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Tonight is the start of the second season for AMC’s Revolutionary War spy drama – Turn. The Wall Street Journal gave it a good send off.
As the second season begins of AMC’s lush and often tense Revolutionary War drama “Turn: Washington‘s Spies,” it’s the autumn of 1777. The young Long Island farmer turned secret rebel Abraham Woodhull (Jamie Bell) is looking for a way to collect information on British military strength in occupied New York City and transmit it via his friend on George Washington’s staff, Ben Tallmadge (Seth Numrich), to the general. Ranged against Abe and other members of the little anti-British spy network called the Culper Ring is the might of the king’s army in America, bolstered by loyalist colonials.
The patriots’ chief adversaries include the cultured and debonair British espionage mastermind Maj. John Andre (JJ Feild), who is based in occupied Philadelphia. There is also a sadistic killing machine, the disgraced British officer John Graves Simcoe (Samuel Roukin), who has been recalled to duty by a reluctant Andre to train a guerrilla-type force to eradicate colonial spies and other enemies of the crown.
With those basics in mind, newcomers to the series—which returns Monday with a two-hour premiere—can just let the pleasures of this handsome and well acted period piece wash over them. It doesn’t hurt at all, for instance, that “Turn” is filmed in Virginia and that this week, for instance, it makes use of authentically appointed rooms and buildings in and around Colonial Williamsburg and at the College of William and Mary. Even the accents—mostly British or versions thereof, with a smattering of Irish, Scottish and others appropriate for the time and place—promote the sense that we are peeking behind the curtain of life as it really happened, not watching another gimcrack re-creationof the bandaged head, flute and limp sort. …
Kevin Williamson writes on another aspect of the left’s “rape project.” This is a further reason for the Rolling Stone UVA fraud.
… the major obstacles to the progressive project are the rule of law, our constitutional order, and competing centers of power outside the state, all of which are on the progressive enemies list: corporations, churches, private schools, tradition-minded social organizations, etc. It takes a certain highly cultivated view of the world to see the Boy Scouts as the enemy.
Put another way: Progressives have had great success shouting “Racist!” to end debate; they hope to add shouting “Rapist.” But this will be difficult to do if rape remains — as it should remain — primarily a matter for the criminal-justice system rather than a nebulous social concern that can be shaped with distortion and exaggeration or, in the case of Rolling Stone, with outright fiction.
This is, to reiterate, not the result of conspiracy with malice aforethought, but of something much worse: a culture of totalitarianism.
Consider the global-warming argument. That argument has a scientific piece, an economic piece, and a political piece. (And other pieces, too.) The Left has for some time tried to discredit arguments about the economic and political aspects of global warming as rejection of science, of “denialism,” a term coined expressly for its association with Holocaust denial. That has not worked, partly because people understand that the political questions and the scientific questions are different questions, but also because the scientific case has been so exaggerated and overstated, generally by non-scientists, that people have come to regard it with some skepticism. What the Left would very much like to do at this point is to silence dissent, for example by pressuring media outlets to suppress criticism (“There aren’t ‘two sides’ to the science, nor to the policy response,” the same conflation of the scientific and the political) or by simply locking up those who disagree in prison, the response favored by Robert Kennedy Jr., writers at Gawker, and certain highly regarded philosophy professors, to mention nothing of Harry Reid, who was quite recently the Senate majority leader. (Mrs. Gandhi was not the first or the last to get that big idea.) This would require doing violence to the constitutional order — beginning with repealing the First Amendment, which Senator Reid attempted — which would be, in ordinary times, a difficult thing to do. But if you believe that the world is ending — and you can convince others that the world is ending, too — then there is nothing that one could not justify doing to prevent that.
But there isn’t a global-warming emergency, at least not one that is going to be fixed by throwing AEI scholars in jail. …
Manhattan Contrarian posts on the looming disaster of federal student loans.
While our federal government continues to chase many mortgage lenders for so-called “predatory lending” practices, perhaps we should check in on the situation of far and away the biggest predatory lender of all, the federal government itself. Its most odious practices are in the area of student loans. I find the term “predatory” a stretch when applied to a mortgage loan for a house, given that in the worst case the borrower got to live in the house, and even if he gets foreclosed and has a deficiency balance he can normally discharge that in bankruptcy. Not a pleasant process, but sometimes life can be tough. Compare that to federal student loans, where the government lends inexperienced 18 – 24 year-olds open-ended amounts, often for dubious and overpriced trade schools, and then flatly forbids discharge in bankruptcy. Many borrowers’ finances are ruined for life, and they don’t even have marketable job skills to show for it. Now that’s predatory! …
The student loan debacle is just one of the areas students are being failed by the modern university system. Victor Davis Hanson has more.
Modern American universities used to assume four goals.
First, their general education core taught students how to reason inductively and imparted an aesthetic sense through acquiring knowledge of Michelangelo, the Battle of Gettysburg, “Medea” and “King Lear,” Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” and astronomy and Euclidean geometry.
Second, campuses encouraged edgy speech and raucous expression — and exposure to all sorts of weird ideas and mostly unpopular thoughts. College talk was never envisioned as boring, politically correct megaphones echoing orthodox pieties.
Third, four years of college trained students for productive careers. Implicit was the university’s assurance that its degree was a wise career investment.
Finally, universities were not monopolistic price gougers. They sought affordability to allow access to a broad middle class that had neither federal subsidies nor lots of money.
The American undergraduate university is now failing on all four counts.
A bachelor’s degree is no longer proof that any graduate can read critically or write effectively. National college-entrance-test scores have generally declined the last few years, and grading standards have as well. …