April 27, 2025

ACTBLUE ACTS LIKE A MONEY LAUNDRY. PERHAPS IT IS ONE.

Posted at 5:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds 72

GREAT MOMENTS IN DEI:

 

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll 655

LET’S FACE IT, THE PLACE IS A CESSPIT OF BIGOTRY: Racism At Harvard. “In thinking about the current battle between the Trump administration and Harvard University, fought over anti-Semitism and DEI, I recalled an earlier controversy in which Harvard–specifically, its law school–pled guilty to racism.”

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds 61

DEMOCRATS: PEOPLE WHO MADE THINGS NOT NORMAL COMPLAINING ABOUT THE NOT-NORMAL RESPONSE TO THEIR NOT-NORMALITY:

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds 160

THE IVY EXILE: Public Health’s Sacrificial Lambs.

In trying to wrap my mind around the self-inflicted catastrophe that was America’s COVID-19 lockdown regime, imposed five years ago this spring, I’ve been inclined to assume that public health leaders deserved something close to a free pass for those surreal first few months — that given the panic and the fog of war, people such as Anthony Fauci were entitled to some measure of grace as they adapted to a fluid situation. But in his harrowing and revelatory new book, An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions, journalist David Zweig details how swiftly national COVID-19 policies diverged from the broadly accepted protocols enshrined in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s pandemic playbook toward an indefinite lockdown model seemingly inspired by China’s heavy-handed mitigation efforts. “The arrival of a new infectious virus was not unprecedented,” he writes. “But the response to it was.”

Nor was it conducted in good faith.

Plus:

Though public health was no doubt a historically noble calling that had saved and improved countless lives over many decades of rigorous empirical and quantitative work, by the 1970s things had begun to go wobbly: More and more activists were tilting the field away from empirical rigor and toward lacquering a questionable scientific patina atop their political priorities. There were still top-flight epidemiologists and others working on challenges such as clean water and infant mortality, but more and more of the field consisted of laundering activism on issues such as gun control or gender norms into pseudoscientific “scholarship.”

Indeed.

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds 179

April 26, 2025

OPEN THREAD: Party on.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds 1879

UNCONSTITUTIONAL:  “Prosecutors to Consider Race in Pleas Deals under New Policy Written by Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty.”  The policy was deliberately written in an effort to disguise its unconstitutionality.  It says both to consider the accused’s race and not to consider the accused’s race in offering plea deals.  But, despite the efforts to conceal it, the unconstitutionality of such a policy should be throbbingly obvious.

When someone tries to tell you that a particular instance of considering race is a cool idea, the best thing to do is “flip it.”  If prosecutors considered an accused’s whiteness in his or her favor as “part of the overall analysis,” but not necessarily as “controlling,” we would rightly be outraged.  It should be no different here.

Can’t this Soros-backed prosecutor be recalled?

Posted at 8:05 pm by Gail Heriot 209