Author Archive: Glenn Reynolds
May 2, 2025
CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE:
Second Amendment issues are civil rights issues. https://t.co/SQixK0ZO6S
— Harmeet K. Dhillon (@HarmeetKDhillon) May 2, 2025
LIKE DRUDGE IF HE WERE STILL RELEVANT: White House introduces White House Wire.
TRUE. WE NEED MORE ACTION FROM CONGRESS, THOUGH: Trump and His Team Win When They Lead From the Front.
PEAK WASHED-UP HIPPIE CRINGE SO FAR. Neil Young Slammed For New Anti-Tesla Song: ‘Peak Washed-Up Hippie Cringe.’
PEOPLE SAY THE GOVERNMENT DOESN’T WORK, BUT IT WORKS FINE AS A MONEY LAUNDRY FOR THE CONNECTED: Elon Musk and the DOGE Team Do Group Interview – What Big Balls Has Uncovered Will Infuriate You.
An accountant friend comments on Facebook: “If you’ve not yet watched yesterday’s FoxNews DOGE bros interview, it’s really a must. DOGE has unconvered just ASTOUNDING levels of incompetence in our federal government. In fact, incompetence doesn’t even begin to reach it. Rather it seems very much to be a system that was intentionally set up without, or more likely robbed of, even basic internal controls so that TRILLIONS and TRILLIONS of money could be spent in ways that are completely unaubitable and therefore unaccountable.”
This isn’t by accident. It’s by design, to facilitate stealing.
THE NEW YORK TIMES IS NOT HAPPY, BUT I’M OKAY WITH IT: The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive. “I think the best way to understand politics right now is that the United States, for the first time in my lifetime, has a real right-wing counterculture — an edgy, radical-seeming alternative to the status quo.” It’s awfully long, and there’s a lot of blather, but there are some interesting nuggets.
Including this on college: “The thing I’ve thought long and hard about — and what I saw when I was a lecturer at UCI — there’s been this severing of a continuity between the past and the present, and I think it’s an intentional severing. These kids, they’re not well read. They don’t really know anything. I spent half of my classes just teaching Wikipedia-tier history just so we can have enough context to have the conversation about the actual stuff we’re talking about.”
WELL, HE HOLDS ALL THE CARDS, AND THE MONEY: Trump Is Likely to Win His Fight with Universities. “Critics of higher education over recent decades will not have much sympathy for Harvard and similarly situated universities in this contest. Beginning in the 1970s, liberal activists discovered that they could use the threat of withdrawn federal funds to induce colleges to reform their faculties by hiring feminists, blacks, environmental activists, and others associated with progressive causes—all for the purpose of promoting “diversity” on campus. Trump has now turned the tables by using these same tactics against them in a campaign to reform the universities from a different direction. As to Trump’s wish to lift Harvard’s tax exemption, he is merely citing a Supreme Court precedent (Bob Jones University v. United States, 1983) created by civil rights activists when they sought to withdraw that school’s tax status because of its racially discriminatory policies. Large research universities are vulnerable to these threats because they are highly dependent on federal funding to sustain their complex scientific and medical establishments. All told, the federal government sent more than $60 billion to colleges and universities in 2023 for research and development alone, most of it in grants and contracts from the National Institutes for Health, the Energy Department, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Health and Human Services.”
May 1, 2025
OPEN THREAD: Make me proud.
WE SHOULD GO THERE AND EXPLORE. Dawn’s Second Look Reveals Vesta Could Be Part of a Lost World. “While smaller asteroids in the belt are considered fragments of collisions, scientists think Vesta and the other three large objects in the belt are likely primordial and have survived for billions of years. They believe that Vesta was on its way to becoming a planet and that the Solar System’s rocky planets likely began as protoplanets just like it. But new research is casting doubt on that conclusion.”
One hypothesis: “Vesta is a broken-off chunk of a growing planet in the Solar System. Jacobson suggested this idea at a conference in the past because he wanted other researchers to consider the idea that some meteorites are pieces of debris from collisions during the era of planet formation in the Solar System.”
TRUTH:
There is not. There has, in fact, never, ever been less of a clamoring for anything that is on offer. In the history of clamoring, no people has ever clamored less than the American people are clamoring for Kamala Harris’s voice. She is clamorless. She is a hollow clamoree. pic.twitter.com/dStanHYBm8
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) April 30, 2025
BRING A GUN TO A KNIFE FIGHT? In the battle between a firearm and a knife, the gun always wins, right? Right? “The one and only time a gun is superior to a knife is when there is sufficient time and distance between combatants.”
I was always told you can rush a gun, but never rush a knife.
PROF. JACOBSON IS NOT WRONG:
The campus "protests" are organized terror campaigns, and should be treated as such. https://t.co/p7V2qb9zXp
— William A. Jacobson (@wajacobson) April 30, 2025
Neither is Prof. Bernstein:
The fact that Harvard permitted this is a pretty clear Title VI violation. https://t.co/zIN4FbuZk8
— David Bernstein (@ProfDBernstein) April 30, 2025
THE NEW SPACE RACE: China’s Shenzhou-19 astronauts back on Earth after six months in space.
THOSE SIDE EFFECTS ARE BAD: Side effect fears prevent many depression, anxiety sufferers from taking meds, survey shows.
BAN FOREIGN INFLUENCE-BUYING: Harvard accepted over $1.4B from foreign sources, Campus Reform audit finds.