“SOMETIMES THE MASK SLIPS:” Texas Democrat Forced To Apologize For Saying Gov. Greg Abbott ‘Hates Trees Because One Fell On Him.’

CHANGE: Psychedelic drug therapy enters new era with Johns Hopkins center.

UPDATE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARIES ACCORDINGLY: New York City bans calling someone an ‘illegal alien’ out of hate.

BETO RIDES THE MOBIUS LOOP OF GUN CONTROL: Beto Goes to Kent State, Argues Only the Government Can Be Trusted With Guns. Someone should tell Beto who did the killing at Kent State.

THE REPORTER FIRED IN THE “BUSCH LIGHT GUY” SCANDAL SAID HE FEELS “ABANDONED” BY THE DES MOINES REGISTER:

The Des Moines Register reporter fired in the wake of a scandal involving offensive tweets — posted by a viral star he interviewed and then his own — broke his silence Friday, telling BuzzFeed News he had been “abandoned” by the newspaper after following standard editorial practice by performing a social media search on the person he was profiling.

“This event basically set my entire life on fire,” reporter Aaron Calvin said.

Which is what Calvin did to Carson King through what Carol Hunter, his editor at the Des Moines Register Owellianly dubbed a “routine background check” afterwards. Which prompted a million or so Twitter users who also have access search engines to perform the same “routine background check” on Calvin. The tweets discovered, some of which were written while Calvin was a student at Hofstra, were not pretty.

More from BuzzFeed:

In the tweet, Calvin apologized for “not holding myself to the same high standards as The Register holds others.”

“I regret publishing that tweet now,” Calvin told BuzzFeed News. “Because I was never trying to hold Carson to any kind of ‘higher standard’ or any kind of standard at all. I was trying to do my job as a reporter, and I think I did so to the best of my ability.”

As soon as the story broke, Calvin said he began receiving a barrage of death threats. He said HR reps at Gannett, which owns the Des Moines Register, forbade him from speaking to the media and told him to leave his apartment for his own safety. They offered to put him up in a hotel, but he stayed with a friend instead.

“I recognize that I’m not the first person to be doxed like this — this whole campaign was taken up by right-wing ideologues and largely driven by that force,” he said. “It was just a taste of what I assume that women and journalists of color suffer all the time, but the kind of locality and regional virality of the story made it so intense.”

Calvin is portraying himself as the victim here, comparing himself to “just a taste of what I assume that women and journalists of color suffer all the time.” As Stephen Miller tweets in response to the above passage, “this is how I imagine Jesus or Nelson Mandela must have felt,” adding, “Yes it’s bad when someone takes tweets out of context to paint someone as a racist, ISN’T IT. Jaw dropping lack of self awareness.”

Speaking of which, curiously missing from BuzzFeed’s article is that (a) Calvin is an alumni of BuzzFeed and (b) BuzzFeed was one of the pioneers of doxxing someone and blowing up their life via an abhorrent tweet, perhaps most prominently, Justine Sacco. Today, the man responsible for that hit is praised by his fellow Democratic Party operatives with headlines such as this one at the Washington Post in August: “Said something you’d like to forget? CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski won’t let it go.”

BuzzFeed’s chronology is also a bit off: Calvin was abandoned by the Des Moines Register before his article was published. A simple deletion of the passage mentioning  Carson King’s tweets written as a 16 year old by Carol Hunter, King’s editor, would have saved both men what angel investor Balaji S. Srinivasan dubbed “mutually assured cancellation” – as well as the destruction of her newspaper’s previously benign reputation.

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Whistleblower Edition.

TRUMP CAMPAIGN FILES FOR ARBITRATION AGAINST ALVA JOHNSON: “As the ancient Tibetan philosophy states: Don’t start none, won’t be none. The good news for Johnson is that she gets to be a victim again. In the #Resistance, there is no higher honor. That big meanie Trump is bullying her just for violating her contract and filing a ridiculous lawsuit based on nothing. That poor woman. Stock up on tissues, Alva. You’re gonna need ’em.”

NEW SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” CONTINUES TO PAY DIVIDENDS: AOC Says People Making 38 Thousand Dollars A Year Are Living In ‘Destitution.’ That’s Ridiculous.

BECAUSE THE STUDENTS ARE ADVANCING THEIR AGENDA: Leading senator asks colleges to explain why they ‘kowtow’ to easily offended students.

He points to Harvard University’s dismissal of a faculty dean for representing Harvey Weinstein in his criminal trial, Duke University’s firing of a veteran professor for his “radical free speech” teaching method, top-down pressure on a Sarah Lawrence College professor for publicly exposing the “widespread liberalism among college administrators,” and Villanova University’s new course-evaluation questions that rate professors on “diversity and inclusion.”

Referring to the Duke situation with Prof. Evan Charney, the Republican senator deadpans: “If asking students to consider arguments other than their own and analyze an issue from all angles causes ‘harm,’ I think it’s fair to ask what the point of higher education is.”

To generate jobs, and shock troops, for Democrats, apparently.

BACK WHEN SAN FRANCISCO LOVED STRAWS: On this day in 1937, a patent was issued to Joseph Friedman for the “Bendy Straw.” Friedman watched his little daughter struggling to use a straight straw at a soda fountain in San Francisco, so he decided to help her out. He inserted a screw and then used dental floss to create corrugations into the straw. He then removed the screw and floss and voilà—a flexible straw. The straws were first marketed to hospitals for bedridden patients, but eventually became popular with children and … well … everyone.

Little did he realize that the plastic version of his cute little invention would eventually be blamed (along with other plastic straws) for destroying the planet.

READ IT AND WEEP: Prof: Tom Brady’s ‘white male omnipotence’ ‘buttresses American white supremacy.’

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LENINTHINK: On the practice behind the theory of Marxism-Leninism.

Lenin regarded all interactions as zero-sum. To use the phrase he made famous, the fundamental question is always “Who Whom?”—who dominates whom, who does what to whom, ultimately who annihilates whom. To the extent that we gain, you lose. Contrast this view with the one taught in basic microeconomics: whenever there is a non-forced transaction, both sides benefit, or they would not make the exchange. For the seller, the money is worth more than the goods he sells, and for the buyer the goods are worth more than the money. Lenin’s hatred of the market, and his attempts to abolish it entirely during War Communism, derived from the opposite idea, that all buying and selling is necessarily exploitative. When Lenin speaks of “profiteering” or “speculation” (capital crimes), he is referring to every transaction, however small. Peasant “bagmen” selling produce were shot.

Basic books on negotiation teach that you can often do better than split the difference, since people have different concerns. Both sides can come out ahead—but not for the Soviets, whose negotiating stance John F. Kennedy once paraphrased as: what’s mine is mine; and what’s yours is negotiable. For us, the word “politics” means a process of give and take, but for Lenin it’s we take, and you give. From this it follows that one must take maximum advantage of one’s position. If the enemy is weak enough to be destroyed, and one stops simply at one’s initial demands, one is objectively helping the enemy, which makes one a traitor. Of course, one might simply be insane. Long before Brezhnev began incarcerating dissidents in madhouses, Lenin was so appalled that his foreign minister, Boris Chicherin, recommended an unnecessary concession to American loan negotiators, that he pronounced him mad—not metaphorically—and demanded he be forcibly committed. “We will be fools if we do not immediately and forcibly send him to a sanatorium.”

* * * * * * * *

One could almost say that force had a mystical attraction for Lenin. He had workers drafted into a labor army where any shirking or lateness was punished by sentence to a concentration camp. Yes, Bolsheviks used the term concentration camp from the start, and did so with pride. Until economic collapse forced Lenin to adopt the New Economic Policy, he demanded that grain not be purchased from peasants but requisitioned at gunpoint. Naturally, peasants—Lenin called recalcitrant peasants “kulaks”—rebelled all over Russia. In response to one such “kulak” uprising Lenin issued the following order:

The kulak uprising in [your] 5 districts must be crushed without pity. . . . 1) Hang (and I mean hang so that the people can see) not less than 100 known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers. 2) Publish their names. 3) Take all their grain away from them. 4) Identify hostages . . . . Do this so that for hundreds of miles around the people can see, tremble, know and cry . . . . Yours, Lenin. P. S. Find tougher people.

Dmitri Volkogonov, the first biographer with access to the secret Lenin archives, concluded that for Lenin violence was a goal in itself. He quotes Lenin in 1908 recommending “real, nationwide terror, which invigorates the country and through which the Great French Revolution achieved glory.”

Read the whole thing.

DAN MARKEL UPDATE: 5 takeaways from Wendi Adelson’s testimony during the Dan Markel case.

WHAT’S AMAZING IS HOW LITTLE THE PRESS SEEMS TO CARE ABOUT THIS: Just 13% trust media ‘a great deal,’ Democrats only majority with ‘confidence.’ Certainly not enough to change their ways.

STEPHANIE GUTMANN: Why is a good man so hard to find? Blame the war on boys and men.

IT’S MORE LIKE A SPOILING ATTACK DESIGNED TO REDUCE THE IMPACT OF THOSE REVELATIONS: Dems’ impeachment frenzy is the prelude to the coming time bombs about to explode in their faces. “The three time bombs have names: Horowitz, Huber, and Durham. When the Department of Justice inspector general issues his report, then John Huber and John Durham, the U.S. attorneys tasked with investigating crimes suspected in the Clinton Foundation; Uranium One; and the FISA warrants used to spy on the Trump campaign, transition, and presidency will be free to start seeking indictments, or to unseal indictments that may have already been issued by their grand juries. The reports and the unleashing of the two U.S. attorneys are coming soon, as those mentioned in the I.G. report are currently submitting their responses for inclusion in the final report.”

What better distraction than an impeachment circus?

THAT’S NOT CRAZY OR UNSERIOUS AT ALL: “Very Few Hearings, If Any”: Dems Hoping To Rush Through Impeachment Before Thanksgiving.

PROGRESS, OF A SORT: New Yorker cover depicts Trump and Giuliani as mobsters murdering Uncle Sam.

I suppose that’s a step up for the New Yorker, since they’re showing Trump murdering a symbol, as opposed to Trump himself being murdered:

That cover ran a year after the GOP’s Steve Scalise and Rand Paul were both attacked, and seven years after the New Yorker blamed the Tucson massacre on Sarah Palin’s clip art and rhetoric.

And it’s not like New Yorker staffers wouldn’t mind putting a “whack job” on America’s freedoms themselves: Calling America’s “Ungovernable” and “Terrifying” Car Culture a “Terrible Mistake” with “Disastrous Drivers” Leading to “Chaos”, Liberal Writer Wants “Smart” Solutions to Bring It to an End.

YOU COULD BE FORGIVEN FOR THINKING THAT ALL GREEN TYPES ARE HYPOCRITES: Canadian Green Party Edits Image of Party Leader To Show Her Using a Metal Straw.

FAST TIMES AT SULZBERGER HIGH: New York Times writer appears to encourage readers to boycott New York Times. Sarah Jeong “made headlines when she was hired by the Times last year, after tweets of hers surfaced in which she mocked and debased white people. The Times defended her hiring at the time.”

From the new Website Disrn — “yes, the guy who founded the Babylon Bee and the guy who now owns the Babylon Bee have created a real news site for you. What a time to be alive.”

Related:

WHEN THE LEFT LOSES REUTERS….“Republicans see impeachment backfiring. Democrats fear they may be right.”