A surprisingly large percentage of these mishaps seem to take place in locations where people speak Spanish…

HT: Vanderleun.

My classmate, Chicago Law Professor Charles Lipson, is justifiably indignant at the shameless partisan behavior of the Establishment Media and the Social Media giants.

[T]he Biden family’s corruption as part of th[e] entrenched system is why the social-media censorship of that story should not be seen as a separate, stand-alone scandal. It is integral to understanding how the Swamp’s ecosystem operations, how it defines our politics.

The operation is visible in the New York Post exposé of Biden family corruption. The FBI has had those documents for months, so they should be either verified or discredited by now. Those findings, if they exist, have not leaked. If the emails are legitimate, they are bombshells. If they are false, they are worse than duds. They are a major disinformation campaign — an assault on our election — and we need to know who is behind it so we can hold them accountable.

Twitter and Facebook have prevented dissemination of the Post story on their platforms. The reason, they say, is that they have not substantiated it themselves. They decided to block all users, including members of Congress and the President’s press secretary, from sharing links to these published stories. Big Tech Knows Best.

Remember, this story was published by a major newspaper, a reputable one with a large circulation, subject to libel and defamation laws. Notice that the Biden presidential campaign has not denied the documents are authentic. They did deny, sort of, one item in one email, namely that VP Biden met with a Burisma executive, despite years of denying any involvement with Hunter’s business dealings. The campaign issued a carefully worded statement, saying only that the vice president had not listed on his official schedule any meeting with a senior Burisma official for the day in question. Later, they acknowledged that there were long gaps in the schedule and that a meeting could have taken place. Maybe it did; maybe it didn’t. We just don’t know as yet. We do know, quite apart from these emails, that VP Biden met with his son’s Chinese business contacts without listing them on his ‘official schedule’.

The New York Post has disclosed a great deal about its sourcing for these Biden stories, far more than other newspapers did when they published anonymously-sourced attacks on Trump. The social media giants didn’t block those. It didn’t even block discredited stories, like one from BuzzFeed that was demolished with an unprecedented public statement from Robert Mueller’s Office of Special Counsel. Today, you can post links to that discredited story on Facebook or Twitter. If you are an Iranian or Chinese propaganda ministry, you can post your stories, too.

To put it bluntly: the ‘verification standard’ isn’t standard and doesn’t require verification unless the social-media czars say it does. It should be called the Alice in Wonderland Standard. ‘“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”’ And so it is with Facebook and Twitter’s ‘verification standard’.

Why did Twitter and Facebook blackout news about Hunter Biden? The obvious answer is that those companies have a dog in the fight, and they are walking behind him with a giant pooper-scooper. It’s impossible to say if they picked that dog for ideological or financial reasons. Perhaps both. Most employees favor Biden, while higher-level executives want to preserve their networks of political power and influence. Both motives point in the same direction.

Trump has framed this New York Post story and its suppression on social media by saying ‘Biden is corrupt’ and ‘Big Tech is biased’. He’s right, of course, but he should go further. Oddly, he is overlooking the very idea he has campaigned on since 2015. Biden, Burisma, Chinese banks, Twitter and Facebook are all faces of the Washington Swamp. Next week, the faces may be different, but the Swamp itself will be the same. The buyers and sellers who populate this fetid ecosystem have powerful reasons to sustain it. For some, that means taking payments from foreign oligarchs and then opening doors for them. For others, that means suppressing news about who opened the doors and why. That is exactly what Big Tech is doing now. They, like the politicians they are protecting, want to retain their power and line their pockets. In Washington, that’s the Circle of Life.

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Yesterday, Yale President Peter Salovey announced nine actions “to enhance diversity, promote equity on campus, and foster an environment in which all community members feel welcome, included, and respected,” causing rational alumni, en masse, to go and throw up in the street.

If you want to read a really choice example of vacuous and pretentious academic blather, go and check out:

“Recommendations of the President’s Committee on Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging”

Dollar quote: “Yale can and must improve in how it creates a climate where all feel safe and valued.”

In today’s America, alas! the national establishment elite has so declined in character and intelligence that its members routinely manifest guilt and a consciousness of their own unworthiness. They are only too eager to grovel, abase themselves, and surrender to the insolent and irrational demands of a deluded radical fringe, addled and intoxicated with a pernicious ideology hostile to Civilization, America, and Yale itself. The people entrusted with custodianship of the Culture and the Canon are classic examples of C.S. Lewis’s “Men Without Chests,” who care for nothing, who believe in nothing beyond personal advancement and the sweet smell of success, and who will reliably pay homage to the latest emotional upheaval afflicting the national community of fashion. Men like Peter Salovey are incapable of conserving anything, of defending anything.

Personally, I have a low opinion of the intelligence of people who go out in wilderness areas inhabited by large predators unarmed. His inane dialogue, “Dude!” had me rooting for the lion very soon.

If I were in his position, I’d have gotten fed up with that lion’s chutzpah early on and picked up a nice large rock or a stout stick and gone on the offensive. I suspect that lion would have run as soon as she saw a human bend over and pick up a rock. She certainly would have run if the human advanced on her with visible belligerent intent.

The nudists and vegetarians at the Mountain Lion Foundation, naturally, have rushed to defend that insolent lion’s behavior, and, of course, they think the millennial did exactly the right things. (groan!)

18th Century plaster work from the ceiling of Holy Grave Chapel in Michaelsberg Abbey, Bamberg, Germany.

Matt Taibbi used to be a particularly sharp-tongued left-wing wiseass journalist. Unfortunately for him, he was afflicted by inconvenient streak of intellectual honesty that caused him to take note of some of the Left’s inconsistencies and irrationalities.

Taibbi was sufficiently indiscreet about those kinds of insights that it cost him a well-paying and prestigious position in the media establishment. He’s now publishing high quality opinion pieces on Substack. I recommend those who can afford it it chip in with a subscription. He’s paid the price for speaking the truth, and I believe his voice will become more and more valuable over time.

Facebook announced Tuesday that it’s stepping up efforts to clean its platform of QAnon content:

Starting today, we will remove any Facebook Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts representing QAnon, even if they contain no violent content…

Facebook had already taken several rounds of action against QAnon, including the removal this summer of “over 1,500 Pages and Groups.” Restricting bans to groups featuring “discussions of potential violence” apparently didn’t do the trick, however, so the platform expended bans to include content “tied to real world harm”:

Other QAnon content [is] tied to different forms of real world harm, including recent claims that the west coast wildfires were started by certain groups, which diverted attention of local officials from fighting the fires and protecting the public.

Describing what QAnon is, in a way that satisfies what its followers would might say represents their belief system and separates out the censorship issue, is not easy. The theory is constantly evolving and not terribly rational. It’s also almost always described by mainstream outlets in terms that implicitly make the case for its banning, referencing concepts like “offline harm” or the above-mentioned “real-world harm” in descriptions. As you’re learning what QAnon is, you’re usually also learning that it is not tolerable or safe. …

[T]he Q ban pulls the curtain back on one of the more bizarre developments of the Trump era, the seeming about-face of the old-school liberals who were once the country’s most faithful protectors of speech rights.

Bring up bans of QAnon or figures like Alex Jones (or even the suppression or removal of left-wing outlets like the World Socialist Web Site, teleSUR, or the Palestinian Information Centre) and you’re likely to hear that the First Amendment rights of companies like Facebook and Google are paramount. We’re frequently reminded there is no constitutional issue when private firms decide they don’t want to profit off the circulation of hateful, dangerous, and possibly libelous conspiracy theories.

That argument is easy to understand, but it misses the complex new reality of speech in the Internet era. It is true that the First Amendment only regulates government bans. However, what do we a call a situation when the overwhelming majority of news content is distributed across a handful of tech platforms, and those platforms are — openly — partners with the federal government, and law enforcement in particular?

In my mind, this argument became complicated in 2017, when the Senate Intelligence Committee dragged Facebook, Twitter, and Google to the Hill and essentially ordered them to come up with a “mission statement” explaining how they would prevent the “fomenting of discord.”

Platforms that previously rejected the idea they were in the editing business — “We are a tech company, not a media company,” said Mark Zuckerberg just a year before, in 2016, after meeting with the Pope — soon were agreeing to start working together with congress, law enforcement, and government-affiliated groups like the Atlantic Council. They pledged to target foreign interference, “discord,” and other problems.

Their decision might have been accelerated by a series of threats to increase regulation and taxation of the platforms, with Virginia Senator Mark Warner’s 23-page white paper in 2018 proposing new rules for data collection being just one example. Whatever the reason for the about-face, the tech companies now work with the FBI in what the Bureau calls “private sector partnerships,” which involve “strategic engagement… including threat indicator sharing.”

Does any of this make “private” bans of content a First Amendment issue? The answer I usually get from lawyers is “probably not,” but it’s not clear-cut. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how this could go sideways quickly, as the same platforms the FBI engages with often have records of working with security services to suppress speech in clearly inappropriate ways in other countries.

As far back as 2016, for instance, Israel’s Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked was saying that Facebook and Google were complying with up to “95 percent” of its requests for content deletion. The minister noted cheerfully that the rate of cooperation had just risen sharply. Here’s how Reuters described the sudden burst of enthusiasm on the part of the platforms to cooperate with the state:

Perhaps spurred by the minister’s threat to legislate to make companies open to prosecution if they host images or messages that encourage terrorism, their rate of voluntary compliance has soared from 50 percent in a year, she said.

Whether or not one views Internet bans as censorship or a First Amendment issue really depends on how much one buys concepts like “voluntary compliance.”

The biggest long-term danger in all of this has always centered on the unique situation of media distribution now being concentrated in the hands of a such a relatively small number of companies. Instead of breaking up these oligopolies, or finding more transparent ways of dealing with speech issues, there exists now a temptation for governments to leave the power of these opaque behemoth companies intact, and appropriate their influence for their own sake.

As we’ve seen abroad, a relatively frictionless symbiosis can result: the platforms keep making monster sums, while security services, if they can wriggle inside the tent of these distributors, have an opportunity to control information in previously unheard-of ways. Particularly in a country like the United States, which has never had a full-time federal media regulator, such official leverage would represent a dramatic change in our culture. As one law professor put it to me when I first started writing about the subject two years ago, “What government doesn’t want to control what news you see?”

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Zman finds 21st Century corporate conformism a lot worse than that of the previous century.

America is now a corporation, rather than a country. It is why the public space is being transformed into something that looks like a corporate training center. You don’t go there to express an opinion or advance your interests, but to learn the latest policies. The person in charge sees herself as a facilitator, using behavioral techniques she learned in graduate school, in order to help you reach your potential an employee.

Just look at how the big social media platforms censure people. It is not traditional censorship we would see in an ideological state. Instead, the first violation gets you a day off to think about what you have done. The next violation gets you a longer bit of time off, which everyone knows means you’re on the list. The next downsizing means you get let go, regardless of your performance. Finally, like an employee that never fit into the corporate culture, you’re fired from the platform.

Note too that the enforcers at these firms clearly share information with one another about violators. One day the problematic user wakes up and his Twitter has been suspended, his Facebook is deleted and his YouTube channel nuked. This happens for the same reason the HR department ticks the box “Not eligible for rehire” when you’re riffed out of the place. It is not about you. You’re dead to them now. It is a service to their peers, so they can avoid hiring the same mistake.

This is why our radicals now sound like every human resource department and our politicians look like everyone at a corporate retreat. The managerial elite is imposing its corporate sensibilities on the country. The dreary sameness we see all around us is what you see inside every corporation. Everything must serve the point of the enterprise, even the aesthetic. Everything is subject to the quest for efficiency, so everything that makes life interesting is removed.

The regions of the country are no longer unique cultures with unique histories, but subsidiaries that must be normalized into the cooperate culture. Movies and television are repetitive and shallow, because corporate culture eschews creativity as risky and embraces banality because it is predictable and safe. Sports are drenched in identity politics because cross-marketing says the way to promote a new product is to attach it to the most successful product in the catalog.

Corporations travel a well-known arc. They start with a frontier mentality, in which the creative and daring control the enterprise. They are trying to develop a new market or subvert an existing market, so they can’t follow old rules. This attracts people who are goal oriented, not process oriented. This is the culture of every start-up, which is why they can find new ways to attack the market and maneuver the company around larger, better established competitors.

That success eventually outgrows the capacity of the start-up culture. Eventually, the people being hired to do the things the enterprise needs doing need to be managed and that means managers and rules. A new type of employee is brought in, the sort who enjoys the process. They enjoy creating employee manuals. Soon they are joined by another type of employee, who values conformity. Her job is to make sure everyone follows the rules and does so with enthusiasm.

This is the current phase of Corporate America. The thing that matters most to the managers is not ideology. In the corporate state, ideology is about as authentic and meaningful as corporate culture. It is just a veneer to decorate the latest HR effort to boost morale. What matters to them is the quest to assimilate the wide range of assets now under corporate control. If you step back and look at the current crisis, it is not an ideological battle, but a war on variety and exception.

This is, in part, why the elites hate Trump. It’s not his politics, as his politics, stripped of the carny act, are rather conventional. They hate Trump because he is the guy who laughed at the white diversity trainer when she shared her painful experiences of oppression at Princeton. They hate him because he just wants to do his job and have a life and an identity outside the company. For the champions of the corporate state, nothing can exist outside the state.

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Outside Magazine profiles a facility that’s found a way to provide nuisance bears with a useful career.

Nearly every bear at the Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center (GWDC) in West Yellowstone, Montana, has a similar backstory. The center is a nonprofit educational facility that houses grizzly bears unable to survive in the wild for one reason or another. It is also home to three small packs of captive-born wolves, a handful of injured raptors, and five American river otters.

When a wildlife official from anywhere in the American West, Alaska, or Canada has a nuisance grizzly bear and wants to avoid euthanizing it, the GWDC is often near the top of their call list. (Unfortunately, due to the center’s limited capacity, the answer is frequently that it can’t take another bear. In that case, says Randy Gravatt, the GWDC’s container testing coordinator, bears typically have to be euthanized.)

Coram, a male grizzly whose weight fluctuates between 550 and 680 pounds depending on the season, wandered through Kalispell, Montana, checking porches for dog kibble. Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks officials trapped him three times before he ended up at the GWDC. Spirit, a female grizzly, couldn’t stay away from a golf course in Whitefish; she was relocated six times—once as far as 100 miles away, but she kept finding her way back to that easy source of food—before one of her cubs was hit by a car and she was taken to the West Yellowstone facility.

Coram, Spirit, and the six other bears that live at the GWDC aren’t just wasting away in captivity, though. They have an important job to do: they test containers to determine whether they’re bear-resistant.

Every spring, Gravatt begins filling coolers, bike panniers, backpacking canisters, and trash dumpsters sent in by big-name manufacturers like Yeti, Cabela’s, Pelican, and Igloo with veggies, dry dog food, fish, honey, and—the bears’ favorites—peanut butter. “They don’t really like mushrooms or onions,” Gravatt says, adding that the bears will eat just about anything else in their quest to pack in around 15,000 calories per day during the summer (more when they’re getting ready to hibernate).

Once the containers are full of goodies, Gravatt gets them in front of the bears, which poke, prod, claw, bite, smash, and sometimes use what he calls “the CPR method,” wherein bears place their front paws atop a container and pump, almost as if they’re trying to revive the unfortunate object. If the container remains intact to a certain standard—gaps, tears, and holes can’t be larger than an inch for trash containers; for food containers, it’s a mere quarter-inch—it gets the bears’ literal seal of approval: a sticker depicting a grizzly’s head and shoulders and the product’s certification number. The GWDC is the only testing facility in the world where products can earn a certificate from the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee (IGBC).

The committee was formed in 1983, a decade after the Endangered Species Act made it clear that the grizzly bear, with its capital-e Endangered status, needed coordinated management. About 450 products—ranging from lightweight plastic bear canisters for backpacking to the heavy-duty coolers you might bring on a multiday river trip to industrial-grade metal dumpsters—have earned a place on the IGBC’s list of bear-resistant products, says Scott Jackson, leader of the U.S. Forest Service’s National Carnivore Program and adviser to the IGBC.

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There are several good potential black bear candidates for the same job residing on my 300-acre Pennsylvania farm right now.

Walter Donway defends Columbus Day (If anything, I’d say conceding too much to the misrepresentations and false charges of the slanderers of the great Navigator).

[T]hose who agitate for the replacement of Columbus Day with [Indigenous Peoples Day] … assert that the arrival of Columbus and European civilization launched the exploitation, enslavement, and genocide of what Columbus dubbed the “Indians.” The charge of “genocide” is grotesquely distorted by some of the worst scholarship in recent history.

Historians set the stage for this by means of a vigorous bidding war. Best estimates made before the allegation of genocide arose were that at its population peak there were a million or so Native Americans north of Mexico. As “genocide” became the issue, the estimates soared to five million, 12 million, 18 million… This laid the foundation for labeling what happened to the natives as the worst genocide ever committed and a “holocaust” to dwarf Nazi Germany.

Whatever size the population, at least 70 percent and up to 90 percent of deaths resulted from diseases brought by Europeans, above all, smallpox. Genocide? The argument, apart from citing one poorly documented alleged attempt to infect hostile tribes by spiking blankets with smallpox, is simply that all deaths the Europeans caused were genocidal.

Without doubt, arrival of Europeans in North America, upon which I will focus, here, began a long process of conflict and cooperation, treaty agreements and wars, unstoppable European expansion and bitter armed resistance of tribes, technological dominance of the advanced European culture over primitive tribal culture, and, most tragically and devastatingly, the introduction of new diseases from Europe to which the native population had no immunity and succumbed in virulent epidemics.

It is established that by 1900 there were fewer than 250,000 Native Americans in United States territory. If we take as our estimate of the original native population one made in 1928, long before the genocide craze, then that population declined from 1,152,950 at the time the Europeans arrived to 250,000 some 400 years later—a loss of 850,000.

That was the cost of the European settlement of North America and it was borne by natives. So what was the benefit? To put the matter most boldly—but, I think, to identify its pivotal historical essence—there is this statement by Dr. Michael Berliner, who is quoted as saying that Europeans brought to the New World

…reason, science, self-reliance, individualism, ambition, and productive achievement” where there was “primitivism, mysticism, and collectivism” in economic arrangements…

And cannibalism, torture as routine for dealing with those outside the tribe, incessant wars of conquest over other tribes, slavery, and human sacrifice. Also, zero progress in science, including medicine, and near zero progress in technology.

Does that matter? No. Not when we are discussing recommendations for mandated national holidays and that one replace another. We can celebrate native American tribal culture as the first to settle the huge North American continent and create a spectrum of variations from the agricultural—to the splendid if murderous light cavalry of the Comanche—to the elaborate structures and settled ways of the Pueblos. We can celebrate all that, even recognizing the “sadistic cannibalism” of the Caribs, the routine infliction of torture, and the murderous conquest of tribe by tribe.

Similarly, we can celebrate Columbus Day as marking the opening of the New World to the Old, altering history in unimaginably far-reaching ways for the human race. Even if Columbus combined brilliant navigation and courage with behavior condemned as atrocious by his peers.

In conclusion, it makes no sense to replace Columbus Day with IPD unless you are promoting the view that European settlement should be viewed as evil, not celebrated, and that tribal culture should be valorized. And that is dead wrong, I think, and worse than wrong. In the perspective of history, unfailingly harsh when one culture and society are displacing others, the European settlement of the Americas represented an enormously beneficial, decisive stride for the human race. Just contrast the Carib culture with the U.S. Constitution.

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Christopher Columbus (detail), from Alejo Fernández, La Virgen de los Navegantes, circa 1505 to 1536, Alcázares Reales de Sevilla.

In his magisterial biography, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, 1942, Samuel Elliot Morrison observes:

[Christopher Columbus did] more to direct the course of history than any individual since Augustus Caesar. …

The voyage that took him to “The Indies” and home was no blind chance, but the creation of his own brain and soul, long studied, carefully planned, repeatedly urged on indifferent princes, and carried through by virtue of his courage, sea-knowledge and indomitable will. No later voyage could ever have such spectacular results, and Columbus’s fame would have been secure had he retired from the sea in 1493. Yet a lofty ambition to explore further, to organize the territories won for Castile, and to complete the circuit of the globe, sent him thrice more to America. These voyages, even more than the first, proved him to be the greatest navigator of his age, and enabled him to train the captains and pilots who were to display the banners of Spain off every American cape and island between Fifty North and Fifty South. The ease with which he dissipated the unknown terrors of the Ocean, the skill with which he found his way out and home, again and again, led thousands of men from every Western European nation into maritime adventure and exploration.

The whole history of the Americas stem from the Four Voyages of Columbus; and as the Greek city-states looked back to the deathless gods as their founders, so today a score of independent nations and dominions unite in homage to Christopher the stout-hearted son of Genoa, who carried Christian civilization across the Ocean Sea.

An annual post.

I just saw an ad from Joe Biden. He said he was going to treat us like family. I can’t wait to go to China and come back a millionaire and have a job that pays me $150,000 a month.

— Darlene (@djf510) October 11, 2020