Archive for 2024
January 12, 2024
LEGAL EDUCATION UPDATE: Stanford Law Appoints Its Third Dean in Four Months: Paul Brest. Well, he’s tried and true.
MAN, DON’T LET ANYONE IN THE HERTZ DEI DEPARTMENT HEAR ABOUT THIS…: Hertz is selling 20,000 electric vehicles to buy gasoline cars instead.
Hertz, which has made a big push into electric vehicles in recent years, has decided it’s time to cut back. The company will sell off a third of its electric fleet, totaling roughly 20,000 vehicles, and use the money they bring to purchase more gasoline powered vehicles.
Electric vehicles have been hurting Hertz’s financials, executives have said, because, despite costing less to maintain, they have higher damage-repair costs and, also, higher depreciation.
“[C]ollision and damage repairs on an EV can often run about twice that associated with a comparable combustion engine vehicle,” Hertz CEO Stephen Scherr said in a recent analyst call.
And EV price declines in the new car market have pushed down the resale value of Hertz’s used EV rental cars.
An over-used engine can be rebuilt but there’s really nothing to be done with a battery that’s endured too many charge cycles except replace the whole damn thing.
OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT, I JUST LAUNCHED A NEW VIP SERIES ON UNDERAPPRECIATED ALBUMS STARTIN WITH: Sinatra & Swingin’ Brass. “To borrow a line from Michael Lewis’s 1989 Wall Street exposé, ‘Liar’s Poker,’ this is the ‘big, swinging dick’ of Sinatra albums — but without the disdain Lewis was heaping on Salomon Brothers traders.”
SCIENCE! Vegan NYC Mayor Under Fire After He Advocates Ditching Diabetes Medication.
New York City mayor Eric Adams (D.) is facing criticism after he claimed in a Netflix documentary that he reversed his type 2 diabetes purely by going vegan and not using his insulin.
“When she saw my number reverse in my A1C, what is the, an indicator of your sugar level, she said, ‘Wow, the medicine must be working.’ And I remember placing all the medicine on the table, unused, and said, ‘No, I didn’t use the medicine. I went on a whole-food, plant-based diet,'” Adams says in the documentary, describing a checkup with his endocrinologist after his diagnosis.
Adams recounted the story, as reported Wednesday by Vice News, in an interview for the Netflix series You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment, which tracks a study measuring the health effects of a vegan versus omnivorous diet on sets of twins. The mayor appears in the series along with other prominent advocates of veganism.
Previously: Food-as-Medicine study finds no improvements in type 2 diabetes patients.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Professor says ‘suppress’ Joe Rogan, Douglas Murray to ‘counter terrorism’: report.
I remember when support for higher ed was justified as promoting a more open and tolerant society.
POSEURS GOTTA POSE: Sanctuary Cities Not Living Up to Their Name.
BECAUSE THEY AREN’T SURVIVABLE IN A HIGH-THREAT ENVIRONMENT. NEXT QUESTION? Forget the F-16: Why Doesn’t America Send A-10 Warthogs to Ukraine?
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: GOP Nomination 2024 — It’s All Over But the Veepstakes. “I have spent some time thinking about Trump’s potential running mates and, I’m not gonna lie, I can’t figure out the best fit. Trump has been very vocal about loyalty, which is most understandable when so many alleged and former confidantes have turned away.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: UChicago Professor Sounds Alarm Over Troubling University Finances. “Assuming that the University nets $60,000 in revenue from each undergraduate, Ando calculated that the tuition of more than 3,300 undergraduates—nearly half the number in the College—would be needed to just service debt every year.”
CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: US Supreme Court declines to review Illinois high court ruling upholding gun ban. “The U.S. Supreme Court’s denial of state Rep. Dan Caulkins’ request for review was issued without comment and comes less than a month after Justice Amy Coney Barrett declined to put the law on hold ahead of a Jan. 1 deadline for gun owners to register banned weapons they owned before the law took effect on Jan. 10, 2023.”
But there is a bright spot: Most owners of assault-style weapons in Illinois appear not to have registered them as required by law.
EVERYTHING’S GOING SWIMMINGLY: Biden ignoring Pentagon, defense spending at pre-World War II levels. With our diplomacy and preparedness, those will one day be known as “pre-World War III levels.”
NO EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: NASA unveils the new X-59 ‘quiet’ supersonic jet today and you can watch live.
K-12 ELIMINATIONISM: Public School Maps Erasing Israel.
Sending your kids to public school is pretty much parental malpractice these days.
C-PLAYERS ALWAYS HIRE D-PLAYERS: Biden Judicial Nominee Torched by Sen. Kennedy Goes Down in Flames.
TAXES, DAMNED TAXES, AND MORE DAMNED TAXES: 3 reasons why rich Californians are selling their mansions and moving to Las Vegas — Mark Wahlberg and Dean Cain have already made the move.
While it’s difficult at best to pinpoint a single statistic that proves an exodus from the Sunset Strip to the Las Vegas Strip among mansion owners, numbers from many corners of the economy show that rich folks are leaving Cali in dramatic numbers, while Vegas has seen some high-earning arrivals recently, including Wahlberg — who hopes to help build a movie studio there (more on that in a bit).
Meanwhile, about 27,300 fewer tax returns were filed in California between 2020 and 2021 that reported an adjusted gross income of at least $200,000, according to research by the non-profit Tax Foundation that cites IRS migration data. Last year, Redfin reported that Los Angeles and San Francisco accounted for the highest number of homebuyers searching to move to Las Vegas from April 2023 to June 2023.
And in terms of new Vegas construction, luxury homes worth in excess of $1 million sold at a record pace in the first half of 2023: 267, more than triple the number during the same period in 2018, according to numbers compiled by local research firm Home Builders Research and cited by the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Overall in 2022, 2,130 luxury home sales of $1 million or more were completed in Southern Nevada, essentially unchanged from the elevated level in 2021, per the Nevada State Bank.
Related: California’s Next Suicidal Idea Will Shock You — Unless It Doesn’t
PEOPLE DON’T GO WHERE THEY AREN’T WANTED: Army Sees Sharp Decline in White Recruits. Go around telling white people they’re the problem, they go somewhere else.
Related: The US Army discovers woke doesn’t win wars — but is it too late?
AT AMAZON, Shop the Winter Sale. #CommissionEarned
SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: The Supreme Court on “Officer of the United States” as used in the Constitution.
THAT OUGHT TO PUT THE PUBLIC’S CONCERNS ABOUT ANTISEMITISM TO REST: Harvard to Host Pro-Terrorist, Anti-Israel Summer Program
SAUVE QUI PEUT: Is France Quietly Ditching Renewable Energy Targets?
STANDING UP AGAINST HATE AND BIGOTRY: Harvard Jewish students sue university over antisemitism: ‘Rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment.’
A group of Jewish students are suing Harvard University over “severe and pervasive” antisemitism on campus, claiming that Harvard has not done nearly enough to protect Jewish students since Hamas’ terrorist attacks in Israel.
The students filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court for Massachusetts, alleging that Harvard is violating the civil rights of its Jewish students.
Harvard has been at the epicenter of the student campus clashes over the Hamas-Israel war since Oct. 7. In the days after the Hamas terrorist attacks, dozens of student groups wrote a letter that blamed Israel for the attacks.
Antisemitic incidents have been reported across the Cambridge campus. One notable incident involved pro-Palestinian protesters surrounding a Jewish student, which led to reports being filed with the FBI and Harvard Police. The U.S. Department of Education launched an investigation into Harvard University, and other schools, for possible civil rights violations since the war started.
“Harvard, America’s leading university, has become a bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment,” the students’ lawsuit states. “Since October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists invaded Israel and slaughtered, tortured, raped, burned, and mutilated 1,200 people — including infants, children, and the elderly — antisemitism at Harvard has been particularly severe and pervasive.
“Mobs of pro-Hamas students and faculty have marched by the hundreds through Harvard’s campus, shouting vile antisemitic slogans and calling for death to Jews and Israel,” the lawsuit reads. “Those mobs have occupied buildings, classrooms, libraries, student lounges, plazas, and study halls, often for days or weeks at a time, promoting violence against Jews and harassing and assaulting them on campus.”
The university has failed to “lift a finger to stop and deter this outrageous antisemitic conduct and penalize the students and faculty who perpetrate it,” according to the students suing Harvard.
Harvard has chosen sides, even if that means creating a hostile educational environment.
More: Antisemitism Lawsuit Filed against Harvard University, Includes Allegations re Harvard Law School.