DEVELOPING: Colin Powell is Still Not a Republican.
Since the days of Nixon, the easiest to become a regular guest on network and cable news is to portray yourself as a prominent Republican who never votes for Republicans.
Archive for 2021
January 10, 2021
XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT: Chinese Media Told to Use Capitol Riot to Attack Democracy.
A reporter from Chinese state media shared with me the guidelines she received on how to report the Capitol riot.
She was told to focus on how the United States’ global reputation would be damaged and deteriorated in her article, mentioning how world leaders were shocked by this insurrection and were concerned about their alliance with the United States. She was also asked to write on how democracy could be hijacked by a group of uneducated people and how democracy could only be realized when the population is highly educated—and that China’s current education level is not suitable for democracy.
In the morning of Jan. 7, a reporter from Phoenix Media told me that an article published by her team about how social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube had all put restrictions on President Donald Trump’s accounts had spawned a series of online discussions about how Western countries such as the United States “don’t even have freedom of speech.”
These discussions were led by China’s Foreign Ministry and were fueled by a number of pro-Chinese Communist Party bloggers. A large number of Chinese netizens have long been under the impression—picking up cues from right-wing media elsewhere—that there is no real freedom of speech in Western countries. They accuse the Western world of holding double standards when criticizing the Chinese government for blocking website content, monitoring internet access, banning dissent and disagreement, and deleting social media accounts.
The reporter expressed concerns about how people interpreted her article and how that would make it even harder to start any discussion about freedom of speech and human rights in China. She had recently interviewed a few #MeToo victims and felt saddened seeing feminists fighting in an environment where the government’s control over the internet, media, and individual bloggers is tighter than it has been in the past decade—and where patriarchy is resurgent. The violence at the Capitol had aided the Chinese government, she said, by giving it another justification for arguing that control of speech is necessary.
Silicon Valley agrees, sadly. As Rod Dreher warned in November China’s “social credit system” was coming to America. The Capitol Hill riot was all the pretext Big Tech needed.
SMOOTH IS FAST AND SLOW IS SMOOTH: How to Train for Faster Shooting.
MEH. I WAS THERE WHEN RALPH MERKLE INVENTED THE “MERKLE CLOUD,” CAPABLE OF SEQUESTERING ENOUGH CARBON TO PLUNGE THE WORLD INTO AN ICE AGE: Carbon Engineering’s Tech Will Suck Carbon From the Sky.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
Shot:
As Roger Kimball writes on The ‘Virtue’ of the New Totalitarians:
The double standard of outrage has been detailed by many commentators. It takes nothing away from the horror of the mob descending on the Capitol this week to point out that Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and their media mouthpieces were outrage deficient when another mob assaulted the Supreme Court during the Bret Kavanaugh hearings, when Antifa and Black Lives Matter protesters torched cities across the country this summer, or, indeed, when there were riots in Washington following Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017.
As the commentator Howie Carr put it, “some riots are more equal than others.” Like Carr, I condemn what happened at the Capitol last week. But I also “wonder where all this outrage was among the chattering classes when the orgy of rioting, looting, arson and murder was gripping the nation last summer.” (As usual, The Babylon Bee deployed some illuminating satire, writing that “Antifa accuses Trump supporters of cultural appropriation.”)
And as a result, welcome to the aftermath of what Rod Dreher dubs The Left’s Reichstag Fire. “Yesterday, I predicted that the Left and the liberal Establishment would use the failed Beer Belly Putsch as an opportunity to begin to implement the rudiments of a social credit system, and to otherwise marginalize and suppress right-of-center discourse and people. Well, here we go.”
Clarice Feldman dubs what followed The Night of the Tech Long Knives.
FASTER, PLEASE: Scientists develop new gene therapy strategy to delay aging.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
● Shot: Little evidence that protests spread coronavirus in US.
—Headline, AP, July 1st, 2020.
● Chaser: Possible virus exposure for lawmakers sheltering during riot.
—Headline, AP, today.
HMM: Biden to release all available COVID-19 vaccine doses later this month.. “When he takes office later this month, President-elect Joe Biden will move to release every available dose of the coronavirus vaccine, breaking with the Trump administration’s policies, a transition team spokesman said Friday. Rather than holding back enough vaccine to provide a recommended second dose for those who receive an initial dose — as the current administration has done — Biden will instead release ‘available doses immediately.'”
This isn’t crazy — there’a an argument that giving twice as many people a shot that will provide 85% immunity is better than giving half as many people a shot that will provide better than 95% immunity — but it has the potential to be a debacle if it leads to a lot of people never getting a second shot, and thus not developing long-term immunity. As the article notes, the FDA just considered and rejected the idea of a single shot for this reason. Quoth the FDA:
Using a single dose regimen and/or administering less than the dose studied in the clinical trials without understanding the nature of the depth and duration of protection that it provides is concerning, as there is some indication that the depth of the immune response is associated with the duration of protection provided. If people do not truly know how protective a vaccine is, there is the potential for harm because they may assume that they are fully protected when they are not, and accordingly, alter their behavior to take unnecessary risks.
We know that some of these discussions about changing the dosing schedule or dose are based on a belief that changing the dose or dosing schedule can help get more vaccine to the public faster. However, making such changes that are not supported by adequate scientific evidence may ultimately be counterproductive to public health.
As a rush for herd immunity, as I say, it’s not crazy. But it’s a risky scheme, and I wonder if the older patients — the very ones who need the most immunity — will be less likely to follow up in time.
ONE OF THE LAST OF WWII’S “SPITFIRE WOMEN” DIES AT 103: “[W]e had a job to do [and] we just got on and did it.”
QUESTION ASKED: Why Won’t Mitch McConnell Adjourn The Senate Until January 21st? “It would shut down the 2nd impeachment travesty and allow a ‘cooling off period’ until the Inauguration. If people were sincere about ‘healing’ or ‘transition integrity,’ Congress would go home. There would be nothing to attack on Capitol Hill. When Biden and the Democrats took over, they could do what they wanted.”
What I particularly loved about Kathy’s film essays was the occasional glimpses she gave us of her own life. One should not take it all as gospel: She had a carefully constructed persona as an agoraphobic misanthrope who never left the flat. Whereas, as Mark Steyn cruisers who had the good fortune to be at her dinner table will attest, in real life she was gregarious and occasionally (as I told her a couple of weeks back somewhat to her horror) verging on bubbly. I had the pleasure a few years ago of introducing her to half the Canadian cabinet over pizza at the Prime Minister’s house. Reading about it afterwards, the highly-strung leftie bloggers were horrified at the thought of the hated Shaidle piercing the holy sanctum of 24 Sussex Drive like a one-woman trial run for the mob’s storming of the US Capitol. But the various ministers of the Crown seemed to enjoy the opportunity to shoot the breeze with her — as we all did.
So here are a few vignettes, as revealed in her movie columns, of Kathy’s life. She was born in Hamilton, Ontario, and, although she got out as fast as she could, she will, after many decades away, be going home:
Read the whole thing.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Universities refuse to cancel rents for students locked out of campus housing under COVID protocol.
SO MUCH FOR COOLER HEADS PREVAILING:
Then there is the matter of Twitter banning the President’s Twitter account. The consequences of that action, as well as Google and Apple taking steps to ban Parler, will reach far and beyond the events at the Capitol. What those moves certainly won’t do is lead to any form of depolarization. These tech platforms are not going to be able to disappear 70 million people from the internet. Those people will simply be chased further underground where they will develop more mistrust that corporate media and Big Tech are in fact their enemy. Neither the media or Big Tech will do much to earn the trust of those people back.
Trump will slink away and out of power, just as he did at the conclusion of his speech on Wednesday. That much is known. However if Joe Biden and the media have any intent on ‘healing’ and ‘unifying’ post-Trump and Trumpism, they haven’t done much to show it. Maybe this is because it’s in the best interest of the Biden agenda, and the revenue of Big Tech, and the audience retention of the corporate media to keep us as we are — a nation divided.
When Obama was elected, the DNC-MSM loved cranking out pieces headlined, “We Are All Socialists Now,” “The Death of Conservatism,” and “James Carville Angles For ’40 More Years,'” as NPR gushed about Carville’s then-latest book in May of 2009. It was part wish fulfillment, and part propping up their nervous core readers — “We don’t have to worry about those guys anymore.” And then the Tea Party coalesced, and by mid-2016, NPR was reduced to running this headline: The Democratic Party Got Crushed During The Obama Presidency. Here’s Why.
In 2021, Democrats don’t care how much they’re angering the right, partly because of their hatred of Trump and his “Deplorables,” as Hillary would say, and partly because, as Stephen Miller writes above, it suits their business model. Once again, this could be a very big mistake on their part.
SYRACUSE HAS BEEN A SERIOUS EMBARRASSMENT: Free speech advocate blasts Syracuse University’s ‘PC campus culture.’
PAUL BEDARD: Final Trump Report Card: Lasting accomplishments fouled by his personality.
The problem is, without his personality, could he have withstood the media pressure to win in 2016, and not fold afterward? Mitt Romney, say, certainly lacks the strength to withstand the pressure, and for that matter to win at all.
DISPATCHES FROM FORBES’ ‘CHIEF CONTENT OFFICER AND EDITOR:’
Let it be known to the business world: Hire any of Trump’s fellow fabulists above, and Forbes will assume that everything your company or firm talks about is a lie. We’re going to scrutinize, double-check, investigate with the same skepticism we’d approach a Trump tweet. Want to ensure the world’s biggest business media brand approaches you as a potential funnel of disinformation? Then hire away.
This isn’t cancel culture, which is a societal blight. (There’s surely a nice living for each of these press secretaries on the true-believer circuit.) Nor is this politically motivated, as Forbes’ pro-entrepreneur, pro-growth worldview has generally placed it in the right-of-center camp over the past century — this standard needs to apply to liars from either party. It’s just a realization that, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, in a thriving democracy, everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts. Our national reset starts there.
So it’s more of a list. A list written in black ink. Call it something like that. Time to cut up the lengthy genre of Hollywood movies that are against such a list into guitar picks.
FACTS WIN OUT: Jonathan Leaf reviews Peter Wood’s “learned and thoughtful demolition of the 1619 Project.”
EH, THEY’LL FOLD JUST LIKE THEY DID FOR THE SPEAKER ELECTION: As Dems Retake Government, Standoff With Party’s Left Flank Looms.
This is the Oligarchs’ Congress. The oligarchs will get what they want, the left flank will get some symbolic woke crumbs.
THEY REALLY KNOW HOW TO BUILD THE MEMORY HOLE AT CNN:
Flashbacks:
● ‘Happy Anniversary’ Al Sharpton: 25 Years Since He Incited Freddy’s Massacre.
● Massacre at Freddy’s In Harlem: Fire Fueled by Anti-Semitism Kills 8.
● “Sharpton paid to keep quiet about lack of black TV programming: suit.”
TO BE FAIR, THEY DON’T SEE THAT AS THEIR JOB: ANALYSIS: Journos Incapable of Treating Democrats Like Politicians.
TO BE FAIR, MAY OF 2020 SEEMS LIKE IT WAS MANY YEARS AGO: Remember when BLM rioters were burning down cities and Colin Kaepernick literally called for more violence? And then, instead of banning him, @Jack gave him $3M?
PLANET OF COPS: An 18-Year-Old Saw Her Mom, Aunt, And Uncle In DC In A Video — So She Named Them.
As Brooklyn College’s Freddie deBoer wrote in his classic “Planet of Cops” essay in 2017, “The woke world is a world of snitches, informants, rats. Go to any space concerned with social justice and what will you find? Endless surveillance. Everybody is to be judged. Everyone is under suspicion. Everything you say is to be scoured, picked over, analyzed for any possible offense. Everyone’s a detective in the Division of Problematics, and they walk the beat 24/7. You search and search for someone Bad doing Bad Things, finding ways to indict writers and artists and ordinary people for something, anything. That movie that got popular? Give me a few hours and 800 words. I’ll get you your indictments. That’s what liberalism is, now — the search for baddies doing bad things, like little offense archaeologists, digging deeper and deeper to find out who’s Good and who’s Bad. I wonder why people run away from establishment progressivism in droves.”
Or to put it another way:
