YOU CAN TELL WHO IS WHO, AND WHO IS WHAT, BY WHAT’S HAPPENING TO THIS NOMINATION. Joni Ernst – Who Voted for Lloyd Austin -Says Hegseth ‘Didn’t Persuade Her.’
December 5, 2024
OPEN THREAD: Because I love you and want to be happy.
NEW CIVILITY WATCH: The Left Cheers An Assassination.
It wasn’t just Taylor Lorenz egging on crazed leftists to go on an assassination spree after the HealthPartners CEO was gunned down on the streets of New York.
It was a vast swathe of the Left who argued it was well-deserved justice and should be emulated with other CEOs. Lorenz herself suggested slyly that a Blue Cross CEO be next on the lst.
I used to think Taylor Lorenz was just a crazy Karen. Now I think she's an evil, repulsive, murder excusing stain that should be banished from polite society https://t.co/Jmdq5HT6cr
— Fusilli Spock (@awstar11) December 5, 2024
Got to be honest, this kind of looks like an encouragement for murder.
Lorenz is not well, and people in her life need to stage an intervention. pic.twitter.com/lWsZBhzgQI
— Legal Phil (@Legal_Fil) December 5, 2024
Beege wrote earlier today a long post about Lorenz’s psychopathy, but the rot runs much deeper than one crazy “journalist” whose shtick is saying outrageous things then crying about how she is being oppressed by people who notice.
A vocal faction of the Left seems to revel in violence and violent imagery, cheering on riots, wearing T-shirts emblazoned with pictures of the murderous Che Guevara, identifying with Antifa, occupying buildings, and appropriating the raised first of defiance as their cherished symbol of resistance to civilization.
The Daily Beast sorta-kinda finds the assassin of Brian Thompson to be totally cool and dreamy: Disturbing Trend as Internet Thirsts After UnitedHealthcare CEO’s Assassin.
Although some social media commentators have condemned the yassification of the killer’s image—“control yourself” wrote one person—the fawning over an alleged murderer seems to reflect a phenomenon called hybristophilia.
DeSales University professor of forensic psychology described it as type of attraction when a person “gets sexually aroused over someone else committing an offensive or violent act” in an 2018 interview with Cosmopolitan. The public’s recent fascination with the Menendez brothers, Ted Bundy and other men of ill repute over the years seem to back this up.
Although there is “no empirical research” to illustrate just how common the phenomenon is, said Louis B. Schlesinger, Ph.D., comments about the UnitedHealthcare executive’s suspected shooter suggest it’s alive and well.
And not just in the offices of Rolling Stone these days, apparently:
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Two contrasting views back-to-back on social media.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: How American entrepreneurs can help win the space race against China.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Julia Steinberg of the Stanford Review interviews Stanford president, Jonathan Levin:
Stanford Review: What is the most important problem in the world right now?
President Levin: There’s no answer to that question. There are too many important problems to give you a single answer.
Stanford Review: That is an application question that we have to answer to apply here.
Ouch. And:
Stanford Review: The first two categories are the buckets of questions that I have. So I’ll move on to my first question about Stanford’s educational and political climate at the present moment. In one of my classes, I was randomly assigned a partner to work on a presentation together. He told me that he had not read a book, cover to cover since the third grade, let alone at Stanford. In June, he will graduate with a degree from Stanford. How is this possible?
President Levin: Have you read a book at Stanford?
Stanford Review: I actually have. I’ve read fifty. I’ve counted. Probably at sixty now.
President Levin: I can’t speak to the particular student you worked with and exactly the way he or she has approached things. I think it’s a missed opportunity if you go through Stanford without doing a lot of reading, because at least in many fields, that’s the way to learn. Now, some fields, it’s true at Stanford, you learn in different ways that aren’t necessarily from books, but you know, I certainly would hope that any student who came to Stanford would spend a lot of time reading and thinking and reflecting. So I think it’s a missed opportunity if that’s not how you choose to spend a good fraction of your time here.
Stanford Review: I agree. Several freshmen I have talked to have bemoaned their mandatory COLLEGE classes that are contract graded, meaning that students will receive an A if their work is turned in on time regardless of quality. One frosh even told me that all of her first quarter classes are contract graded. How does this set students up for success at Stanford and beyond?
To be fair, Stanford doesn’t hold the exclusive on illiterate students: The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.
TATER TAUNTED:
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: In 2018, the BBC reported: MSNBC’s Joy Reid addresses homophobic blog post controversy.
A US TV host sys she “genuinely does not believe” she wrote a series of homophobic blog posts that have resurfaced in recent days.
MSNBC’s Joy Reid has come under fire after posts that mocked homosexuality and claimed to out people as gay were found on her old blog, The Reid Report.
Earlier this week, she denied making the comments and said her website had been targeted by hackers.
But on Saturday she admitted that there was no evidence for this claim.
“I genuinely do not believe I wrote those hateful things, because they are completely alien to me,” she said on her morning programme AM Joy.
“I hired cyber-security experts to see if somebody had manipulated my words or my former blog. And the reality is they have not been able to prove it.”
Today, Reid is leaning hard into the T portion of “LGBTQQIP2SAA” (and whatever additional letters or symbols may have been added since this post was published): Reid Compares Not Giving Gender-Altering Hormones To Minors To Nazism.
One can never expect MSNBC’s Joy Reid to be the level-headed voice of reason, but even by her standards, her Wednesday edition of The ReidOut was off the charts crazy. According to Reid, Tennessee’s law, currently being challenged at the Supreme Court, that forbids so-called “gender-affirming care” for minors is part of a Nazi-like tradition of targeting transgender people.
* * * * * * * *
“In fact, there are more kids who have been exposed to gun violence, estimated at 3 million, than there are transgender Americans of all ages in total. Targeting trans people isn’t new. It is an age-old tradition which Nazi Germany did with brutally violent ends in the 1930s. While the Supreme Court refuses to do anything about weapons of war in schools, today they seemed inclined to uphold Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors.”
To make her case, Reid put up two headlines but didn’t elaborate on the corresponding articles. Perhaps there was a good reason why, because comparing not giving hormones to 10-year-olds to concentration camps and eugenics is absurd. Ironically, the people arguing in favor of “gender-affirming care” are the ones that push others towards sterility, but such details are inconvenient for Joy Reid.
In 2013, Comcast signed off on ad promoting MSNBC that declared “Your children are not your own” — a message to which they apparently still agree:
VIRGINIA POSTREL: The world of tomorrow. When the future arrived, it felt… ordinary. What happened to the glamour of tomorrow?
As the grassroots backlash against urban renewal schemes grew, however, it inspired laws that choked off the very dynamic processes Jacob had celebrated. Citizens, it turned out, often simply wanted to preserve the status quo. Historic preservation laws limited demolishing or in some cases even renovating old buildings. Where once city governments razed whole neighborhoods, now procedures for citizen comment shifted the default toward blocking even small private projects. The shift gave small groups veto power, overriding both democratic representation and market processes.
Using planning hearings and lawsuits, homeowners turned participatory democracy into a powerful defense against change. Sometimes they blocked projects altogether. Sometimes they simply delayed them until they became financially unviable. Many of today’s obstacles to building new housing and environmentally friendly infrastructure originated in the backlash against the hidden costs of modernist progress glamour.
Since the 1980s, technological progress has enjoyed a few flickers of glamour, notably around the singular figure of Steve Jobs, who brought computing power into the everyday lives – and eventually the pockets – of ordinary people. Jobs fused countercultural allegiances with modernist design instincts, technological boldness, and capitalist success. Most important, he gave people products that they loved.
The outpouring of public grief at his death in 2011 demonstrated his power as a symbol. As Meghan O’Rourke wrote in The New Yorker, ‘We’re mourning the visionary whose story we admire: the teen-age explorer, the spiritual seeker, the barefoot jeans-wearer, the man who said, “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”’ Jobs embodied a new ideal of progress, at once uncompromising and humanistic, a vision of advancing technology that artists could embrace. (That the hippie capitalist could be a tyrannical boss and neglectful father were details obscured by his glamour.)
Jobs also helped to deliver on one of the touchstone technologies of twentieth-century progress glamour, a technology almost as evocative as flying cars. The twenty-first century kept the promise of videophones, and they turned out to be far better than we imagined. Instead of the dedicated consoles of The Jetsons, Star Trek, and the 1964 World’s Fair, we got multifunctional pocket-sized supercomputers that include videophone service at no additional cost. ‘I like the twenty-first century’, I tell my husband on FaceTime. But, like refrigerators, videophones aren’t glamorous when everybody has one. They’re just life. We complain about their flaws and take their benefits for granted.
Today’s nostalgic techno-optimists want more: more exciting new technologies, more abundance, and more public enthusiasm about both. Mingling the desires of the old modernists for newness, rational planning, and speed with those of the old nerds for adventure and discovery, they long for action. Their motto is Faster, please, a phrase popularized by Instapundit blogger Glenn Reynolds and the title of James Pethokoukis’s Substack newsletter.
Read the whole thing. 20 years ago, James Lileks wrote:
Sometimes I think you have to be middle aged to realize how cool things are. You grow up with MP3s and iPods, as my daughter will, and it’s the way things are. If you remember the KUNK-KUNK of an 8-track tape, having a featherweight gumpack that holds a billion bits of music is really quite remarkable. (Metheny was followed by something from the “Run Lola Run” soundtrack, which was followed by “I Apologize,” by some nutless 30s warbler, followed by “Dawn” by Grieg.) And then there’s the cellphones and the tiny cameras and the widescreen TVs and home computers that sing to each other silently across the world; wonders, all. This really is the future I wanted. Although I expected longer battery life.
We live in an age of technological wonder, and yet we take it all for granted. (Which itself is a very Jetsons-like response to being surrounded by all this technology.)
AND THE SUN RISES IN THE EAST: “California Fast Food Restaurants Shed Thousands of Jobs after $20 Minimum Wage Hike.”
JOHN LUCAS IS UNIMPRESSED BY THE LAW PROFESSORIATE.
But while it’s fine to call Sandy Levinson to task for his anti-Trump silliness, it’s worth noting that he’s also the author of The Embarrassing Second Amendment, a triumph of intellectual honesty that kickstarted the Second Amendment revolution. That’s an awfully impressive thing that sets him apart from the law professor herd in a very admirable way.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT [VIP]: A Republic, If You Can Keep It.
VIP subscribers asked for more of these longer essays and I’ve been happy to oblige.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY (ASSAD REGIME EDITION):
A disaster is taking place for Russia and the Assad Regime in Syria 🇸🇾
Hama was just lost by Assad/Russia a couple of hours ago. HTS quickly advanced 26km South toward Homs
If Homs is taken, Damascus is cut off from Latakia and Tartus, where Russia’s Air Base and Naval Base are pic.twitter.com/kD5ZZYTLjV
— Ukraine Battle Map (@ukraine_map) December 5, 2024
I didn’t believe the initial report from last weekend that Assad had fled to Moscow but the next report might very well be authentic.
Of course, anyone likely to replace Assad is also likely to be worse than Assad: There Ain’t No Good Guys, There Ain’t No [checks notes] Good Guys…
IT’S PAST TIME TO CLEAN UP THE DEFENSE DEPARTMENT: Admiral Bartleby Would Prefer Not To. “The armed forces are lying, as policy, and deliberately hiding a well-documented number that they have to know, while allowing political ‘debate’ to proceed on the basis of politicized fake estimates.”
And while the warning was eventually lifted, it did seem for a time that Frisco might have had a chance for, a, err, clean start, as Iowahawk tweeted:
UPDATE: Twenty years ago, the bard of Des Moines (and Austin) warned: Top Scientists Warn: Sea Gods Angry.
Washington, DC — Pointing to the devastating weekend Indian Ocean tsunami that left over 24,000 dead, an international blue ribbon committee of climatologists and ecoscientists today issued a stark warning that man-made pollutants have increasingly “make water spirits angry.”
The blunt conclusion prefaced a 2300 page meta-analysis of hundreds of scientific studies and computer models detailing links between human industrial activity and wrathful eco-deities. Entitled “Fire Bad: Fire Very Bad,” the report warns that the planet faces additional catastrophies unless drastic regulatory action is taken to appease Earthen-furies.
“Unclean money devils anger sacred water spirit Tai-Waku,” explained Martin Knudson of Scripps Oceanic Institute. “He now call angry to son the whale, ‘make slap with anger-tails! Bring vengeance-surf to villagers!'”
While most empirical evidence supports the theory of wrathful whale-tail slappings, some scientists are exploring alternative hypotheses for the weekend tsunami. Ecobiologist Jane Geary of UC Santa Cruz points to mounting evidence that the ocean spirit-world may have been driven to gastrointestinal rage by gas-guzzling SUVs.
“Thunder-wagon make smoke cloud of greenhouse gas,” explained Geary. “hungry Tai-Waku eat smoke from thunder-wagon, pass giant wind with mighty fury.”
Peter Novak, chief science officer of the Sierra Club, dismissed Geary’s “Divine Fart” theory, arguing it was more likely that SUVs had triggered the tsunami via a spirit underword sexual encounter.
“Wheels of thunder-wagons wake up Big Earth Spirit-Mother, make to crazy tingle in hairy child-place. She now go to water lair of Tai-Waku, make big angry love on tectonic plate,” said Novak. “Big Earth Spirit-Mother say, ‘if ocean rocking, don’t come a-knocking.'”
In accordance with the prophecy, here’s Jake Tapper today, mining the same territory, apparently unironically:
Jake Tapper wonders if Climate Change is making earthquakes stronger.
A seismologist has to tell him there's no evidence of that. pic.twitter.com/vY5a9DNRZA— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) December 5, 2024
TEXAS: Paxton Takes Aim At Austin Homeless Industrial Complex. “It’s my working thesis that the Homeless Industrial complex is a way to not only rake off graft and corruption for the lest, but also launder money to donate directly to Democrats And what do you know? Search for Sunrise Homeless Navigation Center on Open Secrets yields 15 donations, all to Democrats, including Colin Allred and Kamala Harris this year.”
CHRIS QUEEN REPORTS ON The Kindness of Strangers: A Different Kind of Adventure in the Mountains.
READER FAVORITE: SwissGear 1900 Scansmart TSA 17-Inch Laptop Backpack. #CommissionEarned
THE ‘IMMOVABLE OBJECT’ DOGE MUST CONQUER: Having covered waste, fraud and abuse for three decades, I know full well why President-elect Donald Trump calls the Elon Musk/Vivek Ramaswamy DOGE initiative the biggest challenge since “the Manhattan Project.” My latest Special Report for The Epoch Times lays it out in great detail today.
IT’S LIES ALL THE WAY DOWN: Gun Control Groups Pad Their ‘Gun Violence’ Numbers With Suicides to Inflate Their Statistics.
SHE’S A FREQUENT DISAPPOINTMENT:
Sen. Joni Ernst, who is reportedly lobbying to replace Hegseth as Trump's SecDef nominee, supports the transing of the military and requiring women to be eligible for the draft. Not entirely surprising she prefers the status quo to Pete Hegseth. https://t.co/NRsuprY42n
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) December 5, 2024
THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA Shares Orion Heat Shield Findings, Updates Artemis Moon Missions. “Experts discussed results of NASA’s investigation into its Orion spacecraft heat shield after it experienced an unexpected loss of charred material during re-entry of the Artemis I uncrewed test flight. For the Artemis II crewed test flight, engineers will continue to prepare Orion with the heat shield already attached to the capsule. The agency also announced it is now targeting April 2026 for Artemis II and mid-2027 for Artemis III. The updated mission timelines also reflect time to address the Orion environmental control and life support systems.”
Yes, let’s please get those last two right.
