EVERY INSTITUTION HAS BEEN CORRUPTED, BUT NOT EVERY CORRUPTER GOES TO JAIL: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years for defrauding FTX investors.
Author Archive: Glenn Reynolds
March 28, 2024
COLOR ME UNSURPRISED: Lack of adequate sleep may increase risk of blood pressure.
SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: People with genetic risk for obesity may have to exercise more to stay healthy.
MICHAEL WALSH: What’s Good For General Bullmoose. “Gerald M. Levin, who died last week at the age of 84, will be little noted nor long remembered by the American public, yet his name should live in corporate infamy. As the man who destroyed Time Inc. via a unique combination of ambition, pomposity, luck, greed, unctuousness, and stupidity, Levin is one of the great villains of 20th-century American and journalistic history and a now-deceased exemplar for everything that’s wrong with big business, Wall Street, and the grubby managerial class that controls the lives of millions of people. Look on his Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Don’t mince words, Michael. Say what you really mean here.
Plus: “As John Cassidy wrote in his 2013 post-mortem of the ongoing wreckage in The New Yorker: ‘About the only ones who consistently benefitted from Time Inc.’s transformation into part of a multimedia conglomerate were the bankers and lawyers who put the deals together.’ Not to mention the execs who profited from it. If you’re looking for a point when it all went wrong with the American economy, the murder of Time Inc. at the hands of Levin & Co. is a good place to start.”
Our nation is run by people who live by Rhett Butler’s observation that there’s as much money to be made in tearing down a civilization as in building one up.
WELL, THE READERS HAVEN’T BEEN BOUGHT OFF BY BIG TECH: The NY Times is Skeptical of Jonathan Haidt But Readers Think He Has a Point. “Despite the subtle shade directed at him, most of the readers seem to believe Haidt is on to something with his new book. This is the top comment, upvoted more than 1,800 times:”
I taught high school for nineteen years. I left in 2022. Number one reason: the phones. Students enter class looking at their phones, they walk down the halls looking at their phones, and they sit around the cafeteria and campus after school looking at their phones. It’s only because the handheld digital onslaught occurred over several years that we don’t see it for what it is. Now I teach at a middle school where students never have their phones available. The result? Eye contact, good cheer, lively conversation, laughter, playfulness, and a sense of camaraderie. I left the clouds behind, and now the sun is out again. I’m happy.
I believe it.
THOUGHTS ON the ugly art of Richard Serra. “The man just died, so I’ll keep this brief. I have been tired for decades of this version of the story — the grand artist against the office deplorables. Imagine the workers, wanting to enjoy ‘their precious open space.’ I worked in one of those courthouses for a year during the period when the sculpture bisected the space, and I know how it felt to people who spent their working hours in its vicinity.”
Public art, for basically the entirety of my life, has looked as if it was created in order to demoralize the public, rather than uplift it. Quoth Serra: “I don’t think it is the function of art to be pleasing. Art is not democratic. It is not for the people.”
Except to pay for it, of course. That’s their role. Know your place, peasants! Well, it was a good grift.
Plus, from the comments: “As usual the artist is an egomaniac with a crippling inferiority complex.”
AND HAMAS SUPPORTERS ARE ALWAYS TALKING ABOUT A “HUMANITARIAN CRISIS.” IF YOU’RE A HAMAS SUPPORTER, YOU’RE NO HUMANITARIAN.
Hamas started this war, continues to hold hostages, and has promised to invade Israel again.
If you're concerned about conditions in Gaza, blame Hamas.
Not Israel.
— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) March 27, 2024
DON SURBER: Mutiny on the MSNBC: Ronna Romney McDaniel learns sabotaging Trump won’t save you. “The public humiliation of Ronna, which may have been orchestrated all along, is another head on a pike for Democrats and RINOs. They have gone from Stage 1 (destroy Trump) and Stage 2 (destroy his supporters) to Stage 3 (destroy those who even appear to support Trump).”
As Stacy McCain once said, at some point you have to join the team that you’re on.
WE LIVE IN AN EMPIRE OF LIES: Indelible in the Hippocampus is the Perjury.
More here.
PROBABLY:
Are we most of the way to a new global conflict?https://t.co/m40vRUhkwa
— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) March 28, 2024
BUT TALK OF “WHITE SUPREMACISTS,” “WHITE RAGE,” AND “CHRISTIAN NATIONALISTS” IS STILL OKAY, POSSIBLY EVEN MANDATORY: US Intel Agency Wants To Ban Terms ‘Radical Islamists’ and ‘Jihadist’ Because They’re Hurtful to Muslim Americans: Office of the Director of National Intelligence also instructs employees to avoid ‘blacklisted,’ ‘cakewalk,’ and ‘sanity check.’
Whose side is the “intelligence community” on? Certainly not that of intelligence . . . .
FEMINISTS DON’T CARE UNLESS THEY CAN BLAME A FRATERNITY: Israeli Hostage Says She Was Sexually Assaulted and Tortured in Gaza: Amit Soussana is the first former hostage to publicly say she was sexually abused in captivity. A U.N. report has said it found “clear and convincing information” that some hostages suffered “conflict-related sexual violence.”
MATT TAIBBI: Twitter Files Extra: How the “Censorship Industrial Complex” Case Was Built. “Three separate investigations took over a year to nail down the case that government agencies were improperly censoring by proxy. Forced by courts to stop, they’re desperately trying for a reboot.”
THE ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE IS NOW BASICALLY PRO-DEFAMATION:
The ADL is claiming that “100%” is racist and white supremacist. Beyond parody. The ADL is 100% a joke. pic.twitter.com/k34vj3uwJ5
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) March 26, 2024
And they’re part of a censorship-laundering scheme:
It’s actually much more sinister than just making stuff up. They publish garbage like this then other orgs and 3 letter agencies target Americans based on the ADL’s classifications and reporting
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) March 27, 2024
Related:
One could plausibly make the case that the best way to understand the real political divide in the US is between those who want our political discourse to be policed, limited and controlled by the Kate Starbirds of the world, and those who don't. https://t.co/bTEcP0JOLE
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 26, 2024
OPEN THREAD: Let’s see your best work here.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Watch India’s prototype space plane ace a landing test (video).
THIS IS KIND OF LIKE HOW JOURNALISTS RESPOND WHEN CRITICIZED: Sperm whales respond to orcas with diarrhea: “a big red poop slushy.”
DON SURBER: The greatest Trumpenfreude of all: They kicked President Trump off Twitter. That’s about to make him $3,600,000,000. “Oh how they danced on the night Trump was banned.”
JEFF GOLDSTEIN ON “The Jewish Problem.”
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY:
This contrast is a PR nightmare.
If the Biden campaign lets this side-by-side visual play out tomorrow, they are toast
We'll see what happens.
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) March 27, 2024
BOTH MOSTLY COME FROM CHINA, BUT ARE ADDRESSED VIA A WAR ON AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN CONSUMERS: Global Warming and Plastic Pollution Are Inextricably Trapped in a “Vicious Circle.”
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: District Hiring ‘Whiteness’ Superintendent to Root Out White Supremacy. “It seems that ‘Whiteness’ is a pressing problem for the district, which no doubt explains why there has been so much learning loss in the public schools over the past few years. Enrollment of White students has been dropping, with only 53% of the students being White, and as they have fled to other districts, the problem of White Supremacy has gotten worse, leading to horrible test scores. . . . It’s a troubling thing, to see how Whiteness is harming minority students, and the district is working hard to root it out. As the student body and staff become less White, Whiteness has become an increasing problem. No doubt testing is a White concept too, so perhaps eliminating measurement of student performance will help improve student success rates.”
It’s easy to mock this stuff. And you should. Because it’s stupid. And evil.
FOR BETTER SLEEP, EXERCISE: “Insomniacs looking to get more shut-eye could experience better sleep with consistent exercise, according to new research. The study, published Tuesday in the journal BMJ Open, found those who exercised regularly were 55% more likely to sleep a normal cycle of six to nine hours a night.”
THE WINDS OF CHANGE ARE BLOWING: DC Shocker: Woman Acquitted of Murder, Other Charges After Self-Defense Claim.