Archive for 2024
February 27, 2024
EVERY INSTITUTION HAS NOT ONLY BEEN CORRUPTED, BUT ALSO TAKEN OVER BY MORONS: ‘Unhinged’: Time Mag Claims Christians Self-Immolated to Protest the Roman Empire Too.
READER FAVORITE: Telescoping Magnetic Pick Up Tool. #CommissionEarned
OR THEY CAN JUST STAY AT HOME AND WATCH TIKTOK: CCP Dictator Encourages U.S. Students to Get Brainwashed in China.
I HAD BEEN ASSURED THAT INFLATION WAS AN ILLUSORY, TRANSITORY, HIGH-CLASS PROBLEM, AND OVER ALREADY: Food Is Taking a Bite Out of Your Income. These Consumers Are Getting Creative.
THE BRITISH NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE ISN’T THAT GOOD: UK cancer treatment falls behind other countries, research finds.
One of the greatest triumphs of the British Left was convincing the British to see the BBC and the NHS as items of national pride, instead of as tools of control.
ONLINE CENSORSHIP IN THE UK HAS LED TO FAR MORE ARRESTS THAN THE FIRST RED SCARE: The newest Eternally Radical Idea brings you the fourth installation in our history of censorship in which we compare the age of cancel culture (2014 to today) to eras of mass censorship in history.
“With the memory of the Red Terror, some Americans began to fear the domestic threat of anarchy and communism. When World War I ended in 1918, those concerns exploded into a national panic — what is referred to now as the first Red Scare — which constitutes perhaps the biggest mass censorship incident in U.S. history.”
THIS WAS OBVIOUS ALREADY TO ANYONE WHO HAS SPENT ANY TIME WATCHING VIDEOS OF PROGRESSIVE WOMEN ON SOCIAL MEDIA: More women are psychopaths than previously thought, expert claims – these are the 7 key signs to look out for.
NO ONE WILL EVER BE FREE UNTIL PALESTINIAN TERRORISTS CAN HIJACK PLANES WITH IMPUNITY: Here is someone who’s visa should be in the process of being revoked as we speak.
DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF MARTYRDOM AND THE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARY:
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Biden Gets Confused About Year, Spreads False Story About Trump in Softball Interview With Seth Meyers.
REPORTER: "Can you give us a sense of when you think that ceasefire will start?"
BIDEN (confused): "Well I hope by the beginning of the weekend. I mean the end of the weekend. At least my national security advisor tells me that we're close." pic.twitter.com/lY2ffcg3Jh
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) February 26, 2024
It’s good to see the press taking it easy on the aging Secretary Brezhnev in his dotage: American Press Goes Full Soviet.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Never Trump ‘Principles First’ Summit Was a Parade of Lying Charlatans Who Have No Principles. “It should be noted that these people stopped recognizing their party in 2016 because Donald Trump won an election that his GOP primary opponents almost certainly would have lost to Hillary Clinton. After eight years of His High Holiness the Lightbringer Barack Obama, the squishy middle of the Republican party was OK with losing to one of the most loathsome people in the history of American politics because of ‘principles’ and stuff.”
GET WOKE, GO EXTINCT: “Livelier Than You Are, Whoever You Are.” Thirty years, ago the Yale literary critic Harold Bloom presciently feared that the canon of Western works was endangered. In The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, he foresaw the rise of what he called the School of Resentment, “a cult of gender and racial cheerleading” by “Feminists, Afrocentrists, Marxists, Foucault-inspired New Historicists [and] Deconstructors.” But while he was correct about the immediate future, he may have been too pessimistic about the long term.
Bloom, who died in 2019, believed that the battle was lost. Those of us who aspire to be “individual readers and writers” will still read the Canon, he concluded, while “the others, who are amenable to a politicized curriculum, can be abandoned to it.” Looking at the state of my alma mater, I can see why Bloom felt as he did. But is despair so warranted? Why should not the new Puritans eventually go the way of the old? We hear a lot these days about the (woke) moral arc of the universe. But Shakespeare is interesting, and scolds are not. For all we know, time is still on the Canon’s side.
Read the whole thing (and the Canon).
DON’T GET COCKY: Gas export pause could scramble Biden’s chances in Pennsylvania.
Democrats and labor unions in the state fear that the energy’s industry’s huge footprint there could make it a ripe target for GOP front-runner former President Donald Trump — even as environmentalists praised the move as a brave political action to protect the climate.
Biden’s reelection this year may hinge on whether he can hold the heavily working-class state he narrowly carried in 2020, which is now the second biggest natural gas producer in the country behind Texas. And while his move to reassess the climate impacts of natural gas shipments may have helped shore up support from young environmental activists, others are questioning his strategy.
Democratic Sens. Bob Casey, who is facing reelection this November, and John Fetterman, both argued the pause could hurt their state.
“Sen. Casey and I are very pro-energy, pro-job, pro-union and pro-American security,” Fetterman told POLITICO. “We stand with the president, but on this issue we happen to disagree. I am very clear. Natural gas is necessary right now. It’s a critical part of our nation’s energy stack.”
A lot of union guys who went for Trump over Hillary came home to the Democrats for Biden in 2020 but I don’t think that’s a mistake they’ll make twice.
DON SURBER: Birdbrains in the Press.
The Daily Caller reported yesterday, “Social media users called out the Associated Press on Sunday after the media outlet avoided stating that an illegal immigrant was charged with murdering nursing student Laken Riley.
“Illegal immigrant Jose Antonio Ibarra was arrested and charged Friday by University of Georgia (UGA) authorities for the death of Lake Riley, 22, who was found Thursday afternoon.”
It should be a pretty simple headline to write: “Illegal alien arrested for the murder of UGA nursing student.”
AP couldn’t pull it off. Editors slapped a headline on the story that delved into the Twilight Zone: “The killing of a nursing student out for a run highlights the fears of solo female athletes.”
Reporter Janie Hur in her story could not bring herself to identify the accused as an illegal alien. She did not mention his immigration here at all, identifying him merely as a resident of Athens, Georgia. The promise of her story — women are attacked while jogging alone — was destroyed in Paragraph 6.
Hur wrote, “Crime statistics indicate that these types of attacks are rare, but they underscore the hypervigilance women must take when going out, even for a run on campus.”
Birdbrain. Once AP could get away with it, but thanks to Elon Musk buying Twitter, the AP no longer gets away scot-free with. Christina Pushaw, spokeswoman for deSantis, tweeted, “The corporate media will blame a woman for exercising alone before blaming an illegal alien for killing her.”
They learned this approach in college.
The thing is, although they lie to us, they know the truth, as this illustration by Surber illustrates:
STEVEN MALANGA: The Dead-End Left. Amid the surging success of GOP states, political shifts make course corrections hard for Democratic enclaves because of the “Curley Effect.”
BORDERS:
27 posts from Biden about George Floyd.
0 posts from Biden about Laken Riley.
Did her life matter, @JoeBiden? pic.twitter.com/7HmdtLbOSO
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) February 25, 2024
Related: Biden Brags He Could Let Migrants Shoot Someone On Fifth Avenue And Not Lose Any Votes.
I REMEMBER PAUL BRACKEN TALKING ABOUT HOW VULNERABLE THEY WERE WAY BACK IN THE 1980S: Begun, the Cable Wars Have: No attractive target is ignored forever. “As these cables lay across the world’s ocean floors undefended, they will be attacked. The only way to defend them is via an active defense. You have to eliminate your enemy’s ability to put their ships and crews trained to do this sabotage to sea. Again, the Houthi controlled shoreline is not that vast, nor are their ports many. Where is the world community defending that international order they are always tut-tut’n about? They’re waiting for the USA and UK to do their wet work that they can then critique from the sidelines. The usual pattern.”
MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: Google’s AI Debacle: Why is Google creating pro-Nazi and pro-Confederate propaganda?
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I WAS A HERETIC AT THE NEW YORK TIMES: Adam Rubenstein in the Atlantic on the paper’s young staffers’ 2020 meltdown over Tom Cotton’s op-ed:
All of this happened in the first five years of my career. In the worst of those days, I was attacked not only by colleagues, but also by acquaintances and friends. One friend contacted my girlfriend of seven years, asking whether she would take a stand against “Adam’s role in promoting fascism.” She—the tough-as-nails daughter of Peruvian immigrants who grew up hearing stories of her parents fleeing the Shining Path—ignored it, and some eight weeks later, we were engaged.
As painful as it was in my mid-20s to think that my journalistic career would end as a result of this episode, it’s even more painful to think that newsrooms haven’t learned the right lessons from it. If the Times or any other outlet aims to cover America as it is and not simply how they want it to be, they should recruit more editors and reporters with conservative backgrounds, and then support them in their work. They should hire journalists, not activists. And they should remember that heterodoxy isn’t heresy.
By telling the story the Times told about Cotton’s op-ed, the paper seemed to avoid confronting the tough reality that despite many staffers’ objections, the article was well within the bounds of reasonable discourse. What did it mean for the paper and its coverage that Times employees were so violently opposed to publishing a mainstream American view?
It was clear to me then and it’s clear to me now that the fight over Cotton’s op-ed was never about safety, or the facts, or the editing, or even the argument, but control of the paper and who had it. In the end, all that mattered was that an example had been made.
Rubenstein is no longer with the Times, but as Ed Morrissey writes, the rot is still very much there: Former NYT Editor: It’s a Cult, and I’m Its Heretic.
And it infects every bit of the NYT, not just the opinion section. The staff revolt proved that much, but so does its product. How else can one explain why the New York Times ran the unsubstantiated story that Israel had destroyed the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza at the start of the present war and killed 500 people, without waiting for the sun to come up? Within hours, the Hamas claim was proven false as the hospital remained standing, and it became clear within the day that a Palestinian rocket had misfired and landed in the parking lot.
And yet it took the NYT a week to add an “editor’s note” to their original report that Hamas had “failed to make [the] case” that the IDF had hit the hospital. As I wrote at the time, the NYT wasn’t interested in reporting news but in amplifying propaganda:
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Nor is this limited to Israel, or even Donald Trump. Nicole Gelinas has a must-read essay at City Journal today titled “Department of Incorrections,” in which the Times tried to cover for Mayor Eric Adams and his cash giveaway to migrants. Gelinas had reported on the no-bid deal to disburse $150 million to migrants for food and shelter, but without any safeguards or accountability. Instead of following up and getting answers, the Times went after Gelinas while blaming the criticism on “Republican leaders and conservatives voices.” The piece misrepresented what Gelinas had written, and then refused to correct it when Gelinas asked them to do so.
The Times treated Rubinstein the same way, throwing him under the bus when the staffer revolt erupted. They took his Slack messages out of context to make it sound as though he’d approved Cotton’s piece with “false equivalences” when that message pertained to specific photographs rather than the essay. And even apart from that, there was nothing all that novel about what Cotton advocated. Rubinstein notes the bitter irony of the opposition to Cotton’s suggestion of using the National Guard to quell the George Floyd riots that emerged just a few months later:
On January 6, 2021, few people at The New York Times remarked on the fact that liberals were cheering on the deployment of National Guardsmen to stop rioting at the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., the very thing Tom Cotton had advocated.
William McGowan’s 2010 book Gray Lady Down: What the Decline and Fall of the New York Times Means for America begins with a tribute to the legendary Abe Rosenthal, who was executive editor of the Times from 1977 to 1986:
Rosenthal retired from the executive editor position in 1986 and then wrote a twice-weekly column on the op-ed page until 1999. Along with James Reston and a handful of others, he is identified with the New York Times’ golden age, a time when the paper spoke to—and for—the nation. In May 2006, Rosenthal died after a massive stroke at the age of eighty-four. He had worked fifty-three years for the Times, after coming aboard as a copyboy in 1946 in his early twenties.
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A tribute of sorts to the ideological neutrality of Times news reporting under Rosenthal had come from a rather unusual source: William F. Buckley’s National Review, the very bible of American conservatism. In 1972, as Spiro Agnew railed against the “elitist Eastern establishment press,” and Richard Nixon was livid over the Times’ publication of the Pentagon Papers and its looming endorsement of George McGovern, the National Review produced an article examining the charges of left-leaning bias. Conservatives had long dismissed the Times as “a hopeless hotbed of liberalism, biased beyond redemption and therefore not to be taken seriously,” the magazine observed, asking, “But to what extent was this impression soundly based?” A subheadline telegraphed its findings: “Things on 43rd Street aren’t as bad as they seem.” The National Review audit examined five developing stories, which it said had a “distinct left-right line,” and concluded: “The Times news administration was so evenhanded that it must have been deeply dismaying to the liberal opposition.” It went on to state that conservatives and other Americans would be far more confident in other media—specifically newsmagazines and television networks—if those media “measured up to the same standard” of fairness. “Were the news standards of the Times more broadly emulated,” National Review said, “the nation would be far better informed and more honorably served.”
McGowan noted:
While encouraging reporters to write with more flair, Rosenthal eschewed the subjectivity of the New Journalism, seeing this genre as substituting reportorial ego for a commitment to fact. He was vigilant about conflicts of interest, once firing a reporter who was found to have been sleeping with a Pennsylvania politician she covered while working for the Philadelphia Inquirer. “I don’t care if my reporters are f**king elephants,” Rosenthal was said to have declared, “as long as they aren’t covering the circus.”
But as 2020 proved, and as Rubenstein writes at the Atlantic (curiously, heretics don’t last very long there, either), the circus could be found each day inside the Times’ Slack channel.
UPDATE: When Will the Atlantic Apologize for Its Own Behavior? “The editor of the Atlantic at the time was Jeffrey Goldberg. The editor of the Atlantic is still Jeffrey Goldberg. Does he have something to share with us?”