Nov
2
2021

URLs du Jour

2021-11-02

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  • An unremarkable lie in the WSJ. In an otherwise unremarkable news story headlined: Biden’s Glasgow Challenge Is to Convince World That U.S. Can Lead on Climate. So, good luck with that, Joe. I'm sure you're up to that challenge.

    But:

    India’s Foreign Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, whose country is the third-largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, is among those who say the commitment by the U.S. and other wealthy countries to raise $100 billion a year to help poorer countries to transition to cleaner energy isn’t enough.

    “One-hundred-billion dollars is less than the money [that the] NFL is making from media rights,” Mr. Jaishankar recently said

    That NFL thing sounds fishy. And it is. Subrahmanyam wants $100 billion per year, each and every year, for the indefinite future. The NFL deal, on the other hand (as reported last March) is estimated to cost media companies around $100 billion total—but that's spread over more than a decade, and also spread over five outlets (ViacomCBS, Fox, Comcast/NBC, Disney/ESPN/ABC, and Amazon). And a lot of that depends on the NFL's continued popularity over that period.

    So Subrahmanyam is playing an innumerate game. The WSJ lets that pass, though.

  • At least Fonzie was cool once. We looked at the American Medical Association's new guidelines/demands for "equitable" language yesterday. Jerry Coyne has more on that, worth reading: The AMA jumps the Woke Shark, introduces Medspeak. But a good observation, credited to "GCM", appears at the end, because GCM's eyes did not glaze over at the sheer volume of bilge:

    The AMA brochure is even nuttier than it appears on first view. It says not to use the words vulnerable, marginalized, and high-risk, but then uses the words repeatedly in its preferred usages!! It’s as though the approved and disapproved sections were written by two different people!

    Or it was written by people who were more concerned about appearances than clarity and coherence. And (as also noted yesterday), it's likely they are addicted to the endorphin rush they get from pushing other people around. Belittling ordinary language, demanding your moral inferiors "speak right"—what better way to get your jollies.

  • What would you say you do here? Perhaps they have people skills. Jim Geraghty looks Inside the Intel Community’s Infuriating COVID-Origins Report and it's not a pretty picture, Emily.

    Earlier this year, the U.S. public and the world were provided with a two-page summary of the investigation’s findings, declaring that the U.S. intelligence community could not determine the origins of COVID-19 and could not add anything to what was already known.

    For months people such as myself asked what the point of the U.S. intelligence community was if 18 separate government agencies with amazing technology, enormous resources, and thousands upon thousands of smart and highly trained people couldn’t provide policymakers and the public with clearer answers about life-and-death issues involving the secretive actions of hostile foreign countries.

    It is as if the U.S. intelligence community heard our complaints and answered them . . . with an 18-page report declaring that it could not determine the origins of COVID-19 and could add very little to what was already known. Keep in mind, the U.S. intelligence community was appropriated $62 billion in 2020, and $60 billion in 2021.

    Hey, let's go easy on the US intelligence community, Jim! At least they warned Biden about the rapid collapse of Kabul to the Taliban!

    Oh, wait.

    No, they didn't.

  • And vice versa. Batya Ungar-Sargon (surprisingly, deputy opinion editor at Newsweek) is a guest at Bari Weiss's substack, explaining How Journalism Abandoned the Working Class

    For a long time, the notion that America is an unrepentant white-supremacist state—one that confers power and privilege to white people and systematically denies them to people of color—was the province of far-left activists and academics. But over the past decade, it’s found its way into the mainstream, largely through liberal media outlets like the New York Times, NPR, MSNBC, the Washington Post, Vox, CNN, the New Republic, and the Atlantic.

    What changed? Most obviously: white liberals. Their enthusiasm for wokeness created a feedback loop with the media outlets to which they are paying subscribers. And the impact has been monumental: Once distinct publications and news channels are now staggeringly uniform. A moral panic around race is everywhere: In television segments […] and articles like “Is the White Church Inherently Racist?” and “The Housewives of White Supremacy” and “When Black People Are in Pain, White People Just Join Book Clubs” and “How White Women Use Themselves as Instruments of Terror,” which have become the bread and butter of the New York Times and the Washington Post. 

    I am not sharing an article “How White Women Use Themselves as Instruments of Terror" with either Mrs. Salad or Pun Daughter.


Last Modified 2024-03-25 3:07 PM EDT