There are conflicting reports on whether Texas A&M, as ordered by Governor Greg Abbott, are actually ending their raidcal leftwing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI, AKA critical race theory, AKA social justice), or just pretending.
The Texas A&M University System has moved to remove all Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) statements from their employment and admissions practices, it said in a statement on its website.
Chancellor John Sharp stated that after receiving a letter in February from Gov. Greg Abbott’s office, he ordered a review of all DEI policies in the university system.
“No university or agency in the A&M System will admit any student, nor hire any employee based on any factor other than merit,” said Sharp.
A directive was sent to all university system agencies to limit employment and admissions to a cover letter, curriculum vitae, statements about research and teaching philosophies, and professional references.
A memo obtained from Abbott’s office asserted that DEI policy “has been manipulated to push policies that expressly favor some demographic groups to the detriment of others.”
The University of Texas (UT) System board chairman Kevin Eltife announced a pause on all DEI efforts during a board of regents meeting last week. The move was prompted by his comments about how “certain DEI efforts have strayed from the original intent.”
Is there a reason to doubt the sincerity of this effort? Well, John Sharp is a Democrat, albeit one from an era (he was State Comptroller from 1991 through 1999) where there was still a conservative (or at least moderate) wing to the Texas Democratic Party.
“How Texas A&M Went Woke,” my report from the Claremont Institute, has prompted the Texas A&M administration to respond. First, A&M has reportedly hired someone to continue the process of scrubbing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies from its website. Second, A&M is circulating a memo charging that “misinformation” lies at “the foundation of the report.” A&M compares more than a dozen “Statements from Yenor” against “Facts from Texas A&M University.” But their “facts” are simply the evasions and obfuscations of a guilty party. Their rebuttal presents an object lesson in sophistry.
One category of sophistry is refuting a charge not made. I contend that that A&M “has more DEI administrators than UT-Austin.” A&M responds that a comparison of “executive-level DEI operations” in central administration shows that A&M has fewer. I say A&M has more total DEI administrators; A&M says it has fewer central administrators. Both statements are true. A&M had many more lower-level DEI officials than UT at the time of the counting. I say that A&M created a diversity committee to consider removing statues on campus; A&M responds that no statues have been removed (yet!). Again, both statements are true. A&M has not refuted anything I said.
Sometimes, they claim ignorance; A&M evidently has so many DEI programs that it can hardly keep track of them. One is the LEAD program, which trains department chairs in DEI ideology, among other things. A&M is “not aware of a training for department chairs called LEAD.” A snapshot from ADVANCE, the university’s faculty affairs website, shows that this program still exists under a different name.
Another technique is to deny, deny, deny. A&M administrators describe their own ACES program, which is housed in the Office of Diversity. A&M often lauds ACES as a premier diversity program. It lists ACES in its evaluations of diversity programs. A&M now denies that ACES is “a diversity effort.” Who you gonna believe—A&M or your lying eyes?
Sometimes A&M concedes that their DEI programs exist, but that they have discontinued them or that they will discontinue them.
Snip.
The university has announced in advance how it will get around the A&M system’s recently-announced ban on DEI statements.
The legislature should defund DEI administrative offices in all Texas universities and colleges. All who are currently employed in such offices should be let go. This will make it clear that DEI is bad for one’s career in Texas higher ed. Second, the Texas legislature should adopt the Kalven Report as a vision for university professionalism. Politicized teaching and disciplines should be judged against the standards of the Kalven Report. If disciplines are so thoroughly infused with DEI ideology or any other leftist activism, the legislature should cease to fund them. Disciplines with DEI inscribed into their DNA should not receive public funds.
Most importantly, the Board of Regents must take its job more seriously. It must issue directives to eradicate DEI from universities and then follow through with them by firing university presidents who openly defy the Board or obfuscate their DEI efforts. Personnel is policy. The Left has clamored for DEI practices for generations, and university presidents have responded by permitting the DEI bureaucracy to bloat. It is time for these university presidents to fear conservatives in the legislature more than they do the Left, and this can be done only when select university presidents are fired. If this Board of Regents will not do it, then it too must be released and replaced.
I share Yenor’s skepticism. Those infected with social justice never give up pushing their radical ideology, administration directive or no administration directive. Laying off all DEI personnel is the only way to purge the infection.
A lot of conservatives have criticized Governor Greg Abbott’s anti-CRT/DEI/SJW initiatives as all show and no teeth. But there is at least some sign that those directives have had an effect on the people that run the University of Texas system.
The University of Texas (UT) System will pause all Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts, the board of regents announced last week.
The board chairman Kevin Eltife stated at the start of the meeting he had a comment that was “not an action or discussion item.”
“The topic of DEI activities on college campuses has received tremendous attention nationally and here in Texas,” Eltife said.
“We welcome, celebrate, and strive for diversity on our campus with our student and faculty population.”
“I also think it’s fair to say in recent times, certain DEI efforts have strayed from the original intent to now imposing requirements and actions that, rightfully so, raised the concerns of our policymakers,” he added.
Eltife went on to announce that all DEI policies would be paused on UT campuses and he will be asking for reports on any current policies still operating.
“We will await any action from the legislature for implementation by the University of Texas system at the appropriate time, and if needed, the board may consider a uniform DEI policy for the entire UT system,” Eltife said.
This announcement follows many reported incidents of DEI policies on UT campuses.
In 2021, Texas Tech University announced it was hiring four new assistant professors for its Department of Biological Sciences. Its social media posts made clear the department’s commitment to DEI hiring.
The department released a rubric for evaluating new faculty candidates’ diversity statements about how well they understand and have knowledge of “dimensions of diversity.”
Texas Tech has already released a statement about its steps toward ending DEI hiring and its desire to “always emphasize disciplinary excellence.”
UT Austin has been accused of using DEI policies to “espouse a clear ideological agenda,” and other reports have shown the pervasiveness of DEI in multiple Texas medical schools.
A medical school applicant, George Stewart, has filed a lawsuit against six Texas medical schools for alleged willingness to “discriminate on account of race and sex when admitting students by giving discriminatory preferences to females and non-Asian minorities, and by discriminating against whites, Asians, and men.”
It’s one thing for the board to announce policies, it’s quite another for administrators and department heads to follow them. Right now I would bet some social justice warrior administrators at UT are busy telling their friends on Facebook how they’re going to ignore the board’s directives.
When we start seeing entire DEI pockets of resistance being laid off the way we’ve seen in Florida and in the private sector, then we’ll know it’s real and not just empty talk.
In addition to getting over a cold, I spent most of the non-work day trying to assemble a pressure washer so I could attach a water-jetting attachment so I can clean out a blocked exterior line so I can run my dishwasher without it overflowing my sink.
The result of all this labor is that I still need to call a plumber. So enjoy yet another abbreviated LinkSwarm.
Hmmmmmm! “Hunter Biden Business Partner Flips, Now ‘Cooperating’ With GOP Investigators.”
Eric Schwerin, a close business associate of Hunter Biden who also dealt with Joe Biden’s business and tax affairs, is now working with House GOP investigators looking into Biden family dealings – particularly in Ukraine and China, where the family collected millions of dollars, Just the News reports.
Eric Schwerin, a close business associate of Hunter Biden who also dealt with Joe Biden’s business and tax affairs, is now working with House GOP investigators looking into Biden family dealings – particularly in Ukraine and China, where the family collected millions of dollars, Just the News reports.
“He is cooperating with us,” House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) told the outlet.
“His attorneys and my counsel are communicating on a regular basis. Now, I feel confident that he’s going to work with us, and provide us with the information that we have requested,” Comer continued. “I think that Schwerwin is going to be a very valuable witness for us in this investigation.”
Of note, Schwerin, the former president of Hunter Biden’s now-dissolved investment firm Rosemont Seneca Partners, visited the White House at least 19 times from 2009 to 2015, according to White House visitor log records reviewed by The Epoch Times and first reported by the New York Post.
Patrick L. Wojahn, the Democratic mayor of College Park, MD, resigns over child porn charges. Name that party: His political affiliation only shows up in the 19th paragraph of the piece. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Illnesses to Democratic senators Dianne Feinstein and John Fetterman mean that Democrats have temporarily lost their senate majority. That will teach you to rely to Octagenerians and visibly impaired stroke victims to carry your water. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta submits $5.5 billion bid for NFL’s Commanders.” He should move them to Austin and change the name back to the Redskins, just to spite them.
Did MacKay get Tulipmania wrong? It turns out he was also an enthusiast for the far more destructive “Railway Bubbles” that struck England in the 19th century.
Via Texas Scorecard comes two different stories of how radical racist social justice warrior ideology in the form of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion continues to infect Texas universities.
First up: A University of Texas professor is suing UT officials for violating his First Amendment rights.
In attempts to silence the professor for speaking out on controversial issues, university administration threatened his job, pay, institute affiliation, research opportunities, and academic freedom.
Richard Lowery, Ph.D., a tenured finance professor at University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business, said in the complaint, “The officials at the state’s flagship university violated his constitutional right to criticize government officials.”
In the suit, Lowery claims the university administration “harmed his right to academic freedom.”
Lowery’s suit explains that the First Amendment “protects the right of public university professors to engage their colleagues and administrators in debate and discussion concerning academic matters, including what should be taught and the school’s ideological direction and balance.”
According to the Institute for Free Speech, Professor Lowery is “well known” for his “vigorous commentary on university affairs.” Lowery’s articles have been featured in The Hill, The Texas Tribune, the Houston Chronicle, and The College Fix.
Lowery has also been known to use social media and online opinion articles to “publicly criticize university officials’ actions, and ask elected state-government officials to intervene. He has also used such tools to participate in the sort of academic campus discourse that faculty traditionally pursue.”
In his articles criticizing UT officials, Lowery specifically calls them out for their approaches on issues such as “critical race theory indoctrination, affirmative action, academic freedom, competence-based performance measures, and the future of capitalism.”
On multiple occasions, Lowery reported that university administrators are using diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) requirements to filter out “competent” teachers and professors who disagree with the DEI ideology prevailing on campus.
In response, Lowery claims university administrators “responded with a campaign to silence” him, where they threatened his job, pay, institute affiliation, research opportunities, academic freedom, and labeled his behavior as inviting violence or lacking in civility.
The suit continues, saying school officials “also allowed, or at least did not retract, a UT employee’s request that police surveil Lowery’s speech, because he might contact politicians or other influential people.”
“Lowery got the message,” the suit says.
In response, the professor is seeking to “vindicate” his right of free speech, asking the court to declare the administration’s actions as unconstitutional and restore his First Amendment rights to speak on matters he was previously prevented from speaking on.
DEI has even infected the university previously considered a bulwark of conservative value, Texas A&M:
Thought of by many Texans as a relatively conservative university, a new report explains how Texas A&M has “gone woke” in recent years.
Scott Yenor, a Boise State professor and fellow at the Claremont Institute, explained during a recent interview on The Luke Macias Show how leftist Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies have seeped into the campus.
DEI programs have come under fire recently for prioritizing factors like race, gender, and sexual orientation over merit in hiring, admission, and curriculum.
“Texas A&M has this reputation as being one of the more conservative public universities. I know a generation ago when someone asked me where I would send my kids to school, I said the best public university in the country is Texas A&M,” said Yenor.
But when Yenor began researching DEI programs in college campuses across the country, he found something troubling in Texas.
The interesting thing about these universities is that they advertise what they’re doing. They have a plan and they’re proud of the plan. And then they go about trying to execute the plan. And Texas A&M announced a very radical diversity plan in 2010 and has been executing it like on steroids the last two years.
Yenor mentioned recent efforts to take down a statue of former Confederate General and Texas Governor Sul Ross from campus. Though that movement was unsuccessful, Yenoer argued bigger factors are at play.
“There were attempts to take down statues and, and, you know, other other ways of affecting the campus climate symbolically. But the more important thing is that there’s been a real, real ratcheting up of their understanding of what they have to do. The 2020 diversity plan really concerns breaking down the systems of oppression in words like ‘merit,’ hiring the best person, and things like that,” said Yenor.
To that end, Yenor pointed out a shocking statistic: Texas A&M University currently has more DEI personnel than the University of Texas at Austin.
“It’s true at A&M that diversity is the new merit,” said Yenor.
Governor Greg Abbott issuing a directive banning the teaching of Critical Race Theory doesn’t seem to discouraged social justice warriors from continuing to radicalize Texas higher education. There needs to be sterner measures, including defunding the DEI bureaucracy, followed by pink slips.
he Austin City Council on Wednesday voted to fire City Manager Spencer Cronk following his response to the winter storm earlier this month. The council voted 10-1 in a special called session, with only Natasha Harper-Madison (District 1) voting against Cronk’s firing.
Natasha Harper-Madison is an ultra-lefty sort, which makes me slightly more assured that firing Cronk was the right move.
Cronk’s termination is effective Thursday, Feb. 16. He will receive a one-year severance of $463,001.50, under a City ordinance in which he was hired in 2018. The council has appointed Jesus Garza, who served as Austin’s city manager from 1994 to 2002, to serve as interim city manager.
This is where things get interesting. The city of Austin has an Assistant City Manager, Veronica Briseno. Normal procedure is that the Assistant City Manager takes over as Acting City Manager while a permanent replacement is found. Why was that not done here? Could it have something to do with the fact that current Travis County DA and Soros-backed leftist tool Jose Garza is Jesus Garza’s nephew?
What are the odds?
I mean, it’s just plain odd to hire someone who was last city manager 20 years ago. That’s like thinking that M. Night Shyamalan is a sure thing to helm a big budget movie because Signs made a lot of money.
Following the huge power outages from untrimmed trees in the most recent ice storm, Austin City Manager Spencer Cronk has evidently been fired.
Austin City Council members unanimously agreed to part ways with City Manager Spencer Cronk, two city council members told KXAN under the condition they not be named.
The decision was made behind closed doors in executive session Thursday but has not been announced publicly yet. The city manager had no comment, a spokesperson said.
Mayor Kirk Watson ultimately placed an item on Thursday’s agenda to “evaluate” the city manager’s performance, with the backing of a handful of city council members, after overwhelming swaths of Austin Energy customers lost power during last week’s ice storm.
“The members of the City Council had a productive executive session on Thursday night. I’m going to honor that process and won’t comment on the matters that were discussed,” Watson said Friday.
Council members said they were also frustrated with Cronk’s Wednesday night announcement that the Austin Police Association and the city have reached an agreement in principal without looping in city council members.
Clearly Austin Energy’s ice storm prevention and response was woefully inadequate, but Cronk is largely the scapegoat for the Austin City Council’s own “green” priorities over actual tree maintenance. Austin’s radical leftwing government is filled with people who love preserving trees almost as much as they love raking off graft for leftwing causes.
Scapegoat or not, crazy leftwing causes are why I won’t be mourning Cronk’s departure, as he picked the radical leftwing activist participating in the “Reimaging Austin Police” lunacy. There’s no guarantee, but with Watson as mayor and Mackenzie Kelly on the council, maybe there’s a small chance Austin can hire a city manager more interested in actually managing city government in a competent manner that earning social justice warrior brownie points.
Here’s a longer-than-usual LinkSwarm, since last week’s edition was wiped out by the ice storm power outage.
The leftwing corruption of all government institutions continues apace. “US lost 287,000 jobs while government was reporting +1 million in gains.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
“That’s because economic growth is slowing down,” explains research fellow EJ Antoni. “Even the areas which contributed positively to gross domestic product (GDP) are not necessarily signs of prosperity. For example, business investment grew at only 1.4 percent in the fourth quarter, but that was almost entirely inventory growth. Nonresidential investment, a key driver of future economic growth, was up just 0.7 percent.”
“Meanwhile, residential investment fell off a cliff,” Antoni continued, “dropping 26.7 percent as consumers were unable to afford the combination of high home prices, high interest rates and falling real incomes. No wonder homeownership affordability has fallen to the lowest level in that metric’s history.”
There was a gain in net exports, but that was largely a mirage created by a major slowdown in international trade. “Imports are simply falling faster than exports, which shows up as an increase in GDP.”
But probably most concerning to Antoni is the sharp decline in real disposable income in 2022, which exceeded $1 trillion.
“This is the second-largest percentage drop in real disposable income ever, behind only 1932, the worst year of the Great Depression,” he observed. “To keep up with inflation, consumers are depleting their savings and burning through the ‘stimulus’ checks they received during 2020 and 2021. Credit card debt continues growing, while savings plummeted $1.6 trillion last year, falling below 2009 levels.”
Boom. “Texas has punted Citigroup from the syndicate that’s set to manage the Lone Star state’s largest-ever municipal bond offering, saying the bank’s policies for gun retailers discriminate against the firearms industry.”
Grand Theft Pollo. The food service director of an impoverished Illinois school district was charged with stealing $1.5 million of food — most of which was chicken wings. Vera Liddell, 66, allegedly began stealing from the Harvey School District during the height of COVID-19.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Bill Maher continues to take regular red pills. “The problem with communism and some very recent ideologies here at home, is that they think you can change reality by screaming at it.”
We could be heroes, just for one day. Or once a month, as the case may be…
This week in rapper murders: “Tampa rapper arrested for young mother’s murder days after being acquitted of recording studio double-murder.”
A Tampa jury acquitted Billy Adams of killing two men in a makeshift recording studio in Lutz. He walked free from a Tampa courtroom on January 27.
Three days later, a young mother who was pregnant with her second child was found shot to death in a residential area of New Tampa. Her toddler was still in her vehicle nearby.
A week after her death, Tampa police said Billy Adams “did admit to being the one to pull the trigger.”
Velma, if you haven’t heard, is HBO Max’s “re-imagining” of the animated Scooby-Doo TV show. And by “reimagined” I mean “mangled and mutilated to fit the angry, narrow confines of social justice warrior ideology.”
Since I don’t have cable, I can’t go out of my way to watch it for the sake of reviewing it, so let’s let The Critical Drinker take a whack at it:
If that weren’t enough, let’s let Ryan George of Pitch Meeting also take his turn at bat:
The original Scooby-Doo is hardly going to go down in the annals of television as a classic on the order of Hill Street Blues or I Love Lucy, but it was a solid, wholesome kid-vid TV show that made good use of its limited animation budgets to produce solid, fondly remembered shows that the franchise was strong enough to survive decades of tweaks (“with special guest Don Knotts”), soft reboots, a series of unlikely direct to video movies…
…two “meh at best” live action movies, and even inflicting The Vile Abomination on American viewers.
Even apart from the social justice idiocy, throwing away that legacy for derisive belittlement is just wrong. Moreover, these projects never seem to be profitable or even well-received (remember the disasterous Land of the Lost remake with Will Ferrell?). If you don’t treat the source material with a due amount of respect, all you’re doing pissing off generations of people that grew up watching the originals.
This sort of thing is natural meat for The Critical Drinker, who delights in tearing into Social Justice crap. But the pointed Pitch Meeting takedown seems far more significant, as George has never been one to wade in culture war commentary.
Jordan Peterson always makes a great Joe Rogan guest, and the new interview they did last week is no exception.
Discussing the Twitter files, Critical Race Theory and Marxism, victimhood identity politics, postmodern theory, and falseness of reducing everything to power dynamics.
On the World Economic Forum:
“Globalist Utopian Tyranny” is a great phrase.
They follow in the wake of “Paul Ehrlich, in the 1960s, who really believe, really believe, truly, that maybe the planet should only have 500 million people on it.”
There then follows a devastating take-down of the immortality of pushing 350 million of the world’s poorest to the brink of death through higher energy prices in the hope that maybe 100 years from now life for the poor will be better. I encourage you to watch the entirety of this segment for that.
“It’s a little bit too convenient for me that your prescriptions to save the planet are accompanied by this insistence that the only way forward to that is to give you all the power. It’s like there’s a bit of a moral hazard in, that don’t you think?”
“Do you want to save the planet, or do you want the power? And let’s let’s put the second one first, because the probability that you’re a saint or the messiah is pretty damn low. So that’s the danger of the Davos crowd.”
I suspect I’ll be putting up more snippets from this interview sometime this week…
Democrats enabling sexual predators (yet again), more tanks for Ukraine information, and the unexpected return of Storm Drain Woman. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Published in November of 2022, the story indicated “thousands of child molesters are being let out after just a few months, despite sentencing guidelines.”
The story reported that more than 7,000 inmates convicted of “lewd or lascivious acts with a child under 14 years of age” were released from prison the same year they were incarcerated.
The Daily Mail’s analysis was conducted using a database—created in 1994 after the federal Megan’s Law was passed—requiring law enforcement to make public information regarding registered sex offenders. The news organization examined data in California through July of 2019.
“Everyone should be really upset and frightened by this,” Dordulian said.
According to Dordulian, child molesters are the least likely of criminals to be rehabilitated and are four times more likely to commit the same crime again.
“Once they’re out,” he said, “they are going to re-offend and there’s going to be another child that is victimized by these people.”
Senate Bill 357. Signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in July, the measure decriminalized loitering with the intent to engage in prostitution. The bill did not officially take effect until January 1 of this year; but, from the moment it became law back in July, these women say, the on-the-ground reality changed. “The minute the governor signed it, you started seeing an uptick on the streets,” Powell said. “And on social media, the pimps were saying: ‘You better get out there and work because the streets are ours.’”
The pimps were right: police stopped making arrests for crimes that would no longer be charged. The anti-loitering statute had provided the grounds for officers to question women and children whom they suspected might be trapped in a prostitution ring. “As a police officer, you need probable cause to stop and investigate,” Powell explained. “So if I have a law that says you can’t loiter in this area, with pasties and a G-string, flagging down cars, I could stop you for that because you’re loitering. But if I just say I’m stopping you because you look kind of young, that’s a little weak. So, it takes away a tool.” Without the statute, police hands were suddenly tied. Henceforth, questioning the girls—and potentially provoking a violent confrontation with pimps—came to seem a Pyrrhic gamble, one that California’s police officers would now avoid.
The films, which include “Miss Representation,” “The Mask You Live In,” “The Great American Lie” and “Fair Play,” are licensed to taxpayer-funded schools across every state and sometimes contain sexually explicit imagery and push students to feel “shame and sorrow” about American society split by privilege and oppression. They are paired with curricula that include discussion on Gov. Newsom’s comments within the films, urging them to gather their friends and vote for aligned politicians that support a “care economy” that “embraces universal human values.”
“Former Arlington teachers union president charged with embezzlement. A former president of the Arlington teachers union, who was ousted last spring, has been charged with embezzling more than $400,000 from the organization. Ingrid Gant, 54, of Woodbridge, was arrested yesterday (Monday) in Prince William County on four counts of embezzlement.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
“Thirty years ago, Guan County, Shandong Province launched the ‘Hundred Childless Days‘ campaign under the aegis of national family planning, known in the West as the ‘one-child policy.’ The birthplace of the “Boxers” was deemed to have too high a birth rate by the provincial government. County officials sought to correct this by ensuring that not a single baby was born between May 1 and August 10, 1991.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
North says they do not feel safe anymore, and she believes it all ties back to the large homeless encampment located only feet away from the salon.
“Our safety started to become a big issue. We suffered from multiple break-ins. We’ve had our cars broken into. We clean up feces and needles on a weekly basis. It increased from that to, you know, people approaching us and threatening us with weapons, threatening rape, murder, all of those things,” said North.
The salon has been up and running just off Ben White Blvd. for four years now. North says she has seen an uptick in crime for a while now, but the dangerous behavior from people living in this encampment picked up recently.
“In the past year, it’s gotten increasingly worse and, in the past couple of weeks, it’s gotten to the point where I actually finally felt like this might shut my business down,” said North.
Erin Mutschler, another co-owner of the salon, says they have called the police every time they have dealt with a situation like the one caught on video, but she says police often take 45 minutes to an hour for anyone to show up.
The mayorship of Steve Adler is the gift that just keeps giving, even with him out of office… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Follow-up: Democratic State Rep. Harold Dutton: “Don’t Blame Abbott, Houston ISD Takeover Plan Was My Idea.” (Previously.)
A Florida woman was pulled from a storm drain for the third time in two years. Maybe she was looking for David Icke’s lizard people. Also, she sounds like a real winner: “Police said her license had been suspended 17 times from 2007 to 2020.” (Previously.) (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Jay Leno broke his collarbone, several ribs and both kneecaps in a motorcycle accident. But it sounds like a freak accident: “So I turned down a side street and cut through a parking lot, and unbeknownst to me, some guy had a wire strung across the parking lot but with no flag hanging from it…I didn’t see it until it was too late. It just clothesline me and, boom, knocked me off the bike.” (There’s no evidence the line was strung there by Conan O’Brien.) “But I’m OK!…I’m working this weekend.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
