Archive for 2021
June 26, 2021
One of the memorable details in Billion Dollar Loser, a new account of the rise and fall of the office-sharing company WeWork and its founder Adam Neumann is a list of accoutrements Neumann’s family required for a company campout in 2018. The list includes three air conditioners, two fridges, a signature Range Rover and a Mercedes V-Class, three dinosaur-themed buggies, edamame packets, “4 Aesop Gardenia Shampoo,” and two bartenders. The document is so astonishing in its extravagance that any commentary would detract, and author Reeves Wiedeman simply prints it on four whole pages of his book.
The last part of the list is devoted to alcohol. The family was to be provided with two bottles of Highland Park whisky (thirty years old, at about $1,000 each), among other spirits, and also wine, twenty-four bottles of red and twenty-four of white—all of which, a reader of Jewish sensibilities might be mortified to learn, had to be kosher.
The story of WeWork’s crash, with its delectable details and doses of schadenfreude, has exited the business pages and entered mainstream culture via several podcasts and a Hulu documentary, but the fast-paced and entertaining Billion Dollar Loser is the most thorough treatment so far. Wiedeman, who first came to the subject when he wrote a skeptical profile of Neumann for New York Magazine, has an eye for the tawdry detail and a keen sense of the gap between the ditzy, do-good rhetoric of WeWork and the voracious practices that fueled the company into the start-up stratosphere and then, a heady decade later, sent it hurtling to earth. Judaism isn’t the focus of the book, but it’s an unavoidable presence throughout, the kosher wine being only one example. The WeWork story is a capitalist story, a moral story, and just a great story. But it is also, unfortunately, a Jewish story.
Read the whole thing.
ROGER SIMON: Lead Georgia Election Critic Condemns New York Supreme Court on Giuliani.
I had already scheduled an interview with Garland Favorito— founder of Voter GA— to discuss the latest judicial decisions in his group’s ongoing investigation of possible voter fraud in Georgia during the recent presidential election, when news broke the New York Supreme Court had suspended Rudolph Giuliani’s license to practice law in the state.
The written decision—more like a political tract than a legal brief—referenced the Georgia audit. So, before anything else, I asked Favorito about it, wondering if he had something to say about what happened to the man we used to call “America’s mayor.”
Did he ever.
At first Favorito simply said, “The New York Supreme Court made false assumptions about Georgia on it and used them improperly against Giuliani.”
Then he added: “The State Farm Arena video they showed, I’m sorry, showed clear violations of Georgia law committed by election officials.”
Favorito went silent. I thought that was it—he might even want to pull back—-but the opposite was true. He wanted to say something stronger, with more evidence, and later sent me the following two paragraphs via email:
“The New York Supreme Court falsely concluded that the Georgia hand count audit ‘confirmed the results of the election with a zero percent risk limit.’ The truth documented by expert witness testimony at our May 21st hearing is that the hand count audit had a 21% error rate. That expert witness testimony and recently released public ballot images confirm the correctness of Giuliani’s argument that the vote count was inaccurate.”
“The New York Supreme Court also falsely disagreed that the State Farm Arena video ‘can be viewed as evidence of illegal conduct during the vote tabulation process.’ We identified four violations of Georgia election transparency law in the video. In addition, the video clearly shows potentially illegal duplicate ballot scanning. Furthermore, the hand count audit results indicate thousands of duplicate ballots were scanned into the results further confirming Giuliani’s argument that the vote count was inaccurate.”
[All bolds are Favorito’s. The italics are direct quotes from the New York State Supreme Court.]
I first met Garland months ago when we sat together in the aforementioned State Farm Arena watching that hand count audit of the Georgia vote.
At that time, he got up to show me how one of the several Dominion machines could be connected to the internet by a short ethernet cable to a nearby server. A Dominion representative was standing a few feet away, nodding approvingly.
Favorito is a retired IT (Information Technology, as we all know by now) professional, now devoting his life to electoral integrity. He is also, from my admittedly few contacts, a thoroughly honest guy of the “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” sort, just the kind of person to put the fear of Jehovah in the Democrats and the #NeverTrumpish Georgia GOP hierarchy, notably Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, both of whom seem headed for the primary chopping block.
Related: Biden Administration to Sue Georgia Over Election Integrity Law.
DOMINIC GREEN: Raisi’s election confirms the futility of returning to the Iran Deal.
The president is a placeholder for the people who really run the country. The elections were rigged. And most of the American media cheers along.
No, not the United States: Iran. The peace-loving, centrifuge-spinning, flag-burning regime has a new president, Ebrahim Raisi. The Biden administration did promise us a new era in US-Iranian relations, and here it is: Raisi will be the first Iranian president to take office while under sanctions for mass murder.
In the 1980s, Raisi was a young regional prosecutor. He was part of a four-man ‘death committee’ which ordered the disappearance and killing of thousands of the Islamic revolution’s enemies. You may be shocked to hear human rights’ groups claiming that due process was frequently ignored during this judicial massacre.
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Raisi is what Hannah Arendt would have called a schreibtischtäter, a ‘desk murderer’: a functionary who orders dirty work while keeping his own hands clean. Amnesty calls for his prosecution for ‘crimes against humanity’. The New York Times, adopting the vocabulary of Clueless, calls this an ‘awkward predicament’ for American diplomats. It’s more than awkward, and more than clueless: it’s deeply incoherent and dangerous.
Based on past performance, Barry, Ben and Valerie must be feeling awfully chuffed right now.
OTHAL WALLACE MANHUNT FOCUSES ON ATLANTA; REWARD NOW $200,000: “Wallace is a black nationalist and a member of an anti-white hate group, the NFAC, and posted social media messages boasting about his hatred of police as ‘pigs’ whose blood he intended to shed. He was amassing an arsenal: ‘Investigators found guns and ammo stockpiled in an apartment belonging to a relative of Othal Wallace where the shooting occurred.’ So while the Biden administration is busy prosecuting Trump supporters, this black radical was planning to kill cops…But you won’t see anything about this on CNN or MSNBC.”
UPDATE: Man Who Shot Police Officer Is Arrested, and a Democrat Narrative Is Complicated in the Process. “People can argue about the actual extent that white and black nationalism plays in extremist killings in the United States, but clearly, the situation is far more complicated than repeating talking points that make the ‘wokest’ among us happy. Garland’s claim about white supremacy was meant to throw red meat to a Democrat audience, not actually keep the American people abreast of what is truly going on.”
AT HELEN’S PAGE: From Chris Land, Why Funny Is Funny: a comprehensive (and hilarious) theoretical look at what all humor has in common. “Included with the main book is the companion book How To Make A Funnier You.” I could use this book, I would love to learn how to be funny.
SHALLOWNESS ON PARADE: “Sometimes one just slams right up against the horrific shallowness of legal scholarship, and you can only hope to have kept enough of your wits about you to feel a slight pain. And so I twinge as I read Isaac Chotiner in The New Yorker.”
Of course, in San Francisco, the left hand doesn’t know what the far left hand is doing: “Despite its spending more money per capita on homelessness than any comparable city, [San Francisco’s] homeless problem is worse than any comparable city’s,” SF Weekly noted a decade ago, stumbling into the Fox Butterfield effect.
THIS SEEMS TO BE THE EMERGING CONSENSUS: Lockdowns were not effective in slowing COVID spread, engineering professor concludes.
UNEXPECTEDLY: MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC avoid Sheldon Whitehouse’s all-White club saga, CNN offers less than 5 min of coverage.
Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and the media blackout makes perfect sense.
Evergreen:
HOSTILE EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT: Stanford U prof, Antifa leader plans ‘broad, visible and loud network’ against campus conservatives.
THE PREDICTABLE RESULT OF EXTENDED LOCKDOWNS AND MEDIA HYSTERIA: CDC Reports 51% Increase in Suicide Attempts Among Teenage Girls. “As the report concludes, the implications of lockdowns, such as ‘physical distancing; barriers to mental health treatment; increases in substance use; and anxiety about family health and economic problems’ all particularly affected children, contributing to a widespread increase in suicidal thoughts. . . . The surge in teen suicide is just one example of collaternal damage from lockdowns—others include surges in child poverty, drug overdoses, and unemployment, as well as a sharp decline in cancer screenings—and should come as no surprise. Back in April of 2020, JAMA Psychiatry published a report on the possible consequences of quarantine orders, stating that while they might help quell new infections, ‘the potential for adverse outcomes on suicide risk is high.'”
Related: The Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic and Policy Responses on Excess Mortality. “We fail to find that SIP [Shelter In Place] policies saved lives. To the contrary, we find a positive association between SIP policies and excess deaths.”
IF THEY’RE NOT TELLING US, IT’S BECAUSE THEY DON’T WANT US TO KNOW: Who Killed Ashli Babbitt? “The Babbitt case is only the most fearsome example of what can plainly be seen as a dual system of justice as it relates to political protest.”
SOMETHING POSITIVE FROM FASHION: Femininity makes a comeback? Kind of unexpected but encouraging, no?
EVERGREEN QUESTION: What’s Wrong with Joe Biden? “To put it in his own words: Come on, man,” Jim Treacher writes. “The president of the United States is losing his mental faculties, and the whole world is watching. Covering for this guy is just kicking the can down the road. He’s only going to get worse.”
BIG TECH REALLY MANAGED TO MAKE EVERYONE HATE IT: Why Did Congress Just Vote to Break Up Big Tech? The Judiciary Committee voted 21-20 to split up Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. What happened was unbelievable.
It’s been an extraordinary week. On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled against the NCAA for abusing its monopoly over the terms and wages of student athletes. Yesterday, the House Judiciary Committee, which is the body that has jurisdiction over antitrust law, wrote and voted on legislation to break up big tech firms Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook. There are problems with the bills, and I’ll get into them. But the underlying content is less important than the political message, which is that breaking up big tech is looking increasingly inevitable.
Meanwhile, the new Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan has taken full control of the agency. She’s hired acting directors to run the bureaus, and announced that the FTC will be holding open commission meetings where the public can watch the commissioners vote and debate things. Open meetings haven’t happened in decades, so this is something of a shock to the agency. There’s even a period where the public gets to talk back to the commissioners. Imagine that. The underlying agenda is pretty aggressive (though in the administrative weeds), and starts with finalizing a rule against lying about Made in USA labels. (If you want to sign up to speak, you can do so here.) . . .
What has been happening since the financial crisis of 2008, and what continues today, is nothing short of a revolution in the way Americans think about political economy and monopoly power. We haven’t had such ferment over these issues since the 1890s or 1930s, during the Gilded Age and New Deal. Any one of these bills put forward would be the biggest strengthening of Federal antitrust enforcement in at least fifty years, so that all six passed out of committee – especially the bill that breaks up these firms by statute – is remarkable.
There is one other important aspect of what these bills mean. Put simply, they show representative politics can work. Big tech lobbied aggressively against these bills, and lost the debate. Yes, there are corruption problems, but ideas and investigations matter. Republicans and Democrats actually came together and decided, for once, to govern.
Well, it’s not like these guys got where they are through their social skills. Still it’s an amazing reversal in a surprisingly short time.
STOCKHOLM SYNDROME: Nike boss defends firm’s business in China.
The boss of Nike has made a robust defence of the firm’s business in China after facing a consumer boycott there.
Chief executive John Donahoe said “Nike is a brand that is of China and for China” in response to a question about competition from Chinese brands.
Mr Donahoe was speaking during a call with Wall Street analysts about Nike’s latest earnings report.
The comments come after the sportswear giant was recently hit by a backlash over statements about Xinjiang.
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Several Western brands, including Nike and Swedish fashion retailer H&M, recently faced a backlash from Chinese shoppers after the firms expressed concerns about the alleged use of Uyghur forced labour in cotton production.
As the article in that last link goes on to note, it’s a bullying campaign against western brands by Beijing, in the form of a very top-down state media-led “consumer protest.” And based upon the quote from Nike’s CEO, it’s working.
Related: A Slow Kowtow to China.
Demanding obeisance has a rich history in Chinese culture. In 1793, British envoy Lord George Macartney was charged with opening permanent trade relations with China. The Chinese still clung to the old feudal demand of the kowtow. In the old days, the Chinese believed that the emperor literally ruled the world, which meant foreign rulers were more like vassals. And all vassals must acknowledge the supremacy of the emperor, the Son of Heaven. The problem was that Macartney was essentially a stand-in for the British crown, and he couldn’t in good conscience recognize the emperor as his sovereign.
Kowtowing requires three kneelings and nine prostrations—meaning the supplicant actually lies face down on the floor—in order to demonstrate total inferiority. Macartney agreed to kneel out of respect, but he wouldn’t put his head to the ground nine times.
The Chinese were offended and Britain and China didn’t get the trade deal. I bring up this anecdote for three reasons. First, it’s worth recognizing that the trade deal was in the interests of both countries. Lots of “realists” think that countries do things solely out of raw self-interest. That’s arguably true. But the definition realists use for self-interest is way too narrow. Notions of national pride and honor are also forms of self-interest.
Which brings me to the second reason. America should have some notion of honor. We don’t have a crown, but we do have certain ideas and ideals that we like to claim similar loyalty to. We also like to claim that these ideas and ideals are universal. When we figuratively kowtow to China, we are openly admitting to China that both claims are untrue—or at least negotiable. You can’t claim to believe human rights are universal and inviolable while simultaneously excusing or ignoring the mass violation of human rights that defines China under CCP rule.
Last, none of this is in our interest. It’s not like the Chinese respect us for our groveling. They enjoy watching us bend to their demands and mock our obsequious desire to gain favor as proof of their superior system. They use our self-flagellation over race as a cudgel in their propaganda and diplomacy. Such appeasement only buys greater demands and worse moral and strategic compromises.
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I whiggishly believe that one day China will be a free country. And when it is, the Chinese will not look back on America today as a spiritual ally the way those who were slaughtered at Tiananmen Square did. They will see us as a country that sought approval from the regime that persecuted their ancestors for the cheap at any price of Fast and Furious 9 ticket sales.
As Jim Geraghty wrote in October of 2019, when the CCP-NBA connection exposed for millions of Americans to see: We’re Not Exporting Our Values to China — We’re Importing Theirs.
HIGHER EDUCATION: INCUBATOR OF HATE? Incoming Cal State Dean Defended Farrakhan, Attacked Jewish Critics.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Illinois parent speaks out after viral rant condemning critical race theory. “‘You’re going to deliberately teach kids ‘this white kid right here got it better than you because he’s white’? You’re going to purposely tell a white kid that black people are all down and oppressed? How do I have two medical degrees if I’m sitting here oppressed?’ [Ty] Smith asked in a series of rhetorical questions that drew cheers and applause.”
SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER: Pro-Trump Protesters Give Kamala Harris a Brutal Welcome to El Paso.
HILLBILLY ELEGY AUTHOR EVISCERATES WOKE JOINT CHIEFS GENERAL’S PRIORITIES:
Not very long ago, it seemed that the last thing we would have to worry about would be the United States military going the way of commie academia.
Welcome to Joe Freakin’ Biden’s America, boys and girls.
This trend towards woke sentiments among the higher ranks of the military is disturbing for any number of reasons. Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance brilliantly illustrated a couple of them in a brief Twitter thread on Friday. Vance — a Marine and Iraq War veteran — took Gen. Milley to task, questioning the general’s priorities and reading habits:
Meanwhile, in case you missed it last week: US Navy Punts on Building a Fleet to Compete with China. As Steve noted, “A Navy that can’t fight is just a big wokeness seminar, which I suppose is the point.”
OPENING THE FLOODGATES: “It should be obvious, given previous posts here, that I think that the FDA approval of Biogen’s aducanumab for Alzheimer’s was a mistake. It is a mistake for a whole list of reasons, and we’re about to see another one of those in action.”
APROPOS OF PETER GRANT’S BLOG POST, YOU MIGHT FIND THIS BOOK USEFUL: The Washing of the Spears: The Rise and Fall of the Zulu Nation Under Shaka and Its Fall in the Zulu War of 1879 (Touchstone Books) by Donald R. Morris.
There probably is some bias in there (and not on the side of white anything) though I don’t remember detecting it, when I did my deep dive into African history 17 years ago. What became very clear to me is that whenever civilized (in this case defined as post-tribal) humans collide with tribal humans, tribal humans lose. They use the techniques that work in between tribes, imagining that their adversaries are also a tribe:
They start off with unimaginable massacres and horrible evil in the belief that this will cause the adversaries to back off. Because this works, between tribes. But when you’re dealing with people who view human individuals as both important, and important regardless of tribe, the more atrocities they commit the more they aggravate the anger of the civilized people.
The civilized hold back, afraid of committing atrocities, and the tribal humans commit more atrocities, and act like victors, while doing truly horrific things.
And then at some point the post-tribal people lose it.
What comes after is usually horrific and causes college social studies majors to cry centuries later.
This dance has been performed over and over and over again, since Rome at least. Since we had a polity that transcended tribes. The end is always the same.
So, the neo-tribal barbarians of the left who are following the script to the letter might wish to hear and revise their tactics. They won’t, of course, but we should warn them, all the same. Since we’re the ones who are trying to avoid the horrors.