This Amy post on student loan debt had an outstanding comment stack, with a lot of rewarding moments. El Verde Loco at January 21, 2020 8:45 AM:

> Seize the endowments.

♥

And not to harsh the comment by Ben specifically —there's always tomorrow— but McArdle's thoughts about cosigning loans should be an early read if you're inclined to try to help someone out financially.

The thread is over, but one point to emphasize is that American academics and those who can stream so gently through their venues (both administrators & students) have had a really, really velvety ride in life since WWII. I get annoyed just thinking that the burden they've placed on our nation could be so blithely disregarded. No. Make them generate demonstrable value for all they've already taken from the rest of us. Make it hurt enough for their presumptions to change.

Important point by, of all people, Easterbrook.

On another topic, this was a fascinating comment from Lenona a few days ago:

> Last I heard, Concerned Women
> for America has the same size
> membership - half a million -
> as the National Organization
> for Women. (It used to be a
> lot larger.)

Lenona sees things which the rest of us don't.

Not a happy thing, but maybe Lenona (and others) will share my surprise at this factoid.

Another not happy thing. (I don't know who the twitterer is, but a few people I respect linked him overnight.)

Okay, here's a dumb joke.

Annnnnnd sometimes it's good to have a rhetorical escape hatch when you post a link in a crisis...

Maybe I shoulda waited, since Feigl-Ding
‏ describes himself as former Harvard and "featured whistle blower," an animal new to me. Anyway, five hours later, he's got a lot of links to other information in his timeline.

I don't disagree with what McArdle wrote. When you cosign a loan you should expect you are going to pay for that loan. Which is why most of the time it is parents cosigning for their kids.

From Crid's comment stack linkie, Conan writes

one woman got an exception because her husband shot her five times, putting her in the hospital for two years

Wow. That guy is either a really lousy shot, or he really wanted to hurt her and keep on hurting her.

About peer-reviewed science articles.

In a radio conversation broadcast by the BBC in 1963, the British scientist Peter Medawar, cowinner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1960, asked, “Is the scientific paper a fraud?” As was announced from the outset of the program, his answer was unhesitatingly positive. “The scientific paper in its orthodox form does embody a totally mistaken conception, even a travesty, of the nature of scientific thought.”

...

According to Medawar, the “methods” section is not problematic. However, he unleashes his delightfully witty eloquence on the “results” section: “[It] consists of a stream of factual information in which it is considered extremely bad form to discuss the significance of the results you are getting. You have to pretend firmly that your mind is, so to speak, a virgin receptacle, an empty vessel, for information which floods into it from the eternal world for no reason which you yourself have revealed.”

Was Medawar a curmudgeon? An excessively suspicious mind, overly partial to epistemology?

https://quillette.com/2019/12/21/the-many-faces-of-scientific-fraud/

https://twitter.com/TimRunsHisMouth/status/1220845750747369472

I would have suggested tar & feathers, but this works.

https://twitter.com/JoshuaPotash/status/1220475659031580672

So, you're saying insulting people who's help you need is a bad plan?

https://hotair.com/archives/allahpundit/2020/01/23/jonathan-turley-jerry-nadler-made-major-blunder-accusing-senate-republicans-engaging-cover/