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December 27, 2020
RISIBILITY IN PUNDITRY: “I’m struck by the silliness of the phrase ‘the balm of Jeb Bush.’ Sullivan makes the contrast between moderates and radicals sound like a matter of physical heat. And the best people are the ones whose nature is to remain cool. This distaste for ‘flamboyance,’ ‘bluntness,’ and ‘fever’ is openly elitist — as we see in the last paragraph.”
For the entire left, and much of the right, and our political class in general, the biggest nightmare is that the great mass of Americans will realize what’s been done to them and get angry. It’s fine for urban minorities to get angry, as they can be employed as shock troops. But if the great mass of Americans get angry, that could threaten everyone’s cushy position.
Plus, from the comments: “Liberals pretend to respect Moderate Conservatism, but when a moderate conservative like Mitt Romney comes along, they turn him into an evil, money-grubbing, cancer-giving Hitler youth. Just one example out of many that comes down to the same thing: all Republicans, of any stripe, are Hitler in the end. So why not be Trump?”
“WINE MOMS” IN THE AGE OF THE PANDEMIC: “‘No one is talking about glasses of wine anymore,’ said Ms. Duke, who works for a dog grooming app and lives in Manhattan with her two teenage sons. ‘People are measuring by the bottle,’ she continued.”
Plus, from the comments: “Normal people view the antics of TimesWomen as they would the monkey house at the zoo or a tour of 18th century Bedlam.”
Also: “I remember a commenter 10 months ago suggesting the psychological harm of lockdowns was a huge and unaccounted expense. Wonder where that guy went.”
ASKING THE IMPORTED, ALBEIT BELATED QUESTIONS: Why is Japan obsessed with Kentucky Fried Chicken on Christmas?
NOT ONLY IS 2020 STRANGER THAN WE IMAGINED, IT IS STRANGER THAN WE CAN IMAGINE: Chick-fil-A’s Polynesian sauce packets are exploding because it’s still 2020 and that’s just what happens.
LEFTY CULTURAL INFRASTRUCTURE CRUMBLING FROM LEFTY LOCKDOWNS: A ‘Great Cultural Depression’ Looms for Legions of Unemployed Performers: With theaters and concert halls shuttered, unemployment in the arts has cut deeper than in restaurants and other hard-hit industries.
ASKING THE IMPORTED, ALBEIT BELATED QUESTIONS: Why is the day after Christmas called Boxing Day?
ROGER KIMBALL: Constant’s Liberty, Ancient and Modern.
This is just scratching the surface of Constant’s essay. What he elaborates is a melancholy dialectic of liberty in which nostalgic efforts to resuscitate ancient forms of liberty on the stage of modern life yield tyranny. And yet distinctively modern forms of liberty depend in the end on a ground of genuine political liberty if they are to thrive. Hence the paradox:
Individual liberty, I repeat, is the true modern liberty. Political liberty is its guarantee, consequently political liberty is indispensable. But to ask the peoples of our day to sacrifice, like those of the past, the whole of their individual liberty to political liberty, is the surest means of detaching them from the former and, once this result has been achieved, it would be only too easy to deprive them of the latter.
Modern totalitarians, those of a soft as well as those of a harder disposition, have understood and exploited this paradox. Hence Constant’s prescient warning. Some people, he says, noting that we moderns cannot resurrect ancient forms of liberty without abolishing our quotidian freedoms, “conclude that we are destined to be slaves. They would like to reconstitute the new social state with a small number of elements which, they say, are alone appropriate to the situation of the world today.”
And what are these elements? Constant might have been writing in the opening decades of the 21st century rather than the opening decades of the 19th. Consider: “These elements are prejudices to frighten men, egoism to corrupt them, frivolity to stupefy them, gross pleasures to degrade them, despotism to lead them; and, indispensably, constructive knowledge and exact sciences to serve despotism the more adroitly.”
Read the whole thing
DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE AND THE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARY: Harvard calls women ‘birthing people’ because ‘not all who give birth’ are women.
RUMBLES OF REVOLT: Restaurant Owner BLOCKADES Health Inspector’s Car in Protest.
THERE’S NOTHING YOU CAN DO THAT CAN’T BE DONE. NOTHING YOU CAN SING THAT CAN’T BE SUNG. NOTHING YOU CAN SAY, BUT YOU CAN LEARN HOW TO PLAY THE GAME. IT’S EASY: ‘Dem guru stiffed us:’ Marianne Williamson sued by campaign vendor over unpaid debts.
PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Family sues school that won’t let student out of class promoting anti-white racism.
“A TINY BIT OF GOOD NEWS IN A DISMAL YEAR:” “Political speech is under attack these days from Beijing to Berkeley, so we’ll take victories where we can get them. One arrived Tuesday when the University of Texas at Austin agreed to disband its PC police and end policies that suppress speech on campus.”
COLLUSION: Columbia president advocates softer China approach amid questions over foreign gifts. “Columbia University’s president asked Joe Biden to reduce surveillance of foreign nationals, specifically Chinese nationals. The Ivy League president’s statement comes amid reports that the school failed to disclose more than $1 million from the China for its Confucius Institute, which the school denies.”
BYLINES OF BRUTALITY: Arkansas far-left journalist among four charged in BLM firebombings of police vehicles: report.
(Classical reference in headline.)
ANOTHER TRUMP TRIUMPH: They did it: Kushner, Pompeo, Mnuchin awarded for Middle East peace successes.
INDIAN OCEAN, OFF SOMALIA: A USMC F-35B lands on the amphibious assault ship USS Makin Island. According to the caption, the naval task force is covering the withdrawal from Somalia. Photo taken December 18.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Future Biden Education Secretary Oversaw Creation of Critical Theory Class for High Schoolers.
THIS IS CNN:
It’s a bombshell allegation, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is all over it — with a pillow, as Iowahawk would say:
Evergreen:
CALLING OUT ANTI-SEMITISM: Pro-Israel Group Torches Warnock in New Ad.
WHAT COULD GO WRONG? How the Centers for Disease Control Went Woke.
COLLUSION: Ossoff’s China ties compound Democratic Party’s Hunter Biden, Swalwell woes.
Democratic Senate candidate Jon Ossoff is fighting Republican attacks over his business ties to China as the Georgia runoff nears, but the Hunter Biden and Eric Swalwell scandals involving Beijing aren’t making it any easier.
Mr. Biden, the president-elect’s son, and California Democratic Rep. Swalwell have kept stories about Beijing’s influence in the news, lending oxygen to Republicans hammering Mr. Ossoff‘s link to a Hong Kong conglomerate owned in part by the Chinese communist government.
Mr. Ossoff, a Democrat challenging Republican Sen. David Perdue in the Jan. 5 runoff, slipped a few points in the Dec. 18 poll by the Trafalgar Group, which pollster Robert Cahaly attributed primarily to the China issue. . . .
Alarm over Chinese influence soared starting in mid-October with new reports of Hunter Biden’s lucrative business deals with Beijing, followed by an Axios investigation earlier this month into a suspected Chinese spy who became chummy with some California Democrats, including Mr. Swalwell.
The Perdue campaign connected the dots in a digital ad with news clips of critics, including Sen. Marsha Blackburn, Tennessee Republican, raising concerns about Mr. Ossoff’s company receiving payments from PCCW Media, which is owned in part by China Unicom, a state-run telecommunications provider.
China’s tendrils are everywhere in the Democratic Party.
GREAT MOMENTS IN GASLIGHTING: Kamala Harris talks about childhood Kwanzaa celebrations that probably never happened.
She’s already perfectly fitting in with the Biden administration:
THE YEAR THE RULING CLASS GOT WOKE: Identity politics has become the new secular religion. We need more heretics.
For me, the defining image of 2020 was also the funniest: that of Democratic lawmakers in the US taking the knee, in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, draped in Ghanaian kente cloth.
Watching thoroughly establishment politicians, House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer to the fore, literally kneeling before the new woke politics was striking. It provoked so many questions, not least if Pelosi and Schumer (80 and 70 respectively) would be able to rise again unassisted.
But this absurd attempt at virtue-signalling – which provoked mockery rather than plaudits, even among those it was meant to impress – made one thing clear: that wokeness is the new orthodoxy, and the old elites know this.
Divisive, identitarian ideas around race, gender and sexuality have of course been gaining ground in elite circles for some time. The idea that Western societies are not simply affected by bigotry, but defined by it and built on it, had been gaining ground in academia for decades.* * * * * * * *
What was perhaps more unexpected* was the almost total embrace of Black Lives Matter, the banner under which this movement marched, by the capitalist class. Corporate giants lent their support to the protests. Ben & Jerry’s ice cream pledged to ‘dismantle white supremacy’. And the CEO of JPMorgan Chase took the knee in front of a giant open bank vault.
From the article we linked to yesterday on Christopher Lasch:
Taken as a whole, Lasch’s body of writing offers an account of the limitations of the American political panorama of his era. Conservatism, he suggests, tends to provide de facto ideological cover for the economic developments that have eroded the social values it claims to promote. Liberalism, for its part, has overseen the rise of a state bureaucratic apparatus that promises to compensate for the effects of this erosion. However, in the process, it further weakens the autonomy of individuals, families, and communities, and enables the substitution of democracy with technocratic elite rule. While the New Left of the 1960s rebelled against the expansion of corporate and bureaucratic power, the end result of its revolt was not a reassertion of the local and the communal, but the infusion of those structures with a new therapeutic sensibility.
To borrow the headline of an article we linked to last month: You Keep Using The Word “Liberal:” it doesn’t mean what you think it means.
Related: The Religion to Replace All Other Religions.
* It shouldn’t be that unexpected, considering how easily corporate giants embraced another gnostic religion, radical environmentalism, a few decades ago.
WELL, YES: SpaceX Starship prototype exploded, but it’s still a giant leap toward Mars.
UPDATE: This P.J. Media take, on the other hand, is kind of embarrassing.
Related: “#ProTip, Drew. If you’re worried about taxpayer money being wasted on space progress, go dig into SLS/Orion.” Right?
I CERTAINLY HOPE SO: NYT wonders: Do Dem setbacks in California portend disaster in 2022?
TRUST IS PUBLIC HEALTH’S GREATEST ASSET. WEIRD THAT THEY’RE SO WILLING TO SQUANDER IT. Dr. Fauci justifies lies, saying Americans can’t handle the truth.
A SUBJECT NOBODY EVER ARGUES ABOUT: Selecting The Right Caliber For Self-Defense.
BOOK CRITICIZING CANCEL CULTURE GETS CANCELED BECAUSE AUTHOR CRITICIZED ISLAM:
You may have thought the public discourse couldn’t get any more absurd. Think again. Apparently oblivious to the titanic dimensions of the irony, the publisher Little, Brown just canceled a new book, Welcome to the Woke Trials: How #Identity Killed Progressive Politics by British journalist Julie Burchill because of an “Islamophobic” twitter exchange Burchill had with Muslim writer Ash Sarkar. So you see, it’s fine to stand up for freedom of speech, but some lines must not be crossed. And what was Burchill’s crime? Did she use racial slurs? Did she call for genocide or violence against innocent Muslims? No, apparently all she did was note the readily demonstrable fact that according to Islamic tradition, Muhammad married a child. But telling the truth is a dangerous enterprise these days.
You may not be interested in cancel culture, but cancel culture is interested in you. Read the whole thing.
Little, Brown is owned by Hachette, whose crybully staffers previously cancelled Woody Allen’s autobiography, and threatened to cancel Jordan Peterson’s sequel to best-selling 12 Rules for Life earlier this year. However, they publish such fare as this in their “young adult” category:
Hachette has certainly gotten ultra-woke. I’d ask if going broke is the next step, but the 21st century left certainly enjoys donning their hair shirts.
(Updated and bumped.)
EXTENDED LOCKDOWNS WILL TURN OUT TO HAVE COST MORE LIVES THAN THEY SAVED: Oncologist fears ‘tsunami of cancer’ after COVID-19 lockdowns limited screening.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. France is Bacon.
JOHN ROSENBERG: “If Democrats Win in Georgia, Racial Equality Loses.”
WASHINGTON POST: DENYING ELECTION RESULTS IS LIKE DENYING HOLOCAUST.
(Link safe, goes to Breitbart.com.) Over the years, I’ve been pretty tough on Al Gore, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Stacey Abrams. Unlike the Post though, I’ve never believed any of these politicians were Holocaust deniers. But I’m glad the paper has finally decided to root out the increasing Corbynization of their fellow Democrats.
LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY:
The race-grifting will continue, as long as it’s safe, prestigious, and high-paying.
JEFFREY TOOBIN AND THE MEDIA’S CURIOUS CODE OF DECENCY:
In 2008, Toobin had an affair with Casey Greenfield, the much-younger daughter of veteran political journalist Jeff Greenfield. When Casey Greenfield became pregnant, Toobin reportedly offered her money to have an abortion. When she refused, he told her he would make her regret the decision. After the child was born, Toobin had to be dragged into court and forced to pay child support.
Yet, according to some of his notable colleagues, the real problem here is judgmental prudes. One of Toobin’s New Yorker colleagues, trans activist Masha Gessen, dismissed the incident. “I think it’s tragic that a guy would get fired for really just doing something really stupid,” Gessen told the Times. “It is the Zoom equivalent of taking an inappropriately long lunch break, having sex during it and getting stumbled upon.”
Another New Yorker writer, best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell, told the Times “the only way I could explain [Toobin’s firing] … was that Condé Nast had taken an unexpected turn toward traditional Catholic teaching.” To drive the point home, “Mr. Gladwell then took out his Bible and read to a reporter an allegory from Genesis 38 in which God strikes down a man for succumbing to the sin of self-gratification.”
Gladwell’s superficial understanding of Scripture might be a surprise to readers of his thought-provoking books and, in any event, was a weak attempt to cast doubt on the idea Toobin violated agreed-upon standards of decency. Moreover, it’s hard to imagine there are many jobs in secular America, let alone in vocations heavily dependent on public credibility, where you can turn into Onan the Barbarian in front of dozens of colleagues and still collect a six-figure salary.
In general, excusing libertine elites such as Toobin raises uncomfortable questions for the media. Do black lives matter when 70% of African American children are born out of wedlock? What about the fact that 36% of abortions are performed on African Americans even though they represent 13% of the population – doesn’t that inequality reflect some kind of institutional racism? Don’t expect any serious consideration of these issues coming to an op-ed page near you soon.
Remember #MeToo? It seems so long ago. As Dan McLaughlin wrote in October, “What should shock us is that Toobin has yet to be fired [the New Yorker finally announced Toobin was gone in mid-November, and CNN’s management apparently still haven’t made up their minds yet — Ed], when nearly anyone else would be — any ordinary person, and almost any prominent person whose politics were different from Toobin’s. Instead, it took over a week for anyone to even disclose that he had been disciplined at all. This is perhaps not a great sign regarding how much the media have learned since Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, or Mark Halperin. This is by no means the first indication of Toobin’s horrible, abusive sexual morals.”
HOW CHRISTOPHER LASCH LEFT THE LEFT:
American conservatism, for Lasch, took the assumptions of economic liberalism for granted. In a late essay published in the journal First Things, he remarks that “if conservatism is understood to imply a respect for limits, it is clearly incompatible with modern capitalism or with the liberal ideology of unlimited economic growth.” The acquisitive individualism that is inseparable from this ideology instills a set of attitudes and expectations that undermine not only traditions and communities, but the institutions that the right historically revered as moderating influences against greed and excess: the family and small-scale property ownership. Lasch observes that “twentieth-century capitalism… has replaced private property with a corporate form of property that confers none of these moral and cultural advantages. The transformation of artisans, farmers, and other small proprietors into wage-earners undermines the ‘traditional values’ conservatives seek to preserve.” He concludes: “capitalism’s relentless erosion of proprietary institutions furnishes the clearest evidence of its incompatibility with anything that deserves the name of cultural conservatism.”
Taken as a whole, Lasch’s body of writing offers an account of the limitations of the American political panorama of his era. Conservatism, he suggests, tends to provide de facto ideological cover for the economic developments that have eroded the social values it claims to promote. Liberalism, for its part, has overseen the rise of a state bureaucratic apparatus that promises to compensate for the effects of this erosion. However, in the process, it further weakens the autonomy of individuals, families, and communities, and enables the substitution of democracy with technocratic elite rule. While the New Left of the 1960s rebelled against the expansion of corporate and bureaucratic power, the end result of its revolt was not a reassertion of the local and the communal, but the infusion of those structures with a new therapeutic sensibility.
Over the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated many of the economic, social, and cultural tendencies Lasch deplored. While small businesses have collapsed in record numbers and average families have found themselves destitute, the major tech companies and retail conglomerates like Amazon have reaped massive profits and the stock market has soared; in response, the political class has delivered aid packages that blatantly favor the interests of the latter. As Alex Gutentag recently argued, “the pandemic is a convenient scapegoat for the largest upward wealth transfer in modern human history.” Lasch’s work suggests that the roots of this crisis extend far back into the last century, during which both liberals and conservatives, for different reasons, became increasingly indifferent to the degradation of average people’s lives and livelihoods. He offers us no easy alternatives, but his writings reveal the scale of the problems anyone attempting to look beyond the failings of liberalism must confront.
Read the whole thing.
IT’S COME TO THIS: CBS Frets Too Much Emailing Contributes to Global Warming.
Phillips then turned to environmental author Mike Berners-Lee for the usual carbon-footprint lecture: “But, on the other hand, if you’re at home with the heating on, which it wouldn’t otherwise have to be, then that’s not so good, and you’re probably using more computing stuff than you would be.”
Phillips then recounted that it takes lots of energy to process e-mails, noting the huge quantities that are sent. He then related a British study estimating that “if everyone in Britain sent one less “thank you” e-mail a day, the carbon saving would be like taking about three and a half thousand cars off the road.”
“Hold the smugness” is probably not something CBS should be throwing at the viewers. Somehow, Phillips didn’t try to do the calculation of how much power is horrendously spent on people watching CBS.
This episode of CBS This Morning was sponsored in part by Nissan, which is also ironic with the carbon impact.
Now informed of this knowledge, I assume that CBS will immediately respond by shutting down its Internet server farm, its television broadcasting facilities, or if they’re really serious about the gospel they’re preaching, both. C’mon CBS executives — show us that you take your own news division’s advice seriously!
FOR TWO WEEKS IT WASN’T THAT HARD. FOR NINE MONTHS IT BORDERS ON INSANE. Stop Saying Lockdown Is ‘Not That Hard:’ Staying isolated from family and friends is wrenchingly difficult, even when it’s the right thing to do.
KYLE SMITH: Where’s the Beef, Wonder Woman 1984?
As of Christmas Day, the “Imagine” video is no longer the worst film Gal Gadot and Kristen Wiig have released in 2020. Wonder Woman 1984 is an ode to parachute pants, fanny packs, eyeball-scorchingly bright colors, teased pouffy hair, and shopping malls, but the throwback item it implanted in my mind is Cheez Whiz. This movie is laboratory-made processed corporate goop in a can.
I’ll stick with my Miami Vice DVDs, to keep my happy memories of the mid-‘80s and its pop culture intact.
AT AMAZON, Carhartt Men’s Fleece Neck Gaiter, Black.
THE DEMOCRATS’ PROGRAM IN A NUTSHELL: Schumer Wants Biden to Transfer Wealth From Auto Mechanics to Harvard Grads.
BAD THINGS HAPPEN WHEN YOU MAKE POLITICS YOUR RELIGION: Mother reveals she hid Trump presidency from young son for four years in viral social media post.
A mother’s social media post has gained widespread attention for revealing she hid President Trump’s presidency from her son for the last four years.
“It’s still 2008 in my home. That is, my 6-year-old son assumes Obama is president, he knows Biden is president-elect, but he has no idea Trump exists — which is a deliberate parenting choice I made that spun a little out of control over the past four years,” the woman’s post reads.
* * * * * * * *
Many reacted to the woman’s Facebook post with condemnation, saying her son will lose all trust in her on other issues and characterizing her lying to a young child as “weird.”
“She just completely destroyed her son’s ability to trust his parents about anything, starting as soon as he has a single unsupervised conversation with anyone outside the house. I hope she doesn’t keep him locked away out of a sense of self-pity,” one Twitter user wrote.
“The weirdest part for me is that she clearly just put herself in denial for four years and is trying to claim that she needed to do it to hide the news from…. a two-year-old,” another person wrote on Twitter.
Don’t try this at home, kids parents.
BIDEN’S NOMINEE FOR EPA CHIEF IS KNOWN FOR HIS INTEREST IN COMBATTING “ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM”: If he’s confirmed by the Senate, we will likely be in for an interesting few years.
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights did a report on environmental racism a few years back. Its empirical research demonstrated the opposite of what my progressive colleagues expected: It showed that coal ash dumps were disproportionately located near whites. Somehow that research got buried in the report. My dissent is here.
WHEN THE PUBLIC HEALTH ‘SCIENCE’ ISN’T: Locked-down California runs out of reasons for surprising surge.
America’s most populous state has become one of the nation’s worst epicenters for the disease, setting new records for cases, hospitalizations and deaths almost every day. Things are so bad in Southern California that some patients are being treated in hospital tents, while doctors have begun discussing whether they need to ration care. . . .
Critics have questioned the science behind the regional lockdown orders. Public and industry pressure has already convinced state health officials to reopen playgrounds and relax limits on grocery store capacity. A Los Angeles trial court judge also said the county’s prohibition on outdoor dining was “arbitrary” and that there was insufficient evidence showing it was a source of virus spread.
“Nationally, there has been a kaleidoscopic application of every imaginable type of lockdown order with California being the most restrictive and inflicting the most devastation on small businesses and the most economically vulnerable service workers. And still, we are none the better as far as COVID is concerned,” California Restaurant Association President and CEO Jot Condie said in a statement. “In fact in L.A. where indoor and outdoor dining are completely shut down, with indoor dining [closed] since July, the virus rages on.” . . .
Assemblymember Jordan Cunningham (R-Templeton) argued that the state’s attempt to “shut down types of human interaction without seeing if that’s effective” was creating a backlash of sorts — “driving people to higher-risk activity” like gathering indoors at home, rather than places like restaurants.
“The public health officials have lost credibility with a huge section of the populace. They’re just tuning them out now,” Cunningham said. “The goalposts are moving all the time. … People are fed up with it and they don’t think it makes any sense, and they’re not wrong.”
No, they’re not. And note that this Politico article really wants the answer to be that they just haven’t locked down hard enough.
Plus: Our approach is failing, we must redouble it. Los Angeles Mayor: “Countywide Emergency Order”, New Restrictions And Closures Being Considered As L.A. Becomes Ground Zero Of Covid-19 Pandemic.
Flashback: Against the “Noble Lie” – COVID-19 Edition. “The main political conflict in recent years is between experts or elites and non‐experts. For lack of a better word, the non‐experts are called populists. Their complaints have been specific: Elites and experts are arrogant, they have different values, they condescend in annoying ways, they ignore the sometimes legitimate concerns of populists, among others. Experts say that they should be listened to because they’re more knowledgeable. We see it in debates on every issue from climate change to trade, immigration, and everything in between. The COVID-19 pandemic exposes another criticism of experts: They lie with noble intentions. And the consequences of those noble lies are quite negative.”
The nobility of their intentions is frequently debatable.
Also: Eugene Volokh: And We Should Trust You Now, Dr. Fauci, Because …?
TRUST US, WE’RE EXPERTS. 2020 has been a year of miserable failure for the expert class, even by comparison to the not-stellar years that preceded it.
Related: Lockdowns Do Not Control the Coronavirus: The Evidence.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Beto Is Getting a Swanky New Job That Is the Epitome of Irony.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO OZZIE SMITH: My favorite baseball player ever turns 66 today. (Come for the somersaults, stay for the game.)
ROD DREHER: “Has anything like this ever happened to any society, ever? Three out of ten women under the age of 25 consider themselves to be gay or transgender. Five percent, sure. Maybe even eight percent. But thirty? Will they always think that? Maybe not, but these are their prime childbearing years.”
THE “DR.” WILL SEE YOU NOW: Roger Kimball on Joseph Epstein and the “big gun” of identity politics.
If Epstein were being misogynistic in pointing out a home truth to Jill Biden, was The Washington Post engaging in xenophobia when it made fun of the foreign-born Hungarian-American commentator and Trump supporter Sebastian Gorka for identifying himself as “Dr. Gorka?” He “likes to be called ‘Dr. Gorka,’ ” WaPo sniffed in 2017. But “he gets his way only in conservative media.” And what about Ben Carson? The current Secretary of hud is also the former Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, that is, a real doctor. Yet The New York Times regularly identifies him as “Mr. Carson” even as it lovingly refers to Jill Biden as “Dr.” Is that racist, or is it merely intolerant woke leftism in action? As the author and commentator Glenn Reynolds sharply observed, “It’s good to see the weight of our journalistic and academic establishments being brought to bear to protect the self-esteem of a rich, powerful white woman.”
Heh, indeed. Read the whole thing.™
MICHAEL BARONE: Flyover Country Blues.
ODDEST CHRISTMAS EVER: I spent the entire day working on the copyedits for the volume of essays my gentlemen friend and I working on for Encounter Books. The book should be out in a few months. It will have essays by John Ellis, Gail Heriot, Gail Heriot & Carissa Mulder, Lance Izumi & Rowena Itchon, Peter Kirsanow, Heather Mac Donald, Maimon Schwarzschild, and Peter Wood.
I’m pleased and excited about the book (more details to follow), but … well … working on copyedits would be a tedious way to spend an ordinary working day. Doing it on Christmas Day felt completely wrong … almost disorienting.
Just wait till next year: Biggest tree ever. Decorations for the whole house. Poinsettias. Christmas turkey. Figgy pudding. Egg nog. Hark the Herald Angels Sing. Guaranteed.
December 25, 2020
NASHVILLE CHRISTMAS BOMBING UPDATE: “Law enforcement sources tell CBS News they have found what appear to be human remains near the site of the explosion. They have not indicated whether the remains are from someone connected to the explosion or from an innocent victim.”
UPDATE: Roger Simon on the possible AT&T connection:
The second fact or factoid that emerged was fleeting—the brief mention by one of the newscasters of the accusations that former NSA analyst Edward Snowden had made about AT&T.
This one sent me scurrying to the internet. Back in October 2016, Anthony Cuthbertson wrote in Newsweek under the title “AT&T Spying Program is ‘Worse Than Snowden Revelations’”:
“A for-profit surveillance program carried out by telecommunications giant AT&T was more serious than the 2013 NSA spying revelations, according to digital rights advocates.
“AT&T’s Project Atmosphere was unveiled Tuesday by the Daily Beast to be secretly selling customer data to law enforcement agencies for the purpose of investigating everything from murder to medical fraud.
“Digital rights group Fight for the Future says that making customer data available to local police departments without a warrant goes beyond the government-level surveillance revealed by former NSA contract worker Edward Snowden.
“‘AT&T customers are outraged but this affects everyone,’ Evan Greer, campaign director at Fight for the Future, tells Newsweek. ‘AT&T went far beyond complying with legal government requests and actually built a powerful data mining product to sell our private information to as many government agencies and police departments as they could.’”
For more The Intercept has an article — “The Wiretap Rooms—The NSA Has Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight Cities” that includes the following:
“‘The NSA considers AT&T to be one of its most trusted partners and has lauded the company’s ‘extreme willingness to help.’ It is a collaboration that dates back decades. Little known, however, is that its scope is not restricted to AT&T’s customers. According to the NSA’s documents, it values AT&T not only because it “has access to information that transits the nation,” but also because it maintains unique relationships with other phone and internet providers.”
Stay tuned.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Santa Claus Converts To Calvinism, Moves Everybody To Naughty List.
HMM: “A recreational vehicle parked in the deserted streets of downtown Nashville exploded early Christmas morning, causing widespread communications outages that took down police emergency systems and grounded flights at the city’s airport. Authorities said they believe the blast was intentional. . . . AT&T said the affected building is the central office of a telephone exchange, with network equipment in it. The blast interrupted service, but the company declined to say how widespread outages were. . . . The AT&T outages site showed service issues in middle Tennessee and Kentucky, including Bowling Green about 65 miles (105 kilometers) north of Nashville. Several police agencies reported that their 911 systems were down because of the outage, including Murfreesboro and Knox County, home to Knoxville about 180 miles (290 kilometers) east of Nashville. The Federal Aviation Administration temporarily halted flights out of Nashville International Airport because of telecommunications issues associated with the explosion.”
This reminds me a bit of the mysterious shot-up substation in Silicon Valley a few years back, like it’s someone trying to demonstrate a capability to monkeywrench things. Stay tuned.
Also, if your 911 system can be taken down by an explosion 180 miles away, your 911 system sucks.
HOLLYWOOD, INTERRUPTED: Christmas Movies Show What Hollywoke Gets Wrong.
HAPPY TRAILS, HANS! What Is Everybody’s Favorite Christmas Movie Really About?
BIDEN PROMISES TO END PROLONGED DETENTION AT IMMIGRATION DETENTION CENTERS: That’s great if he can do it consistently with enforcing the law.
But it may be worth pointing out that when I inspected an immigration detention center a couple of years ago with the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, my colleagues and I were a bit surprised that it was as nice as it was. Naturally, what we actually saw didn’t make it into the Commission’s report (which instead parroted unsubstantiated rumors, some of which were obviously and even provably false). But it did make it into my dissent.
THE CLOCK IS TICKING, COCAINE MITCH: Cruz, Preserving Trump Legacy, Heads Off Biden At The Pass On Rejoining Iran Deal, Paris Climate Accords.
AT AMAZON, Bras for Women.
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