QUESTION ASKED: Is President Trump Launching a ‘War on Science?’
This morning’s previous item is certainly related.
Archive for 2017
January 26, 2017
THIS SHOULD BE OBVIOUS, BUT JUDGING FROM THE HYPERVENTILATING, IT ISN’T: No First Amendment problem with the president restricting what executive agencies say in official publications.
President Trump faces two problems, probably intractable, in his efforts to control communications from Federal agencies.
The first is, it can’t be done. The second is, he’ll make “heroes” out of these “rogues” who resist.
UPDATE (From Glenn): Trump is a genius with mass media, but it’s not clear that he’s as expert at dealing with this stuff. But the Army-of-Davids response to this Army-of-Davids behavior wouldn’t come from Trump, but from Trump fans, who might set up fake “Rogue” sites pumping out nonsense, or something like that. There are a lot of Trump fans out there on social media. . . .
IF YOU LOOK AT THIS CHART, YOU CAN REALLY SEE THE IMPACT OF THE TEA PARTY IN 2010: Federal Debt Projected To Grow $10 Trillion Over Next Decade. And yet it only reduced the growth of the debt from catastrophic to awful.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Obama Era Precedents Haunt Media.
Noah Rothman:
“Don’t recall ever seeing a WH do this,” remarked Huffington Post White House reporter Christina Wilkie. “Some might call it Propaganda,” NBC News’ Katy Tur averred. “I didn’t totally expect the 1984-esque dystopian future to be so soon, but life comes at ya fast,” snarked the Center for American Progress’s economist Katie Bahn. But this, too, is not an unparalleled abuse of the public trust; at least, not for those who remember how the Obama administration sold the public on the Iran nuclear accords in 2015.
The Obama administration’s “blog” content (now maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration), which includes former Press Secretary Josh Earnest’s “Regional Roundup: What America’s Newspapers are Saying About the Iran Deal.” The blog consisted entirely of favorable headlines from around the country reciting verbatim (and false) administration claims about the nuclear accord. “The Iran Deal” even had its own Twitter account which disseminated not only favorable press mentions but also crafted insipid pop culture memes to get the millennial generation jazzed about nuclear non-proliferation. Imagine the anxiety among journalists when the Trump White House mirrors this tactic.
If it weren’t for double standards…
In response to “Where the other 11 [TPP] countries go from here,” I wrote, “They’ll come here. To sign bilateral trade deal with us, the world’s most prolific consumers.”
And getting that started took all of two days.
THE TIME FOR MULLING IS PAST: Shaken by Trump’s Criticism of NATO, Europe Mulls Building Own Military Force.
That our NATO partners to live up to their commitment to spend a measly 2% of GDP on defense is not too much to ask.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Charlotte Law School Reopens: 33% Of Students Have Transferred, Prof Says 42% Bar Pass Rate Would Have Been In 20s But For Payments To Students Not To Take Bar.
HMM: Trump’s Immigration Revamp to Include Plans for Safe Zones Inside Syria.
A separate order also would lay the groundwork for an escalation of U.S. military involvement in Syria by directing the Pentagon and the State Department to craft a plan to create safe zones for civilians fleeing the conflict there, those familiar with the plans said. Mr. Trump has said such safe zones could serve as an alternative to admitting refugees to the U.S.
News of the actions, which are expected Thursday, was met with distress across the Middle East. They point to a dramatic reshaping of America’s relations in the region by a president just days in office, when the U.S. is engaged on multiple fronts in the fight against the Islamic State terrorist group.
The initial step on the safe-zone proposal represents another policy reversal from the administration of Barack Obama, who long resisted pressure for such an approach from Congress and U.S. allies in the Middle East because he believed it would draw the U.S. too deeply into another war.
This looks like the first serious test of Rex Tillerson’s State Department. Making safe zones work will require acquiescence — at the very least — from Syria’s current power brokers, and neither Russia, Iran, nor Turkey has much reason to do so.
DEMAND, MEET SUPPLY: Metro Denver apartment rents drop for second quarter.
Average rents decreased and vacancy rates increased in all six of the metro counties covered in the survey, which is the most comprehensive available with 120,000 units measured.
“In 2010, only 498 new apartment units were built in the entire city. Fast forward to 2016 and we’re seeing that same number being delivered every three weeks in Denver,” Teo Nicolais, a Harvard University instructor who specializes in real estate, said in the report.
Nicolais counted 9,962 new units coming into the market in 2016, the highest total ever constructed in metro Denver in a year.
Memo to California: This is what happens when you let builders build.
LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY UPDATE:
ALL THE NEWS THAT FITS THE NARRATIVE: Facebook Updates ‘Trending’ Feature To Fight Fake News, Removes Personalized Topics.
Facebook’s trending topics software will now only feature topics that have been covered by a significant crowd of trustworthy publishers starting Wednesday, Jan. 25, a transition that’ll diminish fake news stories by virtue of prioritizing information sources that have been around longer.
Moreover, trending topics will no longer be a personalized array with respect to individual Facebook users but will instead be a wide coterie of different topics so as to puncture the proverbial bubble — and by extension, the echo chamber that perpetuates isolated views — and expose Facebook users’s different areas of interest.
When the former Obama Administration engaged in this sort of behavior, they called it “nudging.”
“EXTREMIST” Teenage extremist convicted of stabbing German officer.
The Celle state court said the girl, identified only as Safia S. under German privacy regulations, was sentenced to six years in prison, the dpa news agency reported Thursday.
The German-Moroccan dual citizen traveled to Istanbul a year ago hoping to reach Syria but was brought back by her mother — but not before prosecutors say IS members tasked her with conducting an “act of martyrdom” in Germany.
She stabbed the police officer with a kitchen knife in Hannover’s main train station last February.
JOHN FUND ON VOTER-FRAUD DENIALISM: John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky: Why Trump’s probe of voter fraud is long overdue. “All industrialized democracies — and most that are not — require voters to prove their identity before voting.”
SAYONARA? Salon Media near deal to sell big stake to activist hedge fund.
It won’t take much cash for Spear Point to buy a controlling stake in Salon. The 22-year-old digital publishing enterprise, which has been plagued by high-level turnover on the executive and editorial side — as well as declining revenue — has a market capitalization of only $6.1 million and a stock price of 8 cents a share.
At its IPO in 1999, its stock was $10.50 a share with a market cap of $105 million.
Spear Point has been quietly snapping up Salon Media Group shares in recent weeks, sources said.
If Salon gets new management, where will white progressives go for their daily dose of racial guilt?
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS.
Shot:
A longtime admirer of Fidel Castro, Turner has called the former Cuban president “one hell of a guy.” In 2001 Turner told a class at Harvard Law School, “You’d like him [Castro]. He has been the leader of Cuba for 40 years. He’s the most senior leader in the world, and most of the people that are still in Cuba like him.”
Castro, in turn, holds Turner in high regard, so much so that the dictator was the inspiration behind the creation of CNN International. As CNN News Chief Executive Eason Jordan told his audience during a 1999 lecture at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism:
“… Let me also thank Fidel Castro. In the earliest days of CNN, when CNN was meant to be seen only in the United States, the enterprising Fidel Castro was pirating and watching CNN in Cuba. Fidel was intrigued by CNN. He wanted to meet the person responsible. So Ted Turner, who at that point had never traveled to a Communist country or knowingly met a Communist, [went to Havana]. It was big deal for Ted and during the discussions Castro suggested that CNN be made available to the entire world. In fact it was that seed, that idea that grew into CNN International.”
—David Horowitz’s “Discover the Networks” page on CNN founder Ted Turner, as quoted at Ed Driscoll.com, in a 2010 post titled “The Mote in CNN’s Mini-Cam,” a round-up of some of the network’s zanier bootlicks of totalitarian dictators over the years, not least of which was this moment a decade ago:
Chaser: “Following the lead of CNN’s Brian Stelter, Thursday’s Situation Room touted the spike of sales in the book 1984 and strongly hinted that Americans view the Trump administration as the real-life version of Big Brother portrayed in George Orwell’s classic.”
—NewsBusters yesterday.
Shades of clueless Walter Cronkite during run-up to the eponymous year depicted in Orwell’s book, as I wrote in my 2014 review of Cronkite’s biography by leftwing author Douglas Brinkley:
Similarly, in 1970, Brinkley writes that Cronkite believed that “the U.S. government needed to regulate polluting corporations and force them to prioritize environment over profit.” But Cronkite chose to commemorate the arrival of the year 1984 and its Orwellian implications by starring in a special for CBS and drafting a column for the New York Times in which he wrote, “The total absence of privacy the idea that the government is (or may be) always watching, means, most of us would agree, the ultimate loss of freedom.”
Without the implied method of force, how did Cronkite imagine government would regulate corporations “to prioritize environment over profit”?
It’s during this passage of Cronkite that Brinkley concocts a smear of his own, by writing:
Reading George Orwell’s classic novel 1984, published in 1949, had been a revelation for Cronkite. He was stunned by Orwell’s raw insights into both Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia. To Cronkite, the dystopian 1984 was prescient in showing that America’s civil liberties were being gutted by a right-wing agenda.
Gee, wait ‘til Brinkley discovers what Orwell’s Ingsoc stood for, let alone where national socialist Germany and the international socialist Soviet Union were on the ideological spectrum.
And as Joseph Epstein wrote in his review of Brinkley’s book in the September 2012 issue of Commentary (subscription may be necessary to read), Cronkite himself wrote an introduction to a paperback edition of 1984, in which he seemed to think that modernism itself was Orwell’s chief concern:
I read a preface Cronkite wrote to a paperback edition of George Orwell’s 1984, and discovered he thought that the target of the novel was not the brutal devastation of life, private and public, under totalitarianism, but chiefly the danger posed by the technology of modernity. “1984 is an anguished lament and a warning that vibrates powerfully when we may not be strong enough nor wise enough nor moral enough to cope with the kind of power we have learned to amass,” Cronkite wrote. Throughout this preface, the Soviet Union and China, whose governments treated their respective populations as conquered nations, go unmentioned.
As Epstein notes, Cronkite’s preface to Orwell’s epoch-defining novel was written in 1983, “and by then Cronkite had entered that phase of liberalism that finds no country more dangerous than one’s own.”
Which has long been CNN’s view of the world looking out from the Thermopane windows atop their headquarters in Atlanta. But as I said before, if Trump really were half the strongman CNN is trying to depict him as, they’d be falling over themselves to worship him.
UPDATE: “Despite being on opposite sides, protesters on the right and left can end their fears the same way. If you’re afraid that the federal government will ruin your life, reduce the power of the federal government,” Jon Gabriel advises in his latest Arizona Republic column. Where shall we begin shrinking the leviathan, CNN?
January 25, 2017
THE QUESTION IS, DO YOU WANT TO ESTABLISH A CULTURE OF POLITICS- AND IDENTITY-BASED VIOLENCE? Alex Griswold: Don’t Attack Nazis, and Don’t Praise Those Who Do.
Related (From Ed): “The Left summons a demon it will not be able to control,” Rod Dreher writes.
FASTER, PLEASE: Supreme Court Justice … Ted Cruz?
Finally, we’ll have someone who’ll get to the bottom of the Warren Commission Report…
IT’S COME TO THIS: “Democrats hold lessons on how to talk to real people,” says…The Politico, of all places.
But how do you win over someone whom you despise?
UPDATE: “My job is to shut other white people down when they want to interrupt,” says Sally Boynton Brown, a white woman running for chair of the Democratic National Committee. Presumably Brown hasn’t audited the aforementioned lessons quite yet.
I THOUGHT THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: A Lot of What Is Known about Pirates Is Not True, and a Lot of What Is True Is Not Known.