WHEN HEINLEIN’S CRAZY YEARS MEETS OVERBEARING BUREAUCRACY: How we ended up with the ‘Pregnant Man’ Emoji.
Archive for 2022
January 31, 2022
FROM MY COLLEAGUE BEN BARTON: The Supreme Court Needs Diversity in More Ways Than One.
If President Biden makes good on his promise to nominate a black female justice, the Supreme Court will be more diverse than ever in terms of race and sex. But in another sense, the court has become increasingly homogeneous. Recent justices have come from remarkably similar backgrounds—and the president’s reported front-runner, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, would fit right in.
Judge Jackson grew up in a major metropolitan area, and her father was a lawyer. She would be the fifth sitting justice to fit that profile. She earned both her bachelor’s and law degrees at Harvard and would be the seventh justice with an Ivy League undergraduate degree and the eighth graduate of Harvard or Yale law school.
She clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer and would be the sixth justice to have served as a Supreme Court clerk. Two of her prospective colleagues, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, likewise succeeded the justices for whom they clerked. After clerking, Judge Jackson worked at an elite Washington law firm focusing on appellate litigation, as did five other current justices. She has served as a federal appellate judge, like every other justice but Elena Kagan, and would be the fourth justice from the District of Columbia Circuit. . . .
Studies consistently establish that more experientially diverse decision-making bodies tend to avoid groupthink, consider different and more innovative approaches, and then reach better decisions. Given that every justice is already a lawyer, it makes sense to try to diversify across other educational, geographic and experiential axes. This was the case historically, as Harvard graduates shared the bench with former politicians, law professors and even autodidacts with no formal education.
Yes, the Supreme Court should not be limited to the usual “judicial thoroughbreds.”
And I strongly recommend his new book, The Credentialed Court: Inside the Cloistered, Elite Supreme Court. He goes through the biography of every Supreme Court justice and argues — I think correctly — that in prior days the justices were not only more interesting people, but better judges.
Plus:
Mr. Biden may want to look closely at another name reportedly on his short list: Judge J. Michelle Childs. She’s a product of the Columbia, S.C., public school system who earned a scholarship to the University of South Florida and got her law degree at the University of South Carolina—both public institutions. She made partner at a Columbia law firm practicing labor and employment law and has worked in state government and served as a state and federal trial judge. Both she and Judge Jackson are highly qualified to serve on the court, but in terms of sheer diversity, Judge Childs has an advantage.
Childs is also championed by James Clyburn, who extracted Biden’s promist to appoint a black woman in exchange for his support in the Sourth Carolina primary.
FIGHT THE POWER: A reader sends this from Frederick, Maryland.
I HAD BEEN ASSURED IT WAS ONLY A HORSE DEWORMER: Rogan Vindicated? Ivermectin Shows ‘Antiviral Effect’ Against Omicron According to Japanese Study.
HMMM: BECERRA FIRST CABINET SECRETARY UNDER THE BUS?
If the latter was the real concern, then the White House would fire Rochelle Walensky and push Anthony Fauci into retirement. Becerra is apparently more expendable, although it’s not clear why. Becerra doesn’t have any significant background in health care, but that was the case when Biden picked him for this job, too.
That fact would make a Becerra dismissal for scapegoating a bit … complicated. Biden insisted on putting Becerra into that slot mainly to conduct lawfare against the pro-life movement through ObamaCare edicts, a move that generated plenty of criticism at the time. In the middle of a pandemic, people expected a true public-health expert to get chosen to run the nation’s COVID-19 response, not a former attorney general with a radical resumé. Becerra barely survived his confirmation vote at the time, and has done nothing to distinguish himself since. As early as last May, rumors began swirling about Becerra’s standing in the Biden administration.
However, Biden made the choice to appoint an unqualified political hack to run Health and Human Services. Dumping him now would be tantamount to a double confession: first that the pandemic response s been bungled, and second that Biden should never have appointed Becerra in the first place. Neither of those sound like a great way to distance Biden from the pandemic stench, even if he might get an opportunity to reset the response, maybe, if the White House allows a new HHS Secretary to run the policy him/herself.
Good to see the Biden camp finally beginning to agree with Rand Paul. Exit quote: “Are you a medical doctor?”
To be fair, that’s setting the bar pretty low.
Related: Where have we seen this before?
Hint: Not at any leftist protest.
Flashback: America’s elites are waging class war on workers and small biz. “Lockdowns — where the laptop class stays home while working-class people bring them stuff — were enacted in many states. States that had them did no better, and often worse, than states that did not. This became obvious early but resulted in no change of policy. . . . So is it fair to call the overclass response to the pandemic a failure? Well, certainly not for the overclass, whose members are richer, more powerful and more secure in their positions than a year ago. For America? Well, that’s another story.”
Related: The rich and powerful thrived as the rest of us suffered in the year of lockdowns.
Related: Trump is a symptom of a new kind of class warfare raging at home and abroad: “But the New Class isn’t limited to communist countries, really. Around the world in the postwar era, power was taken up by unelected professional and managerial elites. To understand what’s going on with President Donald Trump and his opposition, and in other countries as diverse as France, Hungary, Italy and Brazil, it’s important to realize that the post-World War II institutional arrangements of the Western democracies are being renegotiated, and that those democracies’ professional and managerial elites don’t like that very much, because they have done very well under those arrangements. And, like all elites who are doing very well, they don’t want that to change.”
Also: When Rulers Despise The Ruled. “If the rulers feel neither loyalty nor empathy toward the ruled, the ruled can be expected to return the favor.”
BREAKDOWN DEAD AHEAD: Amazon And Its Discontents. “Amazon is a modern wonder, but it relies on an affluent, law-abiding, high trust society to work properly. If law and order break down because thieves pay no price for stealing packages off your front porch, how does Amazon function?”
ARE YOU WITH THEM? Whistleblower at T-Mobile Releases Internal Emails: Get Jabbed or Get Lost!
BOOK RECOMMENDATION: Fixing You: Shoulder & Elbow Pain: Self-treatment for rotator cuff strain, shoulder impingement, tennis elbow, golfer’s elbow, and other diagnoses. CommissionEarned
CHINA: Xi Jinping Is Watching His Back.
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s image may be all over the news these days, but in real life, Xi has all but vanished from the world stage. Hunkering down in Beijing for more than 700 days, Xi was a no-show at last year’s United Nations General Assembly, the G-20 summit in Rome, and the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland. Xi’s disappearing act is occurring at the same time he and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) face serious domestic headwinds, including rampant energy shortages, rising unemployment, and a real estate market teetering on the edge of collapse.
Times have clearly changed since before the COVID-19 pandemic, when Xi confidently boasted about ushering in a new, China-centric global order. Xi’s refusal to go abroad clearly reflects his fervent desire to stay on top of any renewed coronavirus outbreaks, the second-order effects of which have paralyzed China’s industrial output. But the pandemic alone cannot explain Xi’s refusal to leave his seat of power—or to shelve, however temporarily, his grand international ambitions.
Instead, if Xi’s latest pronouncements are any indication, there is something else keeping him awake at night: growing fears about resistance to his rule from factions inside the CCP.
Put plainly, as China’s economy stumbles and its global standing tumbles, Xi is quickly realizing that after almost a decade in power, his demand for “absolute loyalty” within the CCP remains quixotic at best—and foolhardy at worst. And that is a major cause for concern less than 10 months before the CCP’s 20th Party Congress, when Xi is expected to assume a once unthinkable third term as the party’s general secretary.
…
Xi’s focus on regime security also carried over into remarks later in December before an audience that included nearly every member of the Politburo Standing Committee, China’s highest-level decision-making body. Xi asked that all those present take a pledge to protect the authority of the party’s centralized, unified leadership. Put another way, Xi demanded that the party’s leaders demonstrate their personal loyalty to him. On how many occasions have Standing Committee members repeated this same pledge in recent years? Countless times, for sure. More puzzling is why Xi must constantly hear them declare it in public if, as he so defiantly claims, his political future is all but assured?
…
The simple explanation for Xi’s refusal to leave China and his recent, over-the-top loyalty push is that Xi recognizes he is increasingly vulnerable.
“One-man rule” also means there’s only one man to blame when things go wrong — something every would-be one-man ruler seems to forget along their quest for total power.
GLENN GREENWALD: The Pressure Campaign on Spotify to Remove Joe Rogan Reveals the Religion of Liberals: Censorship.
Given the climate prevailing in the American liberal faction, this authoritarianism is anything but surprising. For those who convince themselves that they are not battling mere political opponents with a different ideology but a fascist movement led by a Hitler-like figure bent on imposing totalitarianism — a core, defining belief of modern-day Democratic Party politics — it is virtually inevitable that they will embrace authoritarianism. When a political movement is subsumed by fear — the Orange Hitler will put you in camps and end democracy if he wins again* — then it is not only expected but even rational to embrace authoritarian tactics including censorship to stave off this existential threat. Fear always breeds authoritarianism, which is why manipulating and stimulating that human instinct is the favorite tactic of political demagogues.
And when it comes to authoritarian tactics, censorship has become the liberals’ North Star. Every week brings news of a newly banished heretic. Liberals cheered the news last week that Google’s YouTube permanently banned the extremely popular video channel of conservative commentator Dan Bongino. His permanent ban was imposed for the crime of announcing that, moving forward, he would post all of his videos exclusively on the free speech video platform Rumble after he received a seven-day suspension from Google’s overlords for spreading supposed COVID “disinformation.” What was Bongino’s prohibited view that prompted that suspension? He claimed cloth masks do not work to stop the spread of COVID, a view shared by numerous experts and, at least in part, by the CDC. When Bongino disobeyed the seven-day suspension by using an alternative YouTube channel to announce his move to Rumble, liberals cheered Google’s permanent ban because the only thing liberals hate more than platforms that allow diverse views are people failing to obey rules imposed by corporate authorities.
It is not hyperbole to observe that there is now a concerted war on any platforms devoted to free discourse and which refuse to capitulate to the demands of Democratic politicians and liberal activists to censor. The spear of the attack are corporate media outlets, who demonize and try to render radioactive any platforms that allow free speech to flourish. When Rumble announced that a group of free speech advocates — including myself, former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, comedian Bridget Phetasy, former Sanders campaign videographer Matt Orfalea and journalist Zaid Jilani — would produce video content for Rumble, The Washington Post immediately published a hit piece, relying exclusively on a Google-and-Facebook-aligned so-called “disinformation expert” to malign Rumble as “one of the main platforms for conspiracy communities and far-right communities in the U.S. and around the world” and a place “where conspiracies thrive,” all caused by Rumble’s “allowing such videos to remain on the site unmoderated.” (The narrative about Rumble is particular bizarre since its Canadian founder and still-CEO, Chris Pavlovski created Rumble in 2013 with apolitical goals — to allow small content creators abandoned by YouTube to monetize their content — and is very far from an adherent to right-wing ideology).
Flashback: Beyond the Culture of Repudiation. “In all of his political writings, [the late Roger Scruton] takes on the Left for scorning existing norms and customs, and for promoting a ‘culture of repudiation.’ The Left is ‘negative.’ It dismisses ‘every aspect of our cultural capital’ with the language of brutal invective: accusing every defender of human nature and sound tradition of ‘racism,’ ‘xenophobia,’ ‘homophobia,’ and ‘sexism.’ Like 1984’s ‘two minutes of hate,’ this language tears down, intimidates, and can never build anything humane or constructive—it is nihilistic to the core. At the same time, Scruton wants to reach out to reasonable liberals who eschew ideology and who still believe in civility and the promise of national belonging. His conservatism can discern the truth in liberalism (another Aristotelian trait) while the partisans of repudiation see half the human race as enemies.”
* I’m so old I can remember when Naomi Wolf at the Huffington Post screamed in September of 2008 that it would be John McCain and Sarah “Evita” Palin who would usher in “the Rovian Police State:”
Please understand what you are looking at when you look at Sarah “Evita” Palin. You are looking at the designated muse of the coming American police state.
You have to understand how things work in a closing society in order to understand “Palin Power.” A gang or cabal seizes power, usually with an affable, weak figurehead at the fore. Then they will hold elections — but they will make sure that the election will be corrupted and that the next affable, weak figurehead is entirely in their control.
Um, thanks for letting us “understand” how things work, Naomi. And from here, she regales us with a strong dose of melodrama:
I realized early on with horror what I was seeing in Governor Palin: the continuation of the Rove-Cheney cabal, but this time without restraints. I heard her echo Bush 2000 soundbites (“the heart of America is on display”) and realized Bush’s speechwriters were writing her — not McCain’s — speeches. I heard her tell George Bush’s lies — not McCain’s — to the American people, linking 9/11 to Iraq. I heard her make fun of Barack Obama for wanting to prevent the torture of prisoners — this is Rove-Cheney’s enthusiastic S and M, not McCain’s, who, though he shamefully colluded in the 2006 Military Tribunals Act, is also a former prisoner of war and wrote an eloquent Newsweek piece in 2005 opposing torture. I saw that she was even styled by the same skillful stylist (neutral lipstick, matte makeup, dark colors) who turned Katharine Harris from a mall rat into a stateswoman and who styles all the women in the Bush orbit –but who does not bother to style Cindy McCain.
Wolf continues to wave her magic butterfly net with yet more inadvertently comedic gems:
...She uses mafia tactics against critics, like the police commissioner who was railroaded for opposing handguns in Alaskan battered women’s shelters — Rove’s style, not McCain’s…
…Reports confirmed my suspicions: Palin, not McCain, is the FrankenBarbie of the Rove-Cheney cabal…
…I believe the Rove-Cheney cabal is using Sarah Palin as a stalking horse, an Evita figure, to put a popular, populist face on the coming police state and be the talk show hostess for the end of elections as we know them. If McCain-Palin get in, this will be the last true American election. She will be working for Halliburton, KBR, Rove and Cheney into the foreseeable future…
Just do a CTL-F and swap out the names, and you’ll have an excellent preview of how the left viewed former President Trump. The Evita references are particularly nostalgic, considering AOC’s embrace of Peron’s legacy in 2019:
4CHAN PRANK CONTINUES TO BEAR FRUIT: U. Nebraska revises mascot to avoid perception of ‘white supremacy.’
THE DARK KNIGHT RISES WASN’T A HOW-TO GUIDE FOR GOOD GOVERNMENT: Seattle Officials Drafted Legislation to Hand Over Police Building to BLM Rioters in June 2020.
Former Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan’s administration drafted legislation in June 2020 that would have transferred the police department’s East Precinct building to a Black Lives Matter organization, the Seattle Times reported on Sunday.
The legislation was drafted by the Department of Finance and Administrative Services around the same time that protesters calling to defund the police converged on the East Precinct in the wake of riots over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
On June 8, 2020, FAS director Calvin Goings emailed three memos and a draft resolution to transfer the East Precinct building to the non-profit Black Lives Matter Seattle–King County. That same day, Seattle police officers boarded up the windows of the East Precinct building and evacuated the premises.
Following the evacuation, activists set up an “autonomous zone” in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, which was cleared by police on July 1 following a series of shootings in the area. Then-police chief Carmen Best slammed the decision to evacuate the building, saying it prevented the department from responding to 911 calls in the vicinity.
Here’s an artist’s recreation of how the proposed transfer of power would have taken place:
BLUE CITY BLUES: Shoplifting kills a Rite Aid — and maybe Manhattan’s comeback chances.
The pharmacy, on 8th Avenue and 50th Street, will close Feb. 8. Last week, it was effectively already shuttered, with most of the store cordoned off with gates. Just a small, strange assortment — children’s coloring books jumbled with vitamins — was marooned on front shelves on “clearance.”
The clearance prices were ironic — because the reason the Rite Aid is closing is mass-scale shoplifting. As The Post reported last week, the shop lost $200,000 in goods in two months.
This store’s workers have had a rough two years. In June 2020 — the summer of “peaceful protests” — the shop suffered looting. The windows were broken and $60,000 worth of drugs stolen.
The Rite Aid was then completely covered in plywood for days.
Since then, the store’s workers — mostly people of color — have suffered the strain of constant disorder.
Related: NY Gov. Hochul issues warning to Manhattan DA: ‘I have options.’
A CHANCE TO HELP CANCEL CANCEL CULTURE: The New Tolerance Campaign is inviting people to contact Georgetown Law dean William Treanor and urge him to stand up to a textbook cancellation campaign by keeping Ilya Shapiro, who sent what he admits was an “inartful” tweet criticizing Biden’s promise to limit his Supreme Court search to black women and exclude males and people of other races from consideration, regardless of qualification. You can learn more in FIRE’s letter to Dean Treanor, too.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Related: “So, basically, people are talking about firing Ilya Shapiro for expressing a sentiment held by most Americans, most non-white Americans, and most Democrats, because it’s too right-wing I guess.”
MATT MARGOLIS: Biden’s ‘Anger’ Over High Insulin Prices Is Fake, Here’s Why. “Because he is responsible for it.”
FINALLY A REAL WORKING-CLASS REVOLT AGAINST THE MAN, AND THE LEFT HATES IT: Canadian truckers send Trudeau into hiding — and just might help end COVID mandates.
You’ve heard of Hidin’ Biden. Our neighbor to the north, my native land, just outdid that with Cut-and-Run Justin.
With the pandemic in full swing, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau urged Canadians to show support for those helping to keep food on their tables. “While many of us are working from home, there are others who aren’t able to do that — like the truck drivers who are working day and night to make sure our shelves are stocked. So when you can, please #ThankATrucker for everything they’re doing and help them however you can,” he tweeted March 31, 2020.
Trudeau had a chance to thank thousands of them personally over the weekend, as the truckers who’ve assembled what they call the Freedom Convoy to protest COVID vaccine mandates and restrictions cruised into the capital. Instead, he fled — breaking isolation to do it.
Covid rules are for the little people, which is one of the things the truckers are unhappy about.
Trudeau should stop worrying about the truckers coming, and start worrying about what happens if they don’t.
Meanwhile the press, as usual, sides with power and against the people:
Disdainful media, of course, spent days warning of violence to come and searched supporters’ messages for evidence of racism. “ ‘So many angry people’: Experts say online conversation around trucker convoy veering into dangerous territory” read a CTV News headline. CBC, Canada’s PBS and NPR, called Saturday’s protest “a raucous demonstration that has police on high alert for possible violence even as organizers urge the crowd to be peaceful.” Police said that night that “no incidents of violence or injuries” were reported and no protesters faced charges.
The elite media also paint the protesters as stupid hicks, claiming they don’t understand that provincial governments all have restrictions that Ottawa can do nothing about. But Saskatchewan premier Scott Moe told truckers he supports their “call to end the cross border ban on unvaccinated truckers” and announced his government will soon “be ending our proof of negative test/proof of vaccination policy in Saskatchewan.”
Because that’s what the press does nowadays.
UPDATE: Heh:
CHARMING: NYC teacher calls for vehicular attack on mourning NYPD officers. “Unfortunately, not everyone was feeling the spirit of paying tribute to the life of the officer who was murdered during a cowardly ambush. One New York City public school teacher took to Instagram and posted a suggestion that someone might want to take a vehicle and plow into the sea of police officers. Christopher Flanigan, a math teacher in Brooklyn, received an immediate response and is probably wishing he’d kept his opinions to himself about now.”