I think you’re gonna find there’s nothing there. I have no regrets. I’m following what the lawyers have told me they want me to do. That’s exactly what we’re doing. There’s no there there. Thank you.
Or perhaps he might want to sing it. This one’s for you, commenter “huxley” and student of French:
And Christopher Wray is among them.
He said he’s “deeply concerned” about China’s AI program, which is “not constrained by the rule of law.” That’s the take-away from his appearance for much of the MSM.
But he said some other things too, Wray did. Among them:
The sophistication of the private sector is improving, and particularly important, the level of collaboration between the private sector and the government. Especially the FBI has I think made significant strides. We are focused on looking at cyber attacks,” Wray said.
Of course, that’s not all that “collaboration” has been doing, is it?
More from Wray:
The competitive advantage the good guys have,” said Wray, is that “When we’re all working together, then they’re no match. Because the bad guys’ relationships with each other are purely transactional. And they’ll turn on each other in a heartbeat if it suits them. But because they’re not constrained by the rule, because they’re not constrained by international norms, we have to be mindful of the advance that gives them and work together in partnership.”
He thinks he’s the good guy.
In one of yesterday’s threads, commenter “physicsguy” asks:
Random question after seeing some of the news from the Davos WEF conference:
What sort of mental illness causes 80+ year olds to cling to power, and set about destroying everything?? I’m thinking here of John Kerry (80), Dr. Evil himself Klaus Schwab (84), Soros, McConnell, Pelosi, etc etc. I’m 70, and know I’m on my way out a lot sooner than when I was 50. I want to spend my final years being happy, being with my family, generally enjoying life. What causes such monsters in their final years to act they way they do?? I’ve never had any real insight into human behavior…probably why I did physics and not psych.
The question was about 80-year-olds, but I think the answer is the same for the 56-year-old Wray. It’s the one Thomas Sowell kept giving, which is that most of them think they’re the good guys, the ones he called “the Anointed.” Many also think that if only they were completely in charge, unconstrained by the rule of law, the world would be a much better place.
Some are probably merely drunk on power and some are probably malign in intent. However, I truly think that most of them are simply under the sway of enormous hubris and self-congratulatory pride (another of Sowell’s phrases as the subtitle of his 1996 book: The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy).
I’ve certainly noticed it, and you probably have, too. There’s a labor shortage that is affecting quite a number of businesses – in particular, restaurants. In my neighborhood, some restaurants have closed and some have gone to just takeout, and as an explanation they say they just can’t find help.
That’s also true for therapists, incidentally. The ones I know are all full up, and some people who are looking for therapy simply can’t find it.
So I read this article with interest, hope to find out what’s going on. But it didn’t really answer the question to my satisfaction.
Take a look and see what you think. In particular, it follows a few people who have dropped out or cut back working and seem to be earning less or nothing. So, how are they surviving, particularly with inflation?
“It is clear there are large swaths of the population who are still unemployed [since the lockdown], and these are low-wage workers who lost their jobs in precisely the places where high-income people cut back so sharply a couple of years ago, ” [economist] Chetty said.
Well, I definitely don’t live in a “high-income” area and yet there’s a big worker shortage where I am. I don’t get it.
Some have other jobs, but what of the rest? Are they now on some sort of welfare or getting other benefits? Have they moved in with relatives? Have they OD’d on Fentanyl? Have they left the country?
The article contains passages such as this one:
…”[T]he US has never had a comprehensive labor supply policy” to bring more workers onto the job, said labor economist Kathryn Edwards. Child care subsidies, paid sick and family leave, and the right to part-time work would lower the job barriers for parents and other caregivers, older workers and people with disabilities.
Divided control of Washington makes any major changes unlikely for the next couple of years.
Excuse me but – WTF? I’m not a labor economist like Kathryn Edwards – in fact, I’m not any kind of economist at all. But where is this money going to come from? And where has a “comprehensive labor supply policy” ever worked as planned? Why must one turn to the federal government? That last question is rhetorical; the answer is “To elect Democrats in hopes of getting more benefits.”
(1) The SCOTUS Deep Leaker is still unidentified. And I think he or she will remain so.
(2) Draconian COVID Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand has resigned:
I’m leaving, because with such a privileged role comes responsibility. The responsibility to know when you are the right person to lead and also when you are not,” The Guardian quoted Ardern as saying. “I know what this job takes. And I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice. It’s that simple.”
Ardren knows that she used to be the right person to lead. And now she knows that, although she still would be the right person to lead if only she hadn’t suddenly run out of gas with no filling station in sight, now that her tank is low or even empty she can’t be the great PM that she once was. It’s that simple.
(3) Alec Baldwin has been charged with two counts of involuntary manslaughter in the “Rust” shooting case, as has the film’s armorer:
Prosecutors also brought involuntary manslaughter charges against weapons handler Hannah Gutierrez Reed, who loaded the gun. The assistant director David Halls, who investigators said gave the loaded revolver to Baldwin just before a rehearsal in an old wooden church at Bonanza Creek Ranch, a popular movie location near Santa Fe, accepted a misdemeanor charge in a plea deal…
The decision comes three months after Baldwin and the film’s other producers struck a proposed settlement agreement with Hutchins’ family to end the wrongful death civil lawsuit they filed early last year.
I haven’t written much about the case, nor have I followed the details very carefully.
(4) The San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee panel, appointed by city supervisors in May of 2021, wants every eligible black person there to get $5 million “as recompense for the ‘decades of harm they have experienced’ as ‘the result of both intentional decisions and unintended harms perpetuated by City policy.’”
And not just a cool five million each, but also “wiping out all debts associated with educational, personal, credit card and payday loans for black households.” Will the city of San Francisco pay off all these loans as well? Sweet! San Francisco, that hotbed of segregation.
Note the requirements to be eligible: at least 18, have called themselves black on official documents for at least 10 years, and at least two out of eight others, of which four are these:
…being born in or having migrated to San Francisco between 1940 and 1996, and having proof of residency for at least 13 years, being personally or a direct descendant of someone jailed in the “failed War on Drugs,” or being a descendant of someone enslaved before 1865.
Extraordinary. It would also bankrupt the city. Virtue-signaling gone mad. But probably just the opening move in a series of negotiations.
(5) Not to be outdone, New York is thinking about reparations for black people too, this time for slavery. You know – New York, that famous slave state, the one that fought with the South in the Civil War? No? You don’t say!
“We saw what happened in California. We want to pass a bill that starts a conversation about reparations,” said Assemblywoman Michaelle Solages (D-Nassau), chairwoman of the New York Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic and Asian Legislative Caucus, to The Post.
Assemblywoman Taylor Darling (D-Nassau) said it would be a “slap in the face” if Gov. Kathy Hochul and the legislature don’t green-light a reparations study commission.
Darling also scoffed that the $223,000 figure that California’s task force recommended for each black descendant there was too low.
That figure of $223,000 isn’t the one discussed in #4 above. It’s a different figure, recommended earlier by a statewide California task force. And “start the conversation” is another term for “make a bold opening bid.”
…chores, errands, and personal obligations to tend to today, and some of them took longer than expected. I just arrived back home, so it’ll take a while to get a couple of posts up.
Meanwhile, consider this a new open thread and keep talking.
I lived in a house for twenty years that also had St. Charles steel cabinets. They were great. That’s the only similarity that house had to anything Frank Lloyd Wright ever designed.
“But it would have been helpful for Joe Biden, when it first came out, to say — and we have tape of Joe Biden saying Trump did something stupid and shouldn’t have done it and it was bad — well, he should have said, ‘Look, I know I look hypocritical in that tape, I’m sorry about that, I didn’t know about this, and know that I know it, I will do what I can to uncover this,’” Behar said.
From Sunny Hostin:
I think it would go a long way for [Biden] to also say ‘and I was careless,’ and we need to not only review these documents, we need to review the process…
At first it was 10 documents, in one place, and then there were some — just a few more — in another place, and now there were four different occasions where documents were found.
As I wrote yesterday in this comment to my post on Mona Charen’s column:
…[T]he parallels to Trump’s papers are just too striking. That’s much harder for some people to wave away then other far more awful things Biden did, because of those obvious and almost inescapable parallels. For example, there’s no Trump parallel to Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. That would tend to make Biden worse than Trump rather than better. But that’s not the point. It’s that the hypocrisy of saying Trump is a criminal for what he did with classified papers versus having to somehow defend and rationalize Biden having papers in his garage with his Corvette that makes it stick in their craw.
Of course, some do manage the task of defending Biden despite this. But some simply cannot. Those words of Biden’s when he asked how anyone could be so irresponsible (about Trump’s MAL papers) ring too loudly in their ears.
So here’s another example of that in the women of The View. They are obviously very very reluctant to feel so disquieted, but they do feel it – at least momentarily. It won’t change their politics, of course.
[ADDENDUM: Paul Mirengoff points out an interesting difference between the documents Biden took and those Trump took.]
My ex-husband saves things. A lot of things. But mostly paper.
Old magazines, old newspapers, old medical records, every piece of artwork our son ever created, and old letters.
Recently he’s been going through the stacks and trying to weed a lot of it out. Good luck. But one of the results of that activity is that he periodically shows me some old letters he thinks might interest me. Some of these are around fifty years old, and none of them were written later than thirty years ago.
It turns out I remember none of them – nor does he, by the way. Some of them I may not even have ever seen in the first place, since many were written to him by members of his family, my in-laws. I’ve found reading them to be an emotional and sometimes revelatory experience.
There’s the humor, wit, and warmth of some people who’ve died, and the act of missing them anew. That’s bittersweet.
Some of the letters to my ex from one particular sibling of his, and his mother, somewhat stunned me. I saw two things in those letters that I would have liked to have known at the time. The first is that one relative, who hasn’t always been the friendliest in real life, always closed his notes by saying to say hi to me. So much friendlier and more thoughtful towards me than I ever knew! The same for my mother-in-law, who mentioned me in every letter with great warmth and praise although in person we had our differences and problems. The whole thing just about brought me to tears, not tears of upset but of a complex of feelings that came down to: if only I’d known. She’s been gone almost twenty years.
A few from my mother, who was a good writer. And although I don’t remember these particular ones I certainly remember her letters, a few of which I’ve saved in my own archives over the years.
And one from a friend I thought had never written me a single thing. Perhaps that’s all she ever did write me – just the one – but it shocked and pleased me nevertheless to see it.
I often tease my ex about his propensity for saving so much. At least now that we don’t live together, I don’t have to open closets and see the stacks, or encounter them in random places out in the open (I have my own stacks, of course, but most are in a file cabinet and the rest are relatively small). But I can hardly criticize him at this point for saving these letters. They seem very precious all these years later.
Something like that. Something absolutely, obviously absurd like that.
Here’s the supposed explanation for the kid-glove treatment of Biden:
President Biden’s legal team has cooperated with Justice Department investigators, helping it avoid more aggressive actions by law enforcement thus far….
One reason not to involve the FBI at an early stage: That way the Justice Department would preserve the ability to take a tougher line, including executing a future search warrant, if negotiations ever turned hostile, current and former law-enforcement officials said.
I was unaware that the DOJ and FBI only got one bite at the apple. But no, they don’t just get one bite at the apple, so this excuse seems nonsensical.
The Wall Street Journal has reported that the Justice Department was given the opportunity to conduct the search for classified material in the Biden office and residences, but declined to do so. Instead, it allow uncleared and unnamed private counsel to search for classified material after the discovery of the highly classified documents in the Penn Biden Center office. It was a decision that could benefit Biden greatly, but at a considerable cost to the department itself.
If true, the decision raises additional questions over the independence of top law enforcement personnel.
Ya think?
Bias is so difficult to deny here that I wonder whether they possibly want the bias to be obvious, to demoralize and frustrate the right still further – because, after all, what can the right do about it at the moment? Vote to impeach Garland in the House? So what?
Turley goes on:
This follows a litany of controversies involving both Donald Trump and Biden where the FBI and DOJ have been accused of political bias and unequal treatment. While the FBI recently denounced critics as “conspiracy theorists,” the record of inexplicable decisions continues to grow by the day.
I think Turley means “the record of otherwise inexplicable decisions continues to grow by the day.”
More:
There is no plausible reason why, given the chance, the Justice Department would not want to conduct a national security search itself. After Nov. 2, the Justice Department was aware that material at the top secret or higher levels was discovered in a closet in the Penn Biden Center. It was also aware that the material may have been moved over the course of six years and that other material could be in other unsecured locations. Nevertheless, it reportedly opted to allow uncleared attorneys to search for additional classified material under a type of “look but please don’t read” edict.
As someone who has worked with classified evidence at the TS/SCI level since the Reagan administration, the decision is breathtaking. It effectively replaced well-established national security protocols with an honor system to be followed by persons unknown…
The decision undermines the credibility of the Justice Department in both the Biden and Trump investigations.
Did they have any credibility left, even before this? But he’s correct that this undermines what was left, if anything.
However, the Justice Department continued to defer to Biden’s counsel like a mere pedestrian at a potential crime scene.
I think that’s too kind. Even a rubbernecking pedestrian takes cellphone photos and videos these days, but the FBI did not. In shades of the Hillary Clinton email “investigation,” the whole thing was done on trust.
Oh, and about “preserving the ability to take a tougher line”? Here’s what Turley writes about what he calls that “baffling” statement:
It is akin to saying that I could have used my keys to enter the home but that would have meant that I could not later force the residents to open the door. If it conducted the search, it could record the search, seize the documents, and take any position it wanted after the fact.
Whatever the endgame here, it certainly was never to treat VP Biden (who had no ability to declassify documents taken at the time) as they had treated former president Trump (who did have the right but whom they treated as a criminal instead). Whatever they’re trying to say to the American public, they’re not trying to make sense to any thinking person – they’re just giving the left some (admittedly weak) talking points, and then they’re doing exactly what they want to do.
What is their goal? Perhaps it’s to keep their options open. If at some future point they want to get rid of Biden, they have this weapon. I don’t think they’re planning that now, though. Meanwhile, they can cite “don’t taint our investigation!” if the House wants any cooperation from them in the House’s investigation of the same set of circumstances.
[NOTE: I’ve been working on a big long post today but finally abandoned it for now because I just need to take my mind off ugly, depressing things. So I’ve pivoted to this one.]
“Swan Lake” is one of those ballets just about everyone knows something about. White swan queen, black swan pretender, evil magician’s spell, beautiful Tchaikovsky music.
But this post is about dancers, then and now, and the way they dance a single Odile (Black Swan) variation. First we have the mid-20th-century performance of Maya Plisetskaya. This was filmed in 1973 when Plisetskaya was either 47 or 48 years old, an age when most dancers have retired or are very much faded:
And this is another Russian dancer who is thought to be excellent in the role, Olga Smirnova. I don’t know the exact year in which this was filmed, but since she’s only 31 years old now, it’s fairly current.
These two videos demonstrate a paradox in ballet development. Smirnova has the more conventional ballet body – long and lithe and elegant. Her line is beautiful, her feet highly arched, her technique stellar all around, and her extensions high.
And yet what she’s doing here doesn’t interest me. In fact, it disturbs me somewhat and makes me feel uneasy. She looks uneasy, at least intermittently. Her dancing stops and starts, with flowing movements one moment and then a pose that interrupts the flow for just a split second but enough to notice.
If there’s one thing separating older dancers from more recent ones – in addition to their lower extensions – it’s their amazing speed. Plisetskaya’s turns just whip around, or appear to. It’s not even clear that she is faster but her emphasis makes her look faster to me. There are also fewer dynamics in Smirnova’s performance compared to the older dancer. That relative monotony is typical of more recent dancers, whose movements don’t tend to have as many accents and whose emphasis is more even.
I find it disconcerting, as though something is ever-so-slightly off but you don’t know what it is because everything is so elegant and lean and gorgeous. But to me, it’s not exactly dancing. I perceive their mental focus on technique, and they are relentlessly, enerringly centered and careful. But ballet should sometimes be more daring, and Plisetskaya is bold and unafraid – which suits the role of Odile in particular. She projects an unusual combination of power and femininity, as well as flirtatiousness when required. Her eyes never reveal uncertainty, unlike those of Smirnova who every now and then seems to have a brief moment of anxiety.
What do I see more recent dancers such as Smirnova conveying in this role? They know that the role of Odile requires that they pretend to be Swan Queen Odette. So they must flap their arms and look evil now and then to show they’re nasty Odile and not really sad Odette. But Plisetskaya embodies the character and never forgets it. She dances with abandon, a trait I’ve never seen in ballet dancers today. When seen in person (which I witnessed as a child) Plisetskaya’s effect onstage was explosive. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since, and I’ve seen a lot of dancers.