to live up to their initial promise. And today’s NASA is a sad shadow of the Apollo era-NASA, both in terms of accomplishment, and in terms of spirit.
But while NASA flounders, Bezos’ Blue Origin flies. Planetary Resources is moving toward asteroid mining. And Musk’s SpaceX is racking up huge progress as well. These companies don’t operate by committee, but by having someone at the top with vision.
Tycoons have their downsides: Their successes can breed hubris, and their fantastic wealth often produces envy. But with so much of both government and industry seemingly ossified via interminable meetings and PowerPoint presentations, it’s nice to see someone shake things up. Sometimes, you need a few tycoons.
Or as Pethokoukis writes:
And for my readers who might like to still sock it to the billionaires, one final point: According to estimates by Nobel laureate economist William Nordhaus, innovators captured only 2 percent of the value they created between 1948 and 2001. He found that “only a miniscule fraction of the social returns from technological advances” accrued to innovators and concluded that “most of the benefits of technological change are passed on to consumers.” I would guess an update analysis would be similar. Indeed, I wrote last April about how most of the value created by Bezos and Amazon doesn’t go to Bezos.
A 2019 Economist piece speculated that an understanding of Nordhaus’s point is why “billionaires are tolerated even by countries with impeccable social-democratic credentials: Sweden and Norway have more billionaires per person than America does.” If only more American policymakers possessed similar insight.
Well, if insight were productive of graft, they’d have it in spades.
A BLACK PROFESSOR, trapped in anti-racist Hell.
OPEN THREAD: Ring in the weekend.
SPACE: Blue Origin wins first NASA business for New Glenn.
I appreciate Jeff Bezos naming a rocket after me and everything, but I wish they’d move faster.
FROM SOME HEAVY HITTERS: An Open Letter to the UNC Board of Trustees.
We are former senior appointees of the U.S. Department of Education, under two administrations, with decades of experience in federal postsecondary education policy. We would like to take this opportunity to commend you on your resolution recommending the development of a School of Civic Life and Leadership at UNC. We welcome these plans for an academic unit devoted to cultivating skills of civil discourse, dialogue, and deliberation.
We also write to voice our objection to the arbitrary and impromptu threat issued against UNC by Belle Wheelan, President of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC). Although she admits that she has not even read your resolution, she has threatened to put UNC on “warning” status due to your effort to provide guidance to your university on matters related to the academic program and curriculum. You are democratically accountable and duly sworn trustees of the university, responsible for its flourishing and service to the public, yet Wheelan demands of you, “Eyes on, hands off.” She proposes for you the role of mere spectators at the university entrusted by the legislature and North Carolina law to your stewardship.
We urge you to reject this false and unacceptable understanding of board governance, which if followed would allow no genuine reform or board leadership at our nation’s public universities. As the sole constituency on campus with a fiduciary duty to the public, not only is your board’s active engagement in university governance permissible: it is in fact your duty.
The people who have been ruining higher ed for decades need adult supervision, but they don’t want it. And it’s not as if the accreditors are even pretending to exercise measured judgment here: “Although she admits that she has not even read your resolution, she has threatened to put UNC on ‘warning’ status.” Puhleez.
This isn’t accreditation, it’s a temper tantrum.
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