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KNOXVILLE NEWS-SENTINEL: Christian, Newsom families reflect 10 years after slayings.

The families of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom held memorial services Saturday at the graves of the two Knoxville torture slaying victims, marking the tenth anniversary of their deaths.

Christian and Newsom, 21 and 23 years old, were the victims of a 2007 carjacking in East Knoxville that ended in the torture, rape and slaying of the couple.

There’s much more, including video, at the link.

UPDATE: 10 Years Later: The Brutal Murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom.

THE CATHEDRAL INTERPRETS THE CHICAGO ATTACK:

4. The mechanism for this homogenization is not obvious. Unlike the Catholic Church, the Cathedral has no pope (although I read recently that Warren Buffet owns 71 newspapers, and the New York Times is owned in part by Carlos Slim, whose vast fortune has a lot to do with his special relationship with the Mexican government). One factor is that the credibility of a set of information sources depends on their being able to agree on a story (coordination games, the peloton effect, the parliament of clocks). Another factor is self-dealing: people with high verbal skills tend to support a system of government that is controlled by people with high verbal skills, and once they control it, they tend to want it to be unlimited in scope. Another factor is self-selection: once an institution becomes dominated by members of a political movement, it tends to become unpleasant and career-limiting for anyone else to work there. Another factor is that the easiest way to write a newspaper story is to copy it from a politician’s press handout. To a considerable extent, these institutions are deliberately manipulated by politicians (broadcast licensing, educational and research funding, journalistic access, selective leaking of secrets, etc., aka Gleichschaltung; in many cases, journalists are literally married to political operatives or are involved in “revolving door” relationships with the political institutions they write about, such as Jeff Immelt of GE, MSNBC and the Obama administration). But the two biggest factors are probably that (1) intellectuals are seduced by political power (the Boromir effect), and (2) these institutions are quasi-religious, and have taken on the peculiar characteristics of the dominant quasi-religion of the day.

5. Three things make an intellectual movement quasi-religious: (1) the outputs that they produce are credence goods, (2) they provide a framework for competition for social status, and (3) this basis is insecure. The fact that credence goods are involved means that conflict about them will tend to be irrational. The fact that social status is involved, and that the basis for social status is insecure, means that this conflict will be relatively vicious, and will carry a strong odor of a witch hunt.

6. The Cathedral is powerful partly because its relative homogeneity allows it to serve as a gatekeeper of politically relevant mass-market information and interpretation. But its real power comes from control of what ideas are associated with high status. Everyone thinks, “I’m my own man. I think for myself.” But unconsciously, people tend to copy the opinions of people who are one step above them on the social ladder. This was explained in the Cerulean Top scene in The Devil Wears Prada.

Read the whole thing; and don’t miss the clip of that aforementioned “Cerulean Top” scene from The Devil Wears Prada, a nifty variation on the line Claude Rains’ sly ambassador character tells Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia: “If we’ve been telling lies, you’ve been telling half-lies. A man who tells lies, like me, merely hides the truth. But a man who tells half-lies has forgotten where he put it.”

HMM: Someone Is Trying To Take Down The Drudge Report — And It’s A Mystery Who’s Behind The Attacks.

RACISM TODAY: The White-Hot Rage Of The Left.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Police: Teacher accused of sex acts with student fled country.

Police said Ekatherine Pappas, 24, of Nottingham, started teaching Spanish at the school on Nov. 16.

A school resource officer became aware Thursday of a video showing a female teacher engaged in a sex act with a male student, police said.

“He came across a student who actually had a copy of the video on their phone,” Baltimore County police Officer Jennifer Peach said.

Detectives confirmed the existence of the video and the teacher’s involvement in sex acts with the 16-year-old student on two occasions, once on Dec. 21 and again on Dec. 22. The incidents were not committed on school property, police said.

“As a teacher, she should’ve known that she’s not allowed to have any kind of a relationship with a student, and secondly a sexual relationship is an unlawful relationship between her age and a 16-year-old child,” Peach said.

Why are public schools such cesspits of sexual abuse?

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PLAGIARISM PROBLEMS FOR MONICA CROWLEY? Well, they didn’t sink Fareed Zakaria, but without reading all the relevant text in her book and elsewhere, which I’m certainly not going to do, I don’t have an opinion of my own.

But here’s a whole chapter on plagiarism from my book (coauthored with Peter W. Morgan, and originally published during the Clinton years), The Appearance of Impropriety: How the Ethics Wars Have Undermined American Government, Business, and Society. Given all the ethics attacks the Trump Administration can expect, everybody in Washington should order a copy!

IS A 2017 RECESSION ALREADY BAKED IN THE CAKE? “The current economic expansion is the fourth-longest on record. This record stretches all the way back to the 1850s. . . . Whatever the reasons that expansions end, the fact that the U.S. has never had an expansion that lasted longer than a decade does not bode well for the current one lasting much longer.”

HOWIE CARR IS NOT IMPRESSED with the Boston Globe’s plan to go from “paper of record” to “organization of interest.” I’m not sure what that means, and neither is Howie:

In a memo to his decimated staff this week, editor Brian McGrory says the Globe will no longer be the “paper of record” (as if it ever was). Instead, he said, the Globe will be an “organization of interest.”

Sorry, not interested.

McGrory’s memo reads like it was composed by a recent graduate of an ESL program, or perhaps translated from another language, most likely consultantese. Everything is to be interesting, “relentlessly interesting.”

After all these years of printing dreary left wing agitprop, how will the Globe become interesting?

“We’ll set up an Audience Engagement team,” McGrory writes. “We will refine and refine again the Hubs system that was proposed by the Mission working group.”

Yeah, that should bring back the readers all right. The Registry of Motor Vehicles couldn’t have put it any better.

But I suspect the outcome will be reprinting Democratic Party and lefty interest group press releases with even less editing. And so does Howie:

Here’s how that will work. If you go to the website at 8 a.m., the lead story might be headlined, “Donald Trump is a terrible man.” If you come back at noon, there will be a totally different, fresh story: “Donald Trump: Threat or Menace?” And then at 3, yet another brand new piece will be posted — “Trump Linked to Cannibal Cult.” . . .

Meanwhile, the last six reporters who haven’t been laid off will have a role in the new imaginary newsroom. McGrory is having one of his deputy senior associate assistant junior managing editors send out a questionnaire asking them “what beats you’ve been dreaming of covering.”

Think of the sharp elbowing that will be going for those most coveted beats: the transgender-bathroom civil rights beat, religion (at the Globe, that’s climate change) and so on. But the prime beat at the Globe, even more prized than the get-Marty-Walsh beat, is the phobia beat. Homophobia, Islamophobia, misogyny, fake hate crimes — you’re guaranteed front page every day. Literally dozens of readers, some of them under the age of 85, will get to know your name!

Heh.

CHANGE: Winston Churchill bust set for Oval Office return by Donald Trump.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

Were I Cuban, I suppose I’d be targeted as a counterrevolutionary for having asked Che Guevara — the only time I met him at the Cuban Mission to the United Nations — whether he could possibly envision eventual free elections in Cuba. Although he professed not to understand English, Che — still lionized on T-shirts in this country — didn’t wait for the translator and burst into laughter. It was then I learned that laughter can be chilling.

—From a 2008 column by the great Nat Hentoff, who passed away yesterday at age 91.

Related: Nat Hentoff, the last honest liberal.

KNOXVILLE: Drone films spectacular views of Neyland, Sunsphere, World’s Fair Park.

DON SURBER: “A year ago today, I wrote this. The next day, I started Trump the Press.”

SO MUCH WINNING YOU’LL BE TIRED OF WINNING: Fiat Chrysler announces $1 billion investment in U.S. manufacturing, 2,000 new jobs.

AN ALL-TERRAIN WHEELCHAIR.

This wheelchair is also cool.

JOURNALISM: Santelli Calls Out Andrea Mitchell: ‘On Election Night, I Never Saw You So Unhappy.’

SHED NO TEARS: Iran’s Rafsanjani is dead. He died of a heart attack.

I differ with this assessment:

…a moderate counter-figure to the ultra-hardliners clustered around Ahmadinejad, under whom Iran’s relations with the West plummeted…

Moderate counter-figure? Try calculated rhetorician in robes. Here’s one reason why I differ:

He held the chairmanship of Iran’s main political arbitration body, the Expediency Council, since 1990, when he was appointed by the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

That would be the Expediency Discernment Council.

Khomeini’s Iran plays a long game and it’s a dangerous game. Rafsanjani was a hard line Khomeinist who was dedicated to advancing Khomeini’s violent vision.

RELATED: Yesterday I added a link to a recent StrategyPage update as background to a post. It drew a couple of thank yous and that’s good. Over the years I have shared my disgust with lack of media context with Glenn, Ed and Stephen. The StrategyPage archives are a trove of “deep news” or “deep dive news.” Here’s the latest Iran update, from December 2016. It’s long. But here’s a useful extract:

The new American president-elect was elected in part because of popular anger over the 2015 Iran treaty. Then there is the fact that the most dangerous threat to Israel is not even Arab but Iran. Iranians are constantly reminded by their leaders that the official Iranian position is that any Moslem nation (especially Saudi Arabia and Turkey) that improves relations with Israel is betraying Islam. Iran also insists that the United States cannot be trusted and that the economic sanctions the July 2015 treaty lifted are not the main economic problem for Iran. That would be the two years of very low oil prices, which is Saudi Arabia’s way (along with some other local Sunni oil states) to put the hurt on Iran. That is only partially true but not relevant to the Iranians. One reason for seeking nuclear weapons is to give Iran the ability to persuade the Saudis to ship less oil and let the price go up. After that there will be the demand to let Iran run the Moslem holy places in Mecca and Medina. The Saudis are not willing to make deals that involve Iranian domination of the region. Yet the low oil prices have hurt the Saudis as well and all the Gulf oil states recently agreed to lower production in an effort to get prices up. What Arabs and Iranians both downplay is that the American fracking technology is changing the oil market more than anything else as is the growing use of non-oil fuels for energy. Even with record low prices the fracking industry survives and as the price of oil goes up more fracking operations resume production. Add to that recent natural gas deposits discovered and rapidly developed in Israel coastal waters and you can see why political relationships are shifting in the Middle East.

CELEBRATE DIVERSITY: Liberal hires only “native English speakers.”

GOOD: Cancer Death Rates Fall as Prevention, Treatment Advance.

REP. ADAM SCHIFF: FORT LAUDERDALE GUNMAN claims he had contacts overseas.

COMCAST-NBC SPOKESMAN THREATENS COMCAST-NBC EMPLOYEE: Al Sharpton promises a “season of civil disobedience” in reaction to the nomination of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) for attorney general in the Trump administration.

Somehow though, I doubt Trump is losing much sleep over Sharpton’s latest bloviations.

HENCE, TRUMP: Virtue-Signaling SJW Leftist San Francisco CEO Tweets to Middle America: Stop being a Sh*thole full of Stupid People:

Future dictionary editions will include the above tweet in their definition of oikophobia.

ALSO, A GLENN BECK LISTENER: Prince Was Apparently Hoarding Gold Bars.

THE HUFFINGTON POST TRANSFORMED INTO THE ONION SO SLOWLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED: Sad Inauguration Workers Prepare To Celebrate A Man They Despise — Some federal workers have no choice but to be at inauguration for Donald Trump.

Gosh. I wonder if they’ll have to bake cakes and serve pizza, as well?