I must be missing your point in your criticism of John Kennedy’s comment about Saule Omarova. Just this February she said that she wanted the small oil / coal companies to go bankrupt. And today she absolutely lied about it, saying she meant the opposite. Well, that doesn’t square with the following sentence in her February statement which was ‘… to promote a green economy’.
She couldn’t have meant the opposite of her hope for bankruptcy and then delivered the rationale of “going Green”.
You might be winnowing down on an irrelevant detail of her date and reason of leaving the Soviet Union but she’s been delivering Marxist cheers THIS YEAR. (Or did you think she just came to the US last week ?).
I find Senator Kennedy’s approach to her dogma has about 1000X as much Common Sense as your quip, unless I misunderstand your intended message. Maybe you can explain.
I’ll save my explanations about how NOT to get to a Green energy economy for later and keep this about how vile of a choice Saule Omarova is. Of all the insulting appointment attempts that Biden has pushed, this one is the worst.
NPR's take on JK Rowling (linked in Bari's TGIF)—the author of all the Harry Potter books, and essential to all the Harry Potter movies—was appalling, in summarizing JKR's tweet as supporting “transphobic statements.” NPR is outrageously wrong.
NPR said:
“Rowling has, in recent years, been the subject of controversy. In 2019, she drew condemnation for her tweets in support of Maya Forstater, a researcher whose transphobic statements cost her her job (though that decision was later successfully appealed).”
The statement Maya Forstater was fired for, was that biological sex is immutable and should not be conflated with gender identity. That's what NPR unqualifiedly described as a “transphobic” statement.
The UK court that vindicated Forstater held that her statement was protected by the UK's Equality Act, she should not have been sacked for saying what she did, and that, in saying biological sex is real, Forstater “did not seek to destroy the rights of trans persons.”
For her support of now-vindicated Forstater, JK Rowling is now shunned by the Harry Potter actors whom she made rich and famous. Nice, kids.
And NPR has gone so far over the line into political editorializing in their “news” reporting that NPR is no longer worth listening to, let alone paying for.
Saule Omarova didn't come to America to escape communism. WSJ article circa Oct. 24, "A Banking Regulator Who Hates Banks."
...
By Ms. Omarova’s own account, she immigrated to the U.S. by “pure chance.”
“I was an undergraduate student at Moscow State University and there was at the very end of the Gorbachev era an exchange program between Moscow State and University of Wisconsin Madison,” she told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. She attended Madison for a semester in 1991 and while there “the Soviet Union fell apart. So there I was, a student without anywhere to go back.”
...
She didn't flee communism. She was more than happy to go back to it.
Oh Sarah Jeong. That name rings a bell. Yes. I remember her now. The NYT Editorial Board member who had previously tweeted out "cancelwhitepeople" and "whitemenarebulls***" and ""Oh man it's kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men."
And to think this charming, pink haired piece of work actually graduated from Harvard Law School. John Harvard is rolling in his grave.
It is not Omoravas burden to shoulder her birthplace. But nice straw man. It is her burden to explain her communist viewpoints in her recent publications. The defense offered in this piece is offensive
You forget about the attack on Project Veritas and Okeefe by the thoroughly corrupt FBI OVER Ashley Biden’s lost diary. Thought experiment: imagine if Trump did this to Don Lemin over Ivankas diary….
The problem with Saule Omarova isn’t the place of her birth but the fact that she retains many of the odious, authoritarian ideas associated with the place of her birth. In short, she’s a leftie nut case—and our absurd president wants to make her Comptroller of the Currency.
On the upcoming Olympics in China, the ongoing genocide of the Uighur people is not a sufficient reason to boycott but the disappearance of a Chinese tennis player just might be.
Why does this strange priority remind of a comment attributed to a different Communist dictator, Joseph Stalin: one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic?
I have to express my frustration on this one. I, like many others, subscribed to Bari's Substack because I sought thoughtful, open-minded, independent thought -- an alternative to the mocking tone of unearned surety which characterizes most "mainstream" Borg media, very notably including the NYT.
This article, while ably written and touching on interesting topics, so clearly enacts most of what is wanting in the aforementioned Borg media that I feel compelled to point out a couple instances. This piece was truly disappointing. Some notes:
- Your understatement in the Kenosha piece is stunning. Quite obviously, per your story, the country's "paper of record" suppressed and purposefully distorted clearly newsworthy material to propagandize people into ignoring or underplaying massive and destructive national riots. This was done so as to mock and characterize as racist concern about these riots, in turn done so as to smear the president and his followers, in turn done so as to shape the election through politically-coordinated deception of the "democratic" populace the NYT aims to control. This is now being used to defame someone who went (perhaps stupidly) to put out these fires. It does not strike me as journalistically appropriate or honest to treat this prolonged and purposeful distortion as a matter of mild academic interest ("something odd") or social-justice pathos related to a handful of people because they were poor. This is deceitful and immoral propaganda that significantly affected national politics.
- Per your description of it, the Ivermectin piece referenced, which is claimed as "definitive," implicitly acknowledges that a large bulk of research on the pill suggests it works to sharply reduce covid infection and symptoms. The criticism is, instead, related to the mechanism by which it works in said studies. It states that IVM works *because of* a happenstance regional correlation (with deworming), not on its own, such that it wouldn't work in, say, the US. This is a tacit acknowledgement of a position that the elite journalistic class as a whole has insulted as conspiratorial for months: That there is clear evidence that this cheap generic has been effective in reducing covid infection and symptoms. Stunningly, after this implicit acknowledgement is made, Nellie offers no criticism or apology, and doesn't make anything explicit. I can only reach the conclusion that this article is deemed "definitive" for opportunistic reasons (consciously or subconsciously), because it is the first well-written piece that A) accepts (as one must) the *obvious evidence of efficacy* while B) maintaining the tone of smug dismissal about the drug. Of course, Scott Alexander may likely be right; he's a brilliant writer and thinker. What's noteworthy is the extraordinary implicit bias, smugness, and avoidance at play in this blurb. It's an exact carbon copy of how the mainstream press treats these subjects (see below).
- As many others have pointed out, your characterization of the Omarova interaction betrays an extraordinary bias and (willful?) lack of understanding of the candidate in question. This is combined with classic elite-media smugness, and played off as a sense of humor and even patriotism.
- You, and many other journalists, owe an enormous *apology* for ragging on (and failing to criticize) Russiagate despite an absolute lack of trustworthy evidence. The corporate press treated the story as absolute damning fact when it was, always, nothing of the kind. (I'm not as familiar with your work; at the very least, you didn't make the slightest attempt at skeptical criticism.) This is absolute, *election-stealing* journalistic malpractice. Journalists deprived the American people of the right to make an informed vote, by systematically lying to them and misrepresenting and overstating reality. American journalism -- really quite close to all of it -- has a moral obligation to apologize profusely, publicly, repeatedly, and with great self-flagellation. Instead, we get a self-absorbed throwaway joke about the time you wasted expending extraordinary bias towards the propagation of a massively distorting calculated lie.
Just a stunning lack of self-awareness on display here. The exact tone of clueless superiority that makes the NYT/Vox/etc so jarring.
My faith in Bari's journalistic acumen has taken a hit this week. First, I learned that for fourteen *months* she was wholly uninformed and misinformed about the facts underlying the Kyle Rittenhouse incidents. Facts that have been available to her for...fourteen *months*.
Now, I see she's provided Nellie Bowles a forum to illustrate *this* kind of cluelessness:
"Dept of Not Her Fault: Speaking of deranged: Sen. John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, seemed confused that a child raised in the Soviet Union might leave for the freedom of America. He said Biden’s pick for currency comptroller, a woman named Saule Omarova, who was born in Kazakhstan: “You used to be a member of a group called The Young Communists. . . . I don’t know whether to call you professor or comrade.” Her elegant (and American) response: “I could not choose where I was born.”
NOWHERE in what Nellie quoted does Sen. Kennedy give *any* indication that he is surprised that "a child raised in the Soviet Union might leave for the freedom of America." So Strike One: trotting out a straw man, and furthermore, thinking (or wanting us to think) that Sen. Kennedy is "deranged" because of something...he DIDN'T say.
Then Nellie portrays as "elegant (and American)" the Communist Omarova's reply, "I could not choose where I was born" which has NOTHING to do with Sen. Kennedy's comment. He did NOT challenge her birthplace, he challenged her choices thereafter.
"You used to be a member of a group called The Young Communists. . . . I don’t know whether to call you professor or comrade."
In fact, joining a group called The Young Communists was very MUCH a choice Biden's Communist nominee DID make. Calling Omarova's response "elegant (and American)" could not be further from the truth. If anything, it was a dishonest response. That's Strike Two.
Alleged journalists don't get three strikes. By the second strike they've forfeited their credibility. They're not journalists. They're advocates or propagandists, or just bad journalist-wannabes.
Googling Nellie Bowles I see that she’s Bari’s girlfriend, maybe more? So I was surprised that Bari’s article in the last day or two showed she was totally misinformed about Kyle Rittenhouse. Wouldn’t Nellie have told Bari what was what since she wrote an article on Kenosha?
I have to say this weeks offering is rather a compendium of leftistism. For example, Beto, a consistently unaccomplished nothing with a rich wife to fund his quests, is not hot in any way and is he really a democrat “star”? Seems this and other blurbs are less informative and more editorial. Hopefully next week will be better.
I was appalled by the fluff comment that you want the year 2017 back, seeing as how it was consumed by the media's propagating the Russiagate hoax. Do you not understand the enormity of the crime that the Dems and their allies committed against the American people and the damage they caused to America's credibility in the world? Anyone paying attention now knows that the US is controlled by a dishonest elite crazy enough to taunt a nuclear-armed power for their selfish political ends.
"Starting next week, TGIF will just be for paying subscribers. Which means in order to yell at me, people have to pay for the pleasure"
I'm a subscriber, so is there a way I can just opt out of your leftist BS take on current events, Ms Bowles? Beto O'Rourke a star and Saule Omarova not a current Marxist? You must be kidding us.
I will be charitable and guess you didn't see some of the things that Saule Omarova said that made Kennedy respond that way. He is from an oil and gas industry state and she is on record saying, 'we want them to go bankrupt if we want to tackle climate change, right?” Her ideas on nationalizing a lot of the banking industry are a little bit puzzling as well. To her credit she was right though when she characterized the financial services industry a “quintessential a–hole industry” full of “systematically a–hole-type behavior.” lol
"I did not choose where I was born" No, Saule, but you DID choose to join the Young Communists. Far from being an adult response, it was a whiny child trying to evade responsibility.
I must be missing your point in your criticism of John Kennedy’s comment about Saule Omarova. Just this February she said that she wanted the small oil / coal companies to go bankrupt. And today she absolutely lied about it, saying she meant the opposite. Well, that doesn’t square with the following sentence in her February statement which was ‘… to promote a green economy’.
She couldn’t have meant the opposite of her hope for bankruptcy and then delivered the rationale of “going Green”.
You might be winnowing down on an irrelevant detail of her date and reason of leaving the Soviet Union but she’s been delivering Marxist cheers THIS YEAR. (Or did you think she just came to the US last week ?).
I find Senator Kennedy’s approach to her dogma has about 1000X as much Common Sense as your quip, unless I misunderstand your intended message. Maybe you can explain.
I’ll save my explanations about how NOT to get to a Green energy economy for later and keep this about how vile of a choice Saule Omarova is. Of all the insulting appointment attempts that Biden has pushed, this one is the worst.
NPR's take on JK Rowling (linked in Bari's TGIF)—the author of all the Harry Potter books, and essential to all the Harry Potter movies—was appalling, in summarizing JKR's tweet as supporting “transphobic statements.” NPR is outrageously wrong.
NPR said:
“Rowling has, in recent years, been the subject of controversy. In 2019, she drew condemnation for her tweets in support of Maya Forstater, a researcher whose transphobic statements cost her her job (though that decision was later successfully appealed).”
The statement Maya Forstater was fired for, was that biological sex is immutable and should not be conflated with gender identity. That's what NPR unqualifiedly described as a “transphobic” statement.
The UK court that vindicated Forstater held that her statement was protected by the UK's Equality Act, she should not have been sacked for saying what she did, and that, in saying biological sex is real, Forstater “did not seek to destroy the rights of trans persons.”
For her support of now-vindicated Forstater, JK Rowling is now shunned by the Harry Potter actors whom she made rich and famous. Nice, kids.
And NPR has gone so far over the line into political editorializing in their “news” reporting that NPR is no longer worth listening to, let alone paying for.
Saule Omarova didn't come to America to escape communism. WSJ article circa Oct. 24, "A Banking Regulator Who Hates Banks."
...
By Ms. Omarova’s own account, she immigrated to the U.S. by “pure chance.”
“I was an undergraduate student at Moscow State University and there was at the very end of the Gorbachev era an exchange program between Moscow State and University of Wisconsin Madison,” she told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. She attended Madison for a semester in 1991 and while there “the Soviet Union fell apart. So there I was, a student without anywhere to go back.”
...
She didn't flee communism. She was more than happy to go back to it.
Oh Sarah Jeong. That name rings a bell. Yes. I remember her now. The NYT Editorial Board member who had previously tweeted out "cancelwhitepeople" and "whitemenarebulls***" and ""Oh man it's kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men."
And to think this charming, pink haired piece of work actually graduated from Harvard Law School. John Harvard is rolling in his grave.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45052534
If the only thing you got out of the Omarova story is a lame exchange with Kennedy, perhaps you should look deeper into the matter.
It is not Omoravas burden to shoulder her birthplace. But nice straw man. It is her burden to explain her communist viewpoints in her recent publications. The defense offered in this piece is offensive
You forget about the attack on Project Veritas and Okeefe by the thoroughly corrupt FBI OVER Ashley Biden’s lost diary. Thought experiment: imagine if Trump did this to Don Lemin over Ivankas diary….
The problem with Saule Omarova isn’t the place of her birth but the fact that she retains many of the odious, authoritarian ideas associated with the place of her birth. In short, she’s a leftie nut case—and our absurd president wants to make her Comptroller of the Currency.
On the upcoming Olympics in China, the ongoing genocide of the Uighur people is not a sufficient reason to boycott but the disappearance of a Chinese tennis player just might be.
Why does this strange priority remind of a comment attributed to a different Communist dictator, Joseph Stalin: one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic?
I have to express my frustration on this one. I, like many others, subscribed to Bari's Substack because I sought thoughtful, open-minded, independent thought -- an alternative to the mocking tone of unearned surety which characterizes most "mainstream" Borg media, very notably including the NYT.
This article, while ably written and touching on interesting topics, so clearly enacts most of what is wanting in the aforementioned Borg media that I feel compelled to point out a couple instances. This piece was truly disappointing. Some notes:
- Your understatement in the Kenosha piece is stunning. Quite obviously, per your story, the country's "paper of record" suppressed and purposefully distorted clearly newsworthy material to propagandize people into ignoring or underplaying massive and destructive national riots. This was done so as to mock and characterize as racist concern about these riots, in turn done so as to smear the president and his followers, in turn done so as to shape the election through politically-coordinated deception of the "democratic" populace the NYT aims to control. This is now being used to defame someone who went (perhaps stupidly) to put out these fires. It does not strike me as journalistically appropriate or honest to treat this prolonged and purposeful distortion as a matter of mild academic interest ("something odd") or social-justice pathos related to a handful of people because they were poor. This is deceitful and immoral propaganda that significantly affected national politics.
- Per your description of it, the Ivermectin piece referenced, which is claimed as "definitive," implicitly acknowledges that a large bulk of research on the pill suggests it works to sharply reduce covid infection and symptoms. The criticism is, instead, related to the mechanism by which it works in said studies. It states that IVM works *because of* a happenstance regional correlation (with deworming), not on its own, such that it wouldn't work in, say, the US. This is a tacit acknowledgement of a position that the elite journalistic class as a whole has insulted as conspiratorial for months: That there is clear evidence that this cheap generic has been effective in reducing covid infection and symptoms. Stunningly, after this implicit acknowledgement is made, Nellie offers no criticism or apology, and doesn't make anything explicit. I can only reach the conclusion that this article is deemed "definitive" for opportunistic reasons (consciously or subconsciously), because it is the first well-written piece that A) accepts (as one must) the *obvious evidence of efficacy* while B) maintaining the tone of smug dismissal about the drug. Of course, Scott Alexander may likely be right; he's a brilliant writer and thinker. What's noteworthy is the extraordinary implicit bias, smugness, and avoidance at play in this blurb. It's an exact carbon copy of how the mainstream press treats these subjects (see below).
- As many others have pointed out, your characterization of the Omarova interaction betrays an extraordinary bias and (willful?) lack of understanding of the candidate in question. This is combined with classic elite-media smugness, and played off as a sense of humor and even patriotism.
- You, and many other journalists, owe an enormous *apology* for ragging on (and failing to criticize) Russiagate despite an absolute lack of trustworthy evidence. The corporate press treated the story as absolute damning fact when it was, always, nothing of the kind. (I'm not as familiar with your work; at the very least, you didn't make the slightest attempt at skeptical criticism.) This is absolute, *election-stealing* journalistic malpractice. Journalists deprived the American people of the right to make an informed vote, by systematically lying to them and misrepresenting and overstating reality. American journalism -- really quite close to all of it -- has a moral obligation to apologize profusely, publicly, repeatedly, and with great self-flagellation. Instead, we get a self-absorbed throwaway joke about the time you wasted expending extraordinary bias towards the propagation of a massively distorting calculated lie.
Just a stunning lack of self-awareness on display here. The exact tone of clueless superiority that makes the NYT/Vox/etc so jarring.
My faith in Bari's journalistic acumen has taken a hit this week. First, I learned that for fourteen *months* she was wholly uninformed and misinformed about the facts underlying the Kyle Rittenhouse incidents. Facts that have been available to her for...fourteen *months*.
Now, I see she's provided Nellie Bowles a forum to illustrate *this* kind of cluelessness:
"Dept of Not Her Fault: Speaking of deranged: Sen. John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, seemed confused that a child raised in the Soviet Union might leave for the freedom of America. He said Biden’s pick for currency comptroller, a woman named Saule Omarova, who was born in Kazakhstan: “You used to be a member of a group called The Young Communists. . . . I don’t know whether to call you professor or comrade.” Her elegant (and American) response: “I could not choose where I was born.”
NOWHERE in what Nellie quoted does Sen. Kennedy give *any* indication that he is surprised that "a child raised in the Soviet Union might leave for the freedom of America." So Strike One: trotting out a straw man, and furthermore, thinking (or wanting us to think) that Sen. Kennedy is "deranged" because of something...he DIDN'T say.
Then Nellie portrays as "elegant (and American)" the Communist Omarova's reply, "I could not choose where I was born" which has NOTHING to do with Sen. Kennedy's comment. He did NOT challenge her birthplace, he challenged her choices thereafter.
"You used to be a member of a group called The Young Communists. . . . I don’t know whether to call you professor or comrade."
In fact, joining a group called The Young Communists was very MUCH a choice Biden's Communist nominee DID make. Calling Omarova's response "elegant (and American)" could not be further from the truth. If anything, it was a dishonest response. That's Strike Two.
Alleged journalists don't get three strikes. By the second strike they've forfeited their credibility. They're not journalists. They're advocates or propagandists, or just bad journalist-wannabes.
Googling Nellie Bowles I see that she’s Bari’s girlfriend, maybe more? So I was surprised that Bari’s article in the last day or two showed she was totally misinformed about Kyle Rittenhouse. Wouldn’t Nellie have told Bari what was what since she wrote an article on Kenosha?
I have to say this weeks offering is rather a compendium of leftistism. For example, Beto, a consistently unaccomplished nothing with a rich wife to fund his quests, is not hot in any way and is he really a democrat “star”? Seems this and other blurbs are less informative and more editorial. Hopefully next week will be better.
I was appalled by the fluff comment that you want the year 2017 back, seeing as how it was consumed by the media's propagating the Russiagate hoax. Do you not understand the enormity of the crime that the Dems and their allies committed against the American people and the damage they caused to America's credibility in the world? Anyone paying attention now knows that the US is controlled by a dishonest elite crazy enough to taunt a nuclear-armed power for their selfish political ends.
"Starting next week, TGIF will just be for paying subscribers. Which means in order to yell at me, people have to pay for the pleasure"
I'm a subscriber, so is there a way I can just opt out of your leftist BS take on current events, Ms Bowles? Beto O'Rourke a star and Saule Omarova not a current Marxist? You must be kidding us.
I will be charitable and guess you didn't see some of the things that Saule Omarova said that made Kennedy respond that way. He is from an oil and gas industry state and she is on record saying, 'we want them to go bankrupt if we want to tackle climate change, right?” Her ideas on nationalizing a lot of the banking industry are a little bit puzzling as well. To her credit she was right though when she characterized the financial services industry a “quintessential a–hole industry” full of “systematically a–hole-type behavior.” lol
"I did not choose where I was born" No, Saule, but you DID choose to join the Young Communists. Far from being an adult response, it was a whiny child trying to evade responsibility.
Who's Nellie Bowles?? Bari's evil twin?