BURIED LEDE: NY JUDGE ISSUES SANE RULING: Happy the elephant is not a ‘person,’ New York’s highest court rules.
I THINK MAYBE AUSTRALIA IS NOT THE BEST PLACE TO DRIVE ELECTRIC: Driver exposes problem with electric cars after 360-mile trip takes an entire day.
WHAT IF THE “ELDERLY AND TERMINALLY ILL” DON’T WANT TO BE EASED INTO THE AFTERLIFE??? Mushrooms may help ease the elderly and terminally ill into afterlife.
CHANGE: Republicans flip U.S. House seat in South Texas, historically a Democratic stronghold. Mayra Flores, a Republican, won a special election to fill the unexpired term of U.S. Rep. Filemon Vela. Another election will be held in November.
WHEN COMMERCIALS AGE BADLY:
@pattycakeskaiju #duet with @genxjono is love to say you can’t make this up but… #react #faddiet #fyp #fypシ #lgbtq #beardedmen #vintage #thatagedwell #commercial ♬ original sound – John Kotrides (GenX Jono)
ABOUT TIME: Virginia Democrats Turn on Soros-Funded Prosecutor. “Loudoun County commonwealth’s attorney Buta Biberaj was a top prospect for the George Soros-funded Justice and Public Safety PAC when she ran for the post in 2019. Three years in, she’s losing allies amid mounting scandals and rising crime. Top Democrats in the county, including board of supervisors chair Phyllis Randall, are searching for a candidate to take on Biberaj, according to two sources with knowledge of their thinking. The embattled official, who faces an ongoing recall effort, was elevated by nearly a million dollars from Soros in 2019 and is up for reelection next year.”
OPEN THREAD: Consider this place a sanctuary.
DOMESTIC TERRORISM: We were promised violence after Supreme Court leak. They weren’t kidding.
WHY IS THE LEFT SUCH A CESSPIT OF VIOLENCE? ‘Ruth Sent Us’ group hinted at targeting Supreme Court Justice Barrett’s children, church. Group gave details on Barrett’s routine, her children’s school and family’s spiritual life.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Chinese university completes space-based solar power ground test facility.
PLEASE LET IT BE SO … FOREVER SO: “How Meltdowns Have Brought Advocacy Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History.”
JOE IS VAGUELY AWARE THAT SOMETHING IS DREADFULLY WRONG, BUT HAS NO IDEA HOW TO FIX IT. LIKEWISE HIS ALLEGEDLY COMPOS MENTIS ADVISORS AND STAFF.
And some of them don’t want to fix it because it’s a crisis by design.
DISPATCHES FROM THE LAPTOP FROM HELL: Listen: The moment Hunter Biden says his father will do anything he tells him to.
Hunter Biden recorded himself boasting that his father will adopt political positions at his command, footage obtained from a copy of his abandoned laptop shows.
“He’ll talk about anything that I want him to, that he believes in,” Biden said in reference to his father, Joe Biden, in the Dec. 3, 2018, recording. “If I say it’s important to me, then he will work a way in which to make it a part of his platform. My dad respects me more than he respects anyone in the world, and I know that to be certain, so it’s not going to be about whether it affects his politics.”
“All those fears you think that I have of people not liking me or that I don’t love myself … I don’t fear that. You know why I don’t fear that? Because the man I most admire in the world, that god to me, thinks I’m a god,” Hunter Biden added in the 77-minute recording, which was taped about five months before Joe Biden launched his successful 2020 presidential campaign in late April 2019. “And my brother did, too. And the three of us, it was literally — I had the support to know I can do anything.”
Exit question: “Is Hunter Biden calling the shots in the White House? Someone is. Joe Biden has many times intimated that he is not the one who is doing so and that he knows this. ”
HOW’S THAT WELCOME WAGON PROGRAM COMING ALONG? Caterpillar to move headquarters to Texas, marking second major corporate departure from Illinois in 6 weeks. “Less than six weeks after defense contractor and airplane-maker Boeing announced it would move its global headquarters out of downtown Chicago, leaders of another major corporation are set to leave the region.”
THE WINTER SOLDIER IN WINTER: John Kerry: We Don’t Need to Drill More for Oil and Gas.
John Kerry, who is the U.S. special presidential envoy for climate, stated at a recent event at the University of Southern California that the country does not need to put more effort into drilling for oil and gas as energy costs continue to rise.
The most obvious sign of the increase in energy costs has been at gas stations, where the national average now stands at $5.01 per gallon, but utility bills are also expected to increase this summer. Republicans in Congress have called for more domestic production to increase the supply of oil in order to reduce the cost.
“And energy security worry is driving a lot of the thoughts now about, ‘Oh, we need more drilling, we need more drilling of this, we need to go back to coal.’ No, we don’t. We absolutely don’t. And we have to prevent a false narrative from entering into this or, again, pun intended, we are cooked,” Kerry said.
Related: US to sell up to 45 million barrels of oil from reserve as part of historic release.
Instead of drilling for ethical oil, why are we begging the Saudis instead? “The visit is a sign that Biden has been forced into a corner and feels he has to prioritize business over ethics, foreign policy experts told [Business] Insider. By visiting the oil-rich country, the experts said Biden is effectively declaring that maintaining friendly relations with Prince Mohammed — the de facto ruler of the kingdom who is often referred to as MBS — is more important than punishing him for Khashoggi’s murder and other human rights abuses.”
Earlier: Is Team Biden might be purposefully grinding down the middle class?
TO BE FAIR, IT’S THE NEW YORK TIMES IN 2022, SO I’M NOT EXPECTING MUCH OF ANYTHING: Joe Kahn is now editing the New York Times. Don’t expect a revolution.
Meanwhile, Kahn and Baquet appear to be aligned on some of the most pressing issues capturing the mind-space of Times employees and the paper’s many critics on social media.
Both men are down on “labels as a shortcut to reporting,” as Kahn put it; he’s resistant to the increasingly loud calls to characterize certain public figures in terms such as “racist” unless the paper has “unambiguous evidence” to back that up. He cited, for example, the deep reporting behind a recent three-part series on Fox News host Tucker Carlson, which included the assertion that “Carlson has constructed what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news*.” (Carlson’s top producer responded that his show “embraces diversity of thought and presents various points of view in an industry where contrarian thought and the search for truth are often ignored.”)
“I don’t know that we should be known as a place that casually or quickly throws around inflammatory labels based on a kind of quick analysis or a quick guess as to how something fits into other people’s belief system,” Kahn said. “We felt like there was a lot of loose discussion about the role that Tucker Carlson as a pundit was playing in the dialogue in American life. But we felt that we had a real opportunity to slow that down and look at it in more detail.”
He also shares Baquet’s strong belief that Times journalists need to de-prioritize Twitter. Part of that is an exhortation to spend less time sending tweets; but a bigger concern is that too many journalist have come to see the Twitter audience as a proxy for the public. Increasingly, he fretted, some Times journalists “don’t even want to engage in certain kinds of stories because they anticipate the reaction that they’ll get from writing on, reporting on, a story that tends to be a lightning-rod type issue on Twitter.”
In accordance with the prophecy:
* Great moments in projection.
I HAVE MINE IN “TURBO” MODE MOST OF THE TIME, LIKE A ’90S 486/DX2 PC: The Human Brain Runs Way Hotter Than We Ever Realized, Scientists Find.
UPDATE YOUR KINDLE: Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition (32 GB) – With a 6.8″ display, wireless charging, and auto-adjusting front light. #CommissionEarned
THESE FOLKS ARE BARKING MAD: Gov. DeSantis was not exactly given a hero’s welcome in New York City on Sunday. The protestors, there purportedly on behalf of the LGBTQ community, included Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), State Senator Brad Hoylman (D-Lower Manhattan), Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou (D-Chinatown), and candidate for Lieutenant Governor Ana Maria Archila. Videos of protestors here.
A friend of mine was present for DeSantis’s speech. As he left the event, he was followed down the street as by a deranged protestor who screamed “JEWISH NAZI!!!!” at him. Lovely.
MUCH OF THE CRISIS, OF COURSE, WAS CAUSED BY LOCKDOWNS AND HYSTERIA PROMOTED BY THE PUBLIC HEALTH ESTABLISHMENT: Amid a national crisis in youth mental health, surgeon general says kids need to be part of the solution.
How about some accountability for that?
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Elephant in the Zoom: Meltdowns Have Brought Progressive Advocacy Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History.
In the eyes of group leaders dealing with similar moments, staff were ignoring the mission and focusing only on themselves, using a moment of public awakening to smuggle through standard grievances cloaked in the language of social justice. Often, as was the case at Guttmacher, they played into the very dynamics they were fighting against, directing their complaints at leaders of color. Guttmacher was run at the time, and still is today, by an Afro Latina woman, Dr. Herminia Palacio. “The most zealous ones at my organization when it comes to race are white,” said one Black executive director at a different organization, asking for anonymity so as not to provoke a response from that staff.
These starkly divergent views would produce dramatic schisms throughout the progressive world in the coming year. At Guttmacher, this process would rip the organization apart. Boonstra, unlike many managers at the time, didn’t sugarcoat how she felt about the staff’s response to the killing.
“I’m here to talk about George Floyd and the other African American men who have been beaten up by society,” she told her staff, not “workplace problems.” Boonstra told them she was “disappointed,” that they were being “self-centered.” The staff was appalled enough by the exchange to relay it to Prism.
The human resources department and board of directors, in consultation with outside counsel, were brought in to investigate complaints that flowed from the meeting, including accusations that certain staff members had been tokenized, promoted, and then demoted on the basis of race. The resulting report was unsatisfying to many of the staff.
Perhaps satisfying the staff isn’t the key to an effective organization. Plus:
For progressive movement organizations, 2021 promised to be the year they turned power into policy, with a Democratic trifecta and the Biden administration broadcasting a bold vision of “transformational change.” . . .
And then, sometime in the summer, the forward momentum stalled, and many of the progressive gains lapsed or were reversed. Instead of fueling a groundswell of public support to reinvigorate the party’s ambitious agenda, most of the foundation-backed organizations that make up the backbone of the party’s ideological infrastructure were still spending their time locked in virtual retreats, Slack wars, and healing sessions, grappling with tensions over hierarchy, patriarchy, race, gender, and power.
“So much energy has been devoted to the internal strife and internal bullshit that it’s had a real impact on the ability for groups to deliver,” said one organization leader who departed his position. “It’s been huge, particularly over the last year and a half or so, the ability for groups to focus on their mission, whether it’s reproductive justice, or jobs, or fighting climate change.”
Woke white people are annoying, stupid, and frequently vicious. Fortunately they’re also usually self-destructive and incompetent. But ultimately, this is just Trump exercising a magical power to destroy his enemies via their own ideology:
Sooner or later, each interview for this story landed on the election of Trump in 2016 as a catalyst. Whatever internal tension had been pulling at the seams of organizations in the years prior, Trump’s shock victory sharpened the focus of activists and regular people alike. The institutional progressive world based in Washington, D.C., reacted slowly, shell-shocked and unsure of its place, but people outside those institutions raced ahead of them. A period of mourning turned into fierce determination to resist. Spontaneous women’s marches were called in scores of cities, drawing as many as 5 million people, a shocking display of force. (Their collapse in a heap of identitarian recriminations is its own parable for this moment.)
Heh. Richly deserved.
BIG SISTER IS WATCHING YOU: Climate-Change Censorship: Phase Two. Now Gina McCarthy tells Big Tech to stifle debate global-warming policy responses.
A few years ago, Facebook enlisted third-party “fact checkers” to review news stories about climate. That didn’t satisfy Democratic Senators who howled about a “loophole” for opinion pieces. Facebook then began appending fact-checks to op-eds, including by our contributors Bjorn Lomborg and Steven Koonin, that criticized apocalyptic climate models and studies. The goal was to restrict readership.
Now progressives are moving to censorship phase two, which is shutting down debate over climate “solutions.” “Now it’s not so much denying the problem,” Ms. McCarthy said in an Axios interview last Thursday. “What the industry is now doing is seeding doubt about the costs associated with [green energy] and whether they work or not.”
Ms. McCarthy cited the week-long power outage in Texas in February 2021. “The first thing we read in the paper was” that the blackouts occurred “because of those wind turbines,” she said. “That became the mantra.” In fact, most of the media immediately blamed climate change and fossil fuels.
We were among the few to point out that wind energy plunged as temperatures dropped and turbines froze. Gas-fired plants couldn’t make up for the wind shortfall despite running all-out, and then some went down too. Ms. McCarthy doesn’t want to admit the inconvenient truth that renewable energy sources are making the grid increasingly unreliable.
And she probably doesn’t enjoy being photographed next to a poster that says “Coal Sucks:” “McCarthy’s denials of Obama Administration hostility to coal were patently insincere, and de Leon’s inclusion of this poster in his office makes clear that hostility to coal is official doctrine of the Democratic Party.”
“IT’S LIKE THESE SCIENTISTS DON’T EVEN WATCH MOVIES:” Slightly Sweaty Terminators. “You’ve got government officials telling you you don’t need AR15s right about the time that Google’s developing an AI but firing the guy who tried to make friends with it, while the Japanese are on the verge of building a killer cyborg for Skynet to drive. I think it’s time to make sure that every strategic weapons launch system on the planet is good and air-gapped.”
IT’S NOT JUST THE WAPO AND THE GRAY LADY: How Meltdowns Brought Progressive Groups to a Standstill.
Executive directors across the space said they too have tried to organize their hiring process to filter out the most disruptive potential staff. “I’m now at a point where the first thing I wonder about a job applicant is, ‘How likely is this person to blow up my organization from the inside?’” said one, echoing a refrain heard repeatedly during interviews for this story. (One executive director noted that their group’s high-profile association with a figure considered in social justice spaces to be problematic had gone from a burden to a boon, as the man now serves as an accidental screen, filtering out activists who’d be most likely to focus their energy on internal fights rather than the organization’s mission.)
Another leader said the strife has become so destructive that it feels like an op. “I’m not saying it’s a right-wing plot, because we are incredibly good at doing ourselves in, but — if you tried — you couldn’t conceive of a better right-wing plot to paralyze progressive leaders by catalyzing the existing culture where internal turmoil and microcampaigns are mistaken for strategic advancement of social impact for the millions of people depending on these organizations to stave off the crushing injustices coming our way,” said another longtime organization head. “Progressive leaders cannot do anything but fight inside the orgs, thereby rendering the orgs completely toothless for the external battles in play. … Everyone is scared, and fear creates the inaction that the right wing needs to succeed in cementing a deeply unpopular agenda.”
During the 2020 presidential campaign, as entry-level staffers for Sanders repeatedly agitated over internal dynamics, despite having already formed a staff union, the senator issued a directive to his campaign leadership: “Stop hiring activists.” Instead, Sanders implored, according to multiple campaign sources, the campaign should focus on bringing on people interested first and foremost in doing the job they’re hired to do.
The reckoning has coincided with an awakened and belated appreciation for diversity in the upper ranks of progressive organizations. The mid-2010s saw an influx of women into top roles for the first time, many of them white, followed more recently by a slew of Black and brown leaders at most major organizations. One compared the collision of the belated respect for Black leaders and the upswell of turmoil inside institutions with the “hollow prize” thesis. The most common example of the hollow prize is the victory in the 1970s and ’80s of Black mayors across the country, just as cities were being hollowed out and disempowered. Or, for instance, salaries in the medical field collapsed just as women began graduating into the field.
“I just got the keys and y’all are gonna come after me on this shit?” one executive director who said he felt like a version of those ’70s-era mayors told The Intercept. “‘It’s white supremacy culture! It’s urgent!’ No motherfucker, it’s Election Day. We can’t move that day. Just do your job or go somewhere else.”
Found via John Sexton, who writes:
There’s so much more to say about this but for now I’d just recommend reading all of it. Also, I have to give the Intercept credit for publishing this and Ryan Grim especially deserves credit for reporting on something that really is red meat for people like me who’ve been arguing for years that woke culture was a destructive force that was sweeping its way through society. I think this article represents the death of the kind of leftist denialism that was put forward for years by people like Alex Pareene and many others. For a long time they treated conservative claims about woke extremism on campus as either unfounded or exaggerated. Now that it’s eating their own institutions alive I think it’s clear they were wrong and we were right.
Flashback: Is Safetyism Destroying a Generation?
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