HMM: Supreme Court allows Biden administration to cut Texas border wire. “The decision on Monday isn’t the final word on the contentious dispute, which has hit a fever pitch in recent weeks as Texas and the federal government stand at odds over how to mitigate the immigration crisis that has seen record levels of illegal immigrants over the border since President Joe Biden took office. . . .The state argues that the federal government does not have the right to destroy Texas’s property and claims ‘eyewitness observers’ reported Border Patrol agents ‘facilitat[ing] the surge of migrants’ into Eagle Pass, Texas.”

WELL, GOOD: Bacteria Responsible For Acne Were Genetically Modified to Treat It Instead.

LOL, ANOTHER HIPSTER NOSTRUM FAILS: Green Menace? Study Finds Food From Urban Agriculture Has 6x Larger Carbon Footprint.

Anyway, I think it’s better if urban areas are dependent on rural areas.

TRUE: Quality Matters, But You Also Need Luck.

LOL, BUSINESS INSIDER: Business Insider: Very Dangerous to ‘Indoctrinate’ Young Americans That They Can Lawfully Possess a Firearm.

KAROL MARKOWICZ: Leave The Pews: “For many liberal Jews, it was hard to ignore that it wasn’t the boogeyman white supremacists that they had been warned about their entire lives. No, it was their professors, their co-workers at the nonprofit, friends of their college-aged kids calling for an end to Israel and celebrating the murder of Jews. And these hateful marches were not happening in rural Alabama, in the places they were taught to fear, but mainly in the bluest of blue cities. . . . By Oct. 8, their ‘allies’ had already taken to the streets, some in grotesque glee over the slaughter of Jews in their homes, others tearing down posters of kidnapped children, to say Israel should just sit down and take it.”

Plus: “To those who sat in the pews for years as their congregation became a shameless political operation, the time has now come to depart. Your synagogue must be a place of worship, not of political activity, and, unfortunately for you, who paid your dues and hoped to align with a community of your peers, the political movement your shul promotes is the one that hates you.”

BUILD MORE NUKES: Sam Altman: Age of AI will require an ‘energy breakthrough.’

I THINK THEY WOULD HAVE BEEN FULLSIZE A COUPLE OF DECADES AGO: Best midsize trucks for 2024.

I HOPE IT STOPS: What happens when you trigger a car’s automated emergency stopping?

RISE OF THE MACHINES: Study shows a computerized decision support system reduces high-risk drug combinations in ICU patients.

WELL, GOOD: Survival rate for pancreatic cancer improves.

SCIENCE MARCHES ON: Harvard Teaching Hospital Seeks Retraction of Six Papers by Top Researchers: Dana-Farber Cancer Institute is reviewing more than 50 papers, including work of the hospital’s CEO.

The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a Harvard Medical School affiliate, is seeking to retract six studies and correct 31 other papers as part of a probe involving four of its senior cancer researchers and administrators.

More than 50 papers, including four co-authored by Chief Executive and President Dr. Laurie Glimcher, are part of a continuing review, according to Dr. Barrett Rollins, the cancer institute’s research-integrity officer. Some requests for retractions and corrections have already been sent to journals, he said. Others are being prepared. The institute has yet to determine whether misconduct occurred.

Also under investigation are papers co-authored by Chief Operating Officer Dr. William Hahn; Director of the Clinical Investigator Research Program Dr. Irene Ghobrial; and Dr. Kenneth Anderson, program director of the Jerome Lipper Multiple Myeloma Center.

All four researchers have faculty appointments at Harvard Medical School, making it the latest tranche of misconduct allegations leveled at Harvard researchers. Claudine Gay resigned as Harvard University president early this year, facing allegations of plagiarism. Last year, Harvard Business School placed Prof. Francesca Gino on administrative leave after accusations that her work contained falsified data.

Glimcher and the other researchers didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Dana-Farber’s disclosure about its probe arrived after a data sleuth pointed to irregularities in the researchers’ papers.

In early January, molecular biologist Sholto David published a blog post describing what he said were signs of image manipulation in papers by the Dana-Farber researchers. David contacted Dana-Farber and Harvard Medical School with his concerns, submitting a list of papers he said contained problems.

The most serious, he said, had to do with images of experimental results that had signs of copy-and-pasting by software such as Adobe Photoshop. “Those are pixel-perfect matches for the same area, but it’s supposed to be a different sample,” he said.

It’s a bad year for Harvard’s brand.

THEY FEAR THE TRUTH:

I've been on social media in its current incarnations and its precursors (like dial-up AOL chat rooms) on-and-off since the mid-'90s.

I have learned one consistent lesson over and over and over, and it has never not happened. Here it is:

Anywhere online that conservatives are…

— Cynical Publius (@CynicalPublius) January 21, 2024

And evil hates to be mocked.

SURE, THAT’LL WORK: Anti-Israel protesters at Columbia demand divestment, threaten tuition strike.

LOL, YALE STUDENTS SKIPPING CLASS: Yale students walk out of class on first day of semester to protest school’s ‘complicity in genocide.’

MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: The Coldest Place. And the survival power of bitching.

THEY’RE NOT WRONG: Voters: Obama is Biden’s puppet master. “Most voters, including a majority of Democrats, believe former President Barack Obama is the controlling influence on President Joe Biden as he pushes forward much of his ex-boss’s liberal agenda.”

JOHN O’SULLIVAN: Parkinson’s Law in the Persian Gulf.

MAKE THE RUBBLE BOUNCE, JUST TO BE SURE: Andy Kessler: Pop Goes the DEI Bubble.

Have we reached peak DEI? The unraveling of “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives had already begun—five states banning DEI programs; Google, Facebook
and others cutting DEI staff; Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard—well before Harvard President Claudine Gay was demoted.

Author Christopher Rufo, echoing 1960s student activists, called the rise of DEI a “long march through the institutions”—a 50-plus-year ideology infiltration into universities, K-12 schools, government, media and corporations with the goal of telling us all how to live. That’s why I enjoy that the word “rot” is back in style to describe what is happening inside the walls of academia.

Like everything based on the writings of Karl Marx—seeing oppressors and colonial struggles everywhere—DEI was doomed to fail. The uniformity of thought known as intersectionality, fostered by DEI, meant all oppressed people must support all others who are oppressed. But that idea burst on Oct. 7 when Hamas raped, murdered and kidnapped Israelis. Many liberals, especially Jewish ones, couldn’t support genocidal “colonized” terrorists. Pop! The long march is in retreat.

By the way, ESG, or investing based on “environmental, social and governance” principles, peaked last June, when BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said he would stop using “the word ESG anymore, because it’s been entirely weaponized.” Never mind that performance of ESG funds has been sketchy and that BlackRock had been adding the label “sustainable” or “ESG” to funds and charging up to five times as much. Then a study published in December by Boston University’s Andrew King found “no reliable evidence for the proposed link between sustainability and financial performance.” Pop!

Most offensive to me was DEI’s devious underlying agenda: societal design. Blinded by fanatical devotion, activists were pawns for the cause of reshaping the world into a collective utopia to be run, of course, by progressive, self-identifying elites. That was the “my truth” that Ms. Gay invoked on her exit. Critical theories and Marxist techniques would take power from you and me, using big government as the enforcer.

The new societal design, embedded in DEI and ESG, envisioned idyllic communal progress. History shows this never works because power corrupts. Diversity meant ideological conformity. Equity meant discrimination. Inclusion meant blurring the sexes. Men winning women’s athletic events would be considered normal. It was all theatrics, like the tampons I’ve seen in men’s bathrooms on Ivy League campuses. Somewhere George Orwell is rolling on the floor laughing.

One goal of progressive societal design is to shrink—depopulation. Twenty-somethings now question having children. Net zero and degrowth, both World Economic Forum approved, are pushed via energy myths: carbon bad, cows bad. A plant-based chicken in every pot and two electric cars in every garage. They envy the merit-touting rich, shout “inequality” and wear “Tax the Rich” dresses. They tear down statues to erase history. How did we let this happen?

You get what you tolerate. Don’t tolerate this.

Related: Are Our Elites Crazy? Yes, yes they are.

Also:

MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: The Coldest Place. And the survival power of bitching.

ROGER KIMBALL: Ramaswamy Defies New York Times Narrative: Suspends Campaign, Backs Trump. “I think it was a writer for Time magazine who, back in the day, illustrated the point by noting the difference in tone between ‘Truman slunk from the room to huddle with his cronies’ and ‘Ike strode from the chamber to confer with his advisors.’ Truman and Ike were doing the same thing, but the description of their activities cast them in very different rhetorical spaces. The Times obviously had Vivek slated for a Truman-like role.”

JOEL KOTKIN: California: where freedom goes to die. Gavin Newsom has turned the Golden State into a woke dystopia.

TIME TO COUGH UP SOME REPARATIONS, I GUESS: LeVar Burton shocked to discover he’s descended from a Confederate soldier. “Burton, who famously portrayed a slave in the 1977 TV miniseries, ‘Roots,’ was floored to find out his great-great grandfather fought to protect the institution of slavery during America’s Civil War. . . . Other celebrities have been shocked to learn about their heritage on the hit PBS show. Last year, former Black Panther Angela Davis was surprised to discover her ancestors came over on the Mayflower.”

THERE SEEM TO BE A LOT OF SECRET PUBLIC-PRIVATE ALLIANCES THESE DAYS: The Secret Public-Private Alliance to End Inflation and Save the Biden Administration. “By now you should be putting things together. The #metoo movement and the BLM pogroms in every major city became the pretext for a ‘re-imagining’ of long-standing IPs, in a way that made no sense as business decisions, but were perfectly rational if the goal was, in fact, to make money disappear.” Heh. A conspiracy so vast . . . .

Plus: “While I do not have what most skeptics would regard as ‘evidence,’ I do have plenty of hearsay and conjecture, which are kinds of evidence.”

LOL, BRUCE BARTLETT’S TDS IS SHOWING:

I'm not so sure. Trump's speech last night to a full house in Manchester was (I reluctantly realized) highly effective. He didn't ramble and he kept all the defects (eg grievances) in check or hidden. No signs of dementia. https://t.co/tZLaeOoCMt

— Mickey Kaus (@kausmickey) January 21, 2024

To be honest, if I could wave my magic want and make DeSantis president I would. I don’t have a magic wand, and he can’t be elected. It’s Trump or Biden (or worse, Kamala, Michelle, Gavin Newsom, or several other worse choices). I choose Trump.