JOHN HINDERAKER: The Washington Post Lies About a Conservative Journalist.

ARTHUR CHRENKOFF: Here come the eco-fascists.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO . . . OH, HELL, THIS IS JUST TOO SAD: A former West Virginia teacher and 2 aides were arrested after alleged abuse was caught on secret recordings.

UM: Chinese police cars parked on the streets of Australia spark alarm amid Hong Kong protests. “Authorities are investigating after fake Chinese police cars were seen cropping up in major Australian cities amid pro-Hong Kong demonstrations across the nation over the weekend. . . . It’s been suggested the vehicles, similar to the police cars stationed in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, are an attempt to intimidate local pro-democracy protesters.”

OPEN THREAD: Hope you had a great Monday.

JUST AS OUR POLITICIANS WANT TO REPLACE THE ELECTORATE WITH SOMETHING MORE TRACTABLE: Maybe CEOs Are Fed Up With Shareholders.

The Business Roundtable said Monday that it is changing its statement of “the purpose of a corporation.” No longer should decisions be based solely on whether they will yield higher profits for shareholders, the group said. Rather, corporate leaders should take into account “all stakeholders”—that is, employees, customers and society writ large.

It is a major philosophical shift for the association, which counts the chief executives of dozens of the biggest U.S. companies as its members. The group, led by JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO James Dimon, is a powerful voice in Washington for U.S. business interests.

The Business Roundtable’s old statement of purpose espoused economist Milton Friedman’s decades-old theory that companies’ only obligation is to maximize value for shareholders.

Like loyalty to voters, loyalty to shareholders limits your freedom to do what you want. In both cases, the abrogation of that loyalty is treated as a moral step, when it is really a species of betrayal.

HOW’S THAT SPACE PROGRAM COMING ALONG? America’s Largest Asteroid Impact Left a Trail of Destruction Across the Eastern United States. “About 35 million years ago, an asteroid traveling nearly 144,000 mph (231,000 km/h) smashed into the Atlantic Ocean near the modern-day town of Cape Charles, Virginia. The space rock vaporized instantly, but its impact triggered a gargantuan tsunami, cast up a monsoon of shattered rocks and molten glass that spanned hundreds of miles and carved out the single largest crater in the United States — the so-called Chesapeake Bay impact structure.”

GENERAL JACK D. RIPPER, VINDICATED AT LAST: Study Links Fluoridated Water During Pregnancy to Lower IQs.

Flashback (From Ed): “Impurifying our precious bodily fluids” — Fear of fluoridation takes a left turn. (From Ronald Bailey of Reason in December of 2001.)

MODERATOR SHOCKED BY LACK OF NATIVE AMERICAN ENTHUSIASM FOR ELIZABETH WARREN: ‘I would expect more excitement from our native citizens.’

Related: Warren scrubs website of Cherokee ancestry claims.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Tempest in a Tardigrade cup: Cute little ‘water bears on the moon’ don’t contaminate space.

TRIUMPH OF THE NARRATIVE WILL:

Here are two ‘narratives’ for you to consider:

1. a) Donald Trump is a New York Republican who became president by accident. His primary interest for future historians will be his use of new digital technologies like Twitter.
2. b) Donald Trump is a white nationalist. His primary interest for future historians will be his mobilization of white resentment to build a Fourth Reich in North America.

Narrative A is probably closer to the truth than Narrative B. But it’s certainly less exciting than Trump being Hitler, or a Russian agent. Narrative B is far more dramatic. It’s darkly historic. It’s going to be all over the New York Times for the next year. It shifts books. It drives engagement. It gets people out on the street and to the voting booths.

There is an obvious objection to this: aren’t the president’s lies more important than those of the Times? Trump lies with breathtaking alacrity, there’s no denying or excusing it.

But the most interesting thing about this presidency is that reactions to Trump have unveiled truths far greater than any lies he has told. Like Tony Montana at the end of Scarface, Trump somehow always tells the truth – deep truths about America – even when he lies.

* * * * * * * *

How they react to him tells you who they really are, and what they really want. The ‘narratives’ they weave, and the facts they’re happy to omit from those stories reveal even more.

Related: Trump Unmasks the Media’s Liberal Advocacy.

(Headline via Power Line.)

THE GUILD PROTECTS ITS OWN: “Mark Halperin has inked a new book deal about political strategy in the Trump era and was blasted by women who accused the disgraced NBC commentator of sexual misconduct. The political journalist — who was fired in 2017 after a dozen women made accusations against him — was aided by dozens of prominent Democrats who participated in the book.”

HEH: Under Mounting Pressure From Snopes, Babylon Bee Writers Forced To Admit They Are Not Real Journalists.

WELL, THAT’S JUST WHAT I THOUGHT IN 2016: Susan Sarandon: Trump Might Be Better for America Than Hillary Clinton.

LEFTIST CNN PANELIST BLOWS UP WHEN CONFRONTED OVER PALESTINIAN TERRORISM: “Liberal writer Peter Beinart erupted at fellow CNN panelist Rich Lowry on Monday while attempting to excuse Palestinian violence toward Israelis, saying he didn’t agree but they also didn’t have to be ‘saints’ to have rights.”

Video at top of article — Beinart seemed ready to throttle the cool and collected Lowry by the time he was done ranting.

Elsewhere in the violent world of CNN: NJ Court Issues Summons For April Ryan’s Bodyguard Who Allegedly Assaulted Journalist.

ANALYSIS: TRUE.

CHANGE: Barr ousts prisons chief after Epstein suicide. “Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide has produced the rarest of events in government scandals these days — actual career consequences for those in authority. Attorney General William Barr demoted acting Bureau of Prisons director Hugh Hurwitz as more details have come to light about multiple failures in the facility where Epstein was housed. . . . The sudden injection of accountability has its own value in that process. It only takes a couple of demotions or terminations for the message to sink in, a phenomenon Barr undoubtedly hopes will work quickly at the Bureau of Prisons.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Adult Spinal Deformity: What To Expect.

AT AMAZON, save in Blu-Ray and DVD.

Plus, deals in Generators and Portable Power. Winter is coming.

TAMARA KEEL’S PET PEEVE: “The phobia some cultures have for pocket knives, no matter how small or innocuous, is one of those things that just grinds me to a halt.”

Okay, it’s one of her pet peeves. . .

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Yale & The Crisis Of American Elites.

Inoue is the director of the UW-Tacoma Writing Center and has explained that “White language supremacy is perpetuated in college classrooms despite the better intentions of faculty, particularly through the practices of grading writing.” It appears that grading on writing ability is one of those acts of white supremacy. He has insisted that professors who use a single neutral standard for all students are perpetuating racism: “[using] single standard to grade your students’ languaging, you engage in racism. You actively promote white language supremacy, which is the handmaiden to white bias in the world.”

You might be thinking, “OK, that’s nuts, but that kind of thing would never fly in STEM disciplines.” Let me introduce you to a peer-reviewed 2017 paper by feminist scholar Donna Riley, who in the same year became head of the Purdue University department of engineering education. Purdue is one of the top engineering schools in the country. Here’s the abstract:

Rigor is the aspirational quality academics apply to disciplinary standards of quality. Rigor’s particular role in engineering created conditions for its transfer and adaptation in the recently emergent discipline of engineering education research. ‘Rigorous engineering education research’ and the related ‘evidence-based’ research and practice movement in STEM education have resulted in a proliferation of boundary drawing exercises that mimic those in engineering disciplines, shaping the development of new knowledge and ‘improved’ practice in engineering education. Rigor accomplishes dirty deeds, however, serving three primary ends across engineering, engineering education, and engineering education research: disciplining, demarcating boundaries, and demonstrating white male heterosexual privilege. Understanding how rigor reproduces inequality, we cannot reinvent it but rather must relinquish it, looking to alternative conceptualizations for evaluating knowledge, welcoming diverse ways of knowing, doing, and being, and moving from compliance to engagement, from rigor to vigor.

In the paper, she writes:

One of rigor’s purposes is, to put it bluntly, a thinly veiled assertion of white male (hetero)sexuality” because rigor “has a historical lineage of being about hardness, stiffness, and erectness; its sexual connotations—and links to masculinity in particular—are undeniable.

Er, right. Here’s a tip for travelers: if you arrive at a bridge over a gorge, you’d better hope that it stands stiff and erect, and that one of Donna Riley’s rigorless students, with their diverse ways of knowing, didn’t have anything to do with engineering the thing.

See also: the 2018  Florida International University bridge collapse that killed six and injured eight, but whose engineers were praised beforehand for their environmentalism and gender equality.

Read the whole thing, which also explores the New York Times’ racialist “1619 Project” as well.

MONEY NEVER MEETS MOUTH HERE: This Is What Happens When You Ask Pro-Taxers to Pay More.

NEWS YOU CAN USE? Libertarian Comedians: A No Doubt Incomplete List.

JEFF GOLDSTEIN: The post I’d hoped I’d never have to write.

As many of you know, my oldest son, Satchel, had a rare form of brain cancer, which — thank god — he’s had successfully treated. He’s fine, though he has to take a regimen of medicine every day to replace pituitary function, having lost his pituitary gland during the surgery.
…
Bottom line is this: we need to somehow get out from under our medical debt, which we put on credit cards mostly, so that we’re able to wait out the sale of our house and not have to declare bankruptcy.

This site of course doesn’t have the readership it once did, as many of my former readers have moved on to new places and new things. But if my long-time readers and friends can possible help us out and would ever be inclined to do so, I ask that you please do so now — and pass the word along to others you think might be able to help.

Read the whole thing, and if you can, maybe chip in. I’m on my way over to PayPal to do just that.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I just made one of my larger blogger donations.