Roundup
(1) Fauci takes the Fifth. The gist of his statement prior to questioning is that he’s great and Rand Paul is a vindictive meanie forcing him to do this. From Fauci:
However, given Senator Paul’s obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me, the only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, quote, “behind bars.” Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion.
Therefore, although it pains me to do so, because of the respect I have for the legislative branch of government and my decades-long record of cooperating with Congress, under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution …
Interesting approach. It’s Paul who’s the sick one, strangely obsessed with this self-aggrandizing public servant who lied to us and made countless people suffer.
(2) Fetterman continues to say sensible things that have the advantage of also being true:
Fetterman openly admitted that early in the pandemic he had dismissed the lab-leak theory largely because it had been labeled a “right-wing” idea. Just like his colleagues. Just like the media. And he confessed that partisanship may have blinded him to evidence that deserved serious consideration.
He identified it as one of his “regrets” during the pandemic.
(3) In no surprise – a phrase I sometimes tire of writing – we learn that China has been paying reporters for good press:
A years-long Chinese influence operation quietly targeted the people responsible for deciding how Americans understood Communist China.
An investigation by this publication identified at least 26 prominent American journalists, editors and broadcasters brought to China through a delegation program run by the Committee of 100, an organization repeatedly linked to figures and institutions inside the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front. The United Front is China’s military-grade influence network described by U.S. officials as working to “co-opt and neutralize sources of opposition” to the CCP with various tactics including pay-for-play trips.
The targets included managing editors, editorial-page chiefs, bureau leaders, nationally syndicated columnists and influential broadcasters from: The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, NPR, PBS, WNYC, Newsweek, Time, Foreign Affairs, USA Today, Financial Times.
The records reveal a deliberate propaganda model: identify the Americans controlling China coverage, bring them through a carefully managed experience inside the country, provide privileged access to Beijing-approved interlocutors and send them back into their newsrooms with friendlier views of China.
They probably get a lot of bang for their buck, by choosing already-sympathetic people and then feeding them information that amplifies their favorable coverage.
(4) Netanyahu says he’s coming to NYC despite Mamdani’s bluster:
“I’m going to New York,” Netanyahu said during an interview with “Hannity” following his White House meeting with President Donald Trump Tuesday.
“I’m going to speak the truth in front of this hate-spewing elected official who’s pitting one group of New Yorkers against the others. He’s turning them against New York Jews.” …
“What are we in the 1930s? What is this? So much hate, so many lies,” Netanyahu told host Sean Hannity.
I assume that Netanyahu has among the best security details in the world. But still, he doesn’t control security in the streets of NYC. Mamdani is grandstanding and trying to foment vicious demonstrations, at the very least.
(5) Another case of alleged plagiarism in the work of a high-up black professor, this time in England:
The University of Cambridge is facing calls to commission an independent inquiry into plagiarism claims surrounding one of its most high-profile professors.
An earlier analysis of Prof Arday’s PhD thesis for The Telegraph had identified more than 100 passages that were identical or nearly identical to another student.
I see that quite a few of the first responses to the tweet on X right now defend Arday and minimize or ignore the plagiarism:
The racists are absolutely tumescent with delight that they have yet another excuse to knock a high achieving minority.
In other words, racists on the right pounce.
Also:
Another attempt from a right wing paper to destroy the life of an aspiring successful black person! Shame on them!
And:
Perish the thought students helped each other with their thesis. “more than 100 passages” – what length are these passages? Are they just sentences or paragraphs? Passages tells us nothing except the Telegraph is trying to be sensational
Also:
Can’t wait to find out who the telegraph is lining up for me to hate tomorrow, after completely falling for this thinly veiled race hate stoking bollocks, I used to have to go out and buy national front propaganda for stuff like this but Elon now puts it straight into my phone!
Blah blah blah.
Diogenes famously went looking for an honest man. How about someone with basic integrity? Does such a man (or woman) even exist? Does anyone care? Or perhaps of greater interest, was integrity more valued in the past, or do we all suffer from a filtered vision of the past? Does modern technology merely provide a bigger firehose for the mendacity that suffuses all (or most) of us?
(4) WOW!!! Gotta love Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — ‘I’m going to speak the truth in front of this hate-spewing elected official..‘ Great man and great leader…
Ho hum. Beginning with Walter Duranty, maybe even earlier, there has been no shortage of communist sympathizers and fellow travelers in the American media.
It depends on how much of the text was plagiarized and whether or not it was done intentionally. Alex Haley was found civilly liable for plagiarizing the work of the historian Harold Courlander. IIRC, the scattered Courlander passages might have amounted in sum to < 1% of the text in Haley's book. Haley was not a man of Kantian discipline and the book was (per his 3d wife) composed by the two of them in an eighteen month marathon of writing. She said it was a disorganized mass of research material when they started on the project.
==
OTOH, critics who have read Martin Luther King's doctoral thesis have calculated that about 1/3 the text was a paraphrase of work by Paul Tillich and the dissertation of an earlier student at BU named John Boozer. (DK if this is the correct proportion or not). Dissertations have long been indexed by Dissertation Abstracts International and it has been true for decades that any researcher with borrowing privileges at a college or university library could order a microfilm copy of a dissertation via University Microfilms International (which later produced printed copies for requestors). King emerged as a prominent figure in 1955. It was another 35 years before someone actually read his dissertation, recognized his inspirations, and wrote critically about it. You’d think this country’s theology faculties would have more curiosity than that.
I suppose its banal to point out that when educational administrators, corporation executives, public sector executives, and faculty want blacks as decorative items, you’re going to have issues you would not otherwise have from removing selective screens which would otherwise be in place. One of them is the mismatch between the subject and the institution employing him. So, you had Melissa Harris at Princeton when she might have been a satisfactory fit for one of New Jersey’s state colleges, &c. The subject’s time is wasted as is everyone else’s.
At my environmental law professor’s in class hint about researching each state’s geothermal laws, I wound up doing that for my JD paper. He didn’t acknowledge me in his paper, but I did get an “A” for the class. So I’m satisfied.
And the states’ geothermal energy laws are a hodgepodge.
Some of the passages in the Cambridge professor’s writing aren’t just taken word-for-word from other scholars’ work, but even contain the same unique spelling and grammar errors.
In other words, he didn’t just (allegedly) plagiarize — that seems to happen all the time in academia — but he plagiarized badly.