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Archive for 2019
December 31, 2019
TRUMPY’S NO JIMMY: Iranian militias attack U.S. embassy in Baghdad, Trump sending 4,000 troops. Plus: “More than 100 U.S. Marines arrived at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad earlier Tuesday to help bolster security after the mob of Iranian-backed Shite militiamen tried to storm the U.S. embassy in Baghdad.”
The Iranians won’t like the way this plays out.
Meanwhile, Democrats are already attacking Trump. Adriana Cohen writes, so much for the water’s edge. Silly Adriana. That’s only for Democratic presidents.
Meanwhile, blue-check lefties have rushed out to call this Trump’s Benghazi. But unlike Hillary, Trump didn’t leave the staff to die, he sent help.
Or as Trump notes:
Related: FLIR Video • Marines Arrive At The U.S. Embassy In Iraq.
OPEN THREAD: It’s the last one of the year decade, so make it special.
MASCOTS OF THE ANOINTED: Greta Thunberg’s father is worried about the “hate” she faces. “The BBC interviewed Greta Thunberg’s father, Svante Thunberg, on a broadcast of Radio 4’s Today program. Young Greta guest-edited the program….Thunberg says the protests have made his daughter happy. Now he worries about the ‘hate’ she encounters. Again I have to wonder about Thunberg’s thought process. Did he not realize that by thrusting his sixteen-year-old daughter into the adult world of professional protesters and allowing her to be used by opportunistic adults that she might encounter some ugliness?”
As America’s Newspaper of Record noted earlier this month: Democrats Introduce Debate Strategy Of Holding Up Small Child Whenever Their Positions Are Challenged.
SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST. Climate Prediction Swings and Misses: A Decade of Alarmist Strike Outs, 2010-2019 (Video).
(Classical reference in headline.)
THAT WAS THE YEAR THAT WAS: Jeff Reynolds’ 2019 Year in Review: McLaughlin Style.
THE TOP MINNEAPOLIS STAR-TRIBUNE STORY OF 2019:
The Star Tribune is [Ilhan] Omar’s hometown newspaper. It has failed to follow up on its most-read story of 2019. It has failed to note that Omar’s 2009 “marriage” was performed by a Christian minister — yet one more sign of its fraudulence. Doing the work that the Star Tribune should have done, the Daily Mail contacted the minister this year. The minister isn’t talking either.
The Star Tribune has failed to report on the fallout from the news of Omar’s affair within the Somali community. It has failed to advance the “brother angle” of the story in any respect since June 23.
The story is still out there for the asking in Minneapolis’s Somali community. The fear of Omar is great, yet I was able to interview several knowledgeable sources in the Somali community over the past six months. These sources all confirmed that Ahmed Nur Said Elmi is Omar’s brother. Wouldn’t a real newspaper want to stay on this story long enough to bring it to a conclusion one way or the other?
Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and the Strib’s silence makes perfect sense.
MILE MARKERS ON THE ROAD TO THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY: Obama Was the Most Anti-Semitic President in History, So Let’s Stop Pointing Fingers at Trump.
To be fair, some of FDR’s worst moments would give Obama’s administration a run for their money.
RIP: Gertrude Himmelfarb, the Historian of Moral Change, Dead at 97. David Brooks writes:
Himmelfarb argued that the Victorians who started the Salvation Army, the various aid societies, and the settlement-house movement worked hard to serve the poor in a disciplined, realistic, sacrificial way, not in a self-indulgent way that would make them feel good but do nothing for those in need. This was the crossroads Himmelfarb always admired. She wrote two books on this transformation of ideas and values, The Idea of Poverty and Poverty and Compassion.
In many of her books and essays, Himmelfarb pits two groups or thinkers against each other, to let us see how contrasting moral ecologies live out in real time. The French Enlightenment versus the Scottish Enlightenment. The optimism of Adam Smith against the pessimism of Thomas Malthus.
One of her greatest essays is “From Clapham to Bloomsbury: A Genealogy of Morals.” First, she shows us the early-19th-century Clapham Sect, a group of evangelical Anglicans who ended the slave trade and fought for decades to reform the prison system. They were morally upright, self-abnegating, adherents to respectable middle-class morality, a little priggish and self-righteous. They were lampooned as “The Saints” in their day.
Bloomsbury was a group of writers and social activists who emerged in the early 20th century, which included people such as Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and Lytton Strachey. Bloomsbury was in open revolt against the Victorian morality that Clapham represented. Art was their religion. Rebellion their pose. They slept around and looked down on the masses. “We repudiated entirely customary morals, conventional and traditional wisdom,” Keynes wrote. “We recognized no moral obligation on us, no inner sanction, to conform or to obey. Before heaven we claimed to be our own judge in our own case.”
A society that has moved from Clapham to Bloomsbury has undergone a moral revolution. So has one that has moved from Lionel Trilling to Ken Kesey. So has one that has moved from Dwight Eisenhower to Donald Trump.
Read the whole thing; although Brooks fails to mention his own role on the road from Ike to Trump.
Related: Links to Himmelfarb’s articles at Commentary, and their reviews of her books.
ANALYSIS: TRUE.
As we approach the end of the decade, let’s remember the best TV moment of the 2010s:
— Daniel Sugarman (@Daniel_Sugarman) December 29, 2019
CULTURE IN WHICH ALL TRUTH IS RELATIVE SUDDENLY CONCERNED ABOUT FAKE NEWS.
Fortunately, America has a Newspaper of Record to cut through the postmodernism, and it’s called the Babylon Bee.
PLEASE DON’T DRIVE DRUNK: OK, OK, it’s New Year’s Eve, so in light of my plea, read this instead.
GOOD NEWS ON PHARMA: The 2010s were a decade of drug breakthroughs.
For all the flak the pharmaceutical industry has taken for its exorbitant pricing practices, there’s no getting around the fact that it’s been a pretty stunning decade for medical progress.
Multiple new categories of medicines have moved from dreams and lab benches into the market and people’s lives, and investors who came along for the ride often reaped extraordinary profits. . . .
As 2020 approaches, it’s worth highlighting how far we’ve come in the last decade in developing new therapies and approaches to treating disease, even as politicians grapple with how to rein in healthcare costs without breaking an ecosystem that incentivizes the search for new discoveries.
Read the whole thing, which suggests the 2020s will be better. Faster please!
There is an exciting story behind Ailes’ downfall. It is the one where [Gretchen] Carlson risks [Roger] Ailes’ legendarily vindictive wrath to build a David vs. Goliath lawsuit against him, including secretly recording their meetings. Instead, Bombshell is a movie about [Megyn] Kelly’s decision to follow Carlson’s lead. That is not the main story material. That is a detail to be included in the epilogue to a better movie.
Still though, Bombshell will make the serviceable b-movie half of a great double-feature, once Hollywood releases the sequel, which focuses on Matt Lauer, Tom Brokaw, Chris Matthews, Touré Neblett, and the rest of the craziness over at NBC…
THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Anti-Semitism Isn’t Blacks Vs. Jews. Saying So Hurts Us All.
Put simply, if you think that solutions to the violent attacks are sowing division, you are conveying to Orthodox Jews that their safety is inconsequential to you. And perhaps even worse, you are conveying that you believe these attacks are emblematic of the communities from which their individual perpetrators hail, or that those communities would not prefer to be places where Jews aren’t attacked. It’s a view that maligns our neighbors in a way that I have not heard anyone in our communities do, and thankfully so; holding a community responsible for the actions of individual wrongdoers is the definition of racism. And while our community is not free of racism (none is), this language of a conflict between Blacks and Jews is nowhere present in the mainstream Orthodox community. There is nobody I know of who talks about these attacks as part of some more significant conflict. Nobody cares what the ethnicity is of the person who is harassing, beating, or shooting them is. All they want is to be safe.
And yet, these bad-faith actors seem focused on making sure people think it is a conflict between two communities. It is they who seem to be focused on creating greater divisions. At a time when there is a need to build bridges, they are setting them all on fire as though they were in a field of straw men. Speaking ostensibly on behalf of minority communities, these people are saying no to the proposed solution, then shrugging at the problem and suggesting nothing else.
Read the whole thing.
AND YOU THOUGHT 2019 SEEMED LIKE A LONG YEAR. With us still: 1995, 25 years on.
I FEEL LIKE THIS GOES WITH THE QUANTUM HEAT ENGINE STORY SOMEHOW: Turning an A/C Compressor Into a Gas-Burning Internal Combustion Engine.
AYN RAND DIDN’T WRITE THE RETURN OF THE PRIMITIVE AS A HOW-TO GUIDE: Hundreds of people queue to be ‘cleansed’ by guinea pigs in bizarre ritual.
THE MOTHER OF ALL CRISES: The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It. In our new book, published today, the social psychologist Roy Baumeister and I argue that the greatest problem in public life is what we call the Crisis Crisis: the never-ending series of hyped threats that needlessly alarm and anger the public. It’s a consequence of the negativity effect, also called the negativity bias, which is the universal tendency for bad events and emotions to affect us more strongly than good ones. This effect continually skews our thinking and the decisions we make in our personal relationships, education, religion, business, sports, media and politics.
Why does government keep growing? Drawing on Mancur Olson’s Rise and Decline of Nations and Robert Higgs’ Crisis and Leviathan, we show how the negativity effect is exploited by journalists, politicians, academics, lobbyists and activists — the merchants of bad, as we call these doomsayers — to scare people into adopting policies that benefit politicians, bureaucrats and special interests while hurting everyone else. Whether you’re absorbing today’s bad news or contemplating the future of humanity, we suggest starting with three assumptions:
- The world will always seem to be in crisis.
- The crisis is never as bad it sounds.
- The solution could easily make things worse.
The negativity effect isn’t going to disappear — evolution has wired it into our brains — and the merchants of bad won’t voluntarily go out of business. They don’t want us to see how much better things keep getting without their help. But they can be resisted, and the book offers some specific proposals for cutting the profits of doom and restoring sanity to public discourse. Read the whole thing (and enjoy a happier new year).