My email, which is at Yahoo, isn’t loading on my computer.. I’m out of town but haven’t had trouble with it till today, and I’ve been in the same place for several days. Anyone else with yahoo email having trouble at the moment?
Boy, I hate this stuff.
I’m on the west coast for a while, visiting friends and family. It’s been raining incessantly and the forecast is for more of the same.
Cold rain in the winter – ugh! Then again, I’m happy to be here and especially to spend time with my grandchildren while they’re still young.
Trump has made another deal:
In his latest effort to lower drug costs, President Donald Trump unveiled Friday “Most Favored Nation” pricing deals with nine more pharmaceutical companies.
The president also announced he would call a meeting next week or early January with health insurers to push them to lower their premiums.
More:
The agreement reached with the nine companies also encompasses $150 billion in combined new investment commitments in domestic manufacturing, research and development of pharmaceuticals.
“For the American people and patients, this represents the greatest victory for patient affordability in the history of American healthcare,” Trump said. “By far, and every single American will benefit.”
Note the “a” word: “affordability.”
Trump added:
“Every president for a generation has promised to reduce drug prices, but they were talking about a little bit,” Trump said. “I am the only one of them to ever even think in terms of favored nations, and that’s what this is. … We are now ‘a most favorite nation.’”
From a professor in Portugal who had taught Neves Valente, the man who killed the two students at Brown and the MIT physics professor in Brookline:
Professor Bruno Gonçalves remembers teaching Claudio Neves Valente at the Instituto Superior Técnico in Portugal, where the suspect studied physics in the late 1990s along with Nuno Loureiro, the MIT professor who was killed.
Gonçalves, who is now the president of the department, told CBS News that Neves Valente was the best student in his course.
Gonçalves also said he knew Louriero, but only from meeting him in later years after he left university, and he has no memory of him as a student. Louriero went on to a successful career in physics research and was director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center.
Neves Valente enrolled in a PhD program in physics at Brown in 2000 but only stayed one year, the university said. Gonçalves said he has searched for other academic or professional traces of his former student after his time at Brown but couldn’t find any.
So that leads to an obvious possible motive: envy of others who have succeeded or who are about to succeed, and rage because of his own failed career despite his brilliance. Perhaps he even thought the class he shot up at Brown was a physics class; I’ve read that it’s where the physics classes used to be held.
In a statement, the Instituto Superior Técnico in Portugal confirmed that Neves Valente had been a student at its Institute for Plasmas and Nuclear Fusion, studying for a degree in Engineering Physics between 1995 and 2000. Loureiro took the course during the same period, the institute said.
“My understanding is that they did know each other,” said Leah Foley, U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts.
He probably was aware of Loureiro’s career trajectory over the years – upward – compared to his own downward path. The classroom at Brown, in which he had apparently taken classes, was the scene of the crime – and the “crime” in his own mind was probably the fact that he never amounted to anything professionally after dropping out of Brown.
Envy. Spite.
Neves Valente was also a visa lottery winner – that’s how he came here again, in 2017. So it’s after 2017 that he has the opportunity to revisit those places and that person, which could explain some of the delay in taking his revenge. There also could be something else in the timing – drug or alcohol abuse, relationship failures, mid-life angst, worsening of schizophrenia or other mental illness, or just a final realization that at 48 he’s never going to make it, never going to fulfill even a fraction of that early promise.
According to the parents of Neves Valente, a break with family occurred over 20 years ago. His age at the time is very consistent with a schizophrenic onset:
When Claudio Neves Valente, a promising physics student in Portugal, headed off to graduate school at Brown University more than 25 years ago, he seemed to have a promising career in science ahead. Soon after, though, he stopped taking classes. Then he cut off all contact with his family back home, a relative said.
In fact, he seemed to vanish.
His mother and father had not seen or heard from him until Friday, when they saw his image in news reports and learned that he was accused in the shooting of students in one of Brown’s science buildings and of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor he had once one to school with in Portugal. …
“They are devastated,” Mirita Domingues, a relative of Mr. Neves Valente’s, told The New York Times. “His mother said this morning that she had always worried that the next time she would hear about him, he would be dead.”
The only child of a well-to-do family … He excelled in school, scoring top grades in every subject …
The article goes on to say that he had been a happy child, and that at eighteen he represented Portugal at the International Physics Olympiad, and was the brightest of the four Portuguese representatives. His high school physics teacher said he was the brightest student he’d ever taught, and that he’d never forgotten him.
And I think it’s very telling that the article goes on to quote a teacher from the school attended by both Neves Valente and Loureiro as saying that although they both were at the top of the class, it was Neves Valente who had the higher grades.
And yet in ensuing years at Brown, where he spent three semesters at the turn of the century, he already was withdrawing socially, according Scott Watson, his only friend at the time who is now a physics professor at Syracuse and says:
“[Neves Valente] wanted to isolate himself” …
Dr. Watson reclled that Mr. Neves Valente was often unhappy and even angry, complaining that classes were too easy and that the food on Brown’s campus was subpar. …
Mr. Neves Valente could be “kind and gentle” his former friend recalled – as well as brilliant. But the suspect could also be a bully, Dr. Watson said, going so far as to call a Brazilian classmate his “slave.”
He left Brown without even getting his Master’s degree, much less a doctorate. He apparently went back to Portugal initially, although no one seems to know how or where he spent the ensuing years until his return to the US in 2017. Even after that, little is known until the murders; an address in Miami turns out to have probably been a false one.
NOTE: He sounds a bit like the path of the Unibomber – from academic prodigy (math in the case of Kaczynski) to dropout in his 20s, to isolation, to murder – although the motives for the Unibomber’s murders seems different.
This doesn’t seem like good news at all. Stefanik was one of the most prominent Republican House members, known in particular for her sharp questioning of the three Ivy presidents about anti-Semitism, and running for the governorship in New York:
GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik unexpectedly dropped her bid to become New York’s next governor Friday — and also said she would not be seeking re-election for Congress.
The high-profile Republican congresswoman said she wanted to avoid a potentially bruising and costly gubernatorial primary, clearing the way for Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman to become front-runner for the party’s nomination.
The jarring move shocked Stefanik’s allies, as the North Country rep had already held the endorsement of almost every one of the 62 county committee chairs and publicly attacked Blakeman immediately after he formally entered the race last week.
She also cited the desire to spend time with her family and particularly her children. But of course that’s the sort of thing politicians always say when they drop out or quit a position. Maybe it’s even true for Stefanik; politics is certainly a dirty, grueling business.
Trump has said:
He’s a friend. She’s a friend. These are two great people running. In a way, I hate to see them running against each other. I hope they’re not going to be damaging each other
Why did Blakeman enter the race to challenge her? That appears to have been the proximate cause of her dropping out, although it wouldn’t explain her decision not to run for the House either. Of course, by running for governor, she already was signaling that she wanted to leave the House. I wonder if she believes the GOP will become the minority in the House, and she doesn’t want to stick around for that? The other thing to remember is that Hochul will probably win against any Republican; New York is that far gone.
Meanwhile, the press blames Trump. What else is new? The NY Times headline says, “Elise Stefanik Tried Everything to Please Trump. He Still Jilted Her” – managing to blame Trump and insult Stefanik in the process, labeling her a scorned lover.
This is just extraordinary:
One wonders how much of the social welfare money handed out all over the country has been to perpetrators of fraud. We’ve always known fraud existed in such programs, but the scope of the fraud being uncovered seems mind-boggling even to many people already cynical about the subject.
And now he’s dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Salem, NH.
Oh, and it was a homeless ex-student in physics, who lives in the classroom building in which the Brown murders took place, who broke the case – posting on Reddit, among other things – and gets the money reward, which at $50K doesn’t seem like nearly enough. Perhaps he should receive a portion of the hefty salary of the president of Brown, whom just about everyone agrees is a nincompoop at best.
Truth really is stranger than fiction. If you wrote a script, would you choose that description of the case and the killer? You can find details of the story here as well as here. From the latter:
[The Brown homeless man] John, it’s been revealed, was the second person of interest whose image was put out earlier this week, and he was onto the suspect way before anyone else. According to a Fox News report, John became suspicious of Neves-Valente after the two “locked eyes” in a campus bathroom hours before the shooting. John then followed the gunman around the campus and eventually confronted him about his weird behavior.
Dead men tell no tales, and unless Claudio Manuel Neves Valente left one of those manifestos so popular with mass murderers, the motive may remain very obscure. It’s somewhat comforting to know it was one killer rather than two, but it’s terrible to think that the second murder might have been avoided if he could he have been caught earlier.
Most people are faulting the lack of good security camera video at Brown and the failure to establish a perimeter in a timely fashion, and the school also has a university chief of security Rodney Chatman, who may be a DEI hire and had left his previous position under a cloud:
According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Chatman said he faced pushback for policing reforms he tried to implement at the school. He departed for Brown in 2021.
In October, two local police unions, the Brown University Security Patrolperson’s Association and the University Police Sergeants Union, issued votes of “no confidence” in Chatman, the former expressing “deep concern among the membership regarding the direction and leadership of the Department of Public Safety,” according to the Brown Daily Herald. …
The school has faced criticism regarding the killer’s access to the building and a lack of security cameras that could have helped in identifying the shooter.
Chatman has only briefly addressed the shooting in the days since it occurred, saying that three outdoor sirens on the campus did not activate during the shooting because of how quickly the event took place, according to the Rhode Island Current.
Fox News Digital has found that diversity, equity and inclusion has been a major focus for Brown’s campus safety department and Chatman himself. …
In a prior post on LinkedIn, Chatman asked other campus police departments to refrain from posting pictures of themselves with weapons or performing tactical maneuvers, suggesting that it could make their communities anxious.
Perhaps worst of all, we have this allegation:
Stefanik shared a report that Brown University was pressured by “human rights groups” demanding that they disable their CCTVs so violent pro-Palestinian activists wouldn’t be held accountable for their actions.
I really, really hope that’s not what happened. But I fear it is.
Many long years ago – perhaps thirty-five? – I read an article describing what was being taught in schools in Palestine, and it made my blood run cold. I don’t recall what periodical it was in, but it certainly wasn’t anything on the right because back then (pre-internet) I wasn’t reading media on the right. It described students macerated in murderous hatred for Israel and Jews, and it was crystal clear that this was going to bear especially disastrous fruit some day.
And it did.
Little did I know at the time that something similar had started to happen to our own children – a bit muted, yes, but similar, although I only came to know about it later on. In America, it wasn’t just about hating Israel, although that formed a significant part of it. It was also about hating the US and western civilization.
This article (hat tip: commenter “miguel cervantes”) is an in-depth look at where this was done, how it was done, and by whom it was done:
Since 1981, American universities have accepted $13.1 billion from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait (Bard, 2024). Qatar alone contributed nearly $6 billion. Roughly 73% of these contributions are worth approximately $10.7 billion. None of these billions have any publicly stated purpose despite federal disclosure requirements (Bard, 2024). …
Here’s what we do know. Saudi Arabia gave Georgetown’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center $20 million. The funding was structured to “follow” the center’s director. This gave the Saudi government effective control over who held the position (Middle East Forum, 2020). Qatar Foundation International sponsored K-12 teacher training sessions. They covered travel and expenses for American educators attending workshops on Middle East history (Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, March 2025). At least one donation explicitly funded a Palestinian Studies professorship at Brown. The position went to someone who supports boycotting Israel (Bard, 2024).
That was Doumani. His position didn’t exist until foreign money created it. His influence shaped the curriculum materials that were used in roughly 8,000 schools. Those materials reached approximately one million students annually. Brown ended the Choices Program in 2025. The university cited financial pressures and mounting criticism over the program’s Israel-Palestine materials as reasons for shutting it down.
The pattern repeats everywhere. Foreign governments fund academic positions. Universities fill those positions with scholars who share the donors’ worldviews. Those scholars create curriculum materials. The materials reach thousands of schools nationwide. Teachers trust them because they bear prestigious university names. Parents never question them because they don’t know the funding sources. Students absorb frameworks that were designed by foreign governments to advance foreign interests.
And it works. Research examining the years 2015 to 2020 found something striking. Institutions that accepted Middle Eastern funding experienced 300% more antisemitic incidents than institutions that didn’t accept such funding (Network Contagion Research Institute, 2024). Separate studies reached the same conclusion.
Seeds are dropped, and it spreads and spreads.
More:
The scholars it trained, the frameworks it promoted, the orthodoxy it enforced are now embedded throughout American academia. They’re training the next generation. It’s a self-perpetuating system that grows more extreme with each cycle.
These scholars don’t stay confined to Middle East Studies departments. They spread to Education departments where they train future K-12 teachers. They move into Schools of Social Work. They populate Ethnic Studies programs where they apply Middle East frameworks to American history. The infection metastasizes. Then it flows downstream to every institution these graduates enter.
Much much more at the link, including the influence of China.
We’ve seen the results. The generational aspect of the problem has been especially apparent after 10/7.
The author continues:
The few states that tried to implement reforms discovered they were attempting to drain an ocean with a bucket. The system is too large. Too interconnected. Too self-reinforcing for any incremental reform to work. It requires comprehensive action at the federal level. It requires sustained political will across multiple administrations. Anything less than that will fail.
The author goes on to recommend a comprehensive 10-point plan to reverse the course of this multi-faceted titanic perversion of US education. It’s hard to imagine we’ll muster the political will to do this, but something extremely drastic is necessary – long past necessary.
I’m extremely pleased to announce that Gerard Van der Leun’s poetry book, Into the Smoke of the World and other poems, is ready for purchase. Poetry was very dear to Gerard’s heart, and this beautiful book features almost all of his poems that survived the Paradise fire, plus many full color photographs and cover artwork by wonderful pastel artist (and Van der Leun reader) Casey Klahn. Please go to the Vanderleunbooks.com website and order. Continue reading →