The old saw about right-wingers that every accusation is a confession is mostly true. But you rarely see it as clearly stated as Trump’s demands on Harvard.

Apparently this was the breaking point for Harvard: cluster hires for conservatives.

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— Charles Petersen (@cpetersen.bsky.social) April 14, 2025 at 2:01 PM

Note that the sentence before the highlighted one says that Harvard must ban ideological litmus tests in hiring. And then the highlighted sentence literally calls for ideological litmus tests in hirings.

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“The Trump administration has grown so furious with Harvard University after a week of escalating dispute between the two sides that it is planning to pull an additional $1 billion of the school’s funding for health research,“ the Wall Street Journal reports.

“Trump administration officials thought the long list of demands they sent Harvard last Friday was a confidential starting point for negotiations.”

“They were surprised on Monday when Harvard released the letter to the public. Before Monday, the administration was planning to treat Harvard more leniently than Columbia University, but now officials want to apply even more pressure to the nation’s most prominent university.”

One of the few areas where I sharply dissent from the norms of contemporary left-liberalism is that of homelessness. To be blunt, homelessness is terrible. It’s a failure of society. It is not OK to be homeless. It is an absolute blight on cities. Where we as a society became so focused on individual rights so that you have people arguing that being homeless is totally cool if people want to be and also if they want to shoot up on the streets, that’s cool too, well, that’s for future historians to figure out. But it’s bad. I grew up around this, being from Eugene, which had giant transient populations before it was cool, and I don’t have much tolerance for the intentionally homeless.

Now, there’s a lot of caveats here. The vast majority of homeless folks are not to blame for their plight and they want stable homes. Housing prices are ridiculous. People absolutely should have a constitutional and legal right to shelter. Cities need to build and build and build. We need to invest in mental health care. We need to find ways to take care of folks who are off their meds and in need of help. We need to provide the counseling needed to work with people to get them off addictive drugs and when that is not possible, as of course it is with a lot of addicts, to find them acceptable and safe housing. In terms of strategies to solve homelessness, I am there for all of them.

But I am not there with homelessness being acceptable and I never will be. It’s just not. Moreover, it’s the biggest political loser issue imaginable. So the great thing about pro-homelessness (and really, GTFOH with the “unhoused” language) advocates is that they are both wrong on the merits and engaging in disastrous politics that drive lots of people to the right! Great job folks!

So when I read this story about San Jose, I can understand the sentiments, even if calling the cops is rarely a good answer for anyone.

In San Jose, Mayor Matt Mahan, a Democrat, recently called for arresting homeless people if they refused shelter three times.

It’s rare for leaders in the liberal Bay Area to adopt such an approach, which critics say criminalizes homelessness. But his idea has drawn widespread support. While there remains opposition, interviews with residents, elected officials and advocates show that rising frustration with homelessness is making Silicon Valley voters desperate for action and leading them to proposals that once would have seemed too right-leaning for these heavily blue cities.

“We can have progressive goals, but we have to have pragmatic ways of achieving them,” Mr. Mahan said in an interview.

San Jose is the largest city in Northern California, with nearly one million residents, but it has long been overshadowed culturally and politically by San Francisco. Most of its population lives in suburban neighborhoods that are only slightly more affordable than the wealthy Silicon Valley enclaves north of the city.

Approximately 6,000 people in San Jose live in shelters, on the streets, along riverbanks and in vehicles. Homelessness is the top concern among San Jose residents by a two-to-one margin, according to city surveys.

Mr. Mahan, a 42-year-old moderate Democrat and tech entrepreneur who has been mayor since 2023, tapped into that anger and decried a crisis of homelessness, crime and dirty streets in San Jose the first time he campaigned for the city’s top job. He vowed to bring a “revolution of common sense.”

The goal of his new plan, he said, is to invest heavily in building more shelters in San Jose and to move homeless people who refuse housing into mental health treatment to help them onto a better path. But it is possible that those living on the streets could serve jail time.

“Homelessness can’t be a choice,” Mr. Mahan said. “Government has a responsibility to build shelter, and our homeless neighbors have a responsibility to use it.”

His proposal has drawn ire from advocates for homeless people, who have said that it ignores the root cause of homelessness: the high cost of living in San Jose and other California cities. But the San Jose City Council has given its initial approval, and a final vote is scheduled for June.

….

Raoul Mahone, 60, sat on a wooden pallet in front of the green tent where he sleeps each night. He nodded to the pinkish-purple blooms of the redbud tree under which he sought shade and the river behind him. Nothing, he said, could persuade him to go indoors.

“They take away paradise and put you in a shelter,” Mr. Mahone said. “They want to lock up the homeless people.”

So, I am most certainly concerned with what happens in shelters, which can be extremely traumatic to people and may well be worse than being out of the street. That’s not OK either. But the proposed program in San Jose seems…not too bad? And getting buy-in from people to have shelters in their neighborhood, that’s really important and good and yes, as a result, there are going to be demands on what happens. But you should not have the right to live on the streets. You should be able to sue the government if you can’t find a place to live. But if your paradise is disaster for others, well, something has to give.

As a reminder, left politics are not, or at the very least should not be, some form of extreme social libertarianism where everyone can do whatever they want to. We have so lost our sense collectivism in this country and the kinds of extreme individualism that the left gets hung up on these days really reflect that. Individual rights are important, but collective life is more important. Individual rights are great when they don’t have a negative impact on others. Have consensual sex with whoever you want! But seeing people losing their minds because they are off their meds on the streets of Portland, dudes taking a shit on the sidewalk, this kind of thing–all of which I have personally seen in the last couple of years while visiting my home state–this is outright bad for people, especially kids who should not be seeing this kind of trauma in person if we can help it.

Either way, if the left wants to be sure that they never win on policy ever again and no one ever trusts you with elected office, keep going down this road of it being completely fine if you choose to be “unhoused.” Homelessness is a social problem. It needs to be treated as a problem. And problems need to be solved. There will inevitably have to be some coercion in that, just like there is coercion in all parts of our society.

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The Trump administration plans to kill the free tax filing program operated by the Internal Revenue Service, the Associated Press reported today, citing two anonymous sources.

The IRS launched Direct File in a pilot for the 2024 tax filing season. It was available to taxpayers in 12 states last year, and was available in 25 states this year. The program's website says the filing tool will be open until October 15 for people who obtained deadline extensions, but it hasn't been updated to account for the plan to end Direct File.

"The program had been in limbo since the start of the Trump administration as Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency have slashed their way through the federal government," the AP article said. "Musk posted in February on his social media site, X, that he had 'deleted' 18F, a government agency that worked on technology projects such as Direct File."

The AP wrote that "two people familiar with the decision to end Direct File said its future became clear when the IRS staff assigned to the program were told in mid-March to stop working on its development for the 2026 tax filing season." The IRS will lose about a third of its staff this year through layoffs and employees accepting resignation offers, The New York Times reported yesterday.

TurboTax maker Intuit repeatedly criticized the Direct File program created during the Biden administration. Intuit has said that "Direct File is not free tax preparation, but rather a thinly veiled scheme where billions of dollars of taxpayer money will be unnecessarily used to pay for something already completely free of charge." The IRS last year said the pilot cost $31.8 million and estimated 2025 costs of $75 million.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) criticized Intuit's lobbying against Direct File and told the AP that Trump and Musk "are going after Direct File because it stops giant tax prep companies from ripping taxpayers off for services that should be free. Americans want a free and easy way to file their taxes—Trump and Musk want to take that away."

Intuit's TurboTax offers free filing for simple returns, but has faced lawsuits alleging that its ads misled consumers who had to pay. In 2022, Intuit agreed to pay $141 million in restitution to millions of consumers and stop a specific ad campaign that promised free filing.

The Federal Trade Commission ruled last year that Intuit violated US law with deceptive advertising and ordered the company to stop telling consumers that TurboTax is free without more obvious disclaimers. Intuit responded by suing the FTC in a case that is still pending at the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit.

The free IRS filing program is also limited to simple returns, but there was hope of expanding its usefulness. The program accepted returns from 140,803 taxpayers in the 12-state 2024 pilot, which was followed by a May 2024 announcement that Direct File would become "a permanent option for filing federal tax returns starting in the 2025 tax season."

The IRS said in the 2024 announcement that it was looking for ways to cover more complicated tax returns. "Over the coming years, the agency's goal is to expand Direct File to support most common tax situations, with a particular focus on those situations that impact working families," the IRS said at the time. The Treasury Department estimated that over 30 million taxpayers were eligible for Direct File this year, but hasn't said yet how many people used it.

House Republicans urged Trump to act even more quickly to kill the program, saying in a December 2024 letter that he should issue "a day-one executive order to end the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) unauthorized and wasteful Direct File pilot program."

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APOD: 2025 April 16 – Halo of the Cats Eye What created the unusual halo around the Cat's Eye Nebula? No one is sure. What is sure is that the Cat's Eye Nebula (NGC 6543) is one of the best known planetary nebulae on the sky. Although haunting symmetries are seen in the bright central region, this image was taken to feature its intricately structured outer halo, which spans over three light-years across. Planetary nebulae have long been appreciated as a final phase in the life of a Sun-like star. Only recently however, have some planetaries been found to have expansive halos, likely formed from material shrugged off during earlier puzzling episodes in the star's evolution. While the planetary nebula phase is thought to last for around 10,000 years, astronomers estimate the age of the outer filamentary portions of the Cat's Eye Nebula's halo to be 50,000 to 90,000 years.

The rate of autism in a group of 8-year-olds in the US rose from 2.76 percent (1 in 36) in 2020 to 3.22 percent (1 in 31) in 2022, according to a study out Tuesday in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a journal published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The report's authors—researchers at the CDC and academic institutions across the country— suggest that the slight uptick is likely due to improved access to evaluations in underserved groups, including Black, Hispanic, and low-income communities.

The data comes from the CDC-funded Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network. The national network has been tracking the prevalence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in 8-year-olds at a handful of sites since 2000, publishing estimates every two years. In 2000, ASD prevalence was 1 in 150, with white children from high-income communities having the highest rates of the developmental disability. In 2020, when the rate hit 1 in 36, it was the first year in which higher ASD rates were seen in underserved communities. That year, researchers also noted that the link between ASD and socioeconomic status evaporated in most of the network.

In the new data, prevalence continued to be higher in underserved communities compared with white children. Prevalence among white children was 27.7 per 1,000, which is lower than prevalence among multiracial (31.9), Hispanic (33.0), Black (36.6), American Indian or Alaska Native (37.5), or Asian or Pacific Islander children (38.2). And, overall, prevalence was higher among children from low-income neighborhoods.

"The reversal of these patterns in prevalence by race and ethnicity and SES [socioeconomic status] is consistent with increased access to and provision of identification services among previously underserved groups," the researchers conclude.

A look forward also shows trends toward more and earlier access to services. While monitoring has focused on 8-year-olds because children are more likely to have a diagnosis by that age, the researchers also examined autism evaluations and rates among children who were 4 years old in 2022. Researchers found that the younger children, born in 2018, had more evaluations in the same age window as the children who were born in 2014.

Disparities

This year, the ADDM included 16 sites across the country—in many past years, there were 11 sites. It's important to highlight that although the prevalence rates from these sites are often seen as national estimates of ASD prevalence, they are not. These 16 sites are not nationally representative. The populations within ADDM "do not generate nationally representative ASD prevalence estimates," the authors caution.

Among the sites, there were large differences. Prevalence ranged from 9.7 per 1,000 children who were 8 years old in Texas (Laredo) to 53.1 in California. These differences are likely due to "differences in availability of services for early detection and evaluation and diagnostic practices," the CDC and network researchers wrote.

For instance, California—the site with the highest prevalence among 8-year-olds and also 4-year-olds—has a local initiative called the Get SET Early model. "As part of the initiative, hundreds of local pediatricians have been trained to screen and refer children for assessment as early as possible, which could result in higher identification of ASD, especially at early ages," the authors write. "In addition, California has regional centers throughout the state that provide evaluations and service coordination for persons with disabilities and their families."

On the other hand, the low ASD rates at the network's two Texas sites could "suggest lack of access or barriers to accessing identification services," the authors say. The two Texas sites included primarily Hispanic and lower-income communities.

The newly revealed higher rates in some of the network's underserved communities could link ASD prevalence to social determinants of health, such as low income and housing and food insecurity, the authors say. Other factors, such as higher rates of preterm birth, which is linked to neurodevelopmental disabilities, as well as lead poisoning and traumatic brain injuries, may also contribute to disparities.

Anti-vaccine voices

The detailed, data-heavy report stands in contrast to the position of health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine advocate who promotes the false and thoroughly debunked claim that autism is caused by vaccines. Last month, Kennedy hired the discredited anti-vaccine advocate David Geier to lead a federal study examining whether vaccines cause autism, despite numerous high-quality studies already finding no link between the two.

Geier, who has no medical or scientific background, has long worked with his father, Mark Geier, to promote the idea that vaccines cause autism. In 2011, Mark Geier was stripped of his medical license for allegedly mistreating children with autism, and David Geier was fined for practicing medicine without a license.

In a media statement Tuesday in response to the new report, Kennedy called autism an "epidemic" that is "running rampant." He appeared to reference his planned study with Geier, saying: "We are assembling teams of world-class scientists to focus research on the origins of the epidemic, and we expect to begin to have answers by September."

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