OPEN THREAD: This is for you.
Author Archive: Glenn Reynolds
May 23, 2024
DEFENDING THE INDEFENSIBLE: NASA defends Artemis cost and schedule amid planning of possible changes.
BY NOT BEING ABLE TO GET OFF THE GROUND? How Artemis astronauts will be protected from solar storms.
ON FLAGS AND COLLARS: On Flags and Collars: RBG wore her dissent jabot the day after the 2016 election. “The day after Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton to win the 2016 presidential election, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg took the bench wearing a black necklace with crystals. It was a piece she typically wore to express her displeasure while reading a dissent from the bench. But Ginsburg, who had called Trump a faker ahead of the election and then apologized, had no dissents to read. . . . If you’ll notice, Justice Alito is not wearing a MAGA hat. In 2020, after RBG’s death, The New York Times praised her sense of style.”
The press is organized now to delegitimize the Supreme Court. They do this with any institution the left doesn’t control.
I LOVE THAT GUY: NEW: Media Matters Lays Off Staffers After Musk Sues. “The Daily Caller also points out that MMFA faces investigations in Missouri and Texas over attempts to manipulate data on Twitter/X, which prompted the suit by Musk.”
HMM: Scientists Reveal The 2 Best Exercises For Lower Blood Pressure. Static-hold exercises like planks and wall sits better than aerobics? I want to believe that!
ROGER SIMON: A Weekend in the ‘Boiler Room’ of Judaism. “The group organizing the gathering—the Jewish Learning Institute (JLI) of the same Hasidic movement—I discovered had become the biggest purveyor of Jewish education in the world. I was not entirely surprised because my wife and I had been taking their excellent courses from Rabbi Yitzchok Tiechtel of Chabad of Nashville. We both had been Ivy Leaguers years ago, in better times for those schools, but now we were engaged in study that was in many ways deeper and more personally fulfilling.”
EVEN AT 900 YEARS OLD, THE EXECRABLE JANE FONDA INVOKES THE ONLY POWER SHE’S EVER ACTUALLY HAD, calling for a “pussy boycott” against fossil fuels. You don’t have it anymore, Jane, and nobody who matters is listening to you.
UPDATE: Sorry, link was wrong before. Fixed now.
AT ONE POINT THEY WERE UNDER CONTROL: STIs, including syphilis, gonorrhea, increasing globally: WHO.
CIVIL RIGHTS VICTORY: Federal Judge Blocks Biden Administration’s Gun Show Background Check Rule in Texas. “Plaintiffs understandably fear that these presumptions will trigger civil or criminal penalties for conduct deemed lawful just yesterday.”
AND OF BEING BOEING: NASA and Boeing’s Starliner delays expose the challenges of space travel.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Brain implant in conjunction with AI app allows nearly mute man to speak in two languages.
THE MODELS HAVEN’T EXACTLY DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES RECENTLY: NASA announces new AI-driven weather, climate modeling tools.
ALL THE BEST PEOPLE ASSURED ME THERE WERE NO RISKS: Risk for psychosis skyrockets among teens who use cannabis.
I DUNNO, I’M MORE OF A “MAKE THE RUBBLE BOUNCE” KINDA GUY: Don Surber: Be kind to libs because they’re losing: Donald Trump isn’t the only one getting the best of them.
THREAD:
SCOOP: Whistleblowers at UCLA medical school say it has dramatically lowered admissions standards for minority applicants.
As a result, they say, 50% of some cohorts now fail basic tests of medical competence.
We've obtained shocking internal data.🧵https://t.co/CVMIXgn6sE pic.twitter.com/3ub10HNPpO
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) May 23, 2024
So when it came time for the admissions committee to consider one such student in November 2021—a black applicant with grades and test scores far below the UCLA average—some members of the committee felt that this particular candidate, based on the available evidence, was not the best fit for the top-tier medical school, according to two people present for the committee’s meeting.
Their reservations were not well-received.
When an admissions officer voiced concern about the candidate, the two people said, the dean of admissions, Jennifer Lucero, exploded in anger.
“Did you not know African-American women are dying at a higher rate than everybody else?” Lucero asked the admissions officer, these people said. The candidate’s scores shouldn’t matter, she continued, because “we need people like this in the medical school.”
Even before the Supreme Court’s landmark affirmative action ban last year, public schools in California were barred by state law from considering race in admissions. The outburst from Lucero, who discussed race explicitly despite that ban, unsettled some admissions officers, one of whom reached out to other committee members in the wake of the incident. “We are not consistent in the way we apply the metrics to these applicants,” the official wrote in an email obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. “This is troubling.”
“I wondered,” the official added, “if this applicant had been [a] white male, or [an] Asian female for that matter, [whether] we would have had that much discussion.”
Since Lucero took over medical school admissions in June 2020, several of her colleagues have asked the same question. . . . Led by Lucero, who also serves as the vice chair for equity, diversity, and inclusion of UCLA’s anesthesiology department, the admissions committee routinely gives black and Latino applicants a pass for subpar metrics, four people who served on it said, while whites and Asians need near perfect scores to even be considered.
Sounds like a conspiracy to deprive people of their civil rights, under color of law. And if you’re worried about black women dying, maybe don’t send them incompetent doctors?
Plus: “Within three years of Lucero’s hiring in 2020, UCLA dropped from 6th to 18th place in U.S. News & World Report’s rankings for medical research. And in some of the cohorts she admitted, more than 50 percent of students failed standardized tests on emergency medicine, family medicine, internal medicine, and pediatrics.”
So who hired her, and who kept her on the job?
CONSEQUENCES: Uvalde Families Sue State Police, School District for Response to School Shooting.
Families of children killed in the mass shooting at an elementary school here two years ago and survivors filed a lawsuit Wednesday against 91 state police officers and the local school district, calling their response the “single greatest failure of law enforcement to confront an active shooter in American history.” . . . A gunman killed 19 fourth-graders and two teachers while nearly 400 officers from some two dozen state and federal agencies waited to intervene for more than an hour, even as children repeatedly called 911 from inside the classroom.
The suit, filed on behalf of families of 17 of the children killed and two of the surviving victims in federal court in the Western District of Texas, is against individuals because of immunity protections for state departments, those involved with the suit said. Among its claims are that the defendants violated the 14th Amendment constitutional rights of the victims and survivors.
A spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Public Safety declined to comment.
We need a federal civil rights law allowing for damages from police departments and officials for failure to protect, with no sovereign immunity.
COLLUSION: Dickinson College cancels CNN commencement speaker to appease pro-Palestinian students.
Related: Is Hamas Winning? Well, it’s certainly getting a lot of help from traitors to the West.
Related:
Weird: Soros-Funded D.A. Declines To Prosecute Soros-Funded Campus Protesters https://t.co/i2Bs9KnGFe pic.twitter.com/Ob1Qad4J7m
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) May 22, 2024
Plus: The Left’s Ideological Mullet: DEI in the Front, ‘Anti-Zionist’ in the Back.
NEW ALLEGATIONS OF PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT IN THE JACK SMITH PROSECUTION OF DONALD TRUMP: “Walt Nauta, one of former President Donald Trump’s co-defendants, [was scheduled] to present arguments that special counsel Jack Smith’s team had selectively and vindictively brought charges against him. But the hearing quickly diverted into a longstanding disagreement over an August 2022 meeting between prosecutor Jay Bratt and Nauta’s defense attorney, Stanley Woodward. Woodward has claimed in court proceedings and filings that Bratt attempted to pressure him into convincing Nauta to cooperate against Trump by threatening to affect a potential judgeship nomination.”
MATT TAIBBI: FOIA Files: Garry Kasparov Resigns from Aspen Institute Commission, Compares it to Soviet Committee: “If I’m being honest…This type of approach was common practice in the USSR.” Leftists gonna leftist. If you let them.
MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: This Is How You Get More Ants: Student protests and college administrators.
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