[ I rate that meme as “mostly true.” There were no sanctuary cities and states arrayed against Obama. His I.C.E. operations were not as sweeping, but that’s because his predecessor hadn’t deliberately stopped enforcing immigration laws. Obama and Trump both employed Tom Homan to oversee I.C.E. operations, something the Axis media notes as seldom as possible.]
I have rarely made one of my replies to commenters a “Comment of the Day,” and I’m not about to today but one of my long retorts this morning made me realize how absolutely tangential and non-substantive the arguments being made by the Mad Left to support defunding or metaphorically castrating I.C.E are. I challenged an intrepid and respected commenter to justify the dishonest and misleading lyrics sung by a Bruce Spingsteen wannabe, genuinely hoping that he could enlighten me.
But the esteemed Democrat contrarian had nothing; just repurposed “Off the pigs!” and “Fry ’em like bacon!” -inspired stuff, as I suspected. When you begin an inquiry having already decided that one side is evil because, you know, they just are, it does not tend to generate an objective analysis. (The exchange is here.)
Notably absent from the courageous response was a feasible suggestion of a better policy to effectively and quickly remove millions and millions of illegal aliens from our land. Without that, the clear message is, “Ha Ha! We opened the borders, and now there’s nothing you can do about it with being compared to the Nazis hunting down the Frank family!”
I’ll be happy to see lively inquiries today on other topics, of course.
Ethics Alarms 
This Minnesota thing really is just the ‘sixties anti-war movement warmed over sixty years later, isn’t it? A cultural reversion to the mean for Baby Boomers. Depressing and disappointing. You’d have thought our generation could have done better. I thought we’d all grown up. Turns out, we just got older.
Many of your generation did grow up. Some of them didn’t and went into academia, politics and entertainment. Over the decades, they have cultivated a narrative of the ’60s as the be-all-and-end-all of cultural experience and moral rectitude. This has done incalculable damage to subsequent generations.
Si!
See, e.g., the Clintons.
Let’s hear it for more long retorts.
I, on the other hand, was spared Springsteen’s Flash-in-the-pan/Pie-in-the-sky anthem. This week, I read “The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today” by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath, “Death on the Nile” by Agatha Christie, “The Good Earth” by Pearl Buck and am partway through “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde.
Mein Gott, AM. You’re doing at warp speed what I’ve been trying to do for decades: read the books on my high school summer reading list. I’m not a speed reader. I could have never survived grad school. I couldn’t have kept up.
Sylvia Plath? “The Bell Jar?” Can you explain why girls in college in the late ‘sixties were enamored of a poetess famous for having committed suicide? Always struck me as hilariously morbid.
” . . . were enamored of . . .”
Thank you for writing that correctly.
jvb
De nada, Juan.
Here’s a good article on women looking to “find themselves,” AND English manners!
‘Bridgerton’ Only Pretends to Be Progressive
Best sentence [emphasis added]:
In a world where the path of traditional seduction has been alternately derailed, re-routed, or blocked entirely by a consent-obsessed culture that imagines sex less as an act of spontaneous passion than a process akin to renting a car, most people would struggle to replicate the Bridgerton-style romance in real life.
I think it was more because they were in search of their identities just as the protagonist in the book was, albeit sans the mental illness. I can’t speak for Plath’s poetry, but “The Bell Jar” struck me as a book of its time. There were things to admire; things to mock.
Best lot of the week, so far, has been “The Good Earth”. Of course, I also liked “The Grapes of Wrath”, so I must have an affinity for the poor attempting to overcome adversity. “Dorian Gray” isn’t bad. Wilde’s wit notwithstanding, I cannot get too much into stories that have English Manners at their core.
So, Austen and Elliott and Meredith and even Henry James, among others, are out? I’m partial to the comedy of manners.
I could only read a few pages of “The Grapes of Wrath.” I found the characters implausibly simple, as in “simpletons.” Did Steinbeck ever really know people like that?
I’ve only read one Austen book, “Pride and Prejudice” which, I suppose, was alright. It’s just that parts of it suffered from Roger Ebert’s Idiot Plot where a misunderstanding that drives some of the action could be resolved in about 5 minutes if two characters would just stop and talk to each other.
Then again, most episodes of “Three’s Company” went that way, too.
But her others might be better.
I haven’t read any James, Meredith or Elliott. We’ll see how they go.
“Did Steinbeck ever really know people like that?”
I can’t speak for Steinbeck, but I know people like that. Simpletons who aren’t educated, in desperate straits and believe advertisements without the ability or desire to discern their reliability are all over the place.
Have you read much Dickens? “David Copperfield,” “Great Expectations.” If you want solid plotting, Dickens is your man. And tremendous characters.
I think “Pride and Prejudice” is the bee’s knees, one of my favorites. I think of Austen as the literary Mozart. They were essentially contemporaries and worked magnificently within (against?) the artistic constraints and expectations of their time. How often do we directly address misunderstandings rather than allow them to fester and drive our behavior? Besides, her work is comedic, therefore, somewhat contrived and intended to be resolved in the end. In any event, her dialogue, characters and sentences are unparalleled.
In any event, I salute your intellectual energy and rigor.
I’d previously read, “Oliver Twist”, “Great Expectations” and “Hard Times”. I have “David Copperfield” and others on this year’s list.
What’s wrong with these people?
Nurse banned from working in his home state of Florida after saying he wouldn’t anesthetize MAGA supporters | Daily Mail Online
Oh, that’s nothing. This nurse called for people to inject them with paralytics and poison them.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15506177/nurse-fired-virginia-hospital-ICE-video.html
This nurse just wished Caroline Leavitt to suffer a severe injury during the delivery of her child.
https://www.news4jax.com/news/florida/2026/01/29/viral-tiktok-video-costs-florida-nurse-her-license-heres-what-she-said/
Do note what I said previously about this being cult behavior that probably leads to mental illness. My stepson told me that he is the only person he knows of at his hospital who isn’t on psychiatric medications.
Yikes!
They are emboldened by a social media bubble that gives them a false sense of security and the mistaken belief that their own relative anonymity will shield them from consequences.
Is this Rep. Ilhan Omar’s “Fight! Fight! Fight” moment?
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/man-charges-rep-ilhan-omar-town-hall/story?id=129618409
Apparently, she was sprayed with apple cider vinegar. Not sure why or if there is meaning behind apple cider vinegar . . .
jvb
And not in her face, but on her clothes. Meanwhile, protesters are spitting at ICE agents, and in their faces. At most the damage to Omar is a cleaning bill. This “attack’ was less substantive than a glitter bomb.
I especially liked the part where Omar advanced toward the fellow, fists raised, ready to bludgeon his racist carcass back to the Stone Age from whence it came. Yep. I 5’2″ person, weighing all of 120 pounds is really gonna hurt a 220 dude squirting her with apple cider vinegar.
jvb
Was that entire incident staged?
Assault with a fermented fruit juice?
I am not ruling it out. She seemed awfully prepared to respond to the cider squirter guy. Some think she looked at him, signaled him to attack, and then responded with gusto and defiance. Her subsequent statements blaming Trump for the MN fraud investigations in the Somali child-care, et al, debacle (you know – the one that brought Walz to his knees?), her immigration issues, and the investigation into how she went from destitute to $30,000,000.00 in a few short years, along with her anti-US sentiments, sure could lead one to conclude that this incident was staged to deflect from those things.
jvb
The #BringBackOurGirls thing was one of the most idiotic statements I had ever seen.
(1) They aren’t ‘our’ girls. They were Nigerian.
(2) They were Christian girls kidnapped by Muslims. No president pushed for the advancement of Muslim countries (OK, Shia Muslim countries) harder than Obama did.
(3) The one person in the country with the power to actually rescue ‘our girls’ was Michelle’s husband, the President of the United States.
So, why is she telling ME to ‘Bring Back Our Girls’? I mean, did she expect me to outfit an expedition to Nigeria, kill a huge number of Muslims, and rescue these girls from the sex slavery they were most likely being subjected to? Would Michelle Obama have authorized me to acquire machine guns, grenades, mortars and other heavy weapons, perhaps from the Institute of Peace? If I did that, would she have backed me up when Democrats called for me to be arrested and charged with some kind of crime (like possessing the non-permitted NFA items from the Institute of Peace)?
No, she was begging terrorist to bring back “our” girls, because terrorists are always persuaded by virtue-signaling, rich politician’s wives making selfies with frowny-faces.
Oh, the irony, Michael. Well done. Thank you.
“The embarrassment is that chemistry was treated as a mere technicality rather than the foundation of the entire conclusion. The embarrassment is that skepticism—real skepticism, the disciplined refusal to accept claims without robust evidence—was framed as denial rather than diligence.”
This is, in my opinion, the money quote from The Brain, Microplastics, and the Collapse of Scientific Restraint. (https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/01/23/the-brain-microplastics-claim-and-the-collapse-of-scientific-restraint/)
This particular article discusses the extraordinary claim that our brains contain a huge amount of microplastics. The problem with this claim is that the study has a fatal methodological flaw. The study relies on spectroscopy and detecting signatures of chemicals to determine a sample’s composition. However, the fats in the brain break down into similar compounds as polyethylene, which means without further differentiation methods, there is no way to tell if the “microplastics” the study detected were actually just normal lipids found in the brain. The whole article is worth reading, as it does an excellent job of explaining the issue.
I recently saw a post on Facebook that decried the idea that experts could be challenged by some novice watching a few YouTube Videos and reading a few scientific papers. This led to a long discussion in the comments, which was unfortunately extremely one-sided. Most everyone agreed that trying to correct an expert in their field was utter hubris.
“Take something you are good at, like maybe changing transmissions. Imagine someone who has watched a few YouTube videos comes up and tells you that you are doing it all wrong. How would you respond?”
The main problem with this is that, in terms of changing a transmission, we can obviously see who is right and who is wrong. The car will run, or the car will not. Indeed, if you truly are an expert in changing transmissions, you can step up and, in simple terms, explain why your process is the correct one, what is wrong with the YouTube watcher’s process, and even perhaps teach your skeptic how to do it correctly.
With any field of expertise, we have to remember that experts are people too, and all humans have flaws. Experts can be tempted by money, power, prestige, and politics. There are also limitations that even experts struggle to overcome. For example, in many branches of research, there are serious problems (often ethical in nature) in creating a good control group.
I have long spoken about the issues inherent in anthropogenic global climate change due to carbonification. In short, people write up models that give the results they want, don’t check them against reality, write them up in such a way that they cannot be reproducible, and declare their findings significant. We see this in other areas.
Vaccination is starting to look scary with all the new research, and what is the sane person to do about it? There are studies showing that you have equivalent chances of significant lifelong medical complications from the newer version of the measles vaccine as you do from the measles virus. The new vaccine no longer promotes lifelong immunity. There are studies showing that getting this vaccination in conjunction with a battery of other vaccines, is strongly correlated with increased rates of childhood illness. All of those studies have been buried, not refuted. Often the authors are subjected to ad hominem criticism, seeking to silence them through shame and ignominy, rather than any direct address of the methods or underlying data.
In all these fields, and so many more, there is one main problem. Skepticism of a claim is now handled as blind denial. My previous paragraph, for example, would lead many to categorize me as one of those anti-vaxxers. I am not, with my family all vaccinated in an age-appropriate manner. But the instant I mention that there is another opinion, many people assume I am opposed to the whole concept.
When I was a kid, the DPT gave you lifelong immunity to pertussis. Vaccinated adults did not develop or carry whooping cough. Today, the pertussis vaccine only keeps the vaccinated from developing symptoms. This is why pregnant women are pressured not only to get the booster if they are more than two years out from their last booster, but to require all family members and caretakers to get the shot. (But get this: daycare providers are not required to get this shot every two years, nor is it considered appropriate to demand your baby only be cared for by those who are “up” on this shot!)
What is strange is that vaccine titers (the blood tests to detect antibody levels) are usually trusted to identify immunity to pertussis, unless a woman is pregnant, in which case the titers for her and everyone around her are not trusted. Why this difference? No one says. But if the pregnant woman is exposed to measles, those titers are considered accurate. Again, no explanation. So, if your titer for measles say you are immune, they don’t require a shot, but they pressure you and all your family to get the pertussis vaccine no matter what the titer says. I also know that vaccines aren’t cheap, with the 2-month vaccines apparently costing $2000, according to the bill my youngest just got due to an insurance filing error. This adds a layer of motive to suspicions, and this CAUSES skepticism.
Our scientific fields, including the medical fields, are filled with hubris. In so many situations, if the research was conducted with the best practices, there would be no need to become defensive and accuse the opposition of denial of standard knowledge. Instead, we could just explain what the issue is with the studies that show data differently. We could have debates and discussions. We would solidify our scientific understanding, and be a better society for it. However, money, power, politics, and other non-ethical considerations have found their way into these situations.
All science is susceptible to bias. However, a good scientist does all they can to limit the bias. Good scientists today are as rare as good journalists, with the results plain to see. I skimmed a few of the studies that led to some of the new MAHA food and alcohol guidelines, as well as some of the opposition research presented. I read up on studies on vegan diets and carnivore diets, and a number of others. These studies directly correlated with the views held by those funding the studies. All these studies, for the most part, followed similar protocols and methodologies, and all were equally flawed in certain ways. Whether one believes any particular study is almost entirely dependent on one’s preconceived notions and politics, which makes these studies practically worthless.
We would like to trust experts, since they are ostensibly the ones who know the intricate details and determine fact from fancy. But the 2020 pandemic revealed that our experts were not really impartial seekers of truth, but a cabal seeking to use their credentials to promote a particular worldview. The subsequent fracture of the oligarchy of experts was needed, but it has harmed the public. I cannot blame skeptics for their lack of trust, especially after we destroyed our society during WuFlu. Those experts insisted that no one question their expertise, even when that expertise was found to be sorely wanting. But without experts, who are we going to trust when a subject is beyond our experience?
Frankly, I am warmed by the myriad amateur skeptics who have been questioning the experts, even if their challenges are naïve or misinformed. They are performing the role the experts should have been doing all along. The experts should be the biggest skeptics, not of people challenging them, but of their own work, so that once every conceivable way a study could be tainted has been dispensed with, what remains is of the highest quality we can achieve. The data and methodology would be open for all to scrutinize, anyone could repeat the findings of the study, one could demonstrate how all challenges to the study have been adequately addressed. Or, more importantly, the experts could humbly acknowledge that their findings do leave room for doubt, discussion, and further research, and actively work to counter those who attempt to spin any questionable results as shocking findings.
Of course, the problem with my solution is that in our overly hedonistic society, people only want sound bites. I am busy raising five kids. I don’t have time to double check everything. I have to trust someone, and someone who matches my biases is going to get my trust. I then find myself within a tribe of like-minded people, which then becomes an echo chamber where nothing gets solved and arguments devolve to demagoguery. Substantial arguments fall prey to the TLDR tag, assuming we even make it past the headline. So it also becomes incumbent upon us to spend a little more time questioning, a little more time being skeptical, and perhaps join in with the other amateur skeptics to make sure our experts cannot rest in complacency.
Whew! Remarkable. In a comment!
I saw an article recently positing that the damage done to the sciences by DEI will take generations to undo.
Sarah,
I keep waiting for the day you post something – even something I know absolutely nothing about – that isn’t beautifully crafted and totally engrossing.
And I’m still waiting…
Yes, that should be a guest post.
Agreed. This is a great comment.
Excellent analysis, SB, IMO COTD-worthy!
Perhaps tangential: When The Truth Wears Off
PWS
What is a reasonable response from health care consumers regarding vaccinations?
My policy is to put trust in the recommendations of professionals, even though I am aware that doctors are not infallible, and that in case of new viruses I may take a while before successful vaccinations and remedies are developed.
I prefer not to fall prey to too much skepticism in vaccines e.g. as a response to the less than perfect rollout of the COVID vaccines. Because as a layman in medicine my skepticism may be based on sound bites produced by the wrong influencers who have big megaphones but not necessarily sound knowledge.
CEES,
Again, my children are all up on their vaccines, so I generally agree with you, but the problem is which doctors do we listen to?
In my experience with doctors, that is a major issue. I live in a small town that rotates through doctors at a rapid pace, so we rarely get one that we have time to evaluate appropriately. Here are some of the doctors I have seen:
Dr. C thought you should get vaccines. Of course, he also thought that he should treat migraines with highly addictive opiods because women who are addicted to drugs could trade sex with him for more scripts.
Dr. S thought that you should not get vaccines. He also claimed that there was no such thing as migraines, that migraines are just a sign that you have high blood pressure and that women make a bit to-do about the little aches and pains that men handle daily and if you’d just toughen up, your headache would not be an issue.
Dr. M was all about vaccines, the more the better. He also believed that all kids who have eating disorders should be addicted to marijuana to get the munchies, which will solve all their eating disorder problems, since marijuana is a completely harmless drug and something we might all benefit from using. Sure, he’ll write a migraine script.
Dr. T thinks some of the vaccines are great, some are awful, and recommends you read all the literature on each of them before getting them or having them given to your kids. He believes in the healing power of diet and exercise, as well as adequate time in the sun for Vitamin D, deficiency of which is critical to most of your health issues, especially migraines, which may be caused by too much blue spectrum light, so spend time each day under red spectrum lights.
Nurses are no better. I have friendships with 6 nurses. Two are all about the vaccines, the more the better. One is anti-vax. Three are somewhere in the middle, ranging from “there is no better option, though the data on these suck” to “these are important, deny these, and read these six studies before you take that one.”
The issue is that we do not HAVE consensus anymore, which means that the “experts” are hard to find and harder to believe, while skeptics are treated as villains and denounced, not on the strength of their claims, but on ad hominem attacks.
I’m currently trying to investigate the claims of Peter McCullough, a licensed MD, who claims that there is not a single vaccine that has lived up to its hype and that the main reason diseases have fallen have more to do with the solutions to malnutrition and increase of safety practices such as handwashing. He has some interesting data to back up his hypotheses, that I am trying to verify or debunk, in my spare time.
One depressing lesson of the events in Minnesota is that even if the Democrats are totally disingenuous, deranged, and completely wrong on the issue, they still may be politically victorious in the end. The Trump administration is not winning the PR battle on immigration enforcement, and the polls are showing damage for Trump. Reason and ethics are only some of the tools in the political debate but often not the decisive ones; what is more important is the raw will to power. The Democrats have that will to power, as they correctly believe that their future electoral success depends on minorities, even if they have to import them. If illegal immigrants did not count in the census, blue states would have fewer Representatives in the House by about 30-40.
What happened is that the Trump administration blinked, and that Walz and Frey have to pay zero political costs for their insurrection. It also shows that BLM style rioting still helps the Democrats to achieves political results. The Minneapolis template will be followed in any other blue sanctuary city and state.
Republican members of Congress do not hold the line on deportation of illegal immigrants. Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) advocates for a, pragmatic, bipartisan approach to immigration reform that combines strict border enforcement with a legal pathway for long-term undocumented residents. He supports the Dignity Act (2025), which offers work authorization for undocumented immigrants, opposes mass deportations of law-abiding families, and pushes to end “sanctuary city” policies. (Source: Google AI Overview). Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) together with Dick Durbin (D-IL) introduced the Dream Act, which opens pathways for certain categories of illegal immigrants to obtain a legal status and become US citizens.
The picture that emerges is that of a Democrat Party that is totally obstinate on immigration issues, for naked electoral reasons, and too many Republican politicians willing to compromise. This also confirms that too many Republican politicians do not have the will and fortitude to secure political wins on issues that were crucial for the voters that elected Trump as President.
The spinelessness of the Republicans will depress the MAGA base in the next elections; why would you turn out to vote if Republicans win the Presidency and Congress, but are unable to implement and enact their agenda due to the lack of will to win?
https://thefederalist.com/2026/01/30/to-cave-on-mass-deportations-is-to-cave-on-every-other-issue/
Cees, I hope the polls and all the articles about MAGA defections are simply part of the AUC’s coordinated effort to win the midterms. I just am not willing to think any of the sturm and drang the left has ginned up over this ICE Out campaign will push people who voted for Trump into the Democrats’ arms. I’m hoping it’s all wishful thinking by the AUC.
Why are there spineless Republicans in the first place?
I suggest we discuss the killing of Alex Pretti from an ethics standpoint.
I was talking this morning to my teenager about AI and data centers and what it means and if it’s beneficial overall or not and then this podcast was in my feed “Can AI save your life?” Discussing partly the summary component of AI and how some hospitals use a ChatGPT system already to do this and “scribe” with permission. I am a bit unsure still how AI will be used as we move forward with it but I can wonder about the nebulous nature of these companies at least. I suppose it’s not important to not know who is building the data center in your backyard but it does seem suspicious. Just like not being sure about what AI is being used on your behalf. Maybe it doesn’t matter. My teenager is appalled that people sometimes prefer AI music to real Music and doesn’t like it in general.
Here’s the link to the Podcast if you’re interested. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/freakonomics-radio/id354668519?i=1000747276556