Kristi Noem may have callously killed a puppy, but RFK Jr. claims he has a dead worm in his brain.

In 2010, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was experiencing memory loss and mental fogginess so severe that a friend grew concerned he might have a brain tumor. Mr. Kennedy said he consulted several of the country’s top neurologists, many of whom had either treated or spoken to his uncle, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, before his death the previous year of brain cancer.

Several doctors noticed a dark spot on the younger Mr. Kennedy’s brain scans and concluded that he had a tumor, he said in a 2012 deposition reviewed by The New York Times. Mr. Kennedy was immediately scheduled for a procedure at Duke University Medical Center by the same surgeon who had operated on his uncle, he said.

While packing for the trip, he said, he received a call from a doctor at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital who had a different opinion: Mr. Kennedy, he believed, had a dead parasite in his head.

The doctor believed that the abnormality seen on his scans “was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died,” Mr. Kennedy said in the deposition.

This is a real thing called neurocysticercosis. It is unusual for political candidates to chat about the worms eating their brain while on the campaign trail, though.

Several infectious disease experts and neurosurgeons said in separate interviews with The Times that, based on what Mr. Kennedy described, they believed it was likely a pork tapeworm larva. The doctors have not treated Mr. Kennedy and were speaking generally.

Dr. Clinton White, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, said microscopic tapeworm eggs are sticky and easily transferred from one person to another. Once hatched, the larvae can travel in the bloodstream, he said, “and end up in all kinds of tissues.”

Though it is impossible to know, he added that it is unlikely that a parasite would eat a part of the brain, as Mr. Kennedy described. Rather, Dr. White said, it survives on nutrients from the body. Unlike tapeworm larvae in the intestines, those in the brain remain relatively small, about a third of an inch.

What next? Is some politician going to confess to paying for sex with a porn star?

They’re a terrifying force of nature. They’re so scary that their presence is sufficient pretext to marshal a squad of cops to deal with the threat.

The mayor of New York City Eric Adams and the police department have used the claim of outside agitators to justify their use of force in clearing the protestors from Columbia University. Adams pointed to the presence of Nahlia Al-Arian as the “tipping point” in his decision to authorize the military-style raids on the campus.

Who is she? Jeremy Scahill writes about how this 63-year old retired fourth grade teacher and grandmother, whose family is from Gaza and who has lost about 200 of her family and friends in the recent Israeli onslaught there, ended up as the embodiment of ‘outside agitators’ that required such brutal force.

Oh no! And a teacher, too? They’re the worst. She’s got the NY police trembling in their jackboots.

I’ve got one of those grandmas living in my house, and I tell you, sometimes I’d like to call out the National Guard, but I’m too scared.

The encampment on campus has been disbanded. It didn’t require the police, or the National Guard, or any tanks — representatives from the administration met with protesters, listened, and negotiated an agreement.

You can read the negotiated settlement.

I don’t know. For such a ferocious gang of militant radicals, they gave in fairly easily. Most of the administrations concessions are things like allowing students to meet with the board of regents and present some formal demands, or to “explore” new programs, or to disclose more budget information. Meanwhile, the students promise to not disrupt commencement. It’s not very exciting stuff, and mostly just defers actual changes to some later date, maybe.

Other universities should pay attention. The students are actually reasonable, but the university had better follow through.

Somehow, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this accusation is true.

In his defense, in this article from 6 years ago, his leftist “credentials” are unimpeachable. OK, man, if you say so.

Very leftist. Very free speech.

My daughter works here!

I notice the wall of cops with shields lined up against a group of students sitting quietly, watching the spectacle. Who has shown up prepared for violence?

Administrators claim they are “balancing students’ right to protest with a desire to minimize disruptions to their campuses and enforce a state rule banning encampments”. I don’t see much evidence of “balance” when one side brings in hired guns to enforce their will.

While my daughter is somewhere on campus, I’m pretty sure she’s nowhere near the protest. She had knee surgery a short while ago and is only able to hobble…so as much as I support the protest, it would be unwise to face off against brutal enforcers who wouldn’t be at all averse to compounding her current problems with a little violence.

All across the country, students are rising up to protest US support for the genocidal state of Israel. The response is growing!

Unfortunately, Columbia University is leading the way in authoritarian counter-reaction.

New York police arrested dozens of people on two campuses Tuesday night after officers cleared out a Columbia University building occupied by protesters.

At Columbia, New York police used a massive armored vehicle to push a bridge into a window of Hamilton Hall, the building demonstrators began occupying the previous night. Officers then streamed over the bridge — quickly retaking the building.

Yeah, to their shame, the Columbia administration called in a tank to put down their students.

In happier news, the protests have spread to Antarctica.

Once upon a time, a lot of liberals were gaga for Nate Silver, who always left me cold. He seemed to be more of a numerologist, or a horse race handicapper, and I suspected he was juggling the numbers to fit his expectations (remember: quantitative & provable with numbers is not necessarily true). It’s polite of him to now confirm that yes, he’s a soulless automaton with no speck of moral reasoning in his body.

Right. People who oppose genocide are just doing it because it’s a fad, exactly like how they pick out jeans at the store. Maybe we live in a society where even the conservative students learn at any early age that “thou shalt not kill,” and us more progressive people tell our kids to treat others as you want to be treated, but nah, students can see bombings and killings and snipers taking out civilians and be unperturbed by any foundational moral principles.

I think Silver is projecting here. He gets his morality from a spreadsheet, so of course no one else could possibly make a decision by examining the issues.

Hey, bonus: doesn’t this remind you of the same arguments made against trans people? It’s a passing fashion, they can’t possibly have thought about the consequences, they’re only doing it because their friends are doing it. There’s no way other people actually think — they’re all NPCs who need to be told what to do by us people with our numbers, which are totally free of bias.

The Morris campus of the University of Minnesota is quiet. We’re small and rural, so I think we lack the critical mass to spark substantial protests, but universities in the Twin Cities are taking up our slack. They’re organizing, building an encampment, and delivering demands.

Students rallied and set up tents at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus, as well as at Hamline University in St. Paul, as anti-war protests continue into a second week.

At the U of M, hundreds of protesters called on the school to divest from weapons manufacturers and companies tied to the Israeli military. The students also want the school to end study abroad programs in Israel.

At around 7:30 p.m., police gave dispersal orders, prompting many to link arms around the grassy area in front of Northrop Memorial Auditorum, where more than 30 tents stood.

Good for them! They are demonstrating peacefully and righteously, although that doesn’t prevent campus police from moving in and arresting students. And, as usual, there are accusations that protesting Israel and Zionism is anti-Semitic — it’s not, but we have to recognize that there are anti-Semitic groups all across the country who are exploiting these protests.

Columbia University administrators are doing a fine job of showing how not to respond to student protests. They set deadlines for students to leave and have threatened them with the thugs called cops, and in response, the students ignored the deadlines and have occupied several campus buildings. Stupid administrators. Instead of listening and recognizing student grievances, they’ve managed to escalate the situation. The problem here is that the administrators are incompetent and don’t believe they have any obligations to the students. The students are the reason the university exists!

The real rioters are cops and college presidents. Students and faculty are linking arms and condemning genocide, while administrators shriek and wail in dismay and send in cops with clubs, guns, and gas to break them up.

The past week or so has been, in many ways, unfathomable: Palestine solidarity protests sprung up at college campuses across the country; Local and state police resorted to violence to break many of them up; Some universities changed their rules last minute just so they could criminalize previously benign student and faculty activity; Prosecutors in most jurisdictions with arrests won’t say if they’ll charge the protesters. Meanwhile in Gaza, multiple mass graves filled with hospital patients were uncovered.

On top of it all, Christian Zionists—in and out of Congress—tried to take over as the true defenders of Israel, while failing to mention why they so zealously defend it. (Hint: If the Jews return to Israel, it will hasten the return of Jesus and an armageddon. Just don’t ask them what happens to the Jews once armageddon happens. Another hint: We go to hell.) Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested in a speech on Columbia’s campus that it might be time to send in the National Guard. Evangelical preachers led a crowd that yelled things like “Go home, terrorists!”, “Go back to Gaza!” and “You want to camp? Go camp in Gaza!” at student protesters. If this all sounds crazy, that’s because it is crazy.

Oh, and about those prohibited activities — here’s a list from the University of Florida.

As has been pointed out online, many of those prohibited activities would shut down tailgating at football games, which most universities regard as a sacred rite.

Faculty, with a few notable exceptions, have been supportive of students’ right to protest. In fact, the Barnard AAUP faculty voted unanimously to make a statement of “no confidence” in the college president. I had to gasp at that — a group of 102 faculty members all agreed on something? I can’t imagine the Morris campus senate doing anything like that, and it probably would take hours of wrangling back and forth to even get a tepid statement out of them. Things must be getting extreme at Barnard.

They tried to do something similar at Columbia, but fell short, and settled for a compromise resolution that was still pretty damning. That’s more like the fractious faculty I know.

At Columbia University, a proposal to censure university president Minouche Shafik fell short, but a resolution calling for an investigation passed by a vote of 62-14 on Friday, according to the New York Times. Shafik has been scrutinized since a decision last week to summon New York police to the campus and authorize them to dismantle an encampment, resulting in the arrest of more than 100 student protesters.

After a two-hour meeting on Friday, the university’s senate approved a resolution that Shafik’s administration had undermined academic freedom and disregarded the privacy and due process rights of students and faculty members by calling in the police and shutting down the protest.

I wonder what it takes to get college presidents to recognize how badly they are fucking up. We’ve got protests sweeping across the nation, they keep generating horrendously terrible optics by sending armored mobs of cops to beat up students and faculty and throwing them in jail, their faculty are sending them strongly worded complaints, and still they keep playing the same stupid games. I don’t have any kids in college anymore, but if they were, and if I saw them getting thrown down and handcuffed at the behest of some asshole college president, I’d be furious and looking to help my kids transfer to some place that isn’t a militarized camp run by wannabe fascists. If I had a kid looking to enroll in college, I’d be torn but what I see at Columbia: the students seem awesome, but man is that place mismanaged. Like a lot of schools right now.

The most encouraging thing I’m seeing about the protests is that wow, the kids are all right. They get it. They are doing the right thing. I would remind them of these words by Frederick Douglass:

Right now, I’m seeing some of the anti-protest Right whining about the encampments, but they’re blocking the siiiiidewaaaalk in the same way that people complained about Black Lives Matter marches, but they’re blocking traaaaffic. Yeah? Too bad. You’re being confronted with a minor inconvenience while Palestinian people are seeing whole families murdered. Get over it.

Stop the genocide, the students will stop troubling your conscience. It’s that easy.

They’re everywhere. In the cities, on the streets, on college campuses.

It’s always a one-sided conversation, but they call it free speech.