RUTHFULLY YOURS

There are two American women whose obituaries were reported in today’s NYTimes: one for the actress who played a princess in Star Wars and one for a ground-breaking physicist and astronomer. The former, Carrie Fisher, achieved fame through the character of Princess Leia and later through her books about her own bi-polar disorder and drug addiction. The latter, Vera Rubin, “transformed modern physics and astronomy with her observations showing that galaxies and stars are immersed in the gravitational grip of vast clouds of dark matter.” (NYT 12/28) As significant details of her life, the Times reports that Carrie Fisher had one marriage lasting less than a year and one daughter born out of wedlock; Vera Rubin was married to another prominent physicist for 60 years, bearing four children who all earned their own Ph.D.’s

A capsule description of Vera Rubin offers that she was “cheerful and plain-spoken, had a lifelong love of the stars, championed women in science and was blunt about the limits of humankind’s vaunted knowledge of nature” (NYT 12/28) A capsule description of Ms Fisher delineates that “she acknowledged taking drugs like LSD and Percodan throughout the 1970’s and ’80’s and later said that she was using cocaine while making “The Empire Strikes Back” In l985, after filming a role in Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters,” she had a nearly fatal overdose. She had her stomach pumped and checked herself into a 30-day rehab program.” (NYT 1228)

I’m sure that everyone who heard of Ms Fisher’s death at age 60 was saddened that this woman suffered from mental illness and drug addiction which undoubtedly hastened her early demise from a heart attack. My question is which woman had her picture and obit on the front page of the Times and what does that say about a society more interested in casual fame and derelict behavior than in genius, hard work and a purposeful life – one that should serve as the ultimate role model for women young and old.

Apparently Kevin Williamson at National Review has jumped over that deadly lemming cliff, along with millions of Trump-maddened New York liberals.

Williamson writes in NR today that

“My own view is that Donald and Ivanka and Uday and Qusay are genuinely bad human beings and that the American public has made a grave error in entrusting its highest office to this cast of American Psycho extras. That a major political party was captured by these cretins suggests that its members are not worthy of the blessings of this republic…”

​Apparently NR editors didn’t read this piece, or worse, they read it and approved it.

That high-pitched grinding sound you hear is William F. Buckley drilling his way out of the grave to keep his beloved National Review from being kidnapped by a hysterical mob of establishment cons.

Uday and Qusay Hussein infamously dropped screaming human beings into industrial plastic shredders to kill them. Either Mr. Williamson is ignorant of that fact, or he has secret information about Barron and Eric Trump and Ivanka that we are not privy to. If so, I would like to ask Mr. Williamson and his neglectful editors to provide the evidence to the world. I am looking forward to Mr. Williamson’s next NR column, which will no doubt show us the cellphone pics.

It may be time for mass hara-kiri at the National Review, for descending into blithering idiocy on Christmas 2016.

Mr. Williamson wrote this NR column to argue for a return to civility in politics… and, in his next breath, committed what Jonah Goldberg has called “argumentum ad Hitleram.”

As a fan of Buckley’s magazine, I’m shocked and saddened.

Tell me it ain’t so, please!

Here’s a paradox for you. Whenever there’s a terrorist attack, the immediate response from government officials and the media is: “Let’s not jump to conclusions.” Yet when there are breaking reports that Muslim or Arab Americans were allegedly victimized by bigots in some hate crime, the response is instant credulity, outrage, and hand-wringing.

This doesn’t really even scratch the surface of the double standard. When there’s a terrorist incident, there’s deep skepticism at every stage of the unfolding story. At first we’re told there’s no evidence that the attack is terror-related. Then, when reports come in that a shooter shouted “Allahu akbar!” or has an Arabic name, we’re assured there’s no evidence that the shooter is tied to any international terror groups. Days go by with talking heads fretting about “self-radicalization,” “homegrown terror,” and “lone wolves.” This narrative lingers even as the killer’s Facebook posts declaring allegiance to ISIS emerge.

Now, truth be told, I think some of this skepticism is understandable. Often, the media and the pundit class on the left and right are too eager to win the race to be wrong first. It’s perfectly proper to not want to get ahead of the facts.

More annoying is the Obama administration’s studied practice of slow-walking any admission that the War on Terror isn’t over, but at least it’s understandable. President Obama came into office wanting to end wars and convince Americans that terrorism isn’t such a big deal. It seems to be a sincere belief. The Atlantic reported that Obama frequently reminds his staff that slippery bathtubs kill more Americans than terrorism. It took Obama six years to admit that the shooting at Fort Hood was terrorism and not “workplace violence.”

Regardless, my point here is that I can understand why politicians and the media want to be skeptical about breaking news events and even why they try to frame those events in ways that fit a political agenda.

The best defense of that agenda isn’t the sorry effort to pad the legacy of our Nobel Peace Prize–winning president. It’s the desire to err on the side of caution when it comes to stigmatizing law-abiding and patriotic Muslims with the stain of acts of terror in the name of their religion. The media don’t want to give credence to the idea that all Muslims are terrorists, not least because that attitude will only serve to radicalize more Muslims. As we are often told, ISIS wants peaceful Muslims in the West to feel victimized and unwelcome.

And that brings me back to the media’s instant credulity for stories of anti-Muslim bias. This eagerness to hype “anti-Muslim backlash” stories has been around for nearly 20 years, and it has always been thin gruel. According to the FBI, in every year since the 9/11 attacks, there have been more — a lot more — anti-Jewish hate crimes than anti-Muslim ones. Which have you heard about more: the anti-Jewish backlash or the anti-Muslim backlash?

Amazingly, the “experts fear an anti-Muslim backlash” stories keep popping up after every Islamic terror attack, despite the fact that the backlash never arrives. To be sure, there have been hateful and deplorable acts against Muslims. But evidence of a true national climate of intimidation and bigotry has always been lacking.

CNN is making a desperate pitch to further enflame the ideological war on cops while it still has a sympathetic ear in the White House. The CNN website is promoting a laughably incomplete study of police use of fatal force under the headline “Black men nearly 3 times as likely to die from police use of force, study says.” Utterly ignored in the study and in CNN’s write-up is any mention of violent-crime rates, which vary enormously by race and which predict officer use of force. Absent such a crime benchmark, analysis of police actions using population data alone, as this latest study has done, is worse than useless; wielded as a bludgeon in the current anti-cop crusade, it is dangerously irresponsible.

James Buehler, a public-health professor at Drexel University, found documentation in public records for 2,285 civilian deaths at the hands of the police from 2010 and 2014. Of those deaths, 96 percent were among males. This gender disparity is magnitudes greater than any racial disparities in officer use of force, but no cop-hater ever complains that males are massively overrepresented in police-civilian interactions. The reason for this double standard is that when it comes to males, it is acceptable to acknowledge, however implicitly, the vast gender disparities in criminal offending; it is not acceptable, however, to acknowledge racial disparities in criminal offending. And the victimology racket, of course, takes no interest in males per se unless they are minorities or gender-fluid.

Buehler’s public-health-data sources presumably contain no information on the circumstances around the deaths — whether the decedents had been attacking the officer, for example, or threatening another civilian. Nor does he suggest that such information would be relevant. He simply reports that even though non-Hispanic white males account for the largest number of deaths at the hands of the police, the number of deaths per million of population was “2.8 times higher among black men and 1.7 times higher among Hispanic men, respectively.”

This finding, CNN tells us, is “disturbing.” CNN is apparently not “disturbed” at the fact that blacks die of homicide at six times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined. Who is killing them? Not the police, and not whites, but other blacks. Black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at 10 times the rate of white and Hispanic male teens combined. Black males between the ages of 18 and 24 commit homicide at 9.3 times the rate of white and Hispanic males of the same age. The elevated black death-by-homicide rate is overwhelmingly a function of the astronomical black homicide-commission rate; in fact, a much smaller proportion of black homicide victims (4 percent) die from police shootings than the white and Hispanic homicide victims (12 percent) who die from police shootings.

President-elect Donald Trump probably will not often communicate with the nation via traditional press conferences. Nor will Trump likely field many questions from New York/Washington journalists.

What we know as “the media” never imagined a Trump victory. It has become unhinged at the reality of a Trump presidency.

No wonder the fading establishment media is now distrusted by a majority of the public, according to Gallup — and becoming irrelevant even among progressives.

Once upon a time in the 1960s, all the iconic news anchors, from Walter Cronkite to David Brinkley, were liberal. But they at least hid their inherent biases behind a professional veneer that allowed them to filter stories through left-wing lenses without much pushback.

When Cronkite returned from Vietnam after the 1968 Tet Offensive and declared the war stalemated and unwinnable, no one dared to offer the dissenting viewpoint that Tet was actually a decisive American victory.

The mainstream-media narrative in 1963 that Lee Harvey Oswald, the Castroite, Communist assassin of President John F. Kennedy, was a product of right-wing Texas hatred was completely crazy — but largely unquestioned.

That old monopoly over the news, despite the advent of cable television and the Internet, still lingered until 2016. Even in recent years, Ivy League journalism degrees and well-known media brand names seemed to suggest better reporting than what was offered by bloggers and websites.

Soft-spoken liberal hosts on public TV and radio superficially sounded more news-like than their gravelly-voiced populist counterparts on commercial radio and cable news.

Yet the thinning veneer of circumspection that had supposedly characterized the elite liberal successors to Cronkite and Brinkley was finally ripped off completely by a media meltdown over Trump.

Fairfax alumna Lisa Pryor has taken to the pages of the New York Times to insist that Australians, like the editors who chose to run her piece, are scared and sobbing that Hillary Clinton will never be president. Pity about what she got wrong and left out.
Long ago, when the bloom of youth was yet upon my cheeks and adventure in my heart, I carried aboard a jet bound for San Francisco a letter from Mum to be opened once the flight was airborne. It was all good advice … don’t drink too much … behave yourself … don’t drink too much … be polite to police officers … don’t drink too much. Sound counsel in every respect, the note concluded with an admonition that today seems both quaintly dated and sadly so, ‘Be a good ambassador for your country.’ Alas that former SMH opinion-page editrix Lisa Pryor (left) was not similarly encouraged to avoid bringing Australia into disrepute. It might have stayed her hand from tapping out the embarrassing missive that appears in the New York Times international edition.

Doctor Pryor’s topic (for a genuine, pill-prescribing doctor she has made of herself since leaving Fairfax) is Donald Trump’s presidential victory or, to be more accurate, the utter catastrophe of Hillary Clinton’s defeat. Times readers are alerted early to the newly minted medico’s fragile emotional condition, which has seen her dissolve in tears “many times, in the shower, in the car.” It would be presumptuous for one other than a physician to recommend an increased dose of the psyche-smoothing medications that she elsewhere notes have done her a world of good, but all that bawling really does suggest a suitable case for stepped-up treatment. Likewise a visit with her optometrist, as it seems she has quite some difficulty reading the charted results of survey questions. But more on that in a tick. First, the paragraph that says so much, not about how Americans “let us down” by rejecting a corruptocrat hypocrite in favour of a vulgarian tycoon, but about the author and the US publication whose front page is moist with its contributor’s latest weepings.

The election of Mr. Trump feels like a sudden plunge after a gradual decline. Already he is goading China, befriending President Vladimir V. Putin, disregarding climate change and refusing daily intelligence briefings because he’s “a smart person.” None of this, we fear, will end well for any of us.

What you mean “we”, white girl? Moving in the circles she does and re-tweeting with approval the asininities of Crikey!’s Bernard Keane and others, it might well be that she has never met anyone other than the sort of people who still regard the SMH as a serious publication, a very small congregation indeed. Were she to get out more it would come as a surprise to learn that some of her compatriots are actually quite pleased to see a bull at the door of the Washington china shop, as the American enterprise has been running in the red for far too long and could do with a top-to-bottom renovation and re-staffing. The paragraph above, representing as it does the cognitive dissonance of the New Establishment, makes the case.

“…a sudden plunge after a gradual decline”

So Obama’s eight years of profligate spending, of fecklessness and impotence, haven’t lifted anyone’s boat, yet US voters must be held to account for electing the man who noted as much and tapped his nation’s dyspepsia.

“…he is goading China…”

Much as Churchill goaded Germany, perhaps, by noting that it was intimidating its neighbours and laying claim to their territories?

National Geographic magazine announced last week that it will feature its first transgender model on the cover in January, a 9-year-old “girl.”

“She has lived as an openly transgender girl since age 5, and she captured the complexity of the conversation around gender,” wrote National Geographic editor Susan Goldberg in a letter announcing the issue. “Today, we’re not only talking about gender roles for boys and girls — we’re talking about our evolving understanding of people on the gender spectrum.”

Avery Jackson, the 9-year-old transgender from Kansas City, Kansas, will appear on the cover wearing hot pink cheetah-print pants. Confident, laid back, and poised with pink-dyed stripes through shoulder-length hair, she does indeed look like a girl, but is 9 — or 5! for that matter — an old enough age to determine one’s own gender? Especially if it is opposite her biological sex?

The magazine’s issue focuses on the “Gender Revolution,” pointing out 80 different 9-year-olds in eight different countries. It hits shelves on December 27, and is guaranteed to stir up controversy.
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Indeed, shortly after the announcement, a Twitter user named Mark Romano declared, “I used to love National Geographic. Unfortunately, it has become nothing but a cesspool of Left-wing insanity.”

Beneath Avery Jackson’s picture stands the single quote, “The best thing about being a girl is, now I don’t have to pretend to be a boy.”