Pun Salad

Mr. Ramirez might have gone with Bearded Spock, but instead:

Im a similar vein, Jeff Maurer turns his substack over to a guest author, Nicole Brown Simpson, who writes: Ukraine Should Not Have Attacked Russia, Just Like I Should Not Have Murdered O.J. Simpson.

But enough sarcasm for today. Francis Fukuyama is dead serious, and correct, when he calls recent moves The Ultimate Betrayal.

On second thought, maybe "ultimate" is the wrong word here. Trump has plenty of time left in his term to do lots more betrayal.

I assume Trump's post-Presidential memoir will be titled The Art of the Stupid, Cowardly, Evil Deal.

Also of note:

• Or maybe Look What You Made Me Do. Christian Schneider characterizes Trump as An Arsonist Posing as a Firefighter (gifted link).

  ‘The whole aim of practical politics,” wrote H. L. Mencken, “is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”

  A century later, we have entered the era of government by hobgoblin. The nation looks on as our president creates imaginary crises that — you guessed it — only he can solve. President Donald Trump continues to be the guy in the neighborhood who smashes storefront windows and then begs glass-repair shops to support him because of his economic stimulus plan.

  Of course, in the run-up to the 2024 election, America had genuine issues that needed addressing. Customers at McDonald’s shouldn’t have to pay for their Filet-O-Fish meals using an installment plan. Illegal immigration at the southern border was a humanitarian catastrophe. Grievance culture had run amok.

  Had Donald Trump stuck to these primary concerns, he would be swimming in goodwill. Instead, he has chosen to invent bizarre crises and pretend to fix them, as though his currently decent approval ratings were guaranteed to last.

  Instead, we got the Gulf of America, Greenland, Panama, Canada, a war with the AP, …

  And of course, betrayal,

• Elon Musk: Vampire Hunter. Eric Boehm presents a simple truth, countering wild assertions from DOGE: Social Security's Insolvency Is Driven by Benefits for the Living, Not Fraud by the Dead

  Elon Musk claims that his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has uncovered "the biggest fraud in history" within the Social Security Administration: Payments to millions of Americans who have likely been dead for a long time.

  That claim seems to be based on a faulty understanding of Social Security data on Musk's part. More to the point: Social Security's fiscal problems aren't the result of fraudulent payments to people who are already dead. It is not benefits for the dead, but rather payments to the living that are driving the program toward insolvency.

  "According to the Social Security database, these are the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE," Musk posted to X earlier this week, along with a chart that purports to show that millions of people over age 100 are still in the program's database. "Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security," Musk suggested.

  Maybe. But other explanations seem more plausible—and none of them involve the government paying Social Security benefits to people well over 100 years old.

  Also urging Elon to stop playing Abraham Van Helsing is Mark J. Warshawsky at AEI: DOGE and Dead People.

  Recently, Elon Musk has made claims while standing with President Trump in the Oval Office that his DOGE associates found that Social Security Administration (SSA) databases contain records of millions of superannuated people, in particular 150 year-olds, not recorded as dead. And he claimed that this finding warrants deep concern that there is rampant retirement benefits fraud at SSA. While the first claim is true, the second is not.

  According to the Inspector General (IG) at SSA, in December 2020, there were about 19 million individuals born in 1920 or earlier who did not have death information on their SSA data record. Only 44 thousand of these individuals, however, are receiving retirement benefits, broadly consistent with Census Bureau data that then there were about 86 thousand people age 100 or older alive in the US. Of the 19 million without death information, about 11 million are recorded with years of birth in 1899 or earlier. In particular, many are apparently coded with the birth year, 1875 (supporting Musk’s claim of 150 year-olds in the SSA database), but this seems to be just a common reference point in the COBOL coding when a birth date is missing or incomplete. Again, though, this is not evidence of fraud – SSA’s own rules and procedures since September 2015 have automatically stopped benefit payments if the beneficiary is age 115, with certain unusual exceptions.

  COBOL! "Now there's a name I've not heard in a long, long time."

  And (continuing our theme) if there ever was a computer language that deserved a stake through the heart…

• There's some good news, even if it's decades delayed. Emma Camp reports: Education Department orders schools to stop all racial discrimination.

  Last Friday, the Department of Education released a "Dear Colleague" letter directing educational institutions to stop all forms of racial discrimination in essentially all aspects of their operations, including "admissions, hiring, promotion, compensation, financial aid, scholarships, prizes, administrative support, discipline, housing, graduation ceremonies, and all other aspects of student, academic, and campus life."

  The letter, from Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor, mostly reiterates existing civil rights prohibitions on racial discrimination, as well as the 2023 Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that barred race-based affirmative action in college admissions.

  "If an educational institution treats a person of one race differently than it treats another person because of that person's race, the educational institution violates the law," the letter reads. "The Department will no longer tolerate the overt and covert racial discrimination that has become widespread in this Nation's educational institutions. The law is clear: treating students differently on the basis of race to achieve nebulous goals such as diversity, racial balancing, social justice, or equity is illegal under controlling Supreme Court precedent."

  I have no idea whether the upcoming "Audre Lord Summit (formerly known as the MLK Summit) will run afoul of the new order. Unfortunately, it's really hard to dictate that this sort of language be eliminated:

  Through active participation in the Audre Lorde Summit, students will be able to:  

  1. Explore strategies to co-create community norms and shared expectations to foster and engage within a brave space.  
  2. Develop a shared meaning of dialogue through conceptualizing and recognizing different modalities of verbal communication including discussion, debate, speech, and dialogue and how they are used.  
  3. Explore intergroup dialogue as a collaborative tool for engaging differences and developing a shared understanding. 
  4. Identify understanding of how our intersecting identities, social structures, and institutions shape our experiences as foundational to engaging in intergroup dialogue.  
  5. Demonstrate the ability to navigate dialogue on critical issues by exploring and practicing frameworks such as the learning edge, affirming inquiry, and responding to triggers appropriately.  
  6. Develop individual goals relating to personal leadership action planning and alliance building to empower continued personal growth and engagement for inclusive leadership.  

  That is some impressive word salad. Navigate that dialogue, student! Conceptualize and recognize those different modalities!

• Yeah, it's not as if they were doing a good job of that. Jerry Coyne is disappointed: The AAUP abandons its mission to defend academic freedom. He quotes from a Chronicles of Higher Education article by Chicago law professor Tom Ginsburg:

  The first salvo came last summer, when the committee issued a statement legitimating academic boycotts, reversing a prior position from 2006 that had declared systemic boycotts to be incompatible with academic freedom because they limit the capacity of scholars to collaborate with whomever they choose. That had been a sensible position. But the new iteration of Committee A suggested that academic boycotts were a “legitimate tactic” and were acceptable against colleges that had themselves violated academic freedom. A bitter debate about Israel is the barely veiled subtext. Whatever the proponents of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions movement say about it being limited to institutions and not individuals, it has led to hundreds of cancellations of collaborations with and invitations to individual Israeli scholars, both Arab and Jewish, at a time when that country’s democracy is in deep trouble. In other words, the AAUP has endorsed a practice that interferes on the ground with the academic freedom of individual scholars — precisely the outcome the prior committee had foreseen — while claiming to be neutral on the specific issue of Israel.

  Next, in October, the AAUP blessed diversity statements as compatible with academic freedom. Mandatory diversity statements are in fact orthogonal to academic freedom, as they do not concern research or teaching. Faculty are divided on their use: Some view them as providing mechanisms to enhance racial diversity among the faculty without running afoul of the law, while others see them as devices to ensure ideological homogeneity. There is significant concern about their legality. The AAUP affirmatively defends them: “Meaningful DEI faculty work,” the organization says, “should be evaluated as part of the core faculty duties of teaching, research, and professional service.” It is hard to imagine that any college receiving federal funds will be able to sustain this posture over the next month, much less the next four years. No leader should have to fight for an already controversial enterprise, one essentially unrelated to academic freedom, when the academic enterprise is under existential threat.

  And more at the link. Sad!