The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Things That Pass for Knowledge

Posted on | April 26, 2020 | 1 Comment

 

This morning, I woke up and checked Instapundit and found an item about the wrongness of Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel’s COVID-19 prediction — “Missed it by that much,” as Maxwell Smart would say — that included this: “The weekends at the Covid didn’t turn out like you planned.”

This is an allusion to a Steely Dan song, “Reelin’ in the Years”:

You been tellin’ me you’re a genius
Since you were seventeen.
In all the time I’ve known you
I still don’t know what you mean.
The weekend at the college
Didn’t turn out like you planned.
The things that pass for knowledge
I can’t understand.

Professor Reynolds and I are about the same age, so obviously I caught the reference, but some of you kids might have missed it. For your education, I’ll explain that Steely Dan was a group formed by keyboardist Donald Fagen and guitarist Walter Becker. Their hit singles included “Do It Again” and “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.” Fagen and Becker met in 1967 as students at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, which is referenced in their 1973 hit, “My Old School”:

California tumbles into the sea —
That’ll be the day I go back to Annandale.

The clever, tightly rhymed lyrics pair that with:

Tried to warn you about Chino and Daddy Gee,
But I can’t seem to get to you through the U.S. Mail.

“Daddy Gee” is a reference to none other than G. Gordon Liddy, who was the Dutchess County prosecutor behind a drug raid on Fagen’s house his senior year at Bard. The charges against Fagen were dropped, but Liddy went on to notoriety as the mastermind of the Watergate burglary. And, subsequently, after his release from federal prison, Liddy became a conservative talk-radio host who frequently had me on as a guest.

Small world! How weird that I, a former teenage dopehead who spent a lot of his adolescence getting high and listening to Steely Dan, later became friends with the guy who busted them for dope back in the day.

Curiosity killed the cat, as they say, but in my case, habitual curiosity merely led to acquiring a vast hoard of trivia in my head. As a teenage dopehead, the allusions in Steely Dan’s lyrics were opaque and puzzling. “My Old School” was really an inside joke for Fagen and Becker, which only their friends at Bard College would understand. And it was not until decades later that curiosity led me to research the song’s background. I had mistakenly thought that the “Annandale” in the lyrics referred to a town in Fairfax County, Virginia. Why Virginia? Because the lyrics make reference to William and Mary, a Virginia college. Another obscure reference in the song is to the “Wolverine” train which, I discovered via Google, was a service of the New York Central line that ran through Annandale, making its last run in 1967, Fagen’s junior year at Bard.

I remember the 35 sweet goodbyes
When you put me on the Wolverine up to Annandale.
It was still September when your daddy was quite surprised
To find you with the working girls in the county jail.
I was smoking with the boys upstairs
When I heard about the whole affair.
I said, Oh, no, William and Mary won’t do.
Well, I did not think the girl could be so cruel.
And I’m never going back to my old school.

Students of poetry appreciate the cleverness of this, and there was always an aura of intellectualism around Steely Dan, as Fagen said in his memoir: “We were perceived as artists just by virtue of our wisenheimer personalities and transparent resentment of authority.”

Ah, so were we all, back in the day! If you were the type who aced your English exams with little to no studying — getting high all the time tends to reduce a teenager’s devotion to schoolwork — you probably were digging on Steely Dan circa 1974. And I suppose you don’t mind a 600-word digression inspired by a phrase on a blog.

Hey, did you know they named their band for a dildo?

“Far out, man.” Reelin’ in the years, indeed.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Need I remind you that The Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!




 

Category: Music

Rumor: North Korean Dictator Dead?

Posted on | April 25, 2020 | Comments Off on Rumor: North Korean Dictator Dead?

 

Important, if true:

North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un may be dead or near death, according to several reports that circulated Saturday.
Former Fox News reporter Adam Housley cited a Hong Kong media outlet that reported the North Korean leader had passed.
Japanese sources reported that the Supreme Leader had undergone a cardiac procedure and was left braindead. “Wild if true. Japanese magazine reports Kim Jong Un may be in a vegetative state after doctors struggled to insert stents in his arteries following a collapse. Source is one Chinese medical official,” Wall Street Journal Japan’s Alastair Gale tweeted.
Reuters reported late Friday that a team of Chinese medical experts had been sent to North Korea “to advise on North Korean leader Kim Jong Un” — a report Housley noted had come out of Taiwan two days earlier.
Housley also noted that Kim Jong Un’s absence from Army Day celebrations were a fair indicator that he was at the very least not doing well.

“At the very least not doing well.”

Yes, and perhaps also “pining for the fjords.”




 

Category: North Korea

1993 Video Emerges Supporting Sexual Misconduct Accusation Against Joe Biden

Posted on | April 25, 2020 | Comments Off on 1993 Video Emerges Supporting Sexual Misconduct Accusation Against Joe Biden

 

The hashtag #DropOutBiden began trending on Twitter this morning in the wake of yesterday’s exclusive report by Ryan Grim at The Intercept:

A new piece of evidence has emerged buttressing the credibility of Tara Reade’s claim that she told her mother about allegations of sexual harassment and assault related to her former boss, then-Sen. Joe Biden. Biden, through a spokesperson, has denied the allegations. Reade has claimed to various media outlets, including The Intercept, that she told her mother, a close friend, and her brother about both the harassment and, to varying degrees of detail, the assault at the time. Her brother, Collin Moulton, and her friend, who has asked to remain anonymous, both confirmed that they heard about the allegations from Reade at the time. Reade’s mother died in 2016, but both her brother and friend also confirmed Reade had told her mother, and that her mother, a longtime feminist and activist, urged her to go to the police.
In interviews with The Intercept, Reade also mentioned that her mother had made a phone call to “Larry King Live” on CNN, during which she made reference to her daughter’s experience on Capitol Hill. Reade told The Intercept that her mother called in asking for advice after Reade, then in her 20s, left Biden’s office. “I remember it being an anonymous call and her saying my daughter was sexually harassed and retaliated against and fired, where can she go for help? I was mortified,” Reade told me. . . .
On August 11, 1993, King aired a program titled, “Washington: The Cruelest City on Earth?” Toward the end of the program, he introduces a caller dialing in from San Luis Obispo, California. Congressional records list August 1993 as Reade’s last month of employment with Biden’s Senate office, and, according to property records, Reade’s mother, Jeanette Altimus, was living in San Luis Obispo County. Here is the transcript of the beginning of the call:

KING: San Luis Obispo, California, hello.
CALLER: Yes, hello. I’m wondering what a staffer would do besides go to the press in Washington? My daughter has just left there, after working for a prominent senator, and could not get through with her problems at all, and the only thing she could have done was go to the press, and she chose not to do it out of respect for him.
KING: In other words, she had a story to tell but, out of respect for the person she worked for, she didn’t tell it?
CALLER: That’s true.

 

This is far more solid corroboration for Reade’s claim against Biden than there was for any of Brett Kavanaugh’s accusers, yet the media devoted round-the-clock coverage to the Kavanaugh accusations. Scott Whitlock at the Media Research Center asks:

Journalists have largely buried this story. ABC, NBC and CNN have not reported on it AT ALL. CBS, PBS and MSNBC have offered very minimal coverage. How long will journalists keep covering up this explosive story?

How long, indeed?



 

Category: Joe Biden, Media Bias, Scandal

‘Morning Joe’ Goes Nuts, Screaming About Fox News: ‘They Never Learn!’

Posted on | April 24, 2020 | Comments Off on ‘Morning Joe’ Goes Nuts, Screaming About Fox News: ‘They Never Learn!’

 

Joe Scarborough is smarter than everybody, so smart that he had foreknowledge of the coronavirus pandemic — “back like in February!” — that would have saved “more people . . . than died in the entire Vietnam tragedy!” Despite this, I have never heard Joe Scarborough criticize Andrew Cuomo for New York’s lack of pandemic preparedness. (New York and New Jersey have 53% of all U.S. coronavirus deaths.) Instead, in his Thursday meltdown, Joe seemed obsessed with Fox News:

 

To sustain his “Orange Man Bad” belief system, Scarborough and others in the anti-Trump media mob must ignore a lot of actual science.

For example, the recent reclassification of a California woman’s death in early February contradicts what we thought we knew about how soon COVID-19 began spreading in the United States. This is related to the discovery, from antibody testing, that the number of confirmed coronavirus cases is actually a fraction of those infected. In other words, because only a small percentage of infected people experience symptoms serious enough to seek medical treatment, the disease was being spread quite widely by people who were asymptomatic long before the presence of the disease was known by U.S. public health officials.

I’ve pointed out before that New York didn’t report its first coronavirus case until March 1. Within two weeks of that first case, however, there were hundreds of people hospitalized with COVID-19 in New York, and the sudden nature of that “surge” can only be understood in the context of what we now know about the high percentage of asymptomatic cases. So if you want to cite to me quotes from President Trump or Fox News personalities from February or early March, expressing a belief that the threat of COVID-19 was exaggerated, you must first answer, what was the known number of cases at the time of the quote? And then you must produce evidence that you (or your preferred sources) were contemporaneously offering better information about the disease.

It was not until the first week of March that the size of the coronavirus threat became evident, and even then, there were still plenty of Democrats — New York Mayor Bill de Blasio among them — who didn’t take it seriously, so it’s not as if Republicans had a monopoly on doubt.

On Jan. 22, President Trump said the coronavirus was “totally under control” and, as far as anyone knew at the time, that was true. Those who claim Trump ignored advice from scientific experts must reconcile their claims with the fact that, until March, even Dr. Anthony Fauci suggested that the public was at little risk from the disease. The situation changed very rapidly, and Trump was understandably reluctant to shut down the entire economy over a comparative handful of cases. It was not until the pandemic in Italy spiraled out of control, prompting a nationwide lockdown order, that the threat here became undeniable.

The key to all the Trump Derangement Syndrome reactions to the coronavirus pandemic — including Joe Scarborough’s screaming rant — is the belief that somehow America is worse than other countries. But this belief is false, as the deaths-per-million rates demonstrate:

Belgium …………….. 576
Spain ………………… 482
Italy ………………….. 423
France ………………. 335
U.K. ………………….. 276
Netherlands ………. 250
Sweden ……………… 213
Ireland ………………. 161
United States …….. 152

Good news! Our COVID-19 death rate has been less than one-third the rate in Belgium or Spain. But you won’t see them report that on MSNBC.

(Hat-tip: Ace of Spades.)




 

Category: MSNBC

Gov. Cuomo: ‘You Can Go to Work and You Can Be an Essential Worker’

Posted on | April 23, 2020 | 1 Comment

Are you currently unemployed because your governor declared your employment to be “non-essential” and you can’t get a job working for a cable news channel? Don’t worry, says the governor:

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday that protesters calling for the state to reopen the economy so they can go back to work could “get a job as an essential worker.”
Cuomo made the comment at the end of a long exchange with WRGB reporter Anne McCloy, who told the governor that she spoke with demonstrators outside New York’s state Capitol in Albany before heading inside for the daily press conference. The protesters told her they can’t wait for widespread coronavirus testing – which Cuomo has been pushing — and want to return to work so they can have an income and feed their families, McCloy said.
“By the way — if you want to go to work, go take the job as an essential worker. Do it tomorrow,” Cuomo said.
“But the people aren’t hiring because of the pandemic,” McCloy responded.
“No, there are people hiring,” Cuomo said. “You can get a job as an essential worker, so now you can go to work and you can be an essential worker and you’re not going to kill anyone.”

Ace of Spades notes that the governor’s “non-essential” brother, who works for an obscure cable channel seen mainly in airport lounges, apparently infected both his wife and his son with COVID-19.




 

Category: New York

Oh, Feminists Losing Their Jobs?

Posted on | April 22, 2020 | 3 Comments

You have to read this very carefully:

An internal document at Vice Media Group lays out a plan for substantial layoffs at the new-media company’s websites, as Vice considers a variety of options to deal with coronavirus pandemic.
The planning document, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, calls for layoffs of over 300 people in digital operations, including major cuts at both Vice News and Refinery29, the women-focused digital publisher Vice acquired last year. . . .
Vice is expecting online ad sales to suffer during the crisis, with expected shortfalls of 33% at Refinery29 and 39% at Vice’s entertainment and news sites, according to the document.

More about that:

It would be shocking if Vice, which lost over a billion dollars in value over the past few years, didn’t make cuts. Vice spent roughly $400 million last year to acquire Refinery29, after investors had already begun writing down their investments in the company.

Refinery29 was originally a fashion-oriented site that, like many other such sites, went all-in on feminism circa 2014. What does it say about Vice management that they would pay $400 million for a site that published articles like “Feminist Gifts For Your Friend Who’s Fighting The Patriarchy” and “Daenerys Targaryen Is Emilia Clarke’s Feminist Inspiration”? But when you’re already losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year, why not?

Vice’s bad investment in Refinery29 is part of a general trend, with the Bustle Media Group (BMG) similarly laying off staff after buying up various failed feminist-themed sites. (Hat-tip: Ace of Spades.)

Who keeps bankrolling these projects and why? How do these investors expect a website like Mic (now owned by BMG) to turn a profit by publishing content like, “Transplaining: My husband wants to transition into a woman. What should I do?” Is there much of a market for such content? “Get woke, go broke,” I guess. The Great Feminist Website Gold Rush lasted about four years, beginning with the “campus rape epidemic” hysteria of 2014 and ending with the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. The fact that Democrats have nominated an old white guy as their presidential candidate, rejecting such “progressive” women as Elizabeth Warren, is the final death knell of that era. Now that all these feminist writers are getting laid off, what will become of their cats?




 

Category: Feminism

Study: 56% of Liberal Women Under Age 30 Have Been Diagnosed as Mentally Ill

Posted on | April 22, 2020 | 2 Comments

 

Trump Derangement Syndrome is real:

Zach Goldberg . . . has analysed the latest dataset released by the reputable Pew Research Center. This is the Pew Research Panel, Wave 64, which interviewed a representative sample of 11,537 American adults between March 19th and March 24th. . . .
Among those aged 18 to 29, some 20.9% of those who described themselves as “Conservative” answered “Yes” to the question “Has a doctor or healthcare provider ever told you that you have a mental health condition?” For those in this age group who were political “Moderates,” 26.3% answered “Yes.” But among those who self-classified as “Liberal” those answering “Yes” jumped up to an astonishing 45.9%.
So, to be clear, almost half of young white American Leftists have been diagnosed with a mental illness. . . .
In general, females are more likely to suffer from mental health conditions than males, because one of the most common of these conditions is depression. According to psychologist Daniel Nettle in his 2007 book Personality: What Makes You the Way You Are, females, being more prone to worry and anxiety, are more prone to depression than males. So Jonathan Haidt, known for his Moral Foundations Theory of political preferences whereby Liberals and Conservatives have a fundamentally different system of morality, asked Goldberg if he had broken down the data by sex.
And Goldberg — who is doing a PhD in Political Science at Georgia State University — analysed the data again, breaking it down by gender. The results were as predicted and were all the more striking for it. According to Pew Research Center data, 56% of Liberal females aged 18 to 29 have been diagnosed with a mental health condition . . .

The obvious question is, “Why?” And the most obvious answer, supplied by Emily Ekins of the Cato Institute, is “locus of control”:

Part of the reason liberals and conservatives disagree about the causes of poverty and wealth is that they disagree about the extent to which personal choices or external forces directs people’s lives. In other words: they disagree about the role of personal agency.
This idea is related to a concept in psychology called the locus of control. People who tend to believe events in their lives are within the control of the individual are described as having an internal locus of control. Those who tend to believe events in their lives are outside of a person’s control are described as having an external locus of control. While in reality both external forces and personal choices play a role, the question is what individuals emphasize. . . .
The [2019 Cato] survey finds that liberals emphasize external forces and that conservatives emphasize personal choices in explaining personal outcomes in their own lives. . . .
These data demonstrate that liberals and conservatives emphasize the impact of personal agency on outcomes differently. Conservatives are more likely to believe that people are responsible for their situations and use their agency to direct their lives, and liberals are more likely to believe that people’s situations are shaped by their environment and other external factors.

Modern liberalism (or “progressivism”) is obsessed with inequality, claiming that all disparities in outcomes are a result of systemic oppression, which must be ended in the name of “social justice.” Everything is interpreted through the lenses of identity politics, where racism, sexism, homophobia and other biases are believed to define the axes of oppression. Because vast social and historic forces are involved in this worldview, it is easy to see why it tends to breed an attitude of helplessness. If the “patriarchy” has been oppressing all women for the past 6,000 years — a core claim of feminist ideology — a young woman who buys into this worldview must see herself engaged in a desperate struggle, even though she herself might be highly privileged, by any objective standard. Feminist activism, I would argue, is a chief cause of the epidemic of insanity that prevails among girls at elite universities.

Think about this: You’re an upper-middle-class suburban white girl whose parents can afford the tuition at Oberlin, Stanford or Yale. Given your advantageous socioeconomic background, your success in life is almost guaranteed — or it would be, were it not for a curriculum that teaches you deranged nonsense, e.g., “gender is a social construct,” in a campus climate where becoming an “activist” is considered a smart career move. The path of progressive activism is unlikely to lead to personal happiness in life, because this sort of activism is all about grievance-mongering around claims of oppression.

Correlation should not be confused with causation, of course. Does liberalism create insanity, or does it merely attract insane people? A political movement based upon policy ideas that are obsolete, discredited and harmful will not attract the best people to its banner. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the core belief of leftism — equality through economic redistribution imposed by an all-powerful government — has been entirely discredited. No honest and intelligent person could endorse the crypto-Marxist policy agenda of the Democratic Party, which is why Democrats attract so many stupid and dishonest people.

Young people have no memory of the Cold War. They do not remember the failure of LBJ’s “Great Society” programs (about which Amity Schlaes has written a new book). Academia is now so dominated by the Democratic Party that Republicans can never be hired to the faculty at elite universities. Students thus never encounter a professor who will explain them that “progressive” policies are doomed to failure, and are instead encouraged to devote themselves to the politics of futility.




 

Category: Fear. Loathing.

CBS News: White Males Are Heroes

Posted on | April 22, 2020 | Comments Off on CBS News: White Males Are Heroes

What? The liberal media gives good publicity to Trump voters?

A company that produces raw supplies for medical manufacturers has risen to the unprecedented challenges of the coronavirus pandemic. Not only did Braskem USA ramp up production of their much-needed materials, but the company also designated “live-in” teams who stayed and worked at their facilities for nearly a month.
The Braskem employees who volunteered to live at work did so to protect others and hopefully prevent the spread of the virus to their families. After 28 days on the job, these employees finally clocked out — and the joyous moment was caught on video. . . .
The team of about 40 workers worked in 12-hour shifts. During work hours, they make polypropylene, the raw materials used to produce a non-woven fiber found in N95 masks, hospital gowns, and sanitary wipes. Occasionally during their off hours, they could watch TV or get drive-by visits from family, WPVI reports.
Knowing they were making a difference in the battle against COVID-19 made the long stay at work worth it. “All the first responders, all the people on the frontlines, we thank you. That’s what makes our job easy to do,” Boyce said.

Now watch the video:

A bunch of heterosexual white males getting good publicity? I’m sure CBS network executives will fire the producer responsible for this.




 

Category: CBS
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