Pun Salad

It's early, but (via Ann Althouse) I have a feeling this is the most amazing thing I'll see today:

Ann also has a short video response from some guy named Roger Daltrey.

Also of note:

• A modest proposal. Arnold Kling recommends separation of University and State.

  I am fond of saying that government involvement in an industry typically consists of subsidizing demand and restricting supply. In the case of higher education, supply is restricted by requiring schools to be accredited, and then turning the accreditation process over to the incumbent institutions. Naturally, this leads to a strong barriers to entry.

  To subsidize demand, the government provides all sorts of loans and grants to students and faculty. Higher education is one of the most powerful lobbies in the country. Because the public is lulled by the non-profit status of universities, there is no outcry over “Big Higher Ed” the way that there is about Big Pharma or Big Tech or Big Finance.

  Universities claim to be essential to upward mobility. They have lobbied for “college for everyone” as a goal. I feel sorry for anyone who buys into this.

  I believe that we need many fewer people going to college, many fewer professors, and many fewer administrators. Instead, we need many more alternatives: trade schools, apprenticeships, online education, innovative teaching models, and even far-out ideas like a network university.

  Couldn't happen too soon. Helping along (as reported by Cory Stahle at Hiring Lab: Educational Requirements Are Gradually Disappearing From Job Postings.

  And we also need undoing of Occupational Licensing.

• Jay's Journey. It's been interesting to witness Jay Bhattacharya's odyssey From “Fringe” to Mainstream. As described by John Tierney at City Journal:

  Four years ago, Jay Bhattacharya was ostracized by his colleagues at Stanford and censored on social media platforms thanks to a campaign against him by the public-health establishment. The director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, sent an email to another NIH official, Anthony Fauci, urging a “quick and devastating published takedown” of Bhattacharya and his fellow “fringe epidemiologists.”

  Bhattacharya is far from the fringe today. Donald Trump nominated him this week for Collins’s old job, director of the NIH. Assuming the Senate confirms him, it will be a major victory for science and academic freedom—and a serious threat to the universities that suppressed scientific debate and promoted disastrous policies during the pandemic, causing public trust in science to plummet. Academic researchers and administrators have mostly refused to acknowledge their mistakes, much less make amends, but Bhattacharya promised yesterday to “reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again.”

  Also optimistic about Bhattacharya's prospects is John Sailer, writing in the WSJ: Jay Bhattacharya Can Bring Science Back To NIH.

  The distorted priorities of American academia often have roots in the federal government. The National Institutes of Health pours millions of dollars into universities for large-scale hiring efforts based on diversity, equity and inclusion. Jay Bhattacharya, President-elect Trump’s nominee to lead the NIH, can put an end to it.

  The NIH’s Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation program, or First, bars universities who receive its grants from hiring on the basis of race, but my reporting shows that many schools do it anyway. In one galling example, a grant recipient stated bluntly via email: “I don’t want to hire white men for sure.” The First program is modeled on the NIH’s own “distinguished scholars program.” Through a Freedom of Information Act request, I acquired records that show how the NIH makes these selections. Application reviewers repeatedly highlight candidates’ sex and minority status and favor those fluent in the vocabulary of progressive identity politics.

  On paper, the program doesn’t involve racial preference. As Hannah Valantine, former NIH Chief Officer for Academic Workforce Diversity, described it in a lecture, the program aims to “change the culture” by recruiting “a critical mass” of scientists “committed to diversity, to inclusion, to equity, and to mentoring.” “Notice that I did not say any particular racial, ethnic or group or gender,” Ms. Valantine added, “because legally we cannot.”

  The implied unvocalized addon to that quote: "… but, trust me, we're doing whatever we think we can get away with."

  For another example, see the "Statement on Race-neutral Admissions" on the "Diversity, Equity, Access & Inclusion" page at the University Near Here.

• A belated Thanksgiving link. The Miami Herald excavates a twenty-year old Dave Barry column: We'd rather eat turkey.

  Thanksgiving is that very special holiday when we take a break from our hectic everyday lives to spend quality time with our loved ones, rediscovering all the reasons why we don't actually live with them.

  But Thanksgiving is also a spiritual time of quiet reflection - a time when we pause to remember, as generations have remembered before us, that an improperly cooked turkey is - in the words of the U.S. Department of Agriculture - "a ticking Meat Bomb of Death."

  Yes, it is a tragic but statistical fact that every Thanksgiving, undercooked turkeys claim the lives of an estimated 53 billion Americans (source: Dan Rather). Sometimes the cause is deadly bacteria; sometimes - in cases of extreme undercooking - the turkey actually springs up from the carving platter and pecks the would-be carver to death.

  One interesting thing to note here is that Dan Rather was a credibility punchline twenty years ago, thanks to "Rathergate".

• A long tradition of failure. Jacob Sullum probably has the most predictable recommendation among Reason's many targets for abolition: Abolish the DEA.

  In 1973, the year the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was born, the federal government counted about three drug-related deaths per 100,000 Americans. By 2022, when the DEA had been waging the war on drugs for half a century, that rate had risen tenfold.

  That does not look like success. Nor do trends in drug use. In a 1973 Gallup poll, 12 percent of Americans admitted they had tried marijuana. According to federal survey data, the share had risen fourfold by 2023, when the percentage reporting past-year drug use was more than double the 1995 number.

  What about drug prices, which the DEA aims to boost through source control and interdiction? From 1981 to 2012, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the average, inflation-adjusted retail price for a pure gram of heroin fell by 86 percent. During the same period, the average retail price for cocaine and methamphetamine fell by 75 percent and 72 percent, respectively. In 2021, the DEA reported that methamphetamine's "purity and potency remain high while prices remain low," that "availability of cocaine throughout the United States remains steady," and that "availability and use of cheap and highly potent fentanyl has increased."

  The inability of our elected representatives to recognize a failed policy has caused me to be bitterly sarcastic at times.

  I can't promise I'll improve anytime soon.