IS THERE ANYTHING THEY CAN’T DO? Why Sydney Sweeney and her double-D breasts are being hailed as proof that woke culture is dead.
Archive for 2024
April 7, 2024
SHE’S NOT WRONG: ‘Truth doesn’t matter’ at Penn, Amy Wax says.
Notice the difference in the way her criticism of affirmative action has been treated, as compared to others’ expression in support of genocide against Jews.
FOUR YEARS AGO TODAY: Explaining the Manchurian Media:
Or to put it another way: China’s Long Tentacles Extend Deep Into American Media.
The companies that own the major news networks, NBC, ABC, and CBS, all do significant business in China. On the print side, top U.S. newspapers like the Washington Post and New York Times have been criticized for running paid China Daily inserts. What they were paid for these inserts is still unknown.
By contrast, conservative news companies are much less involved in China. Conservative radio giant Salem, whose attempt to buy Tribune several years ago provoked an enormous freakout from media reporters over consolidation, is all-American. And Fox, after several troubled attempts to break into the Chinese market—including sending a News Corp team to help build People’s Daily a website—has mostly given up, after selling its Asia-Pacific operations to Disney over the last two years.
Disney owns ABC and has a park in Shanghai. It also owns ESPN, which was criticized for its coverage of China’s retaliation against the NBA earlier this year over one team owner’s support of the Hong Kong protests. But other than ABC, Disney is relatively uninvolved in news.
Comcast, on the other hand, has a much larger footprint in the U.S. media landscape, between NBC News, CNBC, and MSNBC. The company’s role in fostering cultural exchange is truly historic: they’ve brought to millions of American homes a customer service experience akin to a utility provider in a communist country, and have invested billions to bring “Minion Land” and a Harry Potter village to Beijing, with the help of a state-owned investment vehicle.
What might the Chinese government do if it were displeased with something that ran on MSNBC? Perhaps they’d have a tense conversation with their partners at 30 Rockefeller Plaza about the forthcoming slate of movie releases in China. Or it might be worse, given their decision to cut off all NBA games to retaliate against one team owner.
But evidently China is pleased with their partnership so far, and no NBC journalists had their residency permits pulled earlier this month. A March 10 post on the New York consulate’s website touted a recent meeting with Comcast execs:
Comcast Corporation is not only the participator of the increasingly close cultural exchanges, but also the contributor and beneficiary of deeper economic exchanges between China and the US. The NBC and the Universal Studios Theme Park in Beijing are witnesses of the in-depth development of Sino-US economic and trade relations and increasingly close cultural exchanges.
Consul General Huang Ping made a point of discussing China’s response to the coronavirus, as well as news coverage in the U.S.: “China’s prevention and control practices have earned valuable time and experience for other countries. …We hope that the NBC and other U.S. media will objectively and fairly report China’s efforts to control the epidemic.”
Comcast’s masters in Beijing must be quite pleased with the coverage they’re receiving from NBC:
As Jim Geraghty wrote in October of 2019, when the CCP-NBA connection was exposed for millions of Americans to see: We’re Not Exporting Our Values to China — We’re Importing Theirs.
LOL, “OUTRAGE FROM LEFTISTS.” WHAT ELSE DO THEY HAVE TO OFFER? Kyle Rittenhouse appearance at Western Kentucky University triggers outrage from leftists.
Bottom line is that the left is terrified that the normals might respond to its violence with violence.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW:
As seen from Arizona pic.twitter.com/0kAbSvsvgj
— Rich_Rantz2 (@Rich_Rantz2) April 7, 2024
THAT’S WHO THEY ARE, THAT’S WHAT THEY DO: Legacy Media Tries to Suppress Damaging Information. “Rather than dealing with the underlying issue of non-citizens registering to vote, the AP goes on at length about the number of people on social media platforms, primarily Twitter (or ‘X’ if you insist) who use pseudonyms rather than their real names. They heavily imply that this is largely a right-wing phenomenon, despite the fact that there are plenty of anonymous lefties out there posting as well. . . . Keep your eyes open for more of this. It’s part of a much larger pattern. After endlessly accusing Donald Trump and his supporters of trying to steal the 2020 election, the leftist legacy media is laying the groundwork for muddying the waters of the 2024 election in the event that the polls prove to be accurate and Joe Biden manages to lose. The closer we get to November, the more of this you are likely to see.”
The legacy media has declined from trying to persuade people who disagree, to trying to intimidate people who disagree, to simply trying to give their own people some excuse to stay on the plantation.
ROGER KIMBALL: Navigating the Vibe Shift of a Cultural Reckoning.
LOL, NOT LIKELY: VP Kamala Harris: Biden Administration Will Lower Your Energy Bill, “You’re Welcome.”
Related: Kamala Harris is all cutesy coyness as she purports to enlighten us and is so wrong it’s hard even to figure out what she thought she was trying to say. “I’d say the problem is that Harris was given a talking point that she didn’t understand. She didn’t even understand her lack of understanding well enough to realize she needed to memorize the precise talking point and not reword it with embellishments. Getting basketball wrong is embarrassing but harmless, but this display of the Vice Presidents mental capacity and self-awareness is a warning that extends beyond basketball.”
QUESTION ASKED FOUR YEARS AGO YESTERDAY: Has Sweden Found the Right Solution to the Coronavirus?
If the COVID-19 pandemic tails off in a few weeks, months before the alarmists claim it will, they will probably pivot immediately and pat themselves on the back for the brilliant social-distancing controls that they imposed on the world. They will claim that their heroic recommendations averted total calamity. Unfortunately, they will be wrong; and Sweden, which has done almost no mandated social distancing, will probably prove them wrong.
Lots of people are rushing to discredit Sweden’s approach, which relies more on calibrated precautions and isolating only the most vulnerable than on imposing a full lockdown. While gatherings of more than 50 people are prohibited and high schools and colleges are closed, Sweden has kept its borders open as well as its preschools, grade schools, bars, restaurants, parks, and shops.
President Trump has no use for Sweden’s nuanced approach. Last Wednesday, he smeared it in a spectacular fashion by saying he’d heard that Sweden “gave it a shot, and they saw things that were really frightening, and they went immediately to shutting down the country.” He and the public-health experts who told him this were wrong on both counts and would do better to question their approach. Johan Giesecke, Sweden’s former chief epidemiologist and now adviser to the Swedish Health Agency, says that other nations “have taken political, unconsidered actions” that are not justified by the facts.
In the rush to lock down nations and, as a result, crater their economies, no one has addressed this simple yet critical question: How do we know social-isolation controls actually work? And even if they do work for some infectious epidemics, do they work for COVID-19? And even if they work for this novel coronavirus, do they have to be implemented by a certain point in the epidemic? Or are they locking down the barn door after the horses are long gone?
Flash-forward to 2024: How Sweden Proved the World Wrong About Lockdown:
Certainly, Sweden did not do everything right during the pandemic. The government itself admitted that in 2022, when it concluded its inquiry into the handling of the pandemic. However, Sweden did manage to succeed in a few key areas where other nations failed spectacularly. Notably, it did not panic during the crisis. It considered how its policies would impact society as a whole. It did not just focus on limiting cases of Covid. And it did not ignore the potential long-term effects of lockdown. Above all, it recognised that the pandemic policy of China’s authoritarian government should not have served as a guide for a liberal democracy.
Of course, our study isn’t perfect. We could never possibly cover every single health aspect or economic indicator. And yet our analysis does reveal some cold, hard facts about the real cost of lockdowns. The burden is now on the pro-lockdown camp to prove that their disastrous policies were worth it.
As John Tierney wrote here in August, “Sweden’s ‘Laissez Faire’ Pandemic Policies Paid Off. Sweden, which the media denounced in 2020 as a ‘pariah’ and a ‘cautionary tale’ because it stayed open and and told its citizens not to wear masks, has come through the pandemic with the lowest rate of excess mortality in Europe, as Johan Norberg shows in a Cato Institute report. All the more reason its public-health leaders deserve a Nobel Prize.”
Not surprisingly, John’s post was titled, “Why the Media Doesn’t Talk About Sweden Anymore.”
SUICIDE MISSION: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane.
DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: So, the Left Is Now Defending Joe Biden’s Showering With His Daughter.
DEAL OF THE DAY: Greenworks Battery Powered Outdoor Tools. #CommissionEarned
WHEN YOU’RE ON THE CCP PAYROLL, YOU’RE NOT GOING TO SUPPORT ITS INTERNAL OPPOSITION: The Biden Administration Turns Its Back on Hong Kong.
FAFO, VANDERBILT PROTEST EDITION. “A university spokeswoman said Vanderbilt couldn’t share how many students are facing expulsion or suspension related to the incident at Kirkland Hall, where students pushed past a community service officer to enter the administration building as part of a sit-in protest. But in an update to students and staff on Friday, Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs C. Cybele Raver said after a thorough review of the incident, including examination of evidence and interviews with students, administrators issued a range of findings and sanctions, including disciplinary probation as well as suspension and expulsion.”
Related: “WSMV reports that there were three expulsions and one suspension when the protest turned violent.
Busted by Community Notes:
I'm Jack Petocz, a 19 y/o activist that's been fighting for marginalized people for years.
Yesterday, I was expelled from Vanderbilt University for peacefully protesting the genocide in Palestine.
Vanderbilt will let sexual assaulters walk free, but expel passionate organizers.
— Jack Petocz (@Jack_Petocz) April 6, 2024
Flashback: Father Hesburgh and Notre Dame in 1968.
CHRISTINE ROSEN: The Elite War On The American Middle Class: And How To End It.
Consider the recent cultural and political shifts experienced by the typical middle-class American, shifts dramatic enough to be experienced as whiplash by many of its members. During the Covid pandemic, for example, the majority in the middle was told to listen to elite experts and follow the dictates of the institutions those elites controlled. Most did. But as those same elites mandated harmful business and school closures (while conveniently ignoring such restrictions on their own behavior by dining at the French Laundry, as Governor Gavin Newsom did, or sending their children to private schools that remained open), middle-class Americans watched their children’s educational and emotional well-being suffer as the public schools they attended remained shuttered.
The arbiters of culture increasingly ignore the middle to focus instead on minority groups of every stripe (the smaller and more bizarre the better), or on the tribulations of the luxury consumer. When given attention at all, the middle is treated as a bunch of exotic weirdos, despite still being the majority. Cultural products consumed by the middle—their favorite comedians, music, and television shows—often get only grudging or glancing attention from elite media. Increasingly, television shows depict the very wealthy (Succession, The White Lotus) or the poor or working-class (Dopesick, Maid) more than they do the lives of people in the middle. . . .
Rather than be catered to by the elites who seek to make their living off their tastes and wants, the middle class is more likely to hear the elite talk about it as a problem: Middle-class Americans are racist, they complain too much about how expensive everything has become, and they won’t get on board either with the left’s social-engineering schemes or the populist right’s rage-driven apocalypticism.
They are told that “no human is illegal” and that their concerns about an open border are evidence of their own bigotry. They see the poor and other designated “oppressed” receive sympathetic elite attention and government subsidies and programs, and services aimed at helping them. The elite champion the rights of criminals, illegal immigrants, and destructive Black Lives Matter activists who want to dismantle the police. They tell the rest of the country that they must call the homeless the “unhoused” and ignore any quality-of-life effects from that population’s drug use or instability. When the middle class complains, the elite often chide it for having fallen prey to “misinformation” or excessive “right-wing” media consumption.
The middle class is also frequently reminded that shoplifting is a victimless crime even as they see prices rise and goods placed behind locked cabinets—or, in many cases, entire stores shuttered after being scavenged for too long by thieves who go unpunished. In January, after coordinated groups of pro-Palestinian protesters shut down traffic to tunnels and bridges in Manhattan, disrupting the lives of millions of New Yorkers, the New York Post noted how many of the protesters were students at elite colleges such as Yale and Brown, whose activities were being lavishly funded by “the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation” as well as “a Rockefeller family foundation.”
On the rare occasions when such protesters are arrested, they are immediately released and often valorized for their law-breaking, as Black Lives Matter protesters were in the summer of 2020 by soon-to-be–Vice President Kamala Harris. She urged the public to donate to the pro-decarceration Minnesota Bail Fund to “help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota,” many of whom had committed arson, property crimes, and assault; the same fund later secured the release of a man who then murdered someone. As Matthew Crawford observed of these young radicals, many the children of privilege, who have become full-time protesters: “At bottom, we see a refusal of the ruling class to take responsibility for its rule, preferring to [role-play] at the barricades.”
Read the whole thing.
April 6, 2024
I THINK WE ALL KNOW: Why is DOJ Slow-Walking the Case Against a Would-Be Trans Assassin? “It’s not hard to imagine the Biden Justice Department being reluctant to bang the gavel and lay a harsh sentence on someone identifying as transgender in the middle of an election. That’s particularly true if the offender was objecting to Roe being overturned while Biden is running on an ‘abortion rights’ platform.”
OPEN THREAD: Party on, dudes and dudettes.
ON THE UPSIDE, A LOT OF THIS IS BECAUSE MEN ARE LIVING LONGER: Scientists Predict Prostate Cancer Cases to Double Within 20 Years.
Be thankful for small mercies: The article talks about “men” and not “people with prostates.”
JOHN HINDERAKER: Rutgers, Rampant Anti-Semitism, and the Democrats. “‘Globalize the intifada’ means that no Jew should ever be able to live in safety, anywhere in the world.”
Plus: “Many liberals try to distance themselves from these pro-Hamas thugs, some of whom are Middle Easterners who never should have been let into the country. But the fact is that the anti-Semitic violence we are now seeing is of a piece with what liberals often do, when they can get away with it. The Democratic Party has been a party of violence for a long time, as this video reminds us. The current anti-Semitic variation is right at home in today’s Democratic Party.”