THE NEW SPACE RACE: China rolls out out new Long March 7A for second launch attempt.
Archive for 2021
March 9, 2021
OUTRAGE IS RESERVED FOR THINGS REPUBLICANS DO: Joe Biden can’t handle a press conference – where is the outrage?
ALSO, STAY OFF YOUR PHONE: Mix of treatments could be way to restore hand function in thumb-base osteoarthritis.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Bari Weiss in City Journal on The Miseducation of America’s Elites:
When I began working on this story, I didn’t feel that much sympathy for these parents. Some 18 million public school children have not set foot in a school in the past year. A study released in early December by McKinsey and Co. found that virtual learning hurt all students, but students of color the most: remote school set them back by three to five months in math, for example. Such numbers do not begin to capture the crippling effects, including suicidal ideation, that this past year has had on what experts are already calling a lost generation.
The parents in this story are not parents with no other options. Most have the capital—social and literal—to pull their kids out and hire private tutors. That they weren’t speaking out seemed to me cowardly, or worse.
The cynical answer for their silence is two words: Ivy League. “There are definitively rumors that the school has like, say, three picks for Duke and that if you stand up against this your kid will get blackballed,” says one mother.
Another explanation is groupthink and social pressure. “Sometimes the smartest people are the easiest ones to fool,” says a father who recently moved his son from one school to another that he judges to be marginally better. “If you made a decision to go on the board of Dalton having espoused all these leftist views forever and you want your kid to get into Harvard, you are not going to stand up and say, ‘wait a second, guys.’ You’re just not going to do it. Most people want to be members of the club.”
I think it’s true that many people would rather violate their stated principles than be iced out of their social network. But this is a situation that goes beyond getting shunted to a bad table at the Robin Hood gala. To resist this ideology is to go against the entire institutional world.
It’s not just Dalton, a school that has committed to being “visibly, vocally and structurally antiracist.” Bain & Company is tweeting about “Womxn’s History Month.” The Cartoon Network is imploring children to “see color.” Coca-Cola employees were recently instructed to “be less white.” You cannot buy or sell the newly problematic Dr. Seuss titles on eBay. This ideology isn’t speaking truth to power. It is the power.
Most alarmingly, the ideology is increasingly prevalent at the local public school. The incoming New York City schools chancellor is a vocal proponent of critical race theory. In Burbank, the school district just told middle- and high school teachers to stop teaching To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men. The Sacramento school district is promoting racial segregation by way of “racial affinity groups,” where students can “cultivate racial solidarity and compassion and support each other in sitting with the discomfort, confusion, and numbness that often accompany white racial awakening.” The San Diego school district recently held a training in which white teachers were told that they “spirit murder” black children.
“I don’t mean to get emotional, I just feel helpless,” said one mother through tears. “I look at the public school and I am equally mortified. I can’t believe what they are doing to everybody. I’m too afraid. I’m too afraid to speak too loudly. I feel cowardly. I just make little waves.” Another tells me: “It’s fear of retribution. Would it cause our daughter to be ostracized? Would it cause people to ostracize us? It already has.”
Read the whole thing, which reads like battlefield prep for the 21st century American equivalent of the Soviet revolution. It’s quite something to think back on Allan Bloom’s 1987 Cri De Coeur, The Closing of the American Mind, as “the good old days.”
THE MORE A SUSPECT DENIES GUILT, THE MORE GUILTY HE IS: Wisdom from Ibram Kendi, an utter charlatan whose books are now required reading in schools across the country.
PROTESTING IN THE AGE OF MASS SURVEILLANCE.
BARI WEISS: The Miseducation of America’s Elites. Affluent parents, terrified of running afoul of the new orthodoxy in their children’s private schools, organize in secret.
One private school parent, born in a Communist nation, tells me: “I came to this country escaping the very same fear of retaliation that now my own child feels.” Another joked: “We need to feed our families. Oh, and pay $50,000 a year to have our children get indoctrinated.” A teacher in New York City put it most concisely: “To speak against this is to put all of your moral capital at risk.”
Home schooling looks better and better.
BIDEN’S RETURN TO NORMALCY: Report Suggests Never-Ending Presence of National Guard Troops at the U.S. Capitol.
NEITHER HOT NOR COLD: 2021 Mercedes-Benz EQA250 Is a Half-Hearted EV. “In fact, everything that Mercedes-Benz has achieved with the MFA platform over the past decade—precision, agility, lightness—is lost in the EV conversion.”
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Andrew Cuomo Was Paid $65 For Every Book He Sold.
CLASS ACT: Queen Elizabeth II Responds to Meghan Markle’s Racism Accusations. “The whole family is saddened to learn the full extent of how challenging the last few years have been for Harry and Meghan.”
RELATED: Cancel Culture Comes for Piers Morgan. “British commentator Piers Morgan stepped down from Good Morning Britain after backlash due to his doubting Meghan Markle’s accusations.”
No dissent, please, we’re British.
LENIN SAW THE POWER OF MOVIES EARLY: Capital Research Center’s Ken Braun is up with Part One of a four-part series on Hollywood and the Left. Ever hear of Jeffrey Skoll? Me, neither until I read Braun’s piece. Skoll is a big player in moving Hollywood even further to the Left.
I’M EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: Review: Springfield Armory Ronin Operator 10 mm Pistol.
UPDATE: Link was bad before. Fixed now. Sorry!
DON’T TRUST CHINA. CHINA IS ASSHOLE: China Carries Out Giant Microsoft Hack. “This is a huge problem, because Exchange is only used by just about every big business in America, not to mention numerous government agencies. It dominates the market so thoroughly that it’s hard to find market share reports on its competitors.”
ROGER KIMBALL: Justice for Derek Chauvin.
By the way, I say that FBI report ‘revealed’ this extenuating evidence, but it was evidence that the prosecution withheld from public scrutiny until the end of October 2020, by which time Minneapolis and many other cities across the country had been torched by Black Lives Matter rioters demanding ‘justice’ for George Floyd.
Here’s something else. Although Chauvin’s restraint looks brutal, it was actually part of the standard Minneapolis police protocol for dealing with persons exhibiting ‘excited delirium,’ a dangerous, often fatal, condition brought about by too much fentanyl with one’s afternoon tea. According to the medical examiner, Chauvin did not appear to have obstructed Floyd’s airway — Floyd would not have been able to speak if he had — and Floyd did not die from strangulation. Bottom line, George Floyd died from the effects of a self-administered drug overdose, effects that might have been exacerbated by his interactions with the police, i.e., his exertions in resisting arrest. For their part, the police were trying to help Floyd. It was they who called the ambulance because they recognized that Floyd was in extremis.
That’s not what we have been told, is it? The defense has received permission to air the trial publicly. Presumably, all this evidence will be presented. How would you like to be a juror at that trial? How easy will it be to find impartial jurors in Minneapolis, where the city council, in the wake of Floyd’s death, actually voted to abolish its police department? If you were a juror, would you dare to return a ‘not guilty’ verdict?
Not that I think it is likely to come to that. As Powerline’s Scott Johnson reports, ‘At the behest of the mob, Gov. Walz lifted responsibility for the prosecution from the office of the Hennepin County attorney and assigned it to Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison.’ Take a moment to look up Keith Ellison. Savor his connections to the Nation of Islam and other radical groups. Then note that he has more than 130 lawyers in his employ. For the trial of Derek Chauvin, Johnson observes, Ellison has also tapped four prominent outside attorneys, who have offered their services pro bono.
On his side, Derek Chauvin has a local criminal defense lawyer named Eric Nelson. That appears to be it. As Johnson drily observes, ‘If you’re looking for Atticus Finch in the case, Nelson will have to serve.’
So what will happen? Minneapolis is endeavoring to prepare for any eventuality. The area around the courthouse is beginning to look like Nancy Pelosi’s Capitol, surrounded by metal fencing, concrete barriers, and razor wire. The local jailhouse has been fortified and heightened security measures are being put in place around the city.
If you’d like to see photos of yesterday’s rally at a heavily boarded up Minneapolis Government Center plaza, and the far-left messages spray-painted on those boards, James Lileks has you covered.
AS FAR AS I CAN TELL, ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORDS HAVE BEEN PRETTY DISAPPOINTING IN GENERAL: Why Electronic Health Records Haven’t Helped U.S. With Vaccinations.
NO ESCAPISM COMES TO TCM: Turner Classic Movies Surrenders to the Woke Vampires.
That the announcement is typical progressive drivel becomes obvious in the first sentence. Because “the beloved classics” clearly “have stood the test of time,” the phrase “in several ways” signifies nothing. Neither does “when viewed by contemporary standards,” nor the utterly insipid “certain aspects of these films can be troubling.” Hey, welcome to art, snowflakes. The sentence ends with the ultimate vague yet loaded word, “problematic.”
The second sentence is even more offensive to TCM viewers. The last thing they need is liberal movie hosts explaining the “cultural context” and “refram[ing]” these films to “keep their legacy alive.” They tune into TCM instead of modern cable dreck precisely to escape politically correct propaganda and spend a couple of hours with a story, time, and place they can appreciate, and as a break from their day-to-day labors. They don’t need to be told that slavery was bad to enjoy Gone with the Wind, or that kidnapping women is an improper way to provide Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. And they just might enjoy how the lumberjack brothers try to gently romance their abductees with song and dance until the women reciprocate, without feminists blaming Stockholm Syndrome.
If you care about classic films and the golden era of Hollywood (and you should), buy physical media.
HMM: Complement inhibition reverses mental losses in preclinical traumatic brain injury models. “Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a major cause of disability and a risk factor for early-onset dementia. The injury is characterized by a physical insult followed acutely by complement driven neuroinflammation. Complement, a part of the innate immune system that functions both in the brain and throughout the body, enhances the body’s ability to fight pathogens, promote inflammation and clear damaged cells. Complement plays a role in the brain, regardless of infection or injury, as it influences brain development and synapse formation. . . . Researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC), the Ralph H. Johnson VA Medical Center and elsewhere have reported a link between the complement system and the chronic phase of TBI. Their results, published online on Jan. 12 in the Journal of Neuroscience, showed that inhibition of complement at two months after TBI disrupts neurodegeneration and improves cognitive function. . . . Inhibiting complement interrupted the decline in brain cell function and reversed mental losses on tasks that evaluate spatial learning and memory, even when delivery of the inhibitor was delayed until two months after the injury.”
I wonder if doing it closer to the injury would do more good.