Archive for 2019

SOHRAB AMARI ON THE EPSTEIN REPORTING: “Whatever happened to do the old journalistic adage that ‘if your mother tells you she loves you, check it out?’ These days, too many reporters imagine their primary role is to police public discourse about the news — rather than, well, reporting the facts.”

They were happy to spend two years reporting Trump’s nonexistent “collusion” with Russia, without any evidence but that’s different because reasons. And the reasons are that they see their job as promoting the preferred Democratic narrative.

OPEN THREAD: Make this one your masterpiece.

HMM: Earth’s last magnetic field reversal took 22,000 years, longer than expected. “Some scientists estimate the magnetic instability observed in recent years is a sign the Earth’s poles are in the early stages of reversing. Previous models suggest the poles flip every 200 to 300 thousand years, but the last reversal happened some 800,000 years ago. The Earth is due for another reversal.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: An Escalating Tenure Fight Catches Students in the Crossfire: A professor says Macalester College is continuing a yearslong pattern of retaliation and discrimination against her.

In January, Wang Ping, an English professor at Macalester College, planned to invite a Native American spiritual leader to her creative-writing course, to lead students in a drum-making workshop.

“I’m teaching a new course, ‘Migration, Immigration, and Home,’ and the major theme is to bring the indigenous value of the land, water, and earth to the students,” Wang wrote to Proud Indigenous People for Education, a student group at the Minnesota college, describing the drum-making workshop. “I’d like to invite you to be a part of it, if you’re interested.”

For a week, there was no response. Then a student replied from the group’s account. She also copied eight other people, including college officials overseeing multicultural life and Wang’s department.

The student wrote that she had read the course description and syllabus, and she thought the course’s attempt to cover Native ceremonies and practices was not appropriate for a non-Native instructor to teach to non-Native students. “These are cultural practices,” she wrote, “and I am personally livid about this whole situation.”

The proper response from administrators was to tell the student that she’s an idiot and should be ashamed to express such bigoted views. Naturally, that’s not what happened next.

Also, a “drum-making workshop” in an English class? Cost of attending Macalester College: $69,127 per year.

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Mass Killings vs. Mass Shootings. “The reason the high end is non-gun is simple. Firearms, even assault weapons, are inherently limited by the need to change magazines, which is why buddy pairs are considered the smallest tactical unit so that one can maintain fire while the other is reloading. Fire, aerial vehicles, explosives and poison are not similarly constrained. The recent Kyoto animation studio attack killed more people than the El Paso and Dayton shootings combined.”

I’D BE INTERESTED IN KNOWING MORE ABOUT WHETHER THIS WAS TRUE:

“Is the Epstein case going to cause a problem [for confirmation hearings]?” Acosta had been asked. Acosta had explained, breezily, apparently, that back in the day he’d had just one meeting on the Epstein case. He’d cut the non-prosecution deal with one of Epstein’s attorneys because he had “been told” to back off, that Epstein was above his pay grade. “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone,” he told his interviewers in the Trump transition, who evidently thought that was a sufficient answer and went ahead and hired Acosta.

What does “belonged to intelligence” mean, exactly, and what intelligence agency would that be?