Elon Musk, Paul Pelosi and the low status of factual information

Elon Musk is one of those figures whose presence on my radar screen was incidental. I knew the basics of his life story, was aware that he was the world's richest person, and could see that he had a slew of eccentricities. But I never regarded him as crucial to the direction of the world, at least in the short or intermediate term. Maybe one of his big ideas would eventually have some kind of major impact on human history, but not in the foreseeable future. 

Then his purchase of Twitter became a thing, and speculation ran rampant as to where he'd take the company. 

Okay. That seems like a natural reaction when Moneybags Number One makes such a move. But I didn't see how it was going to affect my ability to interact with the friends I've made on the site, or use it to disseminate LITD posts, Precipice essays or my occasional writings elsewhere.

But then comes along this series of moves:

Twitter's new owner Elon Musk appeared to have deleted a tweet posted on Sunday referencing an unfounded theory regarding the attack on the husband of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at their San Francisco home.

The since-deleted tweet was in response to one by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who blamed the attack on hateful rhetoric by the Republican Party and linked to an L.A. Times story about how the suspect promoted far-right conspiracy theories online.

"There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye," Musk replied to Clinton, linking to a site called the Santa Monica Observer that fact-checkers have described as a purveyor of hoaxes, including that Clinton herself had died and been replaced by a body double. The Observer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

It's hard to find details about the allegation in the tweet now, since self-respecting news outlets are reluctant to perpetuate the unsubstantiated gay-lovers'-quarrel angle. But Musk's taking time to fool with it raises the question of why, as the new chief executive of a major social-media company, he doesn't have more important matters on his plate at present. 

Another speculative tidbit ought to be mentioned here. Trumpist sites like Breitbart and Gateway Pundit raised the question of whether a third person was in the Pelosi home when the police arrived, but San Francisco police and Tom Winter of NBC News shot that down pretty decisively. 

Whataboutists had some legit fodder to chew on in asking why coverage of the beating of a Marco Rubio canvasser was scant compared to that for the Pelosi incident. 

There's also the rush among Dems, certainly, and the occasional Republican such as Mitt Romney, to show that they are Caring Human Beings by stating their hopes for Paul Pelosi's full recovery and their assertion that there is no place for this kind of behavior in a civil society. I don't want to ascribe anything but laudable motives to these people, but it just strikes me as a little icky, sort of a let-the-record-show-I'm-not-one-of-those-despicable-creatures-making-this-incident-worse gesture. 

But the Dems among this bunch aren't above making hay over DePape's Qanon rantings on social media, as if he had it together mentally enough to be on board with the ultra-MAGA movement. He didn't. The guy lived in a nudist colony, for cryin' out loud, and had a slew of problems such as hard drug use. This is a pattern that has been detectable at least since that nutter in Tucson beaned Gabbby Giffords in the noggin. Most 21st century gun-wielders who shoot politicians or their associates more closely fit the model of unhinged marginal types than ideologically focused assassins. 

The main point here is that this story's only three days old, and it's already covered in layers of pure speculation. And the new owner of Twitter isn't helping matters any.

This is what we get in a nation so badly polarized - no, make that fractured - and so unable to distinguish the trivial and silly from the grave and profound. Too few care about objective truth to muster the patience for that to be revealed.

It's not going to get better. It's very late in the day.

 

Rashida Tlaib sets priorities

 This kind of thing happens every so often. A leftist who has put identity politics front and center in his or her life as a public figure comes up against a conflict between two supposedly-put-upon demographic groups and must make a choice.

Here is how the Minnesota congresswoman decided the question in this situation:

Rep. Rashida Tlaib is opposed to Muslim parents in her new district who, in an alliance with conservatives, are furious about school materials protestors say are sexually explicit.

On Oct. 13, hundreds of people filed into a Dearborn School Board meeting, most to object to some books in schools that parents said contained inappropriate sexual material, according to FOX 2 Detroit. That meeting followed another earlier in the week that was suspended because the sheer number of attendees present broke fire code.

The Democrat, a member of the leftist "Squad" of House lawmakers, did not respond to a request from Fox News Digital asking about the incident and Muslims objecting to various sexual and gender materials in schools. She has previously condemned the protestors.  

Many of the people in the meeting objecting to the books were Arab American Muslims from the heavily Muslim Dearborn community, FOX 2 reported. They formed an alliance in the contentious meeting with high-profile Republicans also opposed to the books. 

It seems that HRC scorecard rating outweighs solidarity with the Muslim immigrants who have comprised her base: 

"LGBTQ+ rights are human rights, which is why I am proud to earn a 100% on @HRC’s Congressional Scorecard for the 117th Congress," Tlaib said the morning after the contentious meeting. "Everyone deserves to love who they love and live freely. This is only the beginning of the fight for equality."

Read the rest of the linked article. It seems Muslim parents in Minnesota and Missouri, Somali and Bosnian respectively, are none too keen on their kids being taught about statistically abnormal modes of human sexuality, either.  

 

Liz Truss's resignation - initial thoughts

 I sure know how to pick 'em, don't I?

A little over three months ago, I wrote this post extolling her virtues and wishing her the best in the race to be UK PM. And now she holds the record for holding the prime minister office the shortest length of time in British history. 

But I still stand by what I said about her principles:

She's one of those - like Ronald Reagan - who shifted from left to right as she considered which side of the spectrum best aligned with her core values:

Truss, who grew up in Leeds, northern England, worked for 10 years in the energy and telecommunications sectors before entering politics.  

She is married to an accountant and has two daughters.

Her political journey began at the prestigious University of Oxford, where she graduated in politics, philosophy and economics.

But at Oxford, she was an active member of the Liberal Democrat party. 

By her own admission, her switch to the Conservatives shocked her left-wing maths professor father and nuclear disarmament campaigner mother, whom she accompanied to demonstrations as a child.

"One of his colleagues sent an email when he found out saying: 'I see your daughter's become a T***' (Tory)," Truss told The Guardian of her father.

Truss, though, saw the Tories as a better fit for her minimalist state beliefs and quickly became earmarked for success within the party.

Two quotes from her are really helping make the sale for me:

". . .liberating people to start and grow businesses without burdensome red tape is the key to our economic future".

And

"Whether it's 'affirmative action', forced training on 'unconscious bias' or lectures on 'lived experience', the Left are in thrall to ideas that undermine equality at every turn."

Strongly supports Ukraine. 

Who wouldn't have high hopes for such a figure?

But following through was going to entail ripping the Band-Aid off on the policy level, and Britain was not willing to live through the period of disruption required to get to a full re-orienation to a conservative course:

Her Sept. 23 economic plan included a raft of tax cuts that investors worried Britain couldn’t afford. It pummeled the value of the pound and drove up the cost of mortgages, causing economic pain for people and businesses already struggling from an economy yet to emerge from the pain of the pandemic.

That financial tumult led to the replacement of Truss’ Treasury chief, multiple policy U-turns and a breakdown of discipline in the governing Conservative Party.

Truss resigned just a day after vowing to stay in power, saying she was “a fighter and not a quitter.” But she couldn’t hold on any longer after a senior minister quit her government amid a barrage of criticism and a vote in the House of Commons Wednesday descended into chaos and acrimony.

“It’s time for the prime minister to go,” Conservative lawmaker Miriam Cates said, echoing the sentiments of many others. 

And now the Tories are in circular-firing-squad-level disarray and the Liberal Party is blowing their doors off in the polls.

The same thing would happen here if an actual free-market champion started putting in place the policies that would be needed to right post-America's ship. So we keep our debate within the narrow parameters of what, if any kinds of moderations could be made to our current collectivist system.

I'll leave you with this. It's this morning's installment in Ben Sears's weekly POETS Day series at Ordinary Times. It's about an 1802 poem William Wordsworth wrote in which he yearns for a John Milton figure to come along to lift Britain out of what Wordsworth saw as its malaise. Sears closes with the poem, which I shall do here:

London, 1802

William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850)

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
O raise us up, return to us again,
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power!
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart;
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life’s common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay.

y 

 

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Until every last faint whiff is completely gone

 

Ryan, my man, you left yourself vulnerable to this. You're smart; you know that this was an avoidable mistake, but because you thought there was something to the wacko claims of the Arizona Republicans, you decided that overrode smart political strategy.

In other words, you can't escape the election-denier label.

Ryan has always, quite authentically, projected a straight-arrow, solidly-principled-guy image. He has a track record, even preceding winning his state-representative seat, as an impeccably conservative engaged citizen. I agree with him on pretty much all public-policy issues and cultural-issue positions. 

And there's no way I could ever vote for this Thomas guy. He is clearly all in on what it means to be a Democrat in 2022. 

But, Ryan, you have given him about the lowest-hanging fruit a political opponent could ask for.

And this once again reinforces my conviction that, until every last vestige, every faintly detectable trace of the stench of Trumpism, is removed from the Republican Party, I am not going anywhere near a voting booth.

Now, I realize that everybody from drool-besotted leg-humpers to sober, non-biased analysts of the "hard realities" of how politics works would tell me I'm being impossibly unrealistic, that I have to make my choices as an engaged citizen within the parameters of what's politically available. 

(By the way, allow me a moment of digression that is actually relevant here. This is a mirror reflection of what dismays me about Adam Kinzinger going to bat for Democratic candidates in races around the country. Their vision is the antithesis of what he's on record as standing for. It is all about wealth redistribution, identity politics militancy and climate alarmism. No matter what else is happening in the world, giving such people a boost most decidedly does not move the world in a direction that a conservative wants to see it move in.)

No, I want to sleep well at night. I want the eternal record book to show that I didn't participate in the derailing of the American experiment. 

I will find it interesting to see how Ryan deals with this line of attack, but not because I have any personal stake in the contest, but because, like all Republican capitulations to Trumpism, it will provide insights into basic human behavior and motivation. 

The Georgia Senate-seat choices: a microcosm of post-America's general situation

 You're surely at least acquainted with the Herschel Walker situation. Just to make sure the table is set, here's the basic story:

After a woman revealed that Republican senatorial candidate Herschel Walker had urged her to have an abortion, Walker adamantly denied the story and claimed he had no idea who this woman could be.

But there’s a good reason the woman finds that defense highly doubtful: She’s the mother of one of his children.

When the woman first told The Daily Beast her story, we agreed not to reveal certain details about her identity over her concerns for safety and privacy. But then Walker categorically denied the story and said he didn’t know who was making this allegation.

On Wednesday morning, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade asked Walker whether he had figured out the woman’s identity, based on details in the original report.

“Not at all,” Walker replied. “And that’s what I hope everyone can see. It’s sort of like everyone is anonymous, or everyone is leaking, and they want you to confess to something you have no clue about.”

He's claiming he doesn't know her from Adam, but along with the child he convinced her to snuff, they have a kid who has since grown to adulthood.

The mom says Walker talked like a Christian when it was advantageous:

Asked about the role faith played in Walker’s life, the anonymous woman, who identifies as a Christian herself, said even though Walker often talked about Christianity, he uses it “when it works for him.”

She said Walker frequently talked about being a Christian, but never once expressed any misgivings about abortion generally—or any regret about the one that they had. When she got pregnant again years later, the woman says she made a different choice, even though Walker said it still wasn’t “a convenient time” for him.

“He didn’t express any regret. He said, ‘relax and recover,’” the woman recalled, alluding to the message on the “get well” card Walker sent her along with the abortion payment.

“He seemed pretty pro-choice to me. He was pro-choice, obviously,” she said.

“I don’t think there’s anywhere in the Bible where it says ‘Have four kids with four different women while you’re with another woman.’ Or where it praises not being a present parent. Or that an abortion is an OK thing to do when it’s not the right time for you, but a terrible thing for anyone else to do when you are running for Senate. He picks and chooses where it’s convenient for him to use that religious crutch,” she said.

Another Walker son spills some beans about what kind of dad the candidate wasn't"

After Walker denied the report, one of his three sons, conservative social media influencer Christian Walker, released a series of angry statements and videos condemning his dad as a liar, and alleging that the University of Georgia football hero had threatened to murder him and his mother—Walker’s ex-wife.

“I know my mom and I would really appreciate if my father Herschel Walker stopped lying and making a mockery of us,” Christian Walker tweeted after the abortion story broke Monday night. “You’re not a ‘family man’ when you left us to bang a bunch of women, threatened to kill us, and had us move over 6 times in 6 months running from your violence.”

A clip from Dana Loesch's podcast is also getting widely disseminated. The link is in the excerpt below, if you're up for getting thoroughly disgusted:

. . . many Republican backers and media personalities—including Walker himself—have seized on the woman’s anonymity to dismiss the report. On Tuesday, former National Rifle Association spokesperson Dana Loesch called her “one broad” and a “skank.”

Dana's one of those media righties whose on-air persona should have provided clues as to how the Trump phenomenon would affect her. Before the Very Stable Genius came on the scene, she was already honing the "I'm-a-gal-from-the-hills-of-southern-Missouri-who's-handy-with-all-kinds-of-firearms-and-I-don't-take-any-s--- -from anybody" image that became her stock in trade. Her contribution of an essay to National Review's 2016 Against Trump issue was seen, by me, at least, as a surprise. Rowdy radio personalities didn't - and still don't - generally find the VSG objectionable.

But in this era in which the head of their cult is out of office, Trumpists and Neo-Trumpists are leaning heavy into this drag-the-brand-across-the-finish-line mentality. That's how they justified their enthusiasm for Trump, taking the I-don't-care-how-dastardly-he's-been-in-his-personal-life stance, because they thought their policy aims required a desperate clinging-to. 

The vomit-inducing Kurt Schlichter has a column at Townhall today expressing much the same point, saying, in essence, "So the Left thinks it bothers me that it's calling me a hypocrite? Don't flatter yourselves." Sorry, no linky-love. You're a busy person anyway; you don't have time for such garbage. Trust me, it's the usual hell-yeah-I'm-proud-of-my-positions bluster.

But what of Walker's opponent in the Georgia Senate race, the incumbent, Raphael Warnock?

He's a leftist in good standing, checking all the correct identity-politics-militancy boxes, which wouldn't qualify him as much more than a garden-variety modern Democrat, except that when he played the race card in the case of his half-brother, it required him to omit some inconvenient facts that eventually came to light:

When he talks about racism in the U.S. justice system, Sen. Raphael Warnock (D., Ga.) often cites the case of his older brother—a "first-time," "nonviolent" drug offender who was sentenced to life in prison due to a "pandemic of racism," according to the senator.

Warnock has compared his half-brother, whose full name is Keith Coleman, to black victims of police shootings, attributed his imprisonment to the "stigma of color and criminality," and praised his early release in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic as a day of "hope" for the justice system.

But hundreds of pages of court records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon tell a more complicated story: Coleman was a cop with the Savannah Police Department when he was convicted of facilitating a cross-country cocaine trafficking operation in 1996 and 1997—and once warned that he could send a drug dealer’s "black ass" to prison if the dealer didn’t pay Coleman more money.

The details conflict with Warnock’s accounts, which omit that Coleman was a police officer and portray him as a victim of law enforcement corruption rather than a participant in it.

"[My brother] was a first-time offender, convicted of a nonviolent drug-related offense, in which no one got hurt, no one died, no one even got high because the federal government basically created the sting operation," said Warnock in a June 2020 speech to the American Jewish Archives.

Here are the details of how Coleman came to have a run-in with the law:

In November 1995, the FBI launched an undercover sting campaign called "Operation Broken Oath" to investigate whistleblower tips about dirty cops within the Savannah Police Department, according to a pretrial investigative report by the bureau. The probe ensnared nearly a dozen police officers who agreed to provide paid security for undercover FBI agents and informants posing as cocaine traffickers.

One of these officers was Coleman, who quickly became a ringleader in the illegal scheme, using his police-issued handgun and car to escort the purported drug dealers as they drove kilos of cocaine to airports, hotels, and warehouses, according to prosecutors.

Coleman "continued to push for more work and more money." He demanded higher payments after an undercover agent posing as a drug dealer offered him $1,500 for one cocaine-trafficking job.

"If I knowed I was fucking with a motherfucker off the corner who can't afford [to pay me] no more than $1,500, his black ass would be in prison," said Coleman, according to an audio recording cited in the court records.

Coleman later demanded that the purported drug traffickers place the payments in envelopes instead of handing him stacks of cash, arguing that this was a better way to avoid detection.

"No counting by the car," he told them. "[Some witness] might want to mail some shit to 60 Minutes. … ‘I saw police taking some money by a car. Why would he be doing that?’"

Prosecutors allege Coleman received $46,000 in dirty payments and helped traffic a total of 28.2 kilograms of cocaine between November 1996 and March 1997.

On Nov. 21, 1997, Coleman was convicted by a jury of conspiring and attempting to aid and abet the distribution of cocaine, and with carrying a firearm during a drug trafficking offense. He was sentenced to life in prison, and two of his co-conspirators were sentenced to 17 years and 19 years, respectively.

Court records cited Coleman’s possession of a weapon, his abuse of power as a police officer, and his recruitment of other cops as justification for a longer sentence.

And with regard to Warnock's short-lived marriage, most media coverage tends to focus on the fact that his wife's foot showed no signs of injury during the row in which she claims he ran over it with his car.

But that's not all there is to that story:

Georgia Democratic senator Raphael Warnock has been ordered to attend mediation for a custody dispute with his ex-wife, after she accused him of neglecting visitation with their two young children and failing to pay childcare expenses.

Fulton County Superior Court judge Shermela J. Williams said on Friday that there were "numerous unresolved issues" between Warnock and his ex-wife Oulèye Ndoye, and ordered the couple to try to reach a mediated settlement by May 7. A status hearing in the case was also scheduled for May 16, with both Warnock and Ndoye required to attend, according to a notice from the judge on Monday.

Williams did not rule on Ndoye's request that Warnock be held in contempt of court for failing to abide by the original custody agreement.

The allegations against Warnock could undercut his campaign branding as an advocate for women, children, and low-income families. But if the mediation is successful, it could allow Warnock to settle the feud outside of court—and away from the public spotlight—as he mounts a reelection campaign for one of the most hotly contested seats in the midterm elections.

In a court filing in February, Ndoye accused Warnock of leaving her "financially strapped" by refusing to reimburse her for childcare expenses. She said Warnock also "routinely neglects" to give her notice when he is traveling out of town during his visitation days, and instead has the children "picked up from school by friends and [leaves] them with various babysitters overnight" while he is away.

Ndoye claimed Warnock also refused to return personal items that were awarded to her in divorce agreement. She asked the court to hold him in contempt for violating the custody order and that it be revised to allow her to move the children to Massachusetts, where she plans to attend a program at Harvard.

Warnock is also on board with Stacey Abrams's claim that Georgia Republicans want to make voting difficult for particular demographics , a claim that has not been borne out by voter-turnout data.

But we all know why Georgia voters are faced with such dismal options. The Very Stable Genius inserted himself into the January 2021 runoff, telling voters to stay home. For someone who had a keen interest in conflating Republicanism with Trumpism, he sure fouled his own nest with that move. Not that Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue were any great shakes as candidates, but if the point was to advance the Pub brand, he achieved the opposite.

So the Peachtree State's dilemma is ours as a nation. We can either vote for the party of cowards, nuts and sycophants, or the party of wealth redistribution, identity politics militancy and climate alarmism.

Or we can refrain from voting and network with like-minded citizens who insist on a healthier political ecosystem. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We have to meet the noon train - thoughts on the latest Ukraine developments

 The radar screen of the average American citizen is a cacophonous thing. That's partly due to the round-the-clock nature of the modern news cycle. I'd wager, though, that deeper factors are at work.

Because information of a serious nature comes through the same screens that bring us the surfeit of distraction that perpetuates the outsized role amusement has in our lives, our capacity to prioritize various forms of screen content is diminished. We're ever more easily bored as well.

That's why, with Queen Elizabeth's passing, two major hurricanes, extravagant federal executive-branch promises to absolve us from our obligations, MAGA world antics, the commencing of the college and professional football seasons, and inflation's ravaging of our paychecks, it's understandable that Ukraine often gets moved off the front burner.

This is no time to be doing that. Russia's aggression toward Ukraine has brought us to an existential juncture.

Through nothing but brute force, Russia has, at least for the moment, changed the map of Europe:

Putin formally inked decrees declaring Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia to be Russian territory following a series of sham referendums.

The ruthless land grab was made official at the Georgievsky Hall of the Great Kremlin Palace in a signing ceremony.

NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said the move "represents the most serious escalation since the start of the war" while the US said it would continue to provide Ukraine with more equipment.

Meanwhile, the US called for an emergency UN Security Council meeting where it's expected they'll announce a fresh wave of sanctions on Russia.

Toward the end of this week, Ukraine has announced that it will pursue an accelerated route to NATO membership. This is quite the tipping point, is it not? Earlier in this war, all parties kind of concurred that such a move was a ways off. Bringing Finland and Sweden into the fold made more sense, it was thought. 

But with the latest land grab, Kyiv no doubt felt the timeline had to be viewed differently.

Ukraine's application for NATO membership is no less fraught with danger than it's ever been. In fact, it's already been responded to with the starkest ultimatum of all:

Dmitry Medvedev, the Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council, believes that Ukraine's accession to NATO will accelerate the outbreak of World War III.

Source: Medvedev, on Telegram

Quote: "Zelensky wants to join NATO as soon as possible. Great idea. Just begging the North Atlantic alliance to speed up the start of World War III."

Those inhabiting points along the spectrum of appeasement  advocating for a negotiated settlement - a spectrum that includes Trumpist yay-hoos as well as the elder statesman of the Realist school of foreign policy, Henry Kissinger -  probably feel that their position is bolstered. The stakes are now even higher than when they first began pronouncing in favor of appeasement. 

Wherever each of them is coming from, they tend to attempt persuasion with moral arguments - the continued high death counts on each side, the irreversibility of a decision to go to the nuclear level - but the fact is that theirs is an appallingly amoral position. 

Setting a precedent on the world stage that permits elbow room for evil is a dereliction of our highest duty. It's why the train scene in High Noon stirs us. It's why, when we encounter the C.S. Lewis quote informing us that “It is not your business to succeed, but to do right; when you have done so, the rest lies with God,” we react with discomfort but know he's right.

We - and here I mean the entire West - must insist that the only acceptable resolution to this horrific situation is a full restoration of Ukraine's pre-2014 borders.

Putin may mock the notion of a rules-based order as an arbitrary invention meant to justify hegemonic behavior, but he's wrong. Most of the world knows it. That order is what has made to possible to bring force to bear when some entity exhibits real hegemonic behavior.

There will continue to be much on our plate, but it's essential that we grasp the gravity of the moment.

History is going to compel us to do hard things.