LAST TANGO: On this day in 1972, Eugene Cernan (1934-2017) and Harrison Schmitt (1935-still kicking) took their last moon walk. They remain the last human beings to set foot on the moon.
(An interesting analogy might be the Ming Dynasty treasure voyages of the 15th century. During that period, China sent out an impressive expeditionary fleet to Java, Sumatra, India, Ceylon, Persia, Arabia and East Africa. These voyages were intended to impress the world with China’s immense wealth and power. And impress they did. But then the voyages just stopped. Scholars still debate exactly why.)
UPDATE: Not a thriller movie: She Stalked Her Daughter’s Killers Across Mexico, One by One. It was a mistake to turn them over to the authorities, though. She should have just killed them, in instructive ways. At some level, everyone in the community knows who these people are. Everyone — or at least enough people — should make them afraid to be who they are.
Joseph Epstein was recognized on Northwestern University’s website as “emeritus lecturer” for more than twenty years. That changed Saturday when it was discovered that his profile is no longer available. Epstein has been canceled.
Epstein made the mistake of criticizing Jill Biden in an opinion essay published in the Wall Street Journal Friday. He calls her out for insisting on using the designation of “Dr.” with her name. He ends the essay with a suggestion that she consider stopping it, at least for now. He wrote, “please consider stowing it, at least in public, at least for now.” Many people applauded his essay, or at least the sentiment behind it, including myself. Most people with a Ph.D. do not refer to themselves as Jill Biden does, using the formal recognition of her advanced academic degree. It sounds haughty, frankly.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I seem to recall the press getting snooty about Sebastian Gorka, who has a Ph.D. in political science, calling himself Dr. Gorka. Jill Biden doesn’t even have a Ph.D., but an Ed.D. of the sort also held by “Dr.” Bill Cosby.
More (From Ed): Whom does The New York Times consider a doctor? In 2015, Ben Carson was, for a time, “the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination,” until overtaken by Donald Trump. “That’s quite an accomplishment for what initially was considered a very longshot candidacy. Some might suggest it merits a modicum of respect – say, by referring to the longtime director of pediatric neurosurgery at the nation’s premier teaching hospital (Johns Hopkins) with the well-deserved title ‘Dr.’ Yet in the pages of the Times itself, more often than not, Carson isn’t identified that way. In fact, thumbnail analysis I just did of Times stories using the media tracking service Nexis shows that Second Lady Jill Biden (who in 2007 received a doctor of education degree, or Ed.D., from the University of Delaware) is more than three times more likely to be called ‘Dr.’ by The New YorkTimes as Carson is.”
(Updated and bumped.)
OPEN THREAD: Now blast off.
IN AMERICA, CLASS WAR IS OFTEN DISGUISED AS CULTURE WAR: The College-Debt Debate is a Culture War Battle. “The Democrats have become the party of moneyed urban and suburban professionals, and, on the matter of college loans, progressives are happy to see the rich get richer as Americans of more modest means subsidize relatively high-income Democratic households. Biden’s approach is distinguished from the progressives’ only by being a little less of the same.”
SPACE: Three companies win NASA small launch contracts. “Astra Space, Firefly Aerospace and Relativity Space won the contracts through NASA’s Venture Class Launch Services (VCLS) 2 program, the agency announced Dec. 11. The companies will launch cubesats provided by NASA on those missions, with launches required by the end of June 2022.”
ARTHUR CHRENKOFF: Gone in 60 Weeks. “The mission is now accomplished and Joe is not strictly speaking necessary any more, though it would be a tad unseemly to remove him too soon. Unless he drops dead between now and then, he will get sworn in in January and will get to enjoy the Oval Office for a while, more as a decoration than a fixture, while his Administration powers on ahead without much input from him and certainly without much need for all but his figurehead services. The battlespace preparation has already begun, with two independent lines of probing attack launched through the mainstream media: the question of age and infirmity, and the controversy over potential family corruption.”
UPDATE: Jim Bennett emails: “My theory is, Kamela will want Joe to stay for two years and a day, so she will be eligible for that second full term in 2028. She wants the 10-year presidency, second only to FDR. And after all, Joe’s just window dressing. No harm in keeping him around longer. Also, blame him, not her, for the red tide of the 2022 elections.”
Move over, Solyndra. Another green boondoggle from the Obama era has failed, and taxpayers are out as much as $510 million. Late last week Judge Karen Owens approved a Chapter 11 plan of reorganization by Tonopah Solar Energy. Tonopah operated the Crescent Dunes solar plant in Nevada that received $737 million in guaranteed loans from the Obama Administration.
The plan includes a settlement with the Department of Energy that leaves taxpayers liable for as much as $234.68 million in outstanding debt, but the total public cost is even higher. Crescent Dunes also received an investment-tax credit, and the 2009 stimulus legislation allowed it to receive a cash payment in lieu of credit. In 2017 the plant received more than $275.6 million from Treasury under the Section 1603 program, which it used to service its outstanding liabilities. So taxpayers already gave Crescent Dunes cash to pay off its taxpayer-backed loans.
This is one more cautionary tale in climate subsidies. The sun doesn’t deliver power when it’s cloudy or dark. Crescent Dunes promised to solve this problem by using molten salt to retain the heat from the sun and produce steam, so the plant would generate power 24/7. . . .
DOE expected Crescent Dunes to produce up to 482,000 megawatt hours every year, but the plant hasn’t produced that much energy in its lifetime. In 2019 Crescent Dunes’s hot salt tanks suffered what partial owner SolarReserve described as “a catastrophic failure” that has left the plant inoperable.
The feds called Crescent Dunes a success until forced to admit it was a failure. As late as April 2017—when the plant was in the throes of a months-long shutdown—DOE pronounced it a “milestone for the country’s energy future” and a “success story” taken from “mirage to reality.” But in August spokeswoman Shaylyn Hynes admitted that “this project has consistently faced technical failures that have proven difficult to overcome.”
New tech always has teething problems, but this kind of thing keeps happening with massive solar boondoggles.
RICHMOND UPS STORE SENT UNREQUESTED MAILIN BALLOTS: Hayden Ludwig of the Capital Research Center (CRC) has the details on that and much more about Mark Zuckerberg, the Center for Voter Information and much else concerning the Left’s voter manipulation.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Wash U/St. Louis eliminates summer salaries for tenured faculty. “That’s rather dramatic for a law school regularly in the top 25 in the U.S., and one that is part of a very wealthy parent university (although its wealth, I gather, is tied up heavily with the [top] medical and [the middling] business schools).”
Given that law school applications are currently booming, I wonder about this. It can’t just be economic exigency.
The film replaces the novel’s unreliable first-person narrative in favor of a dryly ironic third-person one from Michael Hordern. After taking part in a duel for the affections of his cousin Nora with British officer Captain Quinn (Leonard Rossiter), Barry flees Ireland, mistakenly believing he has killed him. His family have in fact tampered with the shot, reluctant to lose the valuable stipend Quinn has promised in exchange for Nora’s hand. Barry enlists in the British army after being robbed at the outset of his odyssey. Deserting, he becomes press-ganged into the Prussian army, then becomes the protégé of gambler and spy Chevalier de Balibari (Patrick Magee), before eventually meeting Lady Lyndon (Marisa Berenson) at a game of cards. He marries her, achieving wealth and some social standing, before ultimately undoing all he achieved through financial profligacy and vanity, ensuring the venomous enmity of his stepson, Lord Bullingdon (Leon Vitali).
Martin Scorsese said of the film, “I’m not sure if I can say that I have a favorite Kubrick picture, but somehow I keep coming back to Barry Lyndon. I think that’s because it’s such a profoundly emotional experience. The emotion is conveyed through the movement of the camera, the slowness of the pace, the way the characters move in relation to their surroundings. People didn’t get it when it came out. Many still don’t. Basically, in one exquisitely beautiful image after another, you’re watching the progress of a man as he moves from the purest innocence to the coldest sophistication, ending in absolute bitterness—and it’s all a matter of simple, elemental survival. It’s a terrifying film because all the candlelit beauty is nothing but a veil over the worst cruelty. But it’s real cruelty, the kind you see every day in polite society. His audacity is to insist on slowness in order to recreate the pace of life, and to ritualise behaviour of the time. A great example is the seduction scene, which he stretches until it settles into a sort of trance, what always struck me is the ballet of emotions of the film, watch the tension between the camera’s movements and the characters body language orchestrated by the music in this scene.”
Another excellent choice would have been “the owner of a store that was torched this summer or a small business owner who has lost everything because the government forced the closure of their business,” as Anna James Zeigler of the Federalisttweets.
In any case, Frank Martin notes, “It’s my understanding, based on years of public schooling, that ‘Person’ is singular. And yet, there are two ‘People’” on Time’s cover illustration.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): So Time makes Kamala half a person. And yet people complain that the framers treated slaves as 3/5 of a person. So at Time, Kamala’s worth less than a slave.
On Friday, just before the Supreme Court rejected Attorney General Ken Paxton’s (R-Texas) explosive lawsuit challenging the results of the 2020 presidential election in four key swing states, Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. (D-N.J.) asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to refuse to seat members of the next Congress who support President Donald Trump’s effort to challenge the election results. Pascrell accused the 126 Republicans who supported the Texas lawsuit of “insurrection or rebellion” — or at least, of supporting “insurrection or rebellion” — against the Constitution.
“Stated simply, the men and women who would act to tear the United States Government apart cannot serve as Members of the Congress,” Pascrell said in a letter to Pelosi and a statement he posted on Twitter.
“These lawsuits seeking to obliterate public confidence in our democratic system by invalidating the clear results of the 2020 presidential election undoubtedly attack the text and the spirit of the Constitution, which each Member swears to support and defend,” the Democrat argued. “Today I’m calling on House leaders to refuse to seat any Members trying to overturn the election and make donald trump [sic] an unelected dictator.”
—Press release by New Jersey Congressman Bill Pascrell, May 17th, 2017.
REPORT: Chinese Communists Have Infiltrated Top Companies, Governments In US, UK, Australia. “Multiple top international news outlets confirm that a list of 1.95 million Chinese Communist Party members has been leaked, and in it are the names of potentially thousands of individuals who live and work in the West, including at major financial institutions, medical research and pharmaceutical companies, and foreign governments. A document containing 1.95 million names of CCP members was provided to The Daily Mail in the United Kingdom, The Australian in Australia, De Standaard in Belgium, and a yet unnamed Swedish editor, who apparently has not published the story. Inside the list are potentially thousands of names of CCP members who have infiltrated top corporations and high levels of government across the West.”
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