During floods I carried hot food to sandbag crews and public safety workers. I’d show up with 12 bags full of McDonald’s cheeseburgers. People working would step out of the line, wolf down one or two and go right back in.

For fire victims we arranged temporary housing and provided cash or gift cards for people to buy needed things including clothing. No one ever paid for any of it.

That service alone–showing up to counsel and aid fire victims–would be worth supporting the American Red Cross. But they do quite a bit more.

https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-wokes-on-them/

I’m quite fond of Professor Voegeli’s wit as well as his wisdom.
https://www.williamvoegeli.com/

Good analysis and sound advice, which there is no chance the leftist administrations will voluntarily embrace.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/college-presidents-are-lying-about-free-speech

It’s highly concerning that the academic monoculture has led to a shift of the Overton window so far left that mainstream views in America are now considered “fringe” in higher education and sideswiped as bigoted views of the uneducated masses. This divides higher education more and more from the Americans it is supposed to serve. Not surprisingly, trust in educational institutions is at an all-time low—which should broadly be of concern to institutions that are largely dependent on public funding to cover their spiraling costs.
…
At the same time, improvement is possible. Antisemitism on campuses has woken up many to the fact that we have tolerated the erosion of free speech for far too long. The silent majority on campuses is beginning to wake up.
So what needs to happen to restore the institutional integrity of America’s universities?

https://thehill.com/opinion/education/4356430-it-cant-be-that-hard-to-manage-free-expression-on-campus/

It is sad to think that college presidents are being hired by boards of trustees without apparently ascertaining whether their administrators can speak with clarity about fundamental free expression principles and their implementation.

All universities have flashy policies and administrative statements about free expression. Sadly, it is safe to say that a good many college presidents can’t fully explain or interpret them. That should come as no surprise, however, because those policies weren’t designed to manage free expression anyway.

Instead, they were designed as posturing statements to signal lofty ideals, but without ever having to be operationalized. Further, such statements exist to provide cover for administrators to display while simultaneously creating a campus culture that permits some expressions and curtails others. These flimsy statements are bowls of steam, filled with the rhetoric of bureaucracy. Imagine the panic that went through the minds of the cornered college presidents of MIT, Harvard and Penn when they were challenged to sort out and apply their vacuous free speech policies.
…
Universities long ago abandoned creating a marketplace of ideas in favor of pushing preferred perspectives. The term for this approach is “indoctrination.” Princeton Professor Keith Whittington wrote in the Fordham Law Review, “Ultimately, realizing free speech principles on college campuses is a matter of culture as much as it is a matter of policy.” It is high time college presidents worked to manage that culture and stop preening about paper policies.

There are consequences for the nation when its higher education establishments can’t articulate and live out a functionally interdependent learning environment for free expression. Rational thinking about matters of substance leaves the building. The cultural observer G.K. Chesterton once warned about this prospect, “Freedom of speech means practically…that we must only talk about unimportant things.” Too many universities are nearing that point right now.

Victor Davis Hanson cuts to the bottom line.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14756

Can We Save our Universities?
Stop giving money to elite institutions

It took the widely reported, repellent, and exempt wave of anti-Semitism and violent pro-Hamas protestors harassing Jews, finally to convince Americans that their own hallmark universities are illiberal centers of mediocrity and intolerance—and increasingly unsafe.

Of course, Americans had long known that something had gone wrong at their colleges. They had increasingly encountered college graduates who were poorly educated in basic skills and lacked general knowledge—and yet highly politicized, and intolerant of different views and opinions. Ignorant but arrogant is a sad way to start an adult life.
…
In contrast, there is little such anti-Semitic violence at community colleges or trade schools, where the majority of students attends, and must work to pay for their education, and learn skills in a world apart from therapeutic gut courses. In truth, a multiple-choice American history test at a junior college now demands more knowledge from a student than the weaponized essay requirement of an Ivy-League -studies class.

Taxpayers soon will no longer wish to subsidize elite education, especially when campuses no longer can guarantee their graduates are broadly educated and their professional and graduate programs can no longer turn out top-flight experts and specialists.

So, what happened to America’s once monopoly on global excellence in higher education?

In a word, there was too much money—and too little accountability. Tuition soared faster than the rate of annual inflation. The federal government subsidizes almost $2 trillion in student loans, regardless of the quality of education the student receives, and often with the expectation there will be few if any consequences when indebted but poorly educated students’ default on their repayment obligations.

The professors who harass students, and rant endlessly off topic about current politics, are often not audited or reviewed on the quality of their scholarship and teaching as much as their political views, and their racial, gender, and ethnic status. Most have little knowledge of the reality outside the academic world—having spent their entire lives as students and then faculty confined to campus. Tenure is seen as a birthright rather than an ossified privilege only accorded to a tiny fraction of the workforce on the pretense that faculty should be heterodox, independent thinkers, without ideological blinders.

So, to save us from the monsters we created, Americans must get the government out of the student loan business. We must demand that universities’ endowments back their own student loans.

The government should tax endowment income and end lifelong tenure. Universities must expel and deport foreign students who violate campus laws as they violently act out their various hatreds.

Reinstate the SAT for admissions, and end racial quotas. And require a national SAT-like exit exam to reassure the public that graduates at least know more when they leave college than when they enrolled—an increasingly dubious assumption.

But most important of all: the public should stop giving money to elite institutions. To continue such philanthropy is akin to supplying heroin to an addict, gas to a fire, or fireworks to children.

Do not consider our prestigious schools any longer necessarily prestigious. Many are not. Do not hire a graduate simply because she graduated from Yale, or he attended Stanford—unless one prefers to risk dealing with an employee poorly schooled but likely to act out a pampered victim status and to disrupt a workplace.

I don’t want to be near Marshfield, MA on an afternoon when the air gets all shimmery, like before a thunderstorm.

Don’t want to have to answer.

Florida’s legislature has actually been pretty good like that. Even more so than Texas, I’d assert.

Mmmm, well, they may well have corrupted them further back than I am aware of… 😛

}}} Oligonicella:

Mrrr…. yeah, that sounds pretty obnoxious, but it could have been a local admin who was a cheap asshole.

I’ve never heard any significant widespread complaints about politics of the ARC, which is the real issue, here — though there may be some more recent that I’ve not caught — I have heard lots and lots of complaints about the politics of the IRC dating back to at least the 70s, and, according to the above, perhaps even back to the 30s.

The issue here is not whether the ARC is a particularly good charity, as much as whether their politics make them even more obnoxious.

yes chris rufo and chaya Raichik’s investigation lit the match behind the anti zombie movement, the parallels to Romero and Kirkman cannot be closer,