“A police officer who had a woman jailed for over two years on false charges in connection with a bogus sex-trafficking ring cannot be sued, a court confirmed.., because she was acting under color of federal law—a puzzling reminder of the inverse relationship between power and accountability in government.”
“It’s true that institutions of higher education are not entitled to federal funding, which, after all, is paid by taxpayers. The Trump administration, or any administration, could decide, in a moment of unusual frugality, that the U.S. is too indebted to continue sending billions of dollars to wealthy private organizations that have their own massive endowments. But the government shouldn’t use the threat of a funding cut as a form of coercion.
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a provision of the settlement that permits the feds to collect and read Brown faculty course evaluations, and that’s legitimately concerning. In fact, it speaks to the most troubling aspect of the settlement: It lends itself toward the creation of a campus antisemitism police that will be laser-focused on identifying, cataloguing, and eliminating uncomfortable and offensive speech that is nevertheless clearly protected by the First Amendment. In other words, the Trump administration is directly encouraging the formation of campus safe spaces.
The settlement instructs Brown to survey students on their feelings of emotional safety. The survey questions are really something, and include: “whether they feel welcome at Brown; whether they feel safe reporting anti-Semitism at Brown; whether they have experienced harassment on social media.” These are vague questions that will prompt subjective answers. Social media harassment is a particularly fraught topic; what constitutes harassment? If one student is being unkind to another student on Instagram or TikTok, is it really the university’s job to intervene?”
Joe Rogan spread false information based on a graph that he appeared to misunderstand. The article that the graph is from explained why what he was saying is false, so he appears to have not read or understood the article. Many other popular influencers and show hosts brought up Rogan’s false information, spreading it further and cheering on Rogan’s spread of falsity.
Countries recognizing a Palestinian state while Hamas is in power helps cement their power because Hamas can claim that their strategy worked. Their strategy of terrorist attacks and using their people as human shields worked to get the Palestinian state recognized by more countries.
MRNA vaccines are developed faster, so can more quickly deal with a new virus, and can more quickly be adapted to mutating viruses like the flu.
MRNA technology may also be able to help fight cancer.
Good data don’t support links to negative health from food dyes. So, using government influence to get companies to remove them is uneconomical and a foolish government policy.
The Trump administration made a potentially good deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan wants a corridor to its territory that is separated by Armenia. Armenia would consider such a corridor an infringement of its sovereignty. Both sides agreed to let the U.S. and private companies manage the corridor while it remains Armenian territory.
Gavin Newsom tweets in a manner that mirrors Trump’s tweets; Fox News calls it childish for a governor to tweet in such a way while not similarly criticizing the president of the United States. Ridiculous hypocrisy.
Trump administration ruins an FBI agent’s career because he’s friends with the wrong guy. Every other agent now has to worry that if they do something that bothers Trump, even something that is legal and legitimate!, they might lose their job.
This is not the way to retain the best employees for our government! Nor how a democratic country operates.
Trump removes people with great experience for bad reasons, then puts in shills he thinks are loyal. The remaining underlings see that the way to keep their jobs is to shut up, and do what they’re told, even if the shills at the top don’t know what they’re doing.