SOON EVERYONE WILL BE SKINNY, AND BEING SKINNY WON’T BE NEARLY AS COOL: Eli Lilly finds its weight-loss pill works just as well as Ozempic — and investors are loving it. “The data showed that the once-daily pill reduced patients’ weight by an average of 16 pounds, or about 8% of their body weight, and lowered their A1C, a blood-sugar measure, by an average of 1.3% to 1.6%. The pill form is in line with injectable GLP-1 drugs, like Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic, a diabetes drug also used for weight loss.”
Archive for 2025
April 19, 2025
THERE SHOULD BE SHARP LIMITS ON INTERNATIONAL STUDENT ENROLLMENTS IN GENERAL: Feds warn Harvard may lose ability to enroll international students.
“I DIDN’T INHALE”: Van Hollen Backtracks As El Salvador Stunt Backfires Spectacularly.
THAT’S WHO THEY ARE, THAT’S WHAT THEY DO: The Failure of the Expert Class. . .Again.
The problem with the expert class isn’t so much that they override the will of the people, it’s that they face no consequences for being wrong.
Flashback: The Suicide of Expertise.
By its fruit the tree is known, and the tree of expertise hasn’t been doing well lately. As Nassim Taleb recently observed: “With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers.”
Then there’s the problem that, somehow, over the past half-century or so the educated classes that make up the “expert” demographic seem to have been doing pretty well, even as so many ordinary folks, in America and throughout the West, have seen their fortunes decaying. Is it any surprise that claims to authority in the form of “expertise” don’t carry the same weight that they once did?
Truer every day.
THAT’S DIFFERENT BECAUSE SHUT UP:
Remember that time Barack Hussein Obama blamed the Benghazi embassy attacks on a random guy who made a YouTube video that nobody had ever seen and immediately threw him in jail and that was just fine? https://t.co/9ifadpa97p
— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) April 18, 2025
REMEMBER APOLLO 13 [VIP]: Sky Candy and a Big Week in Space History.
And don’t forget there’s a daily dose of space and sky candy at my substack The Stars Our Destination.
NO, EASTER WAS NOT STOLEN FROM PAGANS: It’s Easter weekend, so odds are excellent you will hear or read that the early Christians “stole” Easter from various pagan holiday practices. Rod Martin observes:
“Every year, as Christians around the world celebrate Easter, skeptics revive a familiar claim: that Easter is just a repackaged pagan festival. They point to spring fertility rites, to goddesses like Ishtar and Eostre, and to symbols like eggs and rabbits, declaring Christianity guilty of cultural plagiarism.
“But these assertions, repeated so often they’ve become clichés, collapse under any serious historical scrutiny. The truth is simple: Easter isn’t pagan, and neither are its origins. Rather, it is the central celebration of the Christian faith, grounded in real events, rooted in Jewish (not pagan) practice.”
Martin, who was a member of PayPal’s pre-IPO startup team, then addresses each of the major variations of the “Easter was stolen from pagans” claims and demonstrates their utter improbability. It’s a bit lengthy, but well-worth the reading time for those who seek the facts.
PRESCIENT:
Every so often I revisit this tweet. No reason. No reason at all. Though I don't think you cudgel is what you do with shards. Oh, well. https://t.co/CZRAlyrbRQ
— Varad Mehta (@varadmehta) April 18, 2025
SO IT WOULD APPEAR: Is Canada Brain-Dead?
Though when a country seems stupid, it’s usually a sign of tight media control by the rulers.
Less convincing were commenters like historian Joan Scott, who said Trump’s actions were “unheard of” and “even during the McCarthy period in the United States, this was not done.” Coverage consistently ignored the fact that Columbia has been a poster child for decades-long assault by most all universities on academic freedom, as well as a serial violator of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which requires that public funds not be spent “in any fashion which encourages, entrenches, subsidizes or results in racial [color or national origin] discrimination.”
It would be nice if the NYCLU acknowledged that Columbia’s record is replete with moronic civil liberties offenses. It’s deplatformed with gusto, allowed or encouraged “heckler’s veto” shutdowns of events, and institutionalized compelled-speech “diversity statements” as part of its admissions process (including instructions on what to write, like “When did your privilege result in different treatment than others?”). It has the same problems with the use of race in admissions that Harvard tried to defend and lost at the Supreme Court, and its DEI programs still infect the curriculum with iron race doctrine. The School of Social Work to this day proudly waving the banner of the “PROP or “Power, Race, Oppression, and Privilege” framework,” which makes the department’s “guiding principle” the idea that “anti-Black racism and white supremacy are endemic in our systems and institutions.”
Speech codes are issued in a variety of forms. A Barnard circular even missed the irony of a George Carlin routine, announcing “the following words cannot appear on any posted information at Barnard: shit, piss, suck, cunt, fuck, motherfucker, cocksucker and tits.” These practices and more led to Columbia in 2022 being named the worst campus in the country for free speech by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), getting the country’s sole “abysmal” rating. Ironically, Harvard would soon earn a worse review.
After October 7th, 2023, in a heated and difficult situation, the school made bad decisions. A lot of schools responded to this situation in ways less than ordeal (Cooper Union administrators won themselves a fat Title VI suit after a horrific “Jewish students locked in a library” ordeal), and Columbia seemed to admit to such issues in its early communications. Unfortunately, both parties want to blur lines: the Trump administration seems anxious to define some things that are clearly legal protests as antisemitism and/or discrimination, while schools like Columbia are content to acknowledge “legitimate concerns” without specifying where it crossed a line.
“Part of the problem is that it’s to everybody’s advantage, or they believe it’s to their advantage, to not be specific about problems they’re seeing, or to nix things that could actually be Title VI violations,” says FIRE attorney Robert Shipley.
The Trump administration would have been right to simply demand that Columbia cut the recent shit (and all the other shit). These things are usually resolved on the sly. As Shipley’s colleague Tyler Coward noted, “Historically no higher ed institution has ever lost all its federal funding, which is the consequence for violating Title VI.” But Trump is a different animal. He’s dragging these dramas in the open, making the Ivies dance for their federal crumbs in the most humiliating conceivable manner, like Joe Pesci shooting at the feet of Michael “No, I thought you said, ‘I’m alright Spider’” Imperioli in Goodfellas.
Read the whole thing.
LIGHTNING DEAL: GIANEN Mens Grade 4 Wrinkle-Resistant Plaid Button-Down. #CommissionEarned
DON SURBER: Did Katy Perry just kill feminism? “The 6 celebrities followed Freedom 7’s course? So what? You can retrace the route of the Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria but that doesn’t make you Christopher Columbus.”
The Internet mockery has been extreme:
But efforts at stolen astronaut glamour notwithstanding, the real achievement is in fact that space travel has progressed to the point where you don’t have to be Alan Shepherd or John Glenn to fly in space: You can just be a passenger. Kind of like it’s a sign that air travel has advanced that you don’t have to be Charles Lindbergh to fly across the Atlantic.
These women flew in space because they’re famous. Alan Shepherd was famous because he flew in space. It’s not the same, but that’s okay.
April 18, 2025
OPEN THREAD: Ring in the weekend.
UNEXPECTEDLY: Member of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s administration allegedly caused $20K in damage while vandalizing Teslas: report.
An employee of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was reportedly busted for allegedly causing approximately $20,000 in damage while vandalizing Teslas — just weeks after his failed vice presidential candidate boss mocked the electric car company’s falling stock.
Dylan Bryan Adams, 33, a fiscal policy analyst for the state run by the failed vice presidential candidate, was arrested after he was caught on vehicle surveillance dragging his keys across several Teslas, causing approximately $20,000 worth of damage as he stripped the paint off the electric cars, according to a Minnesota-based crime watch account.
Formal charges are reportedly pending.
Flashback: Did Tim Walz ‘Let Minneapolis Burn?’
There is one point on which everyone I spoke to seemed to agree: The destruction was orchestrated largely by agitators, not local protesters. Some of them were militant anarchists, and some were far-right groups like the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo Bois, and the “Aryan Cowboys.”
“People there with a First Amendment right to protest were being used as cover, whether wittingly or unwittingly, for the destruction,” said one officer, who asked to remain anonymous.
[Minneapolis police lieutenant Kim Voss], who went undercover decades ago to investigate Antifa, told me that “this is what trained activists do. They found a crowd that was really ripe for it. A lot of the looters were local people—ones that got caught up in it. But they were puppets. The activists were the puppeteers.”
More than anyone, though, Voss blames Walz. She recalled once hearing Walz use the line, “We don’t abandon our folks,” referring to Democrats who were calling for Biden to exit the presidential race.
“I thought, You’re so full of shit,” she said. “You did. You left us all behind.”
Related: Tim Walz’s Wife Gwen Kept Windows Open During BLM Riots to ‘Smell the Burning Tires.’ “I kept the windows open as long as I could because I felt like that was such a touchstone of what was — what was happening.”
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Texas Space Commission awards $26 million to five companies.
RADICAL CHIC, THE BOY BAND ERA: Luigi Mangione and the left’s warped choice of heroes.
Meanwhile the resistance was gearing up to back Mahmoud Khalil in a street fight, but Abrego Garcia’s story took precedence. Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen made a big show of flying down to Central America to accomplish nothing, something I used to do in the 1990s when I wanted to boogie board and take drugs. Meanwhile, the US government was releasing information that made sure to label Garcia as the ultimate “bad hombre.”
The framing is absolutely horrible for the Democrats. I have serious doubts as to whether the Trump Administration’s policies will make Americans wealthier and safer. But at least they’re paying lip service to the problems that ordinary people in ordinary situations face. Meanwhile, the Democrats look like they’re mostly concerned about defending alleged assassins and gang members. Not ideal.
These aren’t obscure strategies, either. James Carville, the quotable Crypt-Keeper of Democratic messaging strategy, has said that they need to double down on the Abrego Garcia case. To him, it’s a winner, even if it’s obviously a big loser. These fellows will bear the standard for a long while.
We’ve never seen anything like this, in our political lifetime or any political lifetime. Imagine if the Democrats had thrown their 1972 lot in with Charles Manson. What if Bill Clinton had insisted we “free The Unabomber”? The optics are that disastrous, that ridiculous.
Regarding Manson, according to Jann Wenner’s biographer Joe Hagen in his 2017 book, Sticky Fingers:
As the 1960s kept ending, the next installment was the arrest of Charles Manson and four of his followers for the horrific murder of five people, including actress Sharon Tate, wife of Roman Polanski, at a luxury mansion north of Beverly Hills. When Manson’s trial began in 1970, Wenner leaped at the story with an idea for the headline: “Charles Manson Is Innocent!”
Wenner’s headline was less insane than it sounds to modern ears. Manson was already an object of media obsession, a former Haight-Ashbury denizen who drifted to L.A. and collected hippie acolytes for LSD orgies and quasi-biblical prophecies. While the straight world viewed him as a monster, much of Wenner’s audience saw him, at least hypothetically, as one of their own. The underground press of Los Angeles, including the Free Press, cast him as the victim of a hippie-hating media. Manson was a rock-and-roll hanger-on. Wenner was convinced of Manson’s innocence by his own writer David Dalton, who had lived for a time with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, a Manson believer. “I’d go out driving in the desert with Dennis, and he’d say things to me like ‘Charlie’s really cosmic, man.’”
And of course, Weather Underground member-turned-Obama booster Bernadine Dohrn famously said of Manson and his followers:
Dig it! First they killed those pigs. Then they ate dinner in the same room with them. Then they even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!
As Ed Morrissey wrote on Monday after Taylor Lorenz and CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan each gushed over Luigi Mangione:
Mangione is nothing new. The Left has always turned violent psychopaths into cultural icons as long as they ostensibly supported the Left’s causes. Che Guevara got transformed into a literal fashion icon for decades, despite his bloodthirsty march through 20th century history in support of some of the worst regimes and terrorist groups of his era. My friend Nick Gillespie reminded everyone more than a decade ago of Guevara’s nature:
Born in 1928 and gunned down in 1967 by drunken Bolivian soldiers, Che rarely missed an opportunity to make life miserable for those who opposed him. During the fight against the Batista regime, Che ordered the summary executions of dozens of real and suspected enemies, becoming the very thing he said revolutionaries must be: a “cold-blooded killing machine.” As a leader in post-Revolution Cuba, Che became known as the “butcher of La Cabaña” prison, where he oversaw hundreds of murders of political prisoners and “counter-revolutionaries.”
When he became the effective czar of the Cuban economy and attempted to create a “new man and woman,” or workers fueled by revolutionary ideals rather than conventional workplace incentives, his plans failed catastrophically and helped make Cuba the economic basket case it remains to this day. Along the way, Che did more than his share to help ban rock and jazz music as “imperialist” forms of expression. Such actions mark Che less as the youthful idealist portrayed in the acclaimed film version of his own Motorcycle Diaries and more as a repressive, murderous thug, a Caribbean version of the Taliban.
By the mid-1960s, Che left Cuba to export armed revolution to Africa and South America, all without success. If his violent death at 39 secured his romantic martyrdom to a cause that now thankfully flourishes only in Cuba and North Korea, it is his iconic, beret-bedecked image from a 1960 photo that persists everywhere in popular culture, from Mike Tyson’s torso (the boxer sports a tattoo of Mao along with Che) to beer and booze labels to belt buckles to the T-shirts worn around the world.
Flash-forward several decades and Rolling Stone’s infamous 2013 radical chic hot take on Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev looking totally cool and dreamy on their cover has its roots both in the magazine’s founding days, and the left’s ongoing obsession with those who kill for their approved causes.
HILARIOUSLY PERFECT: COVID.gov Now Goes to Page Debunking ‘Proximal Origins’ Paper, Trashing Fauci.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Sewell Chan Says He Was Fired From CJR After ‘Pointed’ Interaction With Writer ‘Devoted’ to Gaza.
Sewell Chan on Friday said he was fired as the executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review after staffers complained about several recent “pointed interactions.”
One of those interactions, Chan said in a statement shared with TheWrap and posted on X, was with a writer who was “passionately devoted to the cause of the Gaza protests” who had covered the “recent detention of a Palestinian graduate for an online publication he had just written about, positively” for CJR.
“I told him there was a significant ethical problem with writing for an outlet he had just covered,” Chan said.
The other recent interactions that spurred his firing, Chan said, included a conversation with a reporter working on a “sensitive #MeToo investigation” against a “prominent investigative reporter.” Chan said he reluctantly gave her more time to work on the story, which remains unpublished, after urging her to “move expeditiously” towards publishing it. The third “pointed” interaction was with a staffer who refused to come into the office or write at least one story per week, Chan said; that writer received several months’ paid leave to look for a new job from Columbia, he said.
Chan said Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia’s journalism school, confronted him about recent staff complaints about those interactions on Monday.
“While I disagreed with these complaints, I offered to meet with the staff members involved and requested a coach who could help me navigate a charged higher education environment. Instead I was fired,” Chan said.
“These are normal workplace interactions and I did exactly what I was hired to do, which was to provide rigorous, fair, careful editorial oversight and raise the metabolism and impact of a publication that’s supposed to monitor the media,” the former editor maintained.
In 2006, Hugh Hewitt wrote about the Columbia School of Journalism for the late, and sometimes lamented Weekly Standard: The Media’s Ancien Régime.
[Nicholas] Lemann also recommends to me the 1920 Walter Lippmann essay “Liberty and the News,” but curiously not Lippmann’s better known 1922 opus, Public Opinion, which opens this way:
There is an island in the ocean where in 1914 a few Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Germans lived. No cable reaches that island, and the British mail steamer comes but once in sixty days. In September it had not yet come, and the islanders were still talking about the latest newspaper which told about the approaching trial of Madame Caillaux for the shooting of Gaston Calmette. It was, therefore, with more than usual eagerness that the whole colony assembled at the quay on a day in mid-September to hear from the captain what the verdict had been. They learned that for over six weeks now those of them who were English and those of them who were French had been fighting in behalf of the sanctity of treaties against those of them who were Germans. For six strange weeks they had acted as if they were friends, when in fact they were enemies.
You can put Lippmann’s book down after page one, his 1920 essay, and Pulitzer’s vision statement for his school as well. Lippmann’s world, Pulitzer’s world, even Nicholas Lemann’s world of the Harvard Crimson from 1972 to 1976–they are all gone. Every conversation with one of the old guard citing the old proof texts comes down to this point: There is too much expertise, all of it almost instantly available now, for the traditional idea of journalism to last much longer. In the past, almost every bit of information was difficult and expensive to acquire and was therefore mediated by journalists whom readers and viewers were usually in no position to second-guess. Authority has drained from journalism for a reason. Too many of its practitioners have been easily exposed as poseurs.
Lemann understands completely what has happened. I think he regrets it. He is certainly trying to salvage the situation. And there is simply no way he can succeed.
In multiple newsrooms in 2020, but most prominently in the New York Times, young scribes fresh out of J-school thought they should be running the asylums, not their editors. The even younger wannabe-scribes at CJR are simply speeding up the process even before they get their first real jobs.
IT’S ALWAYS IN THE LAST PLACE YOU LOOK: Half The Universe’s Matter Was Missing. Astronomers Just Found It.
TIM WALZ’S STATE GOVERNMENT AT WORK: Minnesota State Government Analyst Arrested for Vandalizing Teslas.
SO MUCH FOR THE LIBERTIES OF ENGLISHMEN: Wintery Knight examines how freedom of speech, religion and family are all but extinct in the island nation formerly known as “this sceptred isle” of liberty.
IMPROVE YOUR SKIN: NutraVive Crepe Repair Cream. #CommissionEarned