Archive for 2021
January 26, 2021
A LACK OF COMPREHENSION: “I realize that in the Manichaean environment of modern politics, everybody’s somebody’s fascist or communist. Surely, however, people who make a point of commenting on politics would have a basic grasp of the viewpoints of those they consider their ideological foes, right? Not so fast.”
To be fair, in 2021, it’s increasingly difficult to distinguish satire from reality.
MINDS WANDER: Study reveals what the brain does during daydreams.
THE MOST IMPORTANT PIECE YOU MAY EVER READ ABOUT HOW MAINSTREAM MEDIA GOT SCREWED UP: Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi continue to be the last few remaining honest (read “classical”) liberals left. Taibbi’s piece today, titled “The Echo Chamber Era” outlines what conservative and libertarian First Amendment lawyers have said for years, only to be ignored, ridiculed, and (in my case) occasionally blacklisted.
“Media critics who work in the corporate press, like Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post, seem determined to look everywhere but inward for solutions. The dominant legend in our business is that if Republicans believe in fairy tales like Q and “Stop the Steal,” the traditional press can do nothing but stand its ground. Sullivan’s reaction to at-times “embarrassing” Inauguration Day coverage was an injunction to reporters to resist the temptation to try to appear more balanced by showing “toughness” with regard to the incoming Biden regime. If anything, Sullivan said, the press should stand even taller in its opposition to red-state lie merchants like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, “without fearing that they’d be called partisan.”
The coverage of Biden’s inauguration was […] a monument to groveling sycophancy. John Heileman at MSNBC compared Biden’s speech to Abe Lincoln’s second inaugural, and suggested that the sight of “the Clintons, the Bushes, and the Obamas” gathered for the event was like “the Marvel superheroes all back in one place” (this was not the first post-election Avengers comparison to be heard on cable). Rachel Maddow talked about going through “half a box of Kleenex” as she watched the proceedings. Chris Wallace on Fox said Biden’s lumbering speech was “the best inaugural address I ever heard,” John Kennedy’s “Ask Not” speech included. The joyful tone was set the night before by CNN’s David Challen, who said lights along the Washington Mall were like “extensions of Joe Biden’s arms embracing America.”
As the Good Professor says: “Read the whole thing.”™
THINK THE NATIONAL DEBT IS BAD? JUST WAIT: Hans Bader at Liberty Unyielding sees soaring deficits and debt as far as the eye can see and beyond. Plus inflation. And recession. Maybe worse. Other than that, Mr. President, what’s in your plans for us?
THOSE 70K KEYSTONE JOBS BIDEN KILLED WERE JUST THE START: The Lid’s Jeff Dunetz says a new study from the American Petroleum Institute (API) expects millions to be lost.
I LOVE ALL THE OUTRAGE FROM PEOPLE WHO DON’T REALIZE THAT’S HE’S JUST REPRISING MAXINE WATERS’ COMMENTS ON TRUMP’S CABINET:
TOTALITARIANISM AND REPRESSION OF SPEECH AND ASSEMBLY: When They Come For You.
(There appears to be a fundraiser for legal expenses, but I have not had a chance to investigate it. I shouldn’t even have taken time to write this post. If anyone knows and can vouch for it, let me know. We’ve had fraudulent fundraisers pop up in the past.)
HE HAS TO WORK BOTH SIDES OF HIS MOUTH: So no wonder Dr. Anthony Fauci is the highest-paid federal employee. Open The Books strikes again.
WATERGATE? RUSSIAGATE? NOW PAGERGATE? Austin, Texas, is likely not the only jurisdiction in America in which taxpayers are still paying for pagers that are almost never used. If you aren’t following the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), you should be, even if you don’t live in the Lone Star State. It may be liberty’s last safehouse.
INTERNET NERDS VS. WALL STREET SUITS: A bunch of Redditors crush a short. “We can stay retarded for longer than they can stay solvent!”
NOW CHINA SAYS CHRISTIANS ARE SPREADING COVID: Don’t miss my latest PJ Media Culture column, this one on how China is a——, I mean, imitating Nero.
I CAN’T GIVE IT AWAY ON SEVENTH AVENUE: Bob McManus: The push to decriminalize ‘streetwalking’ follows a deadly run of NYC ‘reforms’.
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: Biden Reportedly ‘Furious’ with Newsom Over Loosening Lockdown.
Insanity Wrap needs to know: Is the COVID science is so settled, why is Gavin Newsom loosening his state’s draconian lockdown restrictions?
Answer: Politics.
Before we get to the sordid details, a quick preview of today’s Wrap.
- Asking for the data is racist
- Democrats stealing Harriet Tubman’s anti-Democrat fever
- Lena and Hunter sittin’ in a tree?
Bonus Sanity: An answer to the question of which POTUS is the real authoritarian.
And so much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
LETTING THE CHINESE GET INVOLVED WITH OUR GRID, AS BIDEN HAS JUST DONE, PROBABLY WON’T HELP: The Still-Untold Story of Electric Grid Insecurity.
WHEN WE DON’T KNOW THINGS ABOUT GOVERNMENT AND BUREAUCRATS, IT’S USUALLY BECAUSE THEY DON’T WANT US TO KNOW THEM, BECAUSE THEY REFLECT BADLY ON THEM: Why Don’t We Know How Many Vaccine Doses Are Being Thrown Away?
IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA: Canadian casino mogul, actress wife pose as motel workers to cut COVID-19 vaccine line.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: The Washington Post Tried To Memory-Hole Kamala Harris’ Bad Joke About Inmates Begging for Food and Water. “At a time when legacy publications are increasingly seen as playing for one political ‘team’ or the other, this type of editorial decision will not do anything to fix that perception.”
That’s because it’s not just a perception.
TRUMP’S LEGACY: Emirati builds bridges of peace through business.
Al-Shirawi spoke to the importance of being a propagator of peace. He believes that the signing of the Abraham Accords is just the first step, and now it is the people’s turn to build the relationships and create a “new band of brothers.” He wants to turn talk into action through successful business partnerships, and he believes that others will follow suit.
When asked about specific areas of cooperation, Al-Sharawi said he is looking forward to the environmental sphere and exploring Israel’s success in water filtration technology. Both the UAE and Israel face the problem of water scarcity and filtration, and while the technology is emerging in Dubai and other parts of the UAE, businesses, and industry can benefit from the Israeli mastery of this technology.
He also discussed cooperation at the cultural level, saying that it is more than just signing contracts and memorandums of understanding (MOUs), but a beautiful display of learning and unity between Emirati and Israeli communities. He noted the importance of places such as the Abrahamic Family House, an interfaith center that serves as a beacon of coexistence, peace, and goodwill. Places like this emphasize the familial bond between peoples that Al-Shirawi believes has existed for a long time.
Read the whole thing.
TRUMP AND THE FAILURE OF THE EXPERT CLASS: They were right about his character, but his defects were obvious to almost everyone. They were wrong about virtually all else.
The great theme of the Trump years, the one historians will note a century from now, was the failure of America’s expert class. The people who were supposed to know what they were talking about, didn’t.
The failure began with the country’s top consultants and pollsters. Candidate Trump did almost everything lavishly paid political consultants would have told him, and did tell him, not to do—and he won. The most respected pollsters, meanwhile, predicted a landslide for Hillary Clinton. America’s best and brightest political adepts turned out to know very little about the elections they claim to understand.
Also during the 2016 campaign, an assemblage of top-tier academics, intellectuals and journalists warned that Mr. Trump’s candidacy signified a fascist threat. Timothy Snyder, a historian of Nazism at Yale, was among the most strident of these prophets. “Be calm when the unthinkable arrives,” he warned in a Facebook post shortly after the election. “When the terrorist attack comes, remember that all authorities at all times either await or plan such events in order to consolidate power. Think of the Reichstag fire.” Many experts stuck with the fascism theme after Mr. Trump’s election and throughout his presidency. That these cultured authorities couldn’t tell the difference between a populist protest against elite contempt and a coup carried out by powerful ideologues will go down as one of the great fiascoes of American intellectual history.
The fascism charge was only the most acute form of the claim that Mr. Trump was carrying out an “assault on democracy.” Some semantic clarification is in order here. When intellectuals and journalists of the left use the word “democracy,” they typically are not referring to elections and decision-making by popularly elected officials. For the left, “democracy” is another word for progressive policy aims, especially the widening of special political rights and welfare-state provisions to new constituencies. By that definition any Republican president is carrying out an “assault on democracy.” . . .
America’s foreign-policy elite didn’t perform appreciably better. For decades, they had insisted that peace between Israel and the Arab world was impossible without a long-term solution to the Israel-Palestinian problem. It was an axiom, no longer up for debate. Mr. Trump followed through on a promise long made but not kept by the U.S. government to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Foreign-policy experts the world over predicted hellish payback from the Arab world, but the recognition went forward, the U.S. Embassy moved, and the payback consisted of a day’s worth of inconsequential protests.
Meanwhile the administration pressed ahead with a diplomatic push to strike commercial and diplomatic deals between Israel and Arab states. The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco announced they would establish formal relations with Israel, and Saudi Arabia may do the same. The foreign-policy clerisy, having been wrong about the central question of global diplomacy for the past four decades, predictably ignored these achievements.
Then there are the public-health experts. We are still in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, so it is difficult to write about it with the perspective it demands. Yet political talking points aside, this much is apparent: No nation—or anyhow no nation that values individual liberty and isn’t an island—has managed even to slow the spread of Covid-19 without causing economic ruin and attendant disorder. . . .
The most regrettable part of this class failure is that, with rare exceptions, the experts themselves acknowledge no error. Nothing about the Trump years has occasioned soul-searching or self-criticism on their part. But today’s experts will eventually retire and pass from the scene. A newer, fresher generation of pollsters, academics, think-tank scholars and journalists will care more about the truth than they do about aligning with today’s consensus. They will feel no need to disguise their ignorance by signaling hatred of Donald Trump. And they will not fail to note that their most accomplished and revered forerunners were, at crucial moments, idiots.
Related: The Suicide of Expertise.