GOOD LUCK! Boeing’s Starliner secures atop Atlas V rocket for second uncrewed launch. “The commercial spacecraft will launch its second orbital flight test without a crew on July 30. During the mission, it will autonomously dock with the International Space Station to deliver approximately 440 pounds of cargo and crew supplies for NASA.”
Archive for 2021
July 18, 2021
THE DOWNSIDE OF PHAGES: Viral parasites fuel evolution of drug-resistant ‘super bugs.’
ROGER KIMBALL: Are you Having a Free Speech Emergency?
A good barometer of the hysteria was afforded on Bastille Day, when Casey Morrissey, who works at Greenlight Bookstores in Brooklyn, when he (or possibly she) opened a “white box” of promotional books sent round to various independent bookshops by the American Booksellers Association and discovered—horror of horrors—a book whose argument Morrissey disagreed with: Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.
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The great irony in all of this, as the American Conservative’s Rod Dreher noted in his column on the incident, is that all this hand-wringing and woke demands for censorship coincide with the ABA announcement of this year’s “Banned Books Week.” A press release, written in tones of great moral self-satisfaction, declares that the event (like the ABA itself, of course) “celebrates the freedom to read by encouraging readouts, bookstore displays, and community activities designed to raise awareness of the ongoing threat of censorship. . . . The 2021 theme [“Books Unite Us, Censorship Divides Us”] is intended to be inclusive, emphasizing the ways in which books and information bring people together, help individuals see themselves in the stories of others, and aid the development of empathy and understanding for people from other backgrounds.”
Unless, of course, your book happens to argue for something that hasn’t passed muster with this week’s star chamber in charge of deciding what opinions are OK and what must be ignored, censored, or oppressed. An accompanying graphic invites readers, should they encounter “a free speech emergency,” to contact someone from the American Booksellers for Free Expression to commiserate.
There is a “free speech emergency” in the United States circa 2021. The pretend-anguished cries of sexual exotics are only part of the story. Even as this tale of fake woe was circulating, Jen Psaki, press secretary to Joe Biden, titular president of the United States, informed the White House propaganda committee that “We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.” Why? So Facebook can exercise its power to keep Americans in line and on message when it comes to any subject the junta decides the plebs need to be at one about. And who decides what counts as “disinformation”? Shut up.
For the left, that’s what it ultimately comes down to:
Earlier: ABA: We’re Book Banners — But For The Left.
Related: Abigail Shrier: The Books Are Already Burning.
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why Is Young-Adult Fiction So Popular? “The rise of the young-adult novel is the most significant literary event of this century,” writes Tanner Greer, who analyzes the fantasies in The Hunger Games, Twilight, Harry Potter and other phenomenally successful young-adult (YA) novels.
This is the defining feature of the YA fictional society: powerful, inscrutable authorities with a mysterious and obsessive interest in the protagonist. Sometimes the hidden hands of this hidden world are benign. More often, they do evil. But the intentions behind these spying eyes do not much matter. Be they vile or kind, they inevitably create the kind of protagonist about whom twenty-first century America loves to read: a young hero defined by her frustration with, or outright hostility toward, every system of authority that she encounters. . . .
Yet if these novels speak to the sum of our anxieties, they are a poor guide to escaping them. In the world of YA speculative fiction, those who possess such power cannot be trusted. Even worse than possessing power is to seek it: our fables teach that to desire responsibility is to be corrupted by it. They depict greatness as a thing to be selected, not striven, for. This fantasy is well fit for an elite class whose standing is decided by admissions boards, but a poor guide for an elite class tasked with actually leading our communities.
Of course, it’s a great guide for millennials marching in pointless protests.
ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: What Makes Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” Great?
FOLLOW THE REAL SCIENCE: The Question Everything Lockdown Summit. Toby Young of Lockdown Skeptics and others lay out the case against lockdowns at a conference in London.
KEVIN WILLIAMSON: Welcome Back, Carter. “President Biden probably has fond memories of the 1970s. I’ll bet it was a fun time to be a young senator. But the rest of us cannot afford to live in the past. One Carter administration was enough.”
NEW DON’T TREAD ON ME/ GADSDEN T-SHIRTS: No_System, a Helen’s Page advertiser now has a new Gadsden T-shirt out. You can also still get the Gadsden earrings which were out of stock for a while.
HOW’S THAT WELCOME WAGON PROGRAM COMING ALONG? Visualizing All the Vacant Office Space in San Francisco.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Art prof claims enforcing rules at public schools is racist.
THE SQUAD HARDEST HIT: Biden on Cuba: Communism is ‘a failed system.’
MICHAEL BARONE: Joe Biden’s Big Lie.
Did you know that black people are not going to be allowed to vote in America anymore? At least in states controlled by Republicans. Sounds a bit unlikely, but that’s a conclusion you might have come to if you took seriously what President Joe Biden was saying in Philadelphia Tuesday.
Biden decried Republicans’ proposed changes in election laws as “the 21st-century Jim Crow assault” that tries “to suppress and subvert the right to vote in fair and free elections, an assault on democracy.”
This is, to be polite, unhinged nonsense.
Biden is old enough to remember what real Jim Crow voter suppression was like. It meant zero black people voting in places such as Mississippi. It meant threats and violence against black people who tried to register to vote. It meant the unfair application of literacy tests and poll taxes.
Requiring voters to present picture ID is nothing like this: Large majorities think it’s reasonable. Measures such as reducing the number of pre-election voting days in Georgia (there are zero in Biden’s Delaware) or ending pandemic-inspired measures such as drive-thru voting in Harris County, Texas, are not the same. Not even close.
Early in his speech, Biden denounced “the Big Lie,” a reference to Donald Trump’s claims that he actually won the 2020 election. But Biden’s Jim Crow charge is an even clearer instance of the Big Lie — and a more dangerous one since it’s unlikely to be fact-checked by most media. If you want people to condemn a Big Lie, don’t tell one yourself.
In his criticism of Trump, Biden invoked a long-standing norm of American politics. “In America, if you lose, you accept the results. You follow the Constitution. You try again. You don’t call the facts ‘fake’ and then try to bring down the American experiment just because you’re unhappy.”
He spoke these words, apparently unaware that they could be applied to him and his own party.
To be fair, Biden’s unaware of most everything these days. And the people who write his speeches for him don’t care.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. The Ruling Class Poses the Very Authoritarian Dangers It Claimed Trump Did.
They don’t mind authoritarian dangers, so long as they’re the authority.
QUESTION ASKED: Is Black Rifle Coffee About to Throw Its Customer Base Under the Bus for Fun and Profit? “Just as Black Rifle Coffee is on the cusp of changing its financial structure, it is also arriving at a philosophical decision point. Will it stay conservative and cater to the people that made it successful? Will it go ‘woke?’ Will it complete the transition from a cause to a grift? Unfortunately, the signs aren’t all that great.”
July 17, 2021
OPEN THREAD: Come cheer up my lads, ’tis to glory we blog.