Quotulatiousness

August 9, 2021

L. Neil Smith – “[P]ut not thy trust in would-be princes”

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith recounts the sad record of US political parties who claim to support causes but uniformly shrink from actual support of those causes or their advocates:

A late newspaper columnist named Sam Francis (ultimately denounced by the left as a racist, of course) once said that America is ruled by an Evil party (the Democrats) and a Stupid party (the Republicans). To “stupid”, I would rush to add “cowardly”: when the GOP finally got a leader with a spine and testicles and guts (extremely rare qualities among Republicans), they were so terrified of of the man that they betrayed and abandoned him. A third political party, the Libertarians, seems determined to be even more spineless, balless, and gutless; they have specialized for years in nominating con-men and crooks for President.

They also don’t seem to know who their friends are, or how to treat them when they’ve found them. A case in point is one Norma Jean Almadovar, a former police officer and professional sex-worker who wanted to advance the Libertarian Party’s cause and recognition. The party that had always claimed it wanted to legalize prostitution was embarrassed to be confronted by the beliefs they claimed to advocate, and froze her out.

Now the once-admirable conservative youth organization Turning Point USA has faced an almost identical “crisis” and has failed almost identically. The Internet pornography-star Brandi Love (look her up), was originally scheduled to speak at their recent convention — against sex-work — but she was suddenly disinvited and chucked out into the cold, just like Norma Jean. Words like “graceless”, “churlish”, petty, “mean”,and “pusillanimous” come immediately to mind. It appears that competition has worked just as Adam Smith predicted. TPUSA is just as cowardlly and stupid as the LP.

Years ago, I took it on myself to write to Norma Jean to tell her how deeply ashamed I was of the Libertarian Party; it was just one of many reasons that I eventually left the party. Now I’m writing this little ditty in the faint hope that Brandi (whose real name is Tracey Lynn Livermore) will see it. I mean to tell her the same thing about Republicans that’s true of the Libertarians. Sorry sweetie, put not thy trust in would-be princes.

There was a movie, some years ago (it was about police corruption; I don’t remember anything else about it), where the phrase “you’ve lost the meaning” recurred several times. The Libertaran Party and the GOP lost whatever meaning they had long, long ago. Unfortunately, the Marxists, Stalinists, and Maoists we’re up against never lose their meaning. To quote another movie (Die Hard) they want to kill you and cook you and eat you. Not necessarily in that order.

1815 Eruption of Mount Tambora

Filed under: Asia, Britain, Environment, France, History, Military, Pacific, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 6 May 2020

In 1815, the volcano Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa in the Dutch East Indies erupted in the most explosive volcanic eruption in human history. The explosion affected the world’s climate, changing history in surprising ways. The History Guy recalls the forgotten history of the year without a summer.

This is original content based on research by The History Guy. Images in the Public Domain are carefully selected and provide illustration. As very few images of the actual event are available in the Public Domain, images of similar objects and events are used for illustration.

You can purchase the “offshore” bow tie worn in this episode at The Tie Bar:
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All events are portrayed in historical context and for educational purposes. No images or content are primarily intended to shock and disgust. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Non censuram.

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The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered is the place to find short snippets of forgotten history from five to fifteen minutes long. If you like history too, this is the channel for you.

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Script by THG

#volcano​ #thehistoryguy​ #history

From the comments:

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
11 months ago
A viewer complained that much of the footage of volcanoes were volcanoes dissimilar to Tambora. Notably, Tambora is a stratovolcano. Lava from stratovolcano eruptions tends to be very viscous and cools quickly, whereas much of the footage in the episode is from shield volcanos in Hawaii, which produce free-flowing lava. Please understand that I can only use media in the Public Domain. I did not mean to misinform the audience by using the available footage and photographs.

August 8, 2021

Guadalcanal – Allies Take the Initiative – WW2 – 154 – August 7, 1942

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 7 Aug 2021

The Axis Forces are on the move on the Eastern Front and in the Caucasus, but this week the Allies begin an offensive of their own: this week come Allied landings and attacks on Guadalcanal and nearby islands, the first American offensive against the Japanese.
(more…)

Presidential biographies

Filed under: Books, History, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As I’m not an American, I haven’t read many biographies of US Presidents (just Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Grant, and Coolidge if I remember correctly), so I can’t really comment on this project by a man who read and ranked 240 of them:

In 2012, an investment banker and avid history reader named Stephen Floyd began making his way through the American presidents, one biography at a time. It was a way to fill time while commuting to Hong Kong on twelve-hour flights. “I got tired of drinking free wine and watching cheap movies,” he says. Starting with George Washington, he read 240 titles (123,000 pages) in six years or, to be precise, 2,243 days, bringing him up to Obama. (Floyd is not alone in this pursuit: as the Washington Post reports, reading biographies of all the presidents is a thing).

Along the way, Floyd blogged about the books he read at bestpresidentialbios.com where fellow enthusiasts commented on his reviews, sometimes challenged his opinions, and suggested additional biographies to read. His blog posts improved to the point where he became a reliable and knowledgeable reviewer, as good as most professionals. When Stephen Floyd says David McCullough’s much-celebrated biography of John Adams is the second-best biography of John Adams, you need to listen. He can back it up.

Floyd, who continues to review biographies he overlooked in his initial journey, as well as new releases, has covered a dozen volumes on George Washington alone, including all four volumes and 1,800 pages of James Flexner. He rates Ron Chernow’s Washington: A Life the best of the bunch, by far. Chernow is the only biography of the 270-some Floyd has reviewed to earn a five-star rating. Only sixteen authors have 4.5 stars or better. (In case you’re wondering, Floyd gave Hoover one of the worst reviews it got anywhere, but still placed it among the dozen or so biographies with 4.25 stars, and seeing as it’s keeping company with Edmund Morris’s magnificent Theodore Roosevelt series, I won’t complain.)

Of course, one can quibble with Floyd’s judgments, as with those of any reviewer. He has 4.5 stars for Doris Kearns Goodwin’s The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, notwithstanding the padding and the plagiarism (it has been taken out of print by its publisher). He found a lot more to like in Peggy Noonan’s Reagan biography than I did. Also in H. Wayne Morgan’s McKinley, which is nowhere near as fine as Margaret Leech’s lower-rated effort. But Floyd knows what he likes and why.

Going back to the Adams biographies, he celebrates Ferling for his judicious details and careful opinions. “The author’s descriptive capability is on consistent display and he sets the context in most scenes magnificently.” He appreciates that Ferling finds Adams’ relationship with his wife, Abigail, more complicated than the perfect romance portrayed in other biographies.

Floyd is less charmed by McCullough’s “enormously sympathetic” biography of Adams. It is “incontrovertibly excellent,” and firmly rooted in the abundant Adams source material, but the author’s tendency to end every scene with a remark favorable to the subject irks after a while. McCullough comes across as “a mother doting on a favorite child.”

It’s a fair point, and Ferling gets the higher mark.

Bestpresidentialbios.com has all of Floyd’s reviews, and summaries of his reviews broken down by president. It’s a great resource and, as mentioned, he’s still adding to it.

August 6, 2021

Fallen Flag — the Western Pacific Railroad

Filed under: Business, History, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

This month’s Classic Trains fallen flag feature in the Western Pacific Railroad by Arthur L. Lloyd. The first major railroad to bear the name Western Pacific was a short-lived corporation formed to build the furthest-west portion of the first transcontinental railroad between Sacramento and San Jose in California. It operated from 1862 until 1870 and at that point was merged into the Central Pacific. The second entity to bear the name began life as a plan by George Jay Gould (son of the famous — or infamous — Jay Gould) to create a western connection for the Gould-owned Denver and Rio Grande Western. D&RGW had lost access to its earlier western link with the Southern Pacific due to a Harriman-owned Union Pacific attempt to acquire the SP. The new Western Pacific Railway was formed in March 1903, although Gould attempted to hide his involvement in hopes of preventing further obstructions being thrown up by opponents like Harriman.

The Western Pacific company magazine Mileposts included this historical snippet in their 50th anniversary issue (courtesy of the Western Pacific Railroad Museum):

Virgil Bogue had become George Gould’s consulting engineer and recalling his surveys for the Union Pacific in the ’80’s, recommended Beckwourth Pass and the Feather River route. Remembering also an unhappy experience he had once had in locating any other road, only to find the whole route plastered with mining claims of dubious mineral value but through which rights of way must be negotiated, he advised Gould to form a “mining company” first. Accordingly the North California Mining Company was organized and soon nearly 600 placer claims were staked out, blanketing the entire proposed route across the mountains.

Gould turned the job over to the Denver and Rio Grande and its president, E.T. Jeffery, sent a field party under H.H. Yard west to locate the line. It was all top secret. The transit men and stake artists were forbidden even to let their wives know where they were. Letters could only be exchanged through the Denver office of the railroad. Two California corporations, the Butte and Plumas Railway and the Indian Valley Railway, were set up to be the figureheads.

[…]

George Gould still remained completely out of the picture and denied all connection with the project. Although he financed the new surveying parties that were immediately sent out to make the final location, he was forced, in the interests of this secrecy, to keep the Rio Grande engineers in the field as well. The absurd result was two hostile groups struggling to outwit each other and often on the point of exchanging pot shots, though both were actually on the same payroll.

After much chicanery and effort, the railway’s right of way through the Feather River Canyon, the next historically significant fight was securing access to the waterfront along San Francisco Bay, where the legal department of the Southern Pacific believed they had an ironclad monopoly of all the potentially useful access routes to salt water:

… the S.P. was fully confident that it would have but little difficulty in isolating the Western Pacific from a practical outlet on the Bay. The Santa Fe, only a few years before, had built its ferry slip way up at Point Richmond rather than attempt to crack the S.P. stronghold. Bartnett, after a hard struggle against the older railroad’s influence, did secure a small site on the mudflats of the Oakland Estuary. It would have made a miserably cramped ferry terminal but, from all appearances, the WP promoters had concluded it was the best they could do. Harriman’s forces sneered and relaxed. Gould’s were just beginning. Every move was carefully rehearsed and logistics figured to the last detail.

As the Oakland tidelands had gradually been filled in, the Government had extended the banks of San Antonio Estuary with rock quays called “training walls” in order to prevent silt from washing into the Oakland inner harbor channel. A dredger was often necessary to prevent the formation of a bar at the entrance of the channel. This dredger became the Trojan horse of the Gould attack.

On the night of January 5, 1906, the Western Pacific forces under Bartnett struck.

With 200 workmen and 30 guards armed with carbines and sawed-off shotguns, he used the dredging company as a front, and seizing the north training wall, began feverishly to lay a rough track. Most of the guards took up positions at the shore end of the U. S. training wall and maintained them night and day. Laborers snatched their sleep in shelter tents on the wave-washed rocks and the WP commissary department fed them. Scows rushed more rails and ties across the Bay to the end of the wall. Soon there was a mile of track on top of the rock wall.

Of course the Southern Pacific did not quietly accept this outrageous trespassing on domains it had held undisputed for more than half a century. Its legal department, fairly in convulsions, was whipping out the necessary papers for immediate appeal to the law. This was exactly what Bartnett had told Gould would happen and exactly what they both desired. For the courts, as Bartnett had felt sure they would, held that the Southern Pacific title to the waterfronts had not progressed westward with the shoreline as the tidelands and marshes had been filled in, but was valid only to the low tide line of 1852. The S.P.’s “waterfront” therefore was by now well inland, and the new marginal land surrounding it was the property of the city.

The city government was duly grateful to the new railway for almost literally liberating the city’s shoreline from the grip of the Southern Pacific. With most of the legal complications (and paramilitary solutions) out of the way, construction of the full line began in earnest, as Arthur L. Lloyd picks up the story:

Construction started in Salt Lake City. The line would be all 90-lb. rail and have no curve exceeding 10 degrees. To keep to the 1-percent maximum grade, the full-circle Williams Loop was built between Massack and Spring Garden, Calif., and another partial one, Arnold Loop, west of Wendover, Nev.

Work also went from Oakland eastward, and the last spike marking completion was driven on the bridge over Spanish Creek at Keddie, Calif., on Nov. 1, 1909. There was no ceremony. Section foreman Leonardo de Tomasso, age 25, did the honors with a standard steel spike. Arthur Keddie was still around, though. He rode WP’s first passenger train, and he spoke from the Plumas County Courthouse steps in Quincy, Calif., on Nov. 21, 1910.

WP was dispatched completely by train orders and timetable; its only block signals were on the paired track between Weso (Winnemucca) and Alazon (Wells) in Nevada, where eastbound WP and Southern Pacific trains used WP, while both roads’ westbounds used SP.

Route map of the Western Pacific, published in The Architect & Engineer of California and the Pacific Coast, 1905.

WP’s map was simplicity itself, highlighted by a main line from San Francisco Bay to Salt Lake City and a connection with the Rio Grande. The branch to Bieber, Calif., completed in the 1930s, connected to a Great Northern line.

August 5, 2021

Sarah Hoyt on “scientific government”

Filed under: France, Government, History, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise (which came out a few days ago, but I’ve been very busy), Sarah Hoyt outlines the genesis of the push for “scientific government” to save us all from ourselves and set right all the ills of the world:

Look, guys, since the middle of the 19th century, the idea of “scientific government” has been running around with pants on its head screaming insults at passerbys.

I like to say we’re still suffering from the consequences of WWI, but things were if not terminal very ill before then. Kings and emperors and Lord knows what else had got the idea of “science” and “permanent progress” stuck in their pin-like heads, which frankly couldn’t retain much more than the correct fork. And there were pet “scientists” and philosophers (the distinction was sometimes arguable. I mean, after all while doing experiments on electricity the 18th century was also fascinated with astral projection and other such things, and made no distinction. And the 19th was not much better.)

By the 20th century with mechanics and the Industrial Revolution paying a dividend in lives saved and prosperity created, these men of “science” were sure that it was only a matter of time till humanity and its reactions, thoughts and governance were similarly under control. And in the twentieth they expected us to become like unto angels.

Now, is there science that saved lives and created the wealthiest society every in the 20th century. DUH. Who the hell is arguing it. Oh, wait, there’s an entire cohort of people denying it. Not so many in the US — I think it’s hard to tell the real thing from foreign idiots posing. But in any case a minuscule contingent — but in France I know there’s a ton of them. They’re running with the bit in their teeth against rationality (I swear to bog) and thought and science. And trying to rebuild the religion of the middle ages. I read them and shake my head.

You see, you have to separate rationality and science from what the government and experts TELL you is rationality and science.

Yes, I know that France built a “Temple to Reason” and you know what? That by itself tells you their revolution was self-copulating and not right in the head. But you don’t need to go that far. Anyone who says they’re “for science” and want equality of results among disparate humans is not reasonable. Or reasoning. Or rational. They are however for sure completely and frackingly insane.

But I do understand the temptation, because so much of what’s being sold as “science” in the schools is not science but the worn out dogmas of people too stupid to know science if it bit them in the fleshy part of the buttocks.

I mean, never mind 2020. Which … you know? Remember how the flu vanished? Turns out the rat bastards were using a test that diagnosed flu as COVID. No, seriously. Malice or stupidity? I don’t know. And neither do you. Probably yes in most cases, though a lot of people have a ton of “learned stupidity”.

Even before 2020 a lot of our ideas on how things worked were lies, particularly those that hinged on or supported the leftist ideas of human kind. Things like Zimbardo’s (Is he dead yet? I need to know when to mark myself safe from being kidnapped by Zimbardo for crazy experiments. No, he really did that.) prisoner experiments; or the rat habitat experiments that supposedly showed that overpopulation had all sorts of bad effects, and therefore we should stop having kids. Turns out those effects are from the loss of social role. Which honestly, anyone who has looked at a conquered country could tell them. Of course, anyone who had looked at mice would also know they’re not humans, but never mind that. […] In fact, practically everything we think we know about psychology or sociology is likely to be a load of crap, if not outright faked.

And history, which is not really a science. Oh. Dear. Lord. Like, you know, the early form of internationalism, with international supply chains and empires caused WWI and … nationalism was blamed for it. Makes perfect sense … in hell.

In fact all this “science” stuff needs to be judged on one thing only: Does it make human lives better/save them? Or is it the astral projection of economics, sociology and psychology? By their fruits, etc.

Gordon Ingram’s Westarm .308 Battle Rifle

Filed under: Africa, Europe, History, Italy, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 2 Apr 2021

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons​

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In the late 1970s and early 80s, Gordon Ingram came close to producing a military rifle in one of the most convoluted international arrangements I’ve yet heard of. Prototypes were made in Italy using British raw castings, to be tested in Somalia as part of a project to build a rifle factory there with Dominican Republic expertise from the San Cristobal armory. Somalia actually ordered a large quantity of rifles in 7.62x39mm, but Ingram prototyped the design in .223 and .308 as well.

Mechanically, the rifle was essentially a scaled-up M1 Carbine with a long stroke gas piston instead of a gas tappet. The production guns were select-fire, but the handful or prototypes brought into the US were semi-automatic only, to meet import requirements. In .308, the rifle used FAL magazines, while the .223 ones used AR magazines and the 7.62x39mm ones AK magazines.

Unfortunately for Ingram (but predictably), the project fell apart as the result of financial corruption among the many interested parties. The Somali government ended up paying out something like $5 million US and all they got for it were 10 unreliable prototype rifles.

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August 4, 2021

QotD: The Bell Curve of the benefits of (modern) education

Filed under: Education, Humour, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It’s become clear over the last two or three decades that the benefits of education follow a bell curve (see the image at the top of this item).

On the far left of the curve is a newborn — who has learned literally nothing, knows nothing, and has received no benefit from education.

As we learn from our parents at home and our teachers at school, we progress along the curve with benefits accumulating along the way.

But something happens somewhere between sophomore year Vivisecting the Deconstructed Patriarchy 201 at Bleeding Heart College and achieving the dream of earning that Ph.D. from the University of Charging More Than a Mortgage for your dissertation on Imposing Ruthless Meaninglessness on Others.

Somewhere just on the right side of the bell curve, we devolve along the curve with detriments accumulating along the way.

By the time you’re as well educated as Dr. Swannie Jett, you’re so untethered from reality that you’re basically impervious to knowledge.

Stephen Green, “Insanity Wrap #198: Looted & Burned Target Store Puts Up Mural Celebrating Arson”, PJ Media, 2021-05-03.

August 3, 2021

QotD: Robert Heinlein predicted the 2020s amazingly well in 1959

Filed under: Books, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[High school Moral Philosophy teacher and retired Mobile Infantry Colonel Jean DuBois lecturing his class on juvenile delinquents and the permissive society that helped create them:]

“[These] unfortunate juvenile criminals were born with none, even as you and I, and they had no chance to acquire any; their experiences did not permit it. What is ‘moral sense’? It is an elaboration of the human instinct to survive. The instinct to survive is human nature itself, and every aspect of our personalities derives from it. Anything that conflicts with the survival instinct acts sooner or later to eliminate the individual and thereby fails to show up in future generations.

“But the instinct to survive can be cultivated into motivations more subtle and much more complex than the blind, brute urge of the individual to stay alive. [What one] miscalled ‘moral instinct’ was the instilling in you by your elders of the truth that survival can have stronger imperatives than that of your own personal survival. Survival of your family, for example. Of your children … of your nation. And so on up.

“[These] juvenile criminals hit a low level. Born with only the instinct for survival, the highest morality they achieved was a shaky loyalty to a peer group, a street gang. But the do-gooders attempted to ‘appeal to their better natures’, to ‘reach them’, to ‘spark their moral sense’. They had no ‘better natures’; experience taught them that what they were doing was the way to survive. The puppy never got his spanking; therefore what he did with pleasure and success must be ‘moral’.

“The basis of all morality is duty, a concept with the same relation to group that self-interest has to individual. Nobody preached duty to these kids in a way they could understand — that is, with a spanking. But the society they were in told them endlessly about their ‘rights.'”

Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers, 1959, quoted by Dave Huber in “Libertarian sci-fi author predicted current progressive-induced cultural failures over 60 years ago”, The College Fix, 2021-04-03.

August 2, 2021

Who is Colt? A History of the Colt Patent Firearms Manufacturing Company

Filed under: Business, History, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 23 Feb 2017

Today we will take a look at the history of the Colt company, from Sam Colt’s first efforts in Paterson (and before) to the West Hartford remnants that survive today. If you enjoy this type of history, please let me know in the comments!

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons​

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If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow​

Gun display racking provided by Matrix Armory: http://www.matrixarmory.com

August 1, 2021

Not a Step Back! – Wehrmacht Closes in on Stalingrad – WW2 – 153 – July 31, 1942

Filed under: Africa, Australia, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

World War Two
Published 31 Jul 2021

Operation Edelweiss opens with a blast, and as the Wehrmacht closes in on Stalingrad, Stalin issues that famous order. There aren’t just big actions in the East, the Japanese have landed in New Guinea, the Allies try one more offensive at El Alamein, and the Americans have locked in on Guadalcanal.
(more…)

July 29, 2021

Buster Keaton, British Imperialism, and the Era of Spectacle | B2W: ZEITGEIST! I E.23 Spring 1924

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 28 Jul 2021

There’s no business like show business and in the spring of 1924, you can see why. Buster Keaton and Hollywood as a whole are producing some iconic films, the British Empire is putting on a massive exhibition, and there is even talk of a death ray.
(more…)

July 27, 2021

Kurt Schlicter on the gimps of the White House press corps

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At TownHall, Kurt Schlicter expresses his disregard for the media who are supposed to be covering the White House and are voluntarily muzzling themselves and acting more like the ministry of propaganda than the free press. At least in Canada, they have the excuse that they’re paid prostitutes for whatever their federal pimps want them to say … in the United States that’s not (yet) the case:

You gotta love the lib reporters meekly accepting the delicious iron discipline of black-clad Mistress Psaki as she demands “Why do you need to have that information?” when asked about the number of infectos in the petri dish that is the * White House. The only way that kink-fest could have been more on the nose with regard to who our esteemed journalismers actually are is if her severe black outfit was vinyl. Apparently, getting flogged by the Democrat dominatrix turns their collective crank because they just took it. They always just take it. And our Fourth Estate will eagerly beg for more.

Now, it’s not even the gross double standard at play here that’s significant – imagine the fussy fury of the lib-simps if one of Trump’s vanilla spokespeople publicly abused them like that. We’ve learned that the lib-press is immune to shame, at least the kind that comes from having their rank hypocrisy exposed by conservatives. No, it’s that when their Dem domme cracks the whip, they just take it, meekly, obediently, like the groveling submissives they are.

Someday, someone will look back on this pathetic abdication of the media’s dignity and write a history of how the ink-stained wretches of the past became the craven conformists of today, and how now they revel in their own subjugation. Call it 50 Shades of the Gray Lady; when you read the hot scene in the forbidden White House press playroom at page 247, you’ll want to draw a warm bubble bath, light a lavender-scented candle, and pour yourself a goblet of Trader Joe’s screw-top chardonnay. Grrrrrrrr.

Imagine being these people. You can’t? Okay, then take a shot of Dickel Rye and try again to imagine being these people. They all grew up wanting to be the crusading Woodward and/or Bernstein – who themselves were less ace reporters than eager conduits for a disgruntled bureaucrat hack who exploited the callow correspondents to settle his personal scores – and instead they grew up to be the Gimp in the less interesting version of Pulp Fiction that is the DC milieu.

They aren’t breaking stories. They aren’t uncovering wrongdoing. They certainly are not comforting the afflicted or afflicting the comfortable. They are the ruling caste’s janitors. They are drones, thralls to their elite masters, marching in grim conformity in step to the official narrative, never complaining, never questioning, never dissenting. These are licensed, registered, regime journalists.

John McWhorter on “antiracism” in theory and practice at the University of California

Filed under: Education, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

John McWhorter doesn’t just comment on this issue from mere distant concern, because he was working at UC Berkeley and watched it happen before his eyes:

John McWhorter’s Twitter thumbnail image

When I taught at UC Berkeley in the 1990s, it was an open secret that there was a two-tier undergraduate student body. Namely, black and Latino students tended to be considerably less prepared for the workload than white and Asian students.

No one talked about it openly, but plenty attested to it when they were sure the wall didn’t have ears, and to notice it was not racist – it was simple fact. Of course there were weak white and Asian students; of course there were excellent black and Latino students. But a tendency was unmistakable. It was painfully obvious that brown students were admitted according to very different standards than white and Asian ones.

Proposition 209 barred racial preferences of that kind in the UC system as of 1998, and of course, fewer brown students were admitted to the flagship schools Berkeley and UCLA after that. There were still plenty of brown students – the “resegregation” so many furiously predicted never happened. But not as many as before. And there has remained, for almost a quarter century now, a contingent who have never gotten over thinking UC would be better by going back to the way it was.

First there was the addition of a “hardship” bonus to the admissions procedure, with standards relaxed for applicants who could attest to having faced obstacles to achievement such as the death of a parent or serious illness. Formally this was supposed to apply to kids of all races. But immediately evaluators started weighting black and Latino hardship heavier than that suffered by white and Asian kids, as in rejecting an Asian applicant who had gone through the same kinds of hardship as a Latino one who was admitted.

I criticized this in the media, and will never forget when the suits assigned a kind, academically accomplished administrator to take me to lunch to “talk to me”. The poor man did his duty and … sat there lying to me. I genuinely felt sorry for him. But this showed how impenetrably committed to antiracism – or at least what they think is antiracism – these admissions officials are.

But even this kind of thing hasn’t been able to return Berkeley and UCLA to the good old days of having a “representative” number of brown students (apparently “representative” means in lockstep with their proportion of the state population). The problem is that pesky SAT, and at last, UC has gotten rid of it. The SAT will no longer be used to evaluate students for admission or even for scholarships.

A lot of people must have clinked their glasses of Pinot over this. But what they’ve done is not antiracist at all.

QotD: Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer

Filed under: History, Media, Quotations, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Walter Duranty was possibly the worst foreign correspondent in the history of the Western press. Reporting on Russia for the New York Times during the 1920s and 30s, he not only lied through his teeth about the death of millions during the Ukrainian famine, but conspired, with some success, to prevent anyone else from telling the truth about it.

He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1934 for his reporting, but ever since 1990, when a biography of him was published that emphasized the extent of his mendacity, there have been efforts to have the prize symbolically rescinded (Duranty died in 1957).

A man may be honestly mistaken, but Duranty had knowingly and persistently lied about matters of world importance. At the very least he deserved the sack rather than a prestigious award, but was never called to account during his lifetime; and the Pulitzer committee has twice decided that the award should not be withdrawn.

I can see the argument for rescinding the prize because Duranty’s conduct was truly despicable, and the prize had been for what, morally, was a great crime.

But there is also an argument for not rescinding it, for the posthumous withdrawal of an award can look like an attempt to rewrite the history of the awarding authority by an act of auto-absolution. An admission that the Pulitzer committee had made a terrible error of judgment might have been sufficient.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Richard Dawkins Punished for Inviting Us to Think”, The Iconoclast, 2021-04-24.

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