Tucker Carlson about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Karine Jean-Pierre: "The marriage of ineptitude and high self-esteem is really the marker of our time. I've nothing against dumb people at all. My dogs are dumb and I love my dogs....I'm not attacking her for being dumb but the… pic.twitter.com/aL9PyyWyyf
twitter | Tucker Carlson about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Karine Jean-Pierre: "The marriage of ineptitude and high self-esteem is really the marker of our time. I've nothing against dumb people at all. My dogs are dumb and I love my dogs....I'm not attacking her for being dumb but the idea that dumb person has no, and the White House Press Secretary is in the same category, who's no idea she's dumb, she really thinks like she won the prize, she's the most impressive, like: "I'm White House Press Secretary because I'm the best talker in America." It's so crazy and yet the smartest people I know are very often sort of, they have humility."
Slate |What do you mean by the “weaponization of safety”?
The language is about wanting to make Jewish students feel safe. But there isn’t that other side of the conversation, which is: Are Palestinian students feeling safe? Some students are afraid of doxing, and there aren’t conversations about that.
OK, so the school policies have changed. Are there any other ways things have changed in recent years for student activists?
I
do think that one of the things that has changed is that there are ways
universities are, for example, deactivating access cards, taking
students out of dorms, and rapidly creating material
consequences—consequences relating to housing, tuition, fees, expulsion,
etc. Those move much faster, in large part because of technology.
You can, by a click of a button, deactivate students’ cards. It’s
increased the speed at which universities can respond.
And
then, for example, with things like Twitter or TikTok now, there’s the
difference between a university president making a statement that’s
posted online, versus in the past, when that might have just been an
email or in a student newspaper.
What does that conversation occurring publicly mean for this whole dynamic?
It
allows for more scrutiny. So when colleges and universities, for
example, created statements in 2015 and 2016 about anti-Blackness and
police brutality, a lot of those statements were about standing against
hate, etc. And then in 2020, as colleges and universities were once
again creating the statements, there were student groups that brought up
the 2015, 2016 statements being like, What have you done since then? Students are able to say, “You posted about this, and we’re trying to hold you accountable to that.”
What
do you think drove schools like Columbia to take such a dramatic
disciplinary step in these cases? Do you think this situation was
specific to the Israel-Palestine conflict, or standard for any kind of
protest?
I
think colleges and universities feel like this is very complicated.
There’s less of a desire to make a stance, and colleges and universities
are wary of making statements; often, statements are 500 words or less,
and there needs to be, like, a book. So, I think that that’s part of
what makes universities nervous.
Looking
at Columbia, as an example, this is a PR nightmare for them. To arrest
students now, when there’s so much scrutiny, and then to do it in such a
cruel way—students have been talking about only having 15 minutes to
collect their belongings, that their belongings were thrown in the trash
immediately. And to do that on a scale of 100 students, and then to
double down on that, and then say that they’re doing it for safety,
doesn’t make a lot of sense. So what that tells you is that Columbia is
likely facing a lot of pressure from people who do not want students to
be protesting. To the point where they’re making what seems like a very
irrational decision.
nakedcapitalism | This measures is so far under the radar that so far, only Friedman and Matthew Petti at Reason seem to have noticed it. And Petti has pointed out that the Secretary of the Treasury can designate any organization to be “terrorist-supporting organization,” so the does not think, as Friedman seems to, that any other measures are needed to allow an Administration to try to financially cripple not-for-profits engaging in wrong speech.
Note that the messaging depicting Hamas as somehow behind the campus protests has increased:
And Aljazeera has already produced evidence of Zionist groups trying to stoke confrontations at the demonstrations (hat tip Erasmus):
Mind you, not-for-profits are already subject to mission and censorship pressures by large donors, witness the billionaires who loudly said they would halt donations to Ivy League schools if they “tolerated anti-Semitism,” as in did not quash criticism of Israel. But as you will see, this is a whole different level of censorship.
First, we are hoisting Friedman’s entire tweetstorm. She stresses that not only does this bill create a star chamber when existing laws allow for crackwdowns on terrorist supports, but that it could be easily extended to other types of establishment-threatening speech.
A bipartisan bill would give the secretary of the treasury unilateral power to classify any charity as a terrorist-supporting organization, automatically stripping away its nonprofit status….
In theory, the bill is a measure to fight terrorism financing…
Financing terrorism is already very illegal. Anyone who gives money, goods, or services to a U.S.-designated terrorist organization can be charged with a felony under the Antiterrorism Act and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. And those terrorist organizations are already banned from claiming tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(3) of the tax code. Nine charities have been shut down since 2001 under the law.
The new bill would allow the feds to shut down a charity without an official terrorism designation. It creates a new label called “terrorist-supporting organization” that the secretary of the treasury could slap onto nonprofits, removing their tax exempt status within 90 days. Only the secretary of the treasury could cancel that designation.
In other words, the bill’s authors believe that some charities are too dangerous to give tax exemptions to, but not dangerous enough to take to court. Although the label is supposed to apply to supporters of designated terrorist groups, nothing in the law prevents the Department of the Treasury from shutting down any 501(c)(3) nonprofit, from the Red Cross to the Reason Foundation.
Petti explains that an initial target appears to be Students for Justice in Palestine, which he says have not had enough of an attack surface to be targeted under current law; in fact, Florida governor DeSantis had to shelve a plan to shut down Students for Justice in Palestine when confronted with a lawsuit.
Petti explains that his concerns are not unwarranted:
Under the proposed bill, murky innuendo could be enough to target pro-Palestinian groups. But it likely wouldn’t stop there. After all, during the Obama administration, the IRS put aggressive extra scrutiny on nonprofit groups with “Tea Party” or “patriot” in their names. And under the Biden administration, the FBI issued a memo on the potential terrorist threat that right-wing Catholics pose.
The Charity and Security Network, a coalition of charities that operate in conflict zones, warned that its own members could be hindered from helping the neediest people in the world.
“Charitable organizations, especially those who work in settings where designated terrorist groups operate, already undergo strict internal due diligence and risk mitigation measures and…face extra scrutiny by the U.S. government, the financial sector, and all actors necessary to operate and conduct financial transactions in such complex settings,” the network declared in November. “This legislation presents dangerous potential as a weapon to be used against civil society in the context of Gaza and beyond.”
I urge readers, and particularly donors, to alert the fundraising and executive staff at not-for-profits, particularly the journalistic sort, so they can object to this legislation. It would likely not survive a Supreme Court challenge in its current form, but that’s an awfully heavy load to have to carry, plus the legislation might not be subject to an injunction in the meantime.
Tucker Carlson: "Here's the illusion we fall for time and again. We imagine that evil comes like fully advertised as such, like evil people look like Anton Lavey...Evil is an independent force that exists outside of people, that acts upon people...What vessel do they choose? The… pic.twitter.com/ugF3bMgxcx
Tucker Carlson: "Here's the illusion we fall for time and again. We imagine that evil comes like fully advertised as such, like evil people look like Anton Lavey...
Evil is an independent force that exists outside of people, that acts upon people...
What vessel do they choose? The weak. It's weak men and women who are instruments of evil. The weaker the leader, the more evil that leader will be...
Unfortunately we reached the time in American history where every leader is either a woman or a weak man pretty much...Mike Johnson...but he's a weak man and that's the man you should be afraid of....
Weak people just become a host for evil, an empty building that evil occupies, possesses even. And that's exactly what's happening to Mike Johnson. That's absolutely crazy what Mike Johnson is doing, but not because he's evil, it's because he's weak and therefore susceptible to evil..."
APNews | “Jews are scared at Columbia. It’s as simple as that,” he said.
“There’s been so much vilification of Zionism, and it has spilled over
into the vilification of Judaism.”
The protest encampment sprung up at Columbia on Wednesday, the same day that Shafik faced bruising criticism at a congressional hearing from Republicans who said she hadn’t done enough to fight antisemitism. Two other Ivy League presidents resigned months ago following widely criticized testimony they gave to the same committee.
In
her statement Monday, Shafik said the Middle East conflict is terrible
and that she understands that many are experiencing deep moral distress.
“But we cannot have one group dictate terms and attempt to disrupt
important milestones like graduation to advance their point of view,”
Shafik wrote.
Over the coming days, a working group of deans,
school administrators and faculty will try to find a resolution to the
university crisis, noted Shafik, who didn’t say when in-person classes
would resume.
U.S. House Republicans from New York urged Shafik to resign, saying in a letter Monday that she had failed to provide a safe learning environment in recent days as “anarchy has engulfed the campus.”
In
Massachusetts, a sign said Harvard Yard was closed to the public
Monday. It said structures, including tents and tables, were only
allowed into the yard with prior permission. “Students violating these
policies are subject to disciplinary action,” the sign said. Security
guards were checking people for school IDs.
The same day, the
Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee said the
university’s administration suspended their group. In the suspension
notice provided by the student organization, the university wrote that
the group’s April 19 demonstration had violated school policy, and that
the organization failed to attend required trainings after they were
previously put on probation.
The Palestine Solidarity Committee
said in a statement that they were suspended over technicalities and
that the university hadn’t provided written clarification on the
university’s policies when asked.
“Harvard has shown us time and again that Palestine remains the exception to free speech,” the group wrote in a statement.
Harvard did not respond to an email request for comment.
At
Yale, police officers arrested about 45 protesters and charged them
with misdemeanor trespassing, said Officer Christian Bruckhart, a New
Haven police spokesperson. All were being released on promises to appear
in court later, he said.
Protesters set up tents on Beinecke
Plaza on Friday and demonstrated over the weekend, calling on Yale to
end any investments in defense companies that do business with Israel.
In
a statement to the campus community on Sunday, Yale President Peter
Salovey said university officials had spoken to the student protesters
multiple times about the school’s policies and guidelines, including
those regarding speech and allowing access to campus spaces.
School
officials said they gave protesters until the end of the weekend to
leave Beinecke Plaza. The said they again warned protesters Monday
morning and told them that they could face arrest and discipline,
including suspension, before police moved in.
A large group of
demonstrators regathered after Monday’s arrests at Yale and blocked a
street near campus, Bruckhart said. There were no reports of any
violence or injuries.
Prahlad Iyengar, an MIT graduate student
studying electrical engineering, was among about two dozen students who
set up a tent encampment on the school’s Cambridge, Massachusetts,
campus Sunday evening. They are calling for a cease-fire and are
protesting what they describe as MIT’s “complicity in the ongoing
genocide in Gaza,” he said.
“MIT has not even called for a cease-fire, and that’s a demand we have for sure,” Iyengar said. ___
nakedcapitalism | Many US papers are giving front-page, above the fold treatment to
university administrators going wild and calling in the cops on peaceful
campus protests, first at Columbia, followed by Yale and NYU.
Harvard, in a profile in courage, closed its campus to prevent a
spectacle. Demonstrations are taking hold at other campuses, including
MIT, Emerson, and Tufts.
This is an overly dynamic situation, so I am not sure it makes sense
to engage in detailed coverage. However, some things seem noteworthy.
First, in typical US hothouse fashion, the press is treating protests
as if they were a bigger deal than the ongoing genocide in Gaza. I am
not the only one to notice this. From Parapraxis (hat tip guurst; bear with the author’s leisurely set-up):
I am employed as a non-tenure-track professor
in a university department dedicated to teaching and research about
Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness. One day, I arrived at work to find
security cameras installed in my department’s hallway. I read in an
email that these cameras had been installed after an antisemitic poster
was discovered affixed to a colleague’s office door. I was never shown
this poster. Like the cameras, I learned of it only belatedly. Despite
the fact that the poster apparently constituted so great a danger to the
members of my department as to warrant increased security, nobody
bothered to inform me about it. By the time I was aware that there was a
threat in which I was ostensibly implicated, the decision had already
been made—by whom, exactly, I don’t know—about which measures were
necessary to protect me from it. My knowledge, consent, and perspective
were irrelevant to the process…
The prolepsis of the decision did more than protect me—if, indeed, it
really did that. It interpellated my coworkers and myself as people in
need of protection…. I was unwittingly transformed, literally overnight,
into the type of person to whom something might happen.
My employer has a campus—three, actually—meaning that it has a
physical plant. I navigate one of these campuses as my workplace, but it
almost never figures for me as “the campus.” In fact, the
first time since beginning the job when I felt myself caught up in an
affective relation, not to the particular institution where I work, but
rather to “the campus” was when I looked up into that security
camera and felt myself being “watched” by it. Only then did I think, a
couple of months into my temporary contract, that I was not just at my
workplace. Now I was on “the campus.”
This incident with the poster and the camera occurred, of course,
some weeks after the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel and the onset of
Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in Gaza. Against so horrific a
backdrop, and relative to the intimidation and retaliation to which
those who speak out against the war (including—indeed, especially—in the
academy) have been subjected, my story sounds banal. And it is. In its
very ordinariness, however, the anecdote is quite representative: first,
of how decisions get made at contemporary institutions of higher
education (generally speaking, without the input of those whom they
impact); and second, of the logic of a peculiarly American phenomenon I
call campus panic….
The months since October 7 have aggravated the most extreme campus
panic I have witnessed. To judge by the American mass media, the campus
is the most urgent scene of political struggle in the world. What is
happening “on campus” often seems of greater concern than what is
happening in Gaza, where every single university campus has been razed
by the IDF. When all the Palestinian dead have been counted, it seems
likely that these months will be recorded as having inflamed a campus
panic no less intense than the one that accompanied the Vietnam War.
Second, many otherwise fine stories, like Columbia in crisis, again
by the Columbia Journalism Review, and Columbia University protests and
the lessons of “Gym Crow” by Judd at Popular Information, start off
with the 1968 protests at Columbia as a point of departure. And again,
consistent with the Parapraxis account and being old enough to remember
the Vietnam War, I find the comparison to be overdone. Yes, there are
some telling similarities, like the role of right-wing pressure in
getting campus administrators to call out the cops, the device of
dwelling on the earlier uprising seems to obscure more than it reveals.
The Vietnam War, unlike Gaza, tore the US apart. Today’s campus students
are, with only the comparatively small contingent of Palestinian
students, acting to protest US support of slaughter in Gaza. In 1968,
for many, the stake were more personal. The risk of young men having to
serve was real.
Similarly, conservatives then supported the military and were
typically proud of their or any family member’s service. Draft dodging
and demonization of armed forces leaders was close to unconscionable. It
took years of the major television networks and the two authoritative
magazines, Time and Newsweek, showing what the war looked like, and
intimating that the US was not succeeding, that shifted mass opinion.
KATV | Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., chastised Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas Thursday over his alleged mishandling of the southern border.
Mayorkas
has been the subject of intense GOP scrutiny as the migrant crisis
continues to overwhelm U.S. sanctuary cities. While the House issued
articles of impeachment against the border czar this week, the Senate
was quick to shoot them down.
Nonetheless,
Mayorkas remains a polarizing figure on Capitol Hill. Sen. Paul
criticized Mayorkas while hearing his testimony during a hearing of the
Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
“How
did the murderer of Laken Riley get into this country?” the senator
asked, invoking the name of the 22-year-old allegedly slain by illegal
migrant Jose Ibarra. “What is the statute that allowed you to do it? How
could you sleep at night having done that?”
Also
slamming Mayorkas was Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who grilled him over
repeatedly changing his answers when asked about how Ibarra entered the
U.S.
“[Ibarra] was paroled into the United State due to lack of
detention capacity,” Sen. Hawley said. “You and I both know you know
this.”
You just never wanted to cop to it,” the senator added. “You testified falsely under oath.”
Mayorkas
also took heat this week from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who
suggested he “should have deported” Riley, a U.S. citizen, to keep her
safe.
"Her parents would have appreciated that," the congresswoman added.
U.S. sanctuary cities are now using significant
funding to care for migrants. New York City recently announced a $53
million pilot program to distribute prepaid debit cards to migrant
families. Denver Mayor Mike Johnston last week touted his decision to
cut back on $45.9 million worth of expenses as the city deals with an
ongoing influx of migrants.
A Foundation of Joy
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April Three
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
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Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...