April 23, 2024

April 22, 2024

VERY FINE PEOPLE ON BOTH SIDES, WORRIED ABOUT MICHIGAN IN NOVEMBER EDITION:

And from Joe’s boss:

As Joel Pollack tweets, “Only Obama could turn Passover into an occasion for solidarity with the Gazans who attacked Israel on Oct. 7. The missing word from this post, by the way, is ‘freedom.’ Never an important concept for Obama. But it’s the heart of the Passover holiday. He never got it.”

UPDATE: Seth Mandel on the United States of Charlottesville:

“From the river to the sea, Palestine is Arab” is a direct application of the popular academic theory of the day, “decolonization.” The idea of Jewish self-determination in Israel being a settler-colonialist project might be a flat-earth level of historical crankery, but it is all the rage—and I do mean rage—in the classrooms of our esteemed institutions of higher learning. Teaching young minds that Jews must be supplanted from their homes because they represent a race that belongs elsewhere has a long history of inspiring those students to carry out what they’ve been taught. It is no surprise that Jews at Columbia over the weekend were told to “go back to Poland.” The racial ideology at the heart of decolonization theory demands nothing less. As a now-infamous Twitter/X post, amplified by a writer and editor at the Washington Post among others, asked in celebration of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre and sexual torture spree: “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.”

And that helps us understand the look of absolute despondency on Columbia President Minouche Shafik’s face throughout her congressional hearing this week. She, and many of her peers at other institutions, are facing two problems. The first is the violence and harassment targeting visibly Jewish students. Contrary to various media figures’ attempts to spin recent events, this is absolutely taking place on campus and these violations absolutely are being committed by students. They are also, however, taking place outside of campus as part of the same demonstrations a few feet away. It’s not either/or. The campus-organized protests are spreading and so is the violence they incite.

If Shafik is ever dismissed by Columbia, she definitely has a job waiting for her at Reuters, where they believe “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Similarly, Shafik sees terrorism as “a form of protesting:”

 

Posted at 10:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

OPEN THREAD: It’s your moment.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

WE SHOULD REDIRECT ALL FEDERAL DOLLARS, INCLUDING STUDENT LOAN DOLLARS, ELSEWHERE:

Related:

There is a stunning likeness.

Posted at 9:25 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THINGS I LIKE: Hexclad Pans. I bought one of these skillets about a year ago. I’d been using a Greenpan, which worked well when new but lost its nonstick qualities. You could use a special sponge to “rejuvenate” it, and it kind of worked, but not as well as I’d like.

The Hexclad is as good as new after a year, and is entirely dishwasher safe. (The Greenpan says you really shouldn’t put it in the dishwasher regularly.) And don’t tell me I should use a cast iron pan, because in my house, everything winds up in the dishwasher eventually, no matter how many times I repeat that it shouldn’t go there. But very happy with the Hexclad pan. I have their griddle too, and it also works well. My only complaint about the griddle is that the stainless steel band around the top that isn’t nonstick gets burnt-on grease, and that’s hard to clean. Doesn’t interfere with the function, just annoying.

Posted at 6:50 pm by Glenn Reynolds

CHRIS QUEEN: Adventures in Bourbonland, Part 1. “For a long time, I’ve wanted to take a trip to Kentucky to visit some distilleries and take in the atmosphere of the area that inspired and created my favorite whiskey. My brother and his wife have been up there a couple of times, and he and I talked about taking a trip for about a year before we finally booked the trip we took last week.”

Posted at 4:19 pm by Stephen Green

THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN: Multi-Drug Resistant Bacteria Found on ISS Mutating to Become Functionally Distinct. “Closed human-built environments, such as the ISS, are unique areas that provide an extreme environment subject to microgravity, radiation, and elevated carbon dioxide levels. Any microorganisms introduced to these areas must adapt to thrive. By delving into microbial dynamics in extreme environments, this research opens doors to effective preventative measure for astronaut health.”

Posted at 3:48 pm by Stephen Green

OFF THE RAILS:  In 2020, during the “Time of Anxiety” over George Floyd’s death, the California Legislature created a Task Force on Reparations.  In doing so, it appeared to me that the legislators were violating a fundamental rule of governance:  Never create a commission to “study” a controversial problem unless you are relatively certain that you’re going to want to follow its recommendations.

Reparations for African Americans in California are an unusually bad idea.  To begin with, this was never a slave state.  And if the reparations are not for slavery, but rather for racial discrimination over the course of California’s history, then the problem is that other racial and ethnic  groups have suffered from mistreatment at least as much (and in the case of the Chinese more).  Yet, from the start, the Task Force appeared to be stacked in favor of reparations.

When the Task Force’s report came out in June of last year, it did indeed back extensive reparations. There were some awkward moments, but it looked to me that Governor Newsom realized all this had been a mistake and was going to sweep the report under the rug.

I’m starting to think that maybe I was wrong about sweeping this under the rug.  Or rather I was right in the first place:  It’s very hard for a legislature to turn away from the recommendations of a task force it created.

Recently, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to create a “Freedmen’s Agency.”  Shades of Nuremberg:  The Agency will be required to have a “Genealogy Office,” which will be charged with the task of tracing the pedigree of those who apply for reparations to ensure their eligibility.  If the bill passes the Senate and Assembly and it is signed by the governor, the new agency will violate another fundamental rule of governance:  Never create a bureaucracy unless you want it to have the power to carry out its mission.

I have a hard time imagining that this will end well.

In any event, here are some tweets that I could use some “likes” and “retweets” on.  If you have a Twitter/X account and have a minute, please help out.

With luck, we’ll have some other (non-Twitter) ways to send a message to these senators soon.  Right now there’s an immediate need to get their attention any way we can.

Posted at 2:21 pm by Gail Heriot