TAXPAYER-FUNDED INDOCTRINATION AT WORK: SURVEY: Less than one quarter of students have a positive view of capitalism.
It’s entirely possible that higher education as an industry destroys more intellectual value than it creates. In fact, I’d say it’s quite likely.
BIDEN CRIME FAMILY UPDATE: Biden’s narrative on never discussing business deals with Hunter continues to crumble.
There’s nothing new in this report but it’s the first I’ve seen that details the whole damning history dating back to Biden’s time as Barack Obama’s veep.
TO NOBODY’S SURPRISE: Costs for President Joe Biden’s 2021 executive order calling for an EV conversion of the federal government’s non-military vehicle fleet of cars and trucks are soaring and the projected 13-year process is only in year two, according to a GAO report.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Democrats’ Desperate Biden Options—Basement or Replacement. “Now that Sir Sniffsalot has committed to running for reelection, it appears that some of his sycophants are belatedly realizing that — when it comes to their guy — there is no ‘there’ there anymore. Not that there was much there even in Biden’s prime.”
NOW THEY TELL US: Nate Silver: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources —including scientists. “Here’s the scandal. In March 2020, a group of scientists — in particular1, Kristian G. Andersen the of The Scripps Research Institute, Andrew Rambaut of The University of Edinburgh, Edward C. Holmes of the University of Sydney, and Robert F. Garry of Tulane University — published a paper in Nature Medicine that seemingly contradicted their true beliefs about COVID’s origins and which they knew to be misleading. . . . In the Slack and email messages, the authors worked to manipulate the media narrative about COVID-19’s origins and to ensure that their private uncertainty wasn’t conveyed in conversations with reporters. They also thought they were going to get away with it.”
Plus:
The COVID origins story has also been a journalistic fiasco, with the lab leak having been dismissed as a “conspiracy theory” and as misinformation even though many prominent scientists believed it to be plausible all along. Perhaps it’s tempting to give the media a pass — they were manipulated by the “Proximal Origin” authors, after all. But I’m not inclined to, for two reasons.
First, the coverage of the recently leaked emails and Slack messages at major center-left outlets like The New York Times has been pathetic. The Times portrayed Andersen as the victim of a Republican witch-hunt — rather than someone at the center of a major scientific scandal of his own making.
And second, journalists ought to have decent bullshit detectors — including toward scientists, academics and other experts.
Related: Elite Journalists Love Big Brother: Prominent reporters and powerful officials know each other, share attitudes, and trust each other. Even Nate Silver says so: “I also think journalists are more prone toward being manipulated by bad apples in academia and science than they were ten or twenty years ago. As a result of increasing educational polarization, both journalists and the expert class of scientists and academics are far more aligned politically than they once were (the very large majority are left-of-center and vote Democratic in American elections).”
It’s one of the problems posed by a ruling class monoculture, especially when the ruling class has gone crazy.
DEAL OF THE DAY: First Alert 9120B Smoke Detector. #CommissionEarned
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Our society’s ‘top brains’ have gone mad — and dysfunctional politics is the result.
BIDEN CRIME FAMILY UPDATE: Hunter Biden’s gallery sold his art to a Democratic donor ‘friend’ who Joe Biden named to a prestigious commission.
That buyer, Insider can reveal, is Elizabeth Hirsh Naftali, a Los Angeles real estate investor and philanthropist. Hirsh Naftali is influential in California Democratic circles and is a significant Democratic donor who has given $13,414 to the Biden campaign and $29,700 to the Democratic National Campaign Committee this year. In 2022, she hosted a fundraiser headlined by Vice President Kamala Harris.
Insider also obtained internal documents from Hunter Biden’s gallery showing that a single buyer purchased $875,000 of his art. The documents do not indicate the buyer’s identity, which is also unknown to Insider at this time.
In July 2022, eight months after Hunter Biden’s first art opening, Joe Biden announced Hirsh Naftali’s appointment to the Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad. It is unclear whether Hirsh’s purchase of Hunter Biden’s artwork occurred before or after that appointment. Membership on the commission is an unpaid position that is often filled by campaign donors, family members, and political allies — the same crowd that often winds up with US ambassadorial appointments. Hirsh Naftali’s fundraising activities mark her as the kind of well-connected donor who often wins such appointments, regardless of any relationship they might have with the president’s family. But they do not address the possibility that Hunter Biden might have voiced his support for her appointment.
Or maybe Joe was in on the phone calls and didn’t need to be told.
IMPERIAL JAPAN’S ATOMIC BOMB PROJECT: How far along did it get?
POLITICO’S MASCULINITY ISSUE: UNINTENDED PARODY. “All the essays are written by women. Every single one.” “Politico chose a cadre of feminists to sneer at the idea that men literally dying younger and younger, falling behind in schools, no longer going to college, and dropping out of society and relationships is a bad thing. Girl power! It’s disgusting.”
Plus: “Men are doing worse? Good! I don’t like men! One has to wonder whether a single editor at Politico looked at their list of authors and thought: hmm, maybe when discussing masculinity we should ask a man’s opinion? Naah. Why would we?”
Well, Politico is basically Buzzfeed now. And we know about Buzzfeed and masculinity.
FINALLY: THE LEGENDARY MSNBC/OBJECTIVIST CROSSOVER EPISODE! Earth to Crazy MSNBC, The Guardian: Was JFK a ‘Fascist Fitness’ Zealot?
You can’t make it up. Some leftist media sites are so desperate to find fascism under every rock that they’ll even find it at the gym.
Over there at MSNBC the other day was this gem proclaiming that “Pandemic fitness trends have gone extreme — literally.” It reads in part this
Physical fitness has always been central to the far right. In Mein Kampf, Hitler fixated on boxing and jujitsu, believing they could help him create an army of millions whose aggressive spirit and impeccably trained bodies, combined with ‘fanatical love of the fatherland,’ would do more for the German nation than any ‘mediocre’ tactical weapons training.
Catch that first line? Again, it was this: “Physical fitness has always been central to the far right.” Then they went right to Hitler.
Ayn Rand smiles: Editor Bennett Cerf “suggested that some of Rand’s speeches and articles from her newsletter could be repackaged as a stand-alone volume. In response Rand proposed a new book, titled The Fascist New Frontier, after her essay of the same name. Originally enthusiastic about the project, Cerf grew increasingly uncomfortable with the book’s title as he tried unsuccessfully to rouse the interest of his sales staff.”
ANNALS OF FAUX OUTRAGE: Jason Aldean Isn’t ‘Pro-Lynching.’ And His Critics Know It.
Well of course not, that was always a Democrat thing.
THIS IS AN IMPORTANT ISSUE: “Hispanic-Serving Institutions and Emerging Constitutional Issues.” As far as I can see, the constitutional issue is pretty easy as these things go: The program is unconstitutional; it encourages illegal discrimination in admissions; and it needs to be terminated. The article (written by Alex Heideman, one of my former special assistants) provides some useful background.
THE NCLA HAS FILED AN AMICUS BRIEF asking the Supreme Court to formally overrule the Chevron decision. The Court has kinda sorta done so already, but not quite explicitly.
Disclosure/reminder: I’m on the advisory board of NCLA.
HOLIDAYS IN HELL: Meet the tourists who are choosing to holiday in Afghanistan.
“To be honest, a major part of going on the trip was that I was bored as f— at my desk job doing nine to five, five days a week,” mulls Callum Darragh, a 26-year-old office worker from Swindon, Wiltshire. “Maybe it was a slight overreaction to the mundanity of modern life, but there we are. We turned up in Kabul after 40 hours, on four different flights, and when we landed it was kind of terrifying because you see the Taliban posters and whatnot and then you think to yourself, ‘What the hell have I done?’.”
Callum spent two-and-a-half weeks in Afghanistan in August last year, and is one of a growing number of Westerners who are travelling to the country for tourism. The Taliban government is keen for more to come — no surprise when the 7,000 tourists it claims have visited since it took power in August 2021, have brought with them £6.2m of crucial foreign exchange.
The country remains dependent on aid worth £3.5bn annually and a Taliban crackdown on poppy farming is set to decimate the £1bn opium industry. “As we can see in other countries, tourism can bring in a lot of revenue,” Mohammad Nabi Baha, director of the government’s tourist board, candidly told The Times.
To be honest, I think I’ll stick a more traditional tourist destination this year: What I Saw in Iran –a Free Beacon journey to the birthplace of Valerie Jarrett.
ENERGY: A Vast Untapped Green Energy Source Is Hiding Beneath Your Feet. “New experiments in the deserts of Utah and Nevada show how advances in fracking — technology developed by the oil industry — can be repurposed to tap clean geothermal energy anywhere on Earth.”
Right now, Speyrer’s equipment is about 8,500 feet below us, or about 2 percent of the way through that layer, where the heat is already so great that every extra foot, every extra inch, is a hard-won victory. Down there, any liquid you pumped in would become, as Speyrer puts it, hot enough to deep fry a turkey. “Imagine that splashing you,” he says. At that temperature, about 450 degrees Fahrenheit (228 degrees Celsius) his gear can start having problems. Electronics fail. Bearings warp. Hundreds of thousands dollars worth of equipment might go down a borehole, and if it breaks down there, make sure it doesn’t get stuck. In that case, best to just plug that hole, which probably cost millions to drill, tally up your losses, and move on.
Even when things are going well down there, it’s hard to know from up here on the Earth’s surface. “It’s frustrating as hell,” says Joseph Moore, a geologist at the University of Utah, as he watches the halting movements of a 160-foot-tall rig through a trailer window. It’s a cool day in 2022, in a remote western Utah county named Beaver, a breeze whipping off the Mineral Mountains toward hog farms and wind turbines on the valley floor below. The rig looks much like any oil and gas installation dotting the American West. But there are no hydrocarbons in the granite below us, only heat.
Since 2018, Moore has led a $220 million bet by the US Department of Energy (DOE), called FORGE, or the Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy, that this heat can be harnessed to produce electricity in most parts of the world.
It’s always fascinating to watch the left to backflip to gushing about practices like fracking — which was once going to destroy entire ecosystems or something — as soon as they can be harnessed for the left’s goals.
BAD SCIENCE GETS REWARDED: Stanford’s president is not the only researcher pushing unfounded and incorrect conclusions.
Some of these things were said recently, when the Stanford University president resigned to spend more time doing research (which, ironically, was the problem).
Yet, these same people routinely use false studies to push for conclusions they like. In fact, the majority of scientists conduct research that is false, not useful or not helpful. Only a tiny fraction of scientists stick to true and useful.
While fraud is the worst conduct— using false studies to support your views is hardly better. The Figure illustrates the spectrum of bad science from Fraud to Truth. Let me give some examples of people using bad science to further their agenda, and argue for strategies to solve the problem.
Just in the last two years, we have seen bad science repeated widely.
Black doctors have half the risk of death when they care for black babies vs white doctors. That is an incredible claim, and the underlying PNAS paper is completely flawed, as I explain in the link. Sadly the flawed study was cited in the dissenting opinion of the Supreme Court.
During the pandemic, public health ‘experts’ amplified flawed mask studies and, those who routinely promoted flawed studies or flawed interpretations were bizarrely promoted to public health dean.
Much more at the link. Related: Retract “Proximal Origin?” No, says Nature Medicine editor.
We now have contemporaneous Slack messages and emails where the authors not only express doubts that what they were writing was true, but that prove they thought that the claim they were making–that COVID arose naturally without human interference and that it spread from an animal to a human being via natural processes–was likely not true. . . .
There is now a near consensus that at the very least a lab leak is quite plausible, which has raised the question: why hasn’t Nature Medicine, the journal that published this paper that spawned a million censorships, looked into retracting the paper given its clear contradiction with both reality and with the now apparent opinions of the authors as they wrote the paper?
If the authors lied in the paper, shouldn’t it be retracted?
No. Because Nature Medicine is now rewriting history. The editor now claims that the paper wasn’t research at all, but an expression of an opinion. Just a “point of view.” It wasn’t definitive research, but an Op/Ed or something.
Also related: CDC boss’ utterly laughable exit warning on politicized ‘science.’
OUT ON A LIMB: What if we hadn’t bombed Hiroshima? Oppenheimer doesn’t need to ask.
As the name suggests, Christopher Nolan’s latest blockbuster, Oppenheimer, is not a meta-commentary on the Red Scare or the complexities of geopolitical game theory. It does not dig into the moral dilemma Harry Truman, who, as vice president, had no idea the Manhattan Project even existed, faced when FDR died, forcing the former to deliberate on whether the Allies should drop the atomic bomb.
And yet, for some reason, some critics are livid that the film Oppenheimer is about the lived experience of J. Robert Oppenheimer and not a diatribe about American imperialism, the suffering of the Japanese, or a complex moral calculus of why we were justified or not in dropping the Fat Man and the Little Boy. Here’s a brief sampling of the dregs of the dullards.
There’s one name missing from Tiana Lowe Doescher’s roundup: Does any country hate itself like America?
For example, the new film “Oppenheimer,” a movie that examines the individuals and events leading to the development of the atomic bomb during WWII, has sparked a renewed public discussion of America’s use of those bombs on the Japanese Empire. To be sure, there is a legitimate, nuanced, academic debate about Truman’s decision. But to see this hairbrained proposition from two years ago resurface, despite the fact that it is found nowhere in the extensive literature or historical record of the bomb controversy, is depressing:
In case you don’t recognize her, that’s Nikole Hannah-Jones, a woman paid by the nation’s “newspaper of record,” The New York Times, to write about history. Our history. She rose to prominence with another wildly anti-American narrative called the 1619 Project that claimed in its original release to, “reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding.” The point was simple: the evil of slavery was the real story of American history, and everything else we have been led to believe is a lie.
Historians systematically debunked the core of Hannah-Jones’ work, to the point that she virulently denies her original claim, now stating her work, “doesn’t argue, for obvious reasons, that 1619 is our true founding.”
Yet despite the intellectual embarrassment that this “project” became, the Times continues to prop up Hannah-Jones’ faux history, even as she has demonstrated little ability to offer anything meaningful beyond easily-disproven, anti-American claims. Consider, her lie about the atomic bomb.
- Historians debate the accuracy of Truman’s estimated casualty figures – both American and Japanese – should the war have continued without the use of the bomb.
- Historians debate whether the use of the bomb was primarily an attempt to intimidate the Soviets.
- Historians note from broken Japanese code that they were preparing for significant defense of the home islands in the fall of 1945.
- Historians note that not only did the Japanese not surrender after the dropping of the Hiroshima bomb, there was an internal coup (the Kyūjō incident) in Japan to try to prevent surrender even after Nagasaki.
In other words, Nikole Hannah-Jones had, once again, simply made something up and pretended it was credible history. Yet she got to keep her job, to cash a paycheck, to conduct television interviews, to receive academic awards, and more. Why? Because she hates her country?
Is that not just weird?
The above tweet, coupled with Hannah-Jones’ thoughts on Europe should make any WWII history book she deigns to write an amazing read!
JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: A look at gloomy, dystopian Generation Z: Our education system is failing them.
Is failing, has failed.
NORMALLY I RUN A PROMO POST (AND VIGNETTE CHALLENGE) ON SUNDAYS, BUT THIS WEEK IT GOT BUMPED TO MONDAY: Book Promo and Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.
COMMANDER SALAMANDER: This is a Navy.
The people ostensibly running ours need to be reminded what one does.
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