MonopolarMagnetism

In 2017 when neo nazis marched in Charlotteville yielding Tikki torches, spokespeople at every university raced to denounce them. My own chancellor wrote: “There was only one side that provoked the hate-fueled violence…” and “We cannot allow our institutions of higher learning to become centers for ideologies repugnant to everything our nation stands for.” On Saturday Oct 7 2023, I woke up to the biggest slaughter of civilian Jews since the holocaust. The atrocities were plainly documented by Hamas terrorists in snuff porn cascading through my twitter feed, a modern day pogrom. While anti-Israel bias is a well known problem on university campuses, I somewhat naively expected the administration (of any university) to unequivocally disavow this violence and recognize the victims and aggressors as such, just as they had opined on every major event in recent memory. With the facts so starkly laid out, how could they say anything else? Days passed. Governments worldwide, celebrities, and even major league sports released perfectly sensitive and appropriate statements. Meanwhile, universities worked in lockstep, just as they did 3 years ago to send your kids to zoom university after the tuition check cleared, and they posted identical mealy mouthed garbage essentially saying that “there are fine people on both sides.” No mention of Israel, Jews, or Hamas. What was stopping them from making an unequivocal statement that this was a terrorist slaughter targeting civilian Jews? Are they scared of what a fraction of their students would do? Are they so captured that they think that these atrocities are justified? Do they have intel that Iran would hack them if they said the wrong thing? If it is the latter, please send me an e-mail; I promise I won’t post it on twitter. But it is almost certainly the former two reasons. Let me be perfectly clear. As a Jew in urban California, I am not likely to encounter the Charlottsville flavor of nazi. Those people are shunned from society and the individuals at that rally had lost their job at the hotdog stand by Monday morning. But I am surrounded by modern day Nazis who fill the halls and administration of academia, who celebrate in the streets of major western cities before the blood of the pogrom is dry, who sit on the city council of the city where I live. Their propagandized safe spaces have taught them that the slaughter of Jews is acceptable, if there is some justification, just like the Germans in WW2. People of the same ideology were operating in Israel on the morning of Simchat Torah yielding machine guns (not Tikki torches). The only missing piece in the United States is a charismatic leader, and we are just one octogenarian election cycle away from that happening. I do not think that universities should opine on every issue; I actually think they should stay all the way out of making political statements to not tip the scales of free speech. But the fact of the matter is that they have been opining and picking sides for years, and it makes a statement when they suddenly choose to stop doing this.

Suppose we take the original resistivity data of LK99 at face value. The plot from arXiv 2307.12037 is pasted below with digitized resistivity values at characteristic temperatures, in more conventional units for metals, written to the right.