FASTER, PLEASE: Delivery of 45 Age Reversing Gene Therapies at Once is Under Peer Review.. They hope to start treating people in 2025, which would be just right for me, as I leave Late Youth and enter Very Early Middle Age.
Archive for 2019
January 14, 2019
SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: A Letter To Professor John McWhorter. “Your repeated references to President Truman are illustrative. Truman took the U.S. into a major land war in Asia. It was an undeclared war. More than 50,000 Americans died. The U.S. and its allies did not prevail—at least, not in the traditional sense. That conflict still festers to this day. Trump has not taken us into any such conflict; indeed, he is ramping down our participation in such conflicts. Maybe your focus on spelling and sound composition skills are—maybe just a tad—misplaced?”
Good writing, like good shooting, is a valuable skill. Neither has a moral component. The Supreme Court’s best writer was Oliver Wendell Holmes, who told us — eloquently — that it was okay to sterilize people society didn’t like.
FRANCE: The Yellow Vests Are Unstoppable.
Not only does peripheral France fare badly in the modern economy, it is also culturally misunderstood by the elite. The yellow-vest movement is a truly 21st-century movement in that it is cultural as well as political. Cultural validation is extremely important in our era.
One illustration of this cultural divide is that most modern, progressive social movements and protests are quickly endorsed by celebrities, actors, the media and the intellectuals. But none of them approve of the gilets jaunes. Their emergence has caused a kind of psychological shock to the cultural establishment. It is exactly the same shock that the British elites experienced with the Brexit vote and that they are still experiencing now, three years later. . . .
We have a new bourgeoisie, but because they are very cool and progressive, it creates the impression that there is no class conflict anymore. It is really difficult to oppose the hipsters when they say they care about the poor and about minorities.
But actually, they are very much complicit in relegating the working classes to the sidelines. Not only do they benefit enormously from the globalised economy, but they have also produced a dominant cultural discourse which ostracises working-class people. Think of the ‘deplorables’ evoked by Hillary Clinton. There is a similar view of the working class in France and Britain. They are looked upon as if they are some kind of Amazonian tribe. The problem for the elites is that it is a very big tribe.
The middle-class reaction to the yellow vests has been telling. Immediately, the protesters were denounced as xenophobes, anti-Semites and homophobes. The elites present themselves as anti-fascist and anti-racist but this is merely a way of defending their class interests. It is the only argument they can muster to defend their status, but it is not working anymore.
Now the elites are afraid. For the first time, there is a movement which cannot be controlled through the normal political mechanisms. The gilets jaunes didn’t emerge from the trade unions or the political parties. It cannot be stopped. There is no ‘off’ button. Either the intelligentsia will be forced to properly acknowledge the existence of these people, or they will have to opt for a kind of soft totalitarianism.
I bet I know what they’ll choose, if they’re allowed the choice.
Plus:
First of all, the bourgeoisie needs a cultural revolution, particularly in universities and in the media. They need to stop insulting the working class, to stop thinking of all the gilets jaunes as imbeciles.
Cultural respect is fundamental: there will be no economic or political integration until there is cultural integration.
But this is hard when your whole sense of self is based on being superior to the rubes in flyover country.
MARK PENN: Voters want RESULTS not resistance from new Democratic majority.
Echoing Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated 2016 strategy, the Democratic leaders so far have fully planted a flag in simply opposing legislation, funding and appointments under the theory that putting lead boots on President Trump is the best way to get him out of office, even if the country is put on pause for another two years.
This is a fundamental mistake, and just as going overboard with Spartacus moments opposing the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh backfired and strengthened the Republicans in the Senate, this strategy too is likely to throw away the best opportunity Democrats had to build a lasting majority coalition by producing the results the Republicans failed to achieve.
The public ultimately was fed up with Paul Ryan, and under him Congress had about a 20 percent rating. He couldn’t get anything done, leading a fractured caucus to nowhere. He ultimately quit, along with 40 other Republicans. They literally abandoned the House, and suburban swing voters – voters who for a long time voted Republican – switched over to the Democratic Party. These voters were turned off by Trump, and frustrated by Ryan, because they fundamentally support progress and compromise. They are moderate, not liberal voters. They are not dancing in the hallway with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
What’s most interesting about Penn’s analysis is that he was Bill Clinton’s chief political strategist, and his opening move was to come out swinging against Hillary.
I MISS LINDSEY 2.0: GOP Senator Pushes Temporary Deal to Open Government.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), a close Trump ally, said he spoke with the president Sunday and recommended the government be allowed to open for about three weeks to pursue broader immigration legislation. Democrats have been proposing a variety of funding options to reopen the government, including a stopgap funding bill for the Homeland Security Department. Mr. Trump at a White House meeting last week rejected reopening the government without a commitment for funding a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Mr. Graham has been one of many Senate Republicans working on ending the impasse, and moving to end it would give at least temporary relief to the hundreds of thousands of federal workers who late last week missed their first paycheck since the shutdown began. So far, none of the Senate GOP efforts has been successful.
“I tried to see if we could open up the government for a limited period of time to negotiate a deal, and the president says, let’s make a deal, then open up the government,” Mr. Graham said on “Fox News Sunday.” He added: “He’s not going to give in,” Mr. Graham said.
“2.0” gag aside, this feels like Graham signaling to the Democratic leadership, “Hey, I tried my best — maybe you need to really negotiate with him.”
NY TIMES’ FRANK BRUNI WARNS MEDIA COLLEAGUES: DON’T LET TRUMP FOOL US AGAIN IN 2020:
On his quest to help the media reclaim its journalistic integrity, Bruni turned to a laughable source: Disgraced former CBS News anchor Dan Rather, who had to step down in disgrace after using forged documents to “prove” George W. Bush shirked his duties when he was in the Texas Air National Guard in the 1960s and 1970s.
“The shadow of what we did last time looms over this next time,” the former CBS newsman Dan Rather, who has covered more than half a century of presidential elections, told me. And what we did last time was emphasize the sound and the fury, because Trump provided both in lavish measure.
Bruni admitted that the media covered Trump to the detriment of his rivals.
Why did Trump receive so much more coverage than the other presidential candidates, and why was his coverage positive in tone when the Republican race was still being contested and yet negative in tone after it had been decided?
Bruni warned his colleagues in the media about falling for that old “fairness” trap:
Regarding their fitness for office, [Clinton and Trump] were treated identically? In retrospect, that’s madness. It should have been in real time, too.
….
But we fell prey to a habit that can’t be repeated when we compare the new crop of Democratic challengers to Trump and to one another. We interpreted fairness as a similarly apportioned mix of complimentary and derogatory stories about each contender, no matter how different one contender’s qualifications, accomplishments and liabilities were from another’s. If we were going to pile on Trump, we had to pile on Clinton — or, rather, keep piling on her.
As John Hinderaker writes at Power Line, Bruni’s column is “unintentionally revealing. It is headlined, ‘Will the Media Be Trump’s Accomplice Again in 2020?’ As though the press were pro-Trump in 2016! ‘We have a second chance. Let’s not blow it.’ A second chance to help a Democrat beat Donald Trump.”
But we’ve been here before with a prominent Democratic Party activist with a byline, at least once. As I wrote in a 2012 post at Ed Driscoll.com titled “Our Advocacy-Obsessed Apparatchik MSM,” the DNC-MSM are always looking for an excuse to junk even the appearance of a veneer of fairness.
In October of 2004, as the presidential election was entering the final stretch, and with RatherGate then freshly in the media’s collective mind, Mark Halperin, then the ABC News political director, drafted an internal memo that stated both political parties were not equally accountable, as Matt Drudge noted at the time:
The controversial internal memo obtained by DRUDGE, captures Halperin stating how “Kerry distorts, takes out of context, and mistakes all the time, but these are not central to his efforts to win.”
But Halperin claims that Bush is hoping to “win the election by destroying Senator Kerry at least partly through distortions.”
“The current Bush attacks on Kerry involve distortions and taking things out of context in a way that goes beyond what Kerry has done,” Halperin writes.
Halperin’s claim that ABCNEWS will not “reflexively and artificially hold both sides ‘equally’ accountable” set off sparks in St. Louis where media players gathered to cover the second presidential debate.
Halperin states the responsibilities of the ABCNEWS staff have “become quite grave.”
In August, Halperin declared online: “This is now John Kerry’s contest to lose.”
And concurrently, the media raise their opinions of George W. Bush and his late father in order to bash the current man with an (R) after his name in the White House. Old and busted: Texas man bad. The new hotness? Orange man bad.
WHY NOT PRIVATIZE THE WHOLE THING? V.A. Will Spend Billions on Private Health Care. “The most significant change in caring for our veterans in decades.”
JOEL KOTKIN: Trump Is Not Crazy: The Middle Kingdom And The U.S. Economy.
In the poker match between President Donald Trump and China’s new all-but-emperor, Xi Jinping, it’s widely assumed that Xi holds the best hand. Yet President Xi’s hand may not be as awesome as it appears, while the United States, even under this very flawed president, may hold some fine cards.
Of course, Xi wields power in a way that Trump could only dream about. He has close to total control over the media, academia and the business community. In a way not seen in my over three decades of travel to China, Xi has fostered a cult of personality that looms over that vast country, and even has developed a strong cheering section among western business and intellectual leaders.
Yet Xi’s position is not as strong as it seems. His country, which has enjoyed one of the greatest booms in human history, is clearly losing its economic momentum. Its once all-powerful industrial sector has begun to wobble and now Trump’s tariffs, coupled with competition from other countries, threatens the principal driver of China’s economic ascendency.
This decline could exacerbate what is a growing class chasm in the country. A large portion of China’s population remains very poor, and the prospects for moving up even for the educated middle class have diminished. China now suffers a surplus of college-educated people for whom the economy has little place, a potential threat to the Mandarin elite that runs the country.
More serious still is unrest among China’s lower classes, particularly the over 200 million migrant laborers who drove much of the country’s remarkable growth. There have been mounting protests from this constituency, some supported by new Marxist clubs on university campuses. Detestation for the crony regime — 90 percent of China’s millionaires, notes Australian political scientist David Goodman, are the offspring of high-ranking officials — is already widespread .This is forcing Xi to focus more on economic inequality when he might rather be conquering the planet.
Dissatisfaction with corrupt, nest-feathering elites seems to be a global phenomenon.
THIRTY YEARS AGO: Reagan’s Farewell Address warned us not to lose our sense of “informed patriotism.”