Society

I pulled into the Walmart parking lot a little after midnight. Apart from the black Chevy Tahoe I was there to rendezvous with, it was almost empty. The driver, who I only knew as SouthernSigFan7 from the Texas gun forum we both frequent, was standing to the side of the SUV with a smartphone in one hand and a gun case in the other. The AR-15 I was about to buy from him was in that case. I could see he was getting his crypto wallet ready to receive the $2,000 in cryptocurrency I was about to send him to pay for the rifle. This sounds super shady — two total strangers meeting anonymously in a parking lot to exchange crypto for guns — but it’s actually far superior to the old instant background check system it replaced.

San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone’s recent announcement that Nancy Pelosi has been barred from receiving communion brought fresh to Cockburn’s mind a memory he has of once having accidentally attended church with the Speaker of the House (and lived to tell about it). Sometimes alcohol can stir in one a devotional feeling, and so it was that Cockburn found himself at Mass one day at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Georgetown, seated a few rows behind Pelosi. When the time came, Cockburn refrained from receiving communion, but wondered as he watched Pelosi head toward the altar whether anyone should tackle her to the ground to prevent the sacrilege.

The outrageous arrest of Cardinal Joseph Zen last week — together with the Vatican’s weak response — presages dark days for Catholics under Beijing’s authority. Nicknamed “the conscience of Hong Kong,” Cardinal Joseph Zen is known and respected throughout the world for his fearless defense of Chinese Catholics and his opposition to communism. As bishop of Hong Kong, he encouraged and celebrated annual masses on June 4 for the victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre (participation in a Tiananmen Square memorial was one of the “offenses” that put Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai in jail last year). This year, the diocese of Hong Kong has canceled the June 4 Tiananmen Square memorial masses, for the first time in over two decades.

Who should be the custodians of science? For centuries, scientists themselves have been. Now, their custodianship is under threat. Science has long operated as a sort of guild, with the guild managing its own practice and traditions. This holds for the guild’s continuity: admission of aspiring members to the guild is controlled by the guild itself. For the sciences, aspiring members must clear a competitive series of hurdles: apprenticeship (graduate school), journeyman (post-doctoral fellow and assistant professor), then full membership (tenured professor). For the past few decades, science’s stewardship has been shifting into the hands of an arriviste managerial class with no idea what science is or any real respect for it.

News that billionaire Elon Musk is buying Twitter has shaken the world to the point that left-wingers are threatening to deprive us of their every thought by quitting the platform. My guess is this blustering will take those celebrities about as far away as they went when they pledged to leave the country if Trump was elected president. And though Twitter is likely far from rid of the Jameela Jamils and Chelsea Handlers of the world, even a brief reprieve from the balderdash could do us wonders. Last weekend, I had the privilege of experiencing a one-of-a-kind event at my local theater. “Rick Benjamin’s Paragon Ragtime Orchestra” came to town and performed the original musical score to Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr., a 1928 silent film.

Of all the hilarious freakouts over Elon Musk's bid to buy Twitter, my personal favorite comes from journalism professor and self-styled "NYC insider" Jeff Jarvis (as noticed by The Spectator's Bill Zeiser last week). Jarvis tweeted — and I quote — "Today on Twitter feels like the last evening in a Berlin nightclub at the twilight of Weimar Germany." One imagines Mehdi Hasan and Molly Jong-Fast manically jazz-dancing as the Bruenigs belt out a song from a cabaret stage. And surely nothing calls down the specter of fascist totalitarianism quite like Musk's pledge to end Big Tech censorship. Because that's what the Nazis did, right? They kicked down the door to the nightclub, stormed through the horrified crowd, and barked, "ATTENTION PLEASE!

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall in the C-suite at Twitter on Thursday afternoon. The social media company’s San Francisco headquarters reportedly played host to an all-hands meeting in which concerned employees were given the chance to ask questions about billionaire Elon Musk’s offer to buy their company. Their panic is not entirely without merit — Musk has floated the idea of turning Twitter’s building into a homeless shelter. Yet it's worth noting that Twitter’s employees have been told they can work from home indefinitely, and their questions were delivered to a largely empty building via the messaging app Slack.

We know that government’s knack for finding something wrong with everything rivals even the most stereotypical mother-in-law. But the relentless fault-finding’s latest victim may surprise you: federal prosecutors have fined a green energy company $8 million and slapped on a five-year probation period after bald and golden eagles died on its wind farms. There is now no such thing as “clean energy.” Even so-called “green energy” is tinged with the blood of birds. Just when you thought the war on energy couldn’t get any more ridiculous, Joe Biden's Department of Justice has sucker-punched one of its own golden boys.

When I think of Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, I think of Darth Vader. It’s not that Agrawal himself reminds me of the Star Wars protagonist, grave concerns over Twitter’s handling of free speech notwithstanding. I just can't help but think of the nervous imperial commander who receives Vader as he arrives to inspect the Death Star II at the opening of Return of the Jedi. “Lord Vader, this is an unexpected pleasure. We are honored by your presence,” the commander says, with a lump in his throat. The Dark Lord of the Sith flatly replies, “You may dispense with the pleasantries, Commander. I’m here to put you back on schedule.

“Just think about it. Our whole world is sitting there on a computer. It’s in the computer, everything: your, your DMV records, your, your social security, your credit cards, your medical records. It’s all right there. Everyone is stored in there. It’s like this little electronic shadow on each and every one of us, just, just begging for someone to screw with, and you know what? They’ve done it to me, and you know what? They’re gonna do it to you.” — Sandra Bullock as Angela Bennett, The Net, 1995 A few weeks ago, I called the local Domino’s. The man who answered asked whether my address is an apartment or a private residence. I live in a fairly remote Michigan community of about 8,000 people.

The pandemic is not quite over, but we are getting used to its inconveniences. What disaster will be next? An antibiotic-resistant strain of the bubonic plague? Climate collapse? Coronal mass ejection? Will the next catastrophe be natural — perhaps a massive volcanic eruption, the likes of which we have not seen for more than two centuries, since Tambora in 1815? Or will it be a manmade calamity — nuclear war or a cyberattack? And might we inadvertently descend into a new form of AI-enabled totalitarianism in our efforts to ward off such calamities? To all these potential disasters it is impossible to attach more than made-up probabilities. So what can we do about them? The best answer would be that we should strive to imagine them.