SO… THE FREE SPEECH CRISIS ON CAMPUS IS A “MORAL PANIC”… AND ALSO IT’S MY FAULT? My response to Jason Stanley’s criticisms in the NYT profile on FIRE from last weekend.
Archive for 2025
August 27, 2025
CALIFORNIA FAILIN’:
For a bit of perspective, 62 Amish dudes in Pennsylvania did in 48 hours what Gavin Newsom couldn’t do in 2 years.
Oh yeah, and they did it at 4% of the cost https://t.co/2jLYv7fqwj pic.twitter.com/uAY1umWO1B
— Kevin Dalton (@TheKevinDalton) August 26, 2025
The Amish came to work, not to grift.
FOOTNOTES TO THE RECENT NEW YORK TIMES PIECE ON FIRE: And a response to Jason Stanley’s claim that the crisis on campus for the last 10 years has been a “moral panic.”
I KEEP TELLING PEOPLE NOT TO COUNT OUT THE DEMOCRATS…
Overall turnout was 1/3rd of November for this district. Much worse for local GOP. Yikes.
— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) August 27, 2025
…because their voters are angry, they are energized, and they keep scoring wins whenever Trump isn’t on the ticket.
LANGUAGE RULES FOR CRAZY PEOPLE: Columbia Law School Tells Students To Avoid Offensive Terms Like ‘Crazy Uncle’ and ‘Grandfathering.’ “The session, audio of which was obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, came in the wake of the Trump administration’s deal with Columbia University, which pledged to mandate anti-Semitism training for all students and faculty. Though a Columbia official said that the training was not intended to meet that obligation, it appears to have been crafted with the deal in mind.”
MINE WAS ONE OF THEM: ‘No evidence’: Several campuses nationwide hit with false reports of active shooters.
A lot of speculation among students here that someone is trying to soften campuses up for something real by exhausting them with fake threats.
AT AMAZON, Shop the Labor Day Sale. #CommissionEarned
BIDEN APPOINTEES OFTEN SEEMED TO HAVE ONE THING IN COMMON: ENTITLEMENT.
2021: Dallas Fed president Kaplan busted for suspicious stock trades, resigns
2021: Boston Fed president Rosengren busted for suspicious stock trades, resigns
2022: Fed vice chair Richard Clarida busted for suspicious trades, resigns
2025: Lisa Cook vows to stay on
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 26, 2025
OUR BROKEN IMMIGRATION SYSTEM, EXHIBIT #1,000,006:
An indian Walmart VP was making $30,000 a day in illegal kickbacks by discriminating against American applicants in favor of indian h1b applicants who were paying him the kickbacks for hiring them. https://t.co/pBVXIjvfDm pic.twitter.com/FDHLafxrK7
— Aesthetica (@Anc_Aesthetics) August 25, 2025
Related:
Funny story:
Ever click the button to cancel your order in Walmart, but it didn't work and you got the item anyway?Well one Indian engineering team programmed that button, and another Indian engineering team forgot link APIs to make that button work for third party orders.
— Mark Mitchell, Rasmussen Reports (@honestpollster) August 25, 2025
Full text:
So every time that button got clicked, for every marketplace order, the seller was never informed the customer didn’t want the item anymore.
Hundreds of thousands of people, for years, clicked that button thinking their order would get cancelled, but then they got the order anyway And had to bring it to UPS.
I was the first to discover this, among many other things, And both engineering teams didn’t want to fix it because their bosses didn’t want marketplace revenue to seem lower, even though most of these items would be returns.
I just had my team run a query and cancel these orders everyday to fix the issue within days. I could never get anyone to sign off on it, so I just did it.
I assume that the long-term fix has been sitting on some Indian engineering team’s road map for years at this point.
We uncovered dozens of major issues like this that Indian engineering teams were sweeping under the rug.
It’s weird how corrupt hiring practices and corrupt business practices seem to go hand-in-hand.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Wearisome Dem Tough Bros Would Soil Themselves in a Faceoff With Trump. “Yesterday, we saw doughy Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker put down his sandwich long enough to tell Trump not to come to Chicago to slow down the murders. He held the press conference in front of a Trump building, which someone told him would be cool. It wasn’t. And Trump, being the President of the United States and everything, will go wherever he damn well pleases in this country.”
POOR SALESMANSHIP: Cracker Barrel and The Democrats Chose To Cater To The Affluent Niche…And Failed. “They aren’t thinking about you anymore. You’re not of their ilk. The marketing shift made by Cracker Barrel was motivated by the same reason the Democratic Party wanted to change their voter base target. Both wanted to cater to a more affluent audience and were willing to gamble losing their traditionally working-class base for this gain.”
This was motivated more by social snobbery than by a coherent plan for success.
BEGUN, THE OIL WARS HAVE: Russia raises August oil export plan after drone strikes disrupt refineries, sources say.
Russia has revised up its crude oil export plan from western ports by 200,000 barrels per day (bpd) in August from the initial schedule after Ukrainian drone attacks disrupted refinery operations and freed up more crude for shipment, three people familiar with the matter said.
Export planning remains uncertain, however, due to ongoing strikes and shifting repair schedules, so delays and volume revisions are likely, they said.
“Attacks are ongoing and repair deadlines change daily. It’s unclear how much Russia can load this month or next,” one person said.
Russian oil sellers were yet to receive final loading plans for September, though normally they have the full plan a week before the loading month.
Russia’s Energy Ministry and Transneft oil pipeline monopoly did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
They’re probably a bit preoccupied at the moment.
Meanwhile: Ukraine’s Attacks Are Forcing Russia to Ration Its Fuel. “The intensifying Ukrainian drone campaign against Russian refineries has taken some 13% of Russia’s fuel production offline, according to analysts. Sanctions imposed by the West after the 2022 invasion, meanwhile, have limited Moscow’s ability to repair infrastructure and service remaining installations.”
The Reuters estimate is 17%, but who know which is correct — if either.
I dunno, it’s also kinda funny. I mean except for the realization that one of America’s two major parties is crazy and useless and actually kinda dangerous.
THE NEXT GENERATION OF AMERICANS IS COMING ALONG JUST FINE:
Every zoomer I know wants to run guns to the English and Scotts. It brings a tear to this old Irish boi's eyes. Because we Irish Yanks pioneered that skillset 50 years ago.
— Ælþ (@Aelthemplaer) August 26, 2025
ICYMI: SpaceX successfully completes 10th Starship test mission.
The booster separated from the rocket about three minutes after launch, performed a controlled flip after stage separation and then initiated a boostback burn, all while using three engine configurations. The test mission undertook multiple landing burn tests, tested the booster’s payload deployment and conducted several re-entry experiments aimed at returning the rocket’s upper stage to the launch site to be caught. . . .
After deploying the satellite simulators, SpaceX relit a single Raptor engine while in orbit before re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere.
The test affirms the engine’s ability to be used during orbital missions to break out of orbit and return to Earth, according to SpaceX.
The engine successfully relit about 38 minutes into the test launch, and the Starship began re-entry two minutes later.
The re-entry tested the Starship’s newly designed heat shields before it splashed down in the Indian Ocean after slowing from about five times the speed of sound during re-entry as part of a stress test to assess its limitations.
Iterative learning. It’s a thing.
THEY HAVEN’T BEEN PUNISHED ENOUGH YET, BECAUSE THEY HAVEN’T LEARNED YET: Columbia Law School Tells Students To Avoid Offensive Terms Like ‘Crazy Uncle’ and ‘Grandfathering:’ The mandatory session featured a former corporate attorney turned diversity consultant who has called on companies to ‘defend DEI.’
KURT LASH ON the originalist cases for and against birthright citizenship.
That you can argue both sides of this issue from an originalist standpoint supports my argument, many years ago, that Robert Bork’s support of originalism on the ground that it determines outcomes was thoroughly wrong. There are plenty of other good reasons to support originalism, but it’s not a machine that spits out the correct answer every time, or even nearly every time. It’s just another language for arguing about the law. Arguably a better one (I think so) but still just that.