I am a bit ill today with a sore throat and what appears to be a cold (I’ll Covid test later), so posting tomorrow may be light (I write much of the Hilis on the afternoon before).
Welcome to Sunday, December 15, 2024, and National Cat Herders Day. And, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades, I present you with the best commercial of any type ever made, one about cat herding. It was made by EDS (Electronic Data Systems), and now there’s a big Wikipedia page about the commercial, called “Cat Herders”. It was shown once: in 2000 at the Superbowl XXXIV:
Be sure to watch it several times, or you’ll miss some good parts.
It’s also Bill of Rights Day (marking the day that Virginia ratified the first ten Amendments to the Constitution in 1791), National Gingerbread Latte Day (another attempt to convert an adult beverage into a confection), both National Lemon Cupcake Day and National Cupcake Day, and International Tea Day.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the December 15 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Yoon Suk Yeol, the President of South Korea, briefly declared martial law a few days ago, and for that he got himself impeached.
Eleven days ago, President Yoon Suk Yeol of South Korea made a bold power grab, putting the country under military rule for the first time in 45 years, citing frustration at the opposition for obstructing his agenda in Parliament.
His martial law decree lasted only hours, and now he finds himself locked out of power: impeached and suspended by the National Assembly after a vote on Saturday in which a dozen members of his own party turned against him.
Lawmakers sought to draw a line under Mr. Yoon’s tenure after his declaration threw the country’s democracy into chaos and drew public outrage across the country.
Street protests turned to celebrations outside the Assembly when news broke that the impeachment bill had passed. Mr. Yoon’s popularity has plummeted during his two and a half years in office, a term marked by deepening political polarization, scandals involving his wife and a near-constant clash between his government and the opposition-dominated Parliament.
But the political turmoil and uncertainty unleashed by his short-lived declaration of martial law are far from over. Speaking soon after the vote, Mr. Yoon vowed to fight in court to regain his power, even as the police and prosecutors closed in on him with a possible criminal charge of insurrection.
. . .During his suspension from office, Prime Minister Han Duck-soo, the No. 2 official in the government hierarchy, has stepped in as interim leader. “My heart is very heavy,” said Mr. Han, a career bureaucrat. “In this heavy time, I will focus all my strength and effort to stably run the affairs of the state.”
Because Mr. Han is not an elected official, he will lead South Korea with no real political heft at a time when the country faces challenges at home and abroad, such as North Korea’s growing nuclear threat and the return of Donald J. Trump to the White House.
Another NYT article notes this:
The Constitutional Court will now decide whether to reinstate Mr. Yoon or formally remove him, a process that could take up to six months. Here’s how the process unfolded and what lies ahead for him.
They then follow with the process; Yeol will be impeached if 6 of the 9 Constitutional Court justices concur.
*AMCHA declares itself “a non-profit organization dedicated to investigating, documenting, educating about, and combating antisemitism at institutions of higher education in America.” Using a variety of criteria, they’ve ranked over 700 colleges and universities for their degree of antisemitism, ranging from the worst (“extreme”) at #5, to “negligible” (no discernible antisemitism) at #1. And of course the first thing I looked up was the University of Chicago. Here we lie: 11th from the bottom! (Note that NYU a hotbed of Jew hatred, is the worst, and Columbia is #3.)
Here we lie (I’ve put a red box around the U of C, but there are still 30 schools below us that are still in the red zone:
To see how the rankings are determined, and what criteria were used, click on the “data” below for our school. “FJP” is the Faculty for Justice in Palestine, and “statements” are statements construed as antisemitic.
As reader Norm said, who sent me this link, “All of the usual suspects are represented. There are several ways to slice and dice the rankings.”
All I can say is that despite many violations of both the law and of campus regulations, and by both groups and individuals of faculty and students, only a SINGLE punishment was levied the entire year: Students for Justice in Palestine was given a reprimand that had no consequences. The University simply seems reluctant to punish anybody for violating campus speech and assembly rules (I don’t care about anyone who adheres to our speech rules, which are liberal.
But I’m sure that every college that looks bad will find a way that the rankings are flawed.
*The WSJ reports that, because of Trump’s threats of tariffs, Americans are stockpiling goods that are likely to be subject to tariffs and are also goods that are pricey.
Tariff-conscious consumers are stockpiling goods and rushing to upgrade old cars and appliances to get ahead of potential price increases.
A quarter of Americans surveyed said it was a good time for major purchases as they expect prices to go up next year, up from 10% a month prior and a record high, according to the University of Michigan’s monthly survey of consumers. And a third of the 2,000 people surveyed recently by CreditCards.com said they were buying more now because they feared tariffs.
Some economists warn that by spending as though inflation is coming, people could already be pushing it higher. The consumer-price index of goods and services grew 2.7% year over year in November, according to the Labor Department, slightly higher than in the prior month. The boost was driven in part by a surge in durable-goods purchases some shoppers said are related to President-elect Donald Trump’s threats of tariffs on imports from countries including Canada, Mexico and China.
“People can make a judgment that, ‘Well I thought I was going to buy a TV in the next 12 months. Maybe I should buy it in the next 12 weeks,’” said Robert Barbera, director of the Center for Financial Economics at Johns Hopkins University.
On the campaign trail, Trump proposed 10% to 20% tariffs on all imported products, and 60% on Chinese imports, an effort to spur domestic manufacturing and reduce the trade deficit. After the election, he said he would impose a 25% tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico and threatened 100% on the Brics countries of Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates.
Many economists think that tariffs, even if they boost manufacturing, are likely to lead to rising prices.
Yes, and I’d dare to say MOST economists agree. It’s ironic that those consumers who voted for Trump because they thought the cost of living was too high under Biden are going to be whacked with higher prices on many items after January, and prices will rise on items that aren’t even subject to direct tariffs, if producing those items uses other goods that are subject to tariffs.
*Here’a another Trumpian idea that seems pretty bad: he’s considering privatizing the post office. Can he even do that?:
Told of the mail agency’s annual financial losses, Trump said the government should not subsidize the organization, the people said. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect private conversations.
Trump’s specific plans for overhauling the Postal Service were not immediately clear. But he feuded with the nation’s mail carrier as president in 2019, trying to force it to hand over key functions — including rate-setting, personnel decisions, labor relations and managing relationships with its largest clients — to the Treasury Department.
Here are some data on profits and (mostly) losses from the USPS. One year there was a surplus after reforms, but now it’s worse than ever:
We all know that the USPS sucks, but what do you think will happen to postage after mail gets privatized. Yes, you got it: you’ll be paying $2.50 to mail a letter. I can’t imagine a company doing better than the U.S. government in terms of finances.
*A former high-ranking prosecutor of Manhattan has been hired to help represent Luigi Mangione, accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson:
The suspect in the killing of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO has added a prominent defense lawyer to his legal team as Manhattan prosecutors work to return him from Pennsylvania to face a murder charge.
Luigi Mangione will be represented by Karen Friedman Agnifilo, who was a high-ranking deputy in the Manhattan district attorney’s office for years before entering private practice.
Friedman Agnifilo’s law firm, Agnifilo Intrater LLP, confirmed in a statement late Friday that she had been retained to represent Mangione. The firm said she will not be commenting on the case at this time.
. . . . Mangione, 26, remained jailed without bail Saturday in Pennsylvania, where he was initially charged with gun and forgery offenses. Altoona is about 230 miles (about 370 kilometers) west of New York City.
Mangione’s lawyer there, Thomas Dickey, has cautioned against prejudging the case and said that his client would contest his extradition to New York.
But Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said Friday that there were indications Mangione may now give up on that fight.
“We going to continue to press forward on parallel paths, and we’ll be ready whether he is going to waive extradition or whether he is going to contest extradition,” Bragg said at an unrelated press conference in Times Square.
Hours after Mangione’s arrest on Monday, Bragg’s office filed paperwork charging him with five counts, including intentional murder, criminal possession of a weapon and criminal possession of a forged instrument.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has said she’s prepared to ask her Pennsylvania counterpart, Gov. Josh Shapiro, to intervene and issue a governor’s warrant requiring Mangione’s extradition if he does not agree to be moved voluntarily.
If what the cops say that they found on Mangione, and how and where his movements were tracked, are all true, then the man is toast. He better get some high-priced lawyers, because although his state charges don’t carry the death penalty, added federal charges could. (I don’t believe in capital punishment, but this is what he and his team have to worry about.) He’s charged only with second-degree murder so far because, as CNN reports,
. . . . . under New York law, a first-degree murder charge only applies to a narrow list of aggravating circumstances, including when the victim is a judge, a police officer or a first responder, or when the killing involves a murder-for-hire or an intent to commit terrorism, legal experts told CNN.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is a wannabe Maimonedes:
Hili: Maybe we should write a handbook for worried people?Andrzej: What are they worried about?Hili: It absolutely doesn’t matter.
In Polish:
Hili: A może napisać poradnik dla zmartwionych?
Ja: Czym zmartwionych?
Hili: To akurat nie ma żadnego znaczenia.
*******************
From Cat Memes:
From Jesus of the Day:
From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy. I’ve marked the US:
From Masih: ridiculous censorship in Iran:
Khamenei has criminalized any criticism of Bashar al-Assad’s fall.
But it goes further, his words signal orders to arrest critical journalists in Iran and send assassins abroad to silence opponents. This is not just censorship; it’s transnational terror. This blatant attack on… pic.twitter.com/h40m8d9BUg
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) December 12, 2024
A conundrum sent by Luana:
*trying to stop laughing*
Even if they cast a man who claims to be a woman in the role of a man who claims to be a woman it will still just be a man playing the role of a man who claims to be a woman. There’s absolutely no way around this, fellas. pic.twitter.com/QTTIYvUVW3
— Sall Grover (@salltweets) December 13, 2024
From Simon, who says that this is an old theme that made him smile:
I didn't do anything, he fainted from hunger. 😄😄
Bluesky, which is starting to irritate me with its wokeness and virtue-flaunting, is doing its best to ban Jesse Singal. The site, thank Ceiling Cat, is supporting him:
Absolutely insane Orwellian nightmare coverage of an app where viral misinformation has resulted in incitement to murderous threats against a journalist for impartially and scrupulously coverage an ongoing medical scandal pic.twitter.com/rhIi82ANS9
— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) December 13, 2024
Copycats from Malcolm:
copy and paste pic.twitter.com/AmuYoDQyE3
— No Cats No Life (@NoCatsNoLife_m) December 1, 2024
From the Auschwitz Memorial, a short video of “the selection process”:
Watch a short video about the unloading and selection platforms in #Auschwitz:
— Auschwitz Memorial (@auschwitzmemorial.bsky.social) 2024-12-14T09:28:20.924Z
Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, a table made from petrified fish poop. I’d love to have it:
Scotland: hi, how can we help?Buckland: please send a selection of your finest fish turdsScotland: 🧐Buckland: I want to polish themScotland:😳Buckland: to make a table Scotland: 😨Buckland: fossil turds that isScotland: oh right! Yes, of course…
— Scottish Geology Trust (@scottishgeology.bsky.social) 2024-12-13T16:43:59.161Z
. . . and Christmas is coming! (Coynezaa too).
— Standplaats Back In Kraków (@standplaatskrk.pl) 2024-12-13T16:06:45.949Z
The Bill of Rights is a disaster.
The Constitution is a document that establishes a government with coercive power to protect the inherent and unalienable right to exist for every human that exists.
Think that is tautology?
The opposite… it is an axiom that, if voided by the established government, triggers the reaction promised in the Declaration of Independence.
To enumerate rights when each citizen already inhabits them intrinsically gives the impression — and later legal sanction — to the corrupt axiom: that rights are established by government.
The Constitution ought to have simply restated the axiomatic formulation of the Declaration, and then enumerated the specific and highly limited powers of Gov.
Here is the axiom as written by George Mason a few months prior to Jefferson’s faulty failure.
“That all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”
George Mason, The Virginia Declaration of Rights
a) It does not credit God with the empowering of rights – it is “by nature.”;
b) It explicitly declares property an absolute right;
c) states that laws cannot deprive future generations;
d) “acquiring and possessing” property explicitly declared;
e) Pursuing and obtaining happiness inherent, not “given” to them.
Yeah, important stuff to think about here.
Another thought I encountered recently was (paraphrased) :
If a “right” depends on the action/labor of others, then it is not in fact a “right.”
I’m just putting this up – I’m not arguing necessarily.
But I think the authors of the United States founding literature – for those thirteen States at the time – understood they were not gods, and thus could not establish a government of immaculate perfection to bring forth some Third Age – and indeed, no one could ever do so.
Thank you for introducing AMCHA. For some reason, likely operator error early on a Sunday morning, I cannot find a link to the full list of rankings. I have tried several links on the AMCHA website, but simply cannot find such a listing. I see the bottom thirty, and a way to look at any selected school details, but not the entire list.
This is the link to the rankings. Just let it load:
https://amchainitiative.org/azf-barometer#anti-zionist-faculty-barometer/?view_433_per_page=1000&view_433_page=1
Yep, took me awhile to find a searchable page, but interesting to see that W&M came in at Negligible. I guess I’m both happy and maybe a bit surprised.
https://amchainitiative.org/azf-barometer/
Since the rating is called the “Anti-Zionist Faculty Barometer”, I have to wonder if there are students and faculty who will view a high number as a positive. Jim, try this link: https://amchainitiative.org/azf-barometer#anti-zionist-faculty-barometer/?view_433_per_page=1000&view_433_page=1 . I also had to search around to try to find it.
Bluesky is an echo chamber which has moderation to ensure this remains the case, which is what the users want. It’s not intended to be free speech, so blocking Mr. Singal is not really Orwellian, as “Orwellian” would imply that Bluesky was intended to be a free speech site which used twisted logic to ban speech to keep it “free”. Bluesky is a safe haven for people fleeing X to avoid having to see things like that challenged their views.
Per their site: “Cultivate a welcoming environment: Our aim is to create a safe and friendly space where users feel welcomed, supported, and enjoy participating”.
If one sticks to the correct philosophy, it is safe and welcoming. That philosophy does allow for hatred toward the people with the wrong mindset, and this is also what users want, and what they view as a welcoming environment – there’s nothing more welcoming or enjoyable to some than to be able to say “Jesse Singal is a transphobe and should be censored!” or “You know who else did __ like Trump did? Hitler!” and have a thousand others agree with you without any disagreement.
Thank you, Darryl!
I think the phenomenon is milieu control, to produce ideological purity – especially in regard to self-censorship. For milieu control see :
Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism — A Study of “Brainwashing” in China
Robert J. Lifton
W. W. Norton &Co., Inc., New York
1961
(Gotta flip through – it’s a subheading in kne of the chapters). Spoiler : it’s what actual known cults do.
I have to get an amazingly terrifying quote on self-censorship I read, but I can say it was from one of the worst offenders of history.
Jesse Singhal is not a bad actor. Academic medical journals publish articles that run cover for trans-activist pseudoscience. Jesse Singhal writes informed, well-thought-out critiques of those articles that debunk them, and hurt the feelings of trans-activists. That a discussion space wants to exclude him for violating the group’s consensus is truly shameful. You need to hear people like Jesse Singhal, People!
Disclosure: I contribute by financial subscription to Mr. Singhal’s Substack, have since I read his dismantling of Tordoff’s 2022 controlled trial that wasn’t.
I need you to “support” me, not to criticize me. I want you to listen, not tell me what I did wrong. I want, well, I want what I want, so you are not welcome here.
The ramps at the camps video seems awfully sterile and sanitized…a mechanistic recounting of a process. What is important is that the vast majority of the men, women, and children we see in the black and white first scenes with their required yellow stars of david will be dead in a few hours for having done nothing but simply been deemed “other” by their nazi captors.
Indeed. Death came either immediately after selection or after a few months of exposure, disease, and starvation.
In the bad old days, Twitter (now X) was a dark and repressive place. It you failed to worship the highest god (‘trans’), you committed the crime of blasphemy. These days X is not as repressive. Bluesky has taken over as the place where sane ideas are not tolerated.
I call it eXtwitter.
Covering the bases.
I call it Xitter (with the usual Mandarin pronunciation for the prefix).
Ha ha – or, Xa xa…?
I have to say that the AMCHA rankings leave something to be desired …
My own university, NYU, is top (bottom), primarily (as far as I can see) because more faculty have signed boycotting statements than at any other university. But first, there are a LOT of faculty at NYU – and AMCHA doesn’t seem to attempt to take into account the size of the university (we are something like twice the size of Columbia, so proportionately the number of boycotting faculty there exceeds ours!).
But more importantly, the question is – WHY has the issue of boycotting Israel come up so often at NYU? And the simple answer is because NYU institutionally is unusually close to Israel: we have a study abroad center in Tel Aviv, and we also have a research collaborative arrangement with Tel Aviv University. This annoys the hell out of the anti-Zionists here, and so they keep petitioning for the university to close the center and stop collaborating with TAU – but the university has, I’m glad to say, far from stopping, actively doubled down on its Israel commitments in the last year. I suspect that there are simply going to be fewer boycott petitions going around at institutions where there aren’t so many institutional connections in the first place.
None of this is to say that NYU is devoid of antisemitism – far from it, and there have been a lot of very unpleasant instances in the last year. And it makes perfect sense for AMCHA to draw attention to them. But if one is going to make a ranking out of it, one needs a much more robust methodology than AMCHA seems to have adopted.
Remember that NYU settled a lawsuit over antisemitism at the University and, regardless of size, I see it and Columbia mentioned more often than any other school for fostering a pro-Palestinian and an anti-Israel atmosphere.
My observation is that Trump uses tariffs, or the threat of tariffs, for diplomatic purposes rather than economic ones, and, the way people are scurrying around, that seems to be effective.
As for USPS, the price of a stamp will inexorably reach $2.50. And who sends letters? I send about three Christmas cards and two bills a year. I get packages via USPS, but there are private companies that do that. And nowadays it is a regular occurrence that the mailman misdelivers packages in our neighborhood. Mostly, I just get unsolicited, or junk, mail in the mail.
The USPS does not use the term ‘junk mail’. They call it ‘revenue’.
Absolutely. The only thing keeping the USPS from reaching even deeper in the red is unsolicited mail and campaign flyers during the election.
I had thought that the reason the USPS runs in the red was because of deep budget cuts from conservatives who are drooling over the goal to privatize it. They have been deliberately trying to get it to fail for years.
And if the USPS instead loses more taxpayer money, does that mean that the USPS doesn’t lose money on its operations? “Hey, look, we gave it a $12 billion dollar influx of funds. Problem solved this year!”
“… unsolicited, or junk, mail in the mail.”
This^^^
A steep price hike means the unsolicited mail senders (from insurance scams to coupon packs) will immediately be forced to evaluate their decisions. Anyone ever get unsolicited mail from FedEx?
But sure, people send plenty of legit mail. Amazon has some sort of deal going on (Mail Innovations or something). And it’s an institution. So let it compete with the other companies that offer the same or better service and see where the chips fall.
“If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.”
-Milton Friedman
Quote error alert!!!
I looked on Quote Investigator at this famous “quote”. It cites a Newsweek article (March 10, 1980) by Friedman who only ever said :
“Will we read next that government control of prices has created a shortage of sand in the Sahara?”
So – I stand self-corrected! Another case of “quote telephone”.
Who sends letters? I do. And they, and the ones I receive, are cherished more than any text with an emoji.
If the Post Office “sucks”, it’s only because Congress has deliberately crippled it and sabotaged even the smallest effort to improve it over the years, as to not “compete” with any business in any way. (Allowing the USPS to do money orders, etc.)
But the ones who really want the Post Office to continue are UPS and FedEx. They get to pick who they’ll deliver to, but the Post Office has the legal obligation to serve everyone. Rural areas, remote areas, none of which are profitable.
“The Post Office has a legal obligation to serve everyone”,
Except when it’s on strike, as ours is now. Then “everyone” can go fuck themselves, says the union.
Agreed on unions, all who are very good at timing strikes for maximum effect. But the Post Office itself is almost entirely self-funded and still provides a worthwhile service beyond just dropping off mail; the (brief) actual contact with people on their routes in small towns.
“… the Post Office has the legal obligation to serve everyone. Rural areas, remote areas, none of which are profitable.”
Doesn’t this have the effect of making rural residents dependent on one service and being obliged to pay for it (with other tax payers) whether it is worth it or not — or if better service might be available or develop, pay for additional service as well?
As to “it is worth it or not..?
Sorta depends on who you ask. UPS and FedEx already made it clear it’s not worth it to to them to deliver to the roughly 20% of the country that’s rural.
And they don’t delivers to PO boxes at all.
The Post Office doesn’t charge for mail delivery, so I guess you could say rural folk, like everyone else, are dependent on that free service. (However, recent Pew Research, gives the IRS an unfavorable rating of roughly 70%, but a favorable rating to the U.S. Postal Service of 91%.
Better service might be available or develop,
pay for additional service as well?
Sure, what can’t be improved? But again, it depends entirely on who will get to decide: the government, alternate mailers/shippers, billing agencies, unions, voters?
If someone mails me a hand-written letter (or I them), high regard and respect, and willingness to inconvenience oneself on behalf of another, is strongly implicated.
As with rural and remote area mail delivery, so with rural electrification in the 1930’s. (I wonder if Milton Friedman ever voiced an alternative course of action, short of leaving rural folks hanging.)
If foggy memory serves me, at least part of the USPS’s financial problem is due to Congress requiring it to “front-load” (or some such term) employees’ retirement fund.
Sure, there are all those aspects of USPS service to complain about.
But if someone is sending a package to me, I would much prefer it come by USPS than any of UPS, Fedex, DHL, or even Amazon, for one reason. USPS has a key that releases our building’s front gate and the doors off the courtyard into the specific address indoor foyers where the mailboxes are.
For the other delivery services, even if they use the gate code info to get into the courtyard, they have to leave packages outdoors, propped up by the entrance of the particular address. And sometimes they don’t even use the gate code and just toss a package over the gate, to sit in the middle of the pavement of the courtyard. Bah!
Mangione will no doubt be convicted, but my guess is that whether Trump pardons him or not will depend on how many of his most loyal and enthusiastic supporters think the health insurance executive had it coming.
From my observations reading commenters at both left (NYT) and right (WSJ) the left is far angrier about health insurance, although most stop short of defending Mangione.
So I wouldn’t expect Trump to pardon him.
Many of my leftist friends have defended him (albeit in a joking way, leaving room for plausible denial.)
According to wikipedia, ‘[Buckland] claimed to have eaten his way through the animal kingdom: zoophagy. The most distasteful items were mole and bluebottle fly; panther, crocodile and mouse were among the other dishes noted by guests. Buckland was followed in this hobby by his son Frank. On one occasion, Buckland (the father) consumed, perhaps unintentionally, a portion of the mummified heart of King Louis XIV.’
Maybe these delectables were served on his coprolite table.
I read somewhere that there was an entire eating club devoted to sampling such seemingly inedible delicacies.
Oh man I like that – “inedible delicacies” – how ’bout:
“inedible comestibles”
Or
“delectable inedibles”
In a Marvel Comics spoof issue, instead of “the Incredible Hulk” he was “The Inedible Bulk.” (The issue also featured “The Mighty Bore from Jazzguard.”)
I hate to say it, but South Korea seems more sensible than the U.S. They have a president who tried to bring it all down, and he is being impeached. Our previous president tried to do something very similar, and look at what happened to him!
+1
I infer that non-late-stage democracies are like that.
The part of the cat herding commercial that made me laugh the hardest is when the one guy is using that roller delinting thing. Too much! Never saw the ad before.
That whole thing was hilarious.
I attended the University of California, Santa Cruz (#4 on Amcha’s “Anti-Zionist Faculty Barometer”) for my junior and senior years of college, almost fifty years ago.
UCSC has always been a campus who population was activist, counter-cultural, feminist, and pronouncedly left-wing, which is reflected in everything from the campus’s Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California%2C_Santa_Cruz) to the oral history published by the University itself (https://exhibits.library.ucsc.edu/exhibits/show/seeds/home). There was a large left-wing contingent on the faculty (especially in the social sciences and humanities) at the time that I attended, and as far as I know, that hasn’t changed. (Just to give one example, the faculty member whose name is probably most recognizable to the general public is the Black and feminist radical Angela Davis.)
Regarding anti-Zionism at UCSC, the study “Jewish College Students in America” by Eitan Hersh (https://jimjosephfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/HERSH_REPORT-11.1.22.pdf) is primarily based on survey research but also includes quotes from focus groups on five campuses, one of which happened to be UCSC. Here are two quotes from the study, which was published in August 2022 (i.e. more than a year before the Hamas attack on Israel, the Israeli military response, and the subsequent wave of pro-Palestine protests on American college campuses) that reflect the climate of opinion on campus at the time:
“I feel like my school overwhelmingly supports Palestine, and so I’m hesitant to say my belief. My school has developed a culture and doesn’t like it or take kindly when someone expresses an opinion that is not part of the norm. It’s not a symptom of anything uniquely Jewish, it’s just that my school has a culture and likes it when people stay in line, and it just so happens that the school culture supports Palestine.” –UC SANTA CRUZ student, MALE
“Issues on my campus and other campuses have made me hesitant to participate in explicitly Jewish spaces, as opposed to just spending time with my Jewish friends and doing something together.” — UC SANTA CRUZ student, FEMALE
There is a quote from A. Lincoln, that has some bearing on Trump’s proposed tariffs.
“Give us a protective tariff, and we shall have the greatest nation on earth”
A closely related point is that both parties have been moving away from “free trade” for some time now. The battle over the TPP in 2016 (Hillary lied about opposing the TPP, Trump opposed the TPP). The bipartisan trend away from “free trade” continued under Biden.