holy shit it's real.https://t.co/0HKZlCkFaJ pic.twitter.com/20RMRmWpwK

— tsar becket adams (@BecketAdams) January 4, 2021

——————————–

So it turns out Kamala Harris lifted her "Fweedom" story from a 1965 Playboy interview with Martin Luther King, by Alex Haley. Much thanks to @EngelsFreddie for spotting the similarityhttps://t.co/zDONW4Ueqs pic.twitter.com/yQuWZHYEMz

— Q. Anthony (ɔpɛ asem) (@andraydomise) January 4, 2021

HT: Ed Driscoll.

Pasilobus sp.

HuffPo, last August, linked a slideshow of macro photos of unusual spiders described as taken in the neighborhood of Singapore by Nicky Bay.

Nicky Bay blog

————————

Oddly enough, the same photograph appears in two version, 1 and 2, on the web attributed to Melvyn Yeo, who also specializes in macro photography in Singapore.

Who is plagiarizing whom?

In life, the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was notorious for borrowing without attribution, and the Obama White House has kept the King tradition of appropriation marching on, in an Oval Office rug in which King is credited with a line borrowed from Transcendentalist minister Theodore Parker.

Washington Post:

President Obama’s new presidential rug seemed beyond reproach, with quotations from Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. woven along its curved edge.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” According media reports, this quote keeping Obama company on his wheat-colored carpet is from King.

Except it’s not a King quote. The words belong to a long-gone Bostonian champion of social progress. His roots in the republic ran so deep that his grandfather commanded the Minutemen at the Battle of Lexington.

For the record, Theodore Parker is your man, President Obama. Unless you’re fascinated by antebellum American reformers, you may not know of the lyrically gifted Parker, an abolitionist, Unitarian minister and Transcendentalist thinker who foresaw the end of slavery, though he did not live to see emancipation. He died at age 49 in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War.

A century later, during the civil rights movement, King, an admirer of Parker, quoted the Bostonian’s lofty prophecy during marches and speeches. Often he’d ask in a refrain, “How long? Not long.” He would finish in a flourish: “Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

King made no secret of the author of this idea. As a Baptist preacher on the front lines of racial justice, he regarded Parker, a religious leader, as a kindred spirit.

Yet somehow a mistake was made and magnified in our culture to the point that a New England antebellum abolitionist’s words have been enshrined in the Oval Office while attributed to a major 20th-century figure.

Russia knows how to deal with pirates: “They could not reach the coast and, apparently, have all died.”

Hat tip to John C. Meyer.

————————————

Robert Samuelson: What we’re seeing in Greece is the death spiral of the welfare state.

————————————

Jewish World Review: Elena Kagan let Charles Ogletree and Larry Tribe get away with plagiarism. Harvard Crimson story.