Archive for 2023
November 4, 2023
INTERESTING BOOK: Four Lessons From My Three Sons: How You Can Raise A Resilient Kid. #CommmissionEarned
WHEN TOTALITARIAN SOCIALISTS MEET: Mr. Newsom goes to China. On his recent trip to China, the California governor met with President Xi Jinping to talk clean energy, clean transportation, and climate action. But he couldn’t resist a glamorous photo op.
Later that night, Newsom’s press team posted photos to Flickr showcasing the governor’s day at the wall. One of them in particular caught the attention of folks back home. In it, Newsom, sporting aviators and a crisp white shirt, leans one arm against the wall and looks off into the distance, mouth slightly ajar, the late afternoon sun beaming across his face as the wall snakes into the mountains behind him. From that pose (all studied nonchalance) to that hair (salt and pepper and coiffed just so), he looks like the romantic lead of an action movie.
Mockery ensued.
People took to X, the website formerly known as Twitter, to superimpose his photo on different backgrounds: homeless encampments, workers in a mine, the oval office. “The new Ann Getty’s rug,” cracked one commentator, referencing the infamous 2004 Harper’s Bazaar spread where Newsom and then-wife Kimberly Guilfoyle — dubbed “The New Kennedys” — lay together on the floor of an ornate room in Ann Getty’s mansion. (“One of the most glamorous political unions since Jack and Jackie,” the article gushed of the then-San Francisco mayor and his spouse.)
In politics, a photo tells a story more so than anything else. The Great Wall photo elicited a lot of eye rolls, but it was far from the most important image to come out of Newsom’s one-week trip to China. That would be the photo of him shaking hands with Xi — a political feat at a time of geopolitical tension that would be nearly impossible for any other governor, and hard for even national leaders, to land.
Did Newsom take any governing tips from the man who has locked up over a million Uighurs in concentration camps and welded people inside their homes when COVID hit?
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY, CHAIRMAN XI: Foreign investment in China turns negative for first time.
FDI came to minus $11.8 billion, with more withdrawals and downsizing than new investments for factory construction and other purposes. This marked the first negative figure in data going back to 1998.
Foreign investment had remained sluggish after falling sharply in the April-June quarter of 2022, when the Chinese economy was in turmoil from the zero-COVID lockdown in Shanghai.
In a September survey of member companies by the Japanese Chamber of Commerce and Industry in China, nearly half of respondents said they would not invest in China at all in 2023 or invest less than in 2022.
One-party totalitarian dictatorships are poor investment environments.
THE AMY WAX DOUBLE STANDARD AT PENN: Amy Wax, Liz Magill, and Hypocrisy.
I represent Professor Amy L. Wax, a tenured professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. She is the target of charges brought by the former dean of the law school; he asked the school to strip her of tenure and fire her for remarks she made in the media and on campus.
Whatever you may have heard or read about the case, the events of the last few weeks concerning a “Palestine Writes Literature Festival” at Penn and the University’s response to it, and the rallies on campus and statements that have been made since, proves one thing: My client is the victim of a glaring double standard which can only be explained by Penn’s naked, left-leaning partisanship. If you are a Jew-hating and Israel-bashing propagandist, you can say anything and invite anyone you want to campus and you are protected by the school’s commitment to academic freedom. However, if you are a white Jewish conservative thinker who openly challenges the notion that “institutional” or “structural racism” explains life for many African Americans today and you assign books and invite speakers who support those views, then you need to go.
Yep, that’s pretty much how they see it at Penn.
This is all an unprecedented turn of fortune for a company that has enjoyed a nearly uninterrupted string of hits ever since it started independently producing its movies with 2008’s “Iron Man.” That wildly profitable run culminated in the $2.8 billion success of 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame,” a high-water mark for the studio that has earned nearly $30 billion over 32 films.
Replicating that kind of phenomenon is never easy. However, the source of Marvel’s current troubles can be traced back to 2020. That’s when the COVID pandemic ushered in a mandate to help boost Disney’s stock price with an endless torrent of interconnected Marvel content for the studio’s fledgling streaming platform, Disney+. According to the plan, there would never be a lapse in superhero fare, with either a film in theaters or a new television series streaming at any given moment.
But the ensuing tsunami of spandex proved to be too much of a good thing, and the demands of churning out so much programming taxed the Marvel apparatus. Moreover, the need to tease out an interwoven storyline over so many disparate shows, movies and platforms created a muddled narrative that baffled viewers.
“The Marvel machine was pumping out a lot of content. Did it get to the point where there was just too much, and they were burning people out on superheroes? It’s possible,” says Wall Street analyst Eric Handler, who covers Disney. “The more you do, the tougher it is to maintain quality. They tried experimenting with breaking in some new characters, like Shang-Chi and Eternals, with mixed results. With budgets as big as these, you need home runs.”
“The Marvels,” which opens in theaters on Nov. 10, will struggle to get the ball past the infield, at least by Marvel’s outsized standards. The movie, which cost $250 million and sees Brie Larson reprising her role as Captain Marvel, is tracking to open to $75 million-$80 million — far below the $185 million “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” took in domestically in its debut weekend last year.
Directed by Nia DaCosta, “The Marvels” unites Larson’s heroine with two superpowered allies, Teyonah Parris’ Monica Rambeau (introduced in the 2021 Disney+ series “WandaVision”) and Iman Vellani’s Kamala Khan (first seen in the 2022 series “Ms. Marvel”). But instead of seamlessly building on the success of “Captain Marvel,” this move resulted in four weeks of reshoots to bring coherence to a tangled storyline.
Then eyebrows were raised again when DaCosta began working on another film while “The Marvels” was still in postproduction — the filmmaker moved to London earlier this year to begin prepping for her Tessa Thompson drama “Hedda.” (A representative for DaCosta declined to comment.)
“If you’re directing a $250 million movie, it’s kind of weird for the director to leave with a few months to go,” says a source familiar with the production.
The Critical Drinker is wondering why Variety is finally working his side of the street. (He speculates that Kathleen Kennedy and/or her minions want to shift focus to another failing Disney-owned franchise to take the heat off of her — at least for a while.)
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Ohio State University doubled DEI staff in five years, payroll costs almost tripled.
DISPATCHES FROM THE HAMAS WING OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY: Rashida Tlaib Posts Video Pushing Genocidal Rhetoric against Jews.
In one part of the video, a crowd is featured chanting “from the river to the sea” — and text appears on screen further emphasizing this message. As I have written previously, this is a call for genocide against Jews:
The issue is that “from the river to the sea” refers to the entire area in between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — an area that encompasses not just territories captured by Israel in 1967 during the Six-Day War, but the entirety of Israel. Referring to that entire area as “Palestine” is not a call to end the occupation, to create a two-state solution, or even to return Israel to the borders that existed before 1967. It is a call for the elimination of Israel in its entirety. Israel is home to nearly half of the world’s Jewish population. The only way you can eliminate Israel and turn that whole area into Palestine is by killing millions of Jews.
This is not a random video Tlaib reposted which she could claim to have not fully vetted. It is a video in which she herself appears, and it’s posted under her own account. She is well aware that she is calling for genocide against Jews and doesn’t care.
Why should she care? She used the phrase before in December of 2020 without reprisal; why should this year be any different?
Related: Doug Ross tweets a “Moral Equivalency Cheat Sheet” to the Democrats’ Hamas Wing:
DISPATCHES FROM GROUND ZERO OF THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Federal Anti-Semitism Probe Launched Into Oberlin College Over ‘Professor Of Peace’ Who Called For Israel’s Elimination.
LOL:
Harvard Crew Team Unveils New U-Boat https://t.co/JXpDmKtKmT pic.twitter.com/Tnnc0bO2H8
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) November 3, 2023
ANOTHER FAKE INDIAN: Oh, no! My tender years were all a lie! I just learned Buffy Sainte-Marie isn’t really an Indian.
(I’m sorry. I can’t help thinking of this non-Buffy Sainte-Marie song.)
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: State Department Employee Accuses Biden of Supporting Genocide. “I don’t think that State Department employees are supposed to attack the policies and the character of the President of the United States. But after the election of Donald Trump, all the rules changed, and suddenly every federal government employee believes that they should get to decide who has power and what policies are to be implemented.”
This is especially true when everyone knows the sitting president is a dotard and a tool.
STEPS IN IT? SHE IS “IT.”
Rashida Tlaib steps in it.
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) November 3, 2023
RACIAL DISPARITIES IN CRIME VICTIMIZATION: On November 17th, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights will be holding a briefing on crime victimization. (You’d be shocked at how difficult it was to get the full Commission to agree to hold this briefing, but that another story.) Witnesses who will be testifying include John Lott, Rafael Mangual, and John Paul Wright.
If you would like to submit a comment on this subject, you can do so at .
DEAL OF THE DAY: CQR Men’s All Cotton Flannel Shirt. #CommissionEarned
BABIES ARE BEING BEHEADED AND BURNED ALIVE, but the real threat is “Republican ‘Christianism.'”
JIM TREACHER: Obama’s Gonna Save Us from Artificial Intelligence, Everybody.
It can depict any scene you can imagine, in any style you choose. It can mimic human voices. It can mimic human faces. It can generate endless reams of legible text. It’s fascinating, and it’s terrifying. These machines will at least attempt to do whatever you tell it, and the quality of the results is increasing exponentially.
As noted fictional mathematician Ian Malcolm once said: The scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.
This looks like a job for… er… the government???
Former President Barack Obama quietly advised the White House over the past five months on its strategy to address artificial intelligence, engaging behind the scenes with tech companies and holding Zoom meetings with top West Wing aides at President Joe Biden’s request, according to aides to both men…
“You have to move fast here, not at normal government pace or normal private-sector pace, because the technology is moving so fast,” White House chief of staff Jeff Zients recalled Biden saying. “We have to move as fast, or ideally faster. And we need to pull every lever we can.”
First of all, it’s nice to know all the conspiracy theories about Obama scuttling around behind the scenes of this White House were absolutely true.
Second, which is worse: artificial intelligence, or politicians exploiting artificial intelligence to further their ideology?
This isn’t just about Obama, although I’d sooner trust Edward Scissorhands to give me a prostate exam. Nobody in government should have that much power over information. But I’m not comforted by the fact that the president of the United States is trusting this to an unelected functionary. I don’t want control over the robots going to the propagandist who convinced millions of people that “Yes We Can” was a winning message.
Hey, remember when Obama’s lackies assured us that he wouldn’t be the leftist politician delivering 1984? Good times, good times.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: University of Pennsylvania Student Calls Hamas Attack “Glorious, Joyful, Powerful.”
I remember when they sold higher education as a civilizing influence.
PUT ONE FOOT IN FRONT OF THE OTHER. DON’T STOP: How Full Of Brambles Is Our Workaday World.
OUT ON A LIMB: Will universities clean house of antisemitic profs? Don’t bet on it.
Or consider elite Williams College, whose German department wants an assistant professor “committed to inclusive and anti-racist pedagogy,” especially in the areas of “migration, race and anti-racism, post- and decolonial approaches.”
These are just a few of the current university job ads in the humanities and social sciences; I have enough to fill a file cabinet.
The irony of the Williams German department seeking a plainly ideological hire is that these centers of virulent antisemitism would have been at home in the pro-Nazi German universities of the 1930s.
University presidents and especially provosts, who are supposed to be the quality-control officers of higher education, could put a stop to this by exercising their authority to veto such ads or disapprove tenure and advancement of politicized professors.
The invertebrates who serve as college presidents will do nothing meaningful beyond appointing a task force to look into the issue, as Harvard has done to cover its shame.
That is to say: Ward Churchill was a one-off.
Our universities are so far gone and the number of professors deserving of dismissal so large that every school will shrink in terror from the controversies any housecleaning will cause.
The inmates run the asylum.
Indeed: The Shame of Academe.
A great school has a strong leader who is willing to say no to the jackals. Ben Sasse of the University of Florida, for example. “Our educational mission here begins with the recognition and explicit acknowledgment of human dignity—the same human dignity that Hamas’s terrorists openly scorn,” Sasse wrote in a remarkable October 11 statement. “Every single human life matters. We are committed to that truth. We will tell that truth.”
Too many of Sasse’s colleagues are dedicated to truth’s opposite. The past two years have seen the world tumble back into the 1930s. America retreated from Afghanistan. Russia launched the largest ground war in Europe since World War II. Hamas, and its Iranian masters, invaded Israel and sparked another war in the Greater Middle East. World order is collapsing, and the consequence is death and misery.
Nor is it only geopolitics that resembles the interwar period. The intellectual climate does, too. As Allan Bloom observed in his 1987 classic The Closing of the American Mind, German universities in the 1920s and 1930s were seedbeds of fascism. The most prominent German philosopher of the age, Martin Heidegger, belonged to the Nazi Party. He never apologized for his affiliation or behavior. Heidegger’s abstruse thought laid the foundations for the postmodern “critical theory” that has dominated the academy since the early 1990s. The result: Two generations of students cannot tell right from wrong, good from evil, justice from terror.
Or if Berlin in 1933 is too strong a model, how about England in 1933? The Harvard Crimson’s antisemitism disturbingly echoes Oxford in the 1930s.
On a cold February evening in 1933, the students of the Oxford Union debated and passed the motion “That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country.” The debate, which took place a week or so after Hitler was named chancellor of Germany, became an international sensation.
The students’ pacifism and lack of patriotism was viewed as emblematic of the degeneracy of an ungrateful and self-indulgent young intellectual elite. Winston Churchill called the vote “abject, squalid, shameless,” and “nauseating.”
The Oxford Union debate was not simply an academic exercise. At the time, many observers claimed it reinforced the view in Germany that the English were soft.
Alfred Zimmern, professor of international relations at Oxford, wrote to the former Oxford Union president who organized the debate: “I hope you do penance every night and every morning for that ill starred Resolution. … If the Germans have to be knocked out a second time it will be partly your fault.” Churchill would later write that as a result of the “ever shameful” motion, “in Germany, in Russia, in Italy, in Japan, the idea of a decadent, degenerate Britain took deep root and swayed many calculations.”
In our own time, just 18 months ago, the academic aristocracy at the Harvard Crimson endorsed the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement that targets Israel. The BDS movement arose in 2005 as a policy advocated by Palestinian civil society groups to delegitimize and isolate Israel, similar to the anti-apartheid fight against South Africa.
As was the case with the Oxford pledge, the publication of the Harvard Crimson’s editorial immediately attracted national media attention. The editorial argued that BDS could help the Palestinian cause in the same way that BDS helped win liberation for black South Africans.
The breathtaking scope of the proposed academic, cultural, and economic boycott of Israel would, for example, ban Israel from the Olympics, withdraw American and other foreign investments in Israel, and suspend Israel from the U.N. A few years ago, the German Parliament designated the BDS movement as antisemitic.
A principal objective of the boycott is to pressure Israel to agree to a right of return for approximately 7 million Palestinians. While the concept of such a right of “return” may have a superficial appeal to some, such a position, if now implemented, would be a demographic Trojan horse that would destroy Israel.
Which would make academia extremely happy: ‘Columbia Is Lost:’ President of Columbia U. Is ‘Grateful’ For The ‘Persistence’ of Pro-Hamas Students.