thependulumswings

The first Ten Piece Nuggets serving of 2024 awaits your consumption below.

1.  Let’s not obfuscate facts.  Claudine Gay got in hot water when she stubbornly refused before Congress to denounce antisemitic speech at Harvard.   Her plagiarism problem has been lurking in the halls of Harvard for years.
2. While she has been removed from the office of president, let’s also realize that she keeps her 900k a year professorship there.  Only in America can plagiarism be ok at the professorship level but not at the President’s level.   Wait till we rename plagiarism.  How about “work share?”  “Cooperative wording?” 
3. The tired and incorrect finger-pointing to racism at the root of this is so predictable.  Victims. Did we already forget that the president of the University of Pennsylvania, M. Elizabeth Magill, resigned four days after she appeared before Congress and evaded the question of whether students who called for the genocide of Jews should be punished? Did we forget that Magill is white?
4.  Has the pendulum reached its penultimate height and begun a slight descent in the opposite direction with this fiasco?  One can hope.  Diversity, Inclusion, and Equality (the acronym is DIE, not DEI, here at BBR) is a direct assault on what made America great, meritocracy.
5.  Of course, white privilege and other word-salad nonsense will spew from this.  What if someone said black privilege is at play here?  Egads!  When do education, communication skills, honesty, and hard work make their way back into the national narrative?  There are two ways to go up.  One has a trap door, the other is sustainable.
6.  Moving along, the hold your breath for its release of the dozens of Epstein’s court documents yesterday was pretty close to a big fat nothing burger.  Names that were already leaked predictably showed up.
7. Of course, this was only 40 of the supposed 250 documents in all.  The still withheld documents should be released in the coming days and weeks.
8.  Isn’t it beyond odd that the FBI raided Epstein’s Island after he died in jail?  Isn’t it odd that he died in jail?  No, and no.  The coverup, including a few redacted names yesterday, smells awful.
9.  President Joe Biden returned to the White House on Tuesday evening after nearly three straight weeks of vacation.  He was asked, “Are you going to do something about the southern border?”  His answer?  “Well, we gotta do something.”   Sometimes simplicity is brilliance.  Sometimes it isn’t.
10.   While you were enjoying fireworks and a hangover the national debt crossed $34 trillion.  Nancy Pelosi was carrying Biden’s water on MSNBC last evening touting his “debt reduction act.”  A beaming Chris Hayes nodded affirmatively so many times that he was mistaken for a 1970s bobblehead which is insulting to the 70s.

You might need a Tums or two.