Good morning on CaturSaturday, October 25, 2025, shabbos for Jewish cats and also National Greasy Foods Day. Time to get that burger, onion rings, and a shake, preferably a cake shake at Chicago’s Portillo (you may have seen this video before, but I won’t rest until I get one. If you’re visiting Chicago and want the full experience, go to Portillo’s for two dogs dragged through the garden, fries or onion rings, and a chocolate cake shake.
It’s also Hug a Sheep Day, World Pasta Day, World Pizza Makers Day, and National Pit Bull Awareness Day.
Here’s a Google Doodle, but I don’t understand the candy-cane striping. Click on the logo to see where it goes, and then tell me what it means (my best guess is that these are baseball seams):
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 1 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The WaPo has two articles that seem to bode ill for the Republicans. The first says that premiums for Obamacare are set to go up by nearly a third, and this won’t go away if the government shutdown ends and Democrats get their way by extending healthcare subsidies set to expire. This appears to be straight inflation.
Premiums for the most popular types of plans sold on the federal health insurance marketplace Healthcare.gov will spike on average by 30 percent next year, according to final rates approved by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and shown in documents reviewed by The Washington Post.
The premium spikes arrive during a protracted and bitter congressional battle over health insurance costs that prompted a government shutdown since Oct. 1. Democrats have urged an extension of enhanced subsidies for plans sold through the Affordable Care Act to soften the blow of rising insurance costs, while Republicans have said the additional assistance was never meant to be permanent.
The spike in premiums will become visible to more Americans on Monday when the Trump administration is expected to open Healthcare.gov for window shopping to browse the price of plans ahead of the Nov. 1 start to open enrollment. A spokesman for CMS did not immediately return a request for comment.
Second, inflation is not abating:
Gasoline prices, which edged down over the past year — providing some relief to consumers — nonetheless jumped 4.1 percent in September and were the largest factor in a 0.3 percent monthly increase.
But is this really a problem?. The annual rate of inflation is pretty low compared to earlier years, as this figure from the Post shows:
It’s churlish to wish for Americans to experience economic pain so that Democrats will be elected, but in 2028 Americans will be asking themselves, “Am I better off than I was four years ago?” If the answer is “no,” the Democrats will have a shot at the Presidency and perhaps Congress.
*One of my partners in crime, USC’s Anna Krylov, just published this piece at the Heterodox STEM site (click to read). You can read it at the site, but I’ve put the gist below. It’s a copy of a letter she sent to Nature when they asked her to review a manuscript. She refused for several reasons (one of which, the push for “citation justice,” we discussed here the other day.
Dear Dr. Kuttner
I am writing in response to your invitation to review the manuscript titled “Large circular dichroism in the total photoemission yield of free chiral nanoparticles created by a pure electric dipole effect” submitted for publication in Nature Communications.
Although the topic is within my field of expertise and I would normally welcome the opportunity to contribute to peer review, I must decline. Furthermore, I have decided not to engage with journals belonging to the Nature group in any professional capacity in the future because the group has adopted policies and practices that are incompatible with the mission of a scientific publisher.
Scientific publishers play a key role in the production of knowledge — they are a pillar of what Jonathan Rauch has termed the “the Constitution of Knowledge” (Rauch, 2025). The role of the publisher is to be an epistemic funnel: it accepts claims to truth at one end, but permits only those that withstand organized scrutiny to emerge from the other, a function traditionally performed by a rigorous peer-review and editorial process. This process should be guided by scientific rigor and a commitment to finding objective truth.
Unfortunately, the Nature group has abandoned its mission in favor of advancing a social justice agenda. The group has institutionalized censorship, implemented policies that have sacrificed merit in favor of identity-based criteria, and injected social engineering into its author guidelines and publishing process. The result is that papers published in Nature journals can no longer be regarded as rigorous science.
Three representative examples illustrate this decline:
1. Institutionalized social engineering
The Springer Nature Diversity Commitment (Skipper & Inchcoombe, 2019), which you quoted in your invitation letter, openly pledges to “take action to improve diversity and inclusion in the conferences we organise, and in our commissioned content, the peer review population and editorial boards.” Editors are “asked to intentionally and proactively reach out to women researchers” and authors are instructed to suggest reviewers “with diversity in mind.” In other words, editorial choices and peer review are to be guided not solely by competence but by demographic attributes. I cannot stop but wondering — was I asked to review the manuscript because of my expertise in the subject matter or because of my reproductive organs?2. Ideological subversion of literature citations
Nature Reviews Psychology (Unsigned, 2025) now encourages authors to practice “citation justice” — that is, to social-engineer their manuscript’s bibliography to promote members of favored identity groups, even if their works lack the requisite merit or relevance. “Citation justice” is particularly harmful because it undermines the rigor and reliability of published research. When references are chosen not for their scientific relevance or quality but to promote the work of preferred identity groups, the integrity of science itself is compromised (Shaw, 2025; Coyne, 2025).3. Institutionalized censorship
Nature Human Behavior has published a censorship manifesto (Unsigned, 2022) — now widely criticized (see, for example, Rauch, 2022; Winegard, 2022; Krylov & Tanzman, 2023) — in which they openly declare their intent to censor legitimate research findings that they deem potentially “harmful” to certain groups. Not only is it arrogant for editors to presume they have the expertise to make such judgments, the practice is antithetical to the production of knowledge.
There’s a bit more, but you can see it at the site. If every reviewer responded like this, the policies would change pronto, but scientists, like most academics, are too cowardly to fight back as well as far more engaged in their science and their careers than in purifying science from ideology. Pity. (I have responded to one or two publishers in this way.) Imagine how long these policies will continue to chill scientists—far longer than Trump will be doing damage to science. This ideological subversion of science publishing is going to be with us for the long run.
*The conservative City Journal has produced a new ranking of 100 highly-regarded American colleges that differs from other rankings because it incorporates information from several different places plus new information like ideological balance of students and faculty (h/t Luana). Their criteria:
We selected 100 schools that are highly touted by other ranking systems, widely known to the American public, and/or of high regional importance. We analyzed them by gathering data on 68 variables across 21 categories covering major aspects of on- and off-campus life.
Our rankings combine publicly available information from sources such as the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), the Department of Education’s College Scorecard, and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s College Free Speech Rankings. We also developed original measures exclusively for this project, such as the ideological balance of student political organizations and the partisan makeup of faculty campaign contributions.
Each variable in our rankings system is coded so that higher values mean better performance. We then convert every variable to a points scale using a simple min–max formula that quantifies how close the school is to the best possible value of the variable. Specifically, a raw value for a variable (X) is converted to points for our ranking (Y) by linearly scaling it between the minimum and maximum possible scores for that measure (e.g., the 1–5 range on a survey item, the 0-100 percent range of faculty jobs ads that do not require a diversity statement as part of the application):
Y = ((X – X_min) / (X_max - X_min)) * (Y_max – Y_min) + Y_minBecause not every dimension of campus life matters equally, we group related variables into categories and assign larger point caps (Y_max) to more important categories and smaller caps to less critical ones. For example, student ideological pluralism (as measured by self-reported student ideology and the left-right balance of student organizations) accounts for 5 percent of a school’s score while our estimate of how many years it will take the typical student to recoup their educational investment to attend a given college accounts for 12.5 percent.
A school’s overall score is the sum of points across our 21 categories, with the point caps for these categories collectively adding up to 100. Total scores near 100 indicate stronger overall performance and scores near 0 indicate weaker performance.
And, of course, here’s the top ten: (click to enlarge):
There is some (but not substantial) overlap with FIRE’s ranking of 257 colleges and universities for free speech. The University of Chicago made #3 on FIRE’s list, but only #32 on City Journal’s list, almost certainly because Chicago is not ideologically “balanced” (we’re nearly all liberals, with a some unhinged “progressives”). The University of Florida tops City Journal’s list, but is only #45 on FIRE’s. And you’ll want to know where Harvard is. Well, it’s #245 for FIRE, nearly dead last, but #37 on City Journal’s list, probably because free speech is more important to FIRE than to City Journal.
*As ever, I’m stealing a few items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news-and-snark column in the Free Press. This week it’s called TGIF: “My little Totenkopf.” (“Totenkopf“, or death head” refers to the death head that was the SS symbol and worn on their uniforms, but it can also be used as a pirate symbol.)
→ Too racist for the group chat: Paul Ingrassia, President Donald Trump’s pick to head the Office of Special Counsel, is under fire for being the most racist in a leaked group chat. In one message, Ingrassia said he has a “Nazi streak in me”; in another, Ingrassia wrote that “MLK Jr. was the 1960s George Floyd and his ‘holiday’ should be ended and tossed into the seventh circle of hell where it belongs.” Right-wing group chats are cesspools. But this one went a little too far even for his interlocutors. One participant wrote back, “Jesus Christ.” To get that response you have to be so wildly out of line, so brazenly racist. The price of admission for a standard right-wing group chat these days is saying retarded 10 times, yelling at your mom that she’s “hit the wall,” giving two ironic sieg heils, and then posting your 23andMe results. Or at least that’s what I had to do.
This scandal coincided with Ingrassia’s other scandal of allegedly forcing a female subordinate to stay in his hotel room (according to Politico’s administration sources, he apparently arranged ahead of time to cancel her hotel room so that she would be stuck sleeping in his, a real class act, such an authentic office romance, like what you got before the feminists took over). She reportedly filed a complaint about the incident and then, fearing retaliation, withdrew it. Anyway, Ingrassia has finally withdrawn his name from consideration.
→ KKK laws are stymieing UCSD: A University of California, San Diego scholarship for black students was challenged under the Ku Klux Klan Act and must now be available to all students, regardless of race. Somehow our DEI went from color blindness to being so race-obsessed that it fell under KKK legislation. Basically, the college had tried to get around the race-based admissions ban by outsourcing the scholarship to a private foundation to run. Sure sounds like a conspiracy to continue racial discrimination, banned by an old anti-KKK measure from the 19th century. UCSD realized it had been caught, and they ended the scheme. To the UCSD admin: I don’t think this is what they mean by pack a few extra white sheets for college.
→ Wikipedia’s downfall: Wikipedia’s human traffic is down 8 percent in recent months. If you’re wondering why, it could be because of everything they get wrong—or it could be because ChatGPT has become the new Wikipedia, and also my best friend. To all the lazy kids writing research papers, I heavily recommend using AI instead—it might not be right all the time, but it’s a good relationship lesson: No partner is ever 100 percent correct (except for Bar, which I am legally obligated to say or a beefcake attacks me).
→ . . . . Over at Pomona College in Southern California, a campus Jewish group was hosting an October 7 survivor to speak about his experience in captivity and resilience and whatever else you can imagine someone might say to make sense of life after that happens. The talk was interrupted by masked protesters dressed in pseudo-Hamas garb (keffiyehs over their faces except for little eye slits), who attempted to storm the room. You see, the idea of a Jewish man escaping Hamas is infuriating (how dare he!). So kids in America put on the clothing of his attackers to scream at him. Across the world, pretty little blond boy Oxford students are now this week chanting: “Gaza, Gaza, make us proud, put the Zios in the ground.”
Oh, one more:
→ UK rape council falling apart: Over in England, the government has put together a national inquiry into the grooming gangs to address that whole situation, since suppression didn’t work. And of course it’s already corrupted. Two survivors quit the inquiry. In her resignation letter, Ellie-Ann Reynolds wrote that the committee “dictated what we could say publicly, edited our words, and made it clear that speaking openly would jeopardize our place on the panel,” and would often “downplay the racial and religious motivations behind our abuse.” The UK is cooked, for real. They seem so uncomfortable with the fact of the rapes that the most polite thing to do is just ignore it. Ignoring uncomfortable things is ancient WASP wisdom, but it has led them into a very odd nook here, wouldn’t you say? Goodbye England, thanks for the laughs.
The Oxford student named in the Torygraph article was not only arrested, but suspended. While his call for killing Jews is odious, it would be legal free speech in America, as it didn’t pose the danger of imminent and predictable violence or destruction. And I agree with the American policy. Now if he had shouted that stuff in front of a crowd of Jews, things would be different. . .
*Here’s a case of censorship in two media: on stage and in a book. Young adult and children’s fiction are getting heavily woke-ified, so that the least controversial topic is taboo.
Author Jodi Picoult has the dubious honor of being banned in two mediums this fall — her books and now a musical based on her novel “Between the Lines.”
“I’m pretty sure I’m the first author who has now had censorship occur in two different types of media,” Picoult says. “Honestly, I’m not out here to be salacious. I am writing the world as it is, and I am honestly just trying to write about difficult issues that people have a hard time talking about because that is what fiction and the arts do.”
The superintendent of Mississinewa High School in Gas City, Indiana, canceled a production last week of “Between the Lines,” saying concerns were raised over “sexual innuendo” and alcohol references in the musical. Jeremy Fewell, the superintendent, did not respond to a request for comment.
“It’s devastating for us to know that these kids who put in hundreds of hours of hard work had that torn away from them because of the objections of a single parent,” says Picoult.
. . .Picoult noted that the same Indiana high school has previously produced “Grease,” where the sexual innuendo and alcohol abuse is much greater, including a pregnancy scare, sex-mad teens and the line “Did she put up a fight?”
“Between the Lines” centers on Delilah, an outsider in a new high school, who finds solace in a book and realizes she has the power to write her own story and narrate her own life. “It is a very benign message. And it’s actually a really important one for adolescents today,” says Picoult.
The original work, which features a nonbinary character, had already been edited with licensed changes to make it more palatable for a conservative audience, including removing any reference to the nonbinary character’s gender orientation.
Picoult’s books have been widely banned, especially in Florida, and the article documents plays by several people being canceled throughout the U.S. She has a good quote here: “What I know, perhaps better than most people, as someone whose books have been banned, is when one parent starts deciding what is appropriate and what is inappropriate for the children of other parents, we have a big problem.”
Wikipedia has a page on Between the Lines, and the Simon and Schuster’s blurb is here:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s off on a journey:
Hili: I’m going to the end of the world.
Andrzej: Why?
Hili: To see what’s hiding beyond it.
In Polish:
Hili: Idę na koniec świata.
Ja: Po co?
Hili: Żeby zobaczyć co się za nim kryje.
*******************
From Clean, Funny & Cute Animal Memes:
A Halloween mem from CinEmma:
From The Dodo Pet:
I love Masih’s tee-shirt here. The time and place given is where one of her would-be assassins will be sentenced.
Tehran’s regime sent agents to kill my friend at her home in Brooklyn.
Her crime? Standing up against the Mullahs’ oppression of women. So they want to silence her.
Stand with Masih: next Wednesday, Oct. 29, 11 AM, in Courtroom 24A, U.S. Courthouse, 500 Pearl Street, New York. https://t.co/3RBsrDvaNy
— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) October 23, 2025
From Jay, satire about the latest “Freedom Flotilla”. I think this comes from that Israeli comedy show that I’ve shown clips of before:
Ceasefire? Shame on you! pic.twitter.com/2WR6Qu4f3P
— ארץ נהדרת (@Eretz_Nehederet) October 23, 2025
From Simon:
It’s like he’s reading The Onion without realizing it’s satire https://t.co/iafib5j5Ti
— Tina Smith (@SenTinaSmith) October 22, 2025
From Malcolm, a cat guards the nest from a snake and pets a parent!
Good Evening…..
Every nest has its secret guardian pic.twitter.com/OloD1FfjM2— Science And Nature (@InterestingSci1) September 13, 2025
One from my feed; a footy-playing elk (or deer):
Two kids in Colorado were kicking around a soccer ball when an unexpected teammate showed up pic.twitter.com/0EDP4roi4j
— Dudes Posting Their W’s (@DudespostingWs) October 24, 2025
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed to death along with her brothers as soon as they arrived at Auschwitz. She was four years old.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-10-25T10:28:59.651Z
Two from Dr. Cobb. I was like the first guy, and though my infection with a botfly in the head was inadvertent, I decided to leave it in as an experiment:
At Kibale National Park, wildlife epidemiologist Tony Goldberg regularly becomes lunch for various parasites—some of which he turns into science experiments.Learn more: https://scim.ag/4nhTQJa
— Science Magazine (@science.org) 2025-10-24T16:46:03.105917171Z
Matthew calls this “Big Day in the cat shelter”:
A moth got into the shelter tonight and it was the event of the season.
— Tim Price (@timprice.bsky.social) 2025-10-24T01:02:57.533Z
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Those who compare the age in which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in imagination, may talk of degeneracy and decay; but no man who is correctly informed as to the past, will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present. -Thomas Babington Macaulay, author and statesman (25 Oct 1800-1859)
Thank you, Anna, for leading the way with your principled response to Nature journals. It is important that senior research scientists and engineers react strongly to the latest levels of attack on merit and vetting of research. I hope that others join you….after all, in the endgame, it will be pretty tough for them to be a peer-reviewed journal without peers to do the reviewing.
And maybe some additional leadership can be shown by associate editors (if it still works the way it did in my active research days before the turn of the century) stepping away from their positions.
There was a good piece in The Federalist yesterday on the Covid Obamacare subsidies called “How Leftist Think Tanks Twist Facts To Manipulate Congress On Obamacare“. The author says that “. . . misleading terminology conflates premiums with out-of-pocket costs, which ignores the sizable subsidy the federal government will still provide to most enrollees if the Biden-era portion expires.”
“Ten billion in fraud every year? Hold my beer” Donald Trump
50-100$ a month extra cost is a modest effect when many struggle to make ends meet and many could not afford an emergency 500$ bill?
Sure.. push it through and see what it does to your popularity. How many people will go “I will gladly not have health care if it means that woke non-sense stops”?
Interesting to note 9 of the Top 10 City Journal institutions are in the greater South. Parents, if you want your college-bound child to be around a diverse student body and faculty, there’s your list. If Jim Crow comes to mind, when you think of the South, you need to open yours.
Great letter Anna! (big fan).
I note the most opposed to woke nonsense are former captives of communist countries. Former Soviets and escapees of Red China.
best to you Anna,
D.A.
NYC
Thank you Anna Krylov! This garbage has to stop.
But we do need more cats in hospitals. So comforting.
I wouldn’t mind them at Gracie Mansion either. Anyone but Mamdani being there is fine with me.
Amen Debra. Ordered my ballot last week. I always vote in fed elections but only occasionally in city. We’re probably effed already, but I’ll know I didn’t vote for the biggest conman our city has seen since Trump: this LARPing commie puke nepobaby with terroristic ideas.
Amazing he’s done so well so far. Horrible.
D.A.
NYC
Whenever I see something like:
“Gaza, Gaza, make us proud, put the Zios in the ground.”
What comes to mind is:
Stalin, Stalin, he’s our man; If he can’t do it, nobody can —
— which I saw in an “underground” comic in the early 1970’s, probaby a Ripoff Press publication. (Why Stalin even in this context? Hitler doesn’t scan as well, and besides, Stalin was prolific, too.)
The prominent display of nose rings in that video reminded me of “Septum Theory” or “Nose Ring Theory”.
“Septum theory” is a non-scientific, online trend that associates septum piercings with negative personality traits like trauma, instability, or “being a red flag”.
“it suggests that having a septum piercing indicates personality issues, such as making trauma one’s entire personality. “
“. . .Picoult noted that the same Indiana high school has previously produced “Grease,” where the sexual innuendo and alcohol abuse is much greater, including a pregnancy scare, sex-mad teens and the line “Did she put up a fight?”
The Elect groomers possess the higher consciousness of how religion, family (Gramsci/Engels), and the legacy cultural products of prior generations (Butler, Marcuse) precipitated the rupture and exile of the truth contained in the marginalized sparks of society. The gnosis of The Elect empowers them to lead the repair through activism in service of an esoteric spiritual drama.
J. Picoult : “when one parent starts deciding what is appropriate and what is inappropriate for the children of other parents, we have a big problem.”
“Not to have a correct political point of view is like having no soul […]”
-Mao Tse-Tung
On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People (February 27, 1957); 1st pocket ed., pp. 43-44
“This democratic method of resolving contradictions among the people was epitomized in 1942 in the formula “unity, criticism, unity”. To elaborate, it means starting from the desire for unity, resolving contradictions through criticism or struggle and arriving at a new unity on a new basis. In our experience this is the correct method of resolving contradictions among the people.”
Mao Tse-Tung
“On Coalition Government” (April 24, 1945), Selected Works, Vol. III, p. 317
Could you explain how the expected rise in health insurance premiums next year is “straight inflation?” What does that mean? Are there other types of inflation?
If providers are increasing their prices and American customers are demanding ever more medical and other services to be reimbursed by insurance, and pandemic-era subsidies from taxes are being withdrawn, how could premiums not go up? Insurance companies pay out almost all their premium dollars as claims. They make a small percentage margin on the vast sums of money that come in and go out, and on premiums received today that can be invested until paid out, and as a reserve in case they priced the risks wrong. They respond to general price inflation, being price takers. They don’t drive it.
There is a natural tension among policyholders’ desire for low premiums, providers’ desire for generous reimbursement, and patients’ desire for liberal, no-questions-asked coverage for pre-existing conditions and the fabulously expensive illnesses those pre-existing conditions generate. Unless there are monopolistic practices that allow insurance companies to harvest rents, it’s hard to see how premium rises are inflationary (which is defined as higher price for the same or inferior goods. More care is being funded, not less. It may be wasteful but that’s on the providers and all those demanding policyholders who want to get their money’s worth, not on the insurance companies.)
If you want to reduce the cost of health insurance you have to do two things: mandate that even healthy people must buy insurance… and impose wage and price controls on all employees and providers in the healthcare industry. You probably need controls on service menu and volume too, but that’s politically risky. Canada does all three, half-heartedly, and free healthcare is still eating us alive.
The Trump gov only accepts straight inflation. Gay inflation is some Biden shit and obviously way worse!
From a society point of view, public health care makes sense for people of working age – so the moment you retire you can shop for private health insurance. But since governments are still driven by the Boomers, they let those Boomers drain the health care fund.
Have to disagree, FX. It’s actually the reverse, as now. Publicly funded health care was brought in for over 65s (plus disabled and those on renal dialysis) during the Nixon Administration when there were not nearly as many old people as today. But yes, true, old people will grab any benefit they can that someone else pays for and this has got much worse since 1970s. Private health insurance for any voluntary population is unsustainable because of adverse selection, especially in older people whose health varies so much. A 65-year-old knows much more about his own health than any insurance-company underwriter ever can. Voluntary private insurance for the retired will attract the sick old, not just the old, making it too expensive for the poor old to afford. As the less sick opt out, the costs rise rapidly for the sick who remain in, causing still more defections, until none of the faithful can afford it. So for insurance in the elderly to work, you have to compel them all to “enrol” through taxation as soon as they hit 65. But since health care for the elderly is so costly, you have to tax everyone else, too, to help pay for it.
For working-age people, private insurance can work because if the employer offers it, all employees must sign up and pay premiums, thus avoiding adverse selection. (This is what Obamacare tried to do and failed.) There is no need for public care for the employed. Private works just fine. Because employers don’t pay for health insurance — the employees do — the employer has no incentive to drop the insurance plan if it gets too expensive. People healthy enough to work have relatively modest and predictable healthcare needs. Not all employers participate in health insurance plans but most do.
Marginalized populations have very high and unpredictable needs. Frankly nobody really wants to pay for their care and those who have to, resent having to. Much of their care is actually “paid for” by writing it off as a bad debt, aka “uncompensated care”, or charging higher prices to those who can pay. Social trust erodes quickly, one of the costs of diversity. I doubt that Swedish taxpayers are warm-hearted about paying for African migrants who don’t work and blow their arms off in gang wars. Richard Hanania even argues that a benefit of mass immigration is that it makes socialism untenable.
You have to disagree and then you don’t? It is difficult to be sure what you disagree about.
Is public health insurance for the working population not in the interest of society? Private health care not the way to go for the elderly? You explicitly agree on the drain on the health system from the Boomers.
So where is the disagreement?
I’m not optimistic about Trumpian ideas just disappearing after Trump.
Some of the worst ideas are from RFK Jr. It indicates a rising movement of anti-science ideas.
Between the illiberal left and the kooky right, things are looking bad.
Inflation may seem to jeopardize the Republican hold on Congress in 2026 and 2028, but this may not occur if the pop-Left, serving its usual historic function, comes to the Right’s rescue. In the groves of academe, there will be straws in the wind pointing to this trend. For example, watch for ever more grandiose claims by scholars of Critical Gender Theory, AAUP resolutions demanding more intrusive DEI, and maybe student groups extolling assassination of selected wrongthinkers.,
Following Mao’s wisdom, “Not to have a correct political point of view is like having no soul” (h/t Bryan), it’s common sense to remove those defective souls of the non-correct.
Hug a Sheep Day you say? I’m glad I didn’t read that until this evening and it’s too late now.
“I’m pretty sure I’m the first author who has now had censorship occur in two different types of media,” Picoult says.
I am pretty sure that that dubious honour would go to Graham Linehan. Some places refused to stock his book and his Father Ted musical was blocked by Hat Trick Productions after they had already been doing some rehearsals. I wish he would do a fundraiser to buy the musical back. I’ve heard part of the plot, and it sounds hilarious.