Archive for 2023

ON THE CULTURE WARS: Nekulturny.

THEY ALL WENT TO THE SAME UNIVERSITIES. THEY BELIEVE WHAT THEIR WOKE PROFESSORS PREACHED:  Another Brand Bites the Dust?

TECH-MEDIATED NEO-ORWELLIANISM:

We used to be told that Islamic terrorists hated us for our freedom. And maybe they do, but now it’s clear that so do our own governments.

WHY PEOPLE FIND “CONSPIRACY THEORIES” PLAUSIBLE:

Related: “He could not get to Han—Moon’s widow—so he shot Abe, who was ‘deeply connected’ to the church, Yamagami said, just as Abe’s grandfather, also a prime minister and renowned political figure in Japan, had been. Investigators looked into Yamagami’s wild-sounding claims and found, to their alarm, that they were true.”

OPEN THREAD: Just do it.

DID SEN. BOB MENENDEZ AND WIFE IMPROPERLY TAKE GOLD BARS FROM CORRUPT BANK EXEC?

Federal prosecutors are looking into whether an admitted felon helped arrange to give gold bars worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez or his wife in exchange for help, sources familiar with the matter tell News 4.

Investigators want to know if Menendez, a Democrat, offered to contact the Justice Department to try to help that man who was accused of banking crimes. Those questions are now before a federal grand jury in Manhattan that is considering whether to hand up corruption charges against the senior senator from New Jersey.

Sources say witnesses are now testifying before that federal grand jury. Part of the investigation centers on the senator’s ties to Fred Daibes, a New Jersey developer and one-time bank chairman. Officials with the FBI and IRS Criminal Investigation want to know if Daibes or his associates gave gold bars to the senator’s wife, Nadine Arslanian — gold bars worth as much as $400,000.

At the time of the gift handoff, Daibes was facing federal bank fraud charges that could have landed him up to a decade in federal prison.

Will anything come of this? As New York magazine notes, “Menendez possesses an ability to hang on through corruption scandals that would bury most politicians.”

IN SOVIET SAN FRANCISCO, CITY BLAMES CAR OWNERS FOR THEFTS! San Francisco supervisor holds hearing on strategies to address car break-ins.

San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston on Thursday is sponsoring a hearing on strategies to address the city’s problem with car break-ins.

* * * * * * * *

Preston offered on idea on social media Wednesday night.

“Just as government in the 1980’s launched a massive “buckle up” campaign to retrain drivers/passengers to use seatbelts, we need as a city to pound in every way possible the message to visitors: do not leave anything in your car. Do this and we’ll dramatically reduce car break-ins,” said Preston. “We should not be throwing our hands up on this issue.”

When does San Francisco join Chicago and sue Kia and Hyundai for car thefts?

HOW IT STARTED:

Some blame Watergate for this abrupt collapse of trust in institutions, but not very convincingly. For one thing, the decline in trust begins to appear in the polls as early as 1966, almost a decade before the Watergate was known as anything more than a big hole in the ground alongside the Potomac River. For another, the nation had managed unconcernedly to shrug off Watergate-style events before. Somebody bugged Barry Goldwater’s apartment during the 1964 election without it triggering a national trauma. The Johnson administration tapped the phones of Nixon supporters in 1968, and again nothing happened. John F. Kennedy regaled reporters with intimate details from the tax returns of wealthy Republican donors, and none of the reporters saw anything amiss. FDR used the Federal Bureau of Investigation to spy on opponents of intervention into World War II—and his targets howled without result. If Watergate could so transform the nation’s sense of itself, why did those previous abuses, which were equally well known to the press, not do so? Americans did not lose their faith in institutions because of the Watergate scandal; Watergate became a scandal because Americans were losing faith in their institutions.

—David Frum, How We Got Here: The 70s The Decade That Brought You Modern Life — For Better Or Worse.

How it’s going: Public’s view of politics slipping, now ‘unrelentingly negative.’

None other than the Pew Research Center sums up the alarming state of politics in and around the nation at this time. It is “dismal,” the pollster advised.

“Americans have long been critical of politicians and skeptical of the federal government. But today, Americans’ views of politics and elected officials are unrelentingly negative, with little hope of improvement on the horizon,” noted the wide-reaching survey, which was released Tuesday.

“Majorities say the political process is dominated by special interests, flooded with campaign cash and mired in partisan warfare. Elected officials are widely viewed as self-serving and ineffective,” the survey analysis advised, noting that there was no single “focal point” in politics that is troubling the public.

Anger and exhaustion permeate the entire political process.

“There is widespread criticism of the three branches of government, both political parties, as well as political leaders and candidates for office. Notably, Americans’ unhappiness with politics comes at a time of historically high levels of voter turnout in national elections. The elections of 2018, 2020 and 2022 were three of the highest-turnout U.S. elections of their respective types in decades,” the poll analysis advised.

“But voting in elections is very different from being satisfied with the state of politics — and the public is deeply dissatisfied,” it said.

—Jennifer Harper, the Washington Times, today.

 

FIRST-WORLD PROBLEMS: The Agony of the School Car Line: It’s crazy-making and deeply inefficient. “A few generations ago, in 1969, nearly one in two kids walked or biked to school. Now only about one in 10 kids gets to school those ways. And only about a third of children who live within just one mile of school walk or bike there.”

Well, this is because the usual destructive interplay of upper-middle-class women and news media has made people too fearful to let their kids walk to school, and the state child-welfare people — who have been known to go after parents for letting their kids simply play outside — hover in the background making people afraid to do it. But the real problem, as always, is parents (mostly mothers, to be honest) not so much worried about actual safety as about what other parents (mostly mothers, to be honest) will think.

And there’s a bus driver shortage because undisciplined kids and hovering parents make driving a school bus a deeply unappealing proposition.

THE HARDEST WORKING WOMAN IN POLITICS! President Joe Biden to Establish First-Ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, To Be Overseen by Vice President Kamala Harris.

Earlier: Biden gives Kamala Harris another job: VP will now head an online harassment task force to add to her portfolio that includes the border and voting rights.

President Joe Biden has given Vice President Kamala Harris another job — she will head a task force dedicated to fighting online abuse and harassment.

Biden on Thursday will announce the White House Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse and Harris will formally launch it by hosting a roundtable in the afternoon.

The administration said the task force was being launched ‘to address online harms, which disproportionately affect women, girls, people of color, and LGBTQI+ individuals.’

It’s the latest task to be handed to Harris, who has a full plate of issues she leads for the Biden administration, including defending voting rights and examining the root cause of migration.

Flashback: “On the latest Editors podcast, I floated the somewhat-tongue-in-cheek theory that Joe Biden has set Kamala Harris up to fail, a passive-aggressive form of revenge for her shivving him in that first Democratic presidential-primary debate.”

To be fair, there’s enough failure to go around for everybody in this administration.