MAKE NO MISTAKE, THE PRIMARY MOTIVE HERE IS TO CONCEAL RACIAL DISCRIMINATION: Law Schools Embrace LSAT Alternatives Following SCOTUS Affirmative Action Ban.

POOR IRELAND: Eire, We Hardly Knew Ye.

The land of this writer’s ancestors was once known the world over for its stubborn, centuries’ long refusal to submit to the religion and laws of the global empire next door. Nowadays it’s better known for its enthusiasm, its desperation even, for submitting to the religion and laws of another empire just a little further east, namely the European Union.

Perhaps you heard about the riots that took place in Dublin last month, which began as an expression of rage after an Algerian-born man (holding an Irish passport and thus an “Irishman”) attacked several children with a knife outside of their school, leaving one little girl in critical condition. The Irish people had already been on edge, after the conviction of a Roma gypsy from Slovakia named Jozef Puska for the senseless murder of Aishling Murphy, a young Irish woman, as she was jogging in her native County Offaly. Murphy’s boyfriend, in a victim impact statement given at the time of sentencing, angrily noted that Puska had “come to this country, [to] be fully supported in terms of social housing, social welfare, and free medical care for over 10 years [but could] never hold down a legitimate job and never once contributed to society in any way, shape, or form.”

His words were instantly censored by the country’s one-party state media outlets, but they reflected the frustration of many normal Irish men and women who have watched their country’s radical transformation at the hands of its current Taoiseach (prime minister) Leo Varadkar and his Uniparty coalition government over these past several years. And just how radical has it been? Here are some numbers from Philip Pilkington, writing in UnHerd:

“A full 2.8 percent of the population is made up of people who have moved to Ireland only in the last year. This means that if you walk down the average Irish street, one in 35 people will be newcomers to the country. While Ireland had been accepting large numbers of migrants for a long time, this was turbocharged by the war in Ukraine. Ireland, whose political and media classes have become notably outward-looking over the past decade, wanted to prove its liberal values and committed to hosting huge numbers of Ukrainian refugees. On a per capita basis, Ireland accepted six times more refugees than Britain — and made almost no plans for how to accommodate them. The latest numbers show that Ireland’s foreign-born population is 904,800 people. This means that 18 percent of the Irish population is foreign-born.”

Pilkington argues that there is no nation known to history that has successfully assimilated this percentage of recent immigrants. And Ireland, which historically has been known for out-migration — hence the prevalence of number of “Mc” and “O” prefixed surnames throughout the Anglosphere — is unlikely to buck that trend.

Why has the Irish governing class, almost without exception, actively encouraged this transformation? In part it is because it associates Ireland itself with backwardness, and that includes its people — the Muintir na hÉireann, in the old language — whom they refer to as “boggers,” and “culchies,” and find terribly unsophisticated and embarrassing. This is their opportunity to, as Bertolt Brecht facetiously suggested, “dissolve the people” and replace it with another. Which is exactly what they’re doing.

Most countries in the West are governed by a ruling class that doesn’t much like the people it rules.

MARK JUDGE: Why conservatives need reporters in Hollywood.

OUCH: Tobacco Company CEOs, Ivy League Presidents, And Race.

n the spring of 1994, the top executives of the seven largest tobacco companies testified under oath before Congress that nicotine is not addictive. Nearly 30 years later, Americans remember their laughable claims, their callous indifference, their lawyerly inability to speak plainly, and the general sense that they did not regard themselves as part of a shared American community. Those pampered executives, behaving with such Olympian detachment, put the pejorative big in Big Tobacco.

Last week, something similar happened. Thirty years from now, Americans will likely recall a witness table of presidents—representing not top corporations in one single sector, but the nation’s most powerful educational institutions—refusing to speak plainly, defiantly rejecting any sense that they are part of a “we,” and exhibiting smug moralistic certainty even as they embraced bizarrely immoral positions about anti-Semitism and genocide.

Perhaps we need warning labels on college applications.

OPEN THREAD: Hang on to your hopes, my friend.

THE NEW SPACE RACE, LEAD BOOTS PROVIDED BY THE BUREAUCRACY: Federal agencies caught in environmental crossfire over Starship launches.

FORTIFY, FORTIFY: The World’s Oldest Settlements Were Built by a Culture Nobody Expected.

Plus: “Several other Stone Age forts have been found in this region of the world, but none are as old as the Amnya I site. In Europe, comparable sites don’t show up until centuries later and only after the dawn of agriculture. . . . Researchers suspect that a shift in climate roughly 8,000 years ago created the stage for an abundance of seasonal resources in western Siberia, prompting an influx of human migrants.”

This was during the Holocene Climatic Optimum, when the climate was significantly warmer than today.

SO LESS NEED FOR A VACCINE THAT MANY DISTRUST? Open-Science Triumph: “COVID Moonshot” Discovers New Antivirals To Treat COVID-19.

MICROBIOME NEWS: Microbiome insights found in poop help predict infections in liver transplant patients.

HMM: Unstable ‘fluttering’ predicts aortic aneurysm with 98% accuracy.

WELL, THIS IS THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Full-day, solar-powered, bidirectional thermoregulatory clothing that can respond to changing temperatures.

CHANGESAME: Progress toward eliminating child marriage in India has stalled, says study.

SPACE: Rocket Lab puts Japanese satellite into orbit.

GOOD: Melanoma vaccine may improve survival, study shows.

SCIENCE: Scientists Talk With Whales for First Time in Practice for Meeting Aliens.

THE WAR ON CIVILIZATION CONTINUES: Canadian Medical Schools Asked to Shift From “Medical Expertise” to Anti-Racism and Social Justice Training.

THERE’S WAY TOO MUCH MONEY FLOWING INTO HIGHER EDUCATION: Northwestern employs 1 administrator for every 2 undergrads: analysis.

GOOD: Oklahoma bans DEI requirements at public colleges and universities, requires cuts to ‘non-critical personnel’: Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt announced the mandate Wednesday, citing a need to spend more money on preparing young Oklahomans for the workforce, and less on ‘six-figure salaries to DEI staff.’

THEY FEEL SAFE BECAUSE SO MUCH OF OUR GOVERNMENT, MEDIA, AND ACADEMIA ARE ON THEIR PAYROLL: US and allies should warn China over Hong Kong kidnap threats. “Alongside his claim that communist China is a democracy, one of Xi Jinping’s more absurd assertions is that Beijing never interferes in the internal affairs of other nations. This is a patent falsity evinced by China’s expansive intellectual property theft, territorial imperialism, and election interference. Another example of China’s interference in the affairs of other nations is its claimed right to apply extraterritorial justice against political activists living abroad. On Thursday, the Beijing-directed Hong Kong police force issued arrest warrants for five more people living in the United States and the United Kingdom. They are accused of breaching China’s national security law for Hong Kong, which restricts criticism of the Communist Party and efforts to advocate democracy.”

#JOURNALISM: “That’s a NYT headline that makes me think if a comparable group were making memes for Biden, the headline would celebrate them as feisty and smart and really getting under Trump’s skin. . . . I thought this article was going to revile the speech, but it turned much more aggressive, with a very disturbing legal threat.”

They’ve given up persuasion now, in favor of intimidation.

GET WOKE, GO BROKE: Applications for Early Harvard Admissions Dip.

I suspect that this is only the beginning. Of course, Harvard won’t actually go broke, but I believe that its long-term decline starts here.

Totally unrelated: “Harvard forces a Jewish student group to hide its menorah each night after its lighting over fears of vandalism that ‘won’t look good’ for the Ivy League school, the rabbi of Harvard Chabad said.”

WELL, THAT’S HISTORIC, ALL RIGHT: ‘Historic’ Biden Judicial Nominee Sits on Board of Group Founded by Cop-Killing Domestic Terrorist.

President Joe Biden’s latest judicial nominee, whom the White House is hailing as “historic” due to his Muslim faith, serves on the advisory board of a left-wing group with extensive ties to convicted cop killers, the Washington Free Beacon has found.

Adeel Abdullah Mangi, whom Biden tapped to serve on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, is an advisory board member of Alliance of Families for Justice. The organization, which works to end “mass incarceration,” was formed in 2016 with Weather Underground member Kathy Boudin as a founding director. Boudin pleaded guilty to the murder of two police officers and a security guard during an armored truck robbery in 1981. The FBI named Weather Underground a domestic terrorist organization following a string of bombings and robberies in the 1970s and ‘80s.

The Alliance of Families for Justice, where Mangi has served since 2019, organized an event in 2021 to urge the release of six Black Panther and Black Liberation Army members serving life in prison for murdering police officers. The Alliance referred to the cop killers—including Black Panther members Mumia Abu-Jamal, H. Rap Brown, and others—as “freedom fighters” and claimed they were illegally targeted by the FBI.

Mangi’s affiliation with the radical group could spell trouble for his nomination, which Senate Democrats cheered as a “historic” “milestone” during his confirmation hearing Wednesday. Mangi, who works in private practice, would be the first Muslim to serve on the federal appeals court.

His position on the Alliance of Families for Justice board could also present a conflict of interest, which was not discussed at Wednesday’s hearing. The Third Circuit has heard appeals brought by Abu-Jamal, who was convicted of murdering a Philadelphia police officer in 1981. The court overturned Abu-Jamal’s death sentence in 2011.

The Alliance of Families for Justice is not the only radical group on Mangi’s resume. He served until this year on the advisory board for Rutgers Law School’s Center for Race, Security, and Rights, an anti-Israel organization that supports boycotts against Israel and recently blamed Israel’s “settler colonialism” for provoking Hamas terrorists’ Oct. 7 attack. The Center hosted an event on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 that featured Sami al-Arian, a former professor convicted of raising money for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group.

Personnel is policy.

JOHN LUCAS: The Self-Described “Subversive” Dance Group the Bidens Invited to the White House.

I was prompted by a comment from one of my subscribers to do a little research into Dorrance Dance, the dance company featured in the White House performance. What I found was a surprise, although perhaps it should not have been.

I learned that the Dorrance Dance is not just another entertainment group that happens to specialize in tap dancing. Rather, it is an ultra-radical political organization that designs and intends its performances to be “subversive.” The company’s statements and recommendations on its website provide the context that explains what it means when it says that its dancing is meant to be “subversive.” I summarize this below.

Shocker.

HOW “EQUITY” WORKS: Gotcher Equity Right Here: ChiTown Mayor to Ensure EVERY Student a Loser.

HMM: Matthew Perry Died of ‘Acute Effects of Ketamine,’ Autopsy Says.