Wednesday Potpourri

First, a few words of wisdom from Van Jones. Among the liberal and Democratic commentators who fill the airways, Jones is one of the precious few who continually make sense.

The other day, he said this about today’s Democratic Party:

"We're screwed-- defending a broken status quo and offending most of the country turns out is not as popular as my party thought it was gonna be."

Second, on the Doge front, Insurrection Barbie raises some questions about where all the money went. Waste, fraud and abuse does not do it justice:

12 billion dollars was allocated to the Navy for submarines and not one submarine was built.

42.5 billion dollars was allocated to hook people up to high-speed Internet, and not one single person was hooked up to high-speed Internet.

7.5 billion dollars was allocated to build EV charging stations. Only 37 stations were built. Thats 200 million per charging station.

Where is the rest of the money?

We are confident that Elon will find it.

Third, speaking of free speech, or the lack of same, this comes to us from Ireland, via Cillian:

BREAKING: Enoch Burke, a Christian schoolteacher in Ireland, will be STRIPPED of his salary after refusing to use they/them pronouns for a "transgender" student. Burke has already spent 500 days in prison, and the Irish Courts are now punishing him further. This is horrific.

But, consider this. Rosie O’Donnell just relocated to Ireland, because she was horrified at the way America dealt with human rights.

Fourth, from the City Journal, written by one Wei Wah Chin, an analysis of a topic near and dear to these pages. The question is whether or not the American educational system is producing enough STEM graduates.

It’s nice to say that foreign tech companies are going to invest buckets of cash in America. We need, however, to ask whether we have the human capital to render those investments functional. Otherwise, we are going to be importing a lot of foreign talent via the H-1B visa program.

Chin writes:

Still, the H-1B fight points to an underlying problem for the United States. At last count, 86 percent of H-1B approvals were for STEM professionals. If American schools were turning out sufficient numbers of competitive STEM professionals, the need for H-1Bs would plummet. If we were to cancel the program tomorrow, U.S. companies would outsource more work to qualified professionals abroad. And if they were prohibited from doing that, they would cease to be globally competitive.

The failure is relatively recent. Chin writes:

The United States once led the world in STEM talent. Top minds produced breakthroughs in everything from aerospace to semiconductors to biomedicine to software. Today, however, fewer and fewer pockets of excellence flourish in American STEM education.

The culprit, as we have remarked in these pages, lies in DEI programs:

Consider Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) in Virginia, for many years the nation’s top-ranked high school. In 2020, “racial-justice” advocates replaced TJ’s race-blind, test-based admissions with an unholy trinity of quotas, “holistic” criteria, and lotteries, sending TJ into a downward spiral of mediocrity. Other renowned merit-based schools, like New York City’s specialized high schools, Boston’s exam schools, and San Francisco’s Lowell High School, have come under similar attack.

This worldview is well-recognized by now in the code words diversity, equity, and inclusion, along with their many offshoots and variations. Activists have used all this terminology to sabotage excellence in education. They’ve done so either directly, by dumbing-down standards and content, or indirectly, by demeaning the values essential for great education—standards, merit, self-discipline, competitiveness, achievement—as “privileged,” “white,” “settler-colonialist,” and “far-right.”

Indeed, the DEI programs have worked long and hard to sabotage excellence in American education. We will soon find out whether the school system can overcome the handicap and move forward.

Fifth, Columbia University was the first, but it will not be the last university to lose federal funding for countenancing anti-Semitism on its campus.

At Harvard University, the administration is preparing for the worst, by instituting a hiring freeze.

Newsmax has the story:

As fears over losing federal funding heighten, Harvard University is taking action.

The Ivy League school announced a temporary pause on staff and faculty hiring. The news came in a letter signed by university leadership, including President Alan Garber and Provost John Manning.

"We need to prepare for a wide range of financial circumstances, and strategic adjustments will take time to identify and implement," the leadership wrote. "It is imperative to limit significant new long-term commitments that would increase our financial exposure and make further adjustments more disruptive."

But, do not cry for Harvard. Its endowment sits at something like $52 billion.

Sixth, it’s an eggy story. Up to now the media has been chock full of stories about the price of eggs. Apparently, their high prices were a sign that the Trump administration has not yet erased inflation.

But, now, egg prices are falling, so you can be sure you will no longer be hearing about the price of eggs.

Matt Margolis reported on PJ Media:

According to Trading Economics, after reaching an all-time high of $8.17 per dozen in early March, egg prices have plummeted to $5.51, which now sits below the nearly $7 average when President Trump took office in January.

And the following comes from Red State:

But I noticed something anecdotally a couple of days ago in Texas, as did my brother in northern New Jersey. Suddenly, it looked like our egg prices were going down.

Now Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins is confirming that officially, yes, the prices are dropping. You can see her explaining in the video here. (Unfortunately, X, formerly Twitter, is still experiencing issues Tuesday, so we are unable to preview the video on this page.)

"Good piece of news we just got is average cost of dozen eggs has now gone down $1.85," Rollins said. That was since they introduced their plan to reduce the price of eggs about a week and a half ago on February 26. She said it was possible it might inch back up since we are going into the Easter season when it is generally high, but this was good news, and it looks like it might be on trend in the right direction -- down -- now.

Seventh, reality bites, even at Columbia University. Apparently, faculty members are just waking up to the fact that the university has just lost hundreds of millions in federal grants. They are not happy.

Steve McGuire reports:

NEW: Columbia has begun notifying faculty of cancelled grants. From an internal source there: “Grant cancellation notices flowing in now. Labs shutting down. Layoffs imminent. Faculty apoplectic at Katrina Armstrong for letting it get to this point. She has to fix this fast.”

Last, but not least, I currently have some free consulting hours in my life coaching practice. If you are interested, email me at StuartSchneiderman@gmail.com.