Dear Weekend Jolter,
If it was ideal during colds, maybe Minipoo (please, stop being so sophomoric already) would work during pandemics too? Ah well, quelle dommage for Speaker Pelosi — they stopped making Minipoo in the late Sixties. Seemed like a viable alternative to beauty-parlor law breaking, no? About which: This missive’s godfather, Jim Geraghty, has a many be-linked piece recounting the latest flubs and fluffs of the above-the-law leader of America’s Democrats. We suggest you read it.
And then there is Kevin Williamson’s take, noting that the caught-unmasked-in the-act Speaker got her wet hackles up and turned the victimhood tables to attack that b-word of a salon owner. From his piece:
You’re always the bitch when you get in the way of a politician — or a “bimbo” or trailer trash, if the politician in question is a Clinton.
Pelosi protests that she was “set up” by the salon owner. There is nothing new in politics: Washington, D.C., mayor Marion Barry, caught on film smoking crack in a hotel room with a hooker, raged over and over again: “The bitch set me up! The bitch set me up! The bitch set me up!” That didn’t play as well in the courtroom as he might have hoped, but, being a Democrat in the District of Columbia, he was reelected after serving his time.
Pelosi is demanding an apology from the salon owner for allegedly setting her up. It takes a special kind of chutzpah to do something obviously sketchy and then demand an apology for being exposed. But here, too, there is precedent. When young Barack Obama was first running for president, he was criticized for belonging to the congregation of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who preached crackpot racist sermons from his pulpit. A lesser politician might have tried to wiggle around some, but Barack Obama’s political instincts are almost as on-point as Nancy Pelosi’s hair. Embarrassed by his own association with a vicious racist, Obama went on television and lectured the rest of the country on their supposed racism. This was an elevated version of “I know you are, but what am I?” and — damnably — it worked.
Enough here on hair but for this: Relating to this missive’s headline, if you want to listen to the 1942 Frank Sinatra classic which, hard to believe, was written by that Phil Silvers, about another Nancy, you can enjoy it here .
Now, on a quite serious note: NR’s former publisher, Wick Allison, passed away this week. Your Humble and Aging Correspondent, who worked with Wick back in those Days of Yore, wrote what he believes is an honest remembrance of a departed comrade. One who deserves to be remembered. It can be read here.
Now let us get a-Jolting.
A Dozen Gemstones Grabbed at Random from This Past Week’s NRO Treasure Trove
1. The PRC may seem a monolith that will be unstoppable and all-consuming, but Therese Shaheen sees a nation with brewing problems, and it ain’t about beer. From the article:
Just the same, the situation today is without recent precedent. In the past few years, Xi has centralized his personal authority to a degree not seen in a Chinese leader since Chairman Mao. In 2017, Xi took control of the country’s military and often appears in public in a military uniform. He is, in effect, the head of the National Security Council, the head of the foreign policy apparatus, and of multiple economic commissions. In recent public appearances, the state news agency Xinhua has referred to him as “People’s Leader.” Can “Chairman Xi” be far off? In additional to title inflation, in 2018, he imposed constitutional changes on the National People’s Congress that removed a term limit preventing him from seeking a third term in 2023. Xi’s moves and power consolidation mean he is responsible and accountable for both the good and the bad. And lately, there’s been far more bad than good.
Starting with the economy: However the government may have controlled the pandemic, the economy remains weak. Economic growth prior to the pandemic — according to China watchers skeptical of government numbers — was probably flat or negative, notwithstanding official statistics that had it closer to 6 percent. Government at every level and households had combined debt of about 300 percent of GDP. U.S. debt/GDP even after trillions in coronavirus relief spending is less than half China’s level, which leaves fewer levers for Beijing to pull to help stimulate the economy.
While the U.S. Federal Reserve and Congress have injected more than $6 trillion into the economy through massive purchases across many asset classes, the People’s Bank of China balance sheet has remained flat this year. The U.S. Congress provided about $630 billion in direct support to small businesses, compared with less than one-tenth that amount the PRC made available to small businesses in China. Retail sales in China for each month of 2020 are down compared with the same month the year prior. The real data are certainly worse than what the government discloses. In the U.S., retail sales in July were at all-time highs, eclipsing their pre-pandemic levels. According to economist Carlos Casanove at French insurer Coface, the PRC “recovery narrative has been overplayed.”
2. John O’Sullivan checks out the British SJWs enslaved to canceling. Their latest victim: “Rule Britannia.” From the essay:
So the Brits delivered more than “Rule Britannia” promised: It wasn’t only Brits who never would be slaves but anyone living under British rule or on the high seas. It was, moreover, a peculiarly national achievement. In order to buy the slaves their freedom peacefully, the British government raised 20 million pounds sterling in a loan on the money markets. That’s 2.4 billion in today’s money. The British taxpayer finally paid off the last instalment of the loan on February 1st, 2015.
My conclusion is that Ms. Lewis’s comparison of Brits singing “Rule Britannia” with neo-Nazis singing about being forced into gas chambers is so wide of the mark that it makes me wonder what on earth they’re singing on Songs of Praise these days. But the malady seems to be a collective rather than an individual one. Such opinions — it would be generous to call them ideas — are almost compulsory in wokerati circles inside and outside the BBC. And they seem to have become both acute and chronic in the last few years.
I blame Brexit. It has unsettled Remainers in the media so severely that they see threats, insults, and dangers in the lightest expression of contrary taste or opinion — jokes, songs, concert programs, or 18th-century drinking songs. It’s been a long time since anyone sang “Rule Britannia” with any serious imperialist intent. Ditto “Land of Hope and Glory.” The Last Night of the Proms is only half a serious concert. Its second half is a jolly end-of-term romp at which a succession of conductors — most famously Sir Malcolm Sergant (“Flash Harry” to his admirers) and Sir Andrew Davis — ham it up with closing speeches and the promenaders (i.e., the cheap standing seats) play games such as clapping against the grain in order to throw the orchestra off the beat.
“Rule Britannia” itself is a cheerful, rousing, quite unaggressive, popular song from a different age sung by an audience out to enjoy a good time. Is it sung ironically? No, there’s an edge of hostility or subversion to irony which isn’t present in the kind of pantomime atmosphere on the Last Night. Is it then patriotic? Well, it’s not actually hostile to the country, which may be why it’s irritated the BBC mandarins in ways they can’t quite explain. That may also be the reason why on a recent post-Brexit Last Night, some people in the audience turned up to wave European Union flags at the finale. They were mentally canceling Brexit as best they could, by annoying those they thought were Brexit supporters. For myself I would say “Rule Britannia” is a song of comic self-congratulation akin to a pastiche rather than a satire.
3. Victor Davis Hanson hears the sounds of silence about violence. From the essay:
The last possible reason for the silence is the most dangerous of all: Looting is simply no longer a crime but a redistributive lark. Has Biden bought into the increasingly faddish left-wing view that looting is merely an overdue redistribution of someone else’s property, not theft of one’s own? From Vicki Orsterweil’s crackpot book In Defense of Looting to the decisions of blue-state district attorneys not to prosecute most crimes of looting, the Left has created a cottage industry of redefining looting and vandalism as cries-from-the-heart social justice. Biden in his dotage either buys into these crackpot ideas or is savvy enough to realize he’s a figurehead, propped up to put a thin veneer on the state in a radical Jacobin nuthouse.
Watch Trump’s approval polls that are ever so insidiously rising. Even in the predominately left-wing orthodox surveys, they begin to near 46 percent. That suggests the rope-a-dope strategy is now inert and that Biden must leave the basement and play for a time the centrist role of a Hubert Humphrey or Bill Clinton, and he may even have a scripted Sister Souljah moment.
At some point, Biden and his handlers will finally conclude that Kenosha was not an outlier but a symptom and that, as the memory of George Floyd fades, and as the mobs of the nocturnal rioters erode, we are getting down to the proverbial Weatherman-like hardcore agitators. And that means the diminished but more venomous Antifa and BLMA remnants will try to up the ante and torch, loot, shoot, maim, and wreck all the way to the suburbs.
4. Itxu Díaz sees revolution afoot and has thoughts on what Edmund Burke would say about the riots. From the essay:
Surprise. As soon as street agitators got bored with knocking down statues, they started knocking down people. And as soon as the gunshots started ringing, the moderate Biden took off his mask and turned out to be Kamala. Be wary of the adult who bares each and every tooth when smiling. A look at history, especially at that of France and its enlightened guillotine, suggests something quite unpleasant: America is not in the throes of a simple electoral campaign but rather seems to be at the beginning of an extreme leftist revolutionary process. Perhaps the first thing the Right ought to do, if it has any intention of putting up a defense against totalitarian harassment, is to admit it. Nothing that is happening on the streets is the product of chance, unless you consider that the invasion of Poland in 1939 was just bad luck.
It all happened so fast, like a magic trick. Suddenly, there is violence, there is hate, there is fear, there is exceptionality, there are lies, there is resentment, there is division, there is chaos, there is cowardice, and there is looting. In other words, we already have all the best ingredients for baking a real revolutionary cake. The violence still seems to be residual, and that is its greatest danger: that we underestimate it. Check their Twitter accounts: Not a single one of the world’s totalitarian and extreme-Left leaders has missed his appointment with BLM, including the most despotic of them. Xi Jinping is ecstatic: First he exports a pandemic to the enemy, and now the strongest democracy in the West is about to fall into his hands by his preferred means, revolution. It’s like tweeting in capital letters for a week.
What frightened Edmund Burke most about the French Revolution was not the revolutionaries, but the sympathies they aroused among a number of English conservatives. That is what impelled him to speak out against the great farce sponsored by an Enlightenment determined to see blood spilled. Something similar is happening today on American soil. The worst thing is not the savages trying to subvert order through violence, but the complicit attitude of the Democratic Party, which makes less and less effort to hide its enthusiasm for this kind of postmodern revolution, where it makes no difference if a television set is stolen, or someone gets shot, or a Republican politician narrowly escapes a lynching. The truth is that the Left moves in chaos like a fish in water.
5. Issac Schorr checks out the Biden Agenda and finds it slim and amorphous for a POTUS wannabe. From the analysis:
His more general foreign-policy plan is called “the Biden Plan for Restoring American Leadership” and consists of three pillars. Specifically, Biden advocates “reinvigorat[ing] our own democracy” while rebuilding the alliances he contends have been weakened under President Trump, pursuing “a foreign policy for the middle class,” and “renew[ing] American leadership.”
His first pillar is, curiously, focused mostly on domestic reforms such as reforming our criminal-justice system, creating “greater transparency in our campaign finance system,” and once again holding daily press briefings in the White House. He also calls for a restoration of moral leadership by once again sending federal funding to organizations that provide or refer people to clinics that do provide abortion abroad and “revitaliz[ing] our national commitment to advancing human rights and democracy around the world.” Then, “having taken these essential steps, . . . President Biden will host a global Summit for Democracy” with the goals of “fighting corruption, defending against authoritarianism,” and “advancing human rights.” How this body will operate or ensure that its actions have any effect is left to the imagination.
The second pillar is just as domestic-policy-dominant as the first one — stressing the importance of health care, a $15 minimum wage, and infrastructure as well as of significant public investment in “clean energy, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, 5G, and high-speed rail.” On trade, Biden declares that there “is no going back to business as usual” (a tacit endorsement of the Trump agenda without saying as much?) and questionably asserts that he will have half of global GDP — the sum of all earthly democracies — to use as leverage.
6. Mark Curran finds no good in any of the varieties of “Codes of Silence.” From the piece:
Police, like everyone else, run the gamut. The majority are good officers, serving with honor and often under incredibly stressful, difficult circumstances, but some are also bad. There are hardworking officers and lazy officers, honest officers and dishonest officers. And in today’s strong union culture, it is considerably more difficult for supervisors to deal with employees who do not reflect well on their profession. A police pension can be lucrative, and officers will understandably go to great lengths to protect it. There has, as a result, always been a “code of silence” in law enforcement — an unwritten rule that one officer should never incriminate another. This code of silence existed, and continues to exist, in countless police departments across the country. I came face-to-face with it as a prosecutor.
But there are other codes of silence equally dangerous to the public. One applies to street-gang members and the residents of the neighborhoods they terrorize. The residents are not looking to protect the gangs by refusing to identify and testify against suspects; they’re looking not to be killed in retaliation. This is a particular problem in Chicago, the largest city in my home state. Yet Democratic mayor Lori Lightfoot has rejected efforts to strengthen witness-protection programs, saying crime would best be solved by “bringing economic stability to neighborhoods.” And as we wait for that economic stability to lift up neighborhoods with failing government schools and high unemployment, the cycle of violence continues, residents live in constant fear, and children are murdered. Natalie Wallace, a seven-year-old Chicago girl, was shot in the forehead while riding her bike at her grandmother’s Independence Day party two months ago. Chicago police commander Fred Waller summed up the feelings of police and citizens alike afterward, telling reporters, “I’m tired of it, dammit.”
This summer, we’ve seen the horrible effects of a third type of silence: the refusal of elected Democrats to speak out against the violence, looting, and lawlessness that have played out week after week. What began as peaceful protest following the death of George Floyd has become an excuse for organized mobs to incite mayhem, attack police officers, engage in mass looting, and destroy large and small businesses that took decades to build. Officers who have been given explicit orders to “stand down” by the Democrats who run their cities cannot make arrests. And even if they do, prosecutors refuse to prosecute, letting criminals go on low-cost or recognizance bonds within days or, in some cases, hours.
7. Frederick Hess finds “Anti-racist” education to be the stuff of flim-flam. From the analysis:
Students are heading back to school this fall (in-person or remotely) after the longest, strangest summer on record. It’s been the summer not just of COVID but also of massive protests and rioting triggered by the police killing of George Floyd in May. Calls for racial justice have swept the land, and schools have responded by embracing the push for “anti-racist” education. This should be a wonderful thing. If there’s anything that promises to unite a divided nation, it’s joining together to advance equality and justice.
Thus, it’s no surprise that “anti-racism” has found an eager reception. It has made a television star and publishing phenom out of Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Anti-Racist. It’s made a best-seller out of Robin DiAngelo, the author of White Fragility, who explains, “A positive white identity is an impossible goal. White identity is inherently racist; white people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy.” (As DiAngelo puts it, her aim is to be “a little less white” every day.)
The problem: “Anti-racism” is often little more than a crude bit of rhetorical flim-flam, akin to that unlovely old Southern habit of rechristening the Civil War the “War of Northern Aggression.” In fact, much of what passes for “anti-racism” is a poisonous exercise in rank bigotry — especially when applied to education. The healthy impulse implied by “anti-racism” has been coopted by ideologues. While there are serious, practical issues to tackle, the “anti-racists” have instead declared war on the intellectual traits that equip students for personal and civic success.
8. John Shu smacks West Virginia’s conservative AG Patrick Morrisey for misusing “pubic nuisance” laws. From the article:
“Public nuisance” has a specific legal meaning, and the highly regulated business of a pharmacy legally filling a doctor’s prescription is not it. A “public nuisance” is when someone unlawfully interferes with the public’s right to use public land or water (such as a public road, park, or lake), or when someone uses his land to intentionally engage in illegal activity and disturbs the public’s access to or use of nearby land ot water.
The government sues to protect the public’s common right to access and use the land or water, asks the court to enjoin the illegal activity (such as dumping toxic waste or running an illegal gambling ring), and recovers abatement costs from the person or people who actually engaged in the illegal activity. “Public nuisance” does not include selling legal products, and only the person or people unlawfully causing or controlling the illegal activity are responsible.
For example, chemical or playing-card manufacturers are not liable under public nuisance if bad actors misuse their products to create toxic waste or run illegal gambling rings. Similarly, chain pharmacies such as Rite-Aid are not liable when individuals abuse pain medicines or commit crimes to obtain them, or when unethical doctors write pain-medicine prescriptions that they should not.
It seems that the mass-tort plaintiffs’ bar, who are primarily concerned about using state enforcement power for their own financial gain, seduced Morrisey and other state attorneys general with the siren song of huge financial settlements. The fact that Morrisey outsourced previous opioid-related, mass-tort lawsuits to Motley Rice, LLC, which is headquartered in South Carolina and is one of the largest and most infamous mass-tort plaintiffs’ firms in the country, shows this.
9. John Loftus heads to a New Hampshire airplane hangar for a Trump Rally, and finds plenty of raucus. From the piece:
It’s inaccurate, and rather silly, that the media portray the majority of Trump supporters, especially the men, as angry and bitter. Because throughout the evening, the “deplorables” seemed not just in good spirits: They were jubilant. Even if COVID-19 had taken its toll on the city’s economic activity and employment numbers, people still smiled, cheered, laughed, and took selfies with the cardboard cutout of the president. The crowd danced along to the ’70s and ’80s pop hits blaring from loudspeakers. “Macho Man” by the Village People was a favorite. Vendors sold tacky flags: Trump as Rambo or Rocky Balboa. Everything was drenched with Boomer nostalgia.
And that makes complete sense. Overall, the crowd skewed old. There were middle-aged Boomers, graying Boomers, veterans, and bikers with limps. People clutched their Pepsis with dirtied, callused hands. Their tattooed forearms were flecked with paint. Plumes of cigarette smoke made the air sour. Very few Millennials showed up, and the ones who did — many of whom were young men — clumped together in what appeared to be tight-knit social groups. They may have committed what amounts to social suicide in today’s youth culture. Nevertheless, they seemed happy to be out with friends on a Friday night, liberal co-workers on Snapchat be damned. If these young men harbored resentment at the rapidly changing world around them, it was very well hidden. Young women tended to be accompanied by a mother or a grandparent. However, one local teacher in her 30s, who had had both of her knees replaced before COVID, came to the event alone. For her, getting out of the stuffy, politically correct teachers’ lounge was nothing short of a blessing. She hobbled around on crutches, proudly displaying a picture of Trump signing her MAGA hat at rally back in 2016. Younger couples with rambunctious children brought fold-out chairs, snacks, games, and a great deal of patience. There was one mother who wore a QAnon T-shirt and had a QAnon flag draped over her shoulders much like a superhero cape. Her children were glued to their phones, as was the husband. It was an odd, even alarming, sight. But no one seemed to care about — nor did they even notice — the QAnon family. When one woman snaked through the crowd waving a cardboard letter “Q” and screaming at the top of her lungs, people ignored her antics. They were too busy grooving to the music, and before long, they were glued to the large screen above them, glued to the president, who had launched into his typical impromptu introduction at the podium.
10. Rich Lowry thinks the Democrats’ enthusiasm for mail-in voting might be an exploding cigar. From the piece:
No matter what anyone says, there is inevitably going to be more mail-in voting in the fall, but in-person voting is superior. Only about one-hundredth of 1 percent of in-person votes are rejected, whereas rejection rates of 1 percent are common with mail-in votes, and some states exceeded that during their primaries this year.
This should be a five-alarm worry for Democrats. According to polling, almost twice as many Biden supporters as Trump supporters say they’ll vote by mail this year. According to NPR, studies show “that voters of color and young voters are more likely than others to have their ballots not count.” In another universe, if Trump were urging Democrats to stay away from the polls and instead use a method more likely to get their votes discarded, it’d be attacked as a dastardly voter-suppression scheme.
There are at least three ways that mail-in voting could contribute to a 2020 nightmare. Trump could be winning on election night, and the outcome slowly reverse over time. Delayed by the volume of mail-in ballots, states could blow past the deadline for finalizing their results. And if the margins in battleground states are very close, rejected mail-in ballots could lead to protracted, high-stakes court fights.
11. Tobias Hoonhout scores the MSM’s reaction to the until-now-unseen riots, spawned by . . . Russians! And . . . White Nationalists! From the analysis:
Take MSNBC anchor Joy Reid, who warned — “without evidence,” as the pundit class has become so fond of saying — that the unrest was being “perpetrated” by Trump supporters and “white nationalist mobs.”
“The ‘riots’ are not Black Lives Matter marches gone wrong. Armed white nationalists are mobbing these cities to take advantage of protests and scare fellow white people into quietly siding with them. It’s an old, tried and true strategy: using fear & anti-blackness for politics,” Reid tweeted.
Reid’s diagnosis ignores that leftist agitators had been torching and vandalizing businesses and assaulting people at random for months in Portland before Trump supporters showed up in any significant number. She also has the cause and effect exactly backwards in the most recent instance of political violence, the one she was ostensibly referring to, in which a Trump supporter was shot and killed on Saturday by a suspect who has publicly declared his allegiance to Antifa and who has the balled fist of the Black Power movement tattooed on his neck.
Rather than accept and report on the fact that there is a growing contingent of black-bloc anarchists intent on tearing up American cities, CNN’s chief political correspondent, Dana Bash, went looking for a familiar — yet conveniently distant — culprit.
Bash asked Adam Schiff — the same Adam Schiff who breathlessly claimed for more than a year that he had seen “evidence” of Trump-Russia collusion, even after closed-door hearings found none — whether Russia “is trying to fuel some of the civil unrest.” The California congressman did not bat an eye: “We have to worry about their aggravating these tensions in our cities,” he stated. While Russia is undoubtedly trying to help along the self-destructive elements now ascendant on the American left, it isn’t Russian meme-makers who are burning down city blocks.
12. Hey that Michigan Senate race (candidate John James was on the cover of the June 1, 2020 issue) is getting tight, reports Alexandra DeSanctis. From the Corner post:
According to a new internal poll conducted on behalf of the Michigan Senate campaign of Republican John James, his race against incumbent Democratic senator Gary Peters is in a dead heat.
In the new survey of more than 550 registered voters, support for Peters is at 47 percent, while James’s is at 46 percent. Three percent of voters say they’ll support a third-party or write-in candidate, while 4 percent remain undecided.
The survey was conducted by the Tarrance Group between September 1 and September 3. According to James’s campaign, the Republican has narrowly outraised Peters for the overall election cycle and outraised him in five consecutive financial periods.
James, a businessman and military veteran, ran for Senate in 2018 against Michigan’s other incumbent Democratic senator, Debbie Stabenow. He lost that race by about six points, a smaller margin than most polling of the race had predicted.
Lights. Camera. Review!
1. Armond White sees the late Chadwick Bosman treated as a useable enigma. From the piece:
Following Michelle’s dictate, the Democratic media machine went to work creating various tributes to Boseman with the same alacrity as when they used the passing of other black celebrities, from Aretha Franklin to John Lewis, as pretexts for widely broadcast partisan rallies. This climaxed with ABC-TV’s Tribute to a King, an hour-long special emphasizing, as Michelle did, Boseman’s role in the ABC-Disney corporation’s Marvel film Black Panther. This show featured liberal tributes from, among others, corporate head Bob Iger, James Baldwin epigone Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Democratic vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
Harris had already tweeted that Boseman showed “millions of black and brown children the power of a superhero who looks like them.” Her social-justice calculation ignored yellow and red and white children in the same manner as Michelle. Their objective was to limit Boseman’s effectiveness to that of a political tool in liberals’ new segregation movement.
Boseman deserved better, because he gave better. Instead, he got misrepresentation. The Boseman eulogies, like those draped over Aretha Franklin, were evidence of how the media manipulates race, politics, and the arts to control public attitudes. (The speed of such programming is astonishing, as if advance teams stand ready for rhetorical war.) Rather than probe the idiosyncrasies of Boseman’s talent, and the mystery and coincidence of his biopic filmography distinguished by impersonations of such legendary figures as Robinson, Brown, and Marshall, politicians and their media minions retrofitted his career as one based on a partisan program no different from the sinewy, forward-looking archetypes in socialist-realist art.
2. Kyle Smith says — see Tenet. From the review:
We could all use a bit of Wow right now and Tenet is Wow, cubed. I don’t consider it a great movie, but then again I couldn’t really follow it, due to my companion’s need to take several breaks and also perhaps due to its being just about the most narratively convoluted blockbuster Hollywood has yet produced. I sense some competition between the Nolan brothers; after the pair worked on Interstellar, the most recent of the five screenplays they wrote together, Jonathan Nolan saw Inception, thought, “I can make something more complicated than that,” and gave us Westworld. Christopher Nolan went “Pshaw, you call that tricksy? I’ve got something that’ll melt your ganglia, little bro . . .”
How about a movie in which the bad guys and good guys both go backward in time as well as forward? That way somebody could step through a time portal that works like a giant lazy Susan to help save a damsel who has been shot through the midsection, or to fight himself, or to be on both sides of a window that divides moving-forward from moving-backward. Could you really split yourself into two time-selves? Seems unlikely. But Nolan gets that we are living in the age of unlikely, and he tells us that the arrogance of the time masters in this movie is such that they believe they could go back in time and kill their own grandfathers without consequence.
As entertainment, Tenet certainly works on a glandular level. Whether the movie makes some kind of sense or whether the time stuff is simply the gimmick Nolan needs to set up his action tableaux, I couldn’t say, not until I’ve seen the movie about four more times. Nolan’s latest gargantuan effort to blow your mind may duly blow your mind, or it may simply bruise it, but at least it’s a whole lot of movie, and to that I say bravo.
3. Brian Allen is in Rome, catching the definitive Raphael exhibition.He digs it. From the review:
The show is called “Raffaello: 1520-1483,” and that’s not curatorial dyslexia. It starts with Raphael’s death on Good Friday, 1520, on his 37th birthday, and goes backwards, through flashbacks, from the Rome of Leo X and Julius II, two powerhouse popes, to Raphael’s vision to disinter the buried ruins of ancient Rome, to The School of Athens, his development of ideal beauty via his many versions of the Madonna and Child, and to his relationships with Michelangelo, Bramante, Leonardo, Mantegna, Fra Bartolomeo, and Perugino. It ends with the savant’s early years in the art-savvy court of the Montefeltro dukes in Urbino.
Presenting a show backwards is a risk, and an emphatic one since it starts with a nearly life-size reproduction of Raphael’s tomb in the Pantheon. His death shocked Rome and every high-end court in Italy. He was famous when he died and beloved by Leo X, who was “sunk in a measureless grief,” Renaissance historian Giorgio Vasari reported. A few days after Raphael’s funeral, Rome was shaken by earth tremors the pope believed were signals from his spirit.
Starting at the end invites the show’s central questions. Why is Raphael so famous, and why does he matter now? Many of us can answer the question on one point, via Vasari. In his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, from 1550, Vasari couldn’t praise Raphael as an artist with more fervor, but he also defined him as Rome’s leading sex machine.
Wassamatta? Capital Matters!
We treat you to four selections published on NRO and written by the Big Economic Brains that cram our virtual offices.
1. David Bahnsen is at the nexus of the markets and COVID stats, and explains the Dow Jones’ performance in the face of economic shocks. From the analysis:
The market is not as hot as you think. Now, this may seem totally counterintuitive or demonstrably false after what I have just written about the market index price action since COVID lows. But not all “facts” are “brute” or immune from context. That “cap-weighting” reality in the S&P 500 and Nasdaq are distortive, in that they paper over the fact that the five biggest names in the S&P are up roughly 50 percent, whereas the average stock in the index is still down on the year. In fact, 63 percent of the stocks in the S&P 500 are down on the year. The top five companies in the index (1 percent by number) make up a stunning 24 percent of the index by weighting. Those five names are up a whopping 42 percent more than the bottom 495 names in the index. The S&P 500 is composed of a staggering 37 percent in technology names when you add Google, Amazon, and Netflix to the S&P 500 Technology weighting.
The market is performing in line with how it has in past recoveries. But even if you do just take the disproportionate impact of big tech at face value, history has generally seen much of what we are seeing in 2020 — violent sell-offs followed by substantial rallies. In fact, this rally only represents the third quickest move to a new high following a bear-market sell-off in history (late 1980 saw a 27 percent decline followed by a 58-day move to a new high, and 1990 saw a 20 percent decline followed by an 86-day move to a new high). Even looking at the chart of this year’s recovery up against the 2009 market recovery, a striking correlation is immediately detectable. It is important to remember that the market’s significant rally in 2009 and 2010 was not led by a strong economy, either. Unemployment remained stubbornly high through both of those years, and home foreclosures would not begin to settle down until 2011. Markets were not rallying because things were good, yet; they were rallying because things had stopped getting worse.
2. Robert Zubrin fingers the FDA for stifling pharmaceutical innovation. From the piece:
By radically and continually expanding the paperwork, testing, and other legal and regulatory obstacles to bring a new drug to market or treatment to practice, since 1962 the FDA has caused the development time for new drugs to triple (from an average of four years before the amendments to twelve today), the cost to multiply 40-fold, and the number of new drugs introduced per year to be cut fivefold. Within five years of the amendments’ passage, 98 percent of U.S. drug companies (including all the small innovative ones) were eliminated from the drug-development business. Before the amendments, 50 percent of all new drugs invented worldwide were developed in the U.S. Today, it is 15 percent. Not only that, many new life-saving drugs have been kept out of the United States for as many as 20 years after they were put into use in the U.K. or Europe.
One such FDA stall was the agency’s banning in the 1980s of life-saving European anti-AIDS drugs, denying readily available treatments that could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. This ban provoked underground resistance (depicted in the 2013 movie The Dallas Buyers Club) and eventual successful legislative reversal by the gay-rights movement. But sufferers of numerous other diseases without such effective political organization were not so lucky.
In fact, according to the figures assembled by Ruwart, the total number of deaths caused by FDA delay of approval of drugs for treating heart conditions, cancer, diabetes, and numerous other ailments is at least 15 million — or more than ten times the total number of American combat deaths in all of our wars since 1775, combined.
3. Brad Palumbo explains to those who need to hear it again — progressive “wealth” taxes will hurt average Americans. From the article:
“Wealth is accumulated savings, which is needed for investment,” Cato Institute economist Chris Edwards explains. “The fortunes of the richest Americans are mainly socially beneficial business assets that create jobs and income, not private consumption assets. Raising taxes on wealth would boomerang against average workers by undermining their productivity and wage growth.”
This isn’t just a theoretical downside of wealth taxes. A mountain of research shows that they don’t work. The latest evidence comes courtesy of two Rice University economists, who in a new paper studied the effects of something along the lines of Warren’s proposals: a tax of 2 percent on household wealth above $50 million and 6 percent on household wealth of $1 billion or higher.
The economists found that such a wealth tax would cause a 2.7 percent decrease in the size of the economy over the next 50 years. That may sound relatively small, but it translates to trillions of dollars in American wealth that would never get created. They further found that a wealth tax would destroy 1.8 million jobs. It’s not hard to see why. If you make your country’s policies hostile to the wealthy and successful, they’ll take their wealth — and their businesses — elsewhere. They’ll also adapt their behavior and spending decisions domestically to avoid the tax. So, it’s no surprise that the Rice paper also concluded the average household’s income would drop by roughly $2,500 as a result of this supposedly “progressive” tax’s implementation.
4. Ed Conard gives Steve Rattner’s statistics a kick in the graph. From the critique:
By that measure, the Obama administration’s polices grew employment by 7 million workers over employment prior to the financial crisis at end of 2007. His policies did so at a time when the population of 25 to 64 year-olds grew by 8.6 million people. So, after eight years at the helm, the Obama administration created 1.6 million fewer jobs than the growth in working-age adults — the supposed “new normal.”
In contrast, the Trump administration’s policies grew employment by 6.6 million workers at a time when the population of 25- to 64 year-olds grew by 1.4 million people. In three years, President Trump’s policies created 5.2 million more jobs than the growth in working age adults. Unemployment consequently fell and workforce participation rose. No honest person could compare the two administrations and conclude the Trump administration’s economic performance was inferior.
Using a similar time frame, President Obama’s policies grew the economy 1.4 percent per year from its prior peak in 2007 until the end of 2016 when he left office. Until the pandemic, President Trump’s policies grew the economy 2.5 percent per year from its prior peak at the end of 2016.
Over his eight years, President Obama’s policies cumulatively increased real private investment 14 percent over the capital stock in place in 2007. In three years, President Trump’s policies increased cumulative real investment 11 percent. Using a misleading statistic, Rattner points at only the growth rate of investment and not the cumulative benefits of a permanent increase in the capital base, which produces lasting benefits. By most every measure, the Obama administration’s policies produced anemic investment and economic growth relative to the Trump administration.
Just Don’t Stand There: The New Issue of National Review Awaits!
The September 21, 2020 issue, piping hot off the presses and in the hands of that controversial United States Postal Service, can be read right now on NRO (completely if you have an NRPLUS subscription). As is our custom, here are four recommendations, gems pulled from a treasure chest filled with the like.
1. Kyle Smith points all to the right direction of Wrong Way Joe Biden. From the cover story:
Biden has managed to be so consistently wrong about virtually everything that even the stuff he is right about he is also wrong about, at one time or another, notably the Hyde amendment, which was his sole remaining tie to the claim of being an abortion moderate. For 40 years, Biden backed Hyde, which barred federal funding for abortions. He reiterated this stance on June 5, 2019. When other Democrats reacted negatively, he reversed himself the very next day. All principles are disposable depending on where the party leads him, and these days it is venturing very far left of the Obama administration. Says a swooning admirer, New York Times editorial-board member Mara Gay, “Biden’s platform is far more liberal than Barack Obama’s was years ago. . . . We were kind of blown away about how much more similar it is to Bernie Sanders’s platform in some ways than Barack Obama in 2008.”
Perhaps the most noteworthy piece of legislation Biden ever wrote, the 1994 crime bill he drafted in the Senate, came when the party was eager to look tough on crime. Biden later told the National Association of Police Officers, “You guys sat at that conference table of mine for a six-month period, and you wrote the bill.” Today, however, Democrats worry that being tough on crime can mean locking up a lot of black men who commit crimes, so Biden’s new line is to say he was opposed to all of the stuff in his bill that’s now radioactive with the Left: mandatory minimum sentencing, a three-strikes-and-you’re out provision, federal bucks for state prisons. “I didn’t support more money to build state prisons,” he claimed in July of 2019. “I was against it. We should be building rehab centers and not prisons.” (His campaign clarified that Biden supported only $6 billion of federal money for the state prisons, not the $10 billion that was in the final bill — the bill he voted for and bragged about for many years.) When your media arm is also known as “the media,” you can get away with saying you’re against the laws you wrote.
Like Donald Trump, Biden missed the Vietnam War, obtaining five student draft deferments and later being disqualified on account of childhood asthma that apparently did not limit him in any other way; he never mentions having the condition in his memoir, Promises to Keep, in which he boasts of his high-school and college football career and his work as a lifeguard. Just two years out of law school, he began his political career, at 27, winning a seat on the New Castle County Council, and he has been slapping backs and sniffing hair ever since. The year 2020 brings us Biden’s desperate, last-chance play for the presidency, which he first sought more than 30 years ago — in that 1988 campaign that exploded in a fiveway freeway pileup of simultaneous plagiarism scandals during which we all learned that Biden had stolen material for a 15-page law-school paper, then borrowed without attribution from speeches by Hubert Humphrey, John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and, notoriously, British Labour firebrand Neil Kinnock. Like a jewel thief who knocks over Grandma on his way out of the store, Biden lied at the same time he stole: Unlike Kinnock, the son of a Welsh coal miner, Biden could not claim he was the first one in his family “in a thousand generations” to go to college. Biden was so invested in lifting from Kinnock that he even claimed to be descended from coal miners, which perhaps sounds more romantic than the truth, which is that his dad was a used-car salesman and that he attended a private school that today costs $28,000 a year.
2. Jimmy Quinn makes the case for calling the PRC’s treatment exactly what it is: genocide. From the article:
For years, experts and activists have called the situation a “cultural genocide.” That label carries a blistering significance and refers to the CCP’s attempts to wipe out Uyghur culture and traditions. The CCP has razed burial sites, closed mosques, and effectively criminalized most expressions of faith. Still, cultural genocide is not recognized as a crime under the U.N.’s 1948 convention on genocide. Invoking cultural genocide rather than simply genocide has been a cautious way to speak out about the situation in Xinjiang without discrediting one’s argument through exaggeration. In light of recent developments, that’s no longer required.
In late June, Adrian Zenz, the German anthropologist who has provided most of the groundbreaking revelations on the Xinjiang mass-detention drive, published a new report detailing a systematic forced-sterilization and birth-control program to lower Uyghur birth rates. Among his findings were that birth rates plummeted 84 percent from 2015 to 2018 in Xinjiang’s two major Uyghur prefectures; that a mass campaign to sterilize 14 to 34 percent of Uyghur women in rural parts of the region was underway; and that the CCP planned to sterilize or implant intrauterine contraceptive devices in 80 percent of childbearing-age women in Xinjiang’s rural southern areas. During the same period, Zenz noted, the state worked successfully to increase the Han Chinese population in Xinjiang. He likens these population-control techniques, which are based on ethnicity, to “opening or closing a faucet.” They are reminiscent of the CCP’s rule over Tibet, where Chen Quanguo, the party official who has presided over the Xinjiang genocide, gained a reputation for ruthless competence.
This implicates one of the five acts that can be considered genocide under Article II of the convention: “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.” Prior to June, there was already evidence implicating CCP officials in the four other acts: They have killed and caused “serious bodily or mental harm” to Uyghurs, two of the acts. In addition, the CCP has inflicted on the Uyghur people “conditions of life calculated to bring about [their] physical destruction in whole or in part,” by deliberately failing to provide adequate living conditions to detainees. And the CCP has “forcibly [transferred] children of the group to another group,” by sending Uyghur children, whose parents in many cases are detained in the camps, to state facilities.
3. Vincent Cannato turns in an excellent review of David Paul Kuhn’s The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution. From the piece:
The hardhat riot, Kuhn astutely explains, was one skirmish in a kind of civil war within the Democratic Party that led to the breakup of the New Deal coalition and eventually to the Reagan Revolution. On one side of this divide was the traditional worker, FDR’s “everyman,” who supported the New Deal, its labor protections, modest social-welfare policies, and overall concern for the common man and woman. On the other side were more-affluent liberals, especially young people who protested the Vietnam War and pushed for civil rights and women’s rights. By the 1960s, the chasm between these two wings of the Democratic Party was proving unbridgeable.
The white lower middle class, notes historian Steve Fraser, had once “been regarded as cultural heroes standing up to the fat cat, applauded for their everyman insouciance.” By the late 1960s, he continues, “they had become culturally disreputable, reactionary outlaws, decidedly unstylish in what they wore and drank and in how they played; they were looked on as lesser beings.”
Under the mayoralty of John Lindsay, New York City had become a key battleground in this political clash. A liberal Republican who would switch parties after the hardhat riots, Lindsay was an early fashioner of the top-down political coalition that would replace the New Deal coalition. He fused together the business community, liberal reformers, the New Left, and the city’s minority community into a left-liberal coalition. Outer-borough “white ethnics” — many of them middle- and lower-middle-class Democrats — now found themselves the villains in Lindsay’s political play. A privileged WASP, he had little understanding of the lives of the working class and little patience for their complaints about crime, taxes, and welfare.
4. In a powerful essay, Michael J. Lewis contemplates the death of public beauty. From the essay:
Technically speaking, the public space is not quite dead; we still pour extravagant resources into their making. Hudson Yards — at present, New York City’s most swaggering real-estate development — set aside fully 50 percent of its site as public space, and garnished it with fountains, trees, and flower beds. It even commissioned a work of monumental sculpture, that towering and baffling honeycomb of stairs known as “Vessel.” And we still dignify our public spaces with those traditional bearers of civic meaning: columns, statuary, and the formal axis. All three are at play in the just-completed Eisenhower Memorial, in Washington, D.C., which is the work of Frank Gehry, by no means a classicist.
Whatever one thinks of these contemporary spaces and others like them, few would call them “beautiful,” not even their own authors. The official website for the Eisenhower Memorial speaks of “Gehry’s unique vision,” while Hudson Yards prides itself on offering “an immersive and varied horticultural experience.” “Immersive” happens to be a particularly fashionable term of praise at the moment, suggesting a deeper, more engaging level of experience than merely to look at something. The change in language marks a change in aesthetic values, and it helps us understand what has happened to our public spaces since World War II. For there should be no question that something has gone badly wrong.
At first glance, the monumental public spaces of the post-war era do not differ significantly from their predecessors. The Empire State Plaza in Albany, for example, is remarkably similar in composition to the National Mall: A monumental cube of a building launches a mighty axis that runs between two walls of buildings to culminate in a colossal capitol building. There is even the same reflecting pool and profusion of smaller memorials. And yet the Mall in Washington is commonly regarded as America’s noblest civic space, while the plaza in Albany is seen as a monstrous failure, vicious in its inhospitality. The same landscape devices are at play in both, and yet they are wielded to very different effect. One can make such a comparison in almost any American town, and it is between public spaces of pre-war and post-war vintage; or, to put it more accurately, between public spaces that follow the ideals of the City Beautiful movement and those that do not.
Elsewhere in the Conservative Solar System
1. At Spectator USA, Charles Lipson gets snippy with Nancy Pelosi’s hairpocrisy. From the article:
Pelosi’s visit to the hair salon encapsulates this broader problem of entitlement, hypocrisy and two-tier justice. The story won’t have legs though, because the legacy media will cut it off at the knees. Why? The country’s major news organizations are on her side, politically. Most of them reported her mistake briefly and then moved on. Almost all are now partisan instruments, loathe to dwell on anything that might hurt ‘their side’ and eager to highlight anything that hurts their opponents. Opinion shows on Fox News do the same for conservatives, but they are far outnumbered. Since viewers and readers can choose sources that reflect their views, they can avoid stories that challenge them.
This media fragmentation and the flagrant bias exhibited by so many once-reputable outlets has consequences far deeper than Pelosi’s blow dry. It means the Washington Post, which did so much to uncover Watergate, has maintained radio silence on the scandals surrounding the Obama-era FBI, Department of Justice and CIA. They are ignoring the problems now emerging with Robert Mueller and Andrew Weissmann’s investigation. Was there a proper legal basis for their work? Did they hide exculpatory evidence? Did their FISA warrants break the law? The Post, New York Times and other mainstream media are avoiding these questions, just as they avoided Devin Nunes’s serious probe of the investigators’ abuses. They were too busy repeating Adam Schiff’s worthless stories about Russian collusion, contradicted by the sworn testimony he kept hidden.
2. At City Journal, Michael Gonzalez profiles the Marxist leadership behind Black Lives Matter. From the article:
Consider the BLM Global Network. The three women who thought up the BLM name in 2013, and then added the hashtag, later founded the global network. They remain in charge. As the New York Times Magazine explained, “while much of the nation’s attention drifted away from Black Lives Matter, organizers and activists weren’t dormant.” One of the three founders, Alicia Garza, said that “the movement’s first generation of organizers has been working steadily to become savvier and even more strategic over the past seven years, and have been joined by motivated younger leaders.”
As the Times report elaborates, “One of the reasons there have been protests in so many places in the United States is the backing of organizations like Black Lives Matter. While the group isn’t necessarily directing each protest, it provides materials, guidance and a framework for new activists.” Deva Woodly, a professor at the New School, told a Times reporter that, “those activists are taking to social media to quickly share protest details to a wide audience. . . . These figures would make the recent protests the largest movement in the country’s history.”
Melina Abdullah, of BLM’s Los Angeles chapter, told an interviewer that the demonstrations in that city had been strategically planned: “We built kind of an organizing strategy that said, build black community [to] disrupt white supremacy.” Their targets, she said, were the neighborhoods where “white affluent folks” lived. “That’s one of the reasons the marches and the protests were in Beverly Hills.”
A Los Angeles Times story emphasizes the central role that the BLM organization played, saying: “The unprecedented size and scope of recent rallies speaks to how Black Lives Matter has transformed from a small but passionate movement into a cultural and political phenomenon.” Weeks after Floyd was killed, BLM members were “continuing to channel their outrage and grief over his killing into a sustained mass campaign for profound social change. The group has political sway that would have seemed unimaginable just a few months ago.”
3. At The American Conservative, Fred Bauer criticizes the continuing concentration of “woke capital,” and how it will empower the Thought Police. From the article:
The bigness of corporate power, then, plays a central role in the dynamics of cancel culture. For instance, a key beat in some media organizations now is ferreting out voices to remove from various platforms. A distinctive ecosystem has formed. Some nonprofit or activist group (often backed by wealthy interests) compiles a list of deplorable voices or problematic statements. Media figures with influential perches then amplify this negative analysis, both by publicizing it and signal-boosting movements that agitate for “cancelation.” These pressure campaigns can target advertisers or corporate sponsors. They can target a person’s place of employment. They might call for various tech companies to suspend an individual’s account or censor some problematic material.
A concentration of power accelerates this ecosystem of cancelation. In a time when a few technology companies dominate social media (especially Google, Facebook, and Twitter), proponents of mass cancelation only need to win over a few institutional stakeholders. A handful of moderators can decide to purge a voice from those platforms or block a link.
This concentration of power goes far beyond social media. Google and Facebook dominate digital advertising; for instance, Google controlled 73 percent of the $55 billion search-ad market in 2019. This dominance gives these platforms a considerable ability to shape the fates of media organizations that depend upon advertising. And these conglomerates are willing to use this might. In June, for example, Google threatened The Federalist with demonetization because it objected to some of the remarks in the comments section of stories. (Disclosure: I have contributed to The Federalist in the past.) This threat caused The Federalist to remove (temporarily, at least) its comments section. More than a few have, of course, noted the irony of Google relying on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to avoid accountability for what people say on its platforms while also holding media companies accountable for what is said in the comments section of their platforms.
4. Hudson Institute’s John Lee warns about Red Chin’s massive “wolf warrior” diplomatic efforts that are heavy on the insults and threats. Case in point: Australia. From the article:
The Chinese approach against Australia is a predictable one. State-run media delivers the insults through fiery editorials, and ambassador Cheng Jingye issues economic threats — some of which have been carried out. And yet the government — under Malcolm Turnbull and now Scott Morrison — has not blinked.
It was therefore of great interest when the deputy ambassador to Australia, Wang Xining, addressed the National Press Club on Wednesday on the topic of China And Australia: Where To From Here?
The temperament on display was calm rather than combative. The problem was not what Wang said or his manner, but what he did not say. There were four themes around which the remarks were structured: the importance China attaches to respect, goodwill, fairness and a grand vision for the bilateral relationship. All worthy aspirations. But it was as if Wang assumed the broader national audience for which it was intended had fallen into a collective amnesia about what caused the frictions in the first place.
Indeed, every principle Wang raised could be easily turned against Beijing as evidence of insincerity and malfeasance. Consider the virtue of mutual respect, which Wang describes as following basic norms of sovereignty and non-interference in international affairs. When Canberra passed legislation and took other measures to restrict the activities of the United Front from interfering in and covertly influencing Australian institutions and decisions, Beijing responded with rage. Ditto goodwill, which Wang characterises as the need to resolve differences in an amicable manner. Yet, when the Morrison government proposed an investigation into the origins of a virus that has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide and caused enormous economic and social destruction, China imposed restrictions on Australian barley exports and refused to accept calls to discuss the issue.
5. More PRC: At Quillette, Aaron Sarin studies the fiendish crimes of Mao-wannabe Xi Jinping. From the article:
Today, when a Uyghur man is taken from his home by the police, his wife can expect a new man to turn up on the doorstep within days. This will be a spy appointed by the government to monitor her behaviour. Invariably, the spy will be Han Chinese, and as part of his “monitoring” he will share her bed. The Communist Party calls this the “Pair Up and Become Family” program, and the eugenicist overtones are unmistakeable. Xi wants to dilute the Uyghur genes. He is unmoved by the human suffering his program entails — suffering perhaps akin to losing a husband in battle in the ancient world and then being taken as the killer’s concubine (the fate of Andromache in myth and scores of nameless women in reality). These women are being punished for the crime of having married the wrong person.
Under Xi, familial links are always proof of guilt. When the Uyghur academic Dr. Ilham Tohti was sentenced to life in prison for “terrorism” (he had criticised some of the Party’s policies), his family saw their property and assets confiscated, leaving them destitute.2 From a purely logical perspective, this Mosaic morality makes sense. Any serious threat to the wellbeing of our wichildren would make most of us think twice about engaging in dissident behaviour. So the majority of people stay quiet, and in the absence of opposition, Xi is able to focus on strengthening China. As China grows stronger, he achieves his ultimate aim: securing the Party’s position. All very logical, but the cost to the unfortunate family members never enters into the emperor’s equations.
Xi applies the same morality outside Xinjiang and across the nation, forever punishing the sons for the sins of the fathers. He appears to lack any sense of his own absurdity: even two-year-olds have been named on government blacklists, having inherited their parents’ guilt and also their parents’ debts. On other occasions children have been used as leverage. Civil rights lawyer Wang Yu was arrested in 2015 as part of the “709 Crackdown” — the forced disappearance of lawyers across China. Charged with “inciting subversion of state power” (the Party’s favourite catch-all crime), she refused to confess. But one day her interrogators came into the cell and showed her a photograph of her 16-year-old son, labelled “suspect.” The shock was so great that Wang fainted. When she came round she was more than willing to read a prepared confession for the television cameras.4 The journalist Gao Yu had a similar experience after she was taken into custody for leaking a Party document — her child was “threatened with unimaginable things.”
6. Yep, Even More PRC: At Gatestone Institute, Lawrence Kaplan profiles Red China’s “debt-trap” diplomacy, through the nefarious “Belt and Road Initiative,” with poor nations. From the piece:
The BRI networks clearly intend to benefit China, either by stimulating an enormous increase in commerce, or, when debts cannot be repaid, by appropriating whatever assets China selects. China, as the world’s largest importer of oil, will be able to diversify its sources of petroleum as a consequence of several bilateral BRI deals. China most likely also hopes to secure political benefits through BRI arrangements. Countries participating in China’s BRI, and generally friendly to the US and its allies, might shy away from supporting the West’s national security concerns for fear of losing large Chinese investments in their local economies.
There is already plenty of evidence concerning some BRI participating states of muting criticism of China’s poor record on human rights. Many Islamic countries, for example, remain silent on China’s near-genocidal treatment of millions of Muslim Uyghurs in its northwestern province of Xinjiang. Some Muslim states have even praised China’s domestic policies toward Xinjiang’s ethnic Uyghurs. Not one Muslim-majority state voted to condemn treatment of the Uighurs in support of the West’s UN resolution to publicly sanction Beijing.
Critics of China’s BRI program point out that Chinese loan agreements lack transparency and that contracts sometimes serve China’s interests in a racketeering way, oblivious to local concerns. Sri Lanka, for instance, after having failed to meet its debt obligations to China, ceded the port of Hambantota to Beijing. Venezuela delivers oil to China instead of its worthless currency. Ecuador, in the first full year of Xi’s presidency, already was exporting 90% of its oil to China, perhaps even below the world market price. In addition, Ecuador cannot seem to prevent the rape of its marine life just on the edge of its sovereign maritime economic zone by hundreds of Chinese fishing boats near the Galapagos Islands. “They just pull up everything!” said a sea captain who asked not to be named.
7. The College Fix’s Sarah Imgrund reports on black law-school students demanding classroom monitors. Somewhere through the flames, Stalin is smiling. From the beginning of the piece:
The Black Law Students Association at the University of San Diego School of Law is calling for campus administrators to train and post diversity officers in classrooms to observe and report bias and other “disparaging” actions against students of color.
According to an open letter from the USD Black Law Students Association, these diversity officers would be charged with watching classrooms and reporting incidents or conduct they consider questionable or discriminatory.
“As Black law students we are privileged with the opportunity to pursue a legal education and seek membership to the legal profession, however, we are not immune to the oppression that is inextricably linked to our Blackness,” the group states in their six-page letter to USD law faculty and students.
In addition to monitoring duties, the diversity officers would meet annually with professors and deans to go over how they could better promote diversity in the school’s instruction, the letter states.
8. At Law & Liberty, Hans Eicholz exposes a massive pitfall of lefty-progressive historical revisionism. From the essay:
The assertion that slavery is at the core of our modern day economic and legal “system” partakes of this very particular understanding of the systemic nature of discourse. In earlier historical debates, the tensions in logic and practice between free exchange and compulsory labor was a problem requiring historical understanding. It is what prompted Eugene Genovese’s earlier Marxist interpretation of the essentially backward-looking ideology of the Southern Planter Class. Slavery represented not a capitalist, but a re-feudalized order of society.
However, with the realization in the mid-20th century that Marx’s revolution would not occur as a matter of historical necessity, modern day revolutionaries surrendered the claim to an objective structural materialism at work in history for the idea that whatever exists, it exists as a system of thought where all aspects of current conditions become evidence of intentionality on the part of those with power, however complicated or even contradictory such ideas might at first appear.
From such a perspective, ideas and beliefs are imposed and not mediated. And unlike earlier liberal pluralism for which thoughts were formed through processes of give and take, modern progressives have no interest per se in the interplay of ideas with the genuine messiness of authentic legal, political or economic contexts, where distinct individual experiences generate genuine differences of perspective and opinion.
Even classic Marxists, like Genovese, still held that the means of capitalist production were part of a stage in economic development and were not evil in themselves. With modern discourse theory, however, evil is left open to the subjectivity of the beholder whether he or she inclines to seeing systemic machinations of sexism, racism, environmentalism or any combination of the above. All that matters is the systemic reformation of the whole.
Baseballery
Might this have been the worst day of baseball — when two teams, each with over 100 losses, faced off? Twice! It happened on the last day of the 1923 season, a freezing Saturday afternoon in Boston, where the visiting and last-place Philadelphia Phillies — starting the day with a 50-102 record — played a doubleheader against the 52-100 Braves, who, if they dropped the twin bill, would end the season tied for last.
The first game, played (on October 6th, which is somewhat late for teams to still be playing regular-season games) before 1,000 shivering Boston fans, was a 14-inning battle won by the Braves when first baseman Stuffy McInnis (who deserves Hall-of-Fame consideration) tripled, driving in right fielder Al Nixon, which handed ace Jesse Barnes a complete-game walk-off win (Of note: Barnes had four hits and walked once). Philadelphia pitcher Jim Bishop, who faced only two batters in relief for starter Jimmy Ring, took the loss. The Braves’ triumph had virtue: It at least prevented the team from sharing last-place with the Phils.
With little sun left that October afternoon, the teams agreed that the twinbill’s second game would be five innings. And so it was. The contest took only 45 minutes to play. Braves rookie southpaw Joe Batchelder, in the only start of his meager 11-game career, earned the victory, prevailing 4-1 over Lefty Weinert, who ended the season with a 4-17 record.
There was a remarkable event in the abbreviated game. The Phillies initiated a comeback rally in the fourth, and with two on and none out, the solid-hitting first baseman Walter Holke (he batted .311 for the season) smacked a line-drive right at Braves shortstop Ernie Padgett, who stepped on second to double up Cotton Tierney, and then tagged out the stunned Cliff Lee to record an unassisted triple play. A few outs later, the season was over. Not with a bang, but it wasn’t a whimper either. Maybe. . . a bimper?
Oh yes: There was a similar day of bad baseball, played over a decade earlier. But we’ll have to ruminate about it in a future Baseballery.
A Dios
Would you find time to offer a prayer for the peaceful repose of the soul of Wick Allison, aforementioned? And that the Father Almighty gives his family comfort? There is another request: A dear NR friend now undergoes a serious struggle with cancer. Beatable, but a battle that will be helped by Divine Mercy. Ask and you shall receive, so says the Good Book, so . . . will you ask for that Holy Mercy for this wonderful lady? If you need a name, use Nellie — God has the Enigma to decipher. We are truly appreciative for those of you who can make it to the bottom of this weekly beast, and take to heart these pleas for spiritual camaraderie.
God’s Beneficence on All, Especially on This Weekend for Those Who Labor for the Common Weal,
Jack Fowler, who awaits communications slick, cutting, goofy, and corrective that come to him at jfowler@nationalreview.com.