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.

OPEN THREAD: Be here now.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: China launches mystery reusable spaceplane for third time.

WALL OF WATER: Gigantic Wave in Pacific Ocean Was Most Extreme ‘Rogue Wave’ on Record. “Such an exceptional event is thought to occur only once every 1,300 years. And unless the buoy had been taken for a ride, we might never have known it even happened. For centuries, rogue waves were considered nothing but nautical folklore. It wasn’t until 1995 that myth became fact. On the first day of the new year, a nearly 26-meter-high wave (85 feet) suddenly struck an oil-drilling platform roughly 160 kilometers (100 miles) off the coast of Norway. At the time, the so-called Draupner wave defied all previous models scientists had put together.”

Note that by “most extreme” they’re referring to height relative to the other waves going on, not absolute height. That difference is what constitutes its rogueness.

MORE SUPPLY-CHAIN DISRUPTIONS COMING RIGHT UP: Houthi Shooty Re-Routey: Maersk Telling All Its Ships to Avoid the Red Sea.

Governments used to deal with this sort of disruption by hanging pirates.

OUT: RACISM. IN: FACISM. To counter effect of facial biases in legal system, researchers suggest new training. “Researchers at Columbia University are recommending a new form of training to eliminate facial biases that could lead to more severe punishments for defendants with ‘untrustworthy’ features. Certain facial features, such as downturned lips and a heavy brow, can make someone seem untrustworthy, even though these do not have an effect on the person’s character. But according to a new study from Columbia researchers, legal defendants who appear untrustworthy are more likely to be sentenced to death rather than life in prison. This was true even in cases in which participants were conscious of their bias.”

RACISM IN AMERICA TODAY:

Here’s the same mayor claiming it was just an innocent mistake to not invite White people, you know, cause it happens to all of us from time to time. https://t.co/Egeiq2lQ0s

— Liberacrat Media™️ (@Liberacrat_) December 15, 2023

IT’S HARD WHEN NOBODY TRUSTS YOU: CDC warns of ‘urgent need’ to increase vaccinations for COVID-19, other respiratory illnesses.

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU: Mandatory Anti-Drunk-Driving Tech Is Coming, and GM’s Ready: New passenger vehicles will soon be required to have some kind of impaired driving detection onboard.

FIRST LOOK: Rossi Survival Rifle: A lightweight, versatile rifle which shoots both .45 Colt cartridges and .410 shells.

WELL, HARVARD: “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.” (Bumped).

MATT TAIBBI: Orf vs. the Memory Hole: “Extreme MAGA Republicans:” When the president goes to a campaign fundraiser, stock lines ensue. Plus, the “Vermin Switcheroo.”

ANALYSIS: TRUE. The Claudine Gay problem goes way beyond Harvard: Do you really think that people like Claudine Gay are found only at Ivy League universities? We should all be so lucky.

SHOCKER: Oprah Winfrey confirms she added weight-loss medication to regimen.

FLASHBACK: “The NGOs and foundations deserve much, much closer scrutiny than they’re getting, both in terms of their activities, and in terms of where the money goes. And that’s even before you get to basic questions of accounting, oversight, and general honesty in advertising.”

DANIEL HENNINGER: University Presidents Flunk Out.

It may be no coincidence that colleges are abandoning SATs at the same time three university presidents were flunking questions in public about genocide. After receiving Fs for insisting that the answer to any direct question is “It depends on the context,” University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill lost her job and Harvard’s board of governors retained Claudine Gay with a limp vote of confidence—“she is the right leader to help our community heal.” Uh-huh.

This may be the moment to bring back vocabulary tests.

Question: What six-syllable word describes the three university presidents who testified before Congress?

Answer: Pusillanimity.

Next: Name as many synonyms as you can for “pusillanimity.”

Answer, by way of the Merriam-Webster dictionary (remember those?): Cowardice, cravenness, gutlessness, spinelessness and—my favorite—poltroonery.

In those plain words is written the history of academia’s plummet the past 50 years from respectability to antisemitic riots.

First came the speech codes. No, those came second. What began the long downhill roll in the 1970s was grade inflation. Students whose work deserved a C demanded an A or B. Professors who resisted this threat to standards gave up.

That was an early inkling that traditional college norms could be pushed around and politicized. Speech codes emerged at many schools, not least Harvard, arguing that certain words were—another new vocabulary addition—“hurtful.”

After establishing that words alone could bring reprimand by the university, the speech coders expanded the prohibitions to include something new called microaggressions, or inadvertent slights. Microaggressions had a fraternal twin, trigger warnings, which required profs to warn students that a text or even a thought might distress them.

It sounds like a joke now, but we know it was no joke. This was the moment when the adults in the room—presumably the universities’ presidents—should have intervened to protect free speech and inquiry from being diminished. They did not. Virtually without exception, they were pusillanimous. Fellow ostriches included hundreds of spineless boards of trustees.

Here we bring back to this space an important figure in the universities’ decline: Herbert Marcuse (1896-1979). Though Marcuse isn’t a household name, any purportedly serious university intellectual—say, Ms. Magill of Penn or Harvard’s Ms. Gay—knows about his contribution to governance at their institutions.

Marcuse, a left-wing philosopher who taught at Columbia and Harvard, proposed zero tolerance for conservative ideas. “Liberating tolerance,” Marcuse wrote in 1965, “would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.” No one needs a doctorate in anything to understand that. He wasn’t done: “Certain things cannot be said, certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed.”

I can’t conceive a more concise description of cancel culture, which we got.

University presidents should have recognized—or acknowledged—that cancel culture was another sign their schools were off the rails.

They wanted off the rails.

I SEE NOTHING INACCURATE IN THIS HEADLINE: Scummy Privileged Leftist Highway Protestors Hate Us. “Fewer people are lower than a leftist protester who disrupts the lives of regular people just to make a gesture that accomplishes nothing. They behave like scummy privileged children as they make themselves more important than people with real responsibilities. And I truly mean this when I say privileged because they clearly don’t know what it’s like to have your job reprimand you for being five minutes late or driving an hour to a job that barely pays you enough money to take care of your bills. The thousands of people they interrupted on the highway in Los Angeles suffer the repercussions of being unable to make it to their destination on time. How many parents were late picking up their children? How many had their jobs on the line as they sat in man-made traffic?”

Nothing is as important as them having an opportunity to feel significant, and morally superior, when deep down they know they’re anything but.

FOLLOW THE SCIENCE! Fiddling with Volcanic C02: A made-up, disparate accounting model.

ROBERT GRABOYES: Antisemitism’s Sharp Left Turn: An Open Letter to My Left-of-Center Friends.

I THINK THIS HAS BEEN KNOWN FOR QUITE A WHILE: ‘Long flu’ has emerged as a consequence similar to long COVID.

I’M HAPPY TO SEE SANITY REASSERTING ITSELF, BUT SURPRISED TO SEE IT HAPPENING AT BROWN: Forty-one students arrested, booked within University Hall following second sit-in demanding divestment, ceasefire: University ‘is prepared to escalate’ charges if similar actions are taken in the future.

LIFE IN THE BIDEN ERA: Jewish students face swastika, ‘intifada’ calls amid Hanukkah celebrations.

FLASHBACK: A New Class problem. “A common thread among anti-semitism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Americanism is the fear of being outdone by people willing to work harder. It’s not surprising that such a fear exists among a disproportionate number of those who take state-supported jobs. It’s thus not surprising, then, that New Class sensibilities are so often anti-American and anti-capitalist, and increasingly (or perhaps I should say, once again) anti-Semitic, too.”

Plus: “I can’t help but notice that anti-Americanism, and the various manifestations of what some have called Transnational Progressivism, are most common among people who, well, have state-supported managerial or intellectual jobs, the people who made up what Milovan Djilas and others called the ‘New Class’ of bureaucrats and managers in the old Communist world. Not surprisingly, the New Class was deeply concerned with matters of status and position, and deeply opposed to things that might have led to competition on merit. “

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Walls close in on Jew-haters as government starts investigations of campus anti-Semitism.