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From Chris Rufo, at City Journal, "Left-wing DEI bureaucracy has captured Florida State University and installed radical politics as the governing value."
BONUS: At the New York Times, "Education Issues Vault to Top of the G.O.P.’s Presidential Race."
The “Gone Girl” star accompanied his wife, actor-singer Jennifer Lopez, to the ceremony and, due to the power couple’s prime seating inside Los Angeles’ Crypto.com Arena, were seen throughout the night reacting to performances, speeches and quips. But Affleck — no stranger to memes of exasperation — appeared disengaged in the background of host Trevor Noah’s frequent roaming monologues and bored or “miserable” during performances throughout the night, much to the delight of social media. “Someone please check on Ben Affleck #GRAMMYs,” tweeted the Chicks in the Office account. For the record, we did check on Affleck and a representative for him and representatives for Lopez did not immediately respond Monday to The Times’ requests for comment. Meanwhile, images and videos of the subdued “Argo” star-director lighted up the social-media platform, especially a clip of a tense moment between him and Lopez that piqued the interest of amateur lip readers searching for trouble in paradise. Affleck and Lopez wed last year. “When the publicist checks Twitter tells your wife to make you smile for the camera. Oh Ben Affleck,” wrote a user who tweeted the clip. “Ben Affleck worrying if P Diddy was going to perform in 50 Years of Hip Hop ….” added another, referring to Lopez’s ex’s possible involvement in one of the evening’s standout performance collaborations. Spliff Star, left, and Busta Rhymes perform onstage during the 65th Grammy Awards. MUSIC Beyoncé, Harry Styles, hip-hop history and everything else that went down at the Grammys Feb. 5, 2023 And although music legend Stevie Wonder’s and Chris Stapleton’s joint performance got the “Argo” star to his feet, Affleck half-heartedly nodded along to the Motown tribute. “Ben Affleck would rather be anywhere else than front row at the #Grammys2023 watching Stevie Wonder crush Higher Ground,” tweeted Daily Beast writer Matt Wilstein. “Ben Affleck wants to go home Jen. Everyone in this video looks like they are vibing to a different song,” tweeted another user. “Ben Affleck is every introvert everywhere. You can see his batteries draining in real time. Man is already at 23% #GRAMMYs #SaveBen,” wrote another. “Ben Affleck is the 8-year-old dragged to a wedding, wants to go home and play video games,” tweeted NFL veteran Matt Leinart. “Ben Affleck giving off big ‘Only sober guy at a wedding where you know nobody other than your wife’ vibes,” wrote another...
I'm interested to see how this plays out.
It's the end of January, and the industrial city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine can only be reached by a few roads. The threat of being surrounded by Russian troops is ever present. Driving on one of these narrow country roads through the hilly landscape, the thunder of detonations already in your ears, you can make out some of the Ukrainians' old T-72 tanks between the trees – none of Panzerhaubitzer 2000 or Gepard air defense tanks sent by Germany, no American HIMARS multiple rocket launchers. That's not surprising given that, statistically, there is only one of these Western-supplied devices for every 10 or 20 kilometers of front lines? Instead, a gun on wheels appears from behind an embankment, looking as if it had rolled out of a period film: a 57-millimeter caliber cannon, dating back to the end of World War II and mounted on trucks dating from the 1960s. Target control is adjusted from a delivery van, on whose roof a Starlink satellite link maintains contact with the reconnaissance unit that launches drones. The front around Bakhmut shows the extent to which Ukraine is reliant on military aid from the West. The Ukrainian military has modernized its arsenal, mainly with NATO's help. But the wear and tear of the war is so great that Ukrainians are forced in some cases to defend themselves against the Russian attackers using ancient equipment. One of the fighters with the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces, a unit of reservists and volunteers in the Donbas, introduces himself as "Blacksmith." Outside of war, he's an iron craftsman, but now he's an artilleryman. "Pilot" used to be a top manager at a turbine manufacturer. Only the youngest one still seems to have kept his real first name: Dima used to earn his money as a camera assistant on large film productions. Now, he controls the drones. For over a month, the three milled and tinkered with recycled weapons in an old repair shop. In November, they fired the first of them. And how was it? "Very loud. But it's no big deal. I'm a punk musician on the side." "A Game Changer on the Battlefield" Nowhere along the approximately 1,000-kilometer-long front is the fighting in Ukraine currently as fierce as it is in the Donbas. And few cities there have been attacked by Russia's troops as often in recent weeks as Bakhmut. Wave after wave of regular army units and Wagner Group mercenaries have continuously pressed the Ukrainian defenders. Last Wednesday, the Ukrainians admitted that they had to withdraw from the town of Soledar near Bakhmut. This makes the relief in Kyiv that Germany has agreed to supply modern Leopard 2 battle tanks, after months of hesitation, all the greater. Together with their European partners, the Germans plan to deliver a total of two battalions of 40 Leopards each. The United States announced it would send 31 M1 Abrams tanks. Shortly after that, Britain promised Kyiv 14 Challenger tanks. The development marks a turning point. Previously, the West had been reluctant to export such offensive weapons to Ukraine. According to Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the commander of the Ukrainian forces, his army needs 300 Western tanks and 600 armored vehicles to really make a difference against the Russians on the battlefield. Kyiv is nonetheless hoping that the European and American move will mark an inflection point in the war. Zelenskyy wrote on Twitter that he was sincerely grateful to Chancellor Olaf Scholz and "all our friends in Germany." Deputy Foreign Minister Andriy Melnyk spoke to the news agency Deutsche Press Agentur of an historic moment. He said that Berlin's decision to supply tanks is a "game changer on the battlefield." NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg is also convinced that the Leopards could help Ukraine "defend itself, win and prevail as an independent nation" at a "critical moment" in the war, as he tweeted on Wednesday. Russia's ambassador in Berlin, Sergei Nechaev, on the other hand, described the planned delivery as "highly dangerous" on Twitter. He said the move would "take the conflict to a new level of confrontation." Thus far, tanks have played a largely secondary role in the war. They have primarily been used to provide support to artillery efforts and haven't really been used in direct combat. Military experts believe this could now change. Because of their mobility and range, the Leopard tanks are among the best in the world. They are also more effective than Soviet models at firing accurately while traveling at full speed. According to a report by CNN, the Americans have already suggested to the Ukrainian military that they should change tactics. Instead of getting bogged down in battles of attrition like Bakhmut, they believe the Ukrainians should make quick, unexpected advances. The Western allies are already providing modern armored personnel carriers and troop transport vehicles for this purpose, as well as additional artillery and air defenses. In a future advance, the Leopards could ideally attack Russian positions while the transports carrying the infantrymen break through into enemy territory. Mobile flak tanks like Germany's Gepard would protect against air strikes and at the same time create more space for Ukraine's own fighter jets. Artillery support would come from the the rear with, for example, Germany's self-propelled Panzerhaubitze 2000 howitzer. The Ukrainians already successfully tested a surprise strategy, even with their limited resources, in late summer during their counteroffensive in Kharkiv. Since then, however, the Russians have become more attuned to the enemy and have reinforced their positions...
It's Julia Ioffe, at Puck, "There is a growing fear in Washington that Russia will resort to hybrid tactics to inflict pain on Western powers in ways that it can no longer achieve through conventional warfare alone":
From Moscow’s vantage point, it isn’t simply the gross incompetence of its military and intelligence services that prevented Russia from seizing Ukraine in a flashy blitzkrieg last February. It was the fact that Ukraine was armed with NATO weaponry, its troops trained by NATO advisors, its intelligence services constantly fed information by Western intel agencies. Moscow has made no secret of this frustration or its assertion that the battle for Ukraine was a proxy war against the West, itself. This is why, from the very beginning, Moscow has framed this war as one not between Russia and Ukraine, but rather one between Russia and what Vladimir Putin and his coterie love to call “the collective West.” And, according to this consensual ideology, it is this collective West—not the incompetence of any generals or advisors—that has thwarted Putin’s aims of swallowing Ukraine and fulfilling his dream of a pan-Slavic super state with Moscow at its capital. The Ukrainian military, which has come to be known as the MacGuyver army in defense circles, has fought bravely and with great flexibility, able to deftly outmaneuver what was once considered the second most potent army in the world, doing so with a patchwork of various weapons systems from all the various countries of Europe and the U.S. That’s not as easy as it seems. But Putin is not totally wrong. And, indeed, while Russia has punished the Ukrainian people a bushel and a peck and a noose around the neck, what about the West? Yes, there have been inflationary pressures but that’s not enough: on the whole, the West is wealthy enough to withstand them. Last summer and fall, the West worried about a hard, cold winter exacerbated by the potential twin punch of high energy prices and Moscow’s ability to weaponize Europe’s dependence on Russian energy. As I explained in my dispatch last week, Russia originally thought it could punish the collective West, but that gun didn’t fire. Europe quickly diversified away from Russian oil and gas, depriving Russia of its main energy market. The nuclear threat? Well, that worry seems to have abated a bit for now, too, mostly because, as I noted before, Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi have made very clear to Putin that they will wash their hands of him if he goes nuclear. Right now, isolated from the West, Putin needs them too much economically to risk his own isolation. So what is left? People in the Biden administration are worried that this leaves Putin with one remaining option: unleashing a wave of asymmetric chaos across the West. Think political interference, cyberattacks, assassinations. “The Russians wrote the book on this but they haven’t turned it on,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, who once ran the C.I.A.’s operations in Europe, countering the Russian threat. “Why is that?”
Great. *Eye-roll.*
At the Wall Street Journal, "While the U.S. leads in intercontinental missiles and warheads, China’s gains are fueling debate in Congress":
The U.S. military has notified Congress that China now has more land-based intercontinental-range missile launchers than the U.S., fueling the debate about how Washington should respond to Beijing’s nuclear buildup. “The number of land-based fixed and mobile ICBM launchers in China exceeds the number of ICBM launchers in the United States,” the commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees nuclear forces, wrote the Senate’s and House’s Armed Services Committees on Jan. 26. The notification comes as the U.S. is facing the challenge of deterring Russia’s substantial nuclear forces as well as China’s growing nuclear arsenal. U.S. lawmakers are involved in an increasingly heated debate about how best to counter Beijing, including the Pentagon’s response to the Chinese surveillance balloon that recently traversed the U.S. and hovered over Montana, where a portion of the American military’s ICBM arsenal is deployed. The U.S., which is modernizing all three legs of its land, sea and air based nuclear arsenal, has a much larger nuclear force than China. Many of China’s land-based launchers still consist of empty silos, according to U.S. officials and experts outside government. The Strategic Command also notified Congress that the U.S. has more intercontinental-range missiles based on land, and more nuclear warheads mounted on those missiles, than China. The command’s notifications also don’t include submarine-launched missiles and long-range bombers, where the U.S. has a decided advantage, U.S. officials say. Republican lawmakers, however, have cited the ICBM launchers as a portent of the scale of China’s longer-range ambitions and are urging the U.S. to expand its own nuclear forces to counter the Russian and Chinese forces. “China is rapidly approaching parity with the United States,” said Rep. Mike Rogers, the Alabama Republican who chairs the House Armed Services Committee. “We cannot allow that to happen. The time for us to adjust our force posture and increase capabilities to meet this threat is now.” Mr. Rogers said that limits on long-range forces set by a treaty between the U.S. and Russia, known as New START, are inhibiting the U.S. from building up its arsenal to deter Russia and China. That accord, which China isn’t party to, is set to expire in 2026. Arms-control proponents say rather than trying to surpass China’s and Russia’s nuclear forces, the U.S. has more to gain by trying to preserve treaty limits with Russia and by attempting to draw Beijing into a discussion of nuclear-arms control. They also note that the U.S. is undergoing a major modernization of its nuclear forces that will give Washington the option of adding more warheads to its missiles and bombers should China’s buildup proceed faster than anticipated in the 2030s. “It’s in our national interest to keep the Russians under the New START limits. We need to complete our nuclear modernization according to plan, not pile on new requirements,” said Rose Gottemoeller of Stanford University, who negotiated the landmark treaty for the U.S. Mr. Rogers raised the notification Tuesday morning at a House Armed Services Committee hearing on China and U.S. national defense, which focused mostly on Taiwan, the recent incursion by a Chinese surveillance balloon and other concerns. The Biden administration has acknowledged that the challenges posed by nuclear-armed adversaries are complex and wants the U.S. to deal with them using a mix of arms control arrangements and upgraded nuclear forces. “By the 2030s the United States will, for the first time in its history, face two major nuclear powers as strategic competitors and potential adversaries,” the Pentagon said in a policy document known as the Nuclear Posture Review last year. An immediate challenge for the administration is preserving the New START treaty. The Biden administration said last week that Moscow is violating the accord by refusing to allow on-site inspections. Russian officials said Moscow is still adhering to the limits on warheads, missiles, bombers and launchers. China, which has rejected arms-control talks with the U.S., is on track to field about 1,500 nuclear warheads by 2035, up from an estimated operational stockpile of more than 400 in 2021, according to a Pentagon report that was released last year. China’s nuclear buildup has raised concerns that it might use the threat of nuclear escalation to dissuade Washington from rushing to aid Taiwan during a crisis. The U.S. has refrained from providing Ukraine with long-range weapons or sending U.S. forces to the country because it wants to avoid a direct clash with a nuclear-armed Russia. The growth in China’s nuclear forces also raises the risk that any potential conventional conflict between Beijing and Washington could become a nuclear one, though the Pentagon has said that a military confrontation over Taiwan doesn’t appear imminent. China operates a fleet of mobile ICBM launchers and has about 20 liquid-fueled, silo-based missiles. It is also building three ICBM silo fields that are intended to house at least 300 modern solid-fueled missiles, the Pentagon says. Researchers have debated whether China plans to fill all of the silos with nuclear-tipped ICBMs, whether some might be left empty or whether some might be filled with conventionally armed systems. Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists said commercial satellite images of the Chinese silo fields provide no indication that China’s military has been training to load the new silos with ICBMs or conducting exercises at the silo fields...
Background at WSJ, "U.S. Air Defenses Failed to Spot Earlier Chinese Balloon Intrusions, General Says."
And Tucker Carlson's opening earlier tonight:
At Instapundit, "I HOPE WE’RE NOT TOO MESSIANIC, OR A TRIFLE TOO SATANIC."
And from Liz Wheeler:
Don’t fight the culture wars, they say. Meanwhile demons are teaching your kids to worship Satan. I could throw up.
— Liz Wheeler (@Liz_Wheeler) February 6, 2023
pic.twitter.com/p1rqEwVeSW
Is Britain's National Institute of Health held up as a model of compassionate, government-provided health care? It's often held up as superior in many ways.
At the Wall Street Journal, "The NHS is struggling under the effects of budget cuts, Covid delays and an aging population."
I like it.
At the New York Times, "Donald Trump and possible rivals, like Gov. Ron DeSantis, are making appeals to conservative voters on race and gender issues, but such messages had a mixed record in November’s midterm elections":
With a presidential primary starting to stir, Republicans are returning with force to the education debates that mobilized their staunchest voters during the pandemic and set off a wave of conservative activism around how schools teach about racism in American history and tolerate gender fluidity. The messaging casts Republicans as defenders of parents who feel that schools have run amok with “wokeness.” Its loudest champion has been Gov. Ron DeSantis, who last week scored an apparent victory attacking the College Board’s curriculum on African American studies. Former President Donald J. Trump has sought to catch up with even hotter language, recently threatening “severe consequences” for educators who “suggest to a child that they could be trapped in the wrong body.” Nikki Haley, a former South Carolina governor, who has used Twitter to preview her planned presidential campaign announcement this month, recently tweeted “CRT is un-American,” referring to critical race theory. Yet, in its appeal to voters, culture-war messaging concerning education has a decidedly mixed track record. While some Republicans believe that the issue can win over independents, especially suburban women, the 2022 midterms showed that attacks on school curriculums — specifically on critical race theory and so-called gender ideology — largely were a dud in the general election. While Mr. DeSantis won re-election handily, many other Republican candidates for governor who raised attacks on schools — against drag queen story hours, for example, or books that examine white privilege — went down in defeat, including in Kansas, Michigan, Arizona and Wisconsin. Democratic strategists, pointing to the midterm results and to polling, said voters viewed cultural issues in education as far less important than school funding, teacher shortages and school safety. Even the Republican National Committee advised candidates last year to appeal to swing voters by speaking broadly about parental control and quality schools, not critical race theory, the idea that racism is baked into American institutions. Still, Mr. Trump, the only declared Republican presidential candidate so far, and potential rivals, are putting cultural fights at the center of their education agendas. Strategists say the push is motivated by evidence that the issues have the power to elicit strong emotions in parents and at least some potential to cut across partisan lines. In Virginia, Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s victory in 2021 on a “parents’ rights” platform awakened Republicans to the political potency of education with swing voters. Mr. Youngkin, who remains popular in his state, began an investigation last month of whether Virginia high schools delayed telling some students that they had earned merit awards, which he has called “a maniacal focus” on equal outcomes. Mr. DeSantis, too, has framed his opposition to progressive values as an attempt to give parents control over what their children are taught. Last year, he signed the Parental Rights in Education Act, banning instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in early elementary grades. Democrats decried that and other education policies from the governor as censorship and as attacks on the civil rights of gay and transgender people. Critics called the Florida law “Don’t Say Gay.” Polling has shown strong support for a ban on L.G.B.T.Q. topics in elementary school. In a New York Times/Siena College poll last year, 70 percent of registered voters nationally opposed instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in elementary grades. “The culture war issues are most potent among Republican primary voters, but that doesn’t mean that an education message can’t be effective with independent voters or the electorate as a whole,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, who worked for Mr. DeSantis during his first governor’s race in 2018. Mr. DeSantis’s approach to education is a far stretch from traditional issues that Republicans used to line up behind, such as charter schools and merit pay for teachers who raise test scores. But it has had an impact...
Just when you think you've seen it all.
I'm confused. I thought it was supposed to be right-wingers who are against books. pic.twitter.com/awfdyaaZiQ
— Steven F. Hayward (@stevenfhayward) February 3, 2023
This is freaky cold war-level shit.
At the Wall Street Journal, "Blinken Trip to China Postponed After Suspected Spy Balloon Spotted Over U.S.":
WASHINGTON—The Biden administration said that a suspected Chinese reconnaissance balloon drifting over the continental U.S. violated American sovereignty, and indefinitely postponed a scheduled visit to Beijing by Secretary of State Antony Blinken aimed at easing the acrimony in the nations’ relationship. Officials pulled the plug on the trip hours before Mr. Blinken was set to depart, underscoring the enormous challenges of finding areas of constructive cooperation, even as both capitals reiterated on Friday their commitment to reviving talks at a later date. The Chinese Foreign Ministry denied Friday that the craft was for spying, saying it was a civilian balloon designed primarily for meteorological study that had blown off course. “China will continue to maintain communication with the U.S. to properly handle the unexpected situation,” the ministry said in a brief statement. But the U.S. said it was certain of its assessment of the balloon’s intended purpose, and that conditions therefore didn’t allow for constructive dialogue. The Biden administration has made competition with China a central tenet of its broader national-security strategy. In doing so, it is bearing down on a range of contentious issues, from Taiwan to technology, while expanding its own military presence in the Asia-Pacific to counter Beijing’s rising influence. Mr. Blinken on Friday reiterated the U.S. government’s confidence that the craft was a Chinese surveillance balloon, calling it “a clear violation of our sovereignty, a clear violation of international law, and clearly unacceptable.” “We concluded that conditions were not conducive for a constructive visit at this time,” he said in a joint press conference with South Korea Foreign Minister Park Jin. Referring to the People’s Republic of China, Mr. Blinken said, “The PRC’s decision to take this action on the eve of my planned visit is detrimental to the substantive discussions that we were preparing to have.” He said that the U.S. was focused on getting the surveillance asset out of U.S. airspace and said it was premature to discuss consequences. “I can only imagine what the reaction would be in China if they were on the other end,” Mr. Blinken added. The Pentagon said Friday that the balloon had changed course, was flying east at 60,000 feet over the central U.S. and posed no threat to commercial aviation or to people on the ground. Officials declined to specify its location, but Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall wrote on Twitter that the balloon had been detected over northeastern Kansas. The night before, U.S. officials said the balloon was loitering over Montana, having earlier crossed Alaska’s Aleutian Islands and Canada. The Pentagon scrambled F-22 jet fighters and at one point considered shooting down the balloon, which one U.S. official described as roughly the size of three school buses, but didn’t over concerns that the debris would pose a risk to people on the ground. Defense Department spokesman Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said that the balloon bore a payload of surveillance equipment and was expected to drift over the U.S. for a few more days. The Pentagon said it was still reviewing options and wouldn’t say whether it would shoot the balloon down before it leaves U.S. airspace. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Friday that President Biden had first been briefed on the presence of the balloon on Tuesday and had asked the military to present options. All options, she added, remained on the table. Mr. Biden agreed with the decision to postpone Mr. Blinken’s trip to China, she added, calling it a consensus...
From Suzy Weiss, at the Free Press, "Scores of Facebook groups called ‘Are We Dating The Same Guy’ promise sisterhood and security. But they’re a lot more like a crowd-sourced Stasi":
The screenshot, taken from dating app Hinge, shows software engineer Evan,* with thick black hair and a big, toothy smile. His profile says he is 5 feet 8 inches and graduating from Berkeley. Underneath reads a caption: “Evan, 26 🚩🚩🚩” The way the screenshot is positioned, it looks like Evan is gazing at the red flags next to his name. Evan’s profile had been posted anonymously on the Facebook group “Are We Dating The Same Guy? | New York City NYC”—which started in March 2022 as a place where women compare notes on men. It currently has more than 82,000 members. In the past year, scores of similar Facebook groups have sprung up across the U.S. in cities including Charlotte, Philadelphia, Tampa, St. Louis, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, and Austin, and in far-flung locales such as Kosovo, Melbourne, and Thailand. Some have more than 30,000 members, others less than a hundred. Almost anybody can join as long as you agree to a few rules. One requirement is usually a variation of this: Do you swear that you will not screenshot or share anything found in this group with anyone outside of this group? This is vitally important to the integrity of our group and safety of our members. There are rules against “bullying, gaslighting, shaming, victim blaming, or aggressive behavior,” too. But regardless of the Fight Club–style bylaws, the groups are pretty much a free-for-all. The anonymous woman who posted about Evan regaled her group with stories about their four-month relationship before he dumped her. “He struggles with empathy,” she wrote. “He also never tells you what he needs and expects you to guess what he needs.” “He sounds like a classic love bomber to me,” opined one commenter, whose profile photo shows her posing on an Adirondack chair with a corgi. “Borderline personality disorder,” another commenter snarked. “This push and pull is part of the hunt if he is a covert narcissist,” said a third. “They are skilled predators and usually have had this same relationship over and over again.” Another: “Textbook narc.” Dozens of similar comments followed, speculating about Evan and his various pathologies...
A must-read to understanding the obscenely deranged leftist-Democrat polices now taking over the once-Golden State.
From Abigail Shrier, at City Journal, "On the grounds of creating a more welcoming environment for LGBTQ youth, State Senator Scott Wiener is making California a haven for human trafficking."
Well, that recession everyone's been predicting hasn't materialized. This economy is sizzling, *despite* the loathed Biden administration's efforts to throttle it.
At the Wall Street Journal, "U.S. added 517,000 jobs in January, snapping five-month string of slowing employment growth":
The U.S. labor market accelerated at the start of the year as broad-based hiring added a robust 517,000 jobs and pushed the unemployment rate to a 53-year low. January’s payroll gains were the largest since July 2022 and snapped a string of five straight months of slowing employment growth, the Labor Department said Friday. The unemployment rate was 3.4% last month, its lowest level since May 1969. Wage growth continued to soften last month, despite the strong job gains. Average hourly earnings grew 4.4% in January from a year earlier, down from a revised 4.8% in December. Annual revisions to employment and pay data suggest that wage growth has been cooling—but at a slower pace than previously thought. The average workweek rose to 34.7 hours, the highest since March 2022. “This is just incredibly, surprisingly strong,” said Kathy Bostjancic, chief economist at Nationwide. “Not only are you hiring more workers but the workers you have overall are working more hours. It doesn’t really get stronger than that.” The hiring gain was well above economists’ expectations. Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal had expected 187,000 new jobs last month. The report likely keeps the Federal Reserve on track to raise interest rates by another quarter-percentage point at its meeting next month and to signal another increase is likely after that. The central bank raised its benchmark rate by a quarter point this week to a range between 4.5% and 4.75%. The Fed is trying to keep the economy growing at a slower-than-average pace to weaken demand and cool inflation. But the report Friday suggested the labor market had been even more resilient in recent months than recently reported, with the growth in average hour earnings and payrolls revised higher at the end of last year. Stocks fell and bond yields climbed following the jobs report. Payrolls grew in a range of sectors, including leisure and hospitality, professional and business services and healthcare. The hiring surge contrasted against high-profile corporate layoff announcements, particularly by tech companies that have cut back amid economic uncertainty...
At Amazon, Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman, Spin Dictators : The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century.
This man is amazing.
Behind-the-scenes: the provost and president of New College attempted to shut down our conversation with faculty and students, citing a threat against Trustee Eddie Speir. But Speir and I insisted that we continue with the program—and establish a new standard for open discourse.
Behind-the-scenes: the provost and president of New College attempted to shut down our conversation with faculty and students, citing a threat against Trustee Eddie Speir. But Speir and I insisted that we continue with the program—and establish a new standard for open discourse. pic.twitter.com/XW23nimZM9
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) January 28, 2023And watch, "My Speech to the Faculty at New College of Florida."
This is outrageous. Nothing good will come of sidelining parents like this --- it's tantamount to having the state take your kid away from you.
At the New York Times, "Educators are facing wrenching new tensions over whether they should tell parents when students socially transition at school":
Jessica Bradshaw found out that her 15-year-old identified as transgender at school after she glimpsed a homework assignment with an unfamiliar name scrawled at the top. When she asked about the name, the teenager acknowledged that, at his request, teachers and administrators at his high school in Southern California had for six months been letting him use the boy’s bathroom and calling him by male pronouns. Mrs. Bradshaw was confused: Didn’t the school need her permission, or at least need to tell her? It did not, a counselor later explained, because the student did not want his parents to know. District and state policies instructed the school to respect his wishes. “There was never any word from anyone to let us know that on paper, and in the classroom, our daughter was our son,” Mrs. Bradshaw said. The Bradshaws have been startled to find themselves at odds with the school over their right to know about, and weigh in on, such a major development in their child’s life — a dispute that illustrates how school districts, which have long been a battleground in cultural conflicts over gender and sexuality, are now facing wrenching new tensions over how to accommodate transgender children. The Bradshaws accepted their teenager’s new gender identity, but not without trepidation, especially after he asked for hormones and surgery to remove his breasts. Doctors had previously diagnosed him as being on the autism spectrum, as well as with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, PTSD and anxiety. He had struggled with loneliness during the pandemic, and, to his parents, seemed not to know exactly who he was yet, because he had repeatedly changed his name and sexual orientation. Given those complexities, Mrs. Bradshaw said she resented the fact that the school had made her feel like a bad parent for wondering whether educators had put her teenager, a minor, on a path the school wasn’t qualified to oversee. “It felt like a parenting stab in the back from the school system,” she said. “It should have been a decision we made as a family.” The student, now 16, told The New York Times that his school had provided him with a space to be himself that he otherwise lacked. He had tried to come out to his parents before, he said, but they didn’t take it seriously, which is why he asked his school for support. “I wish schools didn’t have to hide it from parents or do it without parental permission, but it can be important,” he said. “Schools are just trying to do what’s best to keep students safe and comfortable. When you’re trans, you feel like you are in danger all the time. Even though my parents were accepting, I was still scared, and that’s why the school didn’t tell them.” Although the number of young people who identify as transgender in the United States remains small, it has nearly doubled in recent years, and schools have come under pressure to address the needs of those young people amid a polarized political environment where both sides warn that one wrong step could result in irreparable harm. The public school that Mrs. Bradshaw’s son attends is one of many throughout the country that allow students to socially transition — change their name, pronouns, or gender expression — without parental consent. Districts have said they want parents to be involved but must follow federal and, in some cases, state guidance meant to protect students from discrimination and violations of their privacy. Schools have pointed to research that shows that inclusive policies benefit all students, which is why some education experts advise schools to use students’s preferred names and pronouns. Educators have also said they feel bound by their own morality to affirm students’ gender identities, especially in cases where students don’t feel safe coming out at home. But dozens of parents whose children have socially transitioned at school told The Times they felt villainized by educators who seemed to think that they — not the parents — knew what was best for their children. They insisted that educators should not intervene without notifying parents unless there is evidence of physical abuse at home. Although some didn’t want their children to transition at all, others said they were open to it, but felt schools forced the process to move too quickly, and that they couldn’t raise concerns without being cut out completely or having their home labeled “unsafe.” Many advocates for L.G.B.T.Q. youth counter that parents should stop scapegoating schools and instead ask themselves why they don’t believe their children. They said ensuring that schools provide enough support for transgender students is more crucial than ever, given the rise of legislation that blocks their access to bathrooms, sports and gender-affirming care. These disputes are unfolding as Republicans rally around “parental rights,” a catchall term for the decisions parents get to make about their children’s upbringing. Conservative legal groups have filed a growing number of lawsuits against school districts, accusing them of failing to involve parents in their children’s education and mental health care. Critics say groups like these have long worked to delegitimize public education and eradicate the rights of transgender people. But how schools should address gender identity cuts through the liberal and conservative divide. Parents of all political persuasions have found themselves unsettled by what schools know and don’t reveal. Mrs. Bradshaw said she wouldn’t align herself with Republican lawmakers who sought to ban L.G.B.T.Q. rights, but she also felt as though her school’s policy left no room for nuance. “It is almost impossible to have these discussions,” Mrs. Bradshaw said. “There is no forum for someone like me.” Other self-described liberal parents said they registered as independents or voted for Republican candidates for the first time as a result of this issue. Although they haven’t sued, some have retained lawyers affiliated with the largest legal organization on the religious right to battle their children’s schools. In November, Erica Anderson, a well-known clinical psychologist who has counseled hundreds of children over gender identity-related issues and is transgender herself, filed an amicus brief in a Maryland lawsuit in support of parents represented by a conservative law group. The parents have argued that their district’s policy violates their own decision-making authority. Transitioning socially, Dr. Anderson wrote, “is a major and potentially life-altering decision that requires parental involvement, for many reasons.” She told the Times that she had to push aside her qualms about working with conservative lawyers. “I don’t want to be erased as a transgender person, and I don’t want anyone’s prerogatives or identity to be taken away from them,” she said, “but on this one, I’m aligned with people who are willing to advocate for parents.” The debate reflects how the interests of parents and those of their children do not always align, said Justin Driver, a Yale Law School professor who has written a book about constitutional conflict in public schools...
Seoul could go nuclear in a heartbeat. Given the sketchy security situation in East Asia, I wouldn't blame them.
At the New York Times, "President Yoon Suk Yeol said that if North Korea’s nuclear threat grows, his country may build a nuclear arsenal of its own or ask the United States to redeploy in the South":
SEOUL — President Yoon Suk Yeol of South Korea said for the first time on Wednesday that if North Korea’s nuclear threat grows, South Korea would consider building nuclear weapons of its own or ask the United States to redeploy them on the Korean Peninsula. Speaking during a joint policy briefing by his defense and foreign ministries on Wednesday, Mr. Yoon was quick to add that building nuclear weapons was not yet an official policy. He stressed that South Korea would for now deal with North Korea’s nuclear threat by strengthening its alliance with the United States. Such a policy includes finding ways to increase the reliability of Washington’s commitment to protect its ally with all of its defense capabilities, including nuclear weapons. Mr. Yoon’s comments marked the first time since the United States withdrew all of its nuclear weapons from the South in 1991 that a South Korean president officially mentioned arming the country with nuclear weapons. Washington removed its nuclear weapons from South Korea as part of its global nuclear arms reduction efforts. “It’s possible that the problem gets worse and our country will introduce tactical nuclear weapons or build them on our own,” said Mr. Yoon, according to a transcript of his comments released by his office. “If that’s the case, we can have our own nuclear weapons pretty quickly, given our scientific and technological capabilities.” South Korea is a signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, or NPT, which bans the country from seeking nuclear weapons. It also signed a joint declaration with North Korea in 1991 in which both Koreas agreed not to “test, manufacture, produce, receive, possess, store, deploy or use nuclear weapons.” But North Korea has reneged on the agreement by conducting six nuclear tests since 2006. Years of negotiations have failed to remove a single nuclear warhead in the North. (American and South Korean officials say that North Korea could conduct another nuclear test, its seventh, at any moment.) As North Korea vowed to expand its nuclear arsenal and threatened to use it against the South in recent months, voices have grown in South Korea — among analysts and within Mr. Yoon’s conservative ruling People Power Party — calling for Seoul to reconsider a nuclear option. Mr. Yoon’s comments this week were likely to fuel such discussions. Opinion surveys in recent years have shown that a majority of South Koreans supported the United States redeploying nuclear weapons to the South or the country’s building an arsenal of its own. Policymakers in Seoul have disavowed the option for decades, arguing that the so-called nuclear-umbrella protection from the United States would keep the country safe from North Korea. “President Yoon’s comment could turn out to be a watershed moment in the history of South Korea’s national security,” said Cheon Seong-whun, a former head of the Korea Institute for National Unification, a government-funded research think tank in Seoul. ”It could shift its paradigm in how to deal with the North Korean nuclear threat.” Calls for nuclear weapons have bubbled up in South Korea over the decades, but they have never gained traction beyond the occasional analysts and right-wing politicians. Under its former military dictator Park Chung-hee, South Korea embarked on a covert nuclear weapons program in the 1970s, when the United States began reducing its military presence in the South, making its people feel vulnerable to North Korean attacks. Washington forced him to abandon the program, promising to keep the ally under its nuclear umbrella. Washington still keeps 28,500 American troops in South Korea as the symbol of the alliance. But in recent months, North Korea has continued testing missiles, some of which were designed to deliver nuclear warheads to the South. Many South Koreans have questioned whether the United States would stop North Korea from attacking their country, especially at the risk of leaving American cities and military bases in the Asia-Pacific region more vulnerable to a nuclear attack. Washington’s repeated promise to protect its ally — with its own nuclear weapons, if necessary — has not dissipated such fear. In its 2022 Nuclear Posture Review, a document that outlines Washington’s nuclear policy for the next five to 10 years, the Pentagon itself noted the “deterrence dilemmas” that the North posed to the United States. “A crisis or conflict on the Korean Peninsula could involve a number of nuclear-armed actors, raising the risk of broader conflict,” it said. “If South Korea possesses nuclear weapons, the United States will not need to ask whether it should use its own nuclear weapons to defend its ally, and the alliance will never be put to a test,” said Cheong Seong-chang, a senior analyst at the Sejong Institute in South Korea. “If South Korea owns nuclear weapons, the U.S. will actually become safer.” By declaring an intention to arm itself with nuclear weapons, South Korea could force North Korea to rethink its own nuclear weapons program and possibly prompt China to put pressure on Pyongyang to roll back its program, Mr. Cheong said. China has long feared a regional nuclear arms race in East Asia. South Korea would need to quit the NPT to build its own arsenal. Analysts said that quitting the NPT would be too risky for the South because it could trigger international sanctions. Some lawmakers affiliated with Mr. Yoon’s party and analysts like Mr. Cheon want the United States to reintroduce American nuclear weapons to the South and forge a nuclear-sharing agreement with Seoul, similar to the one in which NATO aircraft would be allowed to carry American nuclear weapons in wartime. The American Embassy had no immediate comment on Mr. Yoon’s statement.
The spin from the Los Angeles Times: "LAPD’s repeated tasing of teacher who died appears excessive, experts say."
Right. Here's the full context:LAPD released videos of their arrest of Keenan Anderson, a "cousin" of #BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors. He died hours after getting tased during an arrest on Jan. 3 while committing a felony hit & run & attempted car theft. He had cocaine in his system. https://t.co/9a1yBSj3FQ
— Andy Ngô 🏳️🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) January 13, 2023
At Vanity Fair, "'HE IS IN A WEIRD BUNKER'":
Holed up at Mar-a-Lago, and hawking NFTs, Trump has yet to hold a rally since announcing his run. “Money is a real issue,” one source said. Rather than freezing the field, the campaign would now like to see it fill up—the recipe for a 2016 repeat."
She's an associate professor at Oxford, and a contributing writer to the New Yorker --- and something of a literary social media sensation, it turns out.
On Twitter.
I was shocked, like everybody else, no doubt. I like Trevor Lawrence, but I like Justin Herbert too, and after Lawrence gave up four --- four! interceptions, by halftime it seemed impossible for Jacksonville to come back. But they did. Boy did they ever.
The Jacksonville Jaguars trailed the Los Angeles Chargers 27-0 in the opening round of the NFL playoffs and just about everything that could go wrong had gone wrong. Jaguars quarterback Trevor Lawrence had thrown four interceptions—in the first half. The Jags muffed a punt. They looked precisely like the sort of team that squeaked into the playoffs with a middling record simply because they played in a crummy division. And that’s because that’s how they reached the postseason. Then came a comeback that was nothing short of epic. When the Jaguars beat the Chargers 31-30 on a field-goal as time expired, it marked a stunning turnaround for Lawrence; a massive choke by Los Angeles; and the brilliance of a game-changing call by Jacksonville coach Doug Pederson. By erasing a 27-point deficit, the Jaguars completed the third-largest comeback ever during the NFL playoffs. It also comes just weeks after the Minnesota Vikings’ historic 33-point comeback against the Indianapolis Colts during the regular season. Lawrence became just the second quarterback ever to throw four touchdowns and four interceptions in a playoff game...
I was dumbfounded like everybody else. The worse thing is for the life of me I couldn't see the actual fumble until the closeups of the replay. I was just, "What?!!"
At WCPO News 9 Cincinnati, "WATCH IT AGAIN: Cincinnati's own Sam Hubbard runs 98-yard fumble recovery for TD in Bengals-Ravens wild card,"and WGPH Fox 8, "Ravens’ John Harbaugh: QB Huntley Erred on Goal-Line Fumble: The Baltimore coach blamed improper execution on the play that ultimately decided the Ravens’ playoff fate."
WATCH:
A new USA Today/Ipsos poll, "What's going to happen in Washington over the next 2 years? Americans don't expect much: An exclusive USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll shows pessimism about the prospect for compromise or action by a divided government."
Via Susan Page:
ICYMI: Why is bipartisanship so difficult? In our new @USATODAY @IpsosUS poll, only one in ten Americans thinks neither major political party is too extreme. How can you compromise when you think the other side, or both sides, are out of the mainstream? >>> https://t.co/1o7heVVM8W
— Susan Page (@SusanPage) January 16, 2023
This is something.
At the New York Times, "The self-exiled royal has given the world a warts-and-all look at his family — with an emphasis on the warts":
LONDON — King Charles III has long pushed the idea of slimming down the British royal family. If his younger son’s unsparing new book is any indication, he has achieved his goal, though not in the way he intended. The publication of Prince Harry’s memoir on Tuesday — with its scorched-earth details about his rupture with his family — seems likely to dash any near-term prospects that Harry will return to the fold by reconciling with his father; with Camilla, the queen consort; or with his older brother, Prince William. The book, titled “Spare,” paints a portrait of a hopelessly divided House of Windsor. Far from the smooth-running operation known as The Firm, it comes across as a collection of warring fiefs, where family members jockey for advantage with a complicit tabloid press, trying to buff their images by dishing dirt on one another. With Harry and his wife, Meghan, estranged and living in Southern California; the king’s disgraced younger brother, Andrew, in internal exile following his settlement of a sexual assault lawsuit; and the death of Queen Elizabeth II last September, the family’s senior ranks have dwindled to a handful of figures. Even those who remain are caught in a poisonous public-relations contest that pits family members against one another, according to Harry. He writes that an aide to his father and stepmother planted negative stories in the London newspapers about William and his wife, Catherine — a practice that he said also tormented him and Meghan and contributed to their decision to leave. “I was displeased about being used this way, and livid about it being done to Meg,” Harry said in the book, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. “But I had to admit it was happening much more often lately to Willy. And he was justifiably incandescent about it.” Buckingham Palace has stuck to its policy of not commenting on the book or on the cavalcade of television interviews Harry has done to promote it. But as the disclosures reach a clattering peak this week, royal experts predicted Charles and William would have to reach some kind of accommodation with Harry, if only to prevent the rift from overshadowing the king’s coronation in May. The Harry-and-Meghan drama, several royal experts said, has become the gravest crisis confronting the monarchy since the fraught aftermath of the death of Harry’s mother, Diana, the Princess of Wales, in a car crash in the late summer of 1997, when the queen came under rare criticism for not showing enough sympathy. “The key thing that rescued them every time in the past was that the queen was above reproach,” said Peter Hunt, a former royal correspondent for the BBC. “But we now have a king who is himself a divisive figure.” The palace has signaled that Harry and Meghan might be invited to the coronation, suggesting that Charles still hopes to play a healing role. But in an interview Sunday with an ITV correspondent, Tom Bradby, Harry was noncommittal about attending. “There’s a lot that can happen between now and then,” he said. So much has already happened that it is hard to imagine Harry in dress uniform, marching to Westminster Abbey with his father and brother. “This seems unsustainable,” said Ed Owens, a historian who has written about the relations between the monarchy and news media. “It suggests an institutional failure, and a complete contradiction to how historians think of The Firm as always working together. They’re just as often at odds with each other.” Mr. Owens said William, one of the most popular royals, had been particularly damaged by the book. Harry, the “spare” to William’s heir, portrays his elder brother as ill-tempered, entitled and prone to violence, knocking Harry to the floor in one altercation and grabbing his shirt in another. “They’ve got to get a grip on how they deal with Harry,” Mr. Owens said. The latest drip of disclosures began last week with teasers for a promotional TV interview Harry did with ITV and another with the CBS program “60 Minutes.” It accelerated after the book, published by Penguin Random House, leaked out nearly a week before its publication date, first in The Guardian and later in other papers after it was mistakenly put on sale in Spain. The Times obtained its copy in London. For days, nuggets from the book have been splashed across front pages. “Outrageous boast,” The Daily Mirror said Saturday of Harry’s claim that he had killed 25 Taliban fighters as a helicopter pilot in Afghanistan. “Wills lunge at me after Philip’s funeral,” The Sun said on Sunday, referring to Harry’s account of a tense meeting with his brother after they buried Prince Philip, their grandfather, in 2021. On Monday, after the TV interviews, the tabloids played up the claim that Harry had walked back one of the most explosive accusations made by him and Meghan in their interview with Oprah Winfrey in March 2021: that a member of the royal family had spoken in racist terms about their unborn child. The episode is not mentioned in “Spare,” which is curious since Harry skips little else, from his recreational drug use to how he lost his virginity in a field behind a pub. Speaking to Mr. Bradby, Harry did not retract the couple’s claim that a family member had speculated anxiously about the skin color of the child. But he said it was an example of “unconscious bias” rather than racism. Questions of racism reverberated for weeks after Ms. Winfrey’s interview, forcing William to deny that the royal family was racist. They resurfaced again recently when a former lady-in-waiting to the queen, Susan Hussey, was stripped of her duties and forced to apologize after subjecting a Black British guest at Buckingham Palace to insistent questioning about where her family came from. For a few royal watchers, Harry’s decision not to reprise those accusations left the door open for some sort of peacemaking...
The Los Angeles Times has continuing rain and flood reporting here, "Southern California faces another day of punishing rains: ‘We are definitely not out of the woods yet’."
And at CBS News 2 Los Angeles:
She's nasty. I never paid her that much attention, even though she's my congresswoman. But recent news stories have highlighted how disagreeable she really is, and that's putting it nicely.
In late December, Reason had this: "California Congresswoman Katie Porter Blamed, Punished a Staffer For Allegedly Giving Her COVID-19."
And at Fox News: "Rep. Katie Porter used racist language, ‘ridiculed people for reporting sexual harassment,' ex-staffer claims: California Democrat accused of running toxic office."
She's vile, and now she's going to inflict her reprehensible personality on the entire state.At the Los Angeles Times, "Rep. Katie Porter announces bid for Feinstein’s Senate seat."
You can see just how nasty she is at the video:
At the Los Angeles Times, "A string of atmospheric rivers that has left more than 400,000 without power in California will be followed by two major episodes of heavy rain and mountain snow in the next several days, forecasters say."
And watch, at KCRA News 10 Sacramento, "Some Wilton residents choose not to evacuate ahead of strong storm," and "Here's a look at rainfall totals from Sunday night to Monday morning, levels at Arcade Creek."
At the Wall Street Journal, "President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s newly elected government says supporters of former leader Jair Bolsonaro tried to overthrow it."
Also, at the BBC, "Brazilian forces regain control after Congress stormed," and Memeorandum.
And Sky News, here:
From Michael Lind, at the Tablet, "The U.S. is losing its economic advantage in a new era of global conflict."
Good stuff for the new year.
At Yahoo, "Rally star Ken Block dies in snowmobile accident," and at the U.S. Sun, "RACER TRAGEDY Ken Block dead at 55 – Top Gear star and rally driver legend’s cause of death revealed after horror accident."
Block's video of him flying and sliding through San Francisco in a 650-horsepower Ford Fiesta has been viewed at least 110 million times.
Heh.
Brazen.
The mofo is brazen.
At Total Pro Sports, "Steelers’ RB Najee Harris Snatches Microphone From Melissa Stark Following Win vs. Ravens on SNF (VIDEO)."
At 2:40 minutes below:
This dude, at Liberals Leaving, has the rap down!
From Claire Berlinski:
I now know that a great number of my fellow Americans are bonkers. Not even passingly acquainted with the Reality Principle.Stark staring nuts. Off their trollies.
— Claire Berlinski. (@ClaireBerlinski) January 2, 2023
I spent the better part of my life having no idea this was so.
It's weird to know better, now.
Hmm.
Let's see if these predictions hit gold.
At the Wall Street Journal, "More than two-thirds of economists at 23 major financial institutions expect the U.S. to have a downturn this year."
