THIS IS CNN: Don Lemon: ‘I don’t know’ that US sees black people as ‘fully human.’

“I don’t think America has seen enough people like me. I don’t think America intimately knows enough people like me. I would love America to see black people, especially black gay men, as, and I hate this word, normal, and as human beings, and as part of the culture. … I don’t know if America sees black people and especially black gay men as fully human, and as deserving of the American dream,” he told the Washington Post.

Plus:

Lemon argued black and white people are “living in two different realities,” saying former President Donald Trump was “the necessary wake-up for America to realize just how racist it is.”

Flashback: Trump May Have Lost, But Trumpism Won. “And you can see a Trump realignment, bigly, in the fact that Trump markedly increased support among blacks, Hispanics, and Asians (not to mention the Holy Grail of Intersectionality, ‘Other’). And in the fact that Trump doubled his support against LGBT voters. And in the fact that Trump only seemed to lose ground among… Whites.”

IS IT RACIST TO CONFRONT A SUICIDE BOMBER?

The independent inquiry into the Manchester Arena bombing of May 2017, in which 22 pop fans were killed by an Islamist extremist, has published the first volume of its report. It makes for chilling reading. The inquiry has found there were numerous ‘missed opportunities’ to confront Salman Abedi, the bomber, and potentially stop him from detonating the device in his rucksack. Most chilling of all is the reason given by one of the key security guards on patrol that evening as to why he failed to question Abedi. He was worried, he said, that asking a brown-skinned man why he was hanging around the arena might be construed as racist.

Take that in. There was a very shifty-looking young man around the foyer and mezzanine of the Manchester Arena towards the end of an Ariana Grande concert, carrying a ‘bulging’ rucksack so large he ‘struggled’ under the weight of it, and a security guard was reluctant to confront him lest he be accused of racism. In the words of the report, this was a significant ‘missed opportunity’. The ‘inadequacy’ of the security guard’s response to the presence of a highly suspicious individual was one of the many misjudgements made on that black, fateful night, the report says. Is it possible that the fear of being thought of as racist is screwing up everyday life, and even hindering sensible action in threatening situations?

As Mark Steyn wrote in 2005, “With hindsight, the defining encounter of the age was not between Mohammed Atta’s jet and the World Trade Center on 9/11, but that between Mohammed Atta and Johnelle Bryant a year earlier:”

Ms Bryant is an official with the US department of agriculture in Florida, and the late Mr Atta had gone to see her about getting a $650,000 government loan to convert a plane into the world’s largest crop-duster. A novel idea.

The meeting got off to a rocky start when Mr Atta refused to deal with Ms Bryant because she was “but a woman”. But, after this unpleasantness had been smoothed out, things went swimmingly.

When it was explained to him that, alas, he wouldn’t get the 650 grand in cash that day, Mr Atta threatened to cut Ms Bryant’s throat. He then pointed to a picture behind her desk showing an aerial view of downtown Washington – the White House, the Pentagon, etc – and asked, “How would America like it if another country destroyed that city and some of the monuments in it?”

Fortunately, Ms Bryant had been on the training course and knows an opportunity for multicultural outreach when she sees one. “I felt that he was trying to make the cultural leap from the country that he came from,” she recalled. “I was attempting, in every manner I could, to help him make his relocation into our country as easy for him as I could.”

“Better dead than rude,” to coin a phrase.

UPDATE: More examples of “better dead than rude” from one of Glenn’s USA Today columns in 2016:

There were warning signs with the San Bernardino shooters, whose neighbors reportedly didn’t want to call the cops for fear of being thought racist. And there were warning signs with [Omar] Mateen [the Pulse nightclub shooter in Orlando], who apparently had been on security officials’ radar screen for some time but not enough to do anything about it. Classmates of Nidal Hassan said he regularly spouted Islamist propaganda months before he shot up Fort Hood, but the military was too politically correct to do anything and afterward tried for some time to pretend that his deliberate, jihadist attack was merely “workplace violence.”

(Updated and bumped.)

THE COST OF A LEFTIST MOVEMENT AIMED AT REMOVING TRUMP: Why cities can expect 2020’s violent crime spike to last.

OPEN THREAD: Make it special.

SPACE: Space tourism startup flies test balloon 20 miles high over Florida.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Particularly if you’re in the corporate boardroom and letting Twitter flamewars dictate company policy.

Why, it’s like “Twitter sentiment is a Styrofoam iceberg. You may think 9/10 of it is underwater, but actually, 9/10 of it is visible,” to coin an Insta-phrase. Somebody should write a book about this stuff.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: How to Talk Yourself into Believing a Lie.

The backlash against CRT is very real. The notion, for example, that the incensed parents who are descending on school-board meetings in droves have been bamboozled by the Heritage Foundation betrays an unfamiliarity with both how local politics is conducted and the attention parents pay to their children’s education. NBC is one of the first national outlets to even address what has rapidly become a national phenomenon: the outrage over a consensus forged behind closed doors during a once-in-a-century pandemic. On the local level, dispatch after dispatch after dispatch chronicles this organic phenomenon and the surprise with which it has taken supporters of a race-conscious curriculum.

And while we have no way to know if this backlash will have electoral consequences for Democrats on the federal level, municipal elections that hinged on this controversial curriculum have shown that it’s a loser for Democrats. For example, in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburb of Southlake, the slate of candidates who campaigned against a plan not just to teach CRT but to create databases of alleged racial transgressions both in and outside school lost a May election by a resounding 70 to 30 percent of the vote.

It’s whistling past the electoral graveyard to wave this phenomenon off as a fabrication of malevolent right-wing think tanks. More insulting is the notion that it is the right that is somehow obsessed with race. At best, the right can be accused only of noticing that obsession among its opponents.

Exit quote: “The idea that conservatives did anything more than notice this mania is laughable. The legislative efforts on the local level, some of which flirt with violating civic and constitutional propriety, deserve skepticism because this reckoning is entirely organic. Right-wing overreach threatens that emerging consensus. But Republicans should take heart in how Democrats are trying to convince themselves that none of this is real, and no serious person questions the validity of CRT’s sudden ubiquity. They’ll never see it coming.”

THAT WAS DIFFERENT, BECAUSE SHUT UP:

NEW ISRAELI PM NAFTALI BENNETT TRASHES NEGOTIATIONS TO REENTER JCPOA:

One of the issues where Joe Biden and Binyamin Netanyahu disagreed about the most was Biden’s intent to get back into the Iranian Nuclear deal. But if Biden thought that Israel would drop the topic after they dropped Netanyahu he was wrong. At Sunday’s cabinet meeting in Israel, new PM Naftali Bennett trashed Biden’s intention of getting back into the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] as fervently as Bibi ever did. He warned the US and other nations trying to regenerate the JCPOA with Iran to “wake up” following the election of a hard-line murderer as Iran’s new president. reenter the JCPOA, reenter the JCPOA

Iran ‘elected’ hardliner Ebrahim Raisi as its new president on Friday (well, their version of an election). The president-elect – who will be inaugurated in August – is under US sanctions. His nickname is the “Butcher of 1988,” and he’s been linked to the execution and torture of political prisoners, including children and pregnant women.

Bennett warned that Raisi’s election was “the last chance for the world powers to wake up before returning to the nuclear agreement and to understand who they’re doing business with. These guys are murderers, mass murderers.”

So why did/does Obama and his retreads currently working for President Biden want Iran to have the bomb? Because the loathe Israel, obviously, but also, as Lee Smith wrote in Tablet in late November, because it would help in the fundamental transformation of America – one way or another:

Americans don’t want Iran to have the bomb. In 2015 the House and Senate both opposed the deal by 2 to 1, reflecting the opinion of the American public. So why are Obama and his team so eager to repeat their worst debacle?

* * * * * * * *

The Iran nuclear deal was never about the Middle East, which opposed the deal from the start. It was about America. The Iran deal was a part of the worldview that Obama lays out in his new memoir when he writes that he isn’t “yet ready to abandon the possibility of America.” That’s an interesting locution for a man who was elected president of America twice. What does it mean?

What Obama means is that he understands himself as the president of an America that has not yet been realized. The country he led, and leads, is not the historical American nation-state, but a theoretical place that exists “not just for the sake of future generations of Americans but for all of humankind. I’m convinced that the pandemic we’re currently living through is both a manifestation of and a mere interruption in the relentless march toward an interconnected world, one in which peoples and cultures can’t help but collide,” he writes. “In that world—of global supply chains, instantaneous capital transfers, social media, transnational terrorist networks, climate change, mass migration, and ever-increasing complexity—we will learn to live together, cooperate with one another, and recognize the dignity of others, or we will perish.”

The flawed Americans of the here and now may have elected Obama president twice, but they also cling to things like national borders, religion, and guns. Obama’s America is a place without borders. It’s a country in which Big Tech oligarchs, social media warriors, and powerful bureaucrats join hands to destroy those who don’t follow a media-enforced ruling-class consensus. The wealth of Obama’s America isn’t in the hands of families of any race, color, or creed; it belongs overwhelmingly to an oligarchy that partners with the Chinese Communist Party, which uses its massive pool of slave labor to produce cheap goods that destroy hundreds of thousands of small businesses and reduce millions of American workers to penury.

Obama understands that his prophetic vision of a new world is scary to lots of people who live in the contingent historical construction called America. And the Iran deal is a central component of that vision, or else his aides working through Joe Biden wouldn’t be so keen to make it stick. The point of empowering a regime that is anti-American at its core is to help bring the America that is to heel, so it can be transformed into the America that Obama envisions. If it brings chaos and war to the Middle East, why are the lives of Israelis and Saudis worth more than the lives of the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who died last time in the service of one man’s obsessive vision?

Flashback: $400 million sent to Iran as U.S. prisoners released, raising questions.

THAT’S GOOD, BECAUSE I’VE NEVER LIKED IT: Mercedes Has Made Stop-Start Technology Delightful to Use: The EQ Boost 48-volt starter-generator takes away all the frustrating lag that makes people hate stop-start.

CAM EDWARDS: Missouri’s Devastating Response To DOJ Attack On 2A Preservation Act (Video).

DEMOCRACY DIES IN RACIALISM: Washington Post promotes Karen Attiah to ‘race and culture’ columnist a year after she said white women were ‘lucky’ that black people are ‘just calling them Karens and not calling for revenge.’

WHEN HOLLYWOOD WENT NUTS: The Swimmer.

The film was not a success when it was released in 1968, but its narrative ideology and influence would be lasting. The 90-minute story, a mix of Narcissus and Odysseus set to a backdrop of class anxiety and cultural decline, is basically the same one that would take place over seven seasons of Mad Men; if you knew your Cheever, it was easy to imagine Ned sharing the commuter train into Manhattan with Don Draper. When the AMC series began, it even had Don and his family living in Ossining, NY, the same bedroom community Cheever called home when he died.

I was born the same week Cheever’s original story was published in the New Yorker, seven months after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a Catholic whose family had excelled in their imitation of high WASP style. Ten years or so later, a teacher at my Catholic grade school would screen a very expurgated 16mm print of the film to us during English class. I remember finding it baffling, even scary; if this was what being an adult involved, I was in no hurry to grow up.

The world of The Swimmer was recognizable to me years later, when Ang Lee made a movie out of Rick Moody’s 1994 novel The Ice Storm, set in a Connecticut commuter suburb less than a decade after The Swimmer. It told a similar story from a very Generation X perspective – the unsupervised kids growing up with Watergate and stagflation, their parents active soldiers on the front lines of the sexual revolution, hooking up and coming apart.

When we talk about the youthquake that unsettled and remade Hollywood in the late ’60s, Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider gets cited inevitably. But in hindsight it’s difficult to see that the story of Wyatt and Billy crossing America on their motorcycles was more influential than a flop like The Swimmer, made by a movie star, a post-studio mogul and a pair of middle class bohemians that helped fix the image and pass judgment on a whole social class that, just a decade earlier, was certain that it had taken the commanding heights of society.

As James Lileks recently wrote on advertising in the 1950s and ’60s, “Turns out that living in near-Utopia has the worst possible effect: you decide to strive for a different Utopia altogether. Come to think of it, though, the roots of it all are in the ads. They’re testaments to happiness, a goal, a mode of living. But it’s not happiness you get because you’ve earned it. It’s happiness that you deserve as an American. That’s where things started to go sideways. It’s a short hop to thinking you deserve it all because you exist.”

SELF-DEFENSE: You know how to shoot a gun. Do you know how to fight with one?

DON SURBER: Onward Social Justice Warriors. “What I liked about the story was the pair’s self-righteousness about the marketing campaign.”

WITH CHINA A GROWING THREAT, BIDEN’S US MILITARY STAYS EVER-VIGILANT: Biden Administration Will Offer Gender Transition Surgery Through VA Healthcare.

NO, THERE WASN’T AN LGBTQ ‘TERROR ATTACK’ ON SATURDAY: It Was Likely a Drunk Driving Gay Chorus Member. “But, according to local media, the suspect in the crash apparently ‘was wearing a Fort Lauderdale Gay Men’s Chorus t-shirt’ when taken into custody. To that extent, ‘Justin Knight, the chorus’ president,’ confirmed that ‘chorus members were the ones injured and that the driver was ‘part of the Chorus family’…Regardless of the truth, the left could not wait to blame this incident on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. #DeathSantis began trending on Twitter as soon as word got out.”

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Would taller people benefit from bicycles with larger wheels? Speaking as a taller person I would say yes, but perhaps not from the penny-farthing in the illustration.

THAT’S WHAT XI SAID: Cranky NY Times Lashes Out at Right, Claims Virus ‘Far More’ Trump’s Fault Than Xi.

‘YOU CAN LIVE ANYWHERE BUT COLORADO:’ Why Many Remote Job Postings Are Now Actively Excluding One State.

Here’s why.

“A new Colorado law… requires companies with even a few employees in the state to disclose the expected salary or pay range for each open role they advertise, including remote positions,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “The rule’s aim is to narrow gender wage gaps and provide greater pay transparency for employees.”

The result?

“To avoid having to disclose that information… some employers seeking remote workers nationwide are saying that those living in Colorado need not apply,” the Journal notes.

Unexpectedly.

IT’S A MARTIAL ART THAT’S GOOD FOR EVERYTHING EXCEPT FIGHTING: Study: Tai chi may improve depression, anxiety, sleep in stroke survivors.

FATHER’S DAY READING: A Destiny of Undying Greatness: Kiffin Rockwell and the Boys Who Remembered Lafayette and Techno Ranger: A Sam Harper Military Thriller.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Make Your Own Gravlox.

DROUGHT-STRICKEN COMMUNITIES PUSH BACK AGAINST DATA CENTERS: As cash-strapped cities welcome Big Tech to build hundreds of million-dollar data centers in their backyards, critics question the environmental cost.

“We are going to experience a drier and more water-scare future, and every drop of water counts,” said Newsha Ajami, director of urban water policy at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment. “It’s not just Amazon, Microsoft and Google causing these water footprints. But it’s you and me, searching and needing data that ends up in these data centers.”

Ajami said that water has been historically undervalued as a resource in part because it has been cheap for companies to purchase. While many industries have taken great leaps in reducing their electricity use and carbon footprints, they lag behind in water efficiency throughout their supply chains, she said.

“We often overlook the communities impacted, who are often disadvantaged,” she added. “If it was a wealthy community, maybe they wouldn’t allow the data centers to be built in their backyard.”

Curiously though, NBC News.com, the source of the above article, doesn’t recommend that their readers conserve their Internet use by not going to NBC News.com, nor are they planning to voluntarily shutter their server farms and studio locations anytime soon.

QUESTION ASKED: Why Has “Ivermectin” Become a Dirty Word?

On December 8, 2020, when most of America was consumed with what The Guardian called Donald Trump’s “desperate, mendacious, frenzied and sometimes farcical” attempt to remain president, the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held a hearing on the “Medical Response to Covid-19.” One of the witnesses, a pulmonologist named Dr. Pierre Kory, insisted he had great news.

“We have a solution to this crisis,” he said unequivocally. “There is a drug that is proving to have a miraculous impact.”

Kory was referring to an FDA-approved medicine called ivermectin. A genuine wonder drug in other realms, ivermectin has all but eliminated parasitic diseases like river blindness and elephantiasis, helping discoverer Satoshi Ōmura win the Nobel Prize in 2015. As far as its uses in the pandemic went, however, research was still scant. Could it really be a magic Covid-19 bullet?

Kory had been trying to make such a case, but complained to the Senate that public efforts had been stifled, because “every time we mention ivermectin, we get put in Facebook jail.” A Catch-22 seemed to be ensnaring science. With the world desperate for news about an unprecedented disaster, Silicon Valley had essentially decided to disallow discussion of a potential solution — disallow calls for more research and more study — because not enough research and study had been done. Once, people weren’t allowed to take drugs before they got FDA approval. Now, they can’t talk about them.

“I want to try to be respectful because I think the intention is correct,” Kory told the committee. “They want to cut down on misinformation, and many doctors are claiming X, Y, and Z work in this disease. The challenge is, you’re also silencing those of us who are expert, reasoned, researched, and extremely knowledgeable.”

Read the whole thing.