Loose Ends (132)

I see Dr. Fauci is saying that perhaps we should make “seasonal mask wearing” a permanent thing. How about No. This idea summons an occasion for Michael Uhlmann’s suggestion that whenever someone like Fauci comes up with some kind of nifty idea to improve the world, you should repeat the idea aloud, slowly, in a German accent, and see if it still sounds as good. Move over “your vaccine papers, please”; here comes “vere is your mask?”

Bonus: there’s actually a German word for people like Fauci: “Weltverschlechterer,” which means “world-worsener.” (Come to think of it, the Biden Administration staffed full of Weltverschlechterers.)

Anyone notice the complete silence from the Green Nude Eel types about the cyber-hack shutdown of the Colonial Pipeline? These are people who oppose all new pipelines, and would tear down existing ones if they could (take Michigan’s Governor Whitless, for example, who has ordered pipeline shutdowns in Michigan for no good reason), but with parts of the East Coast a couple days away from running out of gasoline and other petroleum products, no doubt the Greenies understand that maybe people might warm up to the idea of having more robust pipeline infrastructure. Imagine if this shutdown occurred in the depth of winter, and curtailed heating oil supplies to the frigid northeast. Gosh, pipelines are just the kind of thing that you might once have found in a Democratic “infrastructure” bill.

Update to our story from a couple weeks back about Cypress College student Braden Ellis, who stood up to his ignorant woke professor about the police.  The initial news items about the matter omitted identifying the professor in the video. I had said that I thought I might have identified the professor from the surprisingly sparse faculty information available on the Cypress College website, but awaited some better information, which caused a couple of commenters to chide me for holding back.

It turns out that I had in fact incorrectly guessed the likely party. It has been confirmed this week that the professor in the video is Faryha Salim, who appears to be another in the large army of low-paid adjunct instructors that colleges and universities are using on a large scale these days. There is not much information available on Salim’s academic background, but she has apparently been placed “on leave” for the rest of this semester, and won’t be rehired in the fall at Cypress.

There is a larger lesson here: whenever someone of scant academic accomplishment is outed publicly for ridiculous or radical views (think Ward Churchill from more than a decade ago), colleges often cut the person loose out of a proper sense of embarrassment. But we can say with a high degree of confidence that there are a lot of Salims and Ward Churchills throughout higher education, and it tells you something that colleges never weed out such people except when there is a public embarrassment.

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