“We are at a critical point in higher education where we must either fight to preserve free speech or yield to a mob-led orthodoxy on our campuses.”
—George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, stating what should have been obvious decades ago.
I am a Turley admirer, but if ever a statement mandated the response, “No shit, Sherlock! What was your first clue?,” it is that one. It is his considered conclusion to a post about the recent silencing of Fox News pundit Tomi Lahren at the University of New Mexico, where her speaking engagement was cancelled by chanting students, a pulled fire alarm, and other tactics designed to keep the campus “safe” from the opinions some students don’t want to allow to be advocated, debated or even heard.
Turley compliments the university’s administration for promising “accountability” (unlike, say, Yale Law School when its students behaved in a similar totalitarian fashion), but even if there is substantive punishment levied, which I doubt, it is just another barn-door fallacy episode. Why are the university’s students behaving like this? Why isn’t the school teaching the values and traditions of the nation and the Bill of Rights as part of its obligation to society and the culture? Why is it hiring faculty members who support these Marxist tactics? Continue reading →
Stop making me defend Scott Pelley!The conservative news media is beating on “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley for what they are calling a “softball” interview, as if every “60 Minutes” interview of a sitting President hasn’t been just as tame, or even tamer. At least Pelley asked Biden about Hunter. The truth is that Americans still prefer to see their Presidents treated with respect and some degree of deference,unless the President is Donald Trump.
It’s funny: the same outlets that are condemning Pelley as a Democratic ally and hack are wondering why Biden’s “handlers” allowed the blithering POTUS to do an interview at all. Of course the conditions demanded for the interview included no follow up questions, and a softball session. And it didn’t matter! Biden’s performance was frightening anyway, andunlike the 2020 interview with Trump, when Leslie Stahl’s clear objective was to attack throughout, the White House couldn’t complain afterwards that the President was sabotaged by a biased journalist. Pelley asked about Joe’s mental fitness, and Biden replied, “Watch me!” And so we did, and have. He continued,
And it ma—, honest to God, that’s all I think. Watch me. If you think I don’t have the energy level or the mental acuity, then — then, you know, that’s one thing. It’s another thing, you just watch and — and, you know, keep my schedule. Do what I’m doing….“I — I think that, you know — I don’t — when I sit down with our NATO allies and keep ’em together, I don’t have ’em saying, ‘Wait a minute, w— how — how old are you? What are you — what say?’ You know, I mean, it’s a matter of, you know, that old expression: The proof of the pudding’s in the eating. I mean, I — I — I respect the fact that people would say, you know, ‘You’re old.’ And — but I think it relates to h— how much energy you have, and whether or not the job you’re doing is one consistent with what any person of any age would be able to do.”
Whether it was Pelley’s intention or not, he ended up doing what ethical journalists are supposed to do: he let the facts speak for themselves.
1. On the topic of social media viewpoint censorship, this:
It takes a lot of chutzpah for YouTube to demonetize a channel because it violates YouTube’s “values” and then sell ads on the same content.
2. Oh please, please let this happen to me! In an open thread at Althouse, a commenter tells this tale,
A friend’s brother lives in Florida. They recently got new neighbors from NY, a husband and wife. A few days after moving in the wife stops over and sits down. She says, “OK, let’s get this out of the way. I am a Democrat and my husband an Independent. What are you?” Non-plussed, he says he is Republican. For the next 15 minutes he was called every expected name- Nazi, racist, etc. IN HIS OWN F-ING HOME!
It’s my contention that the left now knows its flaws are becoming obvious and are overcompensating to hear themselves repeat their failing worldview…
“Ancestor,” a new sculpture by Bharti Kher, has been chosen to reside at the Fifth Avenue and 60th Street entrance to Central Park in New York City for the next year. It’s 18 feet tall, has 24 heads (detail below)….
…and is made to look old and weathered, though it was cast in bronze and is fresh out of the oven, or whatever. The Times says,
“Ancestor” is, at its core, an Indian goddess form, the kind found in Hindu popular iconography, with hair that rises in a bun yet somehow also hangs in a braid. But protruding in clumps pell-mell from her upper body are 23 extra heads, each with its own expression, peering this way and that.
You can read about what the artist thinks this mess means here. I don’t even have a coherent quiz question to pose, just a group of puzzled queries that follow my immediate, “What the hell?”Continue reading →
Of all the fumbling, dishonest, weird things President Biden said in his “60 Minutes” interview last night, that statement: “The pandemic is over” was easily the most significant. Because…
As if there wasn’t enough proof already, this was smoking gun evidence that poor Joe doesn’t know what’s going on in his own administration, or, in the alternative, that what his own administration is doing is only marginally within his power.
Programs and policies completely dependent on the existence of the pandemic are not only ongoing, they are being challenged in court.
Biden’s insane college loan forgiveness scheme relies (dubiously) on the existence of the pandemic to avoid being illegal.
Many school systems are still inflicting mask mandates on children.
Professor Turley points out that Biden’s public statement is certain to be used in briefs relating to the many cases challenging emergency powers and policies used by the Administration, like the appeal being considered en banc by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, challenging the moves taken under the Administration’s claimed pandemic authority.
While conservative critics are concentrating on the inconsistency and self-contradiction represented by Biden’s announcement, the Mask Loving Left is furious, because they want the pandemic, along with the fear and submissiveness it engenders, to continue forever. If the pandemic is gone, how will Democratic states justify installing new voting systems where voters just yell out their choices from the windows of their homes and cars, to be recorded by government vote-takers, written down, and deposited in convenient drop-boxes?
Has an eagerly-anticipated prestige television project ever been so perfectly timed as PBS’s Ken Burns documentary, “The US and the Holocaust,” which began last night with “The Golden Door” (Beginnings-1938)? I can’t think of any. Burns is either lucky, diabolical, or psychic. He is also, like all documentary makers, political, and so is his work. Burns still deserves praise for restraint: though “The US and the Holocaust” can be accused of subtly (and occasionally blatantly) advancing Democratic Party and progressive talking points, it also can be used to support opposing positions as well.
The legitimacy of either exercise is debatable, and will be a great debate topic. True, history repeats itself, but context and details matter. As I watched the first episode of Burns’ opus last night, I felt myself being drowned in striking analogies, many of them seductive and likely to be abused. There is so much summarized history and and so many factoids in just the first episode of this epic that it’s impossible to know when one is getting the truth, sort of the truth, part of the truth, intentionally-manipulated facts, cherry-picked data, ideologically motivated propaganda, or objective, fair analysis. Checking the series would take any individual at least as long as the years it took Burns and his team to make it. I got chills a few times thinking about how completely the typical PBS Democrat would swallow everything that was said last night whole, responding with a hearty, “Yum yum!” Continue reading →
“If we — we individual Americans — can’t handle random snark from varied unknown sources, how can we live with the internet? Who cares if some foreigners are writing crap intended to deceive us into feeling more roiled up and divided than we’re able to do damned well on our own, often with the nudging of the New York Times?”
The day after I complained about how often Althouse has been picking the same topics to write about as I am lately, she did it again. This time, I saw that front page story about 2017 and immediately thought, 1) “Who cares?” and 2) “Boy, I’m sure glad I stopped paying 90 bucks a month for the paper version of this full-time, declining, hyper-partisan propaganda rag.” And as I started to post about how the Times deems it front page worthy to go back five years and try to prove that Russian social media “disinformation” undermined an anti-Trump demonstration that was ridiculous to begin with, something made me check Ann’s blog.
Clearly, she was genuinely ticked off by the story. Althouse doesn’t really write that much in most of her posts, but she did this time, seeing this as entirely contrived and pretty obviously another stretch to swipe at Trump (and the legitimacy of his election): after all, Times readers (and reporters) all think that he was in cahoots with Putin regardless of what the evidence says. Two of Ann’s points,
Unless lists are based on on hard numbers, they are all subjective, based on opinion only. The worst lists are the ones that are opinion but that claim to be based on hard data. Lists are unethical when they mislead the lazy and ignorant, which is to say, most of the public and those who pay attention to internet lists. Again, as in today’s warm-up, the ethics issue is incompetence, and often breaches of honesty and responsibility as well.
The first of the unethical lists was this one, click-baited as “The Smartest Presidents, Ranked By IQ (Guess Who’s No.1)” It’s hard to imagine a worse hash could be made of that topic than the article prepared by Esther Trattner, who must have difficulty spelling IQ herself. This topic became popular during the Trump administration and the previous campaign, because Donald kept boasting about high his IQ is (which is a stupid thing for anyone to do.) There are a lot of these lists (Trattner’s is the worst, but they are all bad.) To begin with, IQ doesn’t measure “intelligence;” it measures, as one psychologist told me, “what IQ tests measure.” There is so much more to intelligence than what that test indicates that conflating the scores with intellect is absurd. Indeed, the man who invested the IQ test condemned using his creation to measure above average intelligence, since its purpose was to assess intellectual deficits.
Interesting issues, dead traffic yesterday…just thought I’d mention it…
I’d like to propose this date, September 18, as National Incompetence Day. On this date in 1962, preening slug of a Union army commander General George B. McClellan blew a golden opportunity to end the Civil War early, and for the usual reasons: he over-estimated the size of the enemy, and, some have concluded, he just didn’t like to fight. The Battle of Antietam had ended the day before after the bloodiest day of fighting ever to occur on North American soil. Lee’s forces were exhausted and depleted; McClellan’s army had just welcomed fresh troops. McClellan had an estimated three times as many soldiers as Lee after the battle, a stalemate, and was in a perfect position to wipe out the Confederate forces and end the war. But, as usual, he stalled. Certain that Lee had many times the men he actually had, (or havingconveniently himself so he could rationalize not continuing the battle) the Union commander allowed the Rebels to retreat from Sharpsburg, Maryland, and head back to the safety of Virginia unmolested, as Lincoln fumed. It was a real chance to deliver a knockout blow and end the Civil War quickly, but George didn’t believe in knockout blows. He specialized in training armies to deliver theoretical knockout blows. To be fair, the training came in useful when a general with guts and ability finally got McClellan’s job: Ulysses S. Grant.
Incompetence isn’t as sexy a breach of ethics as, say, disloyalty or dishonesty, but it probably does more damage than either. McClellan is as perfect a symbol of the often destructive influence it has has on U.S. history as I can think of. Like so many of his ilk, the tendency to screw up didn’t impede the general’s career as thoroughly or quickly as it should have. Amazingly, Lincoln put him in charge of the Union Army twice and the Democratic Party nominated him for President. Fortunately, the party has learned not to try to put total incompetents in charge of the government in the ensuing years…
1. Speaking of ethics incompetence…Faced with having to recognize an LGBTQ student group until its appeal of a lower court ruling worked its way through the courts, Yeshiva University announced last week that it was suspending all undergraduate club activities, punishing everyone in order to get away with discrimination. The issue is, again, religious freedom: Yeshiva’s claim that the New York civil rights laws don’t apply is shaky because the university is incorporated as an educational institution and not a religious one.
“If anyone gets any kind of idea in their head that taking away from Karine or her work, that’s really regrettable. And I’m very sorry that that’s any impression that anyone would have.”
—-National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications Spokesperson John Kirby, a retired Navy rear admiral, responding to a bold reporter who asked what his role was at the White House, since “almost everywhere I go, I have Black people telling me that the reason you’re at the White House is to undermine the first female Black [press] secretary. So can you clarify that?”
John Kirby, the deft and articulate Pentagon spokesperson who was brought to the White House to stand in for Karine Jean-Pierre whenever possible since she is incompetent but can’t be fired, issued the above tersely, showing why he was called upon for the half-rescue mission.
He continued,
I am simply working at the National Security Council, on national security communications. And with her good graces I’m able to come up here every now and then to talk to you about national security issue. That’s my portfolio. That’s where I’m limited. That’s where I’ll stay. And I do it at her invitation and with her approval to come up here. That’s the focus. I’m happy to answer national security questions and that’s about it.
Great answer! Diplomatic, elusive, pretending to deny the truth without doing so…he regrets that anyone gets the impression that he’s covering for Karine’s ineptitude (which is what “undermining” really means in this context), and he’s sorry that anyone has figured it out (though it is obvious to anyone who has heard Jean-Pierre babble and noticed the stark contrast with Kirby’s clarity and skill. Kirby proved what his role is while ducking the question and preserving Karine’s dignity, such as it is.
Meanwhile, here was the White House paid liar lying about the recent Martha’s Vineyard debacle (for hypocritical illegal immigration fans): Continue reading →
Remember “Snowpiercer”? It was a nearly unwatchably grim movie about a climate change solution that goes horribly wrong, reducing the Earth to a frozen, deadly wasteland populated only by the passengers of a single train doomed to circle the globe forever. It became a cable series on TNT for three years because anything can become a cable series for three years now.
Well, now in an example of real life threatening to imitate bad fiction, Wake Smith, who teaches “a world-leading undergraduate course on climate intervention” and is a Senior Fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School specializing in “solar geoengineering” has written a paper, published this week, that lays out his plan to have jets flying at high altitude inject microscopic sulfur dioxide particles into the atmosphere above the North and South Poles. This, see, will reflect sunlight back into space and slightly shade the surface below, retarding the warming of the poles that threaten to extinguish all life, or so the current government of the United States seems to believe. The scheme would be extremely expensive, require international cooperation, and even at best would only “buy some time” until a better and more lasting solution could be developed.
Or it might doom the world to a frozen apocalypse. As the old saying goes, “Ya pays yer money and ya takes yer choice.”Continue reading →
…and is made to look old and weathered, though it was cast in bronze and is fresh out of the oven, or whatever. The Times says,
Ethics Alarms 