Holy shit.

He's going for the endowments.

He's going to not only tax, but confiscate the endowments of every university that the Department of Justice finds has engaged in illegal discrimination under the guise of "equity".

Which is basically every university in the country, but is especially the DIEvy League, which, if this happens, will die.

This will crush one of the enemy's primary power centers.

If he goes through with this, it's a Henry VIII moment. Dissolution of the monasteries. Vast quantities of capital liquidated and removed from the control of his political enemies ... and vast intellectual capital liberated from the cloistered, cloying oversight of midwit administrators. Really didn't expect this to blow up, or would have spoken more carefully.

To be clear, Trump says the DOJ will go after the endowments of universities that continue discriminatory practices. So, past discrimination doesn't count. They need to wilfully continue discriminating.

My bet, however, is that the universities are so packed with anti-white, feminist ideologues that they will try to find sneaky, deniable ways to continue discriminating - for example, ignoring SATs and GPAs in favor of admissions essays. The California university system, which is specifically prohibited from engaging in affirmative action, has been pulling this kind of thing for years; the Ivies did something similar after the Supreme Court decision striking down affirmative action.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is a religious project for these people.

But Trump has now indicated that if they defy him, they will simply be crushed.

Physicist @CJHandmer has an audacious proposal: a 1-kilometre space telescope for mapping exoplanets.

The problem: it isn’t big enough.

A 🧵 about what the Monster Telescope can't do, what it can, and how we can go even bigger to see alien worlds in high rez. 1/24 Handmer published his proposal in @palladiummag, you can read it here.

Briefly, he wants to use Starship – which can put large amounts of material into orbit very quickly – to launch a fleet of 20,000 8-metre mirrors (each of which would already be larger than any space telescope ever launched; James Web is only 6.5 m), which will self-assemble into a colossal 1-km diameter mirror.

The ambition is breathtaking! 2/24

palladiummag.com/2024/10/18/its…

Academia is women’s work now.

That spells it’s doom.

A 🧵 about status arenas, male flight, why dudes rock, and the death spiral of academia.

1/22 There’s a large gap between male and female enrolment, across all racial groups. The enrolment gap has increased steadily since the 1970s. There;s also a gap in graduation rates – men are much more likely to drop out –which compounds the effect of the enrolment gap.

Recently, universities reached the threshold of 60%

2/22

Demographic engineering via mass immigration may trap us in single-party Zimbabwe states run by gay race communists. Maybe we stop this, get populists elected, remigrate the invaders. Maybe not. If not, what then?

A 🧵 about the foundation of democracy in organized violence. As Heinlein said in Starship Troopers, “Violence is the supreme authority from which all other authority is derived.”

Violence is the foundation of politics. This isn’t just true as in the old saw about the state having a monopoly on violence, or as in Clausewitz’ dictum that war is politics by other means. It’s more basic than that. Politics is fundamentally about finding ways to channel violence away from socially corrosive ends, such as crime or blood feuds, and towards socially useful ends, such as defence of the realm or conquest of new territories; and it is about finding alternative means of resolving disputes which are less wasteful of tribal lives than violence.

How did a formerly respectable, once excellent publication focusing on high quality popularization of cutting edge scientific research turn into a cut rate political rag?

Forget about the masthead. Let's look at the people hiding behind it.

First up: the editor in chief, Laura Helmuth.

Helmuth is actually a scientist (PhD cognitive neuroscience), although she prefers to be known as a Woman In Science. From her bio, "She speaks frequently on ... ways to use social media effectively and fight misinformation." Next up, the managing editor Jeanna Bryer.

Bryer has an English BA, an MSc in biogeochemistry, and a graduate degree in journalism. Not really a scientist, though apparently she did some wetland conservation work.

"She is a firm believer that science is for everyone". Does 'everyone' include Trump voters? Rhetorical.

Yikes, that haircut though. Just screams 'bitter middle aged shrew with penis envy'.

Several hundred years ago, a small force of Spaniards landed on the shore of a land heretofore wholly unknown to European man. What followed has been characterized as the mass enslavement of an entire people, the systematic extermination of a culture, and as a genocide.

It was all of those things.

But try to see it from their perspective. These were not sophisticated men. They were second and third sons, with no inheritance to secure their futures, who had struck out on their own to chance their fortunes in the New World as soldiers and adventurers. They hailed from a military culture, which had within living memory concluded a reconquest of their ancestral peninsula that had taken seven centuries to complete. They were hard men from a hard people.

If you're curious, the Trump trial self-immolationist's manifesto is available on SS.

Was he a leftist with TDR?

Outraged MAGA?

Nope.

He's a schizo who thinks The Simpsons was a mind control plot to prepare the world for global fascism via crypto ponzi. These things are happening more and more. Starting to wonder if burning oneself alive to draw attention to one's cause is the new mass shooting.

People are being driven off the edge by the confluence of a decaying social order and ontological fracture.

Norman Rockwell depicts modern America. Body Count