Worth Knowing, Probably Not Quite Threadworthy 1/29

[SVPete]

Twin Cities Police Union Chief: These Deaths Are On Walz, Frey

https://hotair.com/ed-morrissey/2026/01/29/twin-cities-police-union-chief-these-deaths-are-on-walz-frey-n3811330

The New York Post ran this yesterday morning as an "exclusive." It's so exclusive that few if any media outlets bothered to note this accusation from St. Paul Police Federation president Mark Ross.

The issue isn't sanctuary city policy per se, Ross tells the Post. Local police don't need to conduct immigration raids, as Jacob Frey and Tim Walz have declared. However, both the governor and the mayor, as well as commanders in the police departments, have ordered these departments to provide no cooperation with ICE and Border Patrol, even just for crowd control – and that has proven to be a deadly choice:

“Since the Republican National Convention was held in St. Paul back in 2008, Minnesota law enforcement has undergone extensive training in mobile field force configurations and crowd management for major events. And because of that, I think we’re in the best position to deal with that,” Ross said.

“Unfortunately, our local politicians would not allow us to do that,” he added. ...

“Had we been allowed just a little bit of coordination –  not in terms of what ICE is doing, but if they say, ‘Hey, we need to go to this place to serve a warrant, we’re going to be out there a couple hours. We’re nervous that crowds are going to form and give us trouble. Can you come out and help?’ That’s something we can easily coordinate with a little bit of notice, and sometimes with hardly any notice, we can get out there quickly,” Ross said.

“I believe, had we been able to do that, that there would be no loss of life at this point,” he said.

Frankly, while I do not know the gooberment-police relationship details in Minneapolis, I still think this was overdue. Maybe the union guy tried to work out something behind the scenes,, but that police officers had been ordered not to do basic crowd control needed to be made public weeks ago. That's critical context for ICE/CBP operations and for what city gooberment has been doing.

[SVPete]

Biologist Sues Cornell Claiming Racial Discrimination

https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2026/01/28/biologist-sues-cornell-claiming-racial-discrimination-n3811323

Colin Wright is an evolutionary biologist who now works for the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. This week he filed a racial discrimination lawsuit against Cornell University. Wright, who is white, claims he was discriminated against in a hiring process which was focused on making a "diversity hire." In fact, he didn't know at the time that the job was even available because it was never posted publicly.

The lawsuit, filed Monday in federal district court in New York, claims the university violated federal law when it sought to fill a faculty position several years ago. It cites emails from the ecology and evolutionary biology department in December 2020 that allegedly said that to make a “diversity hire” the department would invite candidates from a list of “underrepresented minority scholars” and avoid having the candidate compete with others.

Colin Wright, the plaintiff, was a postdoctoral researcher in that field at Pennsylvania State University at the time. He said he was seeking an academic job and was well qualified for the tenure-track position that Cornell allegedly filled without ever posting the job publicly, as was required by university policy.

Attorneys for the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a conservative think tank with close ties to the Trump administration that brought the case, contend that internal documents classified a list of candidates by race, ethnicity, disability status and sexual orientation. Emails allegedly indicated that the department intentionally avoided a competitive search and planned to approach candidates one at a time until one accepted.

I've long viewed government agency jobs as "Whites need not apply", and don't. That's my choice. When government and "educational" institutions operate that way, it is illegal, and that's what Cornell appears to have done. The LIEden MalAdministration was unsurprisingly incurious, and civil rights agencies and courts knew which way the wind blew.