READER FAVORITE: Jeacitory 12×50 Binoculars with Clear Low Night Version. #CommissionEarned

WHEN SWIFTIAN SATIRE IS A BIT TOO SPOT-ON FOR 2022: UN Deletes Article Touting ‘Benefits’ of World Hunger: ‘Hungry People Are the Most Productive People.’

An article appearing on the United Nations Chronicle website as recently as Wednesday that touted the “benefits of world hunger” has seemingly been taken down.

Screenshots of the post, which web archives appear to show was first published in 2009, began to circulate on Twitter Wednesday.

A link to the article, which now takes visitors to an error page.

It was archived before it was apparently scrubbed from the website by the agency on Thursday.

In it, former University of Hawaii professor George Kent wrote,

We sometimes talk about hunger in the world as if it were a scourge that all of us want to see abolished, viewing it as comparable with the plague or aids. But that naïve view prevents us from coming to grips with what causes and sustains hunger. Hunger has great positive value to many people.

Indeed, it is fundamental to the working of the world’s economy. Hungry people are the most productive people, especially where there is a need for manual labour.

Kent went on to ask, “How many of us would sell our services so cheaply if it were not for the threat of hunger?” he further noted, “For those who depend on the availability of cheap labour, hunger is the foundation of their wealth.”

As Marc Marano of Climate Depot adds, “Given how the world has been transformed under the ‘new normal’ of COVID lockdowns, it seems this old UN Chronicle article presciently reveals how the World Economic Forum and the UN & the WHO, seek to rule humanity with an iron bureaucratic fist and wish to keep the ‘masses’ poor, tired, and hungry.” Meanwhile, a new July 2022 UN report finds: U.N. says 2.3 billion people severely or moderately hungry in 2021.”

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, WYOMING–ARGUABLY OUR MOST BEAUTIFUL RED STATE:  The Wyoming Territory’s constitution was the first to guarantee women the right to vote.  When Wyoming applied for statehood, Congress initially balked, with some members fearing that admitting Wyoming would lead to demands for women’s suffrage in other states. But the Wyoming legislature stood its ground and cabled back to Congressional leaders, “We will remain out of the Union one hundred years rather than come in without the women.”

Congress eventually relented, and on this day in 1890, Wyoming was admitted as our 44^th state. Those who feared that Wyoming’s example would lead to pressure for women’s suffrage were, of course, right.  Before the turn of the century, there were four women’s suffrage states—Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and Idaho—and many more soon thereafter.  Good-o (except for the part about women being more likely to vote for progressives … there’s not a lot of that in Wyoming, y’know).

WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY: Rep. Eric Swalwell’s attempt to convince everybody Dems are the ‘party of freedom’ doesn’t survive reality checks.

SRI LANKA: Dear Democrats, This Is What Your Oppressive Global Initiatives Lead To.

DEAL OF THE DAY: Valano Men’s Long Sleeve Shirts. #CommissionEarned

WASHINGTON POST LATE TO THE PARTY ON FACT-CHECKING POORLY SOURCED ’10-YEAR-OLD RAPE VICTIM’ ABORTION TALE, But Proves Us Right.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Twitter Debates Whether Anne Frank Had ‘White Privilege.’

Flashbacks: I’m A Middle School Teacher And See How Critical Race Curriculum Is Creating Racial Hostility In School.

Missing from our curriculum during the 2020/ 21 school year was the diversity, perspective, truth, and rigor that previously were taught. Previously vetted books were removed from our classroom and sent to recycling.  Gone was the diverse collection of American and World Literature: House On Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, James Baldwin Go Tell It On The Mountain, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, essays by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., poetry by Maya Angelou, Robert Frost, Anne Frank, Night, The Boy In The Striped Pajamas, Macbeth, Walt Whitman, The Salem Witch Trials, The Crucible , Holocaust studies, world genocide, world art, universal themes, universal characters and any book or short story from the literary cannon.

What saddened me most was that I would not be teaching the Holocaust any longer. The Holocaust unit included one of the following: either Anne Frank, The Boy In The Striped Pajamas, and depending on reading level, Elie Weisel’s Night When I asked the school reading coach where all the Holocaust books were, she said “we do not teach the Holocaust because kids can’t relate to the story.” What? Kids can’t relate to genocide, hate, discrimination, and prejudice? Yes children can relate to these universal themes, we all can. Children would never learn about the evils of hatred during the Second World War?  Why? What was it about the truth and perspective that seemed to escape us during the 2020/21 school year?  Exactly why was all this great literature removed from our curriculum?

Earlier: My road to cancellation — Stanford professor and CEO Joel Peterson’s take.

Soon, a Black Lives Matter advocate asked, of all things, whether I would stand for the American flag. To provide context for my decision, I shared a story. As a toddler, I’d seen my mother take a call from the Department of Defense announcing that her fighter-pilot brother had been killed. Honoring her grief, I’d chosen to stand for the flag under which my only uncle had offered the ultimate sacrifice. The student’s response was presented as an irrefutable argument; my choice was “racist.”

Furthermore, in this woke new world, my professional experience was no longer relevant because of the race and gender I’d been assigned at birth. Despite having created tens of thousands of jobs, promoted women and minorities, and coached scores of entrepreneurs, I was deemed an “oppressor” in the catechism of “wokeism.” Furthermore, the penance for being raised in a “systemically racist” society — founded on millennia of Greek, Roman and Judeo-Christian antecedents, no less — was submission, and, if resisted, cancellation.

The reason behind such tyranny came into focus for me when Condolezza Rice, former secretary of state and current director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford, told me she’d shared with her students that the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (9/11’s architect) had felt like “having Erwin Rommel under lock and key.” The blank looks on the faces of her very bright students revealed that they had never heard of WWII’s famous Desert Fox.

Until then, I’d traced the enmity to activists like Jackson and Hannah-Jones. Now, I could see that it also stemmed from students having swapped an education for indoctrination. Those enlisted as social justice warriors had avoided the lessons of history, missed out on refining skills that might have allowed them to judge assertions and denied themselves the insights required to make wise trade-offs.

As the Washington Post reported in 2018, “Holocaust study: Two-thirds of millennials don’t know what Auschwitz is.” Which allows the Corbynization of the Democratic Party to continue apace.

AND WELL THEY SHOULD:  Morton’s steakhouse blasts protesters who ‘harassed’ Kavanaugh at dinner.

(Bumped.)

OPEN THREAD: Because the night belongs to comments.

SRI LANKA: Protesters burn down Sri Lanka PM’s private house.

Related: Amid crisis, Sri Lanka president flees on naval ship, hints video: Report.

CONSERVING CONSERVATISM MOST CONSERVATIVELY: David Brooks Doesn’t Know Why Australian-Style Gun Control is Controversial.

New York Times columnist David Brooks is, in theory, supposed to be the conservative counterweight to Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capehart when the two join PBS NewsHour host Judy Woodruff every Friday to recap the week’s news, but in reality Brooks mostly ends up repeating liberal talking points. A case in point was Friday’s episode where he wondered why Australian-style gun control is so controversial.

Brooks’s remarks came at the end of the segment’s gun control portion after Woodruff asked, “You agree the likelihood of there being any more federal action on guns is very unlikely?”

After noting his agreement, Brooks lamented, “I have never understood why an Australian-style gun buyback is an affront to anybody. It’s an open choice. You can sell your gun or not. But if we’re going to reduce 400 million guns, it would take something like that, not even just banning future purchases. I mean, we have got 400 million here.”

Maybe because it was not “an open choice,” but mandatory and Brooks will probably escape the ire of the fact checkers.

But men with extremely fine trouser creases all assured Brooks that Australia was the way to go.

GOIN’ MOBILE: Never-before-seen images of iconic band The Who on the 50th anniversary of their launch party for their famous fifth album Who’s Next.

RICK MCGINNIS AT STEYN ONLINE: This Butcher’s Yard: Michael Caine and Zulu.

Zulu is the sort of film that it’s become imprudent, even inadvisable, to write about. Nearly six decades since it was released, its subject matter – a battle between white colonial troops and an African army – would certainly never be attempted by a filmmaker today, and certainly not in the same manner as it was in 1964, which it’s worth remembering is as far away from us today as the Civil War was from the first stirrings of the Roaring Twenties.

(These temporal comparisons are facile, to be sure, though we’ve certainly seen as radical a social transformation in the last six decades as the stunning technological changes that happened between the presidencies of Lincoln and Coolidge.)

When it was released, Zulu was billed as a spectacle, an epic action picture that delivered the sort of widescreen thrills that television was two generations from capably providing. Even then, it was made at probably the last plausible moment for this sort of unironic celebration of valour by British redcoats on a foreign field; Tony Richardson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade, released just four years later, would cast a far more acerbic eye on another celebrated instance of Victorian military bravery, reflecting the cultural sea change that had happened on either side of the ’60s.

Zulu retells the story of the Battle of Rorke’s Drift, which was fought from January 22-23, 1879, between a tiny British garrison of just over a hundred men and a Zulu army that outnumbered them nearly forty to one. It might not have been memorialized in film nearly a century later if it had not happened just hours after the worst British battlefield defeat until the next century’s world wars, at the hands of a native army wielding mostly spears and shields against professional soldiers with rifles, cannon and rockets.

The film was directed by Cy Endfield, an American escaping the blacklist in Britain, based on a script co-written by Endfield and John Prebble, and inspired by an article Prebble had written for Lilliput magazine. It was produced by Endfield and actor Stanley Baker, who plays Lt. John Chard of the Royal Engineers, commander of the defense of the supply depot at Rorke’s Drift, a former trading post turned mission station near the bank of the Buffalo River in Natal Province.

The film was meant to be a star vehicle for Baker, but he would be forced to share screen time – and ultimately stand in the shadow – of his co-star, a young cockney actor from London’s named Michael Caine.

Read the whole thing — and then go and rent or stream the whole thing — it’s a brilliant film. Just as Hitchcock’s Vertigo and North by Northwest are unintentional documentaries of San Francisco and New York in the late 1950s, Zulu is an unintentional documentary of a worldview which would soon largely be lost on the movie screen.

HMMMM: Security alert for Jewish community in San Antonio, Texas lifted. The Jewish Federation of San Antonio said the FBI explained there was no longer a “known imminent threat,” but recommends staying vigilant.

I ASKED MY GENTLEMAN FRIEND FOR A GENERATOR FOR MY BIRTHDAY … in case of rolling blackouts … or brownouts or whatever.  I’ve been working on a report for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights about Hurricane Maria and the yearlong power outage it caused in Puerto Rico, and it’s got me wound up.  (Yes, I know that Puerto Rico’s grid was old and rickety, but California’s is not so great either.)  I want something that I can lift and plug into the wall to store up electricity in anticipation of temporary outages … but also something with solar panels to use in case things really go south.  I live on the rim of a canyon where fire hazard is very real.  I could never store fuel on this property.  So is this what I want?  Advice, please.

RICH IS BETTER:  For years now, Israeli kibbutz have been moving away from utopian socialism and toward something more like a market economy.  In the process, they’ve gotten richer.  But did that make them hard-hearted toward the less fortunate?  A new study suggests their attitudes toward market mechanisms have gotten more positive now that they’ve had experience with them, but their support for redistribution to the poor has not changed.  And it’s easier now that they’re richer.

JIM TREACHER: Sounds Like Japan Needs Some Gun Laws.

Shinzo Abe was 67.

I really don’t want to hear that this sort of thing only happens in America. Japan has some of the strictest gun laws in the world, and none of those laws stopped this lunatic from making his own gun and shooting a politician with it. Laws mean nothing to the evil and the insane.

The NRA didn’t do this, unless there’s a Nipponese Rifle Association.

And once again, our media is a disgrace. Here’s how NPR decided to remember Shinzo Abe:

The man who was just assassinated was divisive and arch-conservative, huh?

And here’s their second attempt, after they deleted that one:

2022’s version of the Journolist must have been hopping late last night and this morning: CBS Smears Abe as ‘Polarizing,’ ‘Right-Wing Nationalist’ With ‘Controversial’ Views.

UPDATE: Don Surber spots the AP smearing Abe as well:

As Surber writes, “AP claims to be a news agency…Fact-check: LOL.”

(Updated and bumped.)

THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE: Here is the exact type of person who was most likely to leave San Francisco in the pandemic.

The coronavirus pandemic stripped San Francisco of a decade’s worth of population gain in a single year — mostly by hollowing out its population-rich downtown and neighborhoods close by.

Now, thanks to detailed data from the U.S. Census Bureau, it’s possible to identify the greatest losses by demographics, too. Last week, the census released data population trends by age, sex, race and ethnicity. And it turns out that young adults, particularly white people in their late twenties, drove S.F.’s historic decline.

THE GREAT RELEARNING: Leftist women discover traditional marriage.

(Classical reference in headline.)

本当なら大きい。: AP’s crack fact-check team lets us know Shinzo Abe did not recently tweet ‘I have information that will lead to the arrest of Hillary Clinton.’

Shades of Snopes “fact-checking” the Babylon Bee: The Babylon Bee Satirizes the Absurdities of American Politics. Snopes Doesn’t Seem to Get the Joke.

JOHN O’SULLIVAN: Post-Boris, a Battle with Biden and the Blob.

As it was, all these forces wanted the pandemic restrictions to be tougher and longer. For a long time Boris and his ministers were more or less ventriloquist’s dummies speaking lines written by scientific and medical officialdom in London. Boris struggled to break free and eventually ended the lockdown. But he took a lot of heat for doing so sooner than the Whitehall committee of SAGE, plus “Independent Sage,” the media, Labour, and Uncle Tom Cobley and all wanted.

Britain today and tomorrow will be paying a heavy price for their miscalculations, risk-averse science, and economic ignorance. Boris is paying it today.

In other respects he had real achievements to his credit. He got Brexit done. He sent the extreme left Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, packing in the 2019 election. He put together a broad-based national coalition of all social classes to win his 2019 landslide victory. He was personally popular–a well-known public figure who had edited the Spectatormagazine, written a column in the Daily Telegraph, and appeared for years on a popular radio comedy program about current affairs: “Have I Got News for You.“ And he still has lots of supporters throughout the country who are indignant at his defenestration.

Why then is he Out with a capital O? The answer is his policies. More and more voters, especially those who voted Tory in 2019 for the first time ever, thought he had let them down over policy. And, sadly, they’re correct. His policies were almost more socialist than Labour, hiking spending and raising taxes. He was a passionate advocate of a “Net-Zero” carbon emissions that threatened to reduce living standards, increase taxes and electricity prices, and make the energy crisis a permanent one.

Why did he embrace these policies? I believe it was for the same reason that he initially bowed down to the consensus of doctors and scientists: he believed he had no alternative. It’s vital to say that clearly now because almost exactly the same thing is likely to happen on a very different playing field, the Tory leadership election, unless we wake up.

Read the whole thing.

NOT THE BEE: I’m starting to think there may be a really easy way to avoid getting monkeypox.

THE COLONIES’ NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: British Parliament Forms July 4th Commission To Investigate Colonial Insurrection.

THE ECONOMIST HAS AN “UNEXPECTEDLY” MOMENT: Covid learning loss has been a global disaster.

When covid-19 first began to spread around the world, pausing normal lessons was a forgivable precaution. No one knew how transmissible the virus was in classrooms; how sick youngsters would become; or how likely they would be to infect their grandparents. But disruptions to education lasted long after encouraging answers to these questions emerged.

New data suggest that the damage has been worse than almost anyone expected [emphasis mine — Ed]. Locking kids out of school has prevented many of them from learning how to read properly. Before the pandemic 57% of ten-year-olds in low and middle-income countries could not read a simple story, says the World Bank. That figure may have risen to 70%, it now estimates. The share of ten-year-olds who cannot read in Latin America, probably the worst-affected region, could rocket from around 50% to 80% (see chart 1).

Children who never master the basics will grow up to be less productive and to earn less. McKinsey, a consultancy, estimates that by 2040 education lost to school closures could cause global gdp to be 0.9% lower than it would otherwise have been—an annual loss of $1.6trn. The World Bank thinks the disruption could cost children $21trn in earnings over their lifetimes—a sum equivalent to 17% of global gdp today. That is much more than the $10trn it had estimated in 2020, and also an increase on the $17trn it was predicting last year.

Who on earth could have foreseen this? Flashback: Politico: How Ron DeSantis won the pandemic.

Related:

● Why we must demand that leaders who got COVID wrong admit it and apologize.

—Karol Markowicz, the New York Post, March 6th.

● Speech Therapy Shows the Difficult Tradeoffs of Wearing Masks.

—Atlantic headline, March 2nd.

As Ace of Spades wrote, at the start of a lengthy post on that last headline, “The masking mandates that the corrupt US and state and local governments forced on children, under pressure from the corrupt teachers unions have imposed developmental disorders on children that they may never recover from. The early years of development are critical ones. You don’t get those back. These are critical years of development in which children’s brains are wired to rewire themselves like crazy. Their brains will reconfigure themselves during these years like in no other point in their lives, ever. There is no ‘Do Over’ switch on a child’s formative years.”