Tuesday roundup

The Hoover Institution's Niall Ferguson, writing at the Boston Globe, says everybody's missing who was actually the most important figure at this year's Davos summit:

The most interesting man at Davos was not He Who Must Not Be Named. (In the style of the Harry Potter books, I’m going to omit the name of the Dark Lord, otherwise known as the president of the United States. To be frank, I’m bored of him.) No, the most interesting man at this year’s World Economic Forum was a rather scrawny 53-year-old former English teacher from Hangzhou in eastern China whose business is poised to take over the world economy: Jack Ma, the founder and chairman of Alibaba.

Ferguson says that China's embrace of e-commerce has put Ma ahead of Bezos as a guy with an eye for opportunity. He diversified Alibaba while Amazon was still just selling books.  And the world is still full of emerging markets, which Ma is poised to provide with products.

A few takes on McCabe suddenly leaving his FBI post and the House Intelligence Committee voting to release the four-page memo:

• John Hinderaker at Power Line, who compares and contrasts what Trey Gowdy and Adam Schiff have had to say about the memo release, and also reminds us that there is email documentation of how one conversation in Strzok's and Page's plot to hobble the Trump campaign / administration took place in McCabe's office.
• Victor Davis Hanson at NRO, who invites us to look at a couple of hypothetical scenarios and says in either case we wouldn't be looking a scandals right now:

Had Hillary Clinton polled ten points behind Donald Trump in early 2016, we’d have none of these scandals — not because those involved were moral actors (none were), but because Hillary would have been considered yesterday’s damaged goods and not worth any extra-legal exposure taken on her behalf.

Similarly, if the clear front-runner Hillary Clinton had won the election, we’d now have no scandals. Again, the reason is not that she and her careerist enablers did not engage in scandalous behavior, but that such foul play would have been recalibrated as rewardable fealty and absorbed into the folds of the progressive deep state.

• And just how petty and distaste can the Very Stable Genius be? Look at how he handled the news that, after Comey had been fired as FBI director, was allowed to take an official government flight back home from Los Angeles, per NBC via Susan Wright at RedState:

According to sources (and I’m guessing McCabe was a source):

Trump demanded to know why Comey was allowed to fly on an FBI plane after he had been fired, these people said. McCabe told the president he hadn’t been asked to authorize Comey’s flight, but if anyone had asked, he would have approved it, three people familiar with the call recounted to NBC News.

I’m assuming the FBI plane took him there.

Then of course, showing those New York city values, and his absolute inability to maintain any level of decency, things just went downhill from there.

The president was silent for a moment and then turned on McCabe, suggesting he ask his wife how it feels to be a loser — an apparent reference to a failed campaign for state office in Virginia that McCabe’s wife made in 2015.

McCabe replied, “OK, sir.” Trump then hung up the phone.

Was that necessary?

It was vile. It was juvenile. It was petty.

It was not necessary. McCabe’s family were not part of the job and if Trump supporters get so bent out of shape over anyone pointing out Trump’s wife’s lesbian porn shots, they had better not defend this.

Quincy Jones is interviewed in GQ. It's wide-ranging and full of eye-opening revelations. Take, for example, what he has to say about his early childhood in Chicago:

Jones spent his early years on the South Side of Chicago. His mother was taken away when he was 7—"to a mental home," he says, "for dementia praecox." His father, also called Quincy Jones, worked as a carpenter (8) for, as his son now puts it, "the most notorious gangsters on the planet, the Jones boys." It was rough and scary, and the only promising option that a young boy living within it could envision was becoming a gangster himself: "The '30s in Chicago, man. Whew. No joke. If you think today's bad… As a young kid, after my mother was taken away, my brother and I, we saw dead bodies every day. Guys hanging off of telephone poles with ice picks in their necks, man. Tommy guns and stogies, stacks of wine and liquor, big piles of money in back rooms, that's all I ever saw. Just wanted to be that."

He also speaks of what a good cook Miles Davis was (something I remember Chick Corea noting in a Miles documentary), how he (Jones) currently has 22 girlfriends in places as far-flung as Stockholm and Shanghai, and how he used to buy weed from Malcolm X when he was in Detroit. That merely scratches the surface.

Variety says that the dismal ratings for this year's Grammy embarrassment are not an outlier, but rather emblematic of the numbers for awards shows in the last few years.


Thomas Kidd, writing at The Gospel Coalition, gives us a short history of the misspelling of 18th century evangelist George Whitfield's name.