BACK UP YOUR BRAIN: Uploading The Human Mind Could Become a Reality, Expert Says.
I was more enthusiastic about this stuff back when I had more trust in tech companies.
Author Archive: Glenn Reynolds
June 2, 2025
COMING UP IN TWO MINUTES: Watch Rocket Lab Launch Private Earth-Observing Satellite to Orbit Tonight.
HE’S NOT WRONG:
Wow.
Nate Silver pointing out the uncomfortable truth for Democrats I’ve mentioned before…
There’s an entire demographic who take antidepressants and go to therapy, and then think we should all listen to them on how to run the country. pic.twitter.com/9aAMZ7XJpn
— Geiger Capital (@Geiger_Capital) June 2, 2025
Whole essay here.
BUT WE HAVE THE MAXIM GUN, AND THEY HAVE NOT: Wild Orangutans Display Language Complexity Once Thought Uniquely Human.
GEN Z’S TRAGEDY: “These kids never learned the proper way to be a barfly.”
JAMIE DIMON: America Should Be Stockpiling Bullets.
Most InstaPundit readers:
If you’re looking to do your part, you might start here. A company started by, and owned by, some of my law students.
HARSH BUT FAIR:
This is the hardest a woman has faked it since the last @Bulwark staffers’s wedding night.@LarryOConnor @storm_paglia @ChrisStigall https://t.co/I3wJZcx8QK
— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) June 2, 2025
YES.
If a right-wing movement had burned down a governor’s mansion, murdered two foreign diplomats & firebombed kids and elderly people at a peaceful protest — in the span of a few weeks — what would the coverage look like? What sort of “national conversation” would we be having?
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) June 2, 2025
MAYBE IF THEY’D TRY NOT SUCKING SO MUCH: CNN’s Buried Lede: New Poll Shows Dems Still Cratering. “Bear in mind that CNN’s polls generally lean towards Democrats, too. These are terrible numbers for Democrats, and they aren’t the only indicators of political crisis either. Chalian and Raju go through the issue numbers, and Republicans are still dominating on the most important policy areas.”
Related: CNN’s Harry Enten Flabbergasted by Brutal New Numbers for Dems on Economy.
I LOVE A HAPPY STORY: ‘PROTECTED BY GOD AND A GUN’: 3 Thugs Motivated To Beat a Hasty Retreat in California Home Invasion. “A trio of masked thugs broke into a multi-million dollar home in the Hollywood Hills near Los Angeles Thursday evening. A sign on the property warned that, ‘This house is protected by God and a gun. Screw around and you’ll meet both,’ should have offered the young scholars a clue to pick another house. But to be fair, they probably couldn’t read. Anyway, the trio forced their way in around 10:30 and not fifteen seconds after making entry, they had poked the bear and the bear opened fire. All three of the felons fled in great haste.”
THIS SEEMS TO BE AN INCREASINGLY POPULAR SENTIMENT:
1. Elite universities deserve all the opprobrium they’ve been getting. They’ve discriminated on the basis of race, required loyalty oaths/diversity statements, allowed agitators to disrupt classes, block access, and wage mass campaigns of intimidation and harassment. pic.twitter.com/3cy8DKS9rQ
— Ilya Shapiro (@ishapiro) June 1, 2025
THE BAY AREA MURDER RATE IS OUT OF CONTROL: 6 gray whales found dead in a week in San Francisco Bay.
ALTERNATIVELY, HUMAN ERROR COULD BE AI’S ACHILLES HEEL: Will Human Error Hand AI the Key to Our Destruction?
WHAT’S THE POINT OF FOREIGN STUDENTS? America Doesn’t Need ‘International Students.’ “Notably, few of America’s foreign students are westerners. No European nation even shows up in the top 10 countries for foreign students. The UK is in 15th place and France is only in the 20th. Only Canada, right across the border, is in the top 5, but accounts for only 2.6% of foreign students. Nigeria accounts for three times as many foreign students as France, Iran sends more foreign students than the UK and Pakistan far more than Spain. While most American students who study abroad go to Europe, European students are not going to America. International students are mostly non-westerners and that’s by design.”
Plus:
America doesn’t need international students, colleges do.
And as has been obvious for a long time: what’s good for colleges, isn’t good for America.
American taxpayers subsidized wealthy nonprofit institutions. These institutions demand an unlimited flow of foreign students to further enhance their revenues. And these foreign students, whatever tuition they pay or don’t pay, are benefiting from taxpayer-subsidized institutions.
It’s a good deal for Harvard, but it’s not a very good deal for America. . . .
Foreign students haven’t Americanized the world, they’ve radicalized, Islamized and terrorized America. Many of those third world students who moved here undermined America and even those who went back home, returned with an insider’s understanding of our weaknesses.
And American campuses, in their current state, are hardly likely to do anything other than radicalize foreign students and teach them to hate America.
As they do with American students. Not a great deal, overall.
A CONTROVERSIAL VIEW, BUT TRUE:
Leftists should stop setting people on fire.
— Jon Gabriel (@exjon) June 2, 2025
Related:
We’re in a war. You don’t get to decide that we’re not. You only get to decide whether to win it or lose it.
— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) June 2, 2025
THEY KNOW WHAT THEY WANT PEOPLE TO BE ANGRY ABOUT, AND WHAT THEY DON’T WANT PEOPLE TO BE ANGRY ABOUT:
The PA Gov home arson attack and DC Jewish event murders have been memoryholed by the media. This will be also. https://t.co/AA0MVOxWQt
— William A. Jacobson (@wajacobson) June 1, 2025
COLOR ME UNSURPRISED: Suspect in Antisemitic Attack in Boulder is Illegal Alien Admitted Under Biden. “Fox News’s Bill Melugin revealed that ‘three senior’ DHS sources said Mohamed Sabry Soliman, 45, is ‘an Egyptian national in the U.S. illegally,’ and has overstayed his visa after entering the United States under the Biden administration.”
Big roundup on last night’s human-arson attack here.
ROGER KIMBALL: ‘Snitch’ rewards for college whistleblowers are a reckoning for woke weenies: A new day is dawning in academia.
If you look it up, though, you will discover that “Qui tam” is shorthand for “Qui tam pro domino rege quam pro se ipso in hac parte sequitur,” which makes much more sense: “Who prosecutes in this matter both for the King and for himself.” . . .
‘Snitch’ rewards for college whistleblowers are a reckoning for woke weenies
Speccie new.png
Roger Kimball
“Snitch” rewards for college whistleblowers are a reckoning for woke weeniesA new day is dawning in academia
Sunday, June 1, 2025
Pam Bondi
Donald Trump (L) watches as Pam Bondi speaks (Getty)Like Papal encyclicals, many statutes are known by the opening words of their Latin formulation. One that I just learned about is known as a “Qui tam” action. By itself, it is an enigmatic expression, since it just means “Who so” or “Who as.”
If you look it up, though, you will discover that “Qui tam” is shorthand for “Qui tam pro domino rege quam pro se ipso in hac parte sequitur,” which makes much more sense: “Who prosecutes in this matter both for the King and for himself.” That tam, as is often the case, is balanced with quam, “as x, so y.” Spinoza contains a famous example toward the end of the Ethics: “Sed omnia praeclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt”: “For all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.” And then there is sequitur. I remember when I learned that the deponent verb sequor, “I follow,” also means “prosecute,” as in the motto of the Department of Justice: “Qui Pro Domina Justitia Sequitur,” “Who prosecutes for Lady Justice.”
But I digress…
The origins of “Qui tam” statutes are ancient. Noting that they were intended to “enlist the public to sue to recover civil penalties and forfeitures from those who have defrauded the government,” one historical overview cites King Wihtred of Kent who in 695 declared that “If a freeman works during the forbidden time [i.e., the Sabbath], he shall forfeit his healsfang [fine, mulct], and the man who informs against him shall have half the fine, and [the profits arising] from the labour.”
Nota bene: “The man who informs against him” profits.
How do you spell “incentive”?
This aspect of the procedure – what we might call the “snitch provision” – has always attracted criticism. Because they rewarded private individuals for informing against their fellows, qui tam actions were long ago castigated as a “breeding ground for ‘viperous vermin’ and parasites.” Nevertheless, English law sometimes resorted to qui tam actions when the enforcement of certain statutes appeared “beyond the unaided capacity or interest of authorized law enforcement officials.”
It was the same in America. The colonists frequently employed qui tam actions to curb instances of fraud, rewarding an informer with some portion of the funds recovered from his revelation.
Modern instances of qui tam center around so-called “False Claims” actions. In 1863, in the Civil War, an act was introduced by Senator Jacob Howard to address a spate of “false claims, false vouchers, false oaths, forged signatures, theft, embezzlement, and conspiracy.” The act, Howard explained, deliberately employed “the old-fashion idea of holding out a temptation, …‘setting a rogue to catch a rogue.’”
The False Claims Act has been revised several times in the succeeding century an a half, most recently in 2010. Its provisions are set forth in 31 U.S. Code § 3729.
All this might seem like an arcane bit of legal history. In fact, false claims actions, especially against defense contractors and the health industry, have been something of a growth industry in recent year. In 2024, such actions quietly brought in more than $2.9 billion. And the Trump administration, as part of its effort to purge American colleges and universities of illegal and discriminatory practices, has just turned up the volume to 11 and brought the False Claims Act back to center stage of public consciousness.
On May 19, Todd Blanche, the Deputy Attorney General issued a memorandum announcing that the administration would begin employing the False Claims Act to investigate those “who defraud the United States by taking its money while knowingly violating civil rights laws… and falsely [certifying] compliance with such laws.”
Have you ever witnessed verbal dynamite being detonated? Here is an example:
“Accordingly, a university that accepts federal funds could violate the False Claims Act when it encourages antisemitism, refuses to protect Jewish students, allows men to intrude into women’s bathrooms, or requires women to compete against men in athletic competitions. Colleges and universities cannot accept federal funds while discriminating against their students. The False Claims Act is also implicated whenever federal-funding recipients or contractors certify compliance with civil rights laws while knowingly engaging in racist preferences, mandates, policies, programs, and activities, including through diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs that assign benefits or burdens on race, ethnicity, or national origin. While racial discrimination has always been illegal, the prohibition on such policies became clear after the Supreme Court stated that “[e]liminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”
Make them pay.