NYT Circles the Drain

Steven Hayward of Power Line posts fairly extensive excerpts of the letter of resignation written by Bari Weiss as she leaves an editorial position at The New York Times. She as much as accuses the NYT of becoming the American left's version of Pravda, a total party line propaganda rag. A couple of choice quotes:

The paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. . .

[T]he truth is that intellectual curiosity—let alone risk-taking—is now a liability at The Times. (snip) And so self-censorship has become the norm.

From "newspaper of record" to "ideological megaphone" in maybe a decade, that's damned sad. Are things so tough for the press that this is what is required to elude bankruptcy? I refuse to believe it.

Later ... Steve has now posted the entire letter at the above site, as an addendum. It is beautifully written and I enjoyed reading the whole thing, maybe you will too.

Memories

At her CruzTalking Two blog, the other DrC has a very charming recollection of her days helping with her family's home canning of fruit. Her mom, something of a force of nature, cajoled the neighborhood kids into helping. I think you'll enjoy her memories, I know I did.

She has me thinking about my days helping my own mom home can fruit, jam, and pickles. The fruit and jam were fine but I hated the way pickles and green tomato relish made the house smell. I don't like to eat either and I really hated the smell of hot vinegar, but I ground up bushels of green tomatoes.

Our family moved from LA to the country when I was in 3rd grade. Our place in Hollywood became freeway right-of-way and we moved to our weekend cabin one county up the coast.

That one room cabin sat in an orange orchard and so from about age 8 I grew up in the country, riding a big yellow bus to school. A couple of years later we expanded the cabin into a nice home where I lived until I went away to college. I made the money for my first car trapping gophers out of that orange orchard - left alone gophers kill the trees.

Our place there had formerly been an apricot orchard of which three old trees remained. We had all the 'cots we could eat, plus apricot pies. We canned dozens of quarts of 'cots and dozens of pints of apricot pineapple jam. We also canned boysenberry jam, apple butter, and occasionally plum jam.

Oddly, we never made marmalade. We grew Valencias - juice oranges - picked by braceros working for the Sunkist packing plant. Dad and I didn't drink much of the juice, but mom liked it.

In later years I’ve claimed to be the stereotypical Californian: “Born in Hollywood, and grew up in an orange orchard.” Every word of it true, too.

Mid-20th century California was an amazing place, a near-paradise. People had largely ruined it by century’s end. The other DrC and I no longer call it home, though we still visit non-urban areas where a bit of its former magic persists.

Last Chance? Not This Year

The cover story in the new issue of Time magazine is headlined:

2020 Is Our Last, Best Chance to Save the Planet

Let me say up front, I have no idea if that is true. Environmentalists have cried “Wolf“ so often that they’ve taught us to ignore their plaintive cries.

While I have no idea if this time they are finally correct (pun intended), I can give you a prediction I know to be true. If they are correct, then the planet is really and truly, for certain, scr*wed. With Covid-19 abroad in the land, the environment is going to get little attention for the next couple of years.

The thing that can kill you in the next month always gets way more attention than the thing that can kill you in the next decade. Of course there is always the possibility that Covid-19 will solve the problem by killing half of us humans and vastly reducing our impact on the environment. That is how nature’s balance normally works.

Dang, I am not very cheerful on this Monday morning.

Further Thoughts re Bridgeable Gap

With his column referenced below, Hinderaker posts a map in the by-now classical red and blue, showing the states carried by Trump and those carried by Mrs. Clinton. If the separation into two countries along those lines should occur, the Red country has interior lines of communication, the Blue country does not.

Presumably some treaty permitting transit would be negotiated. However, to the extent that the various non contiguous parts of the Blue country represent different ethnic populations, is there not some likelihood that they will eventually further separate into several more countries, as did East and West Pakistan?

It is likely the Blue country would operate a European model of high taxes, well-funded social welfare services, on the order of France or Scandinavia. The Red country would take more of a low tax, opportunity-based capitalist model. Free movement between the two would exist for some period of months or years, but presumably not be open-ended.

The trouble with Hinderaker’s map is that essentially every large city in the current U.S. would want to be in the Blue country, including places like St. Louis, Denver, Atlanta, and Houston. On the other hand, every rural area including upstate NY, downstate IL and Central Valley CA would want to be in the Red country. There is just no way to have a country of cities, and another of rural areas, all mixed up - or is there?

I’m remembering the walled Chicago of the SciFi film Divergent. Maybe that’s the way we go, with cities as Singapore-style independent (or allied) city states and the rural parts of America being “another country” operating under different, looser rules.

Could this model work? I wonder if Divergent author Veronica Roth saw herself as a prophet? Or maybe the prophet was Harry Harrison with his Make Room, Make Room novel on which the Soylent Green film was based. I’d even make a case for Lee Kuan Yew, the designer of Singapore, as the real “father” of the successful modern city state.

It is looking like we’re going to get the chance to learn what will and won’t work, by trial and error. Because as Hinderaker points out, what we’re doing now is not working.

Is the Gap Bridgeable?

Power Line's John Hinderaker asks some pointed questions about life in 21st century America.

Is there any basis on which we can share governance of America with people who hate our country and our traditions, institutions, culture and freedoms? Why, exactly, should we want to do so? Is there any set of shared assumptions and values that will allow normal Americans and leftists to work together as fellow citizens? One begins to wonder.

He imagines the outcome will be either separation into two countries or extreme federalism, which are alternatives I've explored. His column isn't too long and the whole thing is worth your time.

Don’t Reward a Tantrum

I write this Sunday morning to share a concern I have regarding the Nov. 3 election. Others have written similar things, I’m too lazy to look them up and cite them.

My concern is that people will be so tired of all the #NeverTrump hysteria, Cancel Culture crap, impeachment hearings, riots, and generalized anger being exhibited by nearly every organ of the media, the arts, academia, and anyone else with a soapbox, that they will vote for Joe Biden just to get some peace.

And I believe this is the intent of those generating the unpleasantness. I imagine them thinking if we make enough noise, exhibit enough anger, raise enough false claims of outrageous motives and behavior, people will be so hassled they’ll vote for Sleepy Joe so we’ll shut up. And if it works as they hope, they’ll be rewarded for their mischief and do it again to the next GOP president.

Because you and I and everyone else knows if Sleepy Joe is elected the entire collection of cultural expression outlets will roll over and play dead for four years, minimum. Peace will reign, all will be sweetness and light, however he manages to botch the job, we’ll never hear about it.

We know this because we never heard about all the screw-ups of his mentor. Barack Obama was a genuinely poor president but the press covered for him and told us everything was okay. It wasn’t, but nobody bothered us with the sordid details.

And we know we’d get the same bland “everything’s okay storyline” about a Biden administration. I worry that the prospect of this will be enough to make the difference for Biden, and I worry that it is no accident things turned out this way.

It is important not to reward childish tantrum behavior, for that is what this is.  We seriously need another “this is the flight 93 election” wake-up call. Sadly I’m not the one to write it, this is my feeble attempt.

Weird Marine Mammal Science

National Geographic reports (with photos) the sighting of a beluga whale off the coast of San Diego. Normally a dweller in the far North, nobody knows what it was doing so far south.

Unlike most whales, belugas are totally white, gregarious and maybe 15 feet long. This one appeared to be alone, which is very uncommon, and from external examination at some distance, healthy-looking.

Beluga whales typically restrict themselves to the Arctic and sub-Arctic waters off the coasts of Canada, Greenland, Russia, Scandinavia, and Alaska.

The one time in my life I saw beluga whales, the other DrC and I were in Churchill, Manitoba. We had taken the train north from rural Saskatchewan, to Churchill which is on the shores of Hudson Bay. There were a whole pod of belugas just offshore in the Bay, very visible in the icy water.

That trip was an adventure - the train rocked and rolled along at maybe 25 mph on rails laid over permafrost through hundreds of miles of taiga. Taiga is the name for stunted forests of small, sickly conifers growing atop permafrost.

The rail line existed so the prairie provinces could ship grain from the elevators at Churchill to Europe via Hudson Bay. It was down for a couple of years but began shipping grain (and passengers) again less than a year ago.

The entire year's shipping season at Churchill lasts maybe 8 summer weeks, during which Lloyd's will permit ships to transit that far north. It is a much shorter route than down to the Great Lakes and then out the St. Lawrence River to the Atlantic.

Taking the train to Churchill is great fun if you like train travel, and it is the only way to go other than flying. There are no roads connecting Churchill to the rest of Canada.

The Year 2020, Symbolically

Source: The Week in Pictures (scroll down), by Steven Hayward of Power Line.

Request Denied

Lucianne.com links to a Minneapolis Star Tribune article which reports the Federal Government has denied a request by MN Governor Walz for disaster relief to rebuild 1500 buildings destroyed in the riots. Good, if true.

I hope President Trump refuses disaster aid to every city that ordered the police stand down and let the rioters burn and loot. Also refuses to aid every governor who refused to call out his National Guard to preserve peace and property.

George Floyd was killed in what appears to have been a wrongful manner by police. This is appropriately dealt with by charging the offender(s) with homicide, convicting them, and applying the usual penalties. It is possible their superiors are also negligent but that is, or should be, a civil matter unless it can be demonstrated they ordered the wrongful death.

Floyd's death is no excuse to permit justifiably angry people to destroy significant parts of every large city in the land. Those mayors and governors who tacitly condoned violence by standing down police and troops charged with keeping the peace are complicit in what happened.

Acronym Alert

Lucianne.com links to a Gateway Pundit piece with this title:

WOW! NBC Guest Doctor Who Was Suffering from Coronavirus in Hospital in TV Interviews — NEVER HAD CORONAVIRUS! (VIDEO)

The story improves our understanding of the acronym NBC, it appears to stand for:

Never Believe this Crap

Poor Chet Huntley has to be spinning in his Big Sky grave, a hundred miles north of here. The network once took the idea of “news” seriously.

Weird Anthropological Science

DNA research reported in the respected science journal Nature shows early contact and interbreeding between Polynesians and South American Indians. Somewhere the ghost of Thor Heyerdahl snarls "I told you so" even if he did get the directionality exactly backwards.

One thing that confirms the idea is the widespread cultivation of the sweet potato in Polynesia since pre-Columbian times, although it originated in Central and South America. The researchers believe that contact was made by Polynesians sailing east, as they were serious open ocean navigators with their twin hulled canoes.

I think of Polynesians as the astronauts of their era. Or maybe earlier versions of Kirk and Spock, quite literally “boldly going where no men had gone before.” Hat tip to the New York Post for the link.

You Can't Make This Up

Really, you cannot make up stuff like the following, it would seem too far-fetched, too on the nose. Check out this from Instapundit, who is quoting Heather Mac Donald in The Wall Street Journal (possibly behind paywall):

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is a peer-reviewed journal that claims to publish “only the highest quality scientific research.” Now, the authors of a 2019 PNAS article are disowning their research simply because I cited it.

Psychologists Joseph Cesario of Michigan State and David Johnson of the University of Maryland analyzed 917 fatal police shootings of civilians from 2015 to test whether the race of the officer or the civilian predicted fatal police shootings. Neither did. Once “race specific rates of violent crime” are taken into account, the authors found, there are no disparities among those fatally shot by the police. These findings accord with decades of research showing that civilian behavior is the greatest influence on police behavior.

In September 2019, I cited the article’s finding in congressional testimony. I also referred to it in a City Journal article, in which I noted that two Princeton political scientists, Dean Knox and Jonathan Mummolo, had challenged the study design. Messrs. Cesario and Johnson stood by their findings. Even under the study design proposed by Messrs. Knox and Mummolo, they wrote, there is again “no significant evidence of anti-black disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by the police.”

On Monday they retracted their paper. They say they stand behind its conclusion and statistical approach but complain about its “misuse,” specifically mentioning my op-eds. The authors don’t say how I misused their work. Instead, they attribute to me a position I have never taken: that the “probability of being shot by police did not differ between Black and White Americans.” To the contrary, I have, like them, stressed that racial disparities in policing reflect differences in violent crime rates. The only thing wrong with their article, and my citation of it, is that its conclusion is unacceptable in our current political climate.

Retracting the article was probably part of the price they paid for keeping their jobs or their research funding, if in fact they are able to do so. The per capita crime rates of Blacks and Hispanics are substantially higher than those for whites and Asians. Noting this is a good way to lose one's career and reputation. As a retiree I have neither to lose, so I mention it.

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A quick story from my distant past. An undergraduate roommate, now dead, did a doctorate in research psychology at Berkeley. As a grad assistant he helped with a study that examined non-verbal measures of intelligence in pre-schoolers.

The intent was to show there were no differences across racial groups. When the data was crunched, they found politically incorrect significant differences: Asians were smarter than whites who were smarter than Hispanics who were smarter than Blacks.

This was exactly what the "awful racist" Shockley had claimed. My friend ruefully reported the research was never published.

The "wrong" results would have harmed the researchers' careers even more than the resulting two year publishing "dry spell." My friend's career was also damaged as he was unable to coauthor follow-on articles with the researchers, since none were written.

Thursday Snark

Instapundit reacts to a headline about a Canadian university pressured into referring to Taiwan as “a province of China.”

Taiwan is a province of China like Canada is a province of the United States.

Actually, in addition to its considerable snark value, that isn’t a bad analogy. Canada never overthrew British rule, still recognizes the Queen as their sovereign. We had a revolution, they never did. China had a revolution, Taiwan never did. Both Taiwan and Canada evolved to independence. The parallels are considerable.

A Thursday Question

How is it that painting over BLM graffiti on a CA street is a "hate crime" whereas black-on-white assault and battery is not? I think I know the answer.

We are reaping the whirlwind of Soros-supported lefty prosecutors. Nothing good can come from this sort of bias.

The Idea Catches On

Since June 1 and 19, I have been writing about the spooky parallels between the latter days of the Woodrow Wilson presidency and the current state of a potential Joe Biden presidency. In each case an impaired principal has been coached through it by a supportive spouse.

I certainly recognize the benefits of both having, and being, a supportive spouse. But we do not wish to have impaired, or de facto shadow, presidents.

Others are beginning to make this connection. For example, Stephen Green at Instapundit links to a Stephen Kruiser Morning Briefing column at PJ Media which makes this same point, albeit in a rather snarky fashion.

When Crazy Joe the Wonder Veep’s handlers first began letting him do videos from his quarantine basement, Jill was often sitting at his side, grinning like a proud mother whose idiot underachieving kid had just successfully recited the alphabet for the first time. It was, quite frankly, very creepy to watch.

The longer the Joe Biden Obvious Decline Circus is allowed to go on, the more I’m convinced that Jill Biden is a power-hungry madwoman who so desperately wants to be in the White House that she is willing to subject her husband to what has now become bipartisan ridicule.

Even the NYT's Tom Friedman is worried about Slow Joe.

NYPD Dispirited

New York City is experiencing a big surge in police retirements, the most recent week saw four times as many as the same week last year. The New York Post has the story.

Since George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, 500+ NYPD cops have filed to retire. My calculations find that was 1.5% of the department's sworn officers leaving, in roughly 39 days. If that rate were to continue for the next year, NYPD would be down 13-14% of its force.

Given the reduction in their budget, it appears the retirees won't be replaced. You have to wonder how far things will have to deteriorate before New Yorkers vote in another Giuliani to clean up the mess?

Perhaps, like Baltimore and Detroit, the outmigration of decent people will pass the tipping point. Experience shows this leaves the dispirited remainder to sink further into the morass, unable to stomach a return to the "broken windows" policing their situation requires.

Confucius Institutes Under Fire

A couple of days ago, I wrote (scroll down) that the U.S. needs to eject the Confucius Institutes at various U.S. universities. Now University Times reports that a rebranding has taken place.

The Chinese government has rebranded Confucius Institutes as centres for “language exchange and cooperation”, after years of international criticism over the use of the institutes for propaganda and censorship.

A number of universities have closed their Confucius Institutes, both in the U.S. and Europe. It is unclear whether the remaining units will adopt the new name, as the headquarters has done.

We should send them packing.

An Awkward Truth

Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) is a wounded U.S. combat veteran, of mixed Thai and U.S. parentage. She has said some things recently, in reference to the President's Mt. Rushmore speech, that have bordered on ridiculous. When criticized she has fallen back on reminding us of her suffering for the nation.

I am moved to observe that suffering for our nation does not automatically make a veteran a brilliant politician. Both Sens. Duckworth and the late John McCain are examples of this. Both served bravely, suffered mightily, and I honor their sacrifices.

On the other hand, as politicians both have shown deficient judgment and crankiness. In the same way that being photogenic and having acting or music talent does not make one an expert on domestic and foreign policy, being a veteran likewise doesn't guarantee wisdom.

One could wish this wasn't true, but it is demonstrably the case. Some veterans, like President Eisenhower, Sens. Dole and Cotton, also have political talent; others like Sens. Duckworth and McCain ... not so much.

Sabotage in Iran

A column at PJ Media claims that at least some of the various explosions and fires in Iran are Israeli sabotage of Iran's nuclear effort. Others may be the actions of an anti-regime group within Iran. It cites the New York Times as a source, behind their paywall.

The claim is made that the Iranian nuclear weapon effort has been set back two years. One hopes it is accurate. Since Iran keeps wishing death to Israel, it's only fair if Israel arranges some reciprocity.

About Bubonic Plague

The press is making something of several cases of bubonic plague that have popped up in China. I wouldn't get too worried. As an WHO official says, bubonic is around. For example, California has a case or two every year. No kidding.

Bubonic mostly lives in the rodent population - squirrels, rats, voles, etc. It passes to humans when humans are bitten by fleas from an infected rodent.

In CA this most often happens when an unsuspecting child comes across a rodent that is acting "tame," which is to say unafraid. The rodent is actually too sick to flee, but not dead. The kid handles the rodent, is bitten by its fleas, gets sick, and usually is diagnosed in time to cure him or her.

Ailurophobes, take heed. The Bubonic plagues in medieval Europe could mostly have been prevented if many people had kept house cats around to kill rodents.

Sadly, cats were viewed as evil, often as "familiars" of witches, and avoided in those years. Supposed witches were often tried and executed.