MOVE ALONG, NOTHING TO SEE HERE: Hunter Biden’s gallery sold his art to a Democratic donor ‘friend’ who Joe Biden named to a prestigious commission.
Archive for 2023
July 24, 2023
ROBERT GRABOYES ON ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL: “Alexander Graham Bell is an exemplar of how experts and geniuses can simultaneously do unimaginable good and unspeakable harm, all with the best of intentions. In 1876, Bell introduced the world’s first practicable telephone, bringing the whole world into intimate contact as never before. In that same period, he successfully demanded worldwide changes in the teaching of deaf students and, in so doing, ruined their educations, communities, and lives for nearly a century. Decades later, he feared the raging excesses of eugenics while continuing to lend his name and prestige to that movement—just as it ramped up its agenda of forced sterilizations, rigid segregation, restricted immigration, and state control over who could marry whom. For me, Bell’s story offers profound lessons concerning the state of American education in 2023.”
WHOM THE GODS WOULD DESTROY, THEY FIRST MAKE RIDICULOUS: How to Kill the Incompetocracy: Ruling class legitimacy is built on academic prestige. That’s a fatal weakness ripe for disruption.
As I’ve written before, the ruling class ultimately derives its assumed right to rule from the prestige of academic institutions. The idea is that the smartest kids are admitted to the best schools, where they’re taught by the top minds in the sciences, philosophy, law, medicine, and the arts. They therefore possess both the highest degree of natural aptitude, and have been provided with the best possible training, meaning that they are naturally the most suited to take society’s reigns. As a result, the most powerful institutions recruit primarily from these top universities, meaning that the top universities are the gatekeepers to power. Once one has obtained a degree from the right school, and as long as one does not rock the boat too much, the doors to the halls of power open, and the money follows.
If it worked properly, it would be quite noble. The problem is, it doesn’t. . . .
Credentials are meant to serve a crucial social function. They’re supposed to be a guarantee that a potential employee or professional has mastered the skills for which his services are being retained. When you walk into a doctor’s office, you don’t want to spend three hours grilling him on his knowledge of molecular biology and skeletal anatomy; you want to assume he knows his stuff, so you can get on with the business of figuring out whether or why you’re sick and what to do about it. The credential outsources professional quality control to a third party, making it easier for both of you to conduct business. . . .
At some point over the last generation, the ruling class shifted its emphasis from competence to ideological loyalty. Some degree of indoctrination was always a factor, of course, but until recently the idea was to take the smartest recruits you could find, and then make them loyal. That was the purpose of the Rhodes scholarships, for instance. It was widely understood that while you needed your leadership cadre to be team players, it was absolutely crucial that they also be good at what they do. In practice, that meant sacrificing a certain degree of unity of purpose, because smart, ruthless people also tend to be independent-minded and outspoken. Still, whatever amount of friction that was caused by the ruling class sometimes operating at cross-purposes with itself was more than compensated for by the competitive advantages of a truly meritorious elite.
It doesn’t work that way anymore. Now, entrance into the top schools depends far less on grades, which is to say far less on ability, and more far on ideological purity. The ruling class has prioritized loyalty above all else.
Absolutely. My Post column for tomorrow sounds a similar theme.
Plus:
The result is the incompetocracy: a ruling class exhibiting near perfect unity of rigidly disciplined ideological purpose, able to move in synch with one another like a school of hungry piranhas, but composed of unimpressive cretins who are individually incapable of doing whatever task is assigned to them.
Look at Biden’s train wreck of a regime. These people all attended the best schools. I wrote that last sentence without actually knowing, I just assumed it was probably true, but sure enough: the new press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, went to a Long Island prep school, and has a master’s degree from Columbia. Despite that, she’s barely able to string enough coherent words together to form a half-convincing deception. The mumbling non-entity of a Secretary of State Antony Blinken is a Harvard man, which is no defense against being regularly humiliated by his international counterparts. Treasury Secretary Yellen attended Brown and got her PhD from Yale, which does nothing at all to stop shortages and inflation from nuking the economy. Attorney-General Merrick Garland has a law degree from Harvard, and presides over a steady dissolution in the rule of law. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is a Rhodes Scholar. And so on and so forth. They’re an impressively credentialed group of people, but the country is rotting like a dead raccoon on the highway.
Look at the total failure of the public health system over the last two years, the absolute pointless nightmare we’ve all lived through, and are still living through.
They really are almost incomprehensibly awful.
Plus:
So long as membership into the ruling class is regulated by admission to top universities, however, the ruling class can’t be changed, because the universities are specifically designed to make sure that only the ideologically pure can get through. It’s a cozy relationship they’ve got and none of them have any intention of changing it.
Therefore, we need to break the monopoly of the universities.
Since the universities don’t sell education, but credentials, we need a new system of credentialing.
We do, and we’re seeing more competency-based hiring starting to appear. Not at the top, of course, but disruptors usually start at the bottom and work their way up.
And despite my long excerpts, click through and read the whole thing.
MICROBIOME NEWS: Hardship affects the gut microbiome across generations. “Hardship experienced by mothers during their own childhood or during pregnancy is reflected in the composition of their 2-year-old children’s gut microbiomes, reports an international team of scientists led by UCLA psychologists. The researchers found small to medium changes in the children’s microbiomes. The research is the first to document the transgenerational effects of adversity on the human gut microbiome.”
OLD AND BUSTED: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
The New Hotness? Students—Including Most Conservative Ones—Now Want Their Professors Censored.
Flashback: Freddie deBoer’s Planet of Cops. “The woke world is a world of snitches, informants, rats. Go to any space concerned with social justice and what will you find? Endless surveillance. Everybody is to be judged. Everyone is under suspicion. Everything you say is to be scoured, picked over, analyzed for any possible offense. Everyone’s a detective in the Division of Problematics, and they walk the beat 24/7. You search and search for someone Bad doing Bad Things, finding ways to indict writers and artists and ordinary people for something, anything. That movie that got popular? Give me a few hours and 800 words. I’ll get you your indictments. That’s what liberalism is, now — the search for baddies doing bad things, like little offense archaeologists, digging deeper and deeper to find out who’s Good and who’s Bad. I wonder why people run away from establishment progressivism in droves.”
I BELIEVE IT’S CALLED WINTER COLD-AND-FLU SEASON: Ready for another ‘tripledemic’? CDC prepares for a winter of ‘3 bugs out there.’
THE LEFT GOES CRAZY ANYTIME IT LOSES MONOPOLY CONTROL OF AN UNDEMOCRATIC INSTITUTION: Israel Passes Judicial Reform In Face Of Mass Left-Wing Protests.
And then screams about the “end of democracy.”
NO THANKS, I’M STILL SOCIAL DISTANCING: Enter the Barbie Longhouse.
Spoiler alert: Lots of spoilers abound in this review. Beware!
I walked out of the Barbie movie stunned and in disbelief. Hollywood darling Greta Gerwig, the scowling girlboss writer-director of this guaranteed smash-hit, has somehow made the first movie explicitly set inside the Longhouse.
And she did it totally by accident.
What a time to be alive!
The Longhouse Dreamhouse
If you are still confused about what the “longhouse” is, the Barbie movie is here to set you straight.
To Greta Gerwig and her heavily longhoused life partner and cowriter Noah Baumbach, the feminist Longhouse is good, actually. It’s the only thing keeping men—and Ken—in their place. Greta and her doll-alter-ego are still, always, forever, fighting the mythological patriarchy from the privilege and safety of their Dreamhouses.
She seems totally oblivious of the fact that in modern-day Hollywood, just like in Barbieland, girls rule. Men, and Kens, are firmly in the backseat. Ms. Gerwig and her girlboss sisterhood are riding high.Gerwig is the most in-demand writer of the last decade. And yet—she is also somehow the victim of the patriarchy. This movie is her great Airing of the Grievances.
* * * * * * * *
The last scene is the newly human Barbie, in Santa Monica, wearing Birkenstocks instead of high heels, arriving at a doctor’s office. The receptionist asks her who she’s there to see. Barbie, now calling herself Barbara Handler, says with a gleeful smile, “My gynecologist!”
Cut, roll credits.Gynocracy, take a bow!
In another accidentally based twist, what makes Barbie a woman is having a vagina—paging Matt Walsh!
In the sequel, Depo-Provera Barbie and her uparmored sterilized innards will be living her best life on Tinder, going to Burning Man, attending Planned Parenthood rallies and abortion marches.
All she’s missing in the end is her Mattel-branded pink pussy hat.
And as Glenn noted yesterday. “In trying to make Barbie a feminist hero, they made Ken a Chad idol…Call it the Gordon Gekko effect, where the villain gets the most memorable lines. Or maybe the Colonel Jessup effect.” I saw Oppenheimer yesterday, and was amused by the number of women — and a few men — dressed in pink on their way to see Barbie. I’ll be curious to see what its next weeks of business are like.
As for Oppenheimer, the scenes set at Los Alamos are riveting, the Trinity explosion spectacular, and spectacularly loud, and the various show trial scenes a bit numbing as they shifted from color to black and white, and ran long after the A-bomb explosion, deliberately making it anti-climactic, a very Kubrickian choice. As Kubrick once told an interviewer, “if you end a story with somebody achieving his aim it always seems to me to have a kind of incompleteness about it, because that almost seems to be the beginning of another story. One of the things I like most about John Ford is the anticlimax endings — anticlimax upon anticlimax and you just get a feeling that you are seeing life and you accept the thing.”
READER FAVORITE: TMA Cordless Vacuum Cleaner. #CommissionEarned
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Elon Musk Rebrands Twitter As ‘X’ After CEO Rejects His First Choice ’69Boobies420.’
TRANSPARENCY: FBI ‘Still Analyzing’ Another Killer’s Manifesto The Public Will Likely Never See.
We know what it means when they say they may never know the motive.
TO WHICH THE LEFT SAYS, MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: Solar Panels Don’t Really Help the Environment, but They Do Help Our Enemies.
COLORADO: Proposed ballot measure mandates violent offenders serve most of prison time prior to parole.
Michael Fields, President of Advance Colorado is currently pursuing a ballot initiative for 2024 that would mandate violent offenders serve a large percentage of their sentence before being released back into the public.
Fields said his initiative is the result of a 2021 crime in which Kenneth Dean Lee was arrested for impersonating an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent to an Aurora family and then sexually assaulting their 7-year-old daughter while they were in the home.
At the time of his arrest, Lee was on parole for similar crimes he committed a decade earlier. For those crimes, Lee was sentenced to 23 years to life but was released after serving nine and half years, or just 40 percent of his sentence.
If passed, Initiative 71 — which it is known as for now — would force violent offenders to serve most of their sentences, possibly lowering the recidivism rates and reducing crime in Colorado, Fields said.
Locking up violent offenders — it just might work!
THE WAPO’S GOT A FEVAH, AND IT NEEDS MORE COWBELL JASON ALDEAN! The Washington Post would like to endlessly wokesplain Jason Aldean’s EXTREMELY CONTROVERSIAL song “Try That in a Small Town” so let’s explore their offerings:
The Washington Post likes nothing better than a juicy scandal involving racist white supremacists being all supremacisty, and if there aren’t any, why, they’ll just make one up!
And so, over the course of three days we have no fewer than six pieces in WaPo in which a thoroughly innocuous paean to small-town values is magically transformed into a racist pro-lynching white supremacist anthem.
To accomplish this feat of wizardry requires you go all-in, and did they ever.
This was all hands on deck swarm reporting. It’s as if they were already making room on their shelves for their next Pulitzer.
Fortunately, at least for the moment, Aldean is surviving the Alinsky-esque “pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it” tactics of the WaPo and the left (but I repeat myself) just fine: Jason Aldean Refuses To Apologize In Amazing Speech As ‘USA’ Chants Break Out.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): The problem for the WaPo is that this sort of attack depends on pretending that the person being mobbed is an affront to normal, decent, everyday American values. This is difficult to pull off when you’ve spent the rest of your time either denying that such values exist, or crapping all over them, and even calling them racist and white supremacist.
“COVID ORIGINS:” An Animated Adventure.
IF ONLY WE CAN LEARN TO PROGRAM THOSE: Superior form of T-cell discovered in cancer survivors.
MICROBIOME NEWS: Skin, mouth, lungs … it’s not just your gut that has a microbiome.
OUT ON A LIMB: New job numbers prove red-state policies are the way to go.
Sensible, pro-growth policies have won the day, yet again.
Per the latest state-level jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, eight of the top 10 states for jobs recovered since the pandemic began are led by Republican governors.
All 10 have GOP-controlled state legislatures.
How out unemployment numbers?
Red-state good news dominates there too.
Of the top 10 states with the lowest unemployment rates, eight are led by Republican governors.
And of 17 states that have hit record-new lows of unemployment, 12 have GOP govs.
This news isn’t all that surprising when dealing with an administration full of Obama retreads: Obama should take notes on Texas. “Obama had two years of uncontested control of two branches of the federal government to push his own ‘recovery’ agenda. Yet unemployment has skyrocketed. Not a single job was created in August [2011] nationwide. But the business friendly climate of Texas, fostered by the leadership of Gov. Rick Perry, has created four out of every five jobs in America since 2005.”
MARK PULLIAM ON TEXAS AG KEN PAXTON’S IMPEACHMENT: The Establishment Plots a Coup in the Lone Star State.
IT’S THE CRACK COCAINE OF THE LEADERSHIP CLASS: Artificial Intelligence is the crack cocaine of the digital age.
AI certainly could prove very useful in many critical areas such as medical technology, transportation, energy, space travel and business analytics. Yet it’s economic impact may not be much better than the social media revolution: as Northwestern economist Robert Gordon notes, it has not notably boosted productivity, unlike the strides made by such things as the development of steam engines, electricity, jet propulsion and nuclear power. Recent measurements of further productivity decline do not suggest that the algorithms are making businesses more efficient.
Much of the problem is that the tech oligarchy sees its big money by developing ephemera. The leading AI chip designer and first trillion dollar semiconductor firm, Nvidia, has, for example, grown largely on endeavours such as video games and crypto-currency. Rather than a focus on solving real world problems, the tech giants thrive on surveillance, titillation, and social ‘engagement’. AI could push them – and therefore us – further along that road.
AI may become the crack cocaine of the digital age, offering the highs of facility and speed to the masses without giving most of us anything good. Meanwhile, the dealers – the tech giants and autocratic regimes – will become ever more rich and powerful.
Rather than a boon, the current trajectory of AI seems to be that it will most likely function as a force multiplier for bad things. Its usefulness for enhancing social control makes it a favourite priority of Chinese super-snooper regime while tech firms happily sell their designs to enhance that country’s ever-expanding surveillance state. In the West, AI could well allow tech firms to gather and use private data in ever more pervasive ways.
There are already lawsuits aimed at stopping AI companies from conducting pervasive personal data ‘scraping’, allegedly also including also on the information of children, for their programs.
This is concerning since we already know social media’s impact on young people has been less than positive. New York University professor Jonathan Haidt, and Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, have demonstrated the extraordinary psychological problems associated with social media use, particularly among the young.
(Should we treat tech companies like tobacco companies? Or like asbestos companies?) But beware, leadership class. As AI gets smarter, you’ve been getting visibly dumber. Maybe it’s not the proles who need to worry about being replaced.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: How the Biden Campaign Is Trying to Hide Joe’s Obvious Decline (With an Assist From NBC News). “’Addressing?’ I would like to say to NBC News in my best Inigo Montoya voice. ‘You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.’”