• Greetings from Reykjavik, where I have made the pilgrimage to the ultimate totem to postmodern Europe: the Monument to the Unknown Bureaucrat. No, this is not a joke. It’s real. (Actually overheard a tour guide tell his group that this is “the greatest statue in the world.” See video below.)
And when you ponder the huge block of stone that constitutes the torso and brain of this unknown “person,” it makes ironic sense.
And yes, not to worry, I do plan to consume one of those famous hot dogs that even Bill Clinton couldn’t resist. (This particular hot dog kiosk, which has a long line down the block much of the day, is right next to my hotel.) I figure it will give me lifetime bragging rights over John Yoo and his McRib mania. I’ll send a review in due course.
• The New York Times seems almost gleeful that California is even more corrupt that New York and New Jersey, and amazingly puts its finger on the root of the problem: too much one-party rule:
Over the last 10 years, 576 public officials in California have been convicted on federal corruption charges, according to Justice Department reports, exceeding the number of cases in states better known for public corruption, including New York, New Jersey and Illinois.
California has a larger population than those states, but the recent wave of cases is attributable to much more than that, federal prosecutors say.
A heavy concentration of power at Los Angeles City Hall, the receding presence of local news media, a population that often tunes out local politics and a growing Democratic supermajority in state government have all helped insulate officeholders from damage, political analysts said.
• Well, well well, so it turns out that “anti-racist” superstar Robin DiAngelo (White Fragility) is yet another fraudster and plagiarist. Although the New York Times has gotten around to reporting the story, it was initially reported by the Free Beacon, which first exposed Claudine Gay’s plagiarism and several other cases. Nate Silver asks a pertinent question: how come all these plagiarism stories are being reported in conservative media, and not the mainstream media? The question answers itself, of course.
A complaint filed this month with the University of Washington was obtained and published by The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online journal. The complaint accuses DiAngelo of “research misconduct,” and details 20 instances in which DiAngelo appears to have drawn on the work of other scholars and reproduced it without proper attribution in her 2004 dissertation, “Whiteness in Racial Dialogue: A Discourse Analysis.”
Among the scholars whose work DiAngelo drew on without proper acknowledgment, according to the complaint, are Stacey J. Lee, a professor of education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as Northeastern University’s Thomas K. Nakayama, and his coauthor, Robert L. Krizek, a professor emeritus at St. Louis University.
While DiAngelo cites the scholars whose ideas she is reproducing, and later credits them in her bibliography, the complaint highlights some lengthy passages that repeat phrases almost word for word from their source material, without quotation marks.
But neither the Times nor any other “mainstream” media are asking the deeper question that helps explain their moral blindness to the issue: you can’t spot plagiarism of ideas when everybody believes the same intellectually fraudulent ideas.
So rigid is the groupthink of “mainstream” opinion that the appallingly lightweight content of “anti-racist” stars like Ibram Kendi and DiAngelo proceeded undetected at the New York Times and every other institution that should know better. To paraphrase Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451, there is nothing in these esteemed anti-racist tomes that would make a sub-moron’s mouth twitch.
• You can call me a “Monument Man” if you want:
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