From today's Pirate Wires newsletter. #yestr

"Tuesday, the Trump administration froze over $1 billion of Cornell’s federal funding and $790 million of Northwestern’s, citing civil rights investigations. The campaign against elite universities continues, fueled by accusations of antisemitism, contempt for the DEI industrial complex, and a broader cultural vendetta. Directionally, this is good — universities are bloated credential mills, non-STEM research is largely farcical, and the ballooning student debt crisis is untenable. But if you’re going to kneecap research institutions, throwing the baby out with the bathwater, you can’t just walk away. It’s time for the government to operate with a meaningful, constructive vision for the future. To bring back initiatives reminiscent of the Manhattan Project and Apollo space program, to fund frontier-expanding scientific inquiry in service of real goals: biological mastery, the exploration of space, and the harnessing of nuclear fusion in service of humanity. Sure, burn down the universities, but build something better in their ashes."