'Are you an Emmy winner over there in the back of the room?'

'The bottom of your chin looks like a butt, sir'

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On Aug. 31 Yale’s 23rd president, Peter Salovey, announced he would be stepping down. Since this announcement, much has transpired in the world of American higher education: the resignation of Harvard and UPenn presidents, the creation of campus encampments nationwide, and the cancelation of commencements at Columbia and USC. These developments point to an American higher education system that is malfunctioning. The breakdown we are witnessing at Yale’s peer institutions will continue until leaders are chosen for their courage to apply wisdom to divisive issues.  America’s Founders understood the importance of higher education. Of all his great accomplishments, only three made it onto Thomas Jefferson’s headstone: Author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and the father of the University of Virginia. Jefferson knew that America’s ability to be great and good–UVA’s motto–depended on the presence of high-functioning universities. America’s first polymath, Ben Franklin, famously said, “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” Framers like Franklin and Jefferson understood the value of academic pursuits, and their example lit a spark that motivated generations of Americans to pursue higher education.  When functioning correctly, a nation’s universities serve as a formidable asset. It isn’t difficult to draw a straight line between America’s great achievements and its world-class academic institutions. Would Jonas Salk invent a vaccine for polio without the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine? Would George H.W. Bush end the Cold War peacefully without Yale College? Would Sergey Brin and Larry Page create Google without Stanford University’s Computer Science Department? These leaders, and countless more, received educations enabling them to create and lead in ways positively impacting the lives of everyday Americans. Our nation can’t afford to disrupt these pipelines of educated talent. And it isn’t enough for graduates to just be talented. The success of our nation depends on universities producing graduates with values motivating them to be productive, grateful, and honorable citizens.    At Yale, much has changed since its founding in the 18th Century, but one thing has not–Urim and Thummim, the Hebrew translated as Light and Truth. Since these words first appeared on Ezra Stiles’ diploma in 1746, they have served the institution as a guiding light. As the Yale Corporation navigates its search for its 24th president, I urge it to incorporate a new Hebrew word as a beacon. The word is Daas/Da’at, which means the application of wisdom. It is critical for Yale’s next president to exemplify this important trait. Without it, Yale will fall victim to many of the fights plaguing peer institutions.  The past decade has seen college campuses transform into one of the key battlegrounds of America’s culture war. At almost every turn, leadership has failed to wield the necessary wisdom to confront the barrage of divisive issues. A lack of wisdom resulted in UPenn’s former president stating, “It is a context-dependent decision” when asked by Congresswoman Stefanik if “calling for the genocide of Jews constitutes bullying and harassment.”  Another episode lacking wisdom surfaced on Oct. 7, when Yale’s Dean Burgwell “Burgie” Howard retweeted a crude, one-sided TikTok explanation of the conflict as Hamas carried out its massacre. With this post, Howard spread a message indicating Israel believes it is entitled to the land because an “ancient book of made-up stories” says so, and its citizens ask if Palestinians would “be happy enough to just piss off and die.” In an email I wrote to Dean Howard, I explained: “It is the instinct that concerns me. Why is your instinct to amplify a simplistic explanation designed to be divisive? It seems only logical that a Yale dean who leads student life should avoid this type of messaging at all costs. Yale’s leaders should be modeling wisdom and moral clarity so its students develop the conscience and moral fiber needed to properly respond to tragedies.” There are a few U.S. university leaders currently modeling the wisdom our nation’s academic institutions so desperately need. One example is Ben Sasse, a Yale PhD, who is leading the University of Florida through the same storm impacting institutions like Columbia, Harvard, and UPenn. Sasse’s values are the difference maker in generating clear messaging: In the wake of the Hamas massacre, while many university presidents were gripped by moral relativism, President Sasse wrote, “This is a fallen world. When evil raises its head, as it has in recent days, it is up to men and women of conscience and courage to draw strength from the truth and commit themselves to the work of building something better–to the work of pursuing justice and peace.” When dealing with student protestors who broke university rules he said, “This is not complicated: The University of Florida is not a daycare, and we do not treat protesters like children–they knew the rules, they broke the rules, and they’ll face the consequences.” President Sasse has taken decisive and principled actions because he understands that failing to do so will impede his institution from fulfilling its core mission.  The future of Yale depends on who the Yale Corporation chooses as the next president. As the Corporation narrows its list it should be focused on one trait: Daas. When a president embodies the application of wisdom, Yale will overcome divisive issues and produce graduates with the values our nation demands.   This article was originally published by RealClearEducation. The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation. The post The Most Important Trait for Yale’s Next President: Courage appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The same day the Biden administration and European Union offered their condolences over the death of Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi—the “Butcher of Tehran”—the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, sought the arrest of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli war council members over imaginary war crimes. The first question we need to ask is: Karim Khan and what army? It’s not worth taking a deep dive into the intricacies of law and war, because Hamas does not recognize any moral or legal restrictions on warfare and the International Criminal Court has no real jurisdiction over anyone, anyway. Khan says, “Nobody is above the law.” But there is no such thing as international law. The term is a contradiction and a fantasy. Law is a system of rules regulating citizens—in our case, with the consent of the governed—and is overseen with due process and enforced with penalties. Americans do not recognize any international government, so there can’t be “international law.” Though we occasionally enter treaties with other nations—neither the U.S. nor Israel signed onto the ICC agreement in 2002—the ultimate authority that governs us is the Constitution. We do not recognize the ability of illiberal European institutions to punish our citizens, and neither does Israel. None of that is to mention that the ICC is an enemy of the Jewish State masquerading as a court. Just read the indictment. To begin with, the ICC draws a moral equivalence between the actions of Israel and Hamas. Need it be repeated, Hamas—which even the EU designates as a terrorist organization—targets civilians, women, and children for murder and rape and torture. It is still holding hostages, among them Americans. It does not recognize any rules of warfare. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was never indicted by the ICC. Nor has Bashar al Assad. Nor has Xi Jinping. Nor have dozens of other genocidal dictators. Netanyahu is charged with “extermination,” “starvation of civilians,” and “intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population,” among other imaginary crimes. The ICC presumably relies on the wholly conjured fatality statistics provided by Hamas and spread by the media and the Left. The Israel Defense Forces estimates it has killed around 15,000 terrorists from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, or half of the fatalities—which is a better civilian-to-combatant ratio in an urban warfare setting than perhaps any in history. Notice as well that indictments only charge members of right-center Likud who are in the war cabinet. Right now, Israel has a unity government. Every major political party in Israel is in basic agreement that Hamas must be destroyed in Gaza. There is no government coalition that could survive that does not hunt down the remaining Hamas battalions. And the war cabinet, overseeing the decisions that brought on the ICC indictments, features Netanyahu’s biggest political rival, Benny Gantz, as well. Yet he is not charged. Placing blame on this one man falls in line with the American Left’s rhetoric about Israel’s democratically elected unity government. Using Netanyahu as a straw man is a politically expedient way to attack Israel’s democracy. The entire point of the ICC indictments is to further isolate Israel and reward Hamas. (Israel was about to host Khan to explain their decision-making process, but the “prosecutor” was not interested.) In this regard, the real tell is that the alleged crimes cover actions in both the “territory of Israel” and the “State of Palestine.” The ICC creates a fictitious “state” and downgrades an existing one to a “territory”—even though it is recognized by most United Nations member states. There is no Palestine. An independent Arab Palestine has never existed. There is no historical precedent for it. It didn’t exist under Ottoman rule or the British Mandate or, in the end, under a United Nations Partition Plan that was rejected by every single Arab state and Palestinian leadership. It didn’t exist when the Palestinians were ruled by governments in Jordan and Egypt (a time when there was virtually no international pressure to create an independent “Palestine”), and it didn’t come into existence when the Arab states rejected Israel’s peace gestures after the 1967 and 1973 wars. If Palestinians keep supporting nihilism and terrorism, such a state may never exist. And it won’t make one lick of difference how the U.N. or ICC or EU describes Gaza in press releases. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.  The post Lack of Jurisdiction and Biased Indictment: ICC’s Imaginary Case Against Israel appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Emergency Preparedness – Summer Storms, Tornadoes and Hurricanes

They Are Delusional

UCLA Protesters Set Up a New Encampment Yesterday

Have you been looking for an article you read several years ago but just cant find it? If it was written in 2013, there is a good chance it has simply disappeared from the internet. That’s according to new research from the Pew Research Centre which found that nearly 40 percent of all webpages created in 2013 are no longer accessible because of “digital decay”.Far from being indelible creations, the new analysis demonstrates just how fleeting online content really is. Digital decay is the gradual degradation, corruption or obsolescence of digital information over time.  According to their results, 38 percent of content that existed in 2013 is not available today. When they expanded the scope of this analysis, the researchers found that a quarter of all web pages that existed at some point between 2013 and 2023 were now inaccessible. In most cases, this was because the relevant page(s) were deleted or removed from otherwise functional websites.In this context, the team defined “inaccessible” as a page that is no longer on the host server – the type of thing that will usually lead to a 404 message or another error code.To gather the data for their analysis, the researchers used random samples of just under 1 million webpages (around 90,000 pages per year) from the Common Crawl archives, an internet repository that periodically takes snapshots of the web as it exists at different times. They gathered this information for the years between 2013 and 2023 and then checked to see if those pages still existed.Around 25 percent of those created in this period were no longer accessible as of October 2023. This sum is made up of two types of defunct content: 16 percent of pages were “individually inaccessible” but were on otherwise accessible root-level domains. The other 9 percent, however, were inaccessible because the entire root domain no longer existed.“Not surprisingly, the older snapshots in our collection had the largest share of inaccessible links”, the report’s authors explained.By the end of 2023, 38 percent of the pages collected in the 2013 snapshot were gone. But even the content of the 2021 snapshot suffered from this decay, with about one in five pages being lost.There were also some interesting comparative results for different types of web pages. For instance, the analysis examined the reference links to 50,000 English-language Wikipedia pages. They found that 82 percent of the sampled pages had at least one reference link that took users to non-Wikipedia pages – however, 11 percent of “all references linked on Wikipedia” aren't accessible anymore.On around 2 percent of the source pages sampled, every link was inaccessible or broken, while around 53 percent contained at least one broken link.Government websites also offered some curiosities. The team found that around three-quarters of the 500,000 government web pages they sampled tended to have at least one link. The median average page contained 50 links, but many contained more. The vast majority of these pages go to secure HTTP pages and 16 percent redirect to other pages.But around 21 percent of the examined government pages contained a least one broken link as well. City government pages, it seems, were the worst offenders in this context.Even news sites were not free from the issue. Across the news sites they sampled, researchers found that around 94 percent contained at least one link that took readers away from the website. The median page contained around 20 links, and pages in the top 10 percent had around 56 links.The analysis shows that, like government websites, the vast majority of these links were to secure HTTP pages. Around 32 percent of the links on these news sites redirected users to different URLs than the ones that were originally used. Around 5 percent of news website links are now inaccessible and around 23 percent of all the pages had at least one broken link.Finally, on Twitter (now X), the researchers found that, out of 5 million tweets posted between March 2013 and 2023, 18 percent were no longer available.“In a majority of cases, this was because the account that originally posted the tweet was made private, suspended or deleted entirely,” the researchers explain. “For the remaining tweets, the account that posted the tweet was still visible on the site, but the individual tweet had been deleted.”They also found that tweets were particularly prone to disappearing or being deleted if they were written in certain languages. For instance, half of all Turkish-language tweets and a smaller share of those in Arabic, were no longer available.In total, most “tweets that are removed from the site tend to disappear soon after being posted.”The report is published on the Pew Research Centre website.  

Two different groups of astronomers have reported the discovery of an exoplanet that might be an Earth twin, or maybe a Venus-like world. This world is a fantastic target for exploration and it might provide crucial insights into rocky planets like our own – and their habitability.The planet is called Gliese 12 b and it orbits a star that is much smaller and cooler than our Sun. It is 27 percent of its size and has only 60 percent of its surface temperature. Gliese 12 b is in the hotter part of the habitable zone, which is much smaller around this star, and the planet orbits it in just shy of 13 days.Gliese 12 b is also 4 percent smaller than Earth, a bit more similar in size to Venus. In terms of starlight, it gets about 60 percent more than Earth does, but only 85 percent of what Venus experiences. So, it could be like Earth. Or maybe it had the same runaway greenhouse effect as Venus and it is a hellish world. Or it could have a thin or non-existent atmosphere making it more like a hot Mars or large Mercury.Gliese 12 b is between Earth and Venus in temperature, its atmosphere could teach us a lot about the habitability pathways planets take as they develop.Larissa Palethorpe"Gliese 12 b represents one of the best targets to study whether Earth-size planets orbiting cool stars can retain their atmospheres, a crucial step to advance our understanding of habitability on planets across our galaxy," said Shishir Dholakia, lead author of one of two papers describing this work and a doctoral student at the Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Southern Queensland, in a statement.Researchers are interested in the potential for an atmosphere. If it hasn’t got one, its surface temperature would be too bad: 42°C (107°F). That is about three times Earth’s average of 15°C (59°F). But if it does have one, things could be very different – and also very interesting."Much of the scientific value of this planet is to understand what kind of atmosphere it could have. Since Gliese 12 b gets in between the amount of light as Earth and Venus get from the Sun, it will be valuable for bridging the gap between these two planets in our solar system," Dholakia explained.         "It is thought that Earth's and Venus's first atmospheres were stripped away and then replenished by volcanic outgassing and bombardments from residual material in the solar system,” added Larissa Palethorpe, a doctoral student at the University of Edinburgh and University College London."The Earth is habitable, but Venus is not due to its complete loss of water. Because Gliese 12 b is between Earth and Venus in temperature, its atmosphere could teach us a lot about the habitability pathways planets take as they develop."Red dwarfs such as the one in the Gliese 12 system can be very active, but the star is so close to making it an ideal target for current observatories like JWST, as well as future ones. They should be able to see if the planet does or doesn't have an atmosphere and if it does, even work out its composition. This would be a major step forward in understanding how rocky planets evolve.“Follow-up observations with JWST and future ground-based observations with 30-meter class telescopes for transit spectroscopy are expected to determine whether Gliese 12 b has an atmosphere and whether the atmosphere contains molecular components associated with life such as water vapor, oxygen, and carbon dioxide,” Masayuki Kuzuhara, lead author of the second study and a project assistant professor at the Astrobiology Center (ABC) in Japan, said in a statement.Papers presenting this work are published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.