THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Why Modern Movies Suck — They Can’t Write Men, Part 1 (Video).

Note the Drinker’s comments about how men are portrayed in TV commercials, a recurring Insta-topic since 2005.

THE LATE PAUL JOHNSON IN 2005: The Anti-Semitic Disease.

The historical evidence suggests that racism, in varying degrees, is ubiquitous in human societies, so much so that it might even be termed natural and inevitable (though not irremediable: its behavioral consequences can be mitigated by education, political arrangements, and intermarriage). It often takes the form of national hostility, especially when two countries are placed by geography in postures of antagonism. Such has been the case with France and England, Poland and Russia, and Germany and Denmark, to give only three obvious examples.

OUT: THE ROE EFFECT. IN: THE DOBBS EFFECT: Massive Wave of Liberal Men are Getting Vasectomies to Protest Overturning Roe. “They are volunteering to leave the gene pool.”

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Corvette Summer Edition.

STAY WARM: Carhartt Men’s Knit Cuffed Beanie. #CommissionEarned

COCKBURN: Ten other places Joe Biden should check for classified documents.

So it turns out that there were classified documents lying around Joe Biden’s office and garage at his home in Wilmington, Delaware, dating from his time as vice president. In a press conference today, the president justified this to Fox News’s Peter Doocy by saying, “by the way, my Corvette’s in a locked garage… it’s not like they’re sitting out in the street.”

The news follows the revelation that classified documents were located in his office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, DC. But is that all? Cockburn has several ideas of where his lawyers should hunt next, to save the president the indignity of an FBI raid or imbroglio with the dorks at the National Archives:

Plus one more from America’s Newspaper of Record: Yet Another Stash Of Classified Documents Discovered During Biden’s Colonoscopy.

A NEW WAY TO RANK LAW SCHOOLS.

At present, law-school rankings function mostly as sales and branding mechanisms rather than providing an actual managerial report that reflects institutional performance. They speak very little, if at all, to the way a school is run operationally and its specific strategic plans.

Moreover, law-school rankings are backward looking: The reviewers and organizers of the surveys are mostly media staff, and their objective is to market and sell the rankings report, as well as to generate advertising spending, newsstand sales, subscriptions, cross-selling, and “hits” for digital data purposes. They flatter a handful of schools, while the rest languish year after year for no apparent reason.

The magazines and media companies that run the annual rankings are not able or qualified to tell you very much about the content of each of the law-school programs they examine. (There isn’t much they can tell you about standard law courses, which merely conform to Bar requirements.) Instead, the rankings honor university endowments, investment and donor activity, and the depth and magnitude of corporate and governmental cross-interests. (Harvard, Texas, and Yale are effective hedge funds, with over $30 billion each in investable assets.)

In an interesting coincidence, the Yale Law School, generally ranked for decades as “#1,” recently decided to pull out of the U.S. News & World Report law-school ranking program. (It actually can’t “withdraw,” but that’s another matter.) Suddenly, the entire rankings status quo seems suspect.

Maybe it always was.

THE WASTE LAND REMAINS CONTEMPORARY: A dazzling new critical biography of T.S. Eliot’s modernist epic.

When I corresponded with Hollis by email about the book, I asked him about [Matthew] Eliot’s idea of tradition, which he treats brilliantly. “All literature is happening at once,” Hollis explained. He went on:

That’s a mind-stretching thought of Eliot’s that deserves some reflection: what exactly did he mean by it? That the writings of the past act upon the writings of the present is hardly a controversial idea, but Eliot was saying something stranger and deeper: that the present also acts upon the past. Influence was not a one-way stream, he believed, but something more like a pool in which time swirls. But how can a contemporary work of art act upon one already made in history? It does so, says Eliot, because the achievements of our age shed new light upon those that have gone before; the past is enlarged because of our contribution to it and is therefore changed by it. We know more than the past because the past is what we know, and we must maintain our connection to it in order to retain our connection to deep culture. Tradition, therefore, becomes a kind of door that we must pass through—and individual talent is the key that opens it.

Hollis also shared with me his sense of Eliot’s astute understanding of how poets help themselves to objects beyond their emotions to express those emotions’ essence—one way out of the narcissistic labyrinth that characterizes too much contemporary poetry. “For an artist to operate across such vast time and space,” Hollis pointed out, “for an art to be transcendental, requires a poet to communicate not with something so private to himself as personal feelings or emotions, but to find a representative for those feelings that can be understood by anyone without a personal connection to the author: it requires, in other words, what Eliot called an ‘objective correlative.’” Since Eliot first broached his famous theory in an essay on Hamlet in 1919 by arguing that Shakespeare’s play was a failure because there was no objective correlative in the play that could have reasonably given rise to Hamlet’s rarefied distress, some readers have tended to see the theory as little more than an excuse for brash revisionism. Yet Hollis is certainly right to see it as one of the governing principles behind the composition of The Waste Land. When Pound spoke of the long poem with all its musical registers as an “emotional unit,” he was nicely encapsulating its achievement. Hollis, too, captures the essence of Eliot’s method: “A reader cannot be expected to take interest in the poet’s emotion, only in the expression of emotion through a form common to both readers and writer alike, namely the senses.” The Waste Land epitomizes that “impersonal” form common to both readers and writer alike. Though a lot of Eliot’s personal emotion went into the composition of the poem, as Hollis so copiously shows, The Waste Land succeeds by giving that emotion its proper objective correlative—not least through its wonderful music.

Read the whole thing.

YES: ‘The Science’ Is Ruining Science.

Nature magazine, one of the premier science journals, carried a startling news story last week about a study charting the precipitous decline of “disruptive” scientific research, concluding that this decline is also reducing technological innovation. Using typically advanced quantitative techniques of a massive data set, the full study reports a more than 90 percent decline in “disruptive” scientific findings across nearly all fields over the last 70 years. One of the authors of the study told Nature, “The data suggest something is changing. You don’t have quite the same intensity of breakthrough discoveries you once had.” The chart Nature produced for the story is striking. . . .

Perhaps the most startling aspect of the story is the sub-headline Nature used: “No One Knows Why.” The best the authors can do is the feeble theory that “larger research teams” hinder heterodox investigations.

This finding is ominous, and may help explain the slowing pace of technological innovation, as summarized in Peter Thiel’s famous comment that “we were promised flying cars, but only got 140 characters.” As anyone who follows the holy grail of “innovation” knows, disruption is a prime precursor of progress, highly prized in Silicon Valley as it is in academia. Even before the jargon of “disruption” and “innovation” took over our popular vocabulary, the idea that science progresses by fundamental “paradigm shifts”—or breakthrough discoveries that challenge or overturn the existing consensus—has been widely accepted ever since Thomas Kuhn’s classic explanation in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Nature avoids the most significant and obvious explanation with the myopia of Inspector Clouseau, which is the deadly confluence of ideology and the increasingly narrow conformism of academic specialties. Perhaps this is grasped even more simply by noting the authoritarian attitude expressed in the now-ubiquitous phrase, “The Science,” with the tacit assumption being that science is fully “settled” and that the “consensus” science is unassailable. The epitome of this anti-scientific presumption was best expressed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, who declared during the Covid pandemic that “I represent science,” implying an infallibility previously reserved only for popes.

It is hardly news that dissenting from the “consensus” position of the increasingly left-leaning scientific establishment in academic or government is dangerous to your career and reputation. It is sometimes thought that the “hard” sciences such as physics and chemistry are largely immune for the leftist tide that have destroyed the social sciences and the humanities in our universities, but this is less and less true with every passing year.

Hard to be innovative when the conventional wisdom is set so hard.

WELL: McCarthy’s on a roll, approval up, GOP support is 3-1.

TWIRLING TOWARDS FREEDOM:

Kamala: "I think of this moment as a moment that is about great momentum, inspired by, yes, optimism…but also inspired by also our collective effort to see what can be unburdened by what has been.”pic.twitter.com/6gO6YZaxtr

— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) January 12, 2023

Classical reference in headline:

More new Kamalapropisms here: Watch: Kamala Harris Arrives Just in Time for Some Comic Relief.

WELL, ALSO BECAUSE THEY’RE BEING BRIBED BY THE CHINESE: Progressives don’t want to address the threat of China because of racism.

Actually, pretty sure the bribery is the reason, and the racism talk is the excuse.

HMM: Supreme Court investigators have narrowed leak probe down to a small group of suspects.

Supreme Court officials are escalating their search for the source of the leaked draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, taking steps to require law clerks to provide cell phone records and sign affidavits, three sources with knowledge of the efforts have told CNN.

Some clerks are apparently so alarmed over the moves, particularly the sudden requests for private cell data, that they have begun exploring whether to hire outside counsel. . . .

The Journal’s description of the brief interviews seems to jibe with the idea that investigators aren’t looking for a confession so much as daring the leaker to lie to a direct question. As the article points out, the leak itself probably wasn’t illegal so there’s no punishment in terms of arrest or imprisonment coming for whoever did this whether they confess or not. However, there could be a case made for disbarment if the clerk can be shown to have lied to the Chief Justice or the marshal. That would certainly be a blow to one of the top young lawyers in the country.

Lying to investigators is probably a crime under 18 USC 1001 even if the leak wasn’t a crime. Guilty or innocent, a smart lawyer would lawyer up — a lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client — and clam up.

WAGES ARE UP, BUT PRICES ARE UP MORE: Workers Lose Ground to Inflation Despite Wage Gains. “Worker pay actually fell the past two years after accounting for inflation. Inflation-adjusted average hourly earnings—or real earnings—were down 1.7% in December 2022 from a year earlier, following a 2.1% decline in December 2021.”

Plus:

Despite the possible return of real wage gains, workers could suffer if the economy tips into recession this year, as many economists expect. A recession would likely lead to layoffs and push up the unemployment rate from December’s 3.5%. Fed officials see the unemployment rate rising to 4.6% by the end of the year.

“If you retain a job you’ll be in better shape,” said Kathy Bostjancic, chief economist at Nationwide. “It’s just that there’s going to be an increased risk of layoffs for this year.”

Well, okay then.

FOR THE NYT, THAT’S ACTUALLY A PRETTY GOOD RATIO: Farhad Manjoo’s entry in the gas stove battle is 50% progressive talking points and 50% reality.

NOAH ROTHMAN: The GOP’s Anti-IRS Bill Is Entirely Justified.

If past performance is any indication, the Republican-led House is as interested in good governance as they are in good headlines. The Post senses, probably correctly, that Republicans believe they will secure political advantage by going after one of the most despised law-enforcement agencies in the United States. Fashionable anti-IRS sentiments have been deemed “bad for democracy,” which is a claim that rests on a theory drawing a direct proportionality between the health of the American republic and the success of Democratic political initiatives. The IRS is not popular, and capitalizing on that fact is not dirty pool.

Given the makeup of the Senate and the occupant of the Oval Office, the House GOP’s gesture amounts to a positioning statement. That doesn’t mean it’s valueless. As statements go, Republicans could do worse than to oppose an initiative that will complicate the lives of average Americans without addressing the real obstacles to an efficient federal revenue-collection service.

Also from the new GOP House: McCarthy ‘Sends DC in Utter Panic’ After This Statement About January 6.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Thursday he is considering releasing security footage from the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot—all 14,000 hours of it.

“I think the public should see what happened on that day. I watched what Nancy Pelosi did, where she politicized it. Where, for the first time in the history as a speaker, not allowing the minority to appoint to a committee, to pick and choose,” he told reporters. “We watched the politicization of this. I think the American public should actually see all what happened instead of a report that’s written for a political basis.”

Faster, please.

THAT’S OKAY, THAT ISN’T WHY HE WANTS TO DO IT: Biden has no legal or scientific case to steal your gas stove.

Flashback:

I can’t help but feel that the oppression of the masses wasn’t so much a bug as a feature to them.

Making the common people’s lives worse seems to be a steady theme in elite proposals for social change: Less policing making crime worse, less energy consumption for the hoi polloi – but never the jet-setting elites – demands to eat less meat, travel less, live in smaller homes, swap cars for public transit, submit to social media censorship, etc., etc. If it will worsen ordinary folks’ lot, it’s probably on the agenda.

Why the political class feels this way is a question for another column, but look at what they’ve done over the past few years and ask yourself: If they hated us, what would they do differently?

Well?

DRESS UP: Van Heusen Men’s Dress Shirt Regular Fit Flex Collar Stretch Solid. #CommissionEarned

SUNDOWN JOE APPROACHING SUNSET? Biden’s 2024 Ambitions in Jeopardy With Democrats Over Handling of Classified Documents.

Democrats, even those who ran in 2020, showed signs in 2022 they want to run in 2024. Gabriel Debenedetti wrote in New York magazine about the skepticism of another Biden run in 2024 rumbling quietly through the Democratic Party.

Vanity Fair reported Biden would likely make his 2024 presidential run official in February.

Poll after poll shows Americans don’t want Biden or Trump to run in 2024.

Time for the Party of Youth’s ice floe politics to kick into action. “The next time a Democratic politician makes an anonymous observation about the age or vigor of a colleague with whom they disagree, be skeptical. The remarks are made to reporters as if in sorrow, but the message is about as subtle as a shiv in the prison yard.”

WITH A PERCENTAGE FOR THE BIG GUY: How Biden’s Green Agenda Runs Through Beijing.

JOE FRIDAY LEFT THE COP HOUSE A LONG, LONG TIME AGO: LAPD bans Thin Blue Line flag over complaint it represents ‘racist, bigoted views.’

FORMER UVALDE POLICE CHIEF: I Left the Gunman Unhindered to Continue Killing the Children He Held Hostage, So I Could “Evacuate” The Children Who Were In No Danger Whatsoever.

HE’S SO AWFUL: Watchdog: Buttigieg refused meetings with Democrats and Republicans during paternity leave. “Let’s be honest. Buttigieg failed up into his current position. He was a failed mayor of a small city in the Midwest, unable to keep the potholes filled. From there he ran for president and failed to secure his party’s nomination. As a consolation prize for endorsing Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, he was nominated as Secretary of Transportation. He wasn’t qualified for the job but he checked an important identity box for Democrats and Biden owed him after his endorsement, so Pete got the job.”

Luckily we haven’t had any transportation problems in the last couple of . . . never mind.

FROM LAURA MONTGOMERY:  Under the Earthline: A Science Fiction Lost Colony Adventure.

WELL, OF COURSE:  DOJ Indicts Trump For Biden’s Possession Of Classified Documents.

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