Remember when Harvard president Gay, UPenn president Magill, and MIT president Kornbluth were pilloried for being insufficiently outraged about Palestinians on their campuses? They did give pretty tepid and timid answers to questions about campus protests, but I hate to break the news to you about college presidents: that’s their job, being professionally tepid and timid about everything in order to avoid antagonizing politicians and donors. They could have done better, but they never received any training in being forthright.

Then, strangely, everything shifted from being about their responsibilities to all sides on a politically contentious issue to…plagiarism? Not that that isn’t an important matter, but it’s peculiar how we got this abrupt change in focus. What had happened is that certain ideologically motivated people had decided to really get those college presidents, and they’d been doing their best to dig up dirt on them. They didn’t find evidence of anti-Semitism (that would have been a bad tactic, since the dirt diggers tended to be anti-Semitic themselves), but they did find that one nasty little nugget, the horrible secret that plagues a lot of academics who are pressured to churn out lots of papers.*

Well, unsurprisingly, it turns out that neither anti-Semitism or an epidemic of cheating were the actual motivations behind the assault on university presidents, or universities in general. They really, really hate DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion). This was another anti-woke crusade all along.

Gay’s resignation almost a month after Magill’s had initially redirected the backlash onto Kornbluth, who has largely evaded the brunt of the outrage, kept her job and remained relatively silent amid the calls for her ouster. But as the focus of the online outrage now trains on Business Insider, the calls for the presidents’ firings — once primarily fueled by concerns over antisemitism on campus — are shifting to a broader campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at U.S. colleges and then detouring into seemingly tit-for-tat plagiarism probes. The shift appears to reveal that the initial uproar was never really about protecting Jewish students, scholars told Salon.

“Given how quickly the focus of the people claiming to be concerned about antisemitism on our campuses shifted to academic dishonesty, it certainly appears that the focus was never really about antisemitism and protecting students,” Irene Mulvey, the president of the American Association of University Presidents told Salon. “It’s part of a long-running, well-funded effort to create a false narrative for the public that higher education is broken.”

What’s driving that well-funded effort are conservative billionaires, like Bill Ackman. Ackman’s campaign got briefly short-circuited when it was discovered that his wife, Neri Oxman, had the same plagiarism sins that were used to get Gay fired. Uh-oh. Need to recalibrate. Suddenly, Ackman is babbling about “nuance” and “context.” It would be funny if this weren’t a rich, powerful guy looking for pretexts to get people he doesn’t like fired.

But the act backfired for the financier, whose involvement in the controversy had brought him his fair share of criticism according to Bloomberg, last Thursday after Business Insider released reports accusing Oxman of failing to cite and copying passages from other authors without proper citation in her 2010 MIT dissertation, claims The New Republic notes are similar to those thrown at Gay. While Oxman acknowledged some of the claims and apologized for errors in a post to X, the outlet published a second report the day after alleging at least 15 new instances of plagiarism in her dissertation, including segments claimed to be directly lifted from Wikipedia.

With the ire aimed at his spouse, Ackman’s strong-minded stance against plagiarism in all forms suddenly became more nuanced, with the billionaire arguing in a post to X that charges of plagiarism in academia should be more context-reliant and weigh intentionality. The Business Insider reports prompted Ackman to expand his campaign against higher education to the journalism industry, with the Pershing Square CEO announcing his plans to launch an AI-powered dig for potential plagiarism in the outlet’s work.

What’s this about “intentionality”? I suspect he means plagiarism with intent to lend support to the poor and oppressed is bad, while plagiarism with an intent to enrich billionaires is good.

He just hates DEI. It is the root of all sins.

In the same post in which he detailed a strict stance on plagiarism, Ackman also gave voice to a conservative talking point about DEI, concluding, after meeting with students and faculty at Harvard, that DEI was at the core of the antisemitism cropping up on the campus in the wake of Oct. 7.

I think it would be a stronger point to argue that evangelical Christianity is at the core of that anti-Semitism. Except that conservative evangelical Christians also hate DEI, so he can’t blame them.

You know that DEI initiatives strongly oppose anti-Semitism, along with any racial or ethnic discrimination, right? You can’t be a DEI proponent and also promote bigoted ideas about any group.

This is really all about finding any excuse to cut down anyone who opposes the billionaire agenda.

---

Is too on the nose?

There was an…election event yesterday. That gives it more attention than it deserves. Election spasm? Political twitch? Republican fart?

It was a caucus. I’ve attended a few — these are weird little parties where a select few show up and are given a platform for their often weird ass opinions.

It was in Iowa, a conservative rural state with a bloated status in politics for the sole, and trivial, reason that they schedule their primaries to be first.

It was a solely Republican event. Democrats were put in the shade.

The crook and rapist won.

And yet, all of the newspapers are running this as a front page story, headline news that’s going to be trumpeted endlessly. The Republican also-rans, Haley & DeSantis, were negligible. The media are ready to crown Trump after this trivial and pointless event, that we all knew how was going to turn out. They are happily feeding the illusion that Trump is inevitable without acknowledging that he’s only inevitable among the most contemptible people in the country, MAGA freaks who will ignore his record and his crimes.

Except in the sense that a corrupt criminal is dominating the Republican party, why should I care what happened in Iowa? The media are just playing the horse race game, again. Who cares that this man could destroy the country and that a significant fraction of the electorate are ignorant assholes? We got us a competition! Let’s see who gets first place! Wheeeee! Time to sell more ads!

I feel like Libertarians have been keeping a low profile for the last few years, after learning that airing their ridiculous views gets them almost as much ridicule as “sovereign citizen” declarations (I think there is a lot of overlap between the two groups, though.) The existence of laws and regulations is a slap in their faces, and they believe that if only they could get rid of those meddling, interfering restrictions they could live in an Edenic paradise. So a group of independent thinkers decided to build a suburb in Arizona while ignoring the need to provide water. Water? It falls out of the sky and flows on the ground, we don’t need no stinkin’ pipelines. In the desert.

Arizona law requires homebuilders in active management areas to secure a reliable source of water expected to last at least a hundred years. However, there’s a loophole: the law only applies to subdivisions of six homes or more. You can guess what some clever developers do: they simply build lots of “subdivisions” each consisting of only five homes.

These so-called “wildcat” communities are all over the state. They’re miniature havens of freedom, perfect for stubbornly independent libertarians who want to get out from under the thumb of government bureaucrats telling them where they can and can’t live. Rio Verde Foothills is one such.

But then they made an awful discovery. It turns out, even when you find a way to skirt regulations about water… humans still need water.

Curse you, physical laws of the universe! How dare you disrupt my fantasies with harsh realities?

Suddenly, these people faced what every Libertarian dreads most: consequences.

…because there isn’t much water in the area’s aquifers, many others rely on trucks that deliver water from the city of Scottsdale, which has rights to water from the Colorado River. When Scottsdale shut off the water last year, Rio Verde had nowhere to turn for substitute supplies: There was no spare groundwater, and all the water from the Colorado River was spoken for. Locals who found alternate water haulers had to pay monthly bills that were larger than their mortgage payments.

In my limited experience with life in the dry Eastern Washington state, residents have to pay attention to things like aquifers and reservoirs and irrigation, especially if you’re in a resource-intensive occupation like farming, and those are communal resources with strict rules about how they may be shared. Everyone has to work together to get access to the water they need. These developers decided to just ignore those rules for their own selfish gain.

But let’s not just blame Libertarians and developers. Everyone in the desert Southwest has to recognize that their environment imposes limitations on their growth.

A Jewish history teacher in Israel, Meir Baruchin, dared to criticize Israeli action in Gaza on Facebook.

“Horrific images are pouring in from Gaza. Entire families were wiped out. I don’t usually upload pictures like this, but look what we do in revenge,” said a message on 8 October, below a picture of the family of Abu Daqqa, killed in one of the first airstrikes on Gaza. “Anyone who thinks this is justified because of what happened yesterday, should unfriend themselves. I ask everyone else to do everything possible to stop this madness. Stop it now. Not later, Now!!!”

It was the day after Hamas’s horrific attack on Israel, when the country was reeling from the slaughter of 1,200 people and the kidnapping of more than 240.

He’s made many posts in a similar vein, but that’s all he has done, to rightly criticize the excesses of the Israeli government and their genocidal actions. That’s all. He has written comments in a public forum decrying bad, counterproductive policies and demanding an end to the violence.

You can imagine how that turned out in a fascist state.

An unlikely charge of intent to commit treason landed Meir Baruchin, a grey-haired, softly spoken history and civics teacher, in the solitary confinement wing of Jerusalem’s notorious “Russian Compound” prison in early November.

The evidence compiled by police who handcuffed him, then drove to his apartment and ransacked it as he watched, was a series of Facebook posts he’d made, mourning the civilians killed in Gaza, criticising the Israeli military, and warning against wars of revenge.

I bet you didn’t know that “STOP KILLING PEOPLE” was such a dangerous and seditious thing to say.

Ten days after that Facebook message, he was fired from his teaching job in Petach Tikvah municipality. Less than a month later he was in a high-security jail, detained to give police more time to investigate critical views he had never tried to hide.

Inside Israel, veteran journalists, intellectuals and rights activists say, there is little public space for dissent about the war in Gaza, even three months into an offensive that has killed 23,000 Palestinians and has no end in sight. “Make no mistake: Baruchin was used as a political tool to send a political message. The motive for his arrest was deterrence – silencing any criticism or any hint of protest against Israeli policy,” the long-established Haaretz newspaper said in an editorial.

Yeah, I don’t think an “investigation” was necessary. He was jailed for openly saying things, not for sneaking around with treacherous view he wasn’t airing.

Finally, this might be one of the rare times when using the phrase “witch hunt” is appropriate.

“This story is much bigger than my personal story, or Yael’s personal story. It is a time of witch hunts in Israel, of political persecution,” he said. “I became a ‘Hamas supporter’, because I expressed my opposition to targeting innocent civilians.”

He said he’d received hundreds of private messages of support from fellow teachers and students who were too frightened to go public, and showed several to the Observer.

“The message is crystal clear: keep silent, watch out,” he says, adding that they strengthened his own conviction about speaking out. “I thought to myself, when I retire, I might conclude this is the most significant lesson I ever gave in civics.”

As usual, as always, one must rush to clearly state that one does not support Hamas. We can deplore the violence and genocidal intent of the terrorists and simultaneously deplore the brutal state-sponsored violence and ongoing genocidal frenzy of the retaliation. Most of us learned in kindergarten that two wrongs don’t make a right.

Because he’s a Republican.

Republicans are religious zealots who want to expand the power of government to control your personal private life…and create a white nationalist fascist state. Greg Abbot, the Texas governor, dreams of killing people of the wrong color and wrong ideology.

Appearing on The Dana Show last week, Abbott declared: “We are using every tool that can be used from building a border wall to building these border barriers, to passing this law that I signed that led to another lawsuit by the Biden administration where I signed a law making it illegal for somebody to enter Texas from another country…. The only thing that we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border because, of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”

Oh, dear. He spoke the quiet part out loud.

I grew up sucking at the teat of the Boeing company — like most people living in the Seattle area. So I pay attention when Boeing makes the news in a bad and terrible way, since there was a time when that would have been catastrophic for my family, would probably mean we’d have to move to a smaller, more run-down house, and I wouldn’t be getting any dentistry done for a while. That was the reality of living in a company town. It’s weird to think we’d be happy when Boeing sold a couple of more planes, which would be front page news in the paper.

I felt a faint frisson when I heard about the door panel blowing out on a 737 in flight, and it was peculiar because my first thought wasn’t about the terrified passengers, which would have been more appropriate, but…uh-oh, is my family back in Seattle going to feel the consequences? Boeing has made a lot of bad decisions in the decades since I moved away, and the worst has been the shift from putting the engineers first and at the top of the decision tree and instead promoting all the suits, the MBAs who don’t give a fuck about these machines except as a way to squeeze more money out of the customers. It’s profit uber alles.

A faulty course change pretty well describes Boeing, which went through a restructuring during the 1990s from an “association of engineers” to a firm run by Wall Street shareholders. This catastrophic path has led to another systemic crisis for one of the world’s two major commercial aviation companies, underscoring the deterioration of Boeing’s product quality by financialization, cost-cutting, and outsourcing.

Yep, that’s about it. I’ve known a few engineers in my time, and they’re a bunch of persnickety, demanding people who would have cut a suit dead if they dared to suggest cutting corners on a basic safety issue to save a few bucks. They can be pretty obnoxious that way, daring to rebut such plans with math and analyses and outrage at the temerity of some damn business guy daring to tell them how to make a hunk of metal fly better.

Let’s also blame the airlines. They’re not about safety or even reliable transportation — I’ve had so many bad experiences with airlines that I’m not going to fly unless the situation is pretty dire. Last summer I had scheduled a flight to a science conference, and instead of getting to Syracuse, I spent two days sitting in an airport until they finally just canceled the whole trip beneath me…and offered me a $300 travel voucher to repeat the same bad experience with the same goddamn airline.

After subjecting their passengers to a horrific terror-ride on their improperly maintained airplane, Alaska Airlines offer their traumatized customers a refund and $1500. $1500! Would you take a $1500 offer to fly on a plane that was going to blow out midflight?

I guess in the future I’ll (1) simply not fly anywhere, or (2) if I’m faced with essential travel, book on Airbus, or (3) take a train, if possible, which it often isn’t in America. I’m suddenly sympathizing with Richard Lewinton, who was infamous for refusing to fly. I think it wasn’t because he was a scaredy-cat, but because the state of air travel in this country is deplorable.

I’m blaming capitalism.

You can always trust the Republican candidate to be wrong on all matters of science. Now Trump is opining on magnets. It’s all part of his long history of complaining about magnetic elevators and electronic catapults on aircraft carriers, and it’s just plain stupid.

This guy is the leading Republican candidate. He’s an idiot.

Join me in getting a glimpse of the demented, broken minds of the people who idolize right-wing autocrats.

Here’s Neil Strauss, formerly best known for writing about pick-up artists, and then landed a job writing cover stories for Rolling Stone. I don’t know why. He wrote the November 2017 cover story on Elon Musk, the Architect of Tomorrow.

If we don’t send our civilization into another Dark Ages before Musk or one of his dream’s inheritors pull it off, then Musk will likely be remembered as one of the most seminal figures of this millennium. Kids on all the terraformed planets of the universe will look forward to Musk Day, when they get the day off to commemorate the birth of the Earthling who single-handedly ushered in the era of space colonization.

And then the article just goes on and on in this vein. I couldn’t get far before cramping up with all the cringing.

Matt Binder tells us about Kevin Sorbo’s January 6th Twitter epistles. It’s a classic, here they are in chronological order:

Beautiful descent. I remember watching Hercules with the kids years and years ago…if I knew then what we know now…

It’s January 6th! Not normally a date to party down, but if I were to celebrate it, this is a good way to do so: arrest more insurrectionists. Three more traitors got picked up from their hideout in Florida today. Three years after the fact…the wheels do grind exceedingly slow, but it means we’ll be getting these events for a while to come.

Stupid dupes. I feel no sympathy for these people who challenged the law in order to support a colossal fool and fraud like Trump.

The Washington Post featured this messy caricature of the 147 Republicans who opposed the election of Joe Biden, and are now trying to get re-elected, in spite of their opposition to democracy. I don’t care for it.

The problem is that it exaggerates the surly, nasty, hateful expressions of each individual to the point that they are unrecognizable. I stared at this image for a long time trying to figure out who was who, and just couldn’t do it. At least the article provides a labeled key, which in this case is absolutely essential.

For instance, here’s my state representative, Michelle Fischbach.

If all you knew was the caricature, would you recognize her walking down the street? I don’t think so. Even familiar, easily cartoonish people like Cruz and Green are harder to identify than they should be.

Sure, it accurately captures the spirit of the person — Fischbach is a nasty regressive Catholic culture warrior — but a caricature should at least give us a hint of the physicality of the figure being mocked, or it’s going to miss every time.