YA THINK? Missing IRS Emails Reflect Pattern Of Non-Phony Scandals. “It is amazing how these emails have just disappeared and we’re all supposed to believe that.”
Search Results
PATTERN OR PRACTICE: Second IRS Employee Pleads The Fifth At Oversight Hearing.
HMM: Strange Patterns Discovered on the Red Planet Offer Tantalizing New Evidence for Ancient Life on Mars. “Rapin and the research team say these salt deposits are the first direct fossil evidence of an ongoing cyclical Martian climate where both wet and dry seasons occurred in its ancient past, although previous research had already suggested changes in the seasonal environment on the planet would be capable of providing conditions perfect for the formation of complex compounds that form the building blocks of life.”
JONATHAN HAIDT: Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest.
In conclusion, I believe that Greg Lukianoff was exactly right in the diagnosis he shared with me in 2014. Many young people had suddenly—around 2013—embraced three great untruths:
They came to believe that they were fragile and would be harmed by books, speakers, and words, which they learned were forms of violence (Great Untruth #1).
They came to believe that their emotions—especially their anxieties—were reliable guides to reality (Great Untruth #2).
They came to see society as comprised of victims and oppressors—good people and bad people (Great Untruth #3).
Liberals embraced these beliefs more than conservatives. Young liberal women adopted them more than any other group due to their heavier use of social media and their participation in online communities that developed new disempowering ideas. These cognitive distortions then caused them to become more anxious and depressed than other groups. Just as Greg had feared, many universities and progressive institutions embraced these three untruths and implemented programs that performed reverse CBT on young people, in violation of their duty to care for them and educate them….
We are now 11 years into the largest epidemic of adolescent mental illness ever recorded. I know so many families that have been thrown into fear and turmoil by a child’s suicide attempt. You probably do too, given that the recent CDC report tells us that one in ten adolescents now say they have made an attempt to kill themselves. It is hitting all political and demographic groups. The evidence is abundant that social media is a major cause of the epidemic, and perhaps the major cause. It’s time we started treating social media and other apps designed for “engagement” (i.e., addiction) like alcohol, tobacco, and gambling, or, because they can harm society as well as their users, perhaps like automobiles and firearms. Adults should have wide latitude to make their own choices, but legislators and governors who care about mental health, women’s health, or children’s health need to step up.
The “Reverse CBT” reference is to this:
In CBT you learn to recognize when your ruminations and automatic thinking patterns exemplify one or more of about a dozen “cognitive distortions,” such as catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking, fortune telling, or emotional reasoning. Thinking in these ways causes depression, as well as being a symptom of depression. Breaking out of these painful distortions is a cure for depression.
What Greg saw in 2013 were students justifying the suppression of speech and the punishment of dissent using the exact distortions that Greg had learned to free himself from. Students were saying that an unorthodox speaker on campus would cause severe harm to vulnerable students (catastrophizing); they were using their emotions as proof that a text should be removed from a syllabus (emotional reasoning). Greg hypothesized that if colleges supported the use of these cognitive distortions, rather than teaching students skills of critical thinking (which is basically what CBT is), then this could cause students to become depressed. Greg feared that colleges were performing reverse CBT.
I think it’s an excellent point. Plus:
I have italicized Filipovic’s text about the benefits of feeling like you captain your own ship because it points to a psychological construct with a long history of research and measurement: Locus of control. As first laid out by Julian Rotter in the 1950s, this is a malleable personality trait referring to the fact that some people have an internal locus of control—they feel as if they have the power to choose a course of action and make it happen, while other people have an external locus of control—they have little sense of agency and they believe that strong forces or agents outside of themselves will determine what happens to them. Sixty years of research show that people with an internal locus of control are happier and achieve more. People with an external locus of control are more passive and more likely to become depressed.
I’m somewhat familiar with this since Helen’s dissertation involved locus of control. I have to say that if you wanted to set up an undercover project to destroy the confidence, emotional health, and intellectual integrity of young Americans, you’d probably create the social media/mass media/academia axis that we have today, and that Haidt describes in this piece, which is much longer than these brief excerpts.
NORMALIZING PEDOPHILIA: Next Step in the War on Kids.
Going by previous patterns, including the move to get people to say “Minor Attracted Person” or “MAP” instead of “pedophile,” (which most of the academic types and some ordinary, otherwise-sane people have started using on Twitter and other social media), it seems likely to me that this one isn’t far from a crucial point. This tipping point is the point where it’ll become widely known enough that, if not exactly “mainstream,” enough people will know what it means that it’ll amount, in practical terms, to the same thing.
The idea that people are seeing spread on social media and sending to me relates, in a parallel fashion, to the notion of “transage,” which, unlike “transrace,” has a real chance at succeeding. Trans-race is a struggling notion because race has such a sacred place in the leftist victim hierarchy, but the notion of age holds no such status. Thus, with no higher caste of victims on whose turf they would be stepping, there is a very real chance that this is going to work.
If it does work, the transformation will happen—as most leftist movements do—slowly, and then quite quickly. Out of nowhere, it’ll seemingly happen all at once.
This essay is my attempt to point it out in advance so that each of us can do what we can to stop it.
The first step is to never, never go along with the Left’s Orwellian language games.
THE DEMOCRATS SEEM TO HAVE A PATTERN OF CRAPPING ON THE PEOPLE WHO PROTECT THEM: “Secret Service agents were outraged last year by the White House’s attempt to downplay bite injuries caused by then-first dog Major — even trying to get President Biden to personally pay for a damaged coat, newly released documents show.”
GRAFT, CORRUPTION, RENT-SEEKING… THE NEW NORMAL: Oversight Members Outline ‘Pattern of Ethical Issues’ at Granholm’s Energy Department.
In a Tuesday letter to Granholm that focused on whether assistant secretary Kelly Speakes-Backman “acted inappropriately” by promoting the interests of her former employer in her official government role, the lawmakers called out the agency for ignoring complaints about ethical lapses.
“On May 12, 2021, we first requested information about another conflict of interest regarding your relationship with Proterra, Inc,” the letter states. “Your agency has failed to provide a substantive response. This lack of transparency and apparent pattern of ethical issues raises questions about the stewardship of the agency by the Biden Administration.”
The complaint the committee referenced was in regards to Granholm’s promotion of electric battery company Proterra while she still held millions of dollars in shares of the company. The agency did not produce documents requested by the committee, which is now asking for documents related to Speakes-Backman.
The next time the GOP is in power, entire departments like DOE need to be zeroed out — just like Gingrich & Co. promised (but failed) to do in the game-changing ’94 election.
FIRST THE FAA STARTS MESSING WITH THEM, NOW THIS: DoJ Investigating Space X for Not Hiring a Foreign National. “It is unclear exactly why the IER is investigating a pattern or practice of discrimination when Space X is required to discriminate against broad categories of non-citizens for ITAR compliance reasons.”
DAVID HARSANYI: A Rant against the Media.
Why is the first inclination of Donald Trump’s supporters to lash out at the press when he says something ridiculous? Part of it is political expediency, of course. Most of it, though, is completely understandable.
Even when Trump badly mangles science, journalists, who spend vast amounts of their time chasing gotchas, offer a misleading and histrionic rendering of his comments. Trump doesn’t want Americans to inject themselves with disinfectants or ingest bleach and die. Journalists know this.
The media are a collection of well-funded outlets that set the agenda, narrative, tone, and focus of coverage while conspiring with a major political party. Reporters don’t openly collude with Democrats (well, most of the time they don’t), they merely share the same objectives and set of values. This wasn’t a problem created by Trump’s emergence. It’s problem that’s been festering for decades.
And it was on full display during Trump’s latest press confeerence: ‘Media is broken’: Journo Olivia Nuzzi asks Trump ‘possibly the most ridiculous question asked so far’ at today’s WH COVID19 presser (video).
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Nuzzi’s fellow media flacks are congratulating her on her bravery. But of course, real bravery would be asking Joe Biden about Tara Reade. No journalist has been brave enough to do that, and despite Nuzzi’s previous #MeToo posturing, I very much doubt she’ll break that pattern.
CHRISTOPHER DEMUTH: Trump Rewrites the Book on Emergencies: For the first time in U.S. history, an administration is responding to a crisis with deregulation and decentralization.
Washington’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic is upending one of the most durable patterns of American politics. Throughout history, national emergencies have led to a more powerful and centralized federal government and to the transfer of federal power from Congress to the executive branch. This time, the federal response rests largely on state and local government and private enterprise, with a wave of deregulation clearing the way. The Trump administration has seized no new powers, and Congress has stayed energetically in the game.
The historical pattern is powerful and might have seemed inevitable. In times of war, natural disaster and economic upheaval, action is king. The president and his officials and agencies can act with much greater dispatch than Congress can. They may be forgiven for crossing statutory or even constitutional boundaries—in a crisis, the test of legitimacy is perceived effectiveness. But emergency actions often set precedents for normal times.
Moreover, crises generate proposals for preventing their recurrence. These typically take the form of an agency that, with the benefit of hindsight, could have nipped the crisis in the bud. Positing an omnicompetent government authority is political misdirection: It elides the profound problems of uncertainty and conflicting information and interpretation that precede every catastrophe. That is a sure recipe for highly concentrated, discretionary power.
These tendencies were dramatically on display in the first two national emergencies of the 21st century, 9/11 and the 2008 financial collapse. In response to the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration and Congress created two gigantic agencies with extraordinary powers and insulation from congressional control, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Intelligence was centralized and bureaucratized; federal police powers were extended down to driver’s licenses and much else; the administration established wide-ranging surveillance programs.
In response to the 2008 crisis, the administration arranged corporate mergers and bailouts with only fig leaves of statutory authority. It spent hundreds of billions of dollars without congressional appropriation. These crisis expedients provided the template for the Obama administration’s unilateral responses to mere political frustrations—congressional inaction on its climate change, immigration and other legislative proposals. At the same time, the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 commissioned an army of new regulatory authorities with unprecedented discretion and autonomy.
It is not only crises that propel the administrative state. Lesser events of the 2000s—accounting scandals and a spike in energy prices—also led to new layers of freewheeling federal power. But major emergencies have unfailingly been major inflection points.
Until now. In responding to the coronavirus, the Trump administration has confined itself to longstanding statutory authorities that have been invoked routinely in responding to lesser emergencies. President Trump has used the Stafford Act of 1988 to provide states with emergency financial assistance—but has deferred to their decisions regarding social confinement, business closures, testing and treatment. He has employed the Defense Production Act of 1950 to cajole manufactures to prioritize urgently needed medical equipment—but has relied primarily on consultation, coordination and publicity to coach a private-sector-led mobilization. He has declared a national emergency under the National Emergencies Act of 1976, which can potentially trigger extraordinary regulatory powers—but so far he has used it only for deregulatory purposes, waiving Medicare, Medicaid, Children’s Health Insurance and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act rules that restrict telemedicine and interstate medical practice.
Mr. Trump has received criticism from all sides for these measured responses. It is said, on the one hand, that he should aggressively commandeer state police powers and industrial resources to mount a uniform national response—and, on the other (sometimes by the same critics), that the crisis will sooner or later unleash the authoritarian ambitions Mr. Trump has supposedly been harboring all along.
His replies have been characteristically adamant. He has extolled his administration’s performance on the measures that are unarguably federal jurisdictions—restricting foreign travel, deploying the military’s medical resources, mobilizing production of materials in short supply and allocating them among states and cities, providing information on the spread of the virus and guidance on mitigation measures. He has been jealous of federal prerogatives and sharply critical of governors and business executives he regarded as uncooperative.
But mainly he has given pride of place to federalism and private enterprise—lauding the patriotism and proficiency of our fantastic governors and mayors, our incredible business leaders and genius companies, our heroic doctors and nurses and orderlies, and our tremendous truckers. By shouting out many of them by name and documenting their deeds on a daily basis, he has vivified the American way in action (once reluctantly aroused). When asked why he has not issued orders for nationwide home and business lockdowns, he has emphasized that the intensity of the epidemic varies widely and is best met by calibrated state and local judgments—and added pointedly that such steps would conflict with the Constitution.
What nonsense. Everyone knows that we have a living, breathing Constitution that adapts and changes to meet the needs of the time, defined as whatever the chattering class wants at the moment.
Plus: “The most striking aspect of the administration’s response has been its waiving or liberalizing of hundreds of regulatory requirements that would otherwise impede efforts to cope with the epidemic and ensuing shutdowns. The Food and Drug Administration has relaxed its extreme restrictions on the development and deployment of medical tests, equipment, drugs and vaccines. The Medicare and Hipaa waivers, along with the suspension by many states of their restrictions on out-of-state medical professionals, are allowing doctors and nurses to go where they are needed and to practice telemedicine. The Education Department is easing its micromanagement of school districts to facilitate online teaching and other initiatives. Teachers I know are enthusiastic about the cancellation of this year’s federal testing requirements—now they can actually teach their students instead of merely preparing them for tests.”
Most of these requirements — possibly all — should be permanently abolished.
Related: Social Media as Social Disease.
NOT SATIRE: In His First Day On The Job, Kavanaugh Hired As Many Black Law Clerks As RBG Has In Her Entire Tenure.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh has hired a black law clerk for his new chambers at the U.S. Supreme Court, matching Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s record of African-American clerkship hiring during her tenure on the nation’s highest judicial tribunal.
With his first clerkship hires, Kavanaugh also set a gender composition record, an apparent attempt to buck the high court’s hiring patterns, which tend to favor white, male graduates of elite law schools.
Since joining the high court in 1993, Ginsburg has hired over 100 law clerks, just one of whom is black.
Where are the protestors?
MICHAEL LEDEEN: The First Anti-American President.
Barack Obama will no doubt be chronicled, among other things, as the first anti-American president. No wonder; he’s the product of an educational system that has become increasingly radical and anti-American with each passing decade, and his mother was a stereotypical leftist anthropologist with a passion for the Third World.
The pattern is unmistakable. As Luis Fleischman notes, Obama wanted to make deals with our enemies, Iran being the most dramatic example.
That’s just the intro. Read the whole thing.
PAUL KRUGMAN ON ELECTION NIGHT: “If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.”
L.A. Times this weekend: Strong economy boosts Trump among otherwise skeptical voters.
At a recent focus group that Peter Hart, a longtime Democratic pollster, conducted in Wilmington, N.C., for Emory University, even participants who voted for Trump last year sharply criticized his administration, calling it “chaotic” “embarrassing” and disappointing.
Of the five Trump voters among the dozen participants, only one still strongly supported the president. The harsh critiques from the other four followed a pattern that Hart found earlier this year, illustrating how a segment of Trump voters, mostly college-educated and middle- to upper-income whites, has turned against him because of his behavior.
But when the subject turned to the economy, opinions of Trump noticeably warmed.
Trump wants to “bring the economy jobs — infrastructure, construction,” said Katrina Harrell, a 38-year-old black self-employed businesswoman who voted for Hillary Clinton last year. Harrell was extremely critical of almost all other aspects of the administration, but on the economy she gave Trump credit.
“I think those are good moves,” she said. “I mean, that’s what he knows — business.”
Things do seem to be humming along.
First it was arson, then it was crack, now it’s farm-fresh goat cheese.
Will the horror never end? Can Newark ever catch a break? The questions are implied in a New York Times piece this week headlined with a lament from one city resident that Whole Foods, which opened its Newark branch in late winter, is “not for us.” Newark’s population is only one-fourth white, and it seems obvious that the sentiment being expressed here, as well as the use of the word “gentrification,” are what in other contexts might be called “racial dog whistles.” The Times frets that it’s a “tense moment” and that development is happening “unevenly” in Newark, that only certain neighborhoods have benefited so far. No doubt this is correct. You might think a paper based in New York would be aware of another city where development occurred in an uneven pattern. The Upper West Side gentrified in the 1980s, Times Square in the mid 1990s, the Lower East Side in the late 1990s, Williamsburg and Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in the 2000s. Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant are gentrifying as we speak. It takes a while to renovate a city. . . .
Let’s recap the slate of urban worries on the left. “Food deserts,” meaning a lack of availability of fresh food (or a lack of market demand for it), are bad. The opening of a gigantic store dedicated to selling healthy comestibles and produce, though, is also bad. When large corporations don’t invest in urban communities, that’s shameful. Investment? Also shameful. White flight by people moving to suburbs in the 1960s? Racist. Their grandchildren’s return? Also racist. Increased disorder that leads to garbage-strewn vacant lots, abandoned buildings, and declining property values is troubling, but increased order that leads to refilled buildings, cleaned-up neighborhoods, and rising rents is also troubling. Segregation? Bad. Integration? Bad. Such thoughts are not restricted to the fringe. Ta-Nehisi Coates, perhaps the most revered thinker on black life in America, advances them in his National Book Award winning memoir-cum-manifesto Between the World and Me. When white people started moving into his neighborhood, he felt this way: “I saw white parents pushing double-wide strollers down gentrifying Harlem boulevards in T-shirts and jogging shorts . . . their sons commanded entire sidewalks with their tricycles. The galaxy belonged to them, and as terror was communicated to our children, I saw mastery communicated to theirs.”
Spike Lee compared the gentrification of Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where he grew up, to genocide after someone called the police to complain about his musician father playing late at night. Cornel West equated gentrification with “land-grabbing” and “power-grabbing,” and in an interview with AlterNet he denounced Harlem as “49 percent vanilla” as white people have moved in to “leave precious and poor working people dangling with very little for a place to go.” In his very next comment, he deplored the large number of abandoned buildings in places like Philadelphia as a result of “neoliberal hegemony.”
Sounds racist to me. And what about the Statue of Liberty?
NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Russia Triples its Airstrikes in Syria.
“The escalation marks a dangerous shift in the Russian airstrike pattern to levels only seen prior to the brokering of the cessation of hostilities agreement in late February,” said Genevieve Casagrande, an analyst with the Institute for the Study of War.
The expansion, she notes, coincides with a further breakdown of the internationally-brokered Geneva peace negotiations, which opposition politicians dismiss as a “waste of breath” because of the continued airstrikes on opposition-held territory both by Russian warplanes and the air force of President Bashar al-Assad.
Russia’s air campaign to aid Assad does seem to be yielding better results than the US effort to assist Baghdad.
ELIJAH CUMMINGS TRIES TO FLY COVER FOR THE IRS, JIM JORDAN SHOOTS HIM DOWN:
“The problem now is that our committee is in a mindset where we are just trying to get the IRS,” Cummings said.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio.), chairman of the Oversight subcommittee on administrative rules, fired back.
“We’re not trying to get the IRS. The IRS was trying to get conservative Americans who were exercising their First Amendment, free speech right,” he said. “Twenty-three hearings is a pretty small price to pay when you’re trying to protect fundamental liberties in the Constitution, for goodness sake.”
Jordan said the hearings are warranted because the IRS has engaged in a pattern of destroying records and documents.
If they did nothing wrong, why are so many hard drives “mysteriously” crashing and disappearing?
I SENSE A PATTERN HERE:
● I’m Sorry — If Your Kids’ Lunches Look Like This, You’re Probably Creating Monsters: “Somewhere down the road, you’re going to have a daughter-in-law who hates you for spoiling her husband (your son) because he will enter their marriage expecting the same gourmet lunches with hand-carved Legos and smiley faces. And he’ll probably also leave his socks and underpants all over the house expecting her to pick up after him — because that’s what you always did for him.”
● What Americans Lose When We Refuse Crap Jobs: “First, let us look at the social media fail of reporters that have seemingly never worked in food service. They have been mocking pictures of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker eating ribs while wearing latex gloves… I don’t know anything about the work experience of either reporter, but their apparent ignorance of basic food-safety regulations makes me wonder whether either has ever worked a crap job. Note to the national media: the people who make your food? They wear gloves. It’s for your benefit, not theirs.”
● The doubts of a ‘Social Justice Warrior:’
A few weeks ago, I was heralded as a “Social Justice Warrior” by an anonymous commenter on the Internet. The title was meant, of course, as an insult — but I was elated.
I imagined myself as a superhero, fighting one stigma at a time until the United States became a land of truly equal opportunity.
I suppose I’d prefer to be a Social Justice Ninja, because “warrior” lacks the intrigue and mystery that I always try to emulate in my Cat Woman costume at Halloween.
Nonetheless, to him, I was a warrior for pushing a politically correct agenda by using rhetoric that wasn’t my own, but instead airy slogans right out of the leftist playbook.
I’m ashamed to admit it, but he was right.
I’m a rising junior at Columbia, one of the most PC universities in the country.
It’s one thing to have the already enormous self-esteem that all kids these seem to have drilled into them by their teachers since kindergarten. But if you imagine yourself a superhero ninja Catwoman comic book character while a student in college, it might be time for a wakeup call. (Otherwise, it will arrive good and hard when you enter the workforce.) To paraphrase the line from The Incredibles, if everyone thinks he’s a superhero, then no one is.
Or perhaps it’s gender-specific: while college-aged young women think of themselves as cartoon superheroes, college-aged men are allowed to deteriorate into beta males: “In less than 15 years, we’ve gone from ‘let’s roll’ to ‘let’s not get involved.’”
UNEXPECTEDLY: NEW YORK TIMES KEEPING TED CRUZ’S NEW BOOK OFF ITS BESTSELLER LIST, DESPITE FIRST WEEK SALES THAT WOULD PUT HIM AT #3:
This week, HarperCollins, the book’s publisher, sent a letter to The New York Times inquiring about Cruz’s omission from the list, sources with knowledge of the situation said. The Times responded by telling HarperCollins that the book did not meet their criteria for inclusion.
“We have uniform standards that we apply to our best seller list, which includes an analysis of book sales that goes beyond simply the number of books sold,” Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy explained when asked about the omission. “This book didn’t meet that standard this week.”
Asked to specify those standards, Murphy replied: “Our goal is that the list reflect authentic best sellers, so we look at and analyze not just numbers, but patterns of sales for every book.”
Back in 2008, Roger Kimball, the publisher of Encounter Books (and my colleague at PJM), decided he had enough of those “standards,” and publicly called the NYT on their Pinch of BS:
Encounter Books, the conservative publishing house run by Roger Kimball, will no longer send review copies to the New York Times. In an amusing and much-discussed item posted to the company’s Encounter Intelligence Web log, Mr. Kimball explained that the Times has “studiously” ignored almost all of his titles, and so if it plans to review any in the future, it will have to buy them like any other reader.
In a phone interview with The New York Sun, Mr. Kimball said he doesn’t think his decision will jeopardize the financial health of his company; if anything, it might serve as a “wake-up call” to Times Book Review Editor Sam Tanenhaus, whom Mr. Kimball describes as a “moderate left-wing opportunist” responsible for perpetuating the “travesty” that has become of a once justly celebrated organ of cultural criticism. The Times is now a clearinghouse of “press releases emanating from the p.c. seats of established opinion” and “metrosexual lifestyle stuff,” Mr. Kimball said. (Mr. Tanenhaus did not return The Sun’s phone call for comment.)
When he was named the editor of the Times Book Review in 2004, many believed that Mr. Tanenhaus would be sympathetic to the intellectual right, Mr. Kimball noted, citing Mr. Tanenhaus’s well-received biography of Whittaker Chambers. And yet, throughout his tenure as the head of the Sunday books section, Mr. Kimball charged, Mr. Tanenhaus has assigned those few conservative books the paper has covered to reviewers who seem to have their own axes to grind, and who appear to have little interest in giving the books an objective reading.
“It’s not that the reviews are critical,” Mr. Kimball said. “It’s that they’re sophomoric and uninformed” and seldom rise above the level of the “ideological hatchet-job.”
In early 2009, at the peak of the left’s “We Are Socialists Now” shiny Obama unicorn fever, Tanenhaus, then still editor of the Times’ book review section, infamously published a thin screed titled The Death of Conservatism. About five minutes later, the Tea Party emerged, and by the end of 2010, thanks in large part to the all-Democrat Obamacare bill, the GOP recaptured the House, in 2014 the Senate, and currently 31 states have Republican governors and the GOP controls numerous state legislatures.
Will the GOP take back the White House in 2016? Not if the Times can help it — and they’re doing everything they can to prevent it.
THE STENCH OF WEAKNESS CONFIRMED: Russian bomber flights near US airspace doubled last year.
Russian bombers intruded into the U.S. Air Defense Identification Zone — a transition area around U.S. airspace where the U.S. does not claim sovereignty but keeps close watch — at least 10 times in 2014, double the average of five incursions a year dating to 2006, according to the North American Aerospace Defense Command, known as NORAD. . . .
“We saw last year both an increase in their frequency as well an expansion of the areas where they flew. While these flights are ostensibly for training, they are also clearly intended to message to us,” Adm. William Gortney, the commander of NORAD, told The Washington Times.
Rep. Michael K. Conaway, a Texas Republican who serves on the House Armed Services Committee, said he believes the Kremlin’s message is crystal-clear and that it ultimately could trigger a dangerous response.
“On a tactical level, this is a pattern that shows they’re testing our responses to see what we’re doing and how we do it,” he said. “They’re very provocative, they’re subject to miscommunication, and some event could happen that no one wants.
“So why do the Russians continue to do it? I think they’re rattling sabers in a sense. I think this is definitely coming from [Russian President Vladimir] Putin. They’re flexing their muscles, they’re trying to reclaim the superpower status that Putin has always wanted to. It’s a great concern, it’s dangerous and it’s provocative. There’s no good that can come from it, and it needs to stop,” Rep. Conaway said.
Because a beta male/mom jeans President who tells Russia that he’ll have “more flexibility” after the 2012 election invites Putin’s belligerence. Russia’s annexation of Crimea is only the beginning. It’s almost as though Russia and China are now itching for a fight with a weakened U.S.
USUALLY, IN A JOURNALISTIC FRAUD OR PLAGIARISM SCANDAL, THE FIRST CASE YOU FIND OUT ABOUT IS JUST THE FIRST CASE YOU FIND OUT ABOUT: Ashe Schow: Has the Rolling Stone gang-rape author EVER corroborated a story?
In the wake of Rolling Stone’s refusal to fire the author behind its now-retracted and now infamous University of Virginia gang-rape story, one has to wonder if this is a rare mistake or a pattern of behavior.
There are some big hints that it is the latter.
Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the author in question, actually has a history of writing articles based solely on one person’s account, with no indication that she even tried to corroborate the story or hear any other potential side. . . .
Every story Erdely writes begins the same way — with a story about her main source’s experience written as if Erdely witnessed it herself. From there the article only seeks to bolster the source’s account — all with a credulity that lends itself more to fiction writing than journalism.
The question is whether Rolling Stone will do what the New Republic did in the wake of the Stephen Glass controversy — that is, to review Erdely’s past work and decide whether she should continue to be trusted as an author.
Well, I know the answer to that question already, but yeah.
NEW YORK OBSERVER: Will Orange Be the New Black for IRS Chief Lois Lerner? With five more Computer Crashes, a “pattern of racketeering activity” may be emerging. I very much doubt that she’s the racketeer-in-chief here.
ROSS DOUTHAT: The Parent Trap.
Some of these cases have been reported, but some are first-person accounts, and in some the conduct of neighbors and the police and social workers may be more defensible than the anecdote suggests.
But the pattern — a “criminalization of parenthood,” in the words of The Washington Post’s Radley Balko — still looks slightly nightmarish, and there are forces at work here that we should recognize, name and resist.
First is the upper-class, competition-driven vision of childhood as a rigorously supervised period in which unattended play is abnormal, risky, weird. This perspective hasn’t just led to “the erosion of child culture,” to borrow a quote from Hanna Rosin’s depressing Atlantic essay on “The Overprotected Kid”; it has encouraged bystanders and public servants to regard a deviation from constant supervision as a sign of parental neglect.
Second is the disproportionate anxiety over child safety, fed by media coverage of every abduction, every murdered child, every tragic “hot car” death. Such horrors are real, of course, but the danger is wildly overstated: Crime rates are down, abductions and car deaths are both rare, and most of the parents leaving children (especially non-infants) in cars briefly or letting them roam a little are behaving perfectly responsibly.
Third is an erosion of community and social trust, which has made ordinary neighborliness seem somehow unnatural or archaic, and given us instead what Gracy Olmstead’s article in The American Conservative dubs the “bad Samaritan” phenomenon — the passer-by who passes the buck to law enforcement as expeditiously as possible. (Technology accentuates this problem: Why speak to a parent when you can just snap a smartphone picture for the cops?)
And then finally there’s a policy element — the way these trends interact not only with the rise of single parenthood, but also with a welfare system whose work requirements can put a single mother behind a fast-food counter while her kid is out of school.
And, more significantly, a social-welfare bureaucracy that needs these cases to make work for itself. Coupled with a sad abandonment of traditional remedies for overreaching officialdom.
And I wrote something similar on the subject a while back.
SCIENCE: Inexpensive Brain Scans Could Catch Concussions. “Quantum Institute’s first product is a brain-mapping system based on electroencephalography, or EEG. This test, commonly used to monitor neurological disorders like epilepsy, detects electrical activity in the brain through sensors placed on the scalp. Gee’s company uses quantitative EEG, which includes computer-aided analysis of the wave patterns in the scan.”