GOOD IDEA:
We need to normalize commie shaming again. Communism is perhaps the worst thing to happen to modern humanity and people should feel bad and stupid for liking it.
— Wyatt (@austerrewyatt1) April 5, 2024
April 23, 2024
OPEN THREAD: Do your best.
21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Yes, It’s a Flame-Throwing Robot Dog. And Yes, I Need One.
Doesn’t everyone?
TWENTY MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE:
And a modern reboot of Nixon’s “law and order” ad from 1968. As Charles Glasser wrote here in August of 2020, “[I] cannot stress enough how powerful and resonant this ad was in 1968. Ben Rhodes was right: The young reporters in the MSM don’t know anything, and I’d add neither do their readers. This ad could run today and still be effective. If you support Trump, you should be demanding that they start producing ads like this.”
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Columbia Protestors Clarify They Only Want Death To America After America Is Done Paying Their Student Loans.
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE!
BIDEN: "I used to drive an 18-wheeler."
(Biden has literally never driven an 18-wheeler.) pic.twitter.com/NA8EAni2QK
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) April 23, 2024
AT COLUMBIA, THEY’RE PARTYING LIKE IT’S 1939: Columbia University Turmoil Recalls the Hitler Youth.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: NPR’s Uri Berliner Was Right.
Uri Berliner’s provocative recent essay lamenting “the absence of viewpoint diversity” at NPR brought to mind the critiques of Liz Spayd, the little-remembered final public editor at the New York Times.
Spayd, like Berliner, was a veteran journalist whose departure was a study in the limited tolerance at elite American news organizations for contrary thinking and inward-directed criticism. Spayd left the Times in 2017 when her position as in-house critic was unceremoniously dissolved. Berliner was suspended without pay soon after his essay about NPR was posted this month at the “Free Press” site on Substack. He resigned within days, closing a 25-year career at the public broadcaster.
The two cases, while dissimilar in their details, are both instructive, signaling a distaste for challenges arising from within newsrooms of major media outlets, even when raised by journalists with many years of experience. They also point to an eclipse of values of impartiality, fair-mindedness, and ideological distance that defined American journalism, at least nominally, for decades.
Spayd alluded to those diminished values in her swan song column, writing that “in the long run stories that are measured in tone are more powerful. Whether journalists realize it or not, with impartiality comes authority — and right now it’s in short supply.”
It’s Joseph’s first column at the PJM Mothership, so please click over and read the whole thing.
NOT MUCH OBVIOUS EVIDENCE THAT PEOPLE ARE GETTING SMARTER, THOUGH: Are We Evolving? New Research Reveals That Human Brains Are Getting Larger.
IF TRUMP DID THIS THEY’D CALL HIM RACIST AND UNCIVILIZED: Britain’s Prime Minister Vows Migrant Deportation Flights to Rwanda Will Start Soon.
HE DOESN’T HAVE ANY MORE OF A CHANCE IN FRONT OF A RUSSIAN COURT THAN DONALD TRUMP DOES IN FRONT OF A NEW YORK COURT: Russian Court Denies Evan Gershkovich’s Latest Appeal.
PRETTY IMPRESSIVE TO BE ABLE TO REPAIR A SPACECRAFT THAT IS NEARLY 50 YEARS OLD AND HAS LEFT THE SOLAR SYSTEM: Voyager 1 resumes sending readable status updates after 5 months of repairs.
SANDY’S WAR, THE ANTEBELLUM YEARS: In the AOC Archive.
An archived web page from 2018, created by a developer named Riley Roberts, purported to offer for sale Civet Select, “the world’s most exotic cup of coffee.” In Indonesia, according to the web page, “cage-free indigenous Palm Civets climb to the top of the plantation trees to eat the best coffee beans in the crop. Civets digest the berries and pass the coffee beans. The enzymes in the digestive process remove the bitterness and acidity from the coffee. Farmers hike the plantation and surrounding forest to find the rare, wild Civet droppings. The found beans are thoroughly cleaned, washed and sun dried at the plantation. Lab testing confirms Civet coffee is clean and safe to drink.”
Anyone reading these astonishing claims might well think the resulting product, pardon my French, tastes like shit, but a winsome photo of Roberts’s attractive partner, “Alexandria,” highlights her reassuring guarantee that that’s not the case: “This Civet coffee has a unique, smooth and full-bodied flavor that I really enjoyed.”
Yet most amazing of all is the listed price of the “found” beans for which Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was shilling: $40 for two ounces! Coffee beans usually come in 12-ounce packages, so $240 for a bag of “droppings” would be an awfully steep price even for New York City Democratic Socialists.
And you thought 2019, the year that AOC’s Green Nude Eel dominated news headlines was an innocent year compared with what was to follow. But hey, when you only have 12 years left — before the world ends and/or President Ocasio-Cortez makes everything illegal, you might as well live it up with the finest, most exotic coffee known to socialistkind.
(Classical reference in headline.)
THE NEW YORK TIMES INFORMS ITS READERS OF MILITARY INTRICACIES: “The war has often revolved around artillery, which are large guns that armies use to fire explosive shells and hit targets from a great distance.”
“ELITE HIGHER ED IS CRINGE.” Yep.
Just go to a state school. The premium you're paying for elite private colleges vs. the better public schools is for social clout and not the quality of the education. And that's worth a lot less now that people have figured out that elite higher ed is cringe.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 21, 2024
Related: Just go to a state school. “Even in a period when nearly all American institutions are losing public trust, the decline in confidence for higher education stands out. In 2015, 57 percent of Americans had a ‘great deal’ or ‘quite a lot’ of confidence in higher education, according to Gallup polling. By summer 2023, that number had declined to just 36 percent. . . . These polls, furthermore, preceded the December 2023 congressional hearings that eventually led to the ouster of Penn president Liz Magill and Harvard president Claudine Gay (though in Gay’s case, it was more because of credible allegations that she was a serial plagiarist). They also preceded the recent wave of protests on the campuses of Columbia and other elite schools, variously described as pro-Palestine or anti-Israel depending on the news outlet.”
Conclusion: “So fuck Harvard and fuck the rest of these schools — the correction in perceptions is long overdue. By all means go if it’s in your best interest to do so. But state colleges and institutions are much better institutions for society — one of the things that truly make America great — and often offer a more well-rounded experience and a comparable education at a lower price.”
Related: Ed Morrissey: Once Again, With Feeling: Decolonize Academia Now! “I wish to offer this essay again to remind us that we could force these schools to recognize the damage they are doing by restoring proper market signals to the education industry. And until we do, American Academia will continue to operate as a toxic and destructive element in our society, imposing indoctrination rather than education and producing generations of moral failures and petty totalitarians. And as the past six months have demonstrated, other approaches simply aren’t working.”
One (1) aspect of the downfall of California isn’t actually Gavin Newsom’s doing, unbelievably enough. Cities on the west coast allow permanent homeless encampments because the leftwing circus called the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided to make up their own laws and imposed the rule that homeless people must be permitted to camp wherever they like, until and unless governments create housing for all of them.
The Supreme Court is finally getting around to reviewing this lawless ruling.
However, California is still going to California: Santa Monica okays $1M per unit homeless housing project after audit found state wasted billions on crisis.
A new state audit shows that the effectiveness of California’s homeless programs, on which the state spent $24 billion over five years was not consistently tracked.
Santa Monica city officials last week approved a multimillion-dollar apartment unit for the homeless just days after the release of an audit which found California could not account for the $24 billion it spent on the state’s burgeoning homeless crisis.
The 122-unit building for the homeless will include a mix of studio, one, two and three-bedroom apartments, along with ground floor retail and residential and commercial parking spaces.
A design concept available on the city’s website shows that the multi-apartment unit will cost more than $123 million, for a cost of just over $1 million each for the 122 apartments. A second design concept would have cost even more, north of $200 million for 196 units.
PREVIOUS COVERAGE: California hasn’t been tracking homeless programs’ effectiveness, audit finds
“Moving forward in bringing affordable and permanent supportive housing to city-owned land is a key step in our strategy to fulfill our Housing Element requirements,” Mayor Phil Brock said. “I look forward to the next steps and ultimately seeing families move into these new homes and thrive.”
The measure was approved days after the release of an audit which indicated the state had spent around $24 billion between 2018 and 2023 to tackle homelessness – but did not consistently track whether the huge outlay of public money did anything to actually improve the problem.