Enough is Enough

by

Last night in Tucson:

(University of) Arizona has apologized for a derogatory chant aimed at BYU following the Cougars’ 96-95 upset of the No. 19 Wildcats in Tucson on Saturday night.

Per video of the incident, Wildcats fans chanted an expletive and “Mormons” toward BYU, the flagship school of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as players exited the floor.

If you follow the video at the link you clearly hear that chant in the background.

We can play the “Mad Libs” game where if you swap out “Mormons” for say a racial group or Muslims those students would already have been kicked off campus.

As I have mentioned before, anti-Mormon bigotry is a pervasive form of acceptable hate among our elites and on our campuses. In fact as evidenced by the video, they revel in it. This doesn’t go into the fact that nearly 7% of Arizona is LDS and that church and its members have played a vital role in the state’s history.

I know LDS members take these things in stride, they have seen far worse, but enough is enough. I would hope that the AZ Speaker of the House and President of the Senate have already gotten the Chair of the Arizona Board of Regents and the UofA President on the phone for a nice friendly chat and informed them of the rough ride ahead in the Legislature if they doesn’t deal with the hate.

I’m sure with some analysis of the video feeds we can find the people responsible and I’m willing to bet they are students.

I have two possible solutions. Note neither them involve academic punishment We’ll keep it to the level athletic events and facilities. I guess we could be Trumpian and make an outrageous opening mood (say civil rights charges) to get leverage, but this is just little ole me.

One, the next time BYU is in Tucson for a game eliminate the student section. In fact keep those seats empty. Make it a very public reminder that students are adults and need to behave as such.

Two, from the video identify the worst 100 offenders and ban them from all UofA athletic facilities for a period of five years on pain of prosecution for trespass. I think that would be appropriate. Notice I said “facilities” and not “events” because UofA holds its graduation ceremony in the basketball arena Sorry you kids, cannot come to your graduation, you are banned from the facility. Explain to your families why.

Next week, how to deal with pro-Hamas demonstrators and students who rush the court/field.

Trevor Noah and Brown v. Board

by

I have the guilty pleasure of scanning the traditional media and entertainment. It’s not that any of the various personalities I come across have any intelligent thoughts of their own, witness the ramblings of Margaret Brennan, but their utterances provide a glimpse into the larger sociology of the Left.

So it was of interest that I came across former “Daily Show” host Trevor Noah’s “What Now?” podcast where he interviews Princeton University professor Ruha Benjamin. Noah states:

“And that’s a really powerful thing I’ve learned in communicating with other people. When I’m in a room with anyone where we start to tie together multiple things. So, if I’m in a room with Black people, already there’s like an implicit trust because we know what certain actions, words, and vibes mean.”

I find Noah to be a poseur, and of course he has to have a podcast. But he provides us a great service by providing a gathering place, much like a watering hole on the Serengeti, where he and his ideological ilk can gather in a place of perceived safety and can be observed. So Noah extends his remarks and a little later asks Benjamin:

“Do you think that integration was the right move?”

Read more

In At the Beginning

by

Reading here and there about what can only be viewed as corruption of various charitable agencies by an apparent flood of government dollars, I am certain now that I was inadvertently present at the very start of that corruption – a warping of charitable concern towards refugees, as well as non-refugee migrants, the homeless, the addicted and the otherwise socially maladjusted. I was a college student in my junior year at a no-name public university, at the time of the fall of the South Vietnamese in 1975. My adolescent years had been haunted by the ongoing war in Vietnam, a war painted in the most horrific colors by the then-extent national media. I grew up in a place, a time and in a class of Americans where men were much more likely to be drafted and sentenced to serve for a year in what was painted by the national establishment media as a pointless, endless, thankless war.

Read more

Brennan, JD Vance, and the Spirit of 1776

by

I’m sure most of you by now have heard of Margaret Brennan’s comment during her exchange with Secretary of State Rubio on “Face the Nation.”

“Well he was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide…”

Brennan got raked over the coals by the Right for that comment, since she seemed to imply that the Nazis 1) were in favor of free speech and 2) were using free speech to conduct the Holocaust in the same way they used gas chambers and bullets. Her point, that words are violent (I thought it was silence that was violence), was reinforced by the fact that Vance’s speech brought the chairman of the Munich Security Conference to tears.

Mr. Heusgen is obviously a man who doesn’t think about the Roman Empire every day.

Read more

Trade, Tariffs, and Prices, continued

by

Palmer Luckey, founder & CEO of Anduril, on the importance of US manufacturing.

Warren Buffett had an interesting suggestion for an approach to tariffs: Import Certificates. The idea is that when you export products, you receive import certificates, according to the dollar value of the products exported.  In order to import products, you need to provide Import Certificates of equivalent value.  And the certificates trade. So the system would be self-balancing.

Buffett suggested this approach in a Fortune article more than 20 years ago, I have no idea if that’s still his view, but I think it’s an interesting approach. The original Fortune article is still online but paywalled, the content can be read without subscription here.

See also my post Trade, Tariffs, and Prices from last November, in which I cited an earlier post:

In a world with global and highly-efficient transportation and communications…and billions of people who are accustomed to low wages…is it possible for a country such as the United States to maintain its accustomed high standards of living for the large majority of its people?…and, if so, what are the key policy elements required to do this?

This question should be fundamental to discussions of trade policy, along with national defense and resilience considerations.  See also the discussion about tariffs and consumer price markups–it’s far from true that it’s always just a simple pass-though.