Archive for 2024
March 27, 2024
AT FIRST GLANCE, I’D SAY BOSSY PANTS DICTATOR RANTS ABOUT PANTS TO SYCOPHANTS: Why North Korea has blurred the jeans of its new TV star… Alan Titchmarsh.
Alan Titchmarsh can count himself among the few British celebrities to appear on North Korean state television – but only from the waist up.
The broadcaster had his jeans blurred by Pyongyang’s censors in an episode of the BBC’s Garden Secrets when it was aired on Korean Central Television this week.
North Korea has outlawed jeans since the early 1990s because they are viewed as a symbol of US imperialism.
Titchmarsh, 74, appears to present a peculiar dilemma for those in charge of the reclusive regime’s strict broadcasting rules.
On the one hand, the promotion of gardening and greenhouses holds a special place in North Korean propaganda, particularly at a time of widespread food shortages among the population.
State media only last week claimed that leader Kim Jong-un had opened the “world’s biggest vegetable farm”, the Kangdong General Greenhouse Farm, with his revered young daughter Kim Ju-ae as a sign of his concern for his people’s well-being.
On the other hand, the wholesome Titchmarsh’s unexpected popularity in North Korea is somewhat marred by his fashion choices – it would not do to show the veteran presenter in “anti-regime” jeans.
As a result, the presenter is seen kneeling in a garden bed tending to plants while wearing fuzzy blue trousers.
Won’t the average North Korean viewer wonder why that nice British man working in the garden has his pants constantly covered in a Gaussian blur filter?
CATS DO TOO, THEY JUST DON’T CARE: Brain scans reveal dogs know which words stand for certain objects.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Twilight of the Wonks.
Impostor syndrome isn’t always a voice of unwarranted self-doubt that you should stifle. Sometimes, it is the voice of God telling you to stand down. If, for example, you are an academic with a track record of citation lapses, you might not be the right person to lead a famous university through a critical time. If you are a moral jellyfish whose life is founded on the “go along to get along” principle and who recognizes only the power of the almighty donor, you might not be the right person to serve on the board of an embattled college when the future of civilization is on the line. And if you are someone who believes that “misgenderment” is a serious offense that demands heavy punishment while calls for the murder of Jews fall into a gray zone, you will likely lead a happier and more useful life if you avoid the public sphere.
The spectacle of the presidents of three important American universities reduced to helpless gibbering in a 2023 congressional hearing may have passed from the news cycle, but it will resonate in American politics and culture for a long time. Admittedly, examination by a grandstanding member of Congress seeking to score political points at your expense is not the most favorable forum for self-expression. Even so, discussing the core mission of their institutions before a national audience is an event that ought to have brought out whatever mental clarity, moral earnestness, and rhetorical skills that three leaders of major American institutions had. My fear is it did exactly that.
The mix of ideas and perceptions swirling through the contemporary American academy is not, intellectually, an impressive product. A peculiar blend of optimistic enlightened positivism (History is with us!) and anti-capitalist, anti-rationalist rage (History is the story of racist, genocidal injustice!) has somehow brought “Death to the Gays” Islamism, “Death to the TERFS” radical identitarianism, and “Jews are Nazis” antisemitism into a partnership on the addled American campus. This set of perceptions—too incoherent to qualify as an ideology—can neither withstand rational scrutiny, provide the basis for serious intellectual endeavor, nor prepare the next generation of American leaders for the tasks ahead. It has, however, produced a toxic stew in which we have chosen to marinate the minds of our nation’s future leaders during their formative years.
American universities remain places where magnificent things are happening. Medical breakthroughs, foundational scientific discoveries, and tech innovations that roar out of the laboratories to transform the world continue to pour from the groves of academe, yet simultaneously many campuses seem overrun not only with the usual petty hatreds and dreary fads, but also at least in some quarters with a horrifying collapse in respect for the necessary foundations of American democracy and civic peace.
Sitting atop these troubled institutions, we have too many “leaders” of extraordinary mediocrity and conventional thinking, like the three hapless presidents blinking and stammering in the glare of the television lights. Assaulted by the angry, noisy proponents of an absurdist worldview, and under pressure from misguided diktats emanating from a woke, activist-staffed Washington bureaucracy, administrators and trustees have generally preferred the path of appeasement. Those who best flourish in administrations of this kind are careerist mediocrities who specialize in uttering the approved platitudes of the moment and checking the appropriate identity boxes on job questionnaires. Leaders recruited from these ranks will rarely shine when crisis strikes.
The aftermath of the hearings was exactly what we would expect. UPenn, which needs donors’ money, folded like a cheap suit in the face of a donor strike. Harvard, resting on its vast endowment, arrogantly dismissed its president’s critics until the board came to the horrifying realization that it was out of step with the emerging consensus of the social circles in which its members move. There was nothing thoughtful, brave, or principled about any of this, and the boards of these institutions are demonstrably no wiser or better than those they thoughtlessly place in positions of great responsibility and trust.
Credentialed, not educated, to coin an Insta-phrase.
Flashback: The Suicide of Expertise.
BLUE ON BLUE/CORN, POPPED: DNC Goes Into Full Panic Mode About Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Presidential Bid.
I’M NOT SURPRISED: Depression is common in stroke survivors years later.
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Choosing to Skip Sex And Go Straight to I.V.F.
HMM:
No surprise maritime professionals wanted a tunnel, but the government cut corners and built a bridge, now we suffer the consequences – “just a matter of time” pic.twitter.com/GkRDGmVDDu
— Charles (@charlesbonnerjr) March 27, 2024
That kind of thinking — “the disaster hasn’t happened yet and it probably won’t happen tomorrow” — helped lead to the loss of the Challenger in 1986.
WELL, IT’S A START: Argentina’s Javier Milei Plans to Fire 70,000 Government Workers.
SIXTY YEARS AGO TODAY: ‘Great cracks opened in the ground, buildings twisted and fell:’ Nine photos of devastation from the 1964 great Alaska quake. “Sixty years ago today, March 27, 1964, the second most powerful earthquake on the planet shook Alaska and affected every other province and state along the west coast. Measuring 9.2 and lasting about four and a half minutes, the quake became the largest ever recorded in North America. A fault line almost 1,000 kilometres burst open and tremors were recorded far inland. Motion from the earthquake was noticed as far east as Florida. In Calgary, an Easter service at a Ukrainian church was delayed when a 1,000-pound chandelier began swaying above the heads of church goers.”
READER FAVORITE: Apple AirPods (2nd Generation) Wireless Ear Buds. #CommissionEarned
BUT ONLY ALMOST: NBC News Division Cretins Are So Awful That They’re Almost Making Me Like Ronna McDaniel.
Related (From Ed): So Chuck Todd Apparently Runs NBC News Now?
The ramifications of NBC’s decision yesterday to part ways with contributor RONNA McDANIEL just two days after her paid network debut on “Meet the Press” are just starting to shake out. But they could be expensive.
McDaniel expects to be fully paid out for her contract, two years at $300,000 annually, since she did not breach its terms, we’re told — meaning that her single, not-quite-20-minute interview Sunday could cost the Peacock more than $30,000 per minute, or $500 per second.
That’s just one tidbit we’ve picked up from McDaniel’s side of things following yesterday’s announcement from NBCUniversal News Group Chair CESAR CONDE, and it might be just the beginning of the fallout.
Woof. Five hundred dollars per second? Good work if you can get it, as the saying goes. But that might not be the end of the story. It’s being reported that Ronna McDaniel has enlisted the services of Bryan Freedman, an attorney who has successfully represented many cable news personalities in disputes with their employers.
Make the rubble bounce.
WHO CAN YOU TRUST?
If you needed yet another reason not to trust VPN providers or proxy services…
Here Facebook partnered with a bunch of companies to have root certificates installed on people's phones so they could intercept other app's traffic.https://t.co/lwlU19JEYr pic.twitter.com/WPQufppH5T
— HaxRob (@haxrob) March 26, 2024
OUT ON A LIMB: NBC’s ousting of Ronna McDaniel reinforces status as anti-Trump, pro-Biden network.
NBC News’ dramatic decision to hire and then immediately fire former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel in the span of five days shows just how far left the media juggernaut has drifted in recent years, particularly as the 2024 presidential election steadily approaches.
On Friday, the network announced McDaniel would be joining the Peacock family as a political analyst across all NBC platforms, including its far-left sister network MSNBC. That opened the floodgates of on-air backlash from the company’s biggest liberal stars, including Rachel Maddow.
“This seems to me to be an example of the hermetically-sealed bubble in which these people on the left live because they simply can’t see it from the other side,” Fox News chief political analyst Brit Hume reacted on Monday’s “Special Report.”
NBCUniversal News Group Chairman Cesar Conde sent a memo to staff Tuesday announcing McDaniel was no longer with the network.
“I want to personally apologize to our team members who felt we let them down,” Conde wrote in the memo. “While this was a collective recommendation by some members of our leadership team, I approved it and take full responsibility for it.”
Oh sure, but look at the stalwart Republicans conserving conservatism most conservatively who are there already!
Related: NBC News Staff Reportedly Concerned They’ve Damaged Relationships With GOP Sources.
Why would they be concerned about that?
HMM: More than 1,600 European planes hit by mystery GPS jamming with Russia feared responsible.
Planes flying over and around the Baltic Sea in northern Europe have been suffering technical problems caused by jamming since Sunday, with 1614 planes, mostly civilian, reporting problems since then.
Such interference poses serious issues for pilots, as it can force them to contend with fake signals that give false information about the plane’s position in the sky.
A map posted on X by an open-source intelligence account that tracks interference shows incidents widely spread across Poland and southern Sweden.
Most of the incidents appear to be taking place in Polish airspace, OSINT blogs have reported that planes flying in German, Danish, Swedish, Latvian and Lithuanian airspace have suffered interference problems.
Notably, little to no interference appears to be taking place in Belarus, a staunch Russian ally, or Kaliningrad, the Russian province separated from the mainland by sea and land.
The jamming is almost certainly coming from Kaliningrad.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Let’s Talk About the Absolute Worst Thing in the World.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Boeing, NASA target May 1 for first crewed flight of Starliner to the space station.
Because this is a test flight, Wilmore and Williams, both astronauts with military test pilot experience, will perform some manual maneuvers during the trip to the ISS as well as on the return to Earth. Most of these actions won’t be needed during routine ferry flights to the station outside of emergency situations.
“What’s really kind of cool about Starliner is that it’s very much a pilot’s spacecraft. It’s really maneuverable,” Lammers said. “There’s close to 50 reaction-control and orbital maneuvering jets on it and there’s a stick. And what’s really cool about it is, when you have astronauts that are pilots, they really gravitate towards using it.”
Godspeed…
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: ‘Cruel’: Franklin & Marshall faculty denounce ‘transphobic’ Lia Thomas teammate speech.