AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Chaos At Oscars As Chris Hansen of To Catch a Predator Fame Appears On Stage.
Archive for 2021
April 25, 2021
OPEN THREAD: How was your weekend?
TWITTER IS GARBAGE, RUN BY GARBAGE PEOPLE: Jonathan Turley calls out Twitter for censoring critics of the Indian government’s handling of COVID-19.
AVIATION PROGRESS: NASA’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity completes third successful flight.
WHAT “OTHERING” AND “MAKING LESS THAN” LOOK LIKE IN REAL LIFE:
UPDATE: From the comments: “I’m such a useless mom that my kid has no basic hygiene skills! Thank you, Febreze!”
ISAAC ASIMOV Explains life.
DEESCALATE YOUR POLICE FORCE, SHOUTS THE MOB: Libs on Twitter offered advice on how police could’ve handled the Columbus knife-attack shooting in a non-lethal manner and it’s hilarious.
STAY UNWOKE, DON’T GO BROKE: Capitalist Havens of Free Speech. Market-driven innovation is providing new outlets for free expression in an increasingly intolerant media environment. Steven Malanga chronicles the rise of Substack, Adam Carolla and other rebels against mainstream orthodoxy. He also discusses the history of free speech and what has made it possible: capitalism.
ROGER SIMON: Trump2.0 Should Be the Education President.
Now I realize we’ve already had a self-described “Education President”—George W. Bush. But he wasn’t very good at it. He brought us “No Child Left Behind.” Then President Obama brought us “Common Core”—a bureaucratic Washington-centric mess that never improved anything, actually made things worse and left us with the propagandistic nightmare we have now.
Incongruous as it may seem—and it’s really not—Trump should assume that mantle and make it the number one issue of his campaign to recapture the presidency.
He should start now, very publicly, because, as I noted, we are in crisis, destroying more of our youth by the minute and with them America’s future.
In so doing, Trump would be expanding his base. Conservative activists are far from the only people who are appalled by what is going on in our schools. Parents and indeed grandparents across the country—who have seen it all on Zoom now—are worried stiff about what is happening to their children though many are too fearful of the repercussions to speak up.
They would welcome Trump taking this on, even if they didn’t admit it at first.
This would be especially true of two key parts of the electorate where he did not fare particularly well—suburban women and blacks (where he did better than most Republicans but not yet good enough).
The suburban women will need some wooing (they’ve been propagandized endlessly against him), but many blacks already see school choice as the civil rights movement of our time. (Teaching young black kids that it’s okay not to learn basic math is about as condescending… and racist… as you can get.)
When I say Trump is the man to do this—to take these issues and run—it is because he has already made several early and meaningful steps in that direction. In a sense he has already begun.
Near the end of his presidency he took on phony “diversity” training, critical race theory, and the fundamentally dishonest 1619 Project that even the New York Times, where it first appeared, walked back. Instead, he initiated the 1776 Commission that Biden, of course, killed.
He did make one error, I regret to say, choosing Betsy DeVos for secretary of education. Still tethered to the Bush approach, she didn’t have the courage or the moxie to carry through the necessary reforms and right the ship.
Trump should build his own ex-officio education commission now, actually continue building what he started while in office, and publicize their ideas and initiatives as only he can.
It’s both fun and necessary to dunk on the DNC-MSM for their ridiculously slanted bias, but education reform should be the American right’s number one goal.
WE NEED A COMPLETE AND TOTAL SHUTDOWN OF MICHIGAN UNTIL WE CAN FIGURE OUT WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON THERE: Michigan lawmaker pulled over for driving drunk threatens police. “‘When I call Gretchen,’ he allegedly [said, the arresting officers] would have to hand off their ‘IDs, badge numbers, everything.’”
The 911 calls came pouring in as the black Chevy Tahoe sped down a Michigan highway.
For almost 50 miles, witnesses reported, the vehicle with the vanity plate “ELECTED” was driving so recklessly earlier this month that at least one person saw the car go the wrong way before it rolled into a ditch.
Inside the Chevy, state police found state Representative Jewell Jones, whose blood alcohol level was allegedly more than double the legal limit. In the cupholder behind him was semiautomatic handgun.
“If you hit me, it’s going to be very bad for you. I’ll call Governor [Gretchen] Whitmer right now,” Mr. Jones told the officers on 6 April, according a police report obtained by the Detroit Free Press and other local media. “When I call Gretchen,” he allegedly continued, they would have to hand off their “IDs, badge numbers, everything.”
That interaction marks the latest twist in a stunning case for Mr Jones, who turned 26 just days after the incident and is the youngest-ever member of the Michigan state House of Representatives.
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When he again came into contact with police on 6 April after rolling into a ditch off the shoulder of Interstate 96, the interaction proved to be far more chaotic.
Mr Jones allegedly threatened the Michigan state troopers by telling them he oversaw their agency’s finances. When officers asked for an ID, he tried to show a badge and then shook his arms “as if he were about to do something,” the reports said.
“It’s not going to be good for you, I run y’all budget, bro,” he told them, according to The News.
According to NBC News, “In a lengthy statement, Jones’ attorney, Ali Hammoud, called his client a dedicated public servant, denied the lawmaker resisted arrest and insisted ‘he was not threatening the officers in any way.'”
That’s not quite how it looks on the dashcam video. More details here.
FASTER, PLEASE: Body’s natural pain killers can be enhanced.
HOW DOES ANYONE SURVIVE? ‘Aerosolized’ pathogens hang around after toilet flushes in public bathrooms.
ROGER KIMBALL: Slow-Motion Suicide of the West.
The issue, [James] Burnham saw, is that modern allotropes of liberalism have equipped us with an ethic that is far too abstract and too empty to inspire existential allegiance. Modern liberalism, Burnham wrote in Suicide of the West,
does not offer ordinary men compelling motives for personal suffering, sacrifice, and death. There is no tragic dimension in its picture of the good life. Men become willing to endure, sacrifice, and die for God, for family, king, honor, country, from a sense of absolute duty or an exalted vision of the meaning of history. . . . And it is precisely these ideas and institutions that liberalism has criticized, attacked, and in part overthrown as superstitious, archaic, reactionary, and irrational. In their place liberalism proposes a set of pale and bloodless abstractions—pale and bloodless for the very reason that they have no roots in the past, in deep feeling and in suffering. Except for mercenaries, saints, and neurotics, no one is willing to sacrifice and die for progressive education, medicare, humanity in the abstract, the United Nations, and a ten percent rise in Social Security payments.
Thus it is that Burnham could conclude that the primary function of liberalism was to “permit Western civilization to be reconciled to dissolution,” to view weakness, failure, even collapse as not as a defeat but “as the transition to a new and higher-order in which Mankind as a whole joins in a universal civilization that has risen above the parochial distinctions, divisions, and discriminations of the past.”
Sound familiar? Of course, it does. It’s the hit tune that is playing on every college campus, and that echoes throughout the bulletins emitted by HR departments of major corporations, and the bleatings of Hollywood stars, media “celebrities,” and woke personalities whose affluence is matched only by their ignorance and unconscious commitment to mouthing the sanctioned progressive clichés of the moment.
Read the whole thing, although what Burnham defined as “liberalism” is really a massive stolen base by “Progressives” in the 1920s to rehabilitate the brand after Woodrow Wilson had soiled it completely during WWI, as Fred Siegel wrote in his 2014 history of the American left, The Revolt Against the Masses:
Liberals were those Progressives who had renamed themselves so as to repudiate Wilson. “The word liberalism,” wrote Walter Lippmann in 1919, “was introduced into the jargon of American politics by that group who were Progressives in 1912 and Wilson Democrats from 1916 to 1918.” The new liberalism was a decisive cultural break with Wilson and Progressivism. While the Progressives had been inspired by a faith in democratic reforms as a salve for the wounds of both industrial civilization and power politics, liberals saw the American democratic ethos as a danger to freedom at home and abroad.
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The best short credo of liberalism came from the pen of the once canonical left-wing literary historian Vernon Parrington in the late 1920s. “Rid society of the dictatorship of the middle class,” Parrington insisted, referring to both democracy and capitalism, “and the artist and the scientist will erect in America a civilization that may become, what civilization was in earlier days, a thing to be respected.” Alienated from middle-class American life, liberalism drew on an idealized image of “organic” pre-modern folkways and rhapsodized about a future harmony that would reestablish the proper hierarchy of virtue in a post-bourgeois, post-democratic world.
So from that point of view, “liberalism,” while changing its spots somewhat over the past decade to encompass “critical race theory,” is still working as the original “Progressives” redefined it.
Related exit question from across the pond: What did you do in the Great Culture War, Daddy?
IT’S 2021, SO GRAVITY IS RACIST NOW: Isaac Newton latest historical figure swept up in ‘decolonization’ drive.
21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Japanese man arrested after dating 35 women at the same time in bid to ‘get birthday presents.’
OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH EASTASIA: Smarter-Than-You NYT Award-Winning Columnist Says Antifa and BLM Riots Were a Right-Wing Fever Dream.
REPUBLICANS POUNCE! TNR: Republicans Have Ruined Sports for Republicans. The favorability of the MLB, NBA, and NFL has sharply dropped on the right, thanks to culture warriors like Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson.
It couldn’t have been stuff like this, right?
And speaking of Republicans pouncing:
As Jim Treacher likes to say, “When Republicans screw up, that’s the story. When Democrats screw up, the Republicans’ reaction is the story.”
Related: From America’s Newspaper of Record: Man Who Agrees With The Media, Universities, Corporations, And Hollywood Thinks He’s Part Of The Resistance.
LET ME JUST GET OUT AHEAD OF THE STORY AND SAY THAT GHISLAINE MAXWELL DID NOT COMMIT SUICIDE: New photos show Epstein and Maxwell were VIP guests in Clinton’s White House.