OPEN THREAD: Ring out the weekend.
Archive for 2024
May 12, 2024
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Lunar lander company ispace sees opportunities in Japan-U.S. Artemis agreement.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Jerry Seinfeld’s Commencement Address Sparks Walkout by Antisemites at Duke University.
Seinfeld, who is Jewish, is the parent of two Duke students and an active supporter of the university. He has been vocal in his support for Israel following the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel on October 7. His wife also funded a pro-Israel protest at UCLA last week. When Seinfeld was announced as this year’s commencement speaker, some students expressed opposition to his appearance over his support of Israel, and warned that there would be a display of opposition at the commencement ceremony.
The 70-year-old comedian also made headlines recently for blaming “the extreme left” for ruining comedy.
“Nothing really affects comedy. People always need it. They need it so badly and they don’t get it. Used to be you would go home at the end of the day, most people would go, “Oh, ‘Cheers’ is on. Oh, ‘M.A.S.H.’ Is on. Oh, ‘Mary Tyler Moore’ is on. Oh, ‘All in the Family’ is on. You just expected there’ll be some funny stuff we can watch on TV tonight. Well, guess what? Where is it?” Seinfeld said last month. “This is the result of the extreme left and PC crap and people worrying so much about offending other people. When you write a script and it goes into four or five different hands, committees, groups: ‘Here’s our thought about this joke.’ Well, that’s the end of your comedy,” he said. “They move the gates, like in skiing. Culture, the gates are moving. Your job is to be agile and clever enough that wherever they put the gates, I’m gonna make the gate.”
Exit quote:
Oh no. I hope Jerry Seinfeld can handle a tough audience. https://t.co/ZfkHybI3U1
— Omri Ceren (@omriceren) May 12, 2024
UPDATE:
Organizer Of Walkout Against Jerry Seinfeld Revealed https://t.co/lMLCO8C1OG pic.twitter.com/OkD06vlo97
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) May 12, 2024
FISH HEADS, FISH HEADS, EAT THEM UP, YUM: Can Omega-3 Change the Way Children Think and Feel?
READER FAVORITE: Apple AirPods (2nd Generation) Wireless Ear Buds. #CommissionEarned
PROF. STEVEN CALABRESI: Judge Aileen Cannon is a Heroine: She is scheduled on June 21st to hear oral argument on whether special counsel Jack Smith was unconstitutionally appointed. “The liberal news media is full of false stories about how Judge Aileen Cannon of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida has delayed former President Donald Trump’s trial unnecessarily for allegedly mishandling classified documents. But, in fact, the Biden Administration and its Attorney General, Merrick Garland, are themselves to blame for the current delay. Special Counsel Jack Smith claims to be an inferior officer of the United States, but in fact he holds no such office. Smith is a mere employee of the Department of Justice, and he lacks the power to initiate prosecutions. Lucia v. Securities and Exchange Commission, 585 U.S. __ (2018) holds that only officers of the United States can take actions that affect the life, liberty, and property of citizens. Judge Cannon has asked for oral argument on June 21, 2024 on former President Donald Trump’s motion to dismiss Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment on the ground that Smith was unconstitutionally appointed to his current job because he is not an inferior officer.”
I MEAN, THE EVIDENCE IS ON HER SIDE:
I didn’t compare him to one. He IS one. https://t.co/LUqXuSjktV
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) May 12, 2024
JESSE WALKER: The Night I Asked ChatGPT How To Build a Bomb: Yes, you can trick the bot into giving you information it’s supposed to keep to itself. No, that isn’t something to worry about. “It didn’t occur to me to ask ChatGPT for a bomb recipe until I heard that ChatGPT would not give me a bomb recipe. That felt like a challenge.”
BOB GRABOYES: Five Lessons on the Nature of Pro-Hamas Students, Professors, and Administrators.
UPDATE (From Ed): Graboyes writes:
In sum, Michael Moore’s Weltanschauung rests on a taxonomy devised by 19th century German racists and discredited for nearly a century—but he apparently never bothered to read what those racists actually said about their taxonomy. By Michael Moore’s reasoning, Adolf Hitler would not qualify as antisemitic.
Flashback: Michael Moore, finding Minutemen in the very strangest places.
SELF-DEFENSE: Reloading On The Fly.
GOP TO GAIN FIVE SENATE SEATS IN 2024? Senate GOP campaign insiders tell The Epoch Times they are quite confident about retaking the Senate majority in November with a two-seat gain and a pickup of five is a reasonable possibility.
MASCOT OF THE ANOINTED REACHES EXPIRATION DATE: Queen Greta has exposed the truth about the green movement.
So, Greta Thunberg has a new cause. She’s found a new crusade to throw her weight behind. Forget saving the planet – now she wants to save Palestine.
Yes, the pint-sized prophetess of doom has swapped raging against industrialism for raging against Israel. Mother Nature will just have to wait – her erstwhile valiant defender is busy fixing the Middle East now.
Yesterday, Greta was snapped at the protest in Malmo, Sweden against Israel’s inclusion in the Eurovision Song Contest.
She looked the part. She had a keffiyeh draped over her shoulders and a smug look on her face: the two must-haves of every puffed-up bourgeois activist who gets off on fuming against Israel.
The keffiyeh really has become the uniform of the self-righteous. Go into a hip coffee shop or overpriced Soho burger joint and I guarantee you’ll see a Gen Z’er decked out in the Palestinian scarf.
Whatever happened to the sin of “cultural appropriation”? Not long ago, the right-on raged against white dudes who wear their hair in dreadlocks and white women who don kominos. “Stop stealing other people’s culture!”, they’d yell. Yet now they themselves spend their days in Arab attire.
That image of Greta in Malmo, looking very satisfied with herself, summed up the role the keffiyeh plays in the life of the 21st-century activist. Keffiyeh-wearing is less about drawing attention to the plight of the Palestinians than drawing attention to you. Look at me in my Arab garb, aren’t I good and hyper socially aware – that’s the needy cry of these hipster appropriators.
Yet beneath their radical chic, darker sentiments lurk.
Not least of which is radical environmentalism embracing its nihilistic origins. Plus ça change: the original European environmentalists who had a strange coalition with Islamists were awfully totalitarian as well.
UPDATE:
— Declaration of Memes (@LibertyCappy) May 12, 2024
(Classical reference in headline.)
THEY HATE US, THEY REALLY HATE US!
In her speech, Pelosi argues that voters are “blocked” from making good, rational decisions and voting Democrat because of their culture and views on God
Watch: pic.twitter.com/YAtkNoBGVN
— Winston Marshall (@MrWinMarshall) May 11, 2024
I can’t say it’s at all surprising to see Pelosi channeling Meryl Streep channeling Hillary in the climactic scene from her dystopian 2015 Harvey Weinstein-produced movie The Giver— it’s leftists all the way down:
UPDATE: Oxford Union Debate: Mumford and Sons Musician Rips Pelosi’s Elitism Apart.
DADS ARE HUMAN TOO: (Warning, Spoiler Alert) Glenn and I watched the next to final episode of Young Sheldon where the dad, George dies of a heart attack. Like so many other fans of the show, I am heart-broken because as George Sr.’s character grew over time, I looked forward to seeing the complexity of the interactions he had with his family. If you watched the Big Bang shows, you know that Sheldon and his mom badmouth the dad for the most part, talking in negative terms about him to others and between themselves. He had an affair (turns out to be false) he was a bad dad, etc. In the Young Sheldon show, he is a long suffering dad who sacrifices constantly for the family even as they treat him as the butt of jokes:
Chuck Lorre had two jobs when creating Young Sheldon. One was to make a funny show, and two, undo all the damage made to George Cooper throughout The Big Bang Theory’s run. George was dead when The Big Bang Theory started, but Sheldon and his mother revisited him occasionally. More times than not, they had negative things to say about him, making him seem like the worst husband and father. When he was cast, Lance Barber was aware of the prevailing perception of George. In an interview with TV Line, Barber revealed that there were active efforts to change the character and make him more human instead of the butt of the joke. He and everyone in production overhauled the character to create a new person whom people could identify and sympathize with.
The belittling that the family did to this man was just sad. If he wanted anything, the wife said no, the kids put themselves first, especially Sheldon, and even the mother-in-law picked at him. When he got a better job earlier in the series, everyone cried and wouldn’t move, so he endured a lower status job at a high school. When he needed space in the house, he was told to get out of the way, etc. Right before George dies, things are looking up for him, he gets a college coaching job and the kids are nicer to him and so is the wife. Now that he is gone, they will have to go on without him. It’s sad.
George’s life and death seem like a metaphor for how our society treats men–they are expendable and an easy target for jokes and hit pieces on toxic masculinity. No one notices the sacrifices they make to keep the world moving–whether that be working to support a family, sacrificing their time or their lives for others while getting less and less in return and little notice. Except when that work and sacrifice and the men that do them are gone, then the world or in this case the Cooper family might actually miss the man that they so easily scorned while he was here.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: Far-left U. Wisconsin student groups suspended after antisemitic chalkings.
The University of Wisconsin chapters of Anticolonial Scientists and Mecha have been placed on interim suspension pending an investigation into chalkings which “endorsed violence, supported terrorist organizations and/or contained antisemitic comments.”
According to the student paper The Daily Cardinal, an interim suspension means a group “must cease activities [during] an investigation and decision from the CSO [Committee on Student Organizations].”
The report notes last weekend’s chalk messages had included “Al-Qassam you make us proud, kill another soldier now,” “Power to Al-Qassam” (the military wing of Hamas), “Power to Hezbollah,” and “Down with ‘Israel’ down with ‘USA.’”
Others praised the Houthis, who use the slogan “God is great, death to the U.S., death to Israel, curse the Jews, and victory for Islam.”
Why would a college student group even think of deploying chalk when all the best people assured me in 2016 that it was one of the most dangerous powders of mass (mental) destruction that could be deployed on a campus?
It began at Emory University, but has quickly spread across the country like a calcium carbonate plague. #TheChalkening has now terrorized college students from the University of Michigan to Arizona State, with temporary, hand-scrawled messages of support for Donald Trump on public sidewalks and stairways. While various campuses have dealt with the scourge in different ways—some creating safe spaces for the triggered teens, some encouraging the free exercise of ideas in temporary outdoor media—one school, DePaul University in Chicago, is turning to extreme measures. They’re banning chalk. Or, at least, they’re banning the use of chalk. Whether the campus intends on performing door-to-door dorm searches for paraphernalia remains to be seen.
Why were the University of Wisconsin chapters of Anticolonial Scientists and Mech exempt from such searches?
The Babylon Bee, “the newspaper of record” for anyone with a sense of humor, posed a more interesting thought about the campus demonstrations than anything you can find in the New York Times or Washington Post. The Bee’s headline proclaimed, “Uighur Slaves Struggling to Keep Up with Demand for Palestinian Headscarves.”
Dark humor indeed. The headscarves, like the masks, serve one obvious function: they hide the faces of demonstrators. That’s why bank robbers wear masks, too. Students know they are breaking the rules and professional agitators know they are breaking the law, so it’s smart to hide their faces.
But the scarves have one additional advantage that bank robbers’ masks don’t: the keffiyeh is a visible symbol of Palestinian identity. “Pardon me,” they say, “my virtue is showing.”
The Babylon Bee also picked up another interesting point the legacy media missed. The keffiyehs worn on campus today come from China, like so much clothing. Ah, globalization. Palestinians used to produce the scarves themselves but cheaper Chinese production squeezed them out of the market. The protesters’ attire is a hidden mark of the international trade they loath.
* * * * * * * *
Israel is a prominent target of that ideology. Why? Because, for the left in the US, Canada and Europe, the Jewish state represents so much they hate, wrapped into a single package: capitalism, nationalism, Western religion and economic prosperity success thanks to hard work, intensive education and merit. Since the state’s formation in the 1948, Israelis have resolutely avoided the self-conception of “victimhood,” on which all campus politics is built.
Had Israel chosen to depict itself as the “wretched of the earth,” it had every right to cloak itself in victimhood. The Holocaust, a true genocide, killed more than 6 million and destroyed European Jewry. Arab states have repeatedly launched wars of annihilation against Israel and expelled virtually all Jews from their territories, where Jews had lived for centuries. The ideological left and their Muslim allies demean those refugees as part of a “settler colonial” influx.
Those white settler colonialists are an “unexpectedly” diverse coalition!
Israelis 🇮🇱 admitting that they are “white colonizers” 👇
pic.twitter.com/K0mH6riLLC— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) May 7, 2024
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Nearly Half of All Masters Degrees Aren’t Worth Getting: According to new research, 23 percent of bachelor’s degree programs and 43 percent of master’s degree programs have a negative ROI.
I have a nephew who became a welder instead of going to college. Now out of welding school, after only a couple of months he’s earning an hourly wage that equates to a six-figure income. He has $3000 of debt.
ROGER KIMBALL: Beyond Reason: How Shame and Disgust Shape Law and Society.
It might seem that the meditations of a seventeenth-century French philosopher are pretty distant from the conundrums facing us in the twenty-first century. In some ways, this is true. But Descartes did an enormous amount to define the methods, goals, and ideals of scientific rationalism, a worldview that systematically deprecates the significance of any experience not amenable to rational analysis. Paul Valéry summed up the problem in his brief sketch for an essay on Descartes. Like many moderns, Valéry found himself bewitched by the heroic solipsism of Descartes’ formula, cogito ergo sum. Yet he knew that a corollary of that formula was a world in which “the word ‘knowledge’ is increasingly denied to anything which cannot be translated into figures.” Among other things, this meant that, as Valéry put it, “the truth for modern man, which is exactly related to his freedom of action over nature, seems more and more to be in opposition to everything that our imagination and our feelings would like to be true.” As Valéry understood, we owe our humanity not only to our ability to reason but also to our status as creatures of feeling, imagination, and moral responsibility. In the end, the idea that we are the “masters and possessors of nature” is a risible illusion bred by overweening cleverness. For ultimately, it is nature that masters and possesses us, a fact we deny to our intellectual peril and moral diminishment.
What has all of this to do with the law? For a first answer to that question, let’s broaden the field from hunches to those great underrated human resources, prejudice and the feelings of disgust and moral outrage. On those subjects, I can think of no better place to begin than with Martha Craven Nussbaum, who, among other attainments, is a professor of law, philosophy, classics, and divinity at the University of Chicago. In her book Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law and some related articles, Professor Nussbaum argues that “the law, most of us would agree, should be society’s protection against prejudice.”
Really? I suspect “most of us would agree” that the law ought to be society’s protection against crime. But perhaps Professor Nussbaum thinks that prejudice is itself a crime—though surely not all prejudice. Edmund Burke said that prejudice “renders a man’s virtue his habit.” He meant that if we have a predisposition—a prejudice—toward the right things, they more easily become second nature. Surely Professor Nussbaum would not wish for the law to protect us from that sort of prejudice. And it must be said that she herself is clearly prejudiced against anything she labels “conservative.” I doubt that she believes that the law should be society’s protection against prejudice directed at conservatives.
Read the whole thing.
SHE’S RIGHT:
What kids actually need:
Less therapy, less tech, less diagnosis.
More time outside, exercise, independence, genuine freedom, more time with each other.
Higher expectations for their conduct and achievement.
And a focus on something other than their emotions! https://t.co/J6e49dLggv
— Abigail Shrier (@AbigailShrier) May 11, 2024
NY GIANTS GREAT LAWRENCE TAYLOR TAKES TIME OUT OF HIS WEEKEND TO ATTEND TRUMP RALLY IN NJ: “Taylor was one of just 40,000 expected to support Trump at the latest stop on his campaign trail. He is one of several former or current NFL players who have voiced support for the 45th president of the United States over the past several years.”
SPRING CLEAN YOUR CAR: VIKING Car Detailing Brush Set for Car Cleaning Kit. #CommissionEarned