WELL, JUST SAY IT’S KAMALA’S PROPOSAL AND YOU’VE PRETTY MUCH CAPTURED THAT: “It is difficult to overstate the irresponsibility, corruption, and insanity of this proposal.”
Author Archive: Glenn Reynolds
October 9, 2024
“NONPARTISAN,” I’M SURE: U. Washington students can apply for ‘social justice’ voter registration job.
“ACADEMIC FREEDOM” ORIGINATED AS A LEFTY COVER TACTIC: Anti-Israel agenda motivated professors to abandon academic freedom principles: While the AAUP claims that its recent embrace of academic boycotts is not intended to target Israel, make no mistake, it is clearly motivated by an anti-Israel ideology and, to some, smacks of antisemitism. The AAUP appeared as an effort to protect lefty professors from criticism. It wasn’t meant to protect others, except as a matter of political cover.
CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Expert Panel Analysis of Supreme Court Arguments in Garland v. VanDerStok.
CENSORSHIP:
On Sept 27 @nytimes accused @elonmusk of being “misleading” for criticizing a new California law to censor parody. “The laws have exceptions for parody” said the Times
Five days later a judge ruled the law unconstitutional. Why? Because it banned a video clearly labeled “PARODY” pic.twitter.com/w1oj52ZWs3
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) October 7, 2024
Around the world, governments are trying to censor X. The way they want to do this is by letting newspapers like the NY Times decide what is true and false. Australia is about to pass a law doing this. It’s a recipe for totalitarianism.
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) October 7, 2024
It’s meant to be.
SCIENCE: Nobel Prize in chemistry awarded to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for work on proteins. “Baker designed a new protein in 2003 and his research group has since produced one imaginative protein creation after another, including proteins that can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors, the Nobel committee said. Hassabis and Jumper created an artificial intelligence model that has been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified, the committee added.”
MICHIGAN STATE SEEMS TO HAVE SERIOUS PROBLEMS ALL OVER: ‘A Mockery Of Education’: Dean of Michigan State’s Top-Ranked Ed School Is a Serial Plagiarist, Complaint Alleges.
JOHN LUCAS ON HURRICANE RECOVERY: The American Spirit.
THE DEEP STATE DOESN’T GIVE UP THAT EASILY:
Whatever you call it, you would expect a political force to attack a potent threat to its agenda.https://t.co/FNoVpVBqDe
— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) October 8, 2024
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: After bungled response to Helene, demand a squeaky-clean election.
CHRIS BRAY: Stupidification: The Atlantic Effect.
I was baffled, because that’s not how any of this worked: locals trying to steal land from native people, the kind and gentle federal government trying to stop them. As I wrote yesterday, describing (among other things) the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and Andrew Jackson’s consistent policy of removal, “Flatly, the federal government was invariably the principal agent of American Indian dispossession.” But Jefferson Cowie is about as highly regarded in academia as it’s possible for a historian to be, with a long series of awards and honors and an endowed chair at a major research university. How could a well-respected historian also be someone who thinks that the federal government was trying to prevent Indian dispossession in the 1830s?
Today, with Cowie’s book on white resistance to federal authority in my hands, I can answer that question: he doesn’t. The Jefferson Cowie who appeared on a podcast with Anne Applebaum isn’t quite the Jefferson Cowie who writes books. In the discussion with Applebaum, the benevolent federal government tries to protect the Creeks against dispossession by mean local whites; in the book, federal objections to white settlement on treaty-protected Creek lands are a temporary effort by President Andrew Jackson to sustain an orderly but inevitable removal. . . .
The “he” in that sentence is the President of the United States, so if he was “dead set on Indian removal,” how does that prove the claim that the federal government was trying to protect Creek land rights against “white settlers” who were fighting the federal government to preserve their local “freedom to steal land?” The federal government was doing the stealing — a little more slowly than the settlers wanted. The claim in the book isn’t the claim in the podcast.
Okay then.
Plus: “The subtext underneath all of this discussion screams so loudly that it barely counts as subtext. A book about stupid, backward white people cruelly resisting the wisdom and benevolence of the wonderful federal government appeared in 2022 because Orange Man Bad. Read the reviews: they’re about how Jefferson Cowie’s history of Creek Indian removal in the 1830s shows how mean Donald Trump is.”
October 8, 2024
JORDAN SCHACHTEL: Are we witnessing President Biden’s revenge tour? A Kamala loss would mark the ultimate “I told you so” moment. “Hell hath no fury like a corrupt politician scorned.”
Related: Does Joe Want Kamala to Lose? “Joe has made all the right noises about supporting Kamala’s candidacy. But lately, his actions have been telling a much different story.”
OPEN THREAD: This is it, we’ll hit the heights. And oh what heights we’ll hit.
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: After bungled response to Helene, demand a squeaky-clean election.
TO BE FAIR, THEY SAID THAT ABOUT KATRINA, TOO, AND IT WASN’T SO: Hurricane Helene isn’t an outlier. It’s a harbinger of the future.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Dominican Republic signs Artemis Accords.
GERMS ARE HARD TO KILL: Microbes Found Alive Sealed in Rock For 2 Billion Years. “This means that the microbe community can tell us things we might not have known about microbe evolution here on Earth. But it also suggests that there might be underground microbe communities still alive on Mars, surviving long after the water on the surface dried out.”
Flashback: Why I hope there’s no life on Mars.
HAVEN’T WE KNOWN THIS FOR A LONG TIME? Arm position during blood pressure check may lead to wrong reading, study finds.
A LOOK AT THE 2026 Toyota RAV4.
I SHOT ONE OF THESE YEARS AGO, AND HONESTLY THE RECOIL WASN’T BAD: Gun Review: The Magnum Research Desert Eagle is 50 Caliber Perfection. That’s no doubt because it’s huge and heavy. (It weighs nearly 4 1/2 pounds empty, much more when loaded). It’s also because the .50AE cartridge, while powerful, isn’t as powerful as you probably think.
I ALWAYS ASSUMED IT WAS CLIMATE CHANGE CAUSED BY MARTIAN SUVs: Curiosity rover provides new insights into how Mars became uninhabitable.