RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/the-insanity-of-progressivism-comes-right-out-of-gullivers-travels/

Our intellectual classes today are utterly disconnected from reality. As Milo Yiannopoulos writes in a review of the film Joker, “We are reeling from a disaster still unfolding, the unmaking of reality at the hands of millennial progressivism.” Indeed, when it comes to unmaking reality, our cognitive elite may as well inhabit the parody world of Gulliver’s Travels. Proposing blueprints for radical social change and meddling in the complexities of domestic and economic policy, they have come to resemble Jonathan Swift’s pixilated “projectors” in the Academy of Lagado (Book 3, Chapter 5), a conclave of intellectuals and academics “full of volatile spirits acquired in that airy region” of vacuous irrationality.

In its effort to save the nation, Swift’s Academy put forward various endeavors to advance the economy, improve education, and become energy-self-sufficient. For example, it proposed “extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers.” This new technology “should be able to supply the governor’s gardens with sunshine, at a reasonable rate.” There was an astronomical plan “to place a sun-dial upon the great weathercock on the town-house, by adjusting the annual and diurnal motions of the earth and sun, so as to answer and coincide with all accidental turnings of the wind.” Another project to improve land cultivation led to a Lysenko-like result, namely not a single ear of corn or blade of grass was to be seen. An ingenious “artist” set about employing spiders as weavers of silk, requiring an exhaustive effort grooming colored flies to feed the spiders, all to no purpose.

Nor should we forget the New Math of Swift’s imagining, in which “[t]he proposition, and demonstration, were fairly written on a thin wafer, with ink composed of a cephalic tincture. This, the student was to swallow upon a fasting stomach, and for three days following, eat nothing but bread and water.” The project was a failure since students regularly upchucked their educational diet. Another professor was “employed in a project for improving speculative knowledge,” so that “the most ignorant person,” by arbitrarily operating an “engine” made of bits of wood inscribed with letters, “might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study.” A prominent landowner was tasked with using “wind and air” to run a mill, a work which miscarried miserably. As for architecture, the Academicians set about building houses by “beginning at the roof and working downward to the foundations.” These new theories and practices had the predictable effect, leaving the country in a state of ruin.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/schiffs-snooping-standard-11575841853?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Kudos to Margaret Brennan of CBS for asking Adam Schiff on Sunday about his release of phone logs of his political opponents. Mr. Schiff dismissed any criticism, and his reason is revealing about the balance of power in Washington.

“The blowback has only come from the far right,” Mr. Schiff said. “But look, every investigator seeks phone records to corroborate, sometimes to contradict, a witness’s testimony.”

Yes, but executive-branch investigators who want to get data from private telecom companies typically must obtain some kind of judicial order. Mr. Schiff did it himself. Prosecutors are also supposed to limit the release of data on innocent bystanders like journalists for privacy reasons. The intelligence term of art is “minimization.” Mr. Schiff released the phone logs of journalist John Solomon and Rep. Devin Nunes —information irrelevant to his impeachment case against President Trump. The narrative of his report suggests he did it gratuitously to imply that Mr. Nunes is part of the Ukraine conspiracy, though the Republican has a right to call anyone he wants.

Mr. Schiff is right that he’s getting no criticism from the rest of the press corps. The same media that howled when the Bush Administration gathered metadata to hunt for terrorists is silent when Democrats gather and release it against a conservative journalist and Republicans. Keep this double standard in mind when you next hear media lectures about violating democratic and institutional “norms.”