Archive for 2020
September 23, 2020
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: NY Times: Law Firms Pay Supreme Court Clerks $400,000 Bonuses; New Study Confirms Their Influence With Their Justice. If we abolished law clerks, Supreme Court opinions would be shorter, clearer, and better.
BUT THEY’LL STILL GET THEIR BALLOTS, RIGHT? Election Watchdog Finds 350,000 Dead Registrants on Voter Rolls In 42 States.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Kamala Harris Will Remind Everyone How Awful She Is During Confirmation Hearing. “The optics of Harris teeing off on a Roman Catholic mother with a shrieking progressive ‘Gender traitor’ rant won’t really help Team Harris-Biden win over any hearts and minds in swing states where the polls are tight.”
ON THE UN’S 75TH ANNIVERSARY: Peacekeeping institution? What peace? Time to commemorate the UN war fighters.
Somewhere in a storage room, I’ve a World War II submarine recognition pamphlet framed to display its intriguing title.
Published circa 1943, the pamphlet is no frills — black ink submarine silhouettes and captions on white paper. The silhouettes depict U.S., British Commonwealth, Free French and Soviet Union subs, and, as I recall, a Dutch and a Greek sub as well. The Netherlands, Greece and France had been defeated, but some ships escaped to fight for their “free governments in exile.”
The document’s title: “United Nations Submarines.”
They were U.N. subs, not U.S and Allied subs, and it had a 1943/44 pub date, not 1945, the year the U.N. organization was established, according to those now commemorating its 75th anniversary.
Contemporary question: In 1945 did the UN really move from war-making to peacekeeping?
BONE SORTIE: A B-1B Lancer departs Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska, on its way to Europe in support of a Bomber Task Force mission. Photo taken Sept. 14, 2020. A Murphy’s Law update from January 2020 discusses why the B-1B will be retired before the B-52.
DAVID BARON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Bear spotted in South Knoxville neighborhood.
TELL CANADA TO STOP MEDDLING IN OUR ELECTION: Court papers: Woman wrote ‘give up’ in ricin note to Trump.
NOPE: More than 1200 sign petition to change UT grading scale to pass/fail. We didn’t do that for either World War, for the 1918 Flu, or for the Civil War or the War of 1812. Why now?
YEAH, THEY JUMP SHIP AT THE FIRST LITTLE SIGN OF ARSON, LOOTING, AND RAPE: White women just ‘fair-weather’ fans of Black Lives Matter.
MEDIA MYTH ALERT: Woodward’s latest Trump book prompts myth-telling about Watergate. “‘[T]o explain Watergate through the lens of the heroic journalist,’ I wrote, ‘is to abridge and misunderstand the scandal and to indulge in a particularly beguiling media-driven myth’ — one that even Woodward has disputed. He told an interviewer in 2004: ‘To say that the press brought down Nixon, that’s horseshit.’”
The DNC-MSM’s self-serving mythopoeic narratives don’t write themselves, you know.
PROGRESS: Blue Origin targets this Thursday for New Shepard reusable rocket launch with NASA landing system test. “The launch of Blue Origin’s New Shepard vehicle will be its thirteenth overall for that category of launch craft, and the seventh in a row for this particular rocket. The payload will include an even dozen commercial cargo items, including a Deorbit, Descent and Landing Sensor Demonstration done in partnership with NASA — basically a highly precise automated landing system that will help NASA land on the moon and eventually Mars.”
A SINGLE RAY OF HOPE IN THE FETID, DARK BIZARRO-WORLD OF ACADEMIA: Converse College Associate Professor of Politics Joel Poelvoorde still has his job despite refusing to take mandatory “diversity” training.
FIGHT THE POWER: US House passes forced labour bill that would bar Xinjiang imports.
U.S. SANCTIONS FORCE RUSSIA TO CUT DEFENSE SPENDING: Let me get this straight —OrangeManBad is a tool of the Russkies, so OrangeManBad imposed sanctions on the Russkies that are so tough they had to reduce military spending? Uh, what am I missing here?
QUESTION ASKED: Who’s afraid of Amy Coney Barrett?
Pretty much the entire left, and the news media (but I repeat myself).
WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH – hang on, checking notes – THE WORLD SOCIALIST WEBSITE IS A VOICE OF SANITY: The New York Times and Nikole Hannah-Jones abandon key claims of the 1619 Project.
It is not entirely clear when the Times deleted its “true founding” claim, but an examination of old cached versions of the 1619 Project text indicates that it probably took place on December 18, 2019.
These deletions are not mere wording changes. The “true founding” claim was the core element of the Project’s assertion that all of American history is rooted in and defined by white racial hatred of blacks. According to this narrative, trumpeted by Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones, the American Revolution was a preemptive racial counterrevolution waged by white people in North America to defend slavery against British plans to abolish it. The fact that there is no historical evidence to support this claim did not deter the Times and Hannah-Jones from declaring that the historical identification of 1776 with the creation of a new nation is a myth, as is the claim that the Civil War was a progressive struggle aimed at the destruction of slavery. According to the New York Times and Hannah-Jones, the fight against slavery and all forms of oppression were struggles that black Americans always waged alone.
The Times’ “disappearing,” with a few secret keystrokes, of its central argument, without any explanation or announcement, is a stunning act of intellectual dishonesty and outright fraud. When it launched the 1619 Project in August 2019, the Times proclaimed that its aim was to radically change what and how students were taught about American history. With the aim of creating a new syllabus based on the 1619 Project, hundreds of thousands of copies of the original version of the narrative, as published in the New York Times Magazine, were printed and distributed to schools, museums and libraries all across the United States. A very large number of schools declared that they would align their curricula in accordance with the narrative supplied by the Times.
I agree with the conclusion, but it’s awfully rich coming from the source.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): A friend on Facebook comments: “In a way this is a good day for serious historians. A bunch of charlatans have been forced to back down. There are lessons to be learned more widely about pushing back against dishonesty and bad faith in academia. In years to come this might be seen as one of those turning points. And actually Trump deserves credit here too: he’s made a stink about this.”
Yes, don’t give the left a pass on its lies just because it’s easier to go along. As a famous man said, get in their face and punch back twice as hard.