Say what you want, but I'd rather eat it than a bathttps://t.co/H0gFYmnrrF

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) December 22, 2020

Robert Arvey finds the establishment’s standard of proof this year impossible to meet.

One of my idle hobbies is writing science fiction stories. The first one will be published after I die, at which point I will become rich and famous.

None of them, however, is as strange as the bizarre world in which we now find ourselves. It is as if criminals had broken into your house, while you were home, in broad daylight, and begun loading up your valuable belongings in a rented truck parked in your driveway. You immediately pick up the phone and dial 911.

“911. What is your emergency?”

“I’m being robbed.”

“Really?”

“Yes!”

“Do you have any evidence of that?”

“Yes! I’m looking right at the robbers.”

“Okay. But do you have any video?”

“As a matter of fact, my security cameras are running right now.”

“Good. Put your phone next to the video and let me see.”

“Okay. Here’s the video, and here is live feed of the robbers, directly from my phone.”

“I see. But there are other possible explanations for what is going on.”

“What other possible explanation could there be? You can actually see them robbing my house.”

“Has any court ruled that they are doing that?”

“Court? What the hell are you talking about? You can see them with your own eyes.”

“Let me talk to them.”

“Talk to them? Are you crazy?”

Just then, one of the robbers hears what you said and takes the phone from your hand. “Hello,” he says. Then, “No, we’re not robbing this guy’s house. He’s just a sore loser.” He gives you back the phone.

“This is 911 again. He denies that he is robbing your house.”

“But you can plainly see him.”

“Sir, there are laws against robbing houses. And you have no evidence of widespread house-robbing.”

The police finally show up, and you say, “These guys are robbing my house.”

“Can you prove that?”

“Prove it? Has everyone gone crazy?”

RTWT

——————

Wikipedia:

Newgrange is a prehistoric monument in County Meath, Ireland, located 8 kilometres (5.0 mi) west of Drogheda on the north side of the River Boyne. It is an exceptionally grand passage tomb built during the Neolithic period, around 3200 BC, making it older than Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids.

The original complex of Newgrange was built between c. 3200 and 3100 BC. According to carbon-14 dates, it is approximately five hundred years older than the current form of Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, as well as predating the Mycenaean culture of ancient Greece.

——————

NR’s Kyle Smith puts her doctorate into proper perspective.

Mrs. Biden wanted the credential for its own sake. As for its quality, well. She got it from the University of Delaware, whose ties to her husband, its most illustrious alumnus if you don’t count Joe Flacco, run so deep that it has a school of public policy named after him. That the University of Delaware would have rejected her 2006 dissertation as sloppy, poorly written, non-academic, and barely fit for a middle-school Social Studies classroom (all of which it is) when her husband had been representing its state in the U.S. Senate for more than three decades was about as likely as Tom Hagen telling Vito Corleone that his wife is a fat sow on payday. The only risk to the University of Delaware was that it might strain its collective wrist in its rush to rubber-stamp her doctoral paper. Mrs. Biden could have turned in a quarter-a**ed excuse for a magazine article written at the level of Simple English Wikipedia and been heartily congratulated by the university for her towering mastery. Which is exactly what happened.

Jill Biden’s dissertation is not an addition to the sum total of human knowledge. It is not a demonstration of expertise in its specific topic or its broad field. It is a gasping, wheezing, frail little Disney forest creature that begs you to notice the effort it makes to be the thing it is imitating while failing so pathetically that any witnesses to its ineptitude must feel compelled, out of manners alone, to drag it to the nearest podium and give it a participation trophy.

RTWT

I took a look at her dissertation and found it fully worthy of being shelved next to Michelle Obama’s deathless Princeton thesis.

I didn’t actually read very far. I gave up after encountering:

“Three quarters of the class will be Caucasian; one quarter of the class will be African American; and the remaining seats will be filled with students of Asian descent or non-resident aliens.”

Lowering the Bar reports that some enterprising Moors are giving them the opportunity.

Just a quick warning to let you know that if someone knocks on your door and says you have to move out immediately, and that person is wearing a fez (see above), you probably don’t need to pack your things right away. Some investigation would be warranted even if the person isn’t wearing a fez, but unless you live in Morocco, maybe, the fez should serve as an additional red flag.

Sources report that last week, several homeowners in the Seattle area received surprise visits from strangers who informed them that they (the strangers) were in fact the legal owners of the properties and asked them (the homeowners) to vacate immediately. “Today is the day!” one apparently kept repeating. Why was today the day? That didn’t seem to be clear.

Also, why were they wearing fezzes? There did seem to be an explanation for that.

The “today is the day” visitor eventually handed the homeowner some official-looking federal-government paperwork and left. But looking a little more closely at that paperwork revealed that the federal government in question was not that of the United States of America, but rather the “Moorish National Republic.” Although I guess that depends who you ask, because the “Moorish National Republic” claims to be the true government of the United States of America, and that it owns all the property in North America. There are a variety of “Moorish” groups in the U.S., most if not all of which are offshoots of the “sovereign citizen” movement, something that has appeared on this site many times given its followers’ penchant for making utterly baffling legal-type claims. See, e.g., “Judge Rejects Man’s Claim to Be ‘Some Sort of Agricultural Product” (Oct. 4, 2017); “King of Australia Says He’s Testing Its Court System” (Sept. 13, 2017); “Judge Finds Alleged Indian Tribe to Be ‘Complete Sham’” (May 13, 2008). Many of these claims involve property, sometimes the claimants’ own property and sometimes the property of another. In Seattle it appears to be the latter.

The claims typically involve official-looking but entirely bogus documents, and jargon-filled legal pleadings that might also appear from a distance to be valid but on closer inspection are pretty ridiculous. So a lot like the Trump team’s recent filings, actually, except the Trump team’s grammar is generally a little better. Also, the sovereigns have a tendency to make up their own grammar and magical symbols, something the Kraken hasn’t tried yet, as far as I know.

According to an expert quoted by the Daily Beast, the Moorish offshoot of the sovereign movement also believes it isn’t bound by the same laws as other citizens, but it has different reasons for thinking that. “Some believe they have diplomatic immunity because they’re members of these North American fictitious tribes, that they’re descended from them,” the expert said. “They believe they were the first inhabitants of the Americas, and that therefore they own everything.” There’s no legal basis for any of this, of course, even if you set aside the historical problems, which are significant.

There also seem to be some problems explaining their adoption of the fez, which so far as I can tell has no connection with any of the tribes indigenous to North America (or at least they became indigenous after walking here from Asia thousands of years ago, as I understand it). According to the SPLC, some members of “Moorish” groups believe they migrated here from North Africa, and that a 1787 treaty between the U.S. and Morocco grants them “sovereign immunity.” (That wouldn’t be true even if that treaty existed, which it doesn’t.) The fez apparently originated or at least became popularized in the Ottoman Empire, which controlled parts of northern Africa for a while, and the term “Moor” is or was sometimes used to refer to various Muslim inhabitants of that area. So that might explain the association.

Or maybe they just like the way it looks. Who the hell knows?

RTWT

The New York Post reports that Dalton may be about to go Woke and therefore go broke.

One of NYC’s poshest private schools is in an uproar over an anti-racist manifesto signed by dozens of faculty members with a sweeping list of demands.

The Dalton School — which boasts stars Anderson Cooper, Christian Slater and Claire Danes as alumni — is wrestling with eight pages of “proposals” to overhaul the staffing, curriculum and treatment of black students.

Yearly tuition for grades K-12 at the Upper East Side institution is $54,180 a year.

The proposals — first reported this week by The Naked Dollar blog — grew out of the George Floyd police-brutality protests and long-simmering student complaints of racism at the prestigious school.

But some parents say the backlash has become oppressive.

“My ancestors experienced white supremacy by being slaughtered,” a Jewish parent told The Post. “The idea that being white automatically means you are privileged or a white supremacist is ridiculous. My child comes from people who had to fight for everything they got.

“It’s just about skin color now.”

Those who disagree remain silent, the insider said. “Parents are terrified to speak up for fear of retribution. Parents are acting like spineless wimps.”

One Dalton father, who said he’s removed his children from the school as a result of the manifesto, said Dalton “has totally failed in its mission to uplift the very people it professes to help.

“It’s completely absurd and a total step backwards,” the father, who did not want to be identified, told the Post.

“This supposed anti-racist agenda is asking everyone to look at black kids and treat them differently because of the color of their skin,” he said. “The school is more focused on virtue-signaling this nonsense than it is in actually helping students of color. More parents are going to be pulling their kids out.”

The wide-ranging faculty demands include:

Hiring 12 full-time diversity officers, and multiple psychologists to support students “coping with race-based traumatic stress.”
Assigning a staffer dedicated to black students who have “complaints or face disciplinary action,” and a full-time advocate to help black kids “navigate a predominantly white institution.”
Paying the student debt of black staffers upon hiring them.
Requiring courses that focus on “Black liberation” and “challenges to white supremacy.”
Compensating any student of color who appears in Dalton promotional material.
Abolishing high-level academic courses by 2023 if the performance of black students is not on par with non-blacks.
Requiring “anti-racism” statements from all staffers.
Overhauling the entire curriculum, reading lists and student plays to reflect diversity and social justice themes.
Divesting from companies that “criminalize or dehumanize” black people, including private prisons and tech firms that manufacture police equipment or weapons.
Donating 50 percent of all fundraising dollars to NYC public schools if Dalton is not representative of the city in terms of gender, race, socioeconomic background, and immigration status by 2025.

Dalton officials said the document is just “a set of thought-starters created last summer by a group of faculty and staff responding to Dalton’s commitment to becoming an anti-racist institution.

“The school does not support all the language or actions it contains.” it added.

“Dalton’s commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion and anti-racism is grounded in our deep appreciation for the dignity of all community members, an understanding of differing life backgrounds, empathy for one another, and the ability to engage and listen with respect across differences,” the school said in a statement to The Post.

But Naked Dollar blogger Scott Johnston, who first revealed the manifesto Thursday, said of the demands: “Dalton’s teachers are refusing to come back until they are met.”

The Dalton spokesman rebutted, “We’re expecting all teachers to return after winter break.”

Johnston — the author of “Campusland,” a humorous novel about the “woke” college climate — said the “meltdown” at Dalton reflects the angst and self-imposed guilt of elite private schools across the country. …

the Dalton parent who spoke to The Post predicted that 30 to 40 percent of parents of kids in the Class of 2025 will pull them out of the school and transfer them as a result of the manifesto.

Making the situation more tense, some Dalton parents are fuming over the school’s resistance to reopening classrooms since the COVID-19 outbreak, remaining fully remote while other private and public schools have resumed some or all in-person instruction.

RTWT

HODINKEE reports on the restoration of a famous New York landmark.

Hub of high society as well as industry and political power, the Waldorf-Astoria had as its centerpiece – both at the original location and at the new tower – a magnificent clock, originally created by the Goldsmiths’ And Silversmiths’ Company Of London for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition, better known as the Chicago World’s Fair.

The clock was purchased by John Jacob Astor IV for the original location of the Waldorf-Astoria, and after the demolition, it was one of the few surviving fixtures to find a new home on Park Avenue, where it shone like a golden beacon in the lobby – a landmark and the site of countless rendez-vous – for over 80 years. In 2017, the Waldorf closed for extensive renovations, and the clock, for the first time, was disassembled and moved to a studio in upstate New York for a thorough, and as it turned out, long-overdue restoration. The spectacularly restored clock is now on view at the New York Historical Society and will be returned to the Waldorf when renovations are completed.

Just getting the clock out of the Waldorf lobby and to the restoration workshop was logistically complicated. The clock is nine feet tall and weighs about 4,000 pounds. It’s constructed in four basic sections – the base, the middle, the clock section with four clock faces, and an upper section topped with a model of the Statue Of Liberty. (Lady Liberty was not part of the original design; she was a gift to Astor from the French government and added in 1902.) The disassembled clock was trucked upstate to Stair Restorations, where the actual restoration work took place.

One of the biggest challenges facing the restoration team was a lack of information from the original makers. The Goldsmiths’ Company was unable to locate any records in its archives. This meant that the restoration team at Stair, under the direction of head restorer Nigel Thomas (a 25-year veteran), had only written accounts and a few grainy photographs with which to evaluate the original state of the clock, and the changes it had undergone over the decades.

Original elements are missing – most notably a circle of animated figures which once marched around the top of the octagonal middle section. The figures were misplaced when the clock was moved to the Park Avenue Waldorf-Astoria and have never been found. The base of the clock has also changed over the years. There are actually three bases, one inside the other. “The ‘third-generation base’ is a sort of banquette,” Thomas told HODINKEE, “and we found two more [earlier] bases inside it,” – including the original marble base.

Alarmingly, the clock had also become structurally unsound. Thomas says that at some point – possibly during the installation of the magnetically driven gongs (the clock strikes the Chimes Of Westminster), which replaced the original mechanical striking system – part of the supporting frame had been cut out, allowing the clock to gradually settle into a tilted position.

The four clocks show the time in four different cities: New York, Madrid, Paris, and Greenwich, England. Each dial also has a small inscription advertising Elgin watches – a mysterious element, as Elgin was one of America’s biggest watch and clock makers; not a name you’d expect on the dials of an English-made clock. The likeliest explanation is that the original mechanical movement was at some point replaced by an electric one, though when this was done is unclear. An issue of the Bulletin Of The National Association Of Watch And Clock Collectors from 1960 mentions the replacement of the mechanical movement with an electric one from Elgin; perhaps the inscriptions were added at the same time.

In Thomas’ words, the clock has “led a hard life,” and most of its exposed surfaces were very much the worse for wear. Decades of cleaning, pollution, and constant running had left most of the exposed surfaces of the clock in need of repair and refinishing. Many of the decorative elements, including Lady Liberty, are in ormolu, a type of gilded bronze. The original process used a poisonous mercury amalgam, and gilders often died before the age of 40 from mercury poisoning. The ormolu work on the clock had to be cleaned and replated, and the panels in the tall octagonal section had their plating removed (the base material is pressed copper) and replaced. The goal was not to return the clock to “as new” condition but rather to preserve the patina it had acquired while ensuring continuity in finishing and structural integrity. …

With the layers of grime accumulated over the decades cleaned off, and the finish restored on all exterior surfaces, the remarkable visual richness of the clock can be seen, as well as the interplay of different finishes and surfaces. The figure of Lady Liberty gleams as if lit by the rising sun. …

At each corner of the upper section holding the clock’s dials, there are small pegs which once held additional figurines (visible in the photograph from 1893) which, in keeping with the conservator’s approach, the restoration team did not attempt to reproduce or replace.

Silver plating has been restored on the high relief images on the lower octagonal section, where one can find portrayals of Queen Victoria, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and Grover Cleveland. Below each bust are panels showing scenes of swimming, running, yachting, cycling, baseball, trotting, and horse jumping, as well as a scene of the Brooklyn Bridge, which had opened in 1883 – just ten years before the clock was delivered to the World’s Fair. …

The clock can be seen at the New York Historical Society and will take its place once again as the centerpiece of the Waldorf-Astoria’s lobby when the tower – which will have 375 hotel rooms, as well as 375 condominium residences – re-opens in late 2022.

RTWT

What do you know? There is one rational adult in a position of responsibility in Connecticut, New Britain’s 33-year-old Republican mayor Erin Stewart.

The Hartford Courant reports:

New Britain’s controversial Christopher Columbus statue won’t be heading to storage — at least not yet.

Mayor Erin Stewart on Thursday vetoed the common council’s decision to take down the statue, meaning the issue will drag into January or possibly beyond.

After learning of her decision Thursday afternoon, a top council Democrat said he’ll try to get his colleagues to override it next month.

In a statement condemning “cancel culture,” Stewart warned taking down the monument would set a bad precedent. …

The veto was the latest twist in a local culture battle that began with the nationwide campaign to pull down Columbus statues after the George Floyd protests in June.

Republican leaders and Italian-American groups in New Britain largely pushed to keep the city’s statue in McCabe Park, while Puerto Rican activists, the New Britain Racial Justice Coalition and council Democrats argued it should be moved off city property.

The arguments largely mirror those in cities across the country: Columbus’ defenders portray him as a brave explorer and symbol of Italian-American heritage, while critics say he was a genocidal slave trader and racist.

But earlier this month, several council Republicans sided with Democrats in a 10-4 vote to take it down.

Stewart said Thursday that they never explained how the city would pay to remove it, nor what would replace it at the park. She signaled that she might reconsider if the council provides detailed answers,

“If the council is going to retire Columbus, they ought to have a concurrent and concrete plan for what will go in its place,” she wrote, saying anything less would be an affront to Italian-Americans.

Democratic Alderman Chris Anderson, one of the most outspoken voices demanding removal of the statue, said Thursday afternoon that he’ll look to override the veto next month. That would take 10 votes; currently the council has 14 members because Democrat Emmanuel Sanchez’s seat has been vacant since he resigned last week.

If the Republican aldermen who voted with Democrats also vote to override the veto, they’d prevail. But the GOP caucus has long been loyal to Stewart, and Alderman Sharon Beloin-Saavedra was the only Republican who has appeared passionate about removing the statue.

RTWT

I think she has a good chance of winning. There are a lot of Italians in Connecticut. And how come the Puerto Ricans, descendants of the Spaniards after all, are on the wrong side? Did some Marxist professor convince them that they all descend from Caribbean cannibals?

“Each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth is free from it. And I know, too, that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breathe in somebody’s face and fasten the infection on him. What’s natural is the microbe. All the rest—health, integrity, purity (if you like)—is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter. The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention. And it needs tremendous will-power, a never ending tension of the mind, to avoid such lapses. Yes, Rieux, it’s a wearying business, being plague-stricken. But it’s still more wearying to refuse to be it. That’s why everybody in the world today looks so tired; everyone is more or less sick of plague. But that is also why some of us, those who want to get the plague out of our systems, feel such desperate weariness, a weariness from which nothing remains to set us free except death.”

—-Albert Camus, The Plague

The anonymous professor forwards:

YouTube has announced that it will ban content that questions the fairness or legitimacy of the 2020 election. This is ominously Orwellian. Matt Taibbi comments from the left:

If you want a population of people to stop thinking an election was stolen from them, it’s hard to think of a worse method than ordering a news blackout after it’s just been demonstrated that the last major blackout [Hunter Biden laptop] was a fraud.