THE ECONOMY IS BOOMING: Luxury Stores Are Bursting With Unsold Stuff. “The slowdown has left brands’ own stores, independent boutiques and e-commerce retailers stuffed with unsold stock. The boss of online luxury goods seller MyTheresa said the company is experiencing “the worst market conditions since 2008,” and had 44% more inventory by the end of its latest quarter than a year earlier. Burberry is buying back unsold products from department stores.”

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Researchers create 3D DNA nanorobots.

HMM: First, an arthritis drug that helps treat diabetes. Now this: New study finds diabetes drug may reduce risk for colorectal cancer.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Iran sends biological capsule into space in step toward human launch.

SHE DOESN’T LOOK LIKE A MAGA TYPE, BUT I’M TOLD BY ALL THE BEST PEOPLE THAT THEY’RE THE THREAT: Woman arrested for pouring gasoline, trying to burn down Martin Luther King Jr.’s birth home. “Police said they have arrested 26-year-old Laneisha Shantrice Henderson and charged her with criminal attempt arson and criminal attempt interference with government property.”

Plus: “Police say two tourists from Utah who were in the area saw Henderson pouring gasoline on the home and interrupted her. . . . Video from a witness shared with Channel 2′s Michael Doudna shows a woman dressed in all black pouring gasoline on the windows and in the bushes of the home. Atlanta Fire Department Battalion Chief Jerry DeBerry said had the witnesses not intervened, the house could have been burned to the ground in moments.”

Black woman dressed as Antifa tries to burn MLK birth home, is stopped by a white guy from Utah and two off-duty cops. But if she’d gotten away with it and those bystanders hadn’t been there, the press would be telling us it was yet another example of white-supremacist domestic terrorism.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Sports journalism utterly sucks: Deadspin ‘blackface’ debacle proves it. “Now sports journalism is filled with midwit wannabe politicos, leftist ideologues and talentless influencer types (sometimes all three in one individual), and they all think they’re better and smarter than the audience they’re paid to entertain.”

Which is funny, because they’re not better and smarter than most anyone.

WELL, GOOD: Arthritis drug baricitinib may help patients with Type 1 diabetes.

REMINDER: CBS: Americans need an extra $11,400 today just to afford the basics. “The typical American household must spend an additional $11,434 annually just to maintain the same standard of living they enjoyed in January of 2021, right before inflation soared to 40-year highs, according to a recent analysis of government data.”

Huh. What happened in January 2021?

THE PUBLIC HEALTH PEOPLE HAVEN’T BEEN EXACTLY BRILLIANT, HAVE THEY? Critics say a fumbled rollout of the brand-new RSV shot for babies has pediatricians worried and frustrated.

CAMPUS FREE SPEECH FLASHBACK: Thoughts On Tolerance, Virtue, and Failure.

SEGREGATION NOW, SEGREGATION TOMORROW, SEGREGATION FOREVER: MIT president defends blacks-only dorm: ‘Positive selection,’ not ‘exclusionary.’

MARTIN HACKWORTH: The Road to Hell Is Paved with Entitlement. “When I was lecturing at the university, I encountered legions of students who were convinced that the college experience consisted of four or more years of minimal effort in required courses, collecting a diploma, and then entering the workforce with high compensation based solely on the acquisition of a degree that was often of dubious merit. The fact that one might be expected to actually know something or have developed a work ethic somewhere along the way wasn’t a consideration.”

PROMOTING GENOCIDE IS OKAY, THOUGH: Flashback: Students caught using wrong pronouns at Harvard may violate harassment policies.

A LOT OF PLACES ARE ROTTING: A Moral Rot at Rice University. “While Haniyeh might have been pleased to learn about the support Hamas is getting from Rice faculty and students, the truth is that no one in the Middle East is paying any attention whatsoever to Rice University. Such petitions and resolutions are meant to send a message on the Rice campus. Rice colleagues and students, I hear your message loud and clear. I am a second-generation Holocaust survivor. I recognize antisemitism when I see it. You do not need to be a user of derogatory epithets to be antisemitic; using double standards qualifies.”

The derogatory epithets — and outright support of genocide — are there, though, and increasingly common.

Related thoughts from Eugene Volokh: “No-one likes rude awakenings, bitter lessons, and situations with which one is not quite sure how to cope. But they are tremendously useful. Many of us have indeed been rudely awakened to the magnitude of hostility in many American universities to Israel, Israelis, and Jews. But that’s not because there has been a surge of such hostility: It’s because the existing hostility has revealed itself.”

MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: Reverse Speech Codes Aren’t the Answer: Fighting Campus Hate and Anti-Semitism at the Roots of the Problem.

I also note how much easier the lives of the embattled Ivy League presidents would be if they had just had some principles all along.

And as always, if you like this, please sign up for a paid subscription.

JOHN LUCAS: Biden/Buttigieg DEI Policies Endanger the Country. They Don’t Care. The FAA is seeking people suffering from “severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities” to be air traffic controllers.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY, IVY LEAGUE EDITION: Prediction: Harvard Will Have a New President Next Year.

Related: UPenn’s President Magill Is Probably Toast.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY IN JOE BIDEN’S AMERICA: Drug Shortages Hit Record High. “Why is it in Biden’s America that we always run out of stuff we need most, like prescription drugs, baby formula, and gasoline, but never the junk that is bad for us, like porn, marijuana, public school teachers, FBI agents, CNN contributors, alcohol, Indian casinos, and college?”

DELUSIONAL: More Democrats say Biden is ‘better’ than George Washington.

THIS IS THE CLIMATE OF ANTI-SEMITIC HATE THAT THE LEFT HAS BUILT: Shots Fired at Albany (NY) Synagogue, Suspect Shouted ‘Free Palestine:’ No one has said anything about the suspect “because he has not been charged.”

GOOD LUCK WITH THAT: Elite Universities Attempt Damage Control After Anti-Semitism Backlash.

ALEX BERENSON: Genocide and Jews at Harvard: The double standards and triple speak that have overrun elite academia showed their truest colors yesterday; and the firestorm that has followed may actually matter.

And the universities themselves have made ever-clearer that they don’t care about protecting free speech. They FEAR free speech. They care about protecting minority rights and creating safe spaces.

That’s why misgendering pronouns is “abuse.” That’s why they fell all over themselves to proclaim their solidarity with the George Floyd protests and protestors.

Except when the minority is the Jews.

Then their attackers deserve the fullest possible speech protections.

Then, and only then.

YOU WOULD NEED A HEART OF STONE NOT TO LAUGH:

Another brazen break-in caught on camera. Another L.A. business owner fed up:

“I voted for Karen Bass. I voted for Biden. I voted for Gavin Newsom. I’m sick of it. At some point you have to give me a reason to vote for you again.”@FOXLA pic.twitter.com/EKGtDE5rb6

— MarlaTellez (@MarlaTellez) December 7, 2023

WELL, YES: DEI Drives Campus Antisemitism.

Related: Defund the Diversity Police.

In recent decades, American universities have erected a multitude of new offices, deploying swarms of bureaucrats to harass undergrads and eat out the substance of campus intellectual life. Under the banner of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), these officers wield administrative power to stamp out behaviors that make students feel “unsafe” or “unwelcome.”

Of course, in DEI Thought, some students’ sensitivities count for more than others’. Faced with pro‐​Hamas protests sweeping college campuses in the wake of the 10/7 massacre, university administrators suddenly lost their zeal for punishing “microaggressions.” When it comes to offenses like pro‐​Trump graffiti or culturally insensitive Halloween costumes, they’re ready to pounce: that stuff’s traumatizing, after all. But pogrom‐​endorsement? Hey, it’s complicated. . . .

DEI’s post‐​10/​7 disgrace should be a teachable moment, but many would‐​be reformers are learning the wrong lesson. Congressional Republicans have offered nostrums like using student loans to force deplatforming of “Anti‐​Semitic events” or ramped‐​up “hostile environment” enforcement from the Biden administration’s Office of Civil Rights. GOP state legislators in New York have drafted a “Dismantling Student Antisemitism Act” that would freeze state funding for SUNY schools unless they implement mandatory antisemitism training and bias reporting procedures.

But trying to make DEI programming “fair and balanced” is a fool’s errand. As Milton Friedman once quipped, “What would you think of someone who said, ‘I would like to have a cat, provided it barked’?”

Elected officials have no business trying to micromanage campus culture using the levers of state power. But neither is there any reason the taxpayer should be expected to fund this destructive nonsense.

Instead, at the state level, reformers should use the power of the purse to break the power of the DEI bureaucracy at public universities. T

Yes. Related:

What makes the Harvard / Penn presidents claiming their schools' deep, unshakable commitment to free expression even more hilariously pathetic: they are literally the bottom 2 in FIRE's campus free speech ratings of 248 universities pic.twitter.com/MPpEQ8g4rn

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) December 7, 2023

And inevitably, the Republicans Pounce! take: Republicans Try to Put Harvard, M.I.T. and Penn on the Defensive About Antisemitism.

HOW GOVERNMENT WORKS: Washington State Economist Refused to Lie, So They Forced Him Out.