Archive for 2020
June 25, 2020
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: It’s Time Cancel the Statue-Toppling Morons. “Many have noted that the stupidity displayed by these young people shows how badly our public schools have failed them. In a column I wrote last week a made the opposite point: this is the triumph of our public education system because whitewashing American history to turn the younger generations into an easily controlled mob has been the point of it all for decades.”
Kruiser mentioned on our VIP video chat yesterday that the column he’s alluding to here didn’t find much of an audience. If you missed it then, you won’t want to miss it a second time: “The Second American Civil War Has Already Been Fought and Academia Won.”
THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY IS SNARED IN A MULTI-DIMENSIONAL WAR: My latest Creators Syndicate column (bumped). The column sketches some of the economic, ideological, information, political, military and diplomatic components of the snare.
The goodie-producing economic engine that braces the CCP’s domestic political strategy needs international markets. China’s domestic economy can’t sustain it.
CCP international aggression magnifies the vulnerabilities. Recent vile aggression abounds. But call my choices cherry-picking and I’ll call you a bribed media propagandist.
You’ve been warned.
GOOD NEWS: Falling Covid-19 Death Rates Are Even Smaller Than They Look. “The key gauge to watch is deaths. They’ve been falling since April, and there’s strong reason to believe they’re lower than the official count suggests. The dreaded Wuhan virus is no doubt a nasty bug, worthy of our vigilance and ongoing concern. That said, its virulence, as measured by the daily number of deaths, appears to be waning, as the chart with this piece, courtesy of the COVID-19 Tracking Project of the Atlantic, clearly shows.”
BUSINESSES SUE SEATTLE OVER ‘OCCUPIED’ PROTEST ZONE.
Evidently, not all businesses inside CHAZ are in agreement with this June 12th Daily Beast headline and subhead: “Local Businesses Love the ‘Domestic Terror’ Zone in Seattle, Actually. Despite rumors of extortion and cops making wild claims—and walking them back—the people engaging in capitalism in a cop-free experimental space are having a great time.”
Seattle’s last Republican mayor left office in March of 1969.
BIRD’S EYE VIEW OF AN ABRAMS: An engaging photo — pun intended. An M1A2 tank engages a target on the Konotop range at Drawsko Pomorskie Training Area, Poland.
RELATED: One of my favorites, an Abrams encountering a camel. Here’s a detailed report on Abrams upgrades. It discusses the SEP2/3 (System Enhancement Package) upgrade programs.
THE PURGE: Jamaal Bowman, Far-Left Primary Challenger, Set To Oust 16-Term NY Congressman. “Left-wing candidate Jamaal Bowman has declared victory in his primary challenge against Congressman Eliot Engel (D-NY), the establishment-backed chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee who has served in Congress since 1989.”
AOC it turns out wasn’t a fluke, she was just a cycle early.
MEANWHILE, IN WASHINGTON: Trump’s Impact on Courts Cemented As 200th Judge Appointed to Federal Bench.
I THINK THIS IS GOOD NEWS: As COVID-19 Infections Rise, Patients Are Getting Younger: The trend, which may reflect growing defiance of social distancing in some age groups, implies a lower death rate. Doesn’t this mean we’re building herd immunity among the people least likely to suffer complications, while protecting those who are the most vulnerable?
Plus:
If rising infections in states such as Texas, California, Arizona, and Florida (which yesterday saw a record increase in new confirmed cases) represent a new normal rather than a one-time jump tied to social gatherings on Memorial Day weekend, it will be hard to put the genie back in the bottle, regardless of any legal restrictions politicians decide to reimpose. Given the impracticality of mass enforcement, social distancing has always required voluntary compliance, and the willingness to comply seems to be waning, partly because of sheer impatience but also because the experience with ham-handed, economically devastating, and frequently arbitrary lockdowns has left many people bitter and disinclined to follow official recommendations.
Yes, the public health community squandered the trust that is its biggest asset.
Also, have you noticed that the rise in case numbers comes 1-2 incubation periods after those massive protests that public health people encouraged? And among the age groups that were most likely to protest? If you did, it was probably on your own, and not with the help of the media coverage.
ROBERT TRACINSKI: Throw The Book at the Rioters. “This has been a common profile from the riots, where some of the worst violence, vandalism, and looting has been instigated by relatively well-off young people inflamed, one assumes, less by the lived experience of injustice than by radical leftist ideas. They weren’t there to cry out for reform so much as play-act at revolution. Now that these alleged vandals have been caught, they are very sorry. And, of course, there are plenty of people ready to make excuses for them. . . . This isn’t a spontaneous act of anger. It is a theory of how to achieve political change, and there is a full court press right now to get America to accept assault, looting, and arson as normal and acceptable forms of political activism.”
Related: Here Come The Bourgeois Bolsheviks.
PHILADELPHIA TO REMOVE CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS STATUE FOLLOWING CLASH BETWEEN ARMED MEN AND BLACK LIVES MATTER PROTESTERS. More here:
Mayor Jim Kenney said in a statement Wednesday the city will ask the Art Commission on July 22 to approve the statue’s removal “in light of ongoing public safety concerns about the presence of armed individuals at Marconi Plaza.” The move came less than 24 hours after the most recent incident, in which a group of armed white South Philadelphians provoked a brawl with protesters supporting the Black Lives Matter movement.
“Safety?” Try “Safetyism,” instead.
COMING FROM DEMOCRATS, OF COURSE, AND PROBABLY MOSTLY WHITE ONES: Threats and racist tirades against Sen. Tim Scott increasing. “When CNN asked Scott about the personal toll the threats were taking on him, he said it was ‘very little,’ and then turned to his police reform bill that was just blocked by Democrats on a procedural vote.”
IT WOULD TAKE A HEART OF STONE NOT TO LAUGH: A Minneapolis Neighborhood Vowed to Check Its Privilege. It’s Already Being Tested.
After the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police, Ms. Albers, who is white, and many of her progressive neighbors have vowed to avoid calling law enforcement into their community. Doing so, they believed, would add to the pain that black residents of Minneapolis were feeling and could put them in danger.
Already, that commitment is being challenged. Two weeks ago, dozens of multicolored tents appeared in the neighborhood park. They were brought by homeless people who were displaced during the unrest that gripped the city. The multiracial group of roughly 300 new residents seems to grow larger and more entrenched every day. They do laundry, listen to music and strategize about how to find permanent housing. Some are hampered by mental illness, addiction or both.
Their presence has drawn heavy car traffic into the neighborhood, some from drug dealers. At least two residents have overdosed in the encampment and had to be taken away in ambulances.
The influx of outsiders has kept Ms. Albers awake at night. Though it is unlikely to happen, she has had visions of people from the tent camp forcing their way into her home. She imagines using a baseball bat to defend herself.
Not being able to call the police, as she has done for decades, has shaken her.
“I am afraid,” she said. “I know my neighbors are around, but I’m not feeling grounded in my city at all. Anything could happen.”
Who could have seen this coming?
BLACK LIVES MATTER UNTIL THEY DON’T: Senate Democrats Block Republican Police Reform Legislation.
OPENING THE FLOODGATES? Court: Injured officer can sue Black Lives Matter organizer. “A Louisiana police officer injured during protests over the 2016 killing of a black man can sue a Black Lives Matter organizer on the grounds he acted negligently by leading people to block a highway, a federal appeals court has ruled.”
UPDATE: Oops, someone sent me this and I didn’t notice the date, which was from last year. But Eugene Volokh kindly corrected me and writes: “There’s a cert. petition pending now, see https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docket/docketfiles/html/public/19-1108.html; it’s scheduled to be considered at the late September conference. It’s a very interesting First Amendment issue, with a weird tort law overlay (having to do with the firefighter’s rule), see, e.g., https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Areason.com+mckesson&oq=site%3Areason.com+mckesson&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.3096j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8.”
INSIDE HIGHER ED: Faculty Should Support the Academic Freedom of Colleagues Who Buck Conventional Wisdom. True, and once taken for granted, but this now takes considerable courage.
DUMB: Republican Senate bill seeks an end to ‘warrant-proof’ encryption. “It’s the latest attempt to force tech companies to add a backdoor to encrypted services.”
“Warrant-proof” is a stupid euphemism for “effective,” and turning the keys to all our data over to Washington — where the CIA can’t even protect its own secrets — is actually quite a lot worse than dumb.
DRUG PROHIBITION LEADS TO NO-KNOCK RAIDS, WHICH LEADS TO PEOPLE DYING. OR BEING CHARGED IF THEY DEFEND THEIR HOMES AGAINST UNKNOWN INTRUDERS, AS IN CORY MAYE’S CASE. Breonna Taylor and the Moral Bankruptcy of Drug Prohibition. Note that you can blame police for this, but you should reserve some blame for the politicians who passed the laws they are enforcing.
WHY DID THE WASHINGTON POST GET THIS WOMAN FIRED?
In the hours after publication, the story started to receive widespread criticism from journalists on social media on the grounds that it got its subject fired while lacking news value. (Readers had to get 85 percent of the way through the story to even learn that Schafer had lost her job when she told her employer the story would be running.) The article now has drawn over 2,000 web comments, which are overwhelmingly negative in nature. Yet aside from PR statements to outlets covering the Post’s coverage, the Post’s response to the criticism of this story has been silence. If this is a story with “nuance and sensitivity” that the Post felt “impelled” to run, why is a spirited defense of the Post’s journalism coming only from a non-journalist spokesperson for the paper? The answer we reached, after interviewing ten current Post journalists for this story, is that the paper’s staff generally does not consider the story to be defensible.
“My reaction, like everybody, was, What the hell? Why is this a story?” a feature writer at the Post told New York. “My second reaction was, Why is this a 3,000-word feature?” The feature writer added, “This was not drawn up by the ‘Style’ section.”
Employees at “Style” — the paper’s premiere location for long-form storytelling — were confused and displeased to see the piece running on their turf, two Post employees with knowledge of the situation said. Neither Fisher nor Trent works for the “Style” desk, though as newspapers have gotten increasingly focused on digital distribution, the walls between newspaper sections have become more porous.
While the piece failed as a journalistic investigation of the culture of Washington, D.C.’s “media figures,” it succeeded by a different metric: It ensured that Schafer bore the brunt of the criticism in the piece — for example, describing her insensitive interaction in the taxi en route to the party, an incident that occurred outside the presence of any media figures — with minimum organizational exposure to the Post. If it had leaked that the Post had neglected to pursue a story about blackface, or if the women who brought the tip to the Post had taken it to another outlet or simply tweeted about it, who knows what direction the story might have taken.
Related: The WaPo editor behind the Megyn Kelly blackface story has a history of outing random people.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, HEIGHTENING-THE-CONTRADICTIONS EDITION: Pandemic Worsened Public Higher Ed’s Biggest Challenges.
More than three-quarters of respondents reported government funding is a “big challenge” for their institutions. A primary driver for this is the decline in the belief that public education is a public good, according to a report on survey findings, which also said that the reputation of public higher education has been damaged by the Varsity Blues admissions scandal and various sexual assault and athletics scandals.
Sophia Laderman, a senior policy analyst at the State Higher Education Executive Officers association, has observed similar trends in her research.
“When state governments are faced with reduced tax revenues and increased needs in health care and other essential areas, it’s difficult to allocate funding to higher education over another budget area even if you understand that higher education is essential to future economic development and contributes greatly to our democracy, etc.,” Laderman wrote in an email.
Related: States are cutting university budgets. Taxpayers aren’t interested in funding campus kooks. “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make crazy. And higher education has become objectively crazy.”
HAVE YOU HAD JUST ABOUT ENOUGH?
Yeah. Me too. And no, the image doesn’t lead anywhere. It’s just an accurate representation of the current moment.