Fighter vs. Failer. Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. Robinette was a bad law student and he did not make a good lawyer, bouncing from one firm to another, working briefly as a public defender without leaving any impression, and managing a pool. Successful young attorneys on their way up do not take jobs managing swimming pools. Instead Biden went into politics and continued failing his way upward by crawling through the corrupt underbelly of Delaware politics. His first bid for the White House failed miserably, so did his second bid, and it seemed like he would become just another aging senator looking for an exit strategy to a lobbying firm or an industry trade group that would pay him a lot of money. The End of Sports. With an average of less than 10 million viewers, the series commanded the attention of some 3% of Americans. The 32% drop in viewers came at a time when people, many stuck at home, are obsessively watching television. What were the other 13 million who had been watching last year do? The one thing they weren’t doing was watching a game they had once cared about. And the NBA finals ratings dropped 51%. And the NFL is facing its own ratings struggles as are other sports. Sports is still a metaphor for America, but a very different kind of country in which talent doesn’t matter, but monetizing radical aggrieved victimhood is how the game is really played and won. Washington State is a worrisome window into the future. One Seattle teacher took the opportunity on Veteran's Day to tell her eighth graders in a videotaped online presentation that ‘Our country is divided, our leader is pushing that, he’s not an advocate for peace like Obama was’, before going on to quote the lyrics to John Lennon’s vapid ‘Imagine’. I’m reliably told that even this was a model of rhetorical brilliance compared to the offerings elsewhere in the Seattle public school system, which included from the militant ‘Uniformed aggression is structural and embedded into all aspects of society.'
NY Times increasingly staffed with hires from “outlets that practiced advocacy journalism.” A New York Magazine deep dive portrays the NY Times as basically your college newspaper, in which progressive internal politics are driven by “insurrectionist” new hires. Many of the insurrectionists were coming from places the Times didn’t traditionally recruit from, like new digital-media companies and outlets that practiced advocacy journalism, and part of the challenge had become integrating those employees into the Timesian way of operating…. Of all the fronts on which the Times was being pushed to change, the strongest insurrectionary energy was coming from legions of newsroom-adjacent employees in digital jobs that didn’t exist a decade ago….