Demons in early 14th-century Provençal miniature of "Temptation by Lechery" attributed to Maître Ermengaud, British Museum, via The Conversation.
If it's true, as Stephen Colbert said, that "reality has a well-known liberal
bias", does that mean we should give it less attention, just in pure fairness?
The latest is that the last phase of data collection for the 2020 census—what
they call "nonresponse followup", the personal interviewing of residents who
didn't fill out their forms—is being cut off early.
Originally scheduled
for 13 May–31 July and put off because of the pandemic to 11 August–31
October, it's now going to stop on 30 September, according to reporting from
NPR:
The Census Bureau is cutting short critical door-knocking efforts for the
2020 census amid growing concerns among Democrats in Congress that the
White House is pressuring the bureau to wrap up counting soon for
political gain, NPR has learned.
Attempts by the bureau's workers to conduct in-person interviews for the
census will end on Sept. 30 — not Oct. 31, the end date it indicated back
in April would be necessary in order to count every person living in the
U.S. given major setbacks from the coronavirus pandemic. Three Census
Bureau employees, who were informed of the plans during separate internal
meetings Thursday, confirmed the new end date with NPR. All of the
employees spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of losing their
jobs.
If this is really happening and the Commerce Department isn't announcing it,
let alone offering an explanation, there can only be one fairly obvious
reason: a new phase in the Trump administration's (and Republican Party's)
effort to shrink the number of Democratic congressional districts (and state
legislative districts as well). Following on their failure last year to force
the census to ask the citizenship question, meant to intimidate noncitizens
from responding (thanks,
SCOTUS!), and last week's
announcement
that they plan to exclude undocumented immigrants from the census's
congressional reapportionment numbers
(plainly unconstitutional
according to the explicit language of the 14th Amendment, "Representatives
shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective
numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding
Indians not taxed", and it won't survive court scrutiny), just another day in
the war on reality.
Since people who didn't answer the online census form are people without
broadband access, predominantly minority members—
there still exists a stubborn digital divide that disproportionately
impacts Americans from underserved communities. One in three African
Americans and Hispanics — 14 million and 17 million, respectively — still
don't have access to computer technology in their homes. Similar dismal
numbers, 35 percent of black households and 29 percent of Hispanic
households, do not have broadband.
and immigrants trying to stay out of public attention, afraid (wrongly) that
the data can be used by ICE to hunt down the undocumented, the undercount is
concentrated in the urban areas where these people mostly live, as well as
black rural districts in southern states, and these populations, who largely
vote Democratic, will lose districts, and the overwhelmingly white suburban
areas that provide most of the Republican vote will gain. (There are also
rural broadband-challenged areas with mostly white populations in the
"heartland" from West Virginia to Utah and North Dakota to Arkansas, but their
populations are so small that census workers won't need as much time.)
Reality discriminates against Republicans!
Then there's the word, also from
NPR
(I've been dumping on them lately, but the really good work they do deserves
highlighting too, especially when nobody else is doing it), on the
government's move to privatize the collection of data on Covid-19
hospitalization and shift it from the CDC to the Department of Health and
Human Services:
The established system was disrupted by a memo dated July 10, issued to hospitals by HHS. In the memo, HHS took the unusual step of
instructing hospitals to stop reporting the capacity data to CDC, and to
instead use a reporting platform developed recently by the private
contractor, TeleTracking. As NPR has reported, the details of how the contract was awarded to TeleTracking are unclear.
There was was plenty of outcry at the time (it was unsettling enough that the
news was announced by Roger Stone's old mentee and chauffeur Michael Caputo,
notorious
anti-Chinese racist, whose public relations clients have included Vladimir Putin and Carl
Paladino, now at HHS, though he has no health expertise):
“Historically, C.D.C. has been the place where public health data has been
sent, and this raises questions about not just access for researchers but
access for reporters, access for the public to try to better understand what
is happening with the outbreak," said Jen Kates, the director of global
health and H.I.V. policy with the nonpartisan Kaiser Family
Foundation.
“How will the data be protected?” she asked. “Will there be transparency,
will there be access, and what is the role of the C.D.C. in understanding
the data?”
News of the change came as a shock at the C.D.C., according to two officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity
because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.
And now the results are in, and we're screwed:
The data now available to the public appears to be neither faster nor more complete.
When HHS took over the collection and reporting of this hospital capacity data, it promised to update "multiple times each day." Later, the agency walked that back to say it would be updated daily.
Those daily updates have yet to materialize. On Thursday, an HHS spokesperson told NPR via e-mail, "We will be updating the site to make it clear that the estimates are only updated weekly."
Current data at the site hasn't been updated since 23 July. And
The tallies do not include certain categories of hospitals, including rehabilitation or veterans' hospitals, which have suffered COVID-19 outbreaks. These rehabilitation and veterans' hospitals had previously been included in the data reported by CDC, says the official, who spoke to NPR on background because they were not authorized to speak on the record.
So maybe it's intended to make the situation look better than it is. Or maybe it's just contributor grift—in addition to the TeleTracking firm, the HHS project is powered by Palantir, the company of Trump's seventh largest donor Peter Thiel, which has also earned $1.5 billion from the Trump administration for a surveillance system for ICE.
On July 27, the president and his son Donald Trump, Jr. tweeted a viral video featuring Dr. Stella Immanuel, in which the Houston pediatrician rejected the effectiveness of wearing face masks for preventing the spread of COVID-19 and promoted hydroxychloroquine to treat the disease.
Journalists quickly dug into Immanuel’s background and found that she’s also claimed that having sex with demons can cause illnesses like cysts and endometriosis.
I can't help feeling this is a war on reality on multiple fronts (the demon sex front included).
I'm in the odd position of being happy to say Jonah Goldberg
is right: the reason DHS goons were sent to Portland in their camos and
unmarked vehicles wasn't to protect federal property, as the administration
claimed, or to rehearse a fascist takeover of the country after he loses the
election, as some have said on the left, but just an effort to get some good
video of Trump taking care of some "chaos in the streets" for use in campaign
ads and the Republican convention.
For days, as fireworks and tear gas erupted in the streets of Portland,
Ore., during the deployment of federal tactical teams cracking down on
raucous demonstrations, President Trump campaigned against protesters he
described as “sick and deranged anarchists & agitators” who he said
had threatened to leave Portland “burned and beaten to the ground.”
But even as the president was doubling down, Vice President Mike Pence and
other senior administration officials were negotiating an agreement with
Oregon’s governor, Kate Brown, to begin withdrawing the federal tactical
teams from Portland.
On Wednesday, Ms. Brown announced that the federal law enforcement agents
guarding the federal courthouse in downtown Portland would begin
withdrawing as early as Thursday. “We know where we are headed,” she said.
“Complete withdrawal of federal troops from the city and the state.”
Federal officials confirmed an agreement but hedged on the timing,
cautioning that a departure would depend on the success of the state’s
promise to secure the area.
That last looks like a wary nod to the one unhappy camper, President Trump,
who doesn't like people suggesting that he's ever quit anything—
.@FoxNews
reported incorrectly what the Federal Government is doing with respect to
Portland. We are demanding that the Governor & Mayor do their job or we
will do it for them. To complicated to discuss in a Tweet, but bad reporting
by Fox (possibly on purpose!).
@DHSgov
—but it's pretty clear he did, or the courtiers did it for him, after realizing
that Trump's mercenary force mowing down the Wall of Moms or the Wall of Vets
was not going to be a good look.
There also seems to be some alteration in the
planned withdrawal
of 12,000 US troops, about a third of the force, from Germany that Trump
ordered in June without telling the Germans about it, because he hates
Chancellor Merkel, or because he persists in believing Germany doesn't pay its
"fees", as if NATO were a golf club membership
"Germany's delinquent. They haven't paid their fees, they haven't paid
their NATO fees," Trump told Wednesday reporters outside the White House,
even though no such "fees" exist for members of NATO. "Germany owes
billions and billions of dollars to NATO. And why would we keep all of
those troops there?"
forcing Defense Secretary Mike Esper to invent a different reason
The Pentagon chief cast the decision to cut U.S. forces in Germany as the
result of a months-long review of American deployments in Europe aimed at
bolstering defense [Sure, Jan].
"These changes will achieve the core principles of enhancing U.S. and
NATO deterrence of Russia, strengthening NATO, reassuring allies and
improving U.S. strategic flexibility," Esper said, even as he made clear
that the repositioning of U.S. forces remains tentative. "I want to note
that this plan is subject to and likely will change to some degree as it
evolves over time."
Not so fast; literally, according to this morning's Security Brief from
Foreign Policy, from my email:
While the Pentagon has rushed to begin plans to draw down troops from
Germany at the president’s request, some U.S. service members stationed
there are being told that these moves will take years to carry out,
according to documents obtained by
Some units that are moving back to the United States, including the 2nd
Cavalry Regiment, based in Vilseck, Germany, have been told that the move
will “likely take months to plan and years to execute.”
It's clear, in fact, that they're walking it, very, very, very slowly, back.
Now he's saying in a pinned tweet that he'd like to delay the election
With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020
will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be
a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can
properly, securely and safely vote???
but without saying how he plans to take over functions that have been entirely
outside the control of the executive branch for 233 years. This is because, as
usual, he really has no idea how these things are arranged or who takes care of
them. (At top is the video documentation by Access Hollywood of what seems to
have been Trump's first attempt, at the age of 58, to vote, shepherded by Mr.
Billy Bush, in the 2004 election—he plainly didn't know that you are supposed to
register first.)
How exactly does he go about delaying elections? By issuing tweets announcing
that elections have been postponed? By convincing Barr and the OLC to put
together a case for postponing elections and try to convince Congress to
implement it? I suppose so, but the chances that Congress would comply are
nil.
And are we sure the Republicans won't just violate the law with impunity?
And Mike Pompeo, that grinning grease-faced fool, suggests that they will, but mainly reveals he hasn't read the Constitution in a long long time:
Secretary of State Pompeo this morning, in response to Senator Tim Kaine, on whether a President can delay a Presidential election: "In the end, the Department of Justice and others will make that legal determination."
Because where's the mechanism with which they'll do it?
We are not moving the date of the election. The resistance to this idea among Republicans is overwhelming. We must take all necessary steps to prevent election fraud - including stopping Democrat ballot harvesting - but we will not be delaying the election.
And a founder of The Federalist Society, Trump voter and impeachment opponent, Steven Calabresi, has turned up calling the idea "fascistic"—
“Until recently, I had taken as political hyperbole the Democrats’ assertion that President Trump is a fascist,” he said. “But this latest tweet is fascistic and is itself grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment again by the House of Representatives and his removal from office by the Senate.”
But the main thing for me is, who does it? Barr writes a letter to 50 state secretaries of state and orders them to put the election on hold? Rapid Deployment Teams from DHS fan out to 3000-plus counties to bar the doors of the precincts?
One thing that seems certain to me: he really doesn't have the troops. He doesn't have the troops to do anything more than a demonstration of their impotence like Portland. He has the DHS's Protecting American Communities Task Force (PACT) created by Acting Secretary Chad Wolf on 1 July (with no advice in the official statement as to who's in it to safeguard "our nation’s historic monuments, memorials, statues, and federal facilities" and which can deploy Rapid Deployment Teams (RDT), with no advice to signal who's in them either, but apparently "made up of personnel from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Transportation Security Administration, the Coast Guard, and Customs and Border Protection", and maybe the US Marshals Service. My guess is that it doesn't really exist. Wolf and his trusty SOPDDSHS Cuccinelli may be able to requisition a few dozen guys to occupy a couple of blocks in Portland to rescue the federal courthouse from being "burned and beaten to the ground", but they can't put the nation under martial law. That thing is just a complete fraud (nasty as it may have been for the victims in Portland itself).
More generally, it seems to me that the real ongoing story is the dwindling of Trump's power as everybody inside and outside the administration loses belief in it, hidden, particularly hidden from him, by all these projects, from the Space Force (an inexpensive reshuffling of ongoing projects to make it look like a real thing) to the Durham investigation of the origins of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane, last in a series of desperate attempts in the inspectorate and DOJ and Senate committees to make it look as if McCabe and Mr. Mueller did something cripplingly wrong in investigating the Trump campaign's Russia connections, while Trump sits in his bed praising pizzeria owners for saying nice things about him.
150,000 dead from a pandemic, GDP down 9.5% for the quarter, millions out of work, no Senate rescue package in sight, and the president is promoting a pizza restaurant because its owner is praising him on TV.
Bonus Marchers and police, 1932. Photo by an unnamed Signal Corps
photographer from the National Archives, via
Wikipedia.
Just 88 years ago yesterday, in the midst of the worst economic calamity
and one of the most consequential presidential elections in US history, the
Bonus Expeditionary Force of 17,000 Great War veterans with their families and
social justice warrior comrades were attacked with live ammunition at their
Washington, DC campsite by local police, on orders from President Hoover's
attorney general William Mitchell, two of them dying, and then driven out by an
Army contingent under the command of General Douglas MacArthur.
Our friend Henry noted how much less respectful The New York Times was at the
time toward President Hoover than they are toward President Trump today (one
of the first papers to adopt a nonpartisan stance, as early as 1884, it had
nevertheless endorsed every Democratic presidential candidate since 1912):
A fascinating thread about the Bonus Army yesterday highlighted similarities
with protests today. But I was struck by how much *less* credulous the 1932
version of the New York Times was of Hoover compared to 2020 and Trump.
“Blaming” and “Asserting”:https://t.co/BgZewqZIEbhttps://t.co/EdLEky5RoX
Via Chris Cillizza (LOL), Washington Post, May 2014. I don't really believe in the significance of this but it's hypnotic.
Really irritated yesterday morning by a radio appearance from
Andy Slavitt, a valued voice on medical care and coverage today, falling rhetorically
into a pit of Brooksian cold oatmeal.
GREENE: But our next guest says the fundamental issue is not testing. It
is not face masks or lockdowns or back-to-school guidelines. It is,
fundamentally, trust. Andy Slavitt is a former acting administrator of the
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and he joins me this morning.
Thanks for being here.
ANDY SLAVITT: Morning, David.
GREENE: So why do you see this all about trust?
SLAVITT: Well, if we're wondering why, in the U.S., we're not doing as
well as other nations are - and to be clear, other nations have really
crushed this virus; whether you're talking about Europe or Asia, they
really flattened that curve down to almost nothing. And we ask ourselves
kind of why is it that we haven't done as well? Those other countries,
what are they doing? Mostly, they're using gifts that they were born
with - the ability not to spread the virus by not breathing on people,
either using a mask or staying home. And the answer is that, in those
countries, they are more unified and trusting in what they're saying.
And I'll give you a couple of examples of...
A couple of developments in the Justice Department investigation of the
prehistory of the Justice Department investigation of Donald Trump: the
apparent identification of Christopher Steele's Primary Sub-Source, which I'll
get to in a moment, and another surfaced document, this one supplied to
Senators Chuckles Grassley and Ron Johnson (same Sherlocks who unmasked the
unmasking of General Flynn in the celebrated report of the calls with
Ambassador Flynn that turned out
not to have been masked in the first place).
The latter is another FBI internal report, which according to
Jonathan Turley
(guesting in John Solomon's old spot at The Hill),
shows the FBI used a security briefing of then candidate Donald Trump and top aides to gather possible evidence for Crossfire Hurricane,
its code name for the Russia investigation.
Namely, it's a report of the first Intelligence Community briefing received by
candidate Trump, in the FBI's New York field office, accompanied by his
national security adviser Mike Flynn (because,
WaPo
reported, Flynn was "somebody that I believe in") and his body man Governor
Chris Christie on 17 August 2016, the
day after the FBI opened its Crossfire Razor investigation of Flynn, as it
happens,
It's so pathetic. House Republican Congressional Committee is begging Trump
campaign for a few dollars, out of the $295 million the campaign and the
Republican National Committee are sitting on, and Kushner, who apparently
"oversees such decisions and has a greater say than RNC Chairwoman Ronna
McDaniel", just says no.
The trouble right now is intellectual segregationism, where conservatives
are excluded from academic life, working class voices are excluded from
mainstream media, the Marxist left and theological right are marginalized,
groupthink is practiced by all, and writers are expected to act as the
representatives of a group, the left even more conformist than the right,
and 62% of Americans are afraid to share their beliefs. Fortunately there's
an obvious solution, in which the voices of nonconformity exclude everybody
who doesn't want to subscribe to their SubStack or Patreon site and make
lots of money from their self-selecting audiences.
It's intellectual feudalism replacing intellectual capitalism, a landscape
dotted with castles dominated by figures of daring and resistance like Yascha
Mounk, Andrew Sullivan, Judd Legum, Matt Taibbi, Jonah Goldberg, and David
French defending themselves from behind their moats and battlements. That'll
show those segregationists. Or, as David Brooks says,
Online writers don’t have to chase clicks by writing about whatever Trump
tweeted 15 seconds ago. They can build deep relationships with the few
rather than trying to affirm or titillate the many.
I would like
the record to show
that Judd Legum did not leave ThinkProgress, which he founded, because of
its relentless cancel culture, but because he got sick of being an editor in
chief, with which I can certainly sympathize:
When Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, gets depressed (I
think of it as getting back on his meds) he can get insightful: today, on the
subject of the bizarre war between the Department of Homeland Security and the
municipal government of Portland, Oregon ("Trump's Wag-the-Dog War"), though he's still pretty crazy:
Some presidents, when they get into trouble before an election, try to
“wag the dog” by starting a war abroad. Donald Trump seems ready to wag
the dog by starting a war at home. Be afraid — he just might get his wish.
Trump's told us all about how he hates endless foreign wars, but he's not
opposed to domestic ones.
Listen to how Trump put it: “I’m going to do something — that, I can tell you. Because we’re not
going to let New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and Detroit and
Baltimore and all of these — Oakland is a mess. We’re not going to let
this happen in our country.”
These cities, Trump stressed, are “all run by very liberal Democrats. All
run, really, by radical left. If Biden got in, that would be true for the
country. The whole country would go to hell. And we’re not going to let it
go to hell.”
Lajos Tihanyi, "The Critic", ca. 1916, via
Wikipedia.
This is the thing I meant to do yesterday, but the poetry distracted me.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ for performance artist Donald J. Trump, whose latest piece, "My
Interview With Chris", has just been released on video! You'll be glued to
your screen as he works through some of his most classic material on
paranoia, self-pity, and complete cluelessness.
Fresh off yet another stunning performance on the Montreal Cognitive
Assessment suggesting that he's probably not suffering from mild dementia,
unlike Chris Wallace, he suggested
in an interview with Chris Wallace—
TRUMP: It's all misrepresentation. Because, yes, the first few
questions are easy, but I'll bet you couldn't even answer the last five
questions. I'll bet you couldn't, they get very hard, the last five
questions.
WALLACE: Well, one of them was count back from 100 by seven.
TRUMP: Let me tell you...
WALLACE: Ninety-three.
TRUMP: ... you couldn't answer -- you couldn't answer many of the
questions.
WALLACE: Ok, what's the question?
TRUMP: I'll get you the test, I'd like to give it. I'll guarantee
you that Joe Biden could not answer those questions.
Like, how many words beginning with F can you name in 60 seconds?
Can you name a similarity between a banana and an orange? Can you recall all
five words "face, velvet, church, daisy, red", with or without clues? And the
last, my favorite, can you tell me the date, month, year, what building and
what city you're in?
—Fresh, as I say, off another triumphant demonstration that if Chris Wallace
or Joe Biden is suffering from mild dementia (there's no evidence that either
one is), then he may be suffering from it less, though odds are that Trump
himself hasn't been told it's a diagnostic for cognitive dysfunction and
believes it's a test of how big his genetically superior big brain is, he
showed up for some virtuoso freestyling in his Chris Wallace interview that
will take your breath away, for example in this dazzlingly surreal answer to
Wallace's question on why his administration has failed to come up with a plan
to replace the Affordable Care Act in its three and a half years:
Hi, it's Stupid to say the FBI didn't take the Trump-Russia story seriously
until Trump fired the FBI director and they finally realized there was enough smoke that they might want to think about looking for the fire.
Nevertheless it's the only takeaway I'm getting from Senator Lindsey Graham
(chairing the Senate Judiciary Committee since they took down old Richard
Burr with an insider trading allegation) and his
release of a couple of peculiar documents
from February 2017. I thought he and the comrades wanted us to believe Peter
Strzok and Lisa Page mounted a conspiracy to "spy on Trump" and "take him
down" back in July 2016 or even earlier, but these releases make it pretty
clear that wasn't the case.
WASHINGTON — Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of
Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates
had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the
year before the election, according to four current and former American
officials.
American law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted the
communications around the same time they were discovering evidence that
Russia was trying to disrupt the presidential election by hacking into the
Democratic National Committee, three of the officials said. The
intelligence agencies then sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was
colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence
the election.
One of the things I don't feel I'm hearing in the tributes to Representative
John Lewis, who died yesterday of pancreatic cancer, at the age of 80, is his
role as the spiritual heir of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as the apostle of
nonviolence.*
Not just a spiritual discipline but an effective weapon for change, of course,
for which the training was practically military (as he explained in this
interview with Krista Tippett)
And we had a teacher by the name of Jim Lawson, a young man who taught us
the philosophy and the discipline of nonviolence. We studied. We studied
what Gandhi attempted to do in South Africa, what he accomplished in
India. We studied Thoreau and civil disobedience. We studied the great
religions of the world. And before we even discussed a possibility of a
sit-in, we had role-playing. We had what we called “social drama.”
And we would act out. There would be black and white young people,
students, an interracial group, playing the roles of African Americans, or
an interracial group playing the roles of white. And we went through the
motion of someone harassing you, calling you out of your name, pulling you
out of your seat, pulling your chair from under you, someone kicking you
or pretending to spit on you. Sometimes we did pour cold water on someone
— never hot — but we went through the motion.
Joe Biden may turn out to be what radical centrism looks like.
Then again, who can say? David Brooks has been talking about "radical
centrism" for years and he still doesn't know what it looks like.
David Brooks interviews Joe Biden:
I asked him to describe the big forces that have flattened working-class
wages over the past decades. Other people would have spun grand theories
about broken capitalism or the rise of the corporate oligarchy. But Biden
pointed to two institutional failures — the way Republicans have
decentralized power and broken Washington and the way Wall Street forces
business leaders to focus obsessively on the short term.
He spun a grand theory about broken capitalism and the rise of the corporate
oligarchy, but he didn't use any mean or divisive language, so Brooks didn't
notice. Maybe. What does "the way Republicans have decentralized power" refer
to? Is that a phrase Biden actually used, or a garbled expression in Brooks's
notepad, or something Brooks simply made up? Here's how
Biden's website accounts
for stagnant wages:
What's that line about the last refuge of a scoundrel?
Arkansas ex-governor and holy man Mike Huckabee has been worrying during the pandemic about the needs of stuck-at-home parents and their restless, educationally challenged children, and his special little thing, writes Jesselyn Cook at Huffpost, has been offering them a special deal on merch from his Learn Our History company, advertising it for hundreds of thousands of dollars on Facebook:
Wonder why "FREE" is in scare quotes in the ad? Well, partly because there's a $1 charge for each item in the bundle (such as "The Kids Guide to Coronavirus", "The Kids Guide to President Trump" and "Great Again" video, the "Civil Rights Bundle For Kids", and other units with more "positive, patriotic and unbiased" messages than those "found in many textbooks in use today."
But wait, there's more!
If you don't click there in the (non-scrollable) box and check out the complete Terms & Conditions, you won't find out that you've also committed yourself to
a subscription to Learn Our History’s “Kids Guides” that come “around once a month for the low price of $15.95 plus $4.95 [shipping and processing] per set, billed conveniently to your credit or debit card on file,” as well as an additional subscription to EverBright Kids magazine for an extra $5.75.
You'll just keep getting the stuff and getting charged, and if you think it's going to be easy to cancel once you figure out what they've done to you, you would be wrong. Cook comments,
This isn’t the first time that Huckabee has cashed in on apparent scams. The former Fox News host has spent much of his post-gubernatorial life shilling for grifters, including the sellers of a $74 biblical cancer cure and a diabetes “reversal” treatment containing a “secret ingredient”: cinnamon. (“Let me tell you that diabetes can be reversed. I should know because I did it — and today you can, too!” he said in a 2015 infomercial before railing against prescription drugs, Big Pharma and the “mainstream medical community.”)
the young throwback artist Bari Weiss, representing the liberalism of the good old days of Woodrow Wilson and Alan Dershowitz, takes her departure from the New York Times editorial board, to an extremely gloomy response from National Review's Rich Lowry
They warned Trump would bring fascism to America even as they implemented their own exquisite system of thought control https://t.co/D6HITsn7bp
and Squeaky Ben Shapiro the Straw Man King has emeritated hinself from the helm
of the alleged publication he's been associated with, "The Daily Wire" (I have
to admit while I haven't seen any proof it exists, I haven't looked very hard)
Donald Trump's latest performance piece, Commuting Roger, a
multimedia blizzard of tweets, video clips, official statements, and court
papers, came out to rave reviews, as the president himself said ("I'm getting rave reviews"). Critics adored the extraordinarily swift pacing of the dénouement, in
which the attorney general said Stone's prosecution was justified, Stone
confessed that he'd committed his crimes (lying and intimidating witnesses) to cover up the president's high crimes, and Trump announced he'd paid the price of keeping Stone silent on the details in a Friday night news dump, all in an Aristotelian span of less than 24 hours:
July 9, 2020: Attorney General William Barr declares that Roger Stone’s prosecution was “righteous.”
July 10, 2020: After learning that his appeals to remain out of
prison have been denied and that he must surrender to the Bureau of
Prisons on July 14, Roger Stone tells reporter Howard Fineman, “I had 29 or 30 conversations
with Trump during the campaign period. He knows I was under enormous
pressure to turn on him. It would have eased my situation considerably.
But I didn’t. They wanted me to play Judas. I refused.”
Also on July 10, 2020: Shortly after Fineman’s interview
with Stone becomes public, Trump commutes Stone’s sentence and he becomes
a free man. (Steven Harper/BillMoyers.com)
But there were many remarkable effects along the way, not least the moment in the next day's epilogue, "Remarks to Stakeholders Positively Impacted by Law Enforcement" when he slipped, unexpectedly, out of his usual choppy free verse into 15 lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter, the line of Shakespeare and Milton:
Mahjong tiles revealing that China has words for "north", "east", "south", and "west".
Monsignor Ross Douthat, apostolic nuncio to 42nd Street, takes his Grand
Strategy chops out for a spin ("The Chinese Decade"):
richer-but-not-freer China proved that it was possible for an
authoritarian power to tame the internet, to make its citizens hardworking
capitalists without granting them substantial political freedoms, to buy
allies across the developing world, and to establish beachheads of
influence — in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, American academia, the NBA,
Washington, D.C. — in the power centers of its superpower rival....
So China has won twice over: First rising with the active collaboration of
naïve American centrists, and then consolidating its gains with the de
facto collaboration of a feckless American populist. Four months into the
coronavirus era, Xi Jinping’s government is throttling Hong Kong, taking tiny bites out of India,
saber-rattling with its other neighbors, and perpetrating a near-genocide
in its Muslim West. Meanwhile America is rudderless and leaderless,
consumed by protests and elite psychodrama and a moral crusade whose zeal
seems turned entirely inward, with no time to spare for a rival power’s
crimes.
Furthermore, Trump’s likely successor is a figure whose record and
instincts and family connections all belong to the recent period of
American illusions about China.
One of those naïve American centrists, he means, Joe Biden, and of course
sneaking in the reference to the familiar smear for the cognoscenti, because
that's how Ross rolls—Biden's "family connections" meaning the bogus story
from Peter Schweitzer's fabrication factory according to which Hunter Biden
took some kind of illicit profit from associations with the Chinese government
(I dealt with it briefly
here in the form of a Radio Yerevan joke).
Hi, welcome to the Philosophy Diner, I'm David Brooks ("Two Cheers For Liberalism! (Or Maybe One and a Half)"), and I'll be your server. Today's special is Liberalism, which is my favorite, but I have to warn you, this is not the spicy kind of Liberalism you get from Eleanor Roosevelt and Saul Alinsky, but a more traditional or even antique kind of Liberalism, which is based on the idea that reason is separate from emotion, so it tends to devolve into a detached, passionless Rationalism. Or it's based on the idea that the choosing individual is the basic unit of society, so it devolves into Atomism, in an alienated society of lonely buffered selves. Or if it's based on the idea that people are primarily motivated by self-interest, it could devolve into disenchanted Materialism. To say nothing of Racism, which reduces a human being to a skin color, and people nowadays who dehumanize themselves by reducing themselves to a single label and making politics their one identity, as when they say, "speaking as a Liberal...," leaving no room for the individual conscience.
I guess basically the Liberalism just devolves no matter what you do, and to be honest I can't recommend it, though, speaking as a Liberal, I've been there all my life myself, in this peculiar Rationalist, Atomistic, and Materialist sense. I only give two cheers, like E.M. Forster on Democracy, or am I thinking of Kristol on Capitalism, or Jonathan Chait on Socialism, or something else? Or even less than two cheers, maybe one and a half, because you probably won't like it at all, if only because of the Individualism, which leaves an unpleasant roughness at the back of the palate. I'd advise you to order a small plate of Liberalism with a small plate of Personalism, which is not based on the idea that the choosing individual is the basic unit of society, but the idea that the individual with individual conscience is the basic unit of society. And a basket of freshly buffered selves on the side.
See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Personalism, which is what Brooks's column is apparently really cheering, as opposed to any of these kinds of Liberalism, for further information. It seems to be a very specifically Christian and theologized kind of 19th-century philosophy working its way down to John Paul II, and a way of having your individualism and eating it too, if you know what I mean, often involving the recognition that God is a person too. That's undoubtedly a very crude oversimplification or schematic distortion but I'm not inclined to take it too seriously and just hope nobody cares a lot more than I do.
Kin Ming Estates, Tseung Kwon O, Hong Kong, housing 22,000 people. Image by Baycrest via Wikipedia.
Roy (subscription) asks, on the subject of the contrast between helpless Jonah Goldberg and Rod Dreher and malevolent Tucker Carlson, where we draw the line for conservatives between stupid and evil. It generated a huge amount of very interesting commentary, from which my main contribution:
I'm enough of an old-school love-me-I'm-a-liberal, by upbringing and temperament, that the question makes me kind of uncomfortable. Am I implicitly wondering whether we in the progressive community are really, really smart, or just really, really good?
There's a classic liberal answer according to which stupid and evil are two sides of one coin. People are evil because they don't know any better, and they're stupid because they're too selfish to bother learning. Chicken and egg. Conservatives are evil because they're so unconscious of the exigencies of life outside their own tiny and comfy community that they can't conceive how anybody could get into trouble unless they were bad people, and therefore feel no pity. There's a parallel failure of perspective among liberals like Dickens's Mrs. Jellyby, whose emotions were wholly devoted to starting a mission in Africa while she lost track of her neglected children and suicidal husband, but at least Mrs. Jellyby has some moral imagination.
If conservatives are forced to find out, they might learn. I think David French truly learned something about what it's like to be a black kid when he adopted one and his ugly-white community turned on them. Everybody knows about Mrs. Reagan realizing that stem-cell research isn't immoral when she was caring 24/7 for an Alzheimer's patient and heard that the research could help. That's why we love stories like The Prince and the Pauper or Trading Places.
The thing that distinguishes Tucker from Jonah is the energy he's willing to put into staying ignorant or, if necessary, turning to ignorance on a 1984 dime, as he did with the subject of mask-wearing the other day, adopting the Trump view after weeks of telling his audience the (scientifically correct) opposite. Jonah doesn't have any energy and trusts his friends to make the decisions (David Brooks has a wider circle of friends and adopts three or four contradictory viewpoints without noticing the contradictions). Tucker actively looks for the view that will advance his power goals whether it's true or not, and I agree that's evil. But he doesn't think it's important because he's too stupid to imagine the real-world consequences; he's just a high school kid taking the side the debate coach assigned him, doing his best to win it for the team.
The conversation quickly fell into worrying about "DLC Democrats" or "establishment Democrats", and I had something to say about that as well:
