NORTH CAROLINA LEADING THE WAY ON CAMPUS FREE SPEECH POLICIES. Lots of unironically good news. But as Professor Stephen Porter points out in “I’ve declared war on DEI at NC State,” you’re going to see plenty of resistance to actually following the rules.

READER FAVORITE: Orange Ninja 4-Stage Knife Sharpener. #CommissionEarned

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: ‘Scientific Socialism’ Has Come to Pacific Palisades to Destroy as it Always Does.

CHANGE: Denmark’s ‘zero refugee’ policy drives down asylum admissions to record low.

Denmark’s immigration approach has been influenced by Right-wing parties for more than 20 years, with Mette Frederiksen, the prime minister and leader of the centre-Left Social Democrats, pursuing a “zero refugee” policy since coming to power in 2019.

The country of around six million people received 2,300 asylum requests last year.

“Last year, authorities granted the smallest number of residency permits to asylum seekers that we have seen in recent years,” Kaare Dybvad Bek, the immigration minister, said, calling the figure “historic”.

Home Office figures showed that the UK, which has a population more than 10 times that of Denmark, granted a total of 67,978 asylum claims in the year to June 2024 – more than triple the 21,436 in the previous year.

To be fair, Britain seems determined to commit cultural suicide.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Princess Bride Star Wallace Shawn: Israel Worse Than Nazis.

Best known for both serious fare (1981’s “My Dinner with Andre”) and the 1987 classic “The Princess Bride,” Shawn is one of Israel’s harshest critics.

Shawn chose this moment, as Israeli hostages reveal the horror of their captivity, to compare Israel to Nazi Germany. Except Israel, he said, is actually worse.

The Jewish artist told “The Katie Halper Show,” according to Variety, that Israel is “doing evil that is just as great as what the Nazis did.”

Except when it’s worse, he added.

“They kind of boast about it. Hitler had the decency to try to keep it secret. For some reason, Hitler didn’t want people to know he was doing these things to the Jews. The Israelis are almost proud of it, and it’s demonically evil. And anybody who doesn’t recognize that it’s evil, I can’t, probably, communicate with that person. That might be temporary insanity.”

Inigo Montoya said it best:

WELL, I’M CERTAINLY NOT GOING THERE IN PERSON: Exploring Venus may require exotic tech like balloons and ‘aerobots.’

MARY KATHARINE HAM: Dems Keep Putting Themselves On The Wrong Side Of Popular Issues In Trump Era.

The idea of keeping girls’ sports for girls, protecting them from male competitors in their events and their locker rooms, is an 80 percent issue in America.

“You rarely get 79 percent of the country to agree on anything,” Enten said, terming it a “ginormous majority,” which includes almost 70 percent of Democratic voters.

A hubristic left, culturally dominant for decades and backed by Hollywood, academia, and the media, thought it could take an 80-percent issue and force it into a cultural and political win. It was wrong about that. Convincing people to shut up is not the same as convincing them.

The wisdom of former Speaker Newt Gingrich’s shorthand for political success remains applicable: Find an 80-percent issue and stand next to it.

How a movement convinced itself to flip this admonition on its head and jump on the 20-percent side is one for the history and political science books. Yet, here we are, another Republican president— this one regarded by institutional feminists as nothing short of an abomination—signing a landmark protection for women in sports. Nixon famously signed Title XI in the White House in 1972.

This is a serious issue, but liberals are willing to do it on smaller issues, too.

Friday, Trump announced that he is signing another executive order getting the federal government out of the business of pushing paper straws. The Biden administration had made it a mission via Executive Order to force the country into a future of disintegrating utensils by 2032. But the thing is, they don’t work and they annoy people. Our friends on the left will now spend time crowing about the indispensable nature of mandated, subsidized paper straws, whose banning was built on dubious data from a 9-year-old’s school project, as a pillar of American democracy. Regular voters will enjoy plastic straws that work. If Trump fixes the gas cans next, he may be president forever.

In ways both big and small, the progressive hubris of the last decade has made life uncomfortable for many Americans, and Democrats have gotten very out of practice taking their concerns seriously.

Led by an activist class, exemplified by the newly elected DNC Chair David Hogg, the party seems intent on finding an 80-percent issue and standing on the wrong side of it.

As Abe Greenwald wrote in the Commentary newsletter last week:

If you want to know why, for the first time in 30 years, more Americans identify as Republican than Democrat, it’s because Republicans have been given the easy task of asserting intuitive common sense in a country whose leaders got high on reality-altering theories. It’s now liberals who have to explain why, even though every instinct tells you its monstrous, its ultimately good to toy with children’s gender. Why your daughter should face-off against a boy on the playing field. Why, even though, we have a massive illegal-immigration crisis, it’s ultimately good to keep criminals in the country that they entered illegally. Why, it’s ultimately good to spend your money on a Peruvian transgender comic book.

If it was hard for conservatives to argue for worthy counterintuitive ideas, think how hard it is for liberals to argue for ruinous ones. Watching them try is as fun as discovering conservatism all over again.

Compounded with the fun of watching wanna radical chic leftists self-identify as stodgy reactionaries desperately trying to preserve the old system:

OH, NO… ANYWAY: Cancel Your Museum Trip. The Fauci Exhibit Has Been Axed.

THIS IS A FOLK TREATMENT I’D NEVER HEARD OF: Human breast milk found to enhance corneal healing in new research.

Years ago, a young patient’s mother told Emily McCourt, MD, associate professor of ophthalmology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, that she hadn’t used a prescribed ointment to treat her baby’s chemical corneal burn but instead used her own breast milk.

“I remember thinking, ‘Well, that’s interesting because this patient looks amazing,” McCourt recalls. “Then, I thought about all my patients who said they’ve used breast milk in their baby’s eyes for blocked tear ducts and rashes. There was a real opportunity to look into what was happening and why.”

Interesting.

BEEGE WELBORN: USAID and the Power That Be…or Was.

The Pandora’s box that is USAID, which, now that it’s opened, keeps belching out more evidence of the malevolent, unrestricted inner workings of a rotten, subversive bureaucracy, had to have someone in charge of it for these past few years of particularly egregious anti-American spending.

And so it did – Samantha Power, who took over the agency in May of 2021.
…
Power also has the requisite Harvard (JD) and Yale (BA) degrees, not to mention a non-fiction Pulitzer.

She’s like a progressive cyborg, no?

Notice what I highlighted – Power, with all that unaccountable money at her disposal, was also on Biden’s National Security Council, making sure that USAID would be playing an ‘important role’ in things including geopolitical issues.

Scary AF.

Where were the Democrats screaming about ‘unelected bureaucrats’ then?

Feeding off their largess, of course.

A CIVILIZATION IN RAPID DECLINE: Pakistani immigrant allowed to stay in Britain despite ‘preying on barely pubescent girls when his wife wouldn’t have sex’.

THE DEEP STATE IS REAL, BUT IT’S NOT ALL THAT SPECTACULAR:

On the one hand it's hilarious and pathetic – but on the other it's incredibly instructive – that US corporate media continues to refer to propaganda outlets funded by USAID as "independent media."

Trump and Musk attack "independent media"! (by cutting their US Govt funding). https://t.co/IHoOGIK0nh

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 10, 2025

More like pathetic and dishonest, and kinda cringey.

Related: Your Job Is to Push the Yes Button: The secretaries make the game clear.

Notice when a counter-argument doesn’t describe the argument: I refute (thing I will only vaguely reference). This mode of “argument” is somehow becoming the new normal, quickly.

A gaggle of former Secretaries of the Treasury — Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner, Jacob Lew and Janet Yellen — warn in the New York Times today that the President of the United States is interfering with the operations of the executive branch. No, really. It remains entirely true that warnings about the threat to “Our Democracy” are, in fact, warnings about the threat to Our Bureaucracy. Five people who’ve served at the top levels of the federal government can’t produce one clear and reasonable premise between them.

They just want the money to go to their crowd, because it always has and they feel entitled to it.

The administrative state is impartial, honest, accurate, and pure. “Civil servants” are good; political people are bad. But this is how Article II begins: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” Our entire system of government is premised on the authority of people who, having been elected to office, are accountable to be the people of the country for their choices. A function of government that “has historically been operated by a very small group of nonpartisan career civil servants”: not present in the Constitution. Prove otherwise, if you’d like to try. Show me the authority of that “very small group of nonpartisan career civil servants” in Article II, and tell me exactly where to find it.

Five former senior government officials, feeling themselves wonderfully virtuous, have casually upended the entire American system of government without noticing that they’ve done it. Dire warning: The President of the United States is acting like he’s in charge of the executive branch.

More reason to abolish the civil service.

Related: Smashing the ‘rice bowls’ — how elites are lashing out at Trump and Musk’s reforms.

DAVID THOMPSON: May Contain Drama.

Or, Shakespeare For The Tremulous And Neurotic:

Drama students are being warned of suicide in Romeo and Juliet after a university put more than 200 trigger warnings on works of Shakespeare. The University of the West of England (UWE) has issued warnings for “blood” and “psychological trauma” in Macbeth, as well as “storms” and “extreme weather” in The Tempest.

No laughing at the back.

One theatre show of the shipwreck play was highlighted for containing the “popping of balloons.”

Readers will doubtless recall the Chichester Festival Theatre warning patrons that its production of The Sound of Music, one of the most famous and widely-seen musicals in the world, would contain references to Nazis. Which, for some, would apparently come as a surprise.

We’ve long speculated that there’s no way that Blazing Saddles could be made today. But I had no idea that Hogan’s Heroes reruns might cause sensitive viewers in the 21^st century – or at least those who wish to slap warning labels on absolutely everything – to dive for the fainting couch.

THE E.V. BUBBLE CONTINUES TO DEFLATE: The EV transition hits some snags at Porsche and Audi.

EVs are cool in some respects, but most people rationally don’t want them. And broad adoption would require more electrical generation capacity than greens can tolerate.

FOR SUPER BOWL 60, THIS WOULD BE A HALFTIME SHOW WORTHY OF THE BIG GAME:

Somewhere, the Motown music hitmakers of the 1960s and 1970s, such as the original members of the Four Tops and The Temptations who have passed on, are surely rolling over in their graves at what soul and R&B music has devolved into when an incomprehensible and vulgar mess like rapper Kendrick Lamar’s song “Not Like Us” can win five Grammy Awards, as it did last Sunday night.

Awarding it “Song of the Year” and “Record of the Year” doesn’t speak very highly of the music industry today or of the 13,000 Grammy-voting members of the Recording Academy, either, whose taste appears to be all in their mouths.

“Not Like Us” is sonic entropy that I won’t deign to call music. I haven’t the slightest idea what Lamar is trying to say, because the lyrics are an incoherent, illiterate word salad that would make former Vice President Kamala Harris sound like a rocket scientist by comparison. From what I’ve been able to ascertain online, “Not Like Us” is basically intended as a “diss” aimed at rival rapper Drake.

The song, if you can call it that, is replete with a flurry of gratuitous F-bombs and N-words. But as bad as that is, Lamar also put out a “gay remix” that is even more obscene, with explicit descriptions of sex acts.

* * * * * * * * *

All of this raises a serious question: What was NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell—or whoever in the league’s C-suites chose Lamar as the big game’s halftime performer—thinking?

Welcome to Weimar America, where the left views Donald Trump as a uniquely vulgar individual, whereas Lamar is fit to both perform at the Super Bowl halftime show, and at Fourth of July ceremonies at the White House of recently retired President Obama.

Next year’s NFL championship game in February 2026 will be Super Bowl 60, and with the 60th being a milestone number, allow me to propose a halftime show worthy of the occasion: A Beatles reunion, of sorts.

But not just a reunion of the two remaining members of the Fab Four by themselves, however. I would have Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, both of whom are still recording and performing in concert despite being 82 and 84, respectively, be joined onstage for the 15-minute halftime extravaganza by their musician offspring—James McCartney; the late John Lennon’s sons Julian and Sean Lennon; the late George Harrison’s son Dhani Harrison; and Ringo’s son, Zak Starkey.

Would McCartney and Starr, proselytizing vegetarians (is there any other kind?), deign to perform at a sport centered around a ball commonly dubbed “the pigskin?”

I CAN’T EVEN REMEMBER HOW LONG IT’S BEEN SINCE GOOGLE CHANGED ITS MOTTO TO “GO ON AND BE EVIL”: Rumble CEO Labels Google ‘Evil’ Over Sinister AI Update.

So what specifically did Google change in its new AI standards? In the Jan. 30 version of Google AI principles preserved by Internet Archive, Google promised not to “design or deploy” AI to be used for “[w]eapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people,” or for technologies “that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms.”

But these passages are conspicuously lacking from the newly updated Google AI standards. It seems Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s appearance at Trump’s inauguration (unsurprisingly) betokened no desire for reform.

On the one hand, this is a “Skynet Smiles” moment. On the other hand, China and other rivals will AI-enhance their weapons (and logistics), regardless.

VINAY PRASAD: NIH reduced indirects from 60+% to 15%: 10 things you should know. “You might not realize that when the National Institutes of Health gives out grants, it also pays the institution getting the grant with ‘indirects’, which can be used for any purpose. That means if 100 dollars is paid to the individual grant recipient, 60 dollars or more may be paid to the university. For some facilities it is 90 (see links below). This is obviously money that can’t be spent on more grants. . . . The NIH is now in line with many philanthropic associations that cap indirects at 10-15%. See below. This is widely considered acceptable by universities.”

GET’EM SKEERED AND KEEP THE SKEER ON’EM: GOP senators terrified of crossing Trump, facing Musk-funded challengers.

The White House has signaled that Republicans who thwart Trump’s agenda by voting against his controversial nominees or opposing efforts by Musk to freeze government funding and slash federal agencies, such as the U.S. Agency for International Development, will pay a political price.

And that’s a threat that carries a lot more weight when Musk, the world’s richest man, could easily pour tens of millions of dollars into a Senate Republican primary.

Musk warned Republican lawmakers in December that he was compiling a “naughty list” of members who buck Trump’s agenda. He also pledged shortly after Election Day that his political action committee would “play a significant role in primaries” next year.

At the time, the threat was seen mostly aimed at rebellious House conservatives who loomed as an obstacle to reelecting Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and threatened to derail Trump’s tax agenda by insisting on major spending cuts.

But Republican senators have taken Musk’s warning to heart.
“That’s one of the reasons why you see people who are close to an election, [Sens.] Bill Cassidy [R-La.], Thom Tillis [R-N.C.], voting for certain nominees,” said one Republican senator who requested anonymity to discuss the recent votes of GOP colleagues.

“The White House hasn’t been too subtle about that. I think they’ve been fairly threatening,” the lawmaker added, noting that Cassidy already faces a primary challenge from Louisiana state Treasurer John Flemming.

The real test won’t come until it’s time to vote on DOGE’s proposed budget cuts. That’s when Trump and Musk need to take waffling GOP congresscritters and hold them over a (political) open grave.

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: Sunday Sermon: ‘Sometimes Violence Is Necessary.’

Tennessee preacher Dr. Steve Caudle appears to call for violence against Elon Musk while spreading a rabid form of misinformation about DOGE:

“Sometimes the devil will act so ugly that you have no other choice but to get violent and fight."

Disgraceful. pic.twitter.com/5KK3K2yHkN

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) February 10, 2025

Related: A Clockwork Blue: How the Left Has Come to Excuse Away and Embrace Political Violence.

IS IT JUST ME? OR DOES “SCOUTING AMERICA” SOUND LIKE SOMETHING A FOREIGN POWER WOULD DO? Is This the Final Nail in the Coffin of the Boy Scouts?

CAN’T STOP THE CRINGE: J.B. Pritzker Tries to Out-Trump Trump and it Goes Hilariously Wrong. “‘Please tell me this isn’t real’ was the only thing I could think while watching Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker try to out-Trump Donald Trump on X yesterday, but it was real and it was craptacular.”

YOU WOULD NEED A HEART OF STONE NOT TO LAUGH:

Tens of thousands of angry liberals in D.C. had to drive to work today for the first time in four years, and their seething rage at having to go to work—for Donald Trump!—is making me laugh so hard.

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) February 10, 2025

Related:

Joe Biden's final jobs report is out and it's a doozy.

– 589,000 jobs revised into oblivion
– 70% of jobs created in the government sector
– 99.2% of jobs going to foreign-born workers

This is the mess they’re handing Donald Trump. pic.twitter.com/zUmz4pfBKU

— Peter St Onge, Ph.D. (@profstonge) February 10, 2025

NOT FADE AWAY: James Lileks on Buddy Holly.

GABBY GIFFORDS’ STAFF forgot to turn off replies before putting up an idiotic post.

IT WOULD TAKE A HEART OF STONE NOT TO LAUGH:

You're a software engineer and you didn't think you had to show your work to your new boss' committee?
The era of crying because you have to do work has ended. You make yourself a laughing stock by complaining like this. https://t.co/VMix4Tl1iB

— Justine Bateman (@JustineBateman) February 9, 2025

X works better than Twitter did after Musk cut 80% of the staff — including her. So this is not the own she thinks it is.

What these “victims” don’t get is that the daylight DOGE is shining on government waste, self-dealing, grift, etc., has changed the rules.

Complaints like these no longer carry any weight.