PROGRESS: University of Florida Fired All of Its DEI Staff.

DON’T GET COCKY: Election Countdown: Trump Surges in Swing States Amid Legal Turmoil. Why shouldn’t you get cocky? Because: “The election is eight months away. The Democrats will not be sitting by idly. They have a country to ruin and power to maintain, and they are not going to let up on Trump.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Yale University employs nearly one administrator per undergrad.

JOHN LUCAS: Pushing the Woke Agenda on the Military.

THEY ALWAYS PROMISE THE OMELET, BUT ALL WE EVER SEE ARE BROKEN EGGS:

Damn right! How does rule of law and press freedom help all those starving kids in Canada, Sweden or New Zealand? See how North Koreans all worship the Kim Dynasty for 'delivering full stomachs'.

Or maybe the SCMP wants ever-stupider op-eds… pic.twitter.com/3pKnjn5xss

— HK Hemlock (@HKBigLychee) March 2, 2024

Related: How China strangled its golden goose – and paid a terrible price: Under Xi’s tightening grip, Hong Kong’s days as a global deal-making hub are numbered.

MARK JUDGE: The Upper Room: A Beautiful New Christian Understanding of Grief.

OPEN THREAD: I haven’t forgotten you.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: India targets uncrewed Gaganyaan orbital test mission in July, crewed flight in 2025.

SOONER OR LATER YOU RUN OUT OF OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: Gavin Newsom’s California Model is Collapsing: California deficit soars to $73 billion. “In contrast, prime competitor states like Texas and Florida enjoy large budget surpluses.”

YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT NSF’S TRACK F: The National Science Foundation (NSF) has so far spent at least $39 million funding research and development by private sector firms and academic teams of automated digital censorship tools based on Artificial Intelligence. Can you guess who these tools are to be used against? Look in a mirror, then go here to my Special Report on The Epoch Times.

BOB GRABOYES: A.I. and Community (Double) Standards: Political bias? What political bias?

If it weren’t for double standards, they’d have no standards at all.

SO WILL CNN ANCHORS BE LEARNING TO CODE, OR BUILDING SOLAR PANELS? CNN Appears on the Verge of an Epic Collapse.

“CNN is trying to keep up with the news landscape and become a digital-first provider,” a source said. “It makes sense for them to pursue anchors who have already established a presence there — especially if TV becomes history in their portfolio!”

CNN’s previous attempt at a digital platform failed miserably, with it’s subscription-based streaming service, CNN+, a mere three weeks after its launch back in April 2022. CNN+ aimed for an ambitious goal of securing 2 million subscribers within its inaugural year, but  only managed a meager 150,000 subscribers and purportedly less than 10,000 daily viewers during its highly-hyped launch, making it clear that it was never going to match projections, resulting in the streaming platform being put out of its misery within a month.

Something tells me CNN is going the way of the Hindenburg.

What, no anchors from the History Channel or the Hallmark Network are available as replacements? CNN plunges behind History Channel, obscure Western network in prime time ratings.

Flashback: Coal miners become computer coders.

—Headline, CNN.com, April 22nd, 2016.

Related: They are TV’s ghosts — networks that somehow survive with little reason to watch them anymore.

JESSE SINGAL: If You Can’t See That Adam Rubenstein Was Treated Unfairly, You’re Being A Jerk.

Perhaps the most famous journalist to express this view was the Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times Magazine journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. “Never happened,” she tweeted. Jon Levine, a journalist at the New York Post, asked a reasonable follow-up question: “How can you say that? Have you reported this out? Or do you just not like Adam?” To which Hannah-Jones responded, in a now-deleted tweet: “I’ve worked at the NYT for nearly a decade. That’s how I know.”

That was more or less the level of reasoning on display on Tuesday: I know this didn’t happen. How do I know? I just know. The problem was, Rubenstein had contemporaneously told a number of people about the sandwich event, including Levine and Bari Weiss, and they started coming forward to say so. This didn’t prove it happened, but it did seriously alter the factual contours of the story: for the story to be false, it would have to be the case that Rubenstein fabricated it, at the time, well before he was in any trouble at the Times, to a bunch of his friends. Why?

Anyway, I decided to take Hobbes up on his brilliant suggestion and send an email. A few hours later, an Atlantic spokeswoman responded with a bit more information about the fact-checking process: the details of the sandwich story, she wrote to me, “were confirmed by New York Times employees who had contemporaneous knowledge of the incident in question.”

I don’t think this proves the incident occurred the way independent confirmation from someone who was in attendance would, but on the other hand, come on. The remaining skeptics are demonstrating a textbook example of an isolated demand for rigor: If something happened to a left-leaning person in 2019 that made a right-leaning group look bad, and there was this much evidence for it, of course the sandwich truthers would disseminate it without any further thought. To take one of countless examples, in 2020 Hannah-Jones helped fan an absolutely unhinged conspiracy theory about the government using fireworks to undermine the Black Lives Matter movement before (to her credit) deleting the tweet and apologizing. That theory was evidence-based enough for her to disseminate it. Hell, she had no qualms about immediately calling Rubenstein a liar — a tweet that’s still up — despite being extremely well-positioned to quietly make a call or two and learn more about this incident prior to rendering judgement. I am not particularly well-connected to the Times, but even I have dug up some further off-the-record details (update: I should have mentioned that Megan McArdle also learned more about the incident and publicly said she’s convinced it happened), and it wasn’t difficult to do so. Hannah-Jones obviously could have done the same, but it was more important to tweet and to smear.

During the 20th century, New York Times reporters covered two world wars, Vietnam, and Korea. However, America’s Newspaper of Record reports that their young replacements aren’t holding up as well under pressure: Bomb Squad Called Into New York Times Offices After Discovery Of Suspicious Chick-Fil-A Bag.

UPDATE: Megyn Kelly and Mary Katharine Ham on the Gray Lady’s “Chick-Fil-A Truthers” and their meltdown over first chicken sandwiches and then an op-ed by a US senator:

DON’T GET COCKY:

Two new national #polls show Trump up +4 in prexy election matchup w/Biden@NYTimes-Siena has Trump ahead, 48-44 (980 likely voters); @Forbes-HarrisX has Trump in lead, 52-48 (3,021 registered voters)
➡️Biden not led @RCPolitics poll avg since Sept.https://t.co/svJLf3LlwN

— W. Joseph Campbell (@wjosephcampbell) March 2, 2024

Flashback: The ‘cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us must answer for his failed presidency.

UPDATE: John Podhoretz: How Can Biden Stay In Now?

The American people are sour on the state of things for a reason. Inflation may be lower than it has been, but goods still cost substantially more than they did when Biden took office—and any benefit Americans may be enjoying from the impressive wage growth they may have experienced has been immediately eaten up by higher food prices and higher interest rates and prices on big-ticket items like cars and homes. All of this can get better in the course of this year, but there’s no sign any of it will improve dramatically. And as was proved by the White House effort to make “Bidenomics” happen, with the same success Gretchen Wieners had in making fetch happen, you can’t talk people into feeling that the day-to-day difficulties of life are improving. They will either feel the improvement, have their mood lightened, and feel better about the country and its leadership or they won’t. Right now they aren’t.

And then there’s age.

If you dig into the crosstabs of the NYT-Siena poll you’ll find that there are a bunch of questions they haven’t yet released the answers to but will (I’m guessing) on subsequent days to keep their poll generating new news. I’m guessing those unreleased numbers have to do with perceptions of Biden and Trump on matters of age, competence, and criminality. And given that the results in this poll dovetail pretty well with the recent NBC News poll released three weeks ago, the age response is likely to be devastating for Biden. As Mark Murray of NBC News reported: “A combined 76% of voters say they have major concerns (62%) or moderate concerns (14%) about Biden’s not having the necessary mental and physical health to be president for a second term.”

It’s been said a billion times, but I’ll say it again: One thing Biden really cannot do is get any younger.

Thursday night the president will give the State of the Union address. The stakes are crazily high, because there’s no way to set the bar low. One false move and he’s done for.

But what does “done for” mean? I have no idea. No one can explain to me the modality of how Democrats would dump him from the ticket. That leaves it to Biden and his loved ones. The question is whether Biden himself is looking at these numbers—and in moments of clarity is able to discern the colossal humiliation he may be on the verge of experiencing, not to mention historical judgment that will be rendered of his feckless decision to hold on to the reins of power should he lose in November.

Might he, therefore, get himself out of the race and give Democrats a chance to do what they clearly think is the most important thing they can do—save America from another Trump term?

While the rest of the left are going “Full Cross-Tab Truther” on the poll, Kamala, Michelle, and Gavin smile.

SHOUTOUT TO ALL THE PEOPLE IN 2020 WHO SAID “IT’S JUST A BAD FLU.” CDC COVID Guidelines Now Align With CDC Flu Guidance.

UPDATE: WSJ: It’s Official: We Can Pretty Much Treat Covid Like the Flu Now. “A case of Covid no longer means isolating for five days, according to the latest guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released Friday. It’s the latest sign of the virus’s normalization four years after it upended our lives. You should now follow the same precautions with Covid as you take with the flu, according to new guidelines from the CDC. That means staying home until you’ve gone a day with no fever and symptoms start to improve. Take other precautions for the next five days, including wearing a mask and limiting close contact with others. Those are the same steps the CDC recommends for other respiratory viruses.”

Related (From Ed):

The @CDCgov now says to treat Covid like the flu. Just a reminder… pic.twitter.com/iIxbD9cUXB

— Five Times August (@FiveTimesAugust) March 2, 2024

SCIENCE: How Sweden proved the world wrong about lockdowns: The evidence is clear: authoritarian restrictions did not save more lives.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Congress Members To Wear Barcodes So Lobbyists Can Scan Prices, Self-Checkout https://t.co/O9qG2KGoHr pic.twitter.com/5mDEgRuPSN

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) March 1, 2024

ANOTHER EMBARRASSING ‘CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM’ MOMENT FOR THE MSM: One of the basic tools of agit-prop masters everywhere is to invent a derogatory term, then link it to everybody remotely connected to your opposition. My latest PJMedia column looks at Heidi Przybyla’s mortification.

CLOWARD-PIVEN OR AND BUST! The U.S. national debt is rising by $1 trillion about every 100 days.

Related: Why Team Biden might be purposefully grinding down the middle class.

IT WAS THE BEST OF CARS, IT WAS THE WORST OF CARS. Why the Lucid Air Is the Best and Worst Car We’ve Ever Had.

READER FAVORITE: FLANCCI Mens Slim Wallet with Money Clip. #CommissionEarned

SOD OFF SWAMPY: Climate Dork Shoved To Ground After Confronting Senator Joe Manchin.

Climate protester confronts West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, gets wrecked: pic.twitter.com/0ziEpcl6CY

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) March 2, 2024

As we’ve seen time and time again, there’s no middle ground for many of these activist groups. The constant disruptions, destroying of ancient artifacts, blocking of roads — sometimes even to HOSPITALS are all part of their game plan. Many times it’s financially motivated, as I’ve extensively written about in the past.

A telling sign of how these protesters had no intention of any solution yesterday was when they refused to sit down with Manchin to air their grievances.

“Do you all want to sit down somewhere, so we can talk?” Manchin asked, to which one protester responded, “I’m not going to sit down.” Well, your buddy sure took a seat alright when he was leveled to the floor.

Senator Joe Manchin, by the way, is a Democrat. Based on some of the comments below, I’m pretty sure these climate people just got him more votes – including from Republicans.

This person freaking out at Manchin must be more of this #WhiteRuralRage I keep hearing about. Or perhaps: Environmentalism is a Fundamentalist Religion.

(Classical reference in headline.)

OUT ON A LIMB: You Don’t Need To Document Everything.

And we’re so addicted and used to reflexively recording everything that we end up excusing the weirdest behaviour. They just want to remember the fireworks! Really? There’s crowds of people all capturing the same thing; they will likely never watch that video back, and if they’re posting it online that’s not for memories; it’s for attention. It’s the same thing as ‘90s camcorders! In what world! Camcorders didn’t come with this urge, with this compulsion to constantly update people, with tying your self-worth to likes and followers. You’ll regret it if you don’t record it! Sure, capture occasional moments; keep them for you. But I think if this generation is on track to regret anything it will be the time we wasted documenting and editing and filtering and marketing ourselves for social media. Time we will never get back. My bet is we won’t look back at our hundreds of thousands of Instagram Stories and Snapchats and Boomerangs with fondness that we filmed these moments, but with aching regret that we didn’t fully feel them.

Because look at the people who do document their entire lives! Very often these perfect influencers are falling apart behind the camera. Again and again, perfect online couples seem to implode out of nowhere. Influencers who dedicate every waking moment to documenting their identity have no idea who they actually are. Women who post pictures of their faces from every angle and in every possible lighting hate how they look. Families who capture every moment of their perfect lives get caught in scandal after scandal. And still we keep falling for it: the illusion, the performance, the front. Almost 70% of Gen Z say social media makes them feel stressed, anxious and depressed; over half want to be influencers. What’s happening here? We so easily forget the emotional cost of sharing everything; we so easily forget that those who do are compensating.

Video version of the above essay, with numerous shots of people with iPhones documenting every last micro-second of their lives, here:

NOW BLOCK IT: Team finds novel vehicle for antibiotic resistance.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Norm Dworman Schools Seattle Comedy Club on Free Speech.

Dworman showed sympathy for the duo, but he couldn’t let them go without sharing his thoughts on the responsibilities that come with comedy club ownership.

“You’re obviously nice people, well-intentioned people. You’re in an industry that is about free expression. You’re in an industry that has a history of having landmark incidents regarding free expression that affect the culture. So you chose that industry. You don’t have to live up to that calling … but it’s not like you opened a deli and you found yourself in this.

“You’re becoming a cousin, and you’re nice people and you don’t wanna be, of the people smashing the windows,” Dworman said, noting a recent incident at Berkeley where violent protesters raged against Jewish speakers.

“They started smashing the place up. This is a close cousin of the sentiment that you’re buckling to,” he said. “I can’t sign off on it because it’s wrong. It’s leading the country down a terrible direction with everybody fueled by their certainty that their position is the right one, so right that no one else should even be platformed. And I will smash up Berkeley, and I will riot outside the Comedy Cellar and I will put this comedy club out of business if they should have the nerve, not to endorse a view I do not like, but simply allow that view to be heard.”

Related: MSNBC Legal Lunatic Frets Over America’s ‘Deep Commitment to Free Speech.’

To be fair, it’s always good to see those who view the Stasi in The Lives of Others as the good guys self-identify.