Society

Cockburn blinked twice when he saw that Prince Harry, the not-so-honorable Duke of Sussex will receive the Pat Tillman Award for service. At the Excellence in Sports Performance Yearly Awards, or ESPYs, Prince Harry will be granted the award for his strong connection to sports and for serving the way Pat Tillman did.  Social media reactions to this news did not disappoint: "what sport did he play professionally again" "that is absolute treason" "is this a joke?" and "profoundly unamerican move imo." Many in the comments section were quick to remind the haters that Harry founded the Invictus Games, a “community for all international wounded, injured or sick servicemen and women, serving or veteran.” Prince Harry founded the Invictus Games in 2013.

It takes a master to untangle the web of drama being spun at the Washington Post these days. Fortunately, Cockburn knows a thing or two.  The recent drama concerns Sir William Lewis’s appointment as CEO, handpicked by owner Jeff Bezos, and the subsequent attempt by Lewis to dissuade journalists from covering his role in a long-running British phone hacking scandal (he denies any involvement), which supposedly contributed to the recent and abrupt departure of former editor Sally Buzbee. Add that to the earlier stories of Cameron Barr stepping down in 2023 as managing editor after nineteen years and the lawsuit filed by former Post journalist Felicia Sonmez in 2021, who went ham on her colleagues on Twitter and was subsequently fired.

We are shifting from the early era of space exploration to a more serious phase extending ever further from Earth’s orbit, focused on key opportunities such as mining and manufacturing as well as military purposes. This newly expanded playing field will determine not only who rules in space, but who ends up dominating Earth. The protagonists include some familiar faces — the US, Russia and the European Union — but much competition will come from emerging powers, notably India and China, both of which look upon the “final frontier” as critical to their economic and military futures. Yet the rise of non-state space entrepreneurs, notably SpaceX, has introduced a fresh and potentially decisive factor to the new space race.

Pope Francis this week apologized for decrying the "frociaggine" — or "faggotry" — in the Vatican and in Catholic seminaries for the second time in a matter of weeks. On Tuesday in a private meeting, Francis mentioned the "air of faggotry" in the Vatican, which followed his May 20 comment that "nella chiesa c'è troppa aria di frociaggine" — "in our Church there is too much of an air of faggotry." The Spectator reached out to Frédéric Martel, an anchor at Radio France, a professor at the ZHdK University in Zurich and the author of twelve books, including In the Closet of the Vatican, his explosive New York Times bestseller about the widespread hypocritical homosexual behavior rife in the higher echelons of the Church.

President Joe Biden sat down for an interview with TIME magazine in the White House last week. The questions centered around foreign affairs, with interviewers Massimo Calabresi and Sam Jacobs asking about D-Day, Ukraine, Israel and Hamas, nuclear power, China, inflation, tariffs and immigration. Back in March Americans generally agreed that the economy and foreign affairs were weak points in Biden’s administration. The TIME interview is unlikely to change anyone’s mind. Cockburn identified a few overarching themes: Biden accused TIME of misreporting and leaving his accomplishments unreported. The first accusation: “The Russian military has been decimated. You don’t write about that. It’s been freaking decimated.” Another theme: senility.

Before taking a slight hit to his wealth last year, Vivek Ramaswamy was one of America’s twenty youngest billionaires. His latest venture — a $3 million investment to save BuzzFeed — has Cockburn questioning how he’s made it this far in business.  Last Thursday, news broke that Ramaswamy has acquired a 7.7 percent stake in the ailing digital media company, briefly sending its stocks soaring over 80 percent. The former presidential candidate had apparently been snatching up shares since March, but BuzzFeed, like everyone else, only found out last week. Since then, Ramaswamy has increased his stake to 8.37 percent, becoming the company’s second largest Class-A shareholder.

The mass freakout over Kansas City Chiefs placekicker Harrison Butker’s commencement speech to Benedictine College is a revelatory incident. For one, it’s another sign of the impatient obliviousness of our media landscape. The speech is a mere twenty minutes long, but it’s readily apparent that most commentators on the remarks didn’t bother to watch it. CNN’s Jonah Goldberg put the speech in the context of a reactionary attitude among men toward women in the workplace, which is just absolutely ludicrous if you watch the speech — most of which is an indictment of the current Catholic priesthood — in a segment where the CNN commentators ordered Butker to “stick to kicking.

Just five short years ago, Samsung released the first mainstream folding phone with their debut Galaxy Fold. It had some quirks — a small, slim, external display, thick bezels, an odd asymmetrical notch and an unprecedented $1,980 price tag — but what mattered most was the screen. Open the slim, TV-remote-shaped phone and you gazed upon a great, wide, 7.3-inch screen, bigger than any you could carry in your pocket before, with a folding crease in the middle. You could multitask, watch full-screen YouTube videos and browse the web as you would on a tablet. That is, you could do so temporarily. Early review units catastrophically broke at even the mention of a grain of sand, creating a run of viral tweets and videos.

What is happening in Gaza now provides a glimpse of how all wars may be fought in the future — with artificial intelligence. In The Spectator last November, I wrote about an Israeli airstrike that brought down a six-story building in Gaza City, reportedly killing more than forty civilians. One of the residents, a man named Mahmoud Ashour, dug through the rubble with his bare hands, trying to find his daughter and her four children, a girl aged eight and three boys of six, two and six months — all killed. The Israeli military would not tell me why the building was hit, beyond saying that Gaza’s armed groups put their military infrastructure amid civilians, but Amnesty International said there had been a single member of Hamas living there.

British fabulist Johann Hari is at it again. After revealing he used Ozempic to lose forty pounds in his tell-all book, the alleged journalist still hasn’t shed his penchant for telling porkies. While the miracle drug made him “listless,” “strangely muted” and “emotionally dulled,” it hasn’t killed his energy for dreaming up facts.  In his latest book, Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs, Hari alleged that food critic Jay Rayner had lost pleasure in eating at even the finest Parisian establishments after taking Ozempic. The catch: Rayner has never used Ozempic or any other weight-loss drug.

Have you noticed that whenever the conversation turns to the subject of Charles Darwin, an extraordinary amount of dogmatism is often on view?  What’s curious is that the dogmatism is patent on both sides of the debate, on the side of the Darwinists just as much as the side of Darwin’s critics.  I have often noted with amusement how sensitive to criticism the Darwinian faithful are. Any hint of a shadow of dissent and they rush for the garlic, the wooden stake and a signed copy of On the Origin of Species. I think I understand the psychology of the response. They are terrified lest acknowledging the strength of this or that criticism start them down the road toward creationism and teaching the Book of Genesis in Biology 101. Where does the truth lie?

Western governments seem ill-prepared to grapple with rapidly advancing technology. Watch any congressional hearing where a crusty congressman tries to keep pace with Silicon Valley’s top “autists” if you need further evidence — and read Spencer A. Klavan’s analysis of the high-skill but low-status rejects uniting into a formidable social class. The Silent Generation and boomers simply cannot keep up. The Space Race is back on — and tycoons are eager to cash in on the final frontier. Shane Cashman dives into the new wild west of explorers and entrepreneurs commercializing the great unknown. Lionel Shriver brings us back to earth with a look at the electrical grid and our government’s push for green energy and electric vehicles.

Dr. Jonathan Jiang dreams of beaming an easy-to-read message into space before civilization collapses. He’s run the simulations to test humanity’s self-destruction rate. According to his computers, there’s a 0.1 percent chance that humanity destroys itself in the not-so-distant future. He’s even more pessimistic than Stephen Hawking, who bowed out of public life saying, “I don’t think we will survive another 1,000 years without escaping beyond our fragile planet.” Jiang, who works for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, co-authored the 2022 paper “A Beacon in the Galaxy,” which argues for the importance of streamlining the communications we send into space hoping they might be intercepted by an interplanetary species.

During lockdown, crime shot up around the country. Most cities have seen their numbers come down — most aside from our nation’s capital. Why? In our editorial, we ask what’s being done — it might not surprise you that the answer is “not much.” Matt McDonald, a resident of Navy Yard, one of the worst-hit areas, says that his neighborhood is a failed experiment in gentrification — and asks if help is on the way. And Tim Rice looks at why and how DC got to where it is right now. Elsewhere, Patrick Hauf does a ride-along with the Dallas Police Department, and finds an alternative approach to policing that could be a model for departments around the country.

Cancel culture is back, after all! Ronna McDaniel has today been dropped as a paid contributor by NBC News, according to Semafor's Maxwell Tani. Puck’s Dylan Byers reported earlier this afternoon that executives were considering canning the former RNC chairwoman after virtually every host at sister network MSNBC threw tantrums about her very recent appointment. "Execs are deliberating over details; announcement pending. Meanwhile, McDaniel is seeking legal representation," Byers tweeted. https://twitter.com/DylanByers/status/1772672463790547271 McDaniel's hiring was only announced by NBC on Friday, two weeks after she had stepped down as chairwoman of the Republican National Committee. As the ax fell today, she has lasted under half a Scaramucci.