Good morning on Tuesday, January 14, 2024. I’m here for two days, visiting friends before I fly back home on Thursday. It’s National Hot Pastrami Day, and I’m told the best place to get it in L.A. is Langer’s Delicatessen Restaurant, which, sadly, I won’t be visiting.  They tout their wares thusly:

The No. 19 at Norm Langer’s Westlake landmark should be named the official sandwich of Los Angeles. The pastrami — brined, peppered, smoked, steamed and shaved by hand into rosy kerchiefs — rises from between two slices of double-baked rye bread. A cushion of coleslaw, Swiss cheese and Russian dressing hovers over top like an upper bunk. Your senses are keener in the face of such perfection. Settle into your chestnut-brown, tufted booth seat among the happy cadences of silverware against plates and myriad languages ringing through the dining room. Honestly, though? Slices of hot pastrami, fanned across a plate with vegetable garnishes and perhaps nothing more than a smear of mustard, show how little adornment the brisket really requires.

Now there’s a person who knows how to sell food!

I’m heading up to Pasadena and Altadena today, towns closer to the fire zone. The next post will recount the ordeal of a reader whose family lost not one but TWO houses in the fire. The NYT says that high winds today post a danger for the L.A. fire’s spread:

A rare warning of “particularly dangerous” fire weather went into effect on Tuesday morning in parts of Southern California, where heavy winds were creating conditions for new fires even as firefighters battle the most destructive blazes in state history.

The National Weather Service’s red flag warning covered Los Angeles and Ventura counties, with wind gusts of between 45 and 70 m.p.h. and very low humidity combining to threaten “explosive fire growth,” the service said. The ominous forecast comes after a week in which high winds and perilously dry conditions fueled fires that have killed at least 24 people, with at least 23 others missing. More than 100,000 people have been displaced and whole neighborhoods destroyed.

Good morning from L.A., where the wildfires are still raging, though they’ve been somewhat contained (see below). High winds, however, are threatening to undo the progress firefighters have made. There is still no sign of the fire from USC.

I will be here three more days chilling and visiting friends.

The meeting yesterday on censorship in the sciences was good, I thought,  The highlights for me were Wilfred Reilly’s talk on the taboos in social discourse, the panel on gender led by Sally Satel with Carole Hooven, Diana Blum, and Michael Bailey, Greg Lukianoff’s talk on “How cancel culture destroys trust in expertise” and of course our own panel led by Julia Schaletzky and comprising me and my long-time partner in crime, Luana Maroja.

I was nervous about the last one, as it was the only panel at the meeting with free-form discussion between the panelists (the rest of the panels I saw involved three or four speakers, with each speaker giving a 10-15-minute talk followed by audience questions.  But it went well, I thought, with Julia doing a great job moderating, and, since we know each other’s views, we  all talked back and forth fluently. During the 10-minute Q&A session, some distressed man accused me of using atheism and science to fill the “god-shaped hole” that, he said, afflicts all of humanity.  This is the Little People’s argument that Richard Dawkins recently addressed in the Spectator (reprinted in Free Inquiry), and I was prepared to answer him, though the man was persistent in claiming that I was effectively religious. I finally gave up and told him that if he wanted to define “nature” as “god”, as pantheists do, then yes, I was religious by that definition. But that is pure nonsense.

Wilfred Reilly’s talk was okay but he was not as eloquent a speaker as I had assumed after having read several of his several excellent books. The highlight of the day was Greg Lukianoff’s talk, which ranged broadly over academia, censorship, and deplatforming. I hope people will listen to at least part of the conference when the recording (and videos, I hope) become public and free.

Greg’s points that I remember:

• Firings and punishments of professors for speech are higher now than they ever have been since they were made illegal after McCarthyism in the 1940s and 1960 led to laws making it illegal to punish professors for their political view.  In the last two years there has been a slight decrease in sanctions on faculty, but the level is still hugely higher than, say, twenty years ago.
• Deplatformings of speakers by both administrators and students are also at an all-time high, most recently because of the actions of pro-Palestinian protestors. FIRE keeps track of which side the deplatformings come from, and most come from the Left (these include the pro-Palestinian protestors, which of course are considered Leftists). Here’s a slide showing the trend over time. It is OUR SIDE that is doing most of the deplatforming: the blue line are deplatforming attempts from the Left, and the red line from the Right (of course most administrators and students are from the Left, but this graph shows just numbers, not per capita attempts).  One could conclude from this that, as far as stifling of speech on campus goes, the Left is more repressive than the Right. We must do better.

• Harvard and Columbia are almost neck and neck for the position of dead last on FIRE’s 2025 college free-speech rankings, with Harvard in the ignominious last slot. Both schools have a score of ZERO (and yes, FIRE takes into account several indices of speech freedom) and are rated as “abysmal”, along with NYU, which is third from the bottom. Lukianoff’s solution is to repurpose Columbia as a technical school!
• Lukianoff is firm in saying that DEI is encouraging this kind of speech suppression, and he will have none of it.
• Asked about his views on the ACLU and American Association of University Professors (AAUP), Lukianoff pulled no punches. While he still admires much of the ACLU’s work, and even worked for them, he is disappointed with their unwillingness to defend the civil liberties of non-progressive groups, and with their zeal for defending gender activists over those who oppose them. As for the AAUP, which recently endorsed academic boycotts (read: of Israel) as well as endorsing DEI statements, he said that this group is no longer defending free speech, but is actively opposed to it. I agree!

Lukianoff said a lot more, and I recommend that you listen to his entire talk, which was illuminated with many slides. I hope that the organizers will show them all, but I’m sure they will because the entire conference was videotaped.

Kudos to Anna Krylov, who did most of the heavy lifting to get this conference off the ground,

*The NYT reports that the fires in LA are still causing devastation, with about two dozen people killed.

Dangerous winds were again expected to sweep through Los Angeles late Monday, threatening the progress firefighters have made against the devastating wildfires in the area.

Forecasters have issued a rare fire danger alert, known as a “particularly dangerous situation” red flag warning, for Monday night through Wednesday morning. That is the same level of alert that was issued last week as strong wind gusts fueled the fires that have become some of the deadliest and most destructive in California’s history.

Over the weekend, firefighters slowed the progress of the Eaton fire, near Pasadena. The 14,000-acre blaze was 27 percent contained early Monday, while the 23,700-acre Palisades fire on the west side of Los Angeles was 13 percent contained. The Eaton fire has killed 16 people, making it one of the deadliest in California’s history, and at least eight people have died in the Palisades blaze. Another 16 people have been reported missing in the areas of the two fires, and officials have warned the number of fatalities is likely to rise.

The rare “particularly dangerous situation” designation applied to three areas across Ventura and Los Angeles counties. While forecasters usually only use this special warning every few years, this marks the fourth time it has been issued in the past few months. The previous two warnings came during conditions that led to the Mountain fire in November and the Franklin fire in December.

*Things are expected to improve later this week as the winds die down.  One of the people who had to flee was Sam Harris, who wrote about it on his Substack in a column called “Starting from scratch“:

When the fire started, I was at my desk, on a call with my team at Waking Up. Moments later, I was meditating on the futility of deciding which material things, gathered over a lifetime of acquisitiveness, I most cherished. In the end, I packed our daughters’ favorite stuffed animals, our two cats, a gun, and a bottle of MDMA (“Why the hell not?”). The one object of sentimental value I grabbed on my way out of my office was a mala from my days in India and Nepal. This moment of triage produced a brief reflection on the many years I’d spent traveling along seemingly incongruent paths: How many people understand the value of both a mala and a gun, and can carry each without feeling like a fraud? As I prepared to step out into a city where nearly everyone would soon be bracing for chaos, I was very grateful to have developed both sides of my personality.

After retrieving our youngest daughter from school, Annaka returned to pack for herself and the girls, while I stood at the window in our living room watching the progress of the fire. I find few things more beautiful than perfectly formed cumulus clouds, and the ramparts of smoke now rising in the West were their magnificent, evil twins. After watching this merciless vision evolve for several minutes, I suddenly decided that we had run out of time.

Based on several reports received in the middle of the night, I became nearly certain that we had lost our home. Later evidence has convinced me that it was spared—while two doors away houses were destroyed. We still haven’t been able to return to our street to see for ourselves, but several times a day Annaka and I learn of more friends and acquaintances from nearby areas who have lost everything.

Whatever the state of our home, much of our world has vanished. Our daughter’s school appears to have been burned only partially, and may eventually be rebuilt, but the surrounding neighborhood is now a toxic wasteland. Many other places that have been part of our daily lives for decades were obliterated. I’ve only seen pictures and video, but they reveal a landscape that resembles Hiroshima the day after the bombing. It is hard to imagine how communities that have been so comprehensively destroyed can be rebuilt.

But Sam uses most of his column to urge the very rich to engage in an act of unprecedented philantropy to rebuild the city. An excerpt:

I have a proposal for the Resnicks, and for every other wealthy person who has deep ties to Los Angeles: Identify the portion of your wealth that has no conceivable impact on your quality of life—I am talking about what is, and will always be, just a number on a spreadsheet—and pledge those residual assets to help rebuild our city. To be clear, I am not asking you to sacrifice anything beyond the idea of how wealthy you are on paper.

Whatever happens, it will take years to rebuild the damaged portions of this city.

*Luana sent me a link to this NYT article, “Judge rejects Biden’s title IX rules, scrapping protection for trans students” (archived here). An excerpt:

A federal judge in Kentucky on Thursday struck down President Biden’s effort to expand protections for transgender students and make other changes to the rules governing sex discrimination in schools, ruling that the Education Department had overstepped and violated teachers’ rights by requiring them to use students’ preferred pronouns.

The ruling, which extends nationwide, came as a major blow to the Biden administration in its effort to provide new safeguards for L.G.B.T.Q. and pregnant students, among others, through Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. It arrived just days before those protections were likely to face more scrutiny under a Trump administration that is expected to be hostile to the new rules and could refuse to defend them in court.

In a 15-page opinion, Chief Judge Danny C. Reeves of the Eastern District of Kentucky wrote that the Education Department could not lawfully expand the definition of Title IX to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity, as it had proposed last year.

“The entire point of Title IX is to prevent discrimination based on sex,” he wrote. “Throwing gender identity into the mix eviscerates the statute and renders it largely meaningless.”

The pronoun issue is not as important to me (though it does constitute compelled speech) as the need to protect women’s spaces, especially in sports. The Biden administration had already backed off on this, but this ensures that women’s spaces will be reserved for those whose biological sex is female:

. . .But more significantly, the judge also rejected the revised rule on free-speech grounds, writing that it “offends the First Amendment” by potentially requiring educators to use names and pronouns associated with a student’s chosen gender identity.

“Put simply, the First Amendment does not permit the government to chill speech or compel affirmance of a belief with which the speaker disagrees in this manner,” he wrote.

*Speaking of woke practices, the NYT has a guest essay by Kathleen DuVal, a  professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, called “Enough with the land acknowledgments” (archived here). This has always been a purely performative exercise, and I’ve always said that if those who ritually utter these acknowlegments were truly serious, they would give either money or land back to the Native American tribes they acknowledge. DuVal agrees:

If you work at a university, large corporation or left-leaning nonprofit or have attended certain performances, you have probably heard a land acknowledgment, a ritual that asks you to remember that Native Americans were here long before the peoples of Europe, Africa and Asia. The New York City Commission on Human Rights, for example, on its website “acknowledges the land politically designated as New York City to be the homeland of the Lenape (Lenapehoking) who were violently displaced as a result of European settler colonialism over the course of 400 years.”

The point is to make us more aware of the dispossession and violence that occurred in the establishment and expansion of the United States. But they’ve begun to sound more like rote obligations, and Indigenous scholars tell me there can be tricky politics involved with naming who lived on what land and who their descendants are. Land acknowledgments might have outlived their usefulness.

Instead of performing an acknowledgment of Native peoples, institutions should establish credible relationships with existing Native nations. In the United States, there are 574 federally recognized tribes, plus many state-recognized tribes and communities that own and manage land, operate social services and administer federal programs, much as counties and states do. They run tribal businesses and make small-business loans to their citizens. They provide jobs and revenue that help drive regional and rural economies. What they need from universities, corporations, nonprofits and local and state governments is partnerships that acknowledge and build on their continuing sovereignty.

The problem that remains is identifying who “owned” the land on which many universities and corporations are built, since tribe conquered tribe, with turtles all the way down up to the first people who came to North America across the Bering Strait.

*Of all places, the Deseret News, an organ of the Mormon Church, has a balanced and informative article about the FFRF KerFFRFle; it’s by Valerie Hudson, a professor at Texas A&M university. Click to read:

She also has an earlier article, well worth reading, on Californians’ views about gender extremism. Click headline to read, and remember that California is generally a blue state:

A statue of Tommy Trojan, the iconic image of the University of Southern California. I’m told that when their football team plays UCLA, the UCLAers deface Tommy:

And some animals that once lived in this area sculpted on an academic building. Perhaps it’s the USC biology department:

From Stacy, You know the answer:

From Positive Attitude Quotes via Diana. Tgus us

From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs:

From Masih: a Kurdish woman facing execution in Iran for being a political dissenter.

Save Pakhshan Azizi: A Kurdish Woman Opposing Islamism in the Region, Now Facing Execution in Iran

Pakhshan Azizi’s only “crime” was dedicating her life to supporting displaced women and children while championing the values of freedom and justice. A social worker and women’s… pic.twitter.com/A4BEKef9fA

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) January 8, 2025

From the Babylon Bee:

British Man Arrested For Making Meme Offensive To Child Rapists https://t.co/kkWzan4g5t pic.twitter.com/ROs2fI6ncy

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) January 11, 2025

A few from my feed. If this is true, it’s horrible!

A child marriage in Iraq.

I’m at a loss for words.

pic.twitter.com/opDtzHfX4H

— Dr. Maalouf ‏ (@realMaalouf) January 13, 2025

Wolves’ reaction when a mother wolf returns to the pack – Manitoba, Canada pic.twitter.com/cmvKdaGVO7

— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) January 12, 2025

Lots of brave people working the California wildfires:

I’m not a pilot but I have to imagine that you have to be an absolute BADASS to skim the water in what is basically a flying tank, over and over all day long, and do it with the accuracy it takes to scoop up 1,000+ gallons of water and not have an accident.

My hat is off to… pic.twitter.com/zwzHfy0xI1

— SaltyGoat (@SaltyGoat17) January 11, 2025

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:

This is one person of the 90% of Jews gassed to death when their train arrived at Auschwitz. He was only 13, and never got to see what life held for him beyond cyanide.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-01-13T16:27:46.847Z

Two tweets from Doctor Cobb. First, find the hidden animal. I am not going to tell you, so put your guess in the comments below:

Hidden in plain sight. Can you find the critter? 🔎 🧐

— Matt Bertone (@bertonemyia.bsky.social) 2025-01-12T15:59:25.865Z

Matthew posted this one:

Strange, it’s Helen’s car.

— (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-01-11T11:26:59.538Z

Here’s some quick morning news before I hightail it to the ideology-in-science meeting:

*The meeting yesterday was good, highlighted by a superb opening talk given by Jonathan Rauch, echoing the themes of his equally great book, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.  The quality of the talks was in general high, with just a few clunkers. Props to Anna Krylov, who was the uber-organizer of it all.

Lee Jussim gave a passel of examples of censorship in science, as did Lawrence Krauss (via Zoom), the latter concentrating on physics.  Krauss also excoriated the National Academy of Sciences for political correctness, especially its explicit attempts to equalize membership equity, bypassing merit and apportioning extra new membership slots to sections of the Academy that have more ethnic and gender diversity, as well as geographic diversity.  (He explicitly quoted the NAS’s policy which you can see here; it’s also quoted by Krauss in his WSJ piece here.)

But Marcia McNutt, President of the National Academies, was also at the meeting. When it was the turn of her panel (she talked about the geology of western North America), she briefly struck back at Krauss in an addendum, saying that she was talking about her own area of geological expertise and that Krauss, who “wasn’t a member of the NAS,” shouldn’t speak outside of his area of expertise. That was an unfair remark on her part, especially since Krauss quoted her own organization.  Since when are you disqualified from criticizing how an organization based on merit places merit in second (or third) place when selecting members–just because you don’t belong to that organization? It may not be pleasant for the NAS to hear this, but people have every right to call out such a policy.

*Back in the real world, the LA wildfires are slowly coming “under control” as they say, but not all of them (article archived here):

The mammoth Palisades fire was roaring closer to residential areas of Los Angeles early Saturday, forcing a new round of evacuation orders and dimming hopes that a brief drop in wind speeds would help firefighters tame Southern California’s devastating blazes.

The desert winds that have stoked the fires are expected to pick up again Saturday afternoon. But even without high winds, the most destructive wildfires in Los Angeles’s history expanded overnight across the region’s bone-dry terrain.

The Palisades fire, the largest of them, tore east, chewing up parched vegetation as it raced up the ridges of Mandeville Canyon. The authorities issued mandatory evacuation orders for an area including parts of the Brentwood and Encino neighborhoods, as well as the Getty Center, one of Southern California’s cultural jewels.

The blaze, which has burned through 21,600 acres and razed stretches between Santa Monica and Malibu since it broke out on Tuesday, was only 8 percent contained, according to Cal Fire. To the east, firefighters had contained 3 percent of the 14,000-acre Eaton fire, near Altadena and Pasadena. The blazes, which have killed at least 11 people and destroyed thousands of structures, now rank among the five most damaging in California’s history.

With many people still unaccounted for, officials have said the death toll could rise.

Los Angeles announced a curfew from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. for areas under mandatory evacuation orders. National Guard units have been deployed to secure evacuation zones.

Here’s what we’re covering:

• Water shortage: After reports emerged that a critical reservoir was offline when the fires started, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, said he was ordering an independent review to determine why firefighters ran out of water early on, calling the situation “deeply troubling.”

• The victims: Those who have died include a man in his 60s who lived in his childhood home and drove a bloodmobile; a retired aerospace engineer and an active church deacon; and a retired pharmacy technician whom neighbors called “an angel.” Read more about the fires’ victims.

• Scale of destruction: The combined area burned by this week’s fires is larger than the city limits of San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Boston or Miami. As of Saturday morning, more than 100,000 people were under evacuation orders, and some 160,000 electricity customers were without power.

That is a huge area. I can’t see the destruction from USC, but after the meeting is over I’ll venture out for a couple of days, coming near the burned area.  I’m not a gawker and have no desire to see people’s destroyed homes, but two friends live close to the burned area and I’m visiting them. Another friend lost his beloved home and studio in the woods.

If you’re a celebrity-follower, or one of those who are delighted when the rich get a comeuppance (I’m not one of those, either), here’s a WSJ map of celebrity homes destroyed in the Palisades fire:

*Reader Norm sent this headline (click to read). Wouldn’t you know that those pnefarious Jews were responsible for the California wildfires? Oy! The article is by Vered Weiss from the World Israel News (h/t Norm):

A quote:

Code Pink: ‘When US taxes go to burning people alive in Gaza, we can’t be surprised when those fires come home.’

Anti-Israel groups took to social media to blame Israel for Los Angeles wildfires.

The fires have destroyed hundreds of buildings and prompted the evacuation of tens of thousands of California residents.

On Instagram, Code Pink created a tenuous connection between the fires and Israel’s war in Gaza.

Code Pink wrote, “When US taxes go to burning people alive in Gaza, we can’t be surprised when those fires come home.”

The Anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace wrote, “Instead of putting resources toward making our country livable, our government is putting billions toward Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.”

Fatima Mohammed, head of anti-Israel group Within Our Lifetime posted, “The flames of Gaza will not stop there.”

“Dropping hundreds of thousands of bombs on Gaza, turning it into a blazing inferno, has consequences,” she said. “There are climate consequences that will find us all.”

Commentator Mehdi Hasan asserted that aid to Israel was interfering with funding LA’s fire department.

However, Hasan failed to recognize that Israeli military aid is federal and funding for the fire department is from the City of Los Angeles.

I mean, is that so hard to believe? After all, wasn’t it Marjorie Taylor Greene who, four years ago, blamed California wildfires on Jewish space lasers? Meanwhile, the Palestinians are celebrating the devastation (h/t Malgorzata):

Palestinians celebrate and gloat as the Los Angeles fires rage in the Hollywood hills, while their fans in the UK try to identify which of the victims in California deserve it because they are “Zionists.” pic.twitter.com/fMFTQHbgO8

— Saul Sadka (@Saul_Sadka) January 9, 2025

*Two pair of lynx have been captured in Scotland—in Cairngorms National Park in Scotland.  Lynx do not exist in the wild in Scotland, and it’s not clear if these are Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx; h/t Jez)

A second pair of lynx have been captured after being found near Kingussie in the Cairngorms National Park.

Two other lynx, released illegally, were caught in the same area on Thursday.

Staff from the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland caught all the animals by baiting a series of humane traps in the area to entice them.

The RZSS confirmed that the latest pair had been captured at about 18:30 near the Dell of Killiehuntly, where the two other lynx were also successfully caught.

The latest lynx, believed to be larger than the other two cats, were first spotted at about 07:10 on Friday.

Dr Helen Senn, head of conservation at RZSS, said: “I’m sure that everyone in the community will be happy and relieved to know that the second pair of lynx have been safely captured.

“Early reports are that they appear to be in good health, which is the most important thing.

“It’s been a rollercoaster 48 hours, with people working throughout the day and night, in some extremely challenging conditions, but I’ve been so impressed by the efforts of our own staff as well as partners, and members of the local community to ensure that the outcome is a positive one.”

She added that the lynx would be taken to the Highland Wildlife Park before being moved to Edinburgh Zoo to quarantine for 30 days – as has happened with the first pair found on Thursday.

It’s not clear if they will be released if they are given a clean bill of health, for Scottish naturalists would dearly love to have the species back where it once roamed.

*Today I’ll post four instead of the usual three items stolen from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news summary in the Free Press, called this week, “TGIF: Hellfire.”

→ The Gulf of America: Trump announced that he’ll be renaming the Gulf of Mexico. Now it’ll be the Gulf of America. Here was Trump on Tuesday:

We’re going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, which has a beautiful ring, that covers a lot of territory. The Gulf of America, what a beautiful name, and it’s appropriate.

I love that Trump is framing this as the normal way countries negotiate with each other. Tariffs? Yes. Sanctions? Sure. Change the name of a universally agreed-upon ocean? Absolutely. That is how real statesmen operate: Force your adversaries to relabel their maps. It’s also an incredible PR tactic. Shipwreck in the “Gulf of Mexico”? Don’t know what you’re talking about. New oil field discovered in the Gulf of America? Cha-ching!

Trump is going to release a whole new world map by the end of the year. Canada will be labeled “Area 51.” China renamed CHY-na. Ukraine? You’re thinking of “Little Russia.” New Mexico will, of course, become New America, Florida is D.C., and we’re throwing Connecticut to Elon Musk, who has decided to rename it X!12-ZZ Infiniti.

→ News for the Jews: In more news relevant to Jews (other than world domination), the head of Within Our Lifetime explained that there’s obviously no two-state solution: “As long as Israel exists, it is a genocide against the Palestinian people.” Remember when the whole thing was ceasefire and #peace? Funny how that shifts.

→ Funeral side-eyeing: At President Jimmy Carter’s state funeral yesterday, Kamala, who was seated in front of the formers (Trump, Obama, Clinton, my sweet little George), turned around as Trump and Obama chatted. She quickly looked away, took a deep breath, and pursed her lips. She pretended to read the bulletin like there were secrets in there. And for a moment, I felt her pain. George W. even gave Obama a little tap on the stomach. My favorite part of presidential funerals—yes, I have a favorite part—is getting to watch all these characters interact with each other. It’s like watching the most awkward reunion of The Real Househusbands of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

→ Sex is back: I don’t mean sex-sex. I mean males and females existing. That’s what a federal Kentucky judge decided when this week he struck down one of Biden’s signature policies: remaking Title IX to say that students can self-ID as whatever sex or gender they feel, play on any sport team they identify with, and enter any locker room. If schools didn’t go along with it, they would face the full force of the federal government. Now it’s over. What a strange journey we’ve gone on. Did that really happen?

Yes, indeed, Nellie, yes indeed it did.

After a break, Andrew Sullivan is back with The Weekly Dish. His column this week is called “The Price of Orthodoxies“. The theme is how orthodox opinion can blind us to not only the truth, but to horrible truths. His example are the Pakistani/Bangladeshi “rape gangs” (also called “grooming gangs”) in the UK. (And yes, I know there were some white rape gangs, too.) Excerpts:

The more intense the horror, the more powerful the instinct to doubt when you first hear of it. The sex-abuse scandal in my own church first numbed and incapacitated me. It took some time for me to see the totality of what had happened, and how deeply it had destroyed Catholic moral authority. Again, when I first read about, say, the Catholic school for deaf children where a priest had picked his victims among those whose parents did not know sign language, the feeling of horror was almost too much to process at all. And as with the Bush administration’s torture policy, it took even more time to grasp how this moral rot had been enabled by the very top.

This is why, I think, the scandal of Britain’s Pakistani rape-gangs, and the institutional negligence toward tens of thousands of underage victims over several years, has had a second burst of life. A serious national inquiry on the scandal was conducted years ago (its recommendations not yet implemented). But several towns with the worst records were omitted from that inquiry; and the sheer scale and depravity of what happened has finally begun to sink in. The precipitant was Elon Musk pontificating about the scandal on X, as part of his campaign to bring down Keir Starmer.

The details are hard to absorb. Think of the hideous abuse suffered by that extraordinary French woman, Gisèle Pelicot, sedated and raped by dozens of French men, organized by her husband. Now think of that kind of organized gang-bang — but make it close to ubiquitous in some towns and the victims under-age girls: raped, brutalized, mutilated, beaten, their lives destroyed. Yes, it was that bad. Tens of thousands of rape victims across the country. . .

Why was this allowed to go on for so long? For the same reason the Catholic Church covered up child rape for decades, and Dick Cheney covered up torture. Because the orthodoxies of Catholicism, of the American military, and, in this case, the multicultural experiment were respectively involved. These orthodoxies were sacred, their cultural power extreme. Catholic Boston, conservative America, and elite liberal Britain therefore defended their own orthodoxies for a very long time. And with every successful deflection of responsibility, the number of victims increased.

The truth damns the multicultural project in Britain. Rather than integrating these men of Pakistani heritage, insisting that they adopt the laws and mores of the native population, and treating them like everyone else, the UK elites celebrated cultural difference, enabled the siloing of these populations, bemoaned their own white working-class populations, and forbade any criticism of Islam. So if you called out this stuff, you were instantly called racist. After all, to accuse a non-white minority of raping white girls was a trope right out of white-supremacist fever dreams. And yes, it is a hideous racist trope — from the depths of the American South. But sometimes the trope is the truth.

In all the major cases, I’ve found no reported evidence of Pakistani or Muslim girls being groomed and raped — only poor, white natives.The justification among the rapists, moreover, was that these non-Muslims were sluts who were asking for it and beneath contempt. Racist insults were common as these girls were brutally abused. These were not just rapes, but hate crimes of a grisly sort.

It’s not true that the Brit media ignored the scandal. But it is also true that the space they gave it was trivial compared with, say, coverage of the George Floyd murder, thousands of miles away. And ask yourself: if it had been discovered that there were gangs of white nationalists singling out Pakistani-heritage girls for rape and abuse, with racist and Islamophobic slurs added for good measure, what would the media response have been? The question answers itself.

And if a white Brit had been found guilty of organizing the brutal gang-rape of a Pakistani 12-year-old girl, it’s hard to imagine him receiving a sentence of just three years. To get a sense of why the British public is pissed, it’s worth noting that last year, a white Brit was sentenced to a longer 38-month sentence for writing a social media post. More punishment for a white man’s inflammatory speech than for a non-white man’s gang-rape of a child: a near definition of wokeness. And you wonder why they call him Two-Tier Keir.

Yes, some readers think this is a confected scandal by conservatives aiming to depose the Labour Party and its Prime Minister.  I do not agree with them in the sense that it is not made up, and it is a scandal involving disproportionate numbers of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis.

Finally, a few of us went to Anna Krylov’s (conference organizer) and her partner Jay’s lovely house for dinner the other night. They had been given an evacuation warning, and packed their car, but fortunately the warning was rescinded. I forgot to take photos of the food which was delicious (grilled chicken and a variety of Russian-style sides), but I did get one of the dessert. Also, I was promised that I would get to pet one of their two cats: Mishka (“bear” in Russian), a beautiful gray English shorthair. Here they are:

Mishka (he is somewhat standoffish):

Dessert:

I’ll try to get more photos today, but I doubt the picture of the venue (a large auditorium) or of the box lunches (delicious but unphotogenic) will thrill you.

My schedule is going to be wonky until Wednesday or Thursday of next week, so bear with me as I do my best (I fly home on Tuesday but have a doctor’s appointment on Thursday).

Here is the best I can do with a truncated nooz and photo post.

*The cops in New York are putting huge effort into trying to catch the man who shot Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare. The shooter was very clever, having planned the assassination in advance and having taken great care to pay in cash and not speak to anyone. But they’ve found a backpack in Central Park that may have been abandoned by him. It went straight to forensics without being opened.

What appalls me about this is that so many people are actually celebrating the killing, as if Thompson deserved to die for what his organization did. The man had a wife and two kids, for crying out loud, and what people are cheering for is not just the death penalty, but one inflicted by vigilante justice. If you’re opoposed to the death penalty alone that means you should decry this kind of killing. Kat Rosenfeld at the Free Press talks bout the horror of people who are celebrating Thompson’s death:

The online reaction [to Thompson’s assassination] has been extremely gleeful and extremely dark: “My thoughts and prayers are on hold pending prior authorization,” reads one representative (and massively upvoted) comment on a New York Times Facebook story about the murder. Taylor Lorenz, recently of The Washington Post, wrote, “and they wonder why we want these executives dead” on Bluesky before cross-posting the name and photo of Blue Cross Blue Shield CEO Kim Keck to her accounts on multiple platforms (along with a cheeky suggestion that her followers engage in “very peaceful letter writing campaigns” against murderous insurance execs).

In a viral X post, Columbia University professor Anthony Zenkus—whose profile describes him as an “anti-violence” “trauma expert”—quipped, “Today, we mourn the death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, gunned down. . . wait, I’m sorry—today we mourn the deaths of the 68,000 Americans who needlessly die each year so that insurance company execs like Brian Thompson can become multimillionaires.”

. . .Yolonda Wilson, an associate professor who teaches a course on “Law and Morality” at St. Louis University, said she was “not rejoicing” in the brutal murder of this father of two—even as she implied he deserved it. “I’m not sad about it, either,” she added. “Chickens come home to roost.”

This practice of celebrating the destruction of one individual person as a scapegoat for whatever systemic injustice—racism, or sexism, or in this case, corporate greed—has been a recurring cultural phenomenon since roughly the first Trump administration, one in which Trump himself had been both chief enforcer and prime target, depending on the day. The popularity of this Manichaean brand of thinking shouldn’t surprise us: It has always been human nature to hunt for witches, particularly in moments when everything seems to be either broken or falling apart. When people feel scared and out of control (as anyone who has ever had the displeasure of tangling with a health insurance conglomerate in the midst of a medical crisis surely has), it’s strangely soothing to imagine that every harm, every injustice, can be traced back to the depravity of a single, mustache-twirling villain who feasts while decent people starve.

The only problem is, it’s not true.

The implicit lawlessness of this kind of celebration chills me to the marrow, for we are a nation of laws, not vigilantes. If you want to see a disgusting display of immoral celebration from the American blogosphere, you can go here.

I’ll steal three items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news summary at The Free Press, called this week “TGIF: Pardon Me?” (archived here).

→ Biden’s staff tie up loose ends: Biden fell completely asleep in a meeting this week, also known as a standard workday for Dr. Jill. The video is great because our president is really, fully asleep and honestly looks cozy. He looks happy. Let him snuggle up. This poor man. First of all: Why is his staff sending him to the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor Summit in Lobito, Angola? We couldn’t catapult Jake Sullivan to this one? (That’s where he fell asleep. Angola! Our sweet Joe! He was tired.) Second of all: The meeting did sound boring, and I nearly fell asleep watching the clip.

Anyway, with the president largely out of the picture, his staff and Dr. Jill are doing what they do best: spending money and making sure everyone can work from home forever. Various massive government departments are updating their government-issued forever contracts. From Bloomberg: “The American Federation of Government Employees, a union representing 42,000 Social Security Administration workers, reached an agreement with the agency last week that will protect telework until 2029 in an updated contract.” This is the modern Democrat Party: The number-one priority is work from home. Trump could cut off all aid to veterans and it would be met with a yawn. Cut off work from home and you will see mobs take these streets. Cut off DoorDash and there will be pipe bombs. Make them put on shoes and they will flatten you. (Currently only 6 percent of federal employees work in the office full-time, and that’s almost entirely maintenance and janitorial staff.)

. . . . Meanwhile, Biden did a photo op leaving a bookstore, walking stiffly, holding what no doubt some staffer shoved into his paw. And what is it? A book called The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, about how Israel is an evil settler project. A perfect week for Biden administration priorities.

→ Chase Strangio is on the wrong side of the vibe shift: The Supreme Court this week heard arguments over whether to strike down Tennessee’s ban on medical gender transitions for minors (i.e., no puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgeries till 18). The ACLU sent their most famous lawyer and the face of the organization, Chase Strangio, to argue the case. Before things started, Chase laid out the stakes to CNN’s Jake Tapper: “These are young people who may have known since they were two years old exactly who they are, who suffered for six, seven years before they had any relief.” So: a two-year-old. When I say to my two-year-old that she’s a funny bunny, she says, “No, kitty cat.” Which to me indicates an extremely advanced and gifted conception of herself. Anyway. Surgery for her tail is next week. She has been consistent that she’s a “kitty cat” for months now. She wears kitty cat ears, a woeful stand-in for the real thing that I’m sure some excellent doctors can arrange.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson compared banning medical transitions for minors to bans on interracial marriage. I’m no legal scholar, but it honestly must be fun for your job to just come up with crazy analogies and throw them back at terrified lawyers. I’m just not sure I see the connection she’s making, but I also sometimes throw spaghetti at the wall when nothing’s working. It’s my “why not” business strategy. It’s the “you know what else was illegal once? Interracial marriage” approach.

Remember Strangio? He was the man who favored the banning of Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage—and he’s an ACLU lawyer!

→ And how are the Jews? I haven’t checked in on the Jews in a bit because it’s too dismal, but a few updates this week, are, I’m sorry, funny. The head of the Cultural Affairs Commission (CAC) at UCLA—Alicia Verdugo—allegedly is running a little judenrein office over there. Noticing some unsavory applicants to the team, she reminded her employees (per a great Commentary story): “please do your research when you look at applicants” because “lots of zionists [sic] are applying.” According to a new lawsuit, applicants who indicated any Jewishness were rejected. And Alicia promised at an upcoming retreat that she would share a “no hire list.” Honey, you don’t need to go through all the trouble of making a list of every lefty Jewish student at UCLA who wants to get involved in the diversity team! Just start playing the Wicked soundtrack and see who sings along with Elphaba the loudest. There you go.

Anyway, the official policy of the UCLA Cultural Affairs Commission is: “We reserve the right to remove any staff member who dispels antiBlackness [sic], colorism, racism, white supremacy, zionism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, misogyny, ableism, and any/all other hateful/bigoted ideologies.” I don’t know that it’s legal to ban “Zionists” at a state-funded school. But it’s the word dispel that kills me. It’s so cute and tells you everything. Groping around, trying to use big-ish words but not knowing what they mean, propped up by government funding, the new movement can’t articulate and yet the point comes across. Because the inability to articulate is a sign of the movement’s success. Words, after all, are violence.

. . . . Speaking of words we can no longer define, Amnesty International declared that Israel is doing a genocide. The 300-page report begins: “On 7 October 2023, Israel embarked on a military offensive on the occupied Gaza Strip (Gaza) of unprecedented magnitude, scale, and duration.” Yes, Israel just randomly embarked on an offensive. Anyway, this is a serious charge and to call the war a genocide, Amenesty changed their own definition of it entirely. The new line is that anytime Israel is fighting, it’s doing genocide. And so even in fighting against Hezbollah, which has been lobbing rockets at Israel for years, what is Israel doing? Say it with me: genocide. Meanwhile, in the British Museum, we get this curious history lesson: “By the beginning of the first millennium BC the Israelites occupied most of Palestine except for the southern coastal strip, which continued to be held by the Philistines.” Yes, the Israelites occupied Palestine even before Christ! Where, pray tell, do they imagine Israelites came from?

*Over at the Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan sees Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter as a harbinger of sorts.

if there were a single constitutional provision that, if abused, could tip the American republic into a post-legal authoritarian system, it would surely be the pardon power. Historically, a presidential pardon was designed to show mercy to a remorseful individual who had usually already paid some price for a crime of some sort. The most recent DOJ regulations, for example, reserve pardons for people who’ve waited at least five years after their conviction or release from prison. In theory, nothing qualifies the power but a president’s civic virtue; in practice, it is usually applied very narrowly.

Previous presidents have abused the power — George HW Bush protected Caspar Weinberger, Clinton saved Marc Rich — even as they also deployed it on traditional lines. Some used it for family members — most obviously Clinton’s pardon of his own half-brother, Roger, and Trump’s pardon of the repulsive Charles Kushner, father of Trump’s son-in-law. Ford, of course, pardoned Nixon for reasons of state. But it was Donald Trump who first saw the potential for the promise of pardons in advance for individuals prepared to commit crimes for the president. That takes the pardon power to new heights.

A pro-active pardon for criminality ordered by the president is, after all, another phrase for the categorical end of the rule of law. It means that a president’s flunkies — or anyone else in presidential favor — can commit any crime in the secure knowledge there will never be punishment. It thereby puts an entire class of people selected by the president effectively above the rule of law. It makes the president a king.

And what Joe Biden has now done in offering an extraordinarily broad pardon for his own corrupt mess of a son is to thoroughly legitimize this monarchical prerogative. Hunter has been pardoned not just for specific crimes he has committed or was about to be sentenced for (tax avoidance, gun crime, lying on a federal form, etc.); but for anything illegal he might have done in the last eleven years — which covers all of his shady dealings with Burisma, the Ukrainian company that paid him almost $400,000 for … not much in particular. It also covers the years when Hunter’s firm brought in a staggering $11 million from Ukrainian and Chinese business interests.. . .

[After Trump]. . . . The American people are secondly responsible for this mess — by re-electing a man brazenly pledging to violate the rule of law by selectively prosecuting his political enemies. But Biden’s tit-for-tat response and proposed addition of retroactive pardons to Trump’s proactive ones — and the way it has been greeted enthusiastically by many Democratic partisans — completes the circle.

It means we could be moving incrementally from the rule of law to the rule of the executive — a system where those in government are above the law, and each president of either party operates on that understanding. Each POTUS will abuse the system to maximize his own side’s advantage; and then his or her successor will do the same in reverse. We simply alternate elected monarchs — just as the Founders intended!

The Founders are responsible too, of course. They built a system designed to thwart any single individual’s attempt to make himself a king — and then provided a nearly unlimited pardon power that, if abused, could do exactly that.

From Cat Memes; look at this poor kitten!

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:

Masih points out a horrific new misogynistic law in Iran:

Shocking News:
Execution for Showing Your Hair: New Hijab Law in Iran

The Islamic Republic has taken its war on women and dissent to horrifying new levels. A new law now allows execution for those accused of promoting “nudity, unveiling, or improper attire.” Imagine this:… pic.twitter.com/mGkeEQRPAT

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) December 6, 2024

Jesse Singal got canceled on Bluesky (called here “Bluehair”), and that just seems unfair to me.  It is surely not free speech:

Jesse Singal has been officially labeled intolerant on the BlueHair app. I have plenty of opinions that are out of synch with right-wing orthodoxy. No one tries to cancel me. Jesse is an obedient lib on every issue except trans ideology, and they hate him. pic.twitter.com/dDuYCgNpNA

— Hunter Ash (@ArtemisConsort) December 7, 2024

When I retweeted that, people said it wasn’t true, so here’s Singal’s own verification:

The overall situation is that my entire account has been labeled “Intolerant” by BlueSky because it ostensibly “Discriminat[es] against protected groups.” So every one of my posts has a warning label. Couple samples. pic.twitter.com/yvcdZEttPc

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) December 7, 2024

From Malcolm; one minute of copy cats.

copy and paste pic.twitter.com/AmuYoDQyE3

— No Cats No Life (@NoCatsNoLife_m) December 1, 2024

From Matthew, who says, “These are all galaxies except for the eight stars that are in our galaxy and have six-pointed refractions because they are so bright.”

Clean, high-resolution image of the deep universe from the previous post.🔭 🧪

— Jwst Feed (@jwstfeed.bsky.social) 2024-12-04T15:06:07.955Z

Also from Matthew: a lovely embroidered tabby:

He’s finished! I love embroidering a tabby. 🪡 🧵

— Megan 🪡 (@ohnomegan.bsky.social) 2024-12-02T05:05:55.317Z