#JOURNALISM:

You could cure cancer while simultaneously saving a baby from a burning building and you will never get the boundless love, devotion, and compassion a journalist will show to a murderer. https://t.co/mxqWTIL59h

— James Kirkpatrick (@VDAREJamesK) January 27, 2024

OPEN THREAD: Party like it’s Saturday night.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Northrop charges on lunar Gateway module program reach $100 million.

THE CRITICS CAN LUMP IT: People Are Paying Big For Moon Burials And It Could Be Crossing a Concerning Line. “Legal and ethical maze?” Maybe a manufactured one.

THE SUPERMODELS OF MY YOUTH ARE NOT IMMUNE TO THE YEARS: Paulina Porizkova to get hip replacement.

ALSO, TRY FEEDING THEM LESS. Probiotics might help dogs lose weight, study finds.

DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT GEOGRAPHY: Governors of Maryland and Kansas State Don’t Realize Taylor Swift’s Boyfriend Plays in Missouri and Not Kansas.

Trump was crucified for making a similar gaffe in February of 2020; don’t look for a similar response this time around from the DNC-MSM.

PRAISE THE LORD, AND PASS THE AMMUNITION: Determined Would-Be Murderer Meets the Power of Prayer… and a Pistol.

READER FAVORITE: TurboTax Deluxe 2023 Tax Software, Federal & State Tax Return.#CommissionEarned

JOHN KERRY, PETE BUTTIGIEG* HARDEST HIT: Opinion: Evidence EVs are a fading fad is ‘rolling in fast’ as Tesla, GM and Ford slash prices.

In the early 1990s, every self-respecting American yuppie and retired suburban couple bought an electric bread maker, with sales hitting 4 million units. But the fad soon faded as these amateur bakers discovered that stuffing a precise quantity and ratio of flour, eggs, butter, yeast and salt into a metal box takes time and costs much more than strolling to the corner bakery.

Are plug-in electric vehicles the bread makers of our day?

YESTERDAY: Andrew Cuomo plots comeback with border attacks on Biden.

Also yesterday: DOJ says Andrew Cuomo sexually harassed 13 women.

Cuomo’s a scumbag, sure, but still, I question the timing.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Buying a new or used car is still shockingly expensive.

HMM: Border Patrol Says Agents Will Not Remove Texas Razor Wire Barriers. “In defiance of the Biden Administration’s wishes, senior figures within Customs and Border Protection have stated that there are no plans to have Border Patrol agents remove razor wire barriers erected along sections of the border by the Texas National Guard.”

HE WAS ALWAYS WAY AHEAD OF EVERYONE ELSE: Adam Smith on the Negativity Effect. Long before psychologists and economists documented the negativity effect — “Bad is stronger than good,” as Roy Baumeister and I summarized it in The Power of Bad — Adam Smith recognized its many manifestations (like loss aversion — we fear losses more than we appreciate gains) and offered lucid explanations, as Yahya Alshamy and Daniel Klein explain in a new paper.

THE APPLE ADVERT THAT BRAINWASHED AMERICA:

Four decades on from Ridley Scott’s Apple Mac ad, its message of human liberation seems, in hindsight, risible. We do not live in the utopia promised by the Super Bowl ad, nor in the liberating world the Think Different campaign foretold, but in a conformist dystopia more nightmarish than those of Ridley Scott ‘s best movies.

True, the fall of the Berlin Wall five years after the Apple Mac was launched did herald the end of rule by the real-life Big Brothers of the Soviet bloc, but in our current world of digital surveillance and data mining, in which your every key stroke exists in the cloud, you’d be forgiven for thinking that we live in something if not quite as totalitarian as Orwell’s dystopian nightmare, then something similar. We are ruled not by Big Brother but tech bros such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and current Apple CEO Tim Cook.

But here’s the twist. Big Brother needed electroshock, sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, drugs, rats in cages and hectoring propaganda broadcasts to keep power, while his Ministry of Plenty ensured shortages of consumer goods so that subjects were in an artificial state of need. Today’s tech giants have more effective tactics to ensure we do their bidding. They have ingeniously made us desire our own domination, glutting us with must-have goods. So, at least, argues Korean German philosopher Byung-Chul Han in his book Psychopolitics, in which he distinguishes between 20th century totalitarian control and its 21st century successor.

“Confession obtained by force has been replaced by voluntary disclosure,” Han argues. “Smartphones have been substituted for torture chambers.” Well, not quite. Torture chambers still exist. But the point remains: control of the masses beyond the wildest imaginings of real-life wannabe Big Brothers including Hitler, Mao, and Stalin has been achieved largely by more subtle means.

That’s quite a take from an author born in South Korea. Whatever the (many) excesses and pitfalls of today’s hyper-online era, they pale in comparison to the methods of the neighboring hermit kingdom, which can be summed up in one forgotten name: Otto Warmbier.

LONGEVITY: Biohacker spending $2m a year to reverse his age beaten by man paying just $30,000 a year.

SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: Alligators freeze themselves in solid ice to survive US cold snap.

THE PERILS OF OVERHYPE: COVID-19 pandemic perceived as less serious than other health problems, suggests 7-country survey.

JORDAN SCHACHTEL: We are witnessing the mass memory-holing of the lockdown era.

Very few, if any of the people in government today continue to defend the policies they put in place from 2020 to 2022. Some of them are indeed hooting and hollering about issues we’re all passionate about, but in a way that seeks to redirect attention away from their actions during this time.

They were complicit, or worse, actively undermining our rights when it mattered, and a true inquiry would drag those Covid skeletons out of the closet for the world to see. An accountability process wouldn’t just implicate the likes of Fauci and Pharma, but the entire system itself.

And it’s not just the ruling class that doesn’t want Covid accountability.

The ugly truth is that a vast majority of our fellow Americans embraced the hysteria, and many took to aligning with the people in charge to target and demonize the small minority who spoke out against the collective overreaction to the “pandemic.” This is an era that most would simply rather not relitigate. For both the people in the halls of power and most of the population, they benefit by both recalibrating their politics to the current majority view, but also by sweeping this multi-year disgrace under the rug.

We are witnessing the mass memory-holing of the lockdown era, which will allow for the bad guys to get away with it, because nobody seems to want to look in the mirror.

Both sides are eager to embrace the memory hole. On the left, blue state governors are eager for voters to forget their draconian policies; Fauci and Randi Weingarten want us to forget how hard they pushed for school closures. And Trump doesn’t want anyone remembering how he attacked red state governors who re-opened their states “too early.”

Exit question: Will Covid voting rules stay in place in 2024?

HMM: Strange vision problems may indicate Alzheimer’s disease. “The condition is called posterior cortical atrophy (PCA). It involves a sudden difficulty in performing vision-related tasks — for example writing, judging whether an object is moving or stationary, or easily picking up a dropped item. Everyday tasks like these become difficult despite the fact that a person’s eye exam comes out fine.”

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Laid-Off LA Times Reporter Sits On Street Corner With Sign Reading ‘Will Call You Racist For Food.’

QED:

More on the artwork in the above tweet here: LA Times Writer Slammed for Racist Claims that White Drivers are ‘Polluting the Air’ of ‘People of Color.’

TRUE: No Task Force Can Save Harvard.

Harvard is the Boeing. 737 MAX of higher education. A great American brand is squandering the public’s trust. Failures of quality control are damaging its market dominance. Like any corporation, Harvard is looking for new management and working to burnish its image. Unlike most corporations, Harvard has no idea what it is doing. Boeing still has engineers; Harvard has only professors. When the wheels came off at Chrysler in 1978, the company brought in Lee Iacocca. Harvard has brought in Derek Penslar.

Mr. Penslar is a professor of Jewish history. He calls Israel a “settler colonial” state and compares the Jewish state’s establishment to France’s colonial takeover of Algeria. In August he signed an academic petition called “The Elephant in the Room.” It endorsed the conspiracy theory that the Netanyahu government’s proposals for judicial reform mask a plan to “ethnically cleanse all territories under Israeli rule of their Palestinian population.” It asserted that Israel imposes a “regime of apartheid” on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and accused the country of “Jewish supremacism.”

“Jewish Supremacism: My Awakening to the Jewish Question” is the name of a book by white supremacist David Duke. If you go far enough left, you go far right without knowing it. Mr. Penslar leads Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies and has been named a co-chairman of the university’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism. The latter appointment was an “unforced error,” Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. special envoy for monitoring and combating antisemitism, told the Journal Wednesday.

The spontaneous campus celebrations after Hamas’s massacre, rape and kidnapping of Israelis on Oct. 7 meant that Harvard could no longer ignore its problem with Jews, and especially the Jewish state. Prodded by donors and shamed by the media, the university’s then-president, Claudine Gay, commissioned a committee.

Then Ms. Gay told lawmakers that calling for the genocide of Jews was sometimes acceptable at Harvard, depending on the “context.”

It’s a toxic member of a toxic industry.

STAY WARM: Hanes Men’s Ecosmart Fleece Sweatshirt. #CommissionEarned

QUESTIONS NOBODY IS ASKING: Does Oppenheimer’s Golden Globes win herald a troubling return to Hollywood’s macho ‘dad movie’ days?

It may be Oppenheimer’s race to lose. After a compelling five-win sweep of the Golden Globes on Sunday, Christopher Nolan’s propulsive three-hour drama has ossified as the frontrunner for this year’s awards season, pipping competitors such as Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro and colourful doll-based comedy Barbie. If 2024 is indeed to be Oppenheimer’s year, the film would be a deserving victor. It’s a meaty, intelligent and wonderfully crafted piece of work – a career high for Nolan and its lead Cillian Murphy, who plays atomic bomb creator J Robert Oppenheimer. And yet, there’s something about the idea of an Oppenheimer win that feels strangely backwards-facing.

Oppenheimer, so the argument goes, is a film for men. Perhaps intensified by its strange and ubiquitous juxtaposition with the women-led Barbie, Nolan’s film has been scrutinised extensively through the lens of gender. No matter how reductive this assertion may be – that Nolan’s film is simply “one for the boys” – it’s hard to deny there’s a degree of truth to it.

Oppenheimer’s plot, about genius physicists racing for time to build a powerful weapon before the Axis possibly complete theirs hardly seems like the stuff of ’80s and ‘90s era buddy cop movies and most action movies. But those films made money, and made superstars who can be remembered with just one name – such as Arnold, Sly,  Harrison. In the post-pandemic world, shouldn’t Hollywood be concentrating on what puts butts in seats?

But, you know what else put butts in seats?

Don't be an ass. This is just opening weekend, and it out-earned Oppenheimer by a lot. As it did in total B.O.

"Siri, why newspapers are dying?" https://t.co/izwc8gzvxc pic.twitter.com/KE1Ayw17ms

— Joel Engel (@joelengel) January 25, 2024

Which of course makes perfect sense; linking to a Tweet from July which exclaimed, “The Patriarchy is back bros,” Glenn wrote, “In Trying To Make Barbie A Feminist Hero, They Made Ken A Chad Idol. “Call it the Gordon Gekko effect, where the villain gets the most memorable lines. Or maybe the Colonel Jessup effect.”

But in any case, the ‘80s could survive with both Top Gun and antiwar films such as Platoon and Cruise’s own Born on the Fourth of July. The ’90s Hollywood box office did just fine with both the feminist-oriented Thelma & Louise, and all those macho buddy cop and action movies. In an effort to regain its footing, why can’t the industry produce multiple styles of films for a varied audience in the not-so-roaring 2020s?

THE DELUDED TEARS OF TAYLOR LORENZ:

Lorenz’s current employer is the Washington Post, which also shed a lot of its staff late last year – despite, as Lorenz points out, having the potentially limitless financial backing of ‘billionaires’. Four years ago, the Washington Post had to pay out a whopping $250million to a schoolboy it falsely accused of being a racist. It was later revealed that the teenager, Nicholas Sandmann, was actually the victim of harassment. He was widely condemned in the media, which assumed, because he was wearing a MAGA cap and was anti-abortion, that he must have been the bad guy, without bothering to check the facts.

Despite this and many other instances of journalistic malfeasance, Lorenz thinks Americans should feel really, really sorry for the poor old* mainstream media.

Watching this once-vital part of American public life crumble before our eyes is undoubtedly alarming. But far more alarming has been the depths of the self-delusion and corruption into which the American media have sunk in recent years.

This is what Lorenz gets most wrong in her impassioned little speech. She seems to imply that journalists deserve special protection because they are so darn virtuous. Their jobs are so important. When, in reality, the mainstream media have outraged and alienated at least half of the American population. Mainstream journalists have been the main purveyor of government disinformation on topics ranging from Russiagate to the origins of Covid-19 to the culture war. They treat ordinary Americans as akin to domestic terrorists if they do not want boys in girls’ school bathrooms. Far too many media professionals exist in privileged bubbles and make their contempt for regular people – who they never tire of stereotyping as racist, sexist, homophobic mouthbreathers – abundantly clear.

And now we should feel sorry for them? It’s a little late for that.

Indeed. As John Nolte writes, in a post titled, “Left-Wing Media Collapse Marches On — Vice, BuzzFeed Sell Off Parts:”

A mere four years ago, Vice [Media] purchased Refinery29 for — wait for it, wait for it — $400 million. So Vice paid $400 million for Refinery29 in 2019, and now Vice itself is valued at less than that, at $350 million.

This is the not-so-slow-motion collapse of an ideology and attitude.

At long last, this young, ignorant, smarter-than-thou, know-it-all, effete, smug way of delivering news and lifestyle content has run its course. People are sick of the attitude, sick of being lied to, sick of being told how to live, how to speak, what to believe, and what does and does not make you virtuous.

The left’s rotting corpse institutions, including the media, Hollywood, and academia, are all facing an overdue reckoning. Take notice because these are joyous times.

* By the way, how old does Lorenz think that the DNC-MSM is these days?  ‘The Entire Journalism Industry Is In Freefall:’ Taylor Lorenz Vlogs The Death Of MSM As BuzzFeed, Insider And Vice Jettison Assets.

Opining on the sad state of journalism is Jeff Bezos’s vocal-fry champion,Taylor Lorenz, who said this week that “The entire journalism industry is basically in a free-fall,” and that the LA Times’ woes follow “months and months of layoffs in the media industry.”

“And it’s not just digital media sites,” she continues. “Local news has been obliterated, the newspaper industry is cratering, radio is essentially dead – aside from NPR which has been gutted.

Radio is dead? Area spinster apparently morns loss of Guy Lombardo, Benny Goodman and other big bands on AM radio. Otherwise, that must be big news to the millions of talk radio listeners, even after the death of Rush Limbaugh in 2021:

"Nobody *I* know voted for Nixon"

— jimtreacher.substack.com (@jtLOL) January 25, 2024