News Digest

Lowering the Bar

No surprise — law schools are going woke. Which means even corporate-lawyers-in-training have to pretend to hate capitalism. This fall, first year students at Stanford Law School were greeted with a National Lawyers Guild guide on how students can reconcile their “anti-racist, anti-capitalist, etc. beliefs” with the law school experience. According to The Washington Free Beacon, this guide comforts first-years that, thanks to the Guild’s support, “every day you learn about how evil the U.S. legal system is.” It also lays down the law on Stanford itself: “Elite law schools exist to serve elite interests — upholding the patriarchal racial colonial capitalism that crushes people and planet.” Incoming students are reassured that they will be “learning how not to give a f—.”

Tips for dealing with the eeeevil law education include: seeing a therapist, skipping homework, and remembering that great grades aren’t everything. According to the Stanford Law website, the Stanford National Lawyers Guild is “dedicated to the liberation of all people.” But if prospective lawyers really wanted to be liberated from this gobbledygook, they’d file a class-action suit to stop capitalist-based student fees from supporting it.

Bum Rap

The Chi-Com propaganda beat goes on. China has already infiltrated American culture — they’ve co-opted the sports world and Hollywood — now they’re aiming at rap. As evidence mounts that covid-19 originated from the Wuhan lab, the Chinese Communist Party [ccp] is trying to drum up blame to deflect elsewhere: an American military lab. As The Washington Free Beacon reports, the Chinese government is using a ridiculous rap video to carry their disinformation. Because the Chi-Coms apparently consider bad rap the best instrument for their anti-American bs.

In a heavy foreign accent, the wannabe rapper slams Fort Detrick, MD as “a witch’s cauldron,” wildly mispronouncing the improbable lyrics, including “sanctimonious” as sanni-moan-ee-us. Classic rap it is not. Singing the same tune, Chi-Com newspaper China Daily and Foreign Ministry spokesman Lijian Zhao are also blaming Fort Detrick for the pandemic, because everyone knows Maryland was the coronavirus epicenter. not.

The conspiracy-theory rap video includes psychedelic-effect footage of Anthony Fauci calling Rand Paul a liar, spliced with Jen Psaki asking China “to be transparent, to be forthcoming with data and information.” You would stop the music right there, ccp Central, if you gave a rap about the truth.

Power Shopping

A bookcase, a chair, and 50 dollars’ worth of electricity — that could now be a typical purchase from ikea. Ingka Group, which owns most ikea stores around the world, says that, starting in its home market of Sweden, outlets will soon be offering “renewable energy” for sale.

Ingka’s energy partner, Svea Solar, will buy the electricity “on the Nordic power exchange” and resell it to ikea consumers. According to Reuters, the electricity will be produced via solar panels and wind farms, and users will be able to track their electricity usage via a smartphone app. Households will pay “a fixed monthly fee plus a variable rate.” (Whatever that means. Unfortunately, you’ll likely have to rely on ikea instructions for specifics.)

“We want to make electricity from sustainable sources more accessible and affordable for all,” says Jonas Carlehed, head of sustainability for ikea in Sweden. He told Reuters he wants to offer renewable energy and ikea solar panels in all their stores worldwide. What happens when the wind dies and the sun hides in the middle of a dark Nordic winter? Here’s the ikea catalog description: “Buyers of solar: s.o.l.”

Grounded Mound

An “artificial hill” in central London was slated to be one of the city’s newest highlights, but visitors have a universally low opinion of it, reports AP. Marble Arch Mound was designed to attract shoppers back to the commercial heart of London. At 80 feet high, it’s supposed to offer inspiring views of Oxford Street and Hyde Park. However, actual viewers were inspired to dub the mound “a slag heap.”

The thing cost $8.3 million to construct, almost double the pre-build estimate. The Westminster Council member who oversaw the project resigned as the cost soared — and profits took a nosedive. Tickets were originally $6.50, but everything went downhill from there. The greenery died and visitors complained, calling it “London’s worst tourist attraction,” according to the bbc. The Council minimized the issues as “teething problems,” reassuring the public that “the mound is a living building by design. We’ll continue to adapt and improve London’s newest outdoor attraction.” So far, the most notable improvement is the price reduction. Climbing the mound will remain free until it closes in January, when it will presumably become an official junk pile.

CLIMATE CRAZIES

Doom Drills

Ah, fall — the start of the new school year and the season for hurricanes whirling up the Atlantic coast. But according to fema, “Climate change is making natural disasters more frequent, more intense, and more destructive.” So the feds are allocating big fema funds (i.e., taxpayers’ money) to teach K-12 students “skills and knowledge” to prepare for climate cataclysm.

According to “Ring the Alarm: It’s Time for U.S. Schools to Have Climate Disaster Drills” in The Hill, two disaster aficionados say “preparedness” for climate calamity needs to be taught just like fire drills and earthquake drills. Joshua DeVincenzo and David Mazzuca of Columbia’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness say students need to be trained to pack emergency “go bags,” to recognize “signs of heat exhaustion in loved ones,” and to “avoid flood-prone roadways.”

And why miss the chance to use federal funds to turn students into preppers? Kids under 18 are already panicked by climate catastrophe talk. According to the bbc, a new global survey reveals that nearly 60 percent of young people say they feel very or extremely worried about climate change. Three-quarters say the future is frightening. And 56 percent say humanity is doomed.

But DeVincenzo and Mazzuca think kids need even more scaremongering. They claim that disaster preparedness hasn’t been incorporated into K-12 education because educators don’t know where to fit it. Well, why not make it the whole curriculum? It’s not as if anyone’s teaching the three Rs anyway.

Against the Tide

A new nasa website is making waves, trying to keep the rich jittery about rising seas at their favorite hotspots due to global warming. As reported by The Hill, luxe resort areas like Acapulco and Cabo San Lucas are predicted to be soon flooded by seawater (cramping the vacay style of a certain Austin Democrat mayor flouting his own covid rules). The new nasa platform, called Sea Level Change, lets users envision apocalyptic surging sea levels from 2020 to 2150, using doomsday UN computer models. It “predicts the end of the Mexican coastline as we know it!” screams The Hill. Hardest hit: beaches favored by the wealthy. Will all this alarmism stop the top 1 percent from purchasing huge oceanfront mansions everywhere in the world? It will not. They know it’s all hot air.

Fruity

If you’re not on TikTok, and hopefully you aren’t, you haven’t heard a bunch of lamebrains blame this year’s bad allergy season on capitalism. According to the moronic TikTok conspiracy theory, eeevil capitalist cities planted only “male trees” because greedy capitalists want to deny common people access to free fruit — from “female trees.” So with no female trees to fertilize, “male trees” are producing too much pollen. Voilà: hay fever galore.

Enter botanist Dr. Sarah Taber, who created a “tree sex ed” Twitter thread to set the record, er, straight: “Most tree species have both male and female flowers… There are no ‘male vs female trees’ for most species. It is impossible to plant only male trees.” The rest of the botanist’s answer was celebrated by the gay publication PinkNews: “Trees do not respect the human gender binary. You could say the reason we have so much pollen is [because] trees are super f—ing queer.”

And besides, says Dr. Taber (whose declared pronouns are “she/her”), the severe allergy season is really due to climate change. Because science.

Buzzy Brew

Would you feed bees coffee? No, you would not. Because you are not engaged in the gallant and noble pursuit of science. The New York Post reports on a new study published in the essential journal Current Biology, in which scientists gave bees caffeine to see how diligently they pursued floral aroma. In order to “disentangle the effects of caffeine-improving memory for learned food-associated cues versus caffeine as a reward” (because this is how science works), researchers used “robotic experimental flowers.” Whatever they are.

One group of bees was trained to pursue a strawberry smell with a sugary reward, while another group received a caffeine reward. Turns out, the bees with the caffeine buzz got busier. They made more visits to scented fake flowers than the other bees. The caffeinated bees also spent less time visiting each flower, implying that they found food faster with wake-up juice.

So now what? Will the next issue of Current Biology reveal studies in bee rehab to kick caffeine addiction? Or will scientists now spritz pumpkin spice latte into beehives to kick off their mornings amongst the robotic flowers? Only science knows.

Illustrations Bum Rap/Lowering the Bar/Power Shopping/Grounded Mound/Doom Drills ©2021 Allison Smith for The Limbaugh Letter; Illustrations Against the Tide/Buzzy Brew: ©2021 Shutterstock/Vectortatu/Victor Metelskiy/laduhis72; Rainbow Tree: ©2021 Getty Images/George Wood/Stringer