THIS IS WHY YOU’RE ALREADY ON YOUR FIFTH REPUBLIC. “Political chaos in France after Macron refuses to name PM from leftwing coalition.” Man, imagine if voting for someone made no difference here! Heh heh heh… (tugs collar)

(H/T Ace of Spades.)

THE DEBT-FREE FOUR-YEAR DEGREE: IS IT POSSIBLE? Yes, with lots of work. But with the Democrats on a suicide mission to forgive college debt, it probably makes no sense to save or pay upfront for college when you could always just help your kid pay back the loans and still have a chance of getting some of that sweet, sweet free money. Perverse incentives much?

WILL COLLEGES HANDLE THE ISRAEL-HAMAS PROTESTS BETTER THIS YEAR? Define “better,” I guess. The obvious solution would be to have sensible rules and enforce them evenhandedly. Does anyone think that’s likely to happen?

WHAT A MONSTER. Pitt cardiologist Norman Wang was demoted, had an article retracted, and was told he was “unsafe” for students because of maniac statements like “Ultimately, all who aspire to a profession in medicine and cardiology must be assessed as individuals on the basis of their personal merits, not their race and ethnic identities.” He’s suing. (In the meantime, if you need a cardiologist, I suspect he’s a safe bet.)

‘ENDORSED BY SELINA MEYER’ IS NOT THE FLEX THEY THINK IS. Or is the message here the meta-message: that they can nominate anyone regardless of actual votes, rub it in your face, and you just have to deal with it? More from my unwilling membership on the DNC Endless Spam List. (Khaaaaan!)

HOW DEI IS CORRUPTING MILITARY EDUCATION. It’s only “corrupting” the military if you think the government is focused on foreign threats as opposed to domestic threats. A survey of its behavior in the past few years suggests that such an assumption might be erroneous.

THIS KAMALA CAMPAIGN TEXT JUST SEEMS DESPERATE. Does not scream “joy,” that’s for sure.

(Whatever evil prankster put me on the DNC spam list, well played, and I hate you.)

FORMER DAVIDSON DEAN: COLLEGES ARE TOO WED TO THE STATUS QUO. All good points, though tradition is valuable. But as enrollment drops, you’d think job #1 for colleges would be “stop alienating the people paying for this.” They won’t even do that.

ARE FACULTY SALARIES REALLY TOO LOW? I don’t know, but I do know this: they are not going up at anywhere near the rate of tuition. So where’s the money going? (Reminds me of doctors–medical costs skyrocket, but doctors’ salaries sure don’t. Who’s taking the dang money?)

‘GLOBAL ALLIANCE FOR RESPONSIBLE MEDIA’ SHUTS DOWN DAYS AFTER LAWSUIT FILED BY X, RUMBLE. Wow, what a super “responsible” move. Super happy that these were the folks policing what I could read.

Beware, though: it likely just means that they have already started a successor effort to hammer people/organizations who countenance badthink.

IMMINENT STUDENT LOAN DISASTER: MORE THAN HALF OF BORROWERS NOT PAYING. The sooner we can put an end to the current student loan system, the better. The incentives for every party are just dead wrong.

CALIFORNIA COMMUNITY COLLEGE DISTRICT THAT CENSORED ANTI-COMMUNIST FLYERS SETTLES FIRE LAWSUIT FOR $330,000. And administrators have to go to First Amendment training–annually.

DUKE ENDS RACE-BASED SCHOLARSHIP PROGRAM IN WAKE OF SUPREME COURT DECISION. Legalized racial preferences always made a mockery of equal justice under law. That the Court continues to allow it in employment, etc. continues to be to our great national shame.

VDARE.COM SHUTTING DOWN AS A RESULT OF LAWFARE. Its current homepage tells a harrowing tale of how government and corporations collaborated to wipe a website off the Internet, free speech be damned. I don’t know enough about the site to opine on its content, and I also know that doesn’t matter. We should be very angry that our institutions enable and engage in this cowardly silencing behavior–and wonder who else they’re silencing today.

LOUSY NEW TITLE IX REGS OFF TO A DESERVEDLY ROUGH START. Bad news: the regs strip students of critical free speech and due process rights, taking away the right to a live hearing and to cross-examine witnesses, and (while ED has been cagey on this) making schools punish students for “misgendering.” Good news: They’re so bad that, for now, courts have blocked them from taking effect in 26 entire states, and on many other campuses as well.

This huge mess is directly attributable to ED’s determination to use Title IX as an excuse to attack some of our most fundamental rights as Americans.

SURVEY REVEALS MAJORITY OF AMERICANS NOT BORN YESTERDAY; DID NOT RECENTLY FALL OFF TURNIP TRUCK. FIRE’s national survey also found that, by wide majorities, “Americans do not trust the government to fairly decide what speech is annoying, disturbing, harassing, indecent, intimidating, terrifying, or threatening.”

REALLY SEEMS LIKE IT WOULD BE HARD FOR THE SECRET SERVICE TO MISS THIS. He’s not sneaking, he’s just freely running around up there on the slopey roof.

Video from Donald Trump assassination attempt victim’s POV shows figure moving on roof moments before gunfire in Butler PA
https://t.co/y21Fof5GPt #FoxNews

— UnboundedLife (@unboundedlife1) July 31, 2024

‘HEALTH EQUITY’ VS. TEACHING ACTUAL MEDICINE.  Med schools in 2024: “Instead of asking, ‘How can individuals protect themselves against health problems?,’ doctors should wonder, ‘What kind of public collective action is necessary to confront health inequity across identifiable populations?’”

WHISTLEBLOWERS: HOMELAND SECURITY REFUSED TO FOLLOW LAW ON DNA TESTING ILLEGALS FOR MORE THAN A DECADE. My praise for DHS’s super-duper sincere commitment to libertarian principles is tempered by knowing there is no way it would ever be extended to the law-abiding citizens they are supposedly “securing.”

FBI DIRECTOR WRAY: MAYBE IT WAS SHRAPNEL THAT HIT TRUMP, WHO KNOWS? YOU are supposed to know. YOU are the head of the FBI. It has been nearly two weeks. If the FBI doesn’t actually know whether a bullet hit the former President, it should be shut down. If the FBI does know and its director is lying, the FBI should be shut down.

As usual, I hasten to note that am not suicidal, I do not have any blackmail-worthy compulsions, and I do not have any information that would lead to the arrest and/or conviction of Hillary Clinton.

‘KIDS ONLINE SAFETY ACT’ GIVES GOVERNMENT DANGEROUS POWERS OVER AMERICANS’ EXPRESSION. Would it even be considered if it didn’t? Government and industry pass up so many non-Orwellian ways to make kids “safer” online that there’s no reason to give them any benefit of the doubt.

DO DIVERSITY STATEMENT BANS NOT GO FAR ENOUGH? The real problem is that any regulation only works if the people being regulated aren’t going out of their way to undermine it.

BIDEN STILL IN SECLUSION, VP HARRIS ‘FILLING IN’ FOR HIM, DISCUSSING HIS ‘LEGACY’ AT WHITE HOUSE SPEECH. Biden needs to make an appearance, now, even if it’s from his sick bed. Some Biden aide posting a PDF on X is not sufficient proof that this isn’t “coup o’clock.”

SECRET SERVICE SOURCE: WOULD-BE TRUMP ASSASSIN HID RIFLE AHEAD OF DEADLY RALLY SHOOTING. “It was not immediately clear where he hid it, however.” Smart money’s gotta be on the slightly sloped roof, right?

‘HUNDREDS OF RACIST PLANT NAMES WILL CHANGE AFTER HISTORIC VOTE BY BOTANISTS.’ Seems like this could be confusing, but I guess it could be worse, right? Oh, it is. “A second change to the rules for naming plants that aimed to address problematic names, such as those recognizing people who profited from the transatlantic slave trade, also passed — albeit in a watered-down form.”