DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: NYC Mom Hired ‘Deprogrammer’ for Daughter ‘Brainwashed’ by College’s Woke Agenda.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Tim Cook Says He’s Ready To Pull Twitter From App Store Once President Xi Gives The Order.

BREAKING NEWS FROM 2000! Increasingly, Trust in Election Outcomes Appears Dangerously Partisan.

NOW THE TRUTH CAN BE TOLD:

In focusing on America’s rising rates of violent crime leading up to the midterm elections, Republicans were routinely accused of playing a dirty trick on voters.

“We don’t really have a common definition of what crime means,” crime-statistics analyst Jeff Asher asserted in an October interview with NPR. Apparently, the range of activities that constituted a violation of statute made it difficult to discern what voters meant when they said “crime.” And when “crime” wasn’t a nebulous concept that eluded the unsophisticated, it was cast as a problem presided over by Republicans. “Research has repeatedly shown that crime is rising faster in Republican, Trump-supporting states,” wrote Clinton-era Labor Sec. Robert Reich. It certainly wasn’t rising in cities led by lenient progressive prosecutors, as the Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein noted, citing the entirely dispassionate research produced by the Center for American Progress. Indeed, violent crimes such as homicides and rapes were down in 2022, according to the FBI’s midyear survey. “Violent crime is not soaring,” Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank asserted. “In fact, it might be declining.”

These formless arguments orbit around one animating imperative: Neutralize the crime issue. In no less a venue than the Associated Press, a mid-2021 article previewed this approach by castigating the GOP for failing to make sufficient note of (at the time) declining rates of drug offenses and burglaries while recklessly emphasizing your increased risk of being murdered by a stranger. The GOP was deploying “a new twist on an old ‘law and order’ argument from the party’s past, harkening back to President Richard Nixon.” The GOP failed to make note of the “complicated reasons for fluctuating crime rates” in 2020 and early 2021, such as the “protests that erupted after the killing of George Floyd by police”—which were accompanied by a lot of crime and a muted response from law enforcement.

Now that the election has passed, the truth can be told. Indeed, the truth was lacking only in one vital attribute: an angle.

Regarding the AP: “‘Gaslighting’ is Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2022,” they report.

Speaking of mush from the wimp, I give the Biden administration credit for the rise of “gaslighting” to prominence in 2022. However, you will find nary a hint of the administration’s possible contribution to its popularity in the AP story. I pride myself in not having used the word so far in 2022. It has become a mind-numbing cliché. I can’t afford to lose the brain cells.

Of course “gaslighting” is the word of the year — Obama or retreads from his administration are in the Oval Office:

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Celebrities Cut Ties With Balenciaga After MyPillow Spotted In Photo Shoot.

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Hyperventilating About Kanye Can’t Hide The Left’s Antisemitism Double Standard.

GENTLEMEN, YOU CAN’T DO JOURNALISM HERE — THIS IS NBC NEWS! NBC’s Mystery of the Week: Where in the world is Miguel Almaguer after Pelosi-report retraction?

AARON RODGERS, 9/11 TRUTHER? Former NFL QB Claims Aaron Rodgers Pushed 9/11 Conspiracy Theories: He Told Me I ‘Should Read Up’ on Them.

If Rodgers is let go by Green Bay after the season, he could always end his career in Seattle: Pete Carroll Isn’t Shying Away from His 9/11-Truther Reputation.

JIM TREACHER: Is Apple Helping the CCP Stifle Dissent?

Here’s what was in the latest iPhone update, according to Zachary M. Seward of Quartz:

Hidden in the update was a change that only applies to iPhones sold in mainland China: AirDrop can only be set to receive messages from everyone for 10 minutes, before switching off. There’s no longer a way to keep the “everyone” setting on permanently on Chinese iPhones. The change, first noticed by Chinese readers of 9to5Mac, doesn’t apply anywhere else.

In other words, Chinese iPhone users can’t do or say anything without the CCP knowing about it. Dissent can be quashed before it even starts. The Chinese people can be kept under the CCP’s thumb. And Apple is helping.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk asks, “Apple has mostly stopped advertising on Twitter. Do they hate free speech in America?”

Yes. Next question?

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Reinventing the Root of All Evil.

The migration of ID and money into the network accomplishes an extraordinary thing. It promises to protect the public from bad players but leaves everyone potentially vulnerable to a perverse playing field run by the Big Guys. The saga of Sam Bankman-Fried may be over, but the story of the system he was advocating is not. Despite our desire to virtualize everything the physical still has its place in the world. One of the enduring problems facing all cryptographically protected digital assets is the five dollar wrench attack, so named after the hypothetical heavy who threatens to beat you with a 5 buck wrench unless you tell him the PIN to your cold wallet. That’s why totalitarianism plus digital assets equals less money in the bank than you think. We have not yet invented a way to banish men from the loop.

https://twitter.com/JamesMelville/status/1597282329181159425

Read the whole thing.

OUT ON A LIMB: The Packers need to find the guts to say no to Aaron Rodgers. “Will the Packers do that — bench Rodgers — if the doctors say things are good? He has been playing with a broken thumb on his throwing hand for weeks and now he has issues with his ribs. He also turns 39 later this week and I can’t imagine anything less fun at that age than playing tackle football in the freezing cold against grown men who would love nothing more than to slam you to the turf. There’s nothing left for Rodgers to do here. There’s a lot left for the Packers to learn from with [Jordan] Love. The timing all just seems to be right. Will the Packers have the guts to do it? Their fans should hope so.”

HIGHER EDUCATION IMPLOSION UPDATE: The Babylon Bee Publishes a Hysterical Spoof of a College English Course Description. Oh, Wait!

If the Babylon Bee’s most creative satirists conjured up a parody of a woke college course description, it would probably read something like this:

Reading and Writing Gender and Sexuality ENGL 214 CREDITS: 0.5

How do you read gender? How do you read sexuality? How and in what ways have gender and sexuality been written and rewritten? This course serves as an introduction to queer and transfeminist theories and practices in gender and sexuality studies. Conceptualized through its intersections with race, ethnicity, coloniality, class, and ability, the sex/gender system of oppression has long served as a taxonomizing apparatus. And yet, the literary, in league with anticolonial, civil rights, and LGBTQ social movements, not only sheds sharp light on how gender and sexuality are regulated and troubled, but also animates the liberatory potential of imagining embodied relations otherwise. At once world-building and world-shattering, representations of gender and sexuality can leverage critiques against normativity in the same gesture as they bow to reproducing it. Taking our transnational cue from subjugated knowledges and intersectional epistemologies, we’ll constellate the diverging genealogies and methodologies that have shaped the politics and aesthetics as well as the ethics and affects of gender and sexuality. Against the traffic of binary opposition, we’ll index the possibilities of intimacy and performativity that determine desiring subjects and their objects. As a class collective, our aim will be to read and reread as well as write and rewrite texts that interrogate and complicate how gender and sexuality, as contested sites of pleasure and pain, are embodied and experienced. The geographic and generic focus of this course may vary; for more information, students should contact the instructor. This counts toward the methods requirement for the major and an elective for the women’s and gender studies major. Open only to first-year and sophomore students. Prerequisite: ENGL 103 or 104.

Sadly, this nonsensical, unintelligible gibberish was copied, word-for-word, from an actual English course description currently appearing on the website of Kenyon College, one of the nation’s preeminent liberal arts colleges.  That Kenyon approved a course description (and course) so replete with esoteric academic jargon and hackneyed, woke buzzwords reveals the intellectual vacuousness that currently permeates the college.

Could actually be worse, though: Duke University To Publish A ‘F*ggotology’ With Intro That References Anal Sex.

IN THE HOT SEAT: Iranian reporters grill US coach, captain with government questions in surreal presser.

HAPPY 93rd BIRTHDAY: Berry Gordy: The Visionary Who Made Motown.

A company that was started with a loan of $800 went on to help shape the sound of the 20th century. We could only be talking about Motown Records, founded on January 12, 1959 by Berry Gordy Jr, who was born in the city he helped make synonymous with soulfulness, Detroit, on November 28, 1929. Unfailingly spritely, just ahead of his 90th birthday, Gordy announced his retirement at the Hitsville Honours ceremony, safe in the knowledge that his achievements will last forever.

Gordy built his empire on his early success as a songwriter, notably of “Reet Petite,” “Lonely Teardrops” and others for perhaps the pre-eminent black music entertainer of the late 1950s, Jackie Wilson. Detroit, the Motor City itself, was sharing the fruits of America’s post-war economic boom, and there were possibilities for a young and savvy business creative, as we’d call them now. But no one, surely not even Berry himself, could have known exactly the global dimensions that those possibilities would assume in the coming decades.

Gordy’s genius was to adopt the assembly line methods of both Detroit and Hollywood to the music industry, a topic I explored in my interview with Allan Slutsky, the producer of one of the best documentaries about the record label in the 1960s, Standing in the Shadows of Motown.

WHEN REALITY IS TOO OUT THERE FOR THE BABYLON BEE TO SATIRIZE: Controversial energy official charged with stealing woman’s luggage at MSP. “Sam Brinton, one of the first ‘openly genderfluid individuals in federal government leadership,’ was charged with felony theft last month after allegedly stealing a woman’s luggage at MSP Airport.”

You remember Sam, right?

Here’s the story:

Law enforcement at the Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP) International Airport were alerted to a missing suitcase in the baggage claim area on Sept. 16. The adult female victim said she flew into MSP on a Delta flight from New Orleans and went to retrieve her checked bag at carousel seven.

Airport records confirmed the navy blue Vera Bradley roller bag arrived at 4:40 p.m. but was missing from the carousel. So law enforcement reviewed video surveillance footage from the baggage claim area and observed Brinton removing a navy blue roller bag from carousel seven, according to a criminal complaint.

The complaint says Brinton removed a luggage tag from the bag, placed it into a handbag he was carrying, and “then left the area at a quick pace.” Brinton arrived at MSP Airport around 4:27 p.m. on an American Airlines flight from Washington, D.C., but did not check a bag, meaning he had no reason to visit baggage claim, according to the complaint.

Police showed the surveillance video to the victim and she confirmed it was her bag.

Brinton left the airport in an Uber for a stay at the InterContinental St. Paul Riverfront hotel, where he checked in with the blue bag, the complaint says.

He returned to MSP on Sept. 18 with the bag in hand for a departing flight back to Washington, D.C., authorities allege.

Surveillance video from Dulles International Airport shows Brinton traveling with the bag on an Oct. 9 return trip from Europe, the complaint notes.

The victim said the estimated value of the bag and its contents was around $2,325.

“Brinton’s first court hearing is scheduled for Dec. 19 in Hennepin County. Alpha News attempted to contact Brinton via email but received an automatic reply saying he is on leave and unable to access his email.”

UNEXPECTEDLY: Dumb ‘Activist’ Calls Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh ‘Fascist’; Can’t Define Fascism.

NO ENEMIES TO THE LEFT: Chinese Rise Up Against Lockdowns that Elites Advocated in the US.

It’s an open question why the CCP remains so obsessively dedicated to this policy of Zero Covid; theories range from bureaucratic inertia to “saving face,” to a test of loyalty for Party members, to keeping ‘the science’ alive, to simply putting on a show to reassure international onlookers that the CCP really does believe in what it sold them and at least they don’t have it as bad as in China. It remains to be seen whether these protests will result in any real change in the country’s direction. But in the meantime, it’s worth remembering who it was exactly who advocated these insane Zero Covid lockdown policies and urged us to emulate them: Our own media elites and health officials.

Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and their love for the CCP’s lockdowns (as reflected in the many screencaps at the above link) makes perfect sense.

OUT ON A LIMB: Americans Still Don’t Enjoy Soccer.

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: Is ‘Moonage Daydream,’ the New David Bowie Documentary, Worth the Roller Coaster Ride?

My latest, over at Eddriscoll.com.

ERICK ERICKSON: Groundhog Day. “The point here is very basic — we are 708 days from a presidential election and we’re already having this much drama from both Trump personally and the inept and incompetent staff around him who should be preventing this stuff from happening. Either Trump knew Fuentes or he didn’t. That the staff let the guy in the room is the problem and Trump is ultimately responsible for his staff. Given three straight Trump related election losses and all the extra soap opera drama, Republicans, do you really want to put up with this crap and hope he ekes out a win in 2024, or do you maybe want to consider someone fresh and new who has a history already of beating back a hostile press and the left? Such people do exist.”

DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: Balenciaga and the rise of paedo chic. “Balenciaga is blaming the photographer, and is even threatening to sue him. It has apologised for the pics, and for the inclusion of ‘unsettling documents’, and has wiped the campaign from its Instagram. The photographer, meanwhile, insists he had nothing to do with choosing the products or the models. He just set up the lighting and clicked. So no one’s to blame? You know how it is – you take a few photos to promote your products and, darn, you accidentally include children with pervert teds and a nod to a ruling that dismantled part of the child-porn law. Could happen to anyone.”

Related:

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): It’s a mystery how this could have happened:

ELON MUSK WAS RIGHT ABOUT “HANDS UP, DON’T SHOOT” BLM NARRATIVE: “The Whole Thing Was A Fiction.”

For some reason, Musk deleted the tweet and substituted a tweet that only had the link to the DOJ report.

But that didn’t stop more outrageous outrage, such as from Tech Times, Elon Musk Deletes His Tweet, Defending the Ferguson Cop Who Shot Unarmed Michael Brown. John Sexton did a good job dissecting how various lefty outlets tried to whatabout the DOJ report in response to Musk’s now-deleted tweet.

Well, yes, Brown was unarmed. Including when just prior to the shooting he strong-armed a local convenience store.

And Brown also was unarmed when he sucker-punched officer Darren Wilson in the face as Wilson sat in a patrol car, and tried to steal Wilson’s gun. That was the first time Brown was shot, and then he was shot fatally when he made a second charge at Wilson.

Wilson was exonerated and never charged by the local prosecutors or the Eric Holder – Barack Obama Justice Department.

Not everybody can handle the truth, though: St. Louis mayor Tishaura Jones quits Twitter over Elon Musk’s Ferguson tweet.

ALL THOSE YEARS AGO: “In 1978, George married Olivia Arias and in the same year they had a son, Dhani.  Dhani only discovered his father’s past when he was at school.  ‘I came home one day from school after being chased by kids singing ‘Yellow Submarine’, and I didn’t understand why,’ he has said.  ‘It just seemed surreal: why are they singing that song to me?  I came home and freaked out to my dad: ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were in the Beatles?’  And he said: ‘Oh, sorry. Probably should have told you that.’  It’s impossible to imagine, John, Paul or Ringo neglecting to mention they were in the Beatles to their children.”

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Chicago Mayoral Candidates Piling on Lori Lightfoot and Her Dismal Record on Crime.

I can’t say I blame them, especially after all of her promises to clean up the city:

Chicago’s last Republican mayor left office in 1931.

NARRATOR: ACTUALLY, GIVEN THIS ADMINISTRATION, YOU WILL. The U.S. Approves Oil Production, but You Won’t Believe Where.