CREATING RACISM WHERE IT DOESN’T EXIST: Racial Sensitivity as Condescension.
Archive for 2016
January 19, 2016
BREAK UP BIG TEXTBOOK: Even better, bring your kids home to school.
A big tip-off to a distorted market is a lack of competition. There are basically three big education materials companies: Pearson, a British-based global giant resented almost everywhere it goes; McGraw-Hill; and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Previously, there were dozens if not hundreds of little education presses.
James O’Keefe’s Common Core Videos Are Just The Tip Of The Iceberg, Part I.
TAXES ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Hillary Clinton’s Caymans-tax-dodge hypocrisy.
BUT WHAT PRECISELY ARE THEY LOOKING FOR: Hey, kids — colleges see your social-media profile.
MAKES ABOUT AS MUCH SENSE AS A CHOCOLATE HAMMER: Feminist Foreign Policy.
FASTER PLEASE: Adult Stem-Cell Success in MS.
RIP GLENN FREY, who passed away at the relatively young age 67 based on what sounds like a painful combination of “rheumatoid arthritis, acute ulcerative colitis, and pneumonia,” according to TMZ.
Chris Queen offers up his take on Frey’s six best vocal performances at the PJ Lifestyle Website – and then there are the effortless harmony vocals the band as a whole were capable of, which first attracted the attention of producer Glyn Johns and music impresario David Geffen in 1971.
As I’ve mentioned before, my father was a huge big band and swing music fan. For him, popular music died the moment the wheels of the Beatles’ flight from London touched down at the then-newly renamed Kennedy Airport in February of 1964, and he was reduced to playing the old songs from his voluminous record archives, and catching the old boys in concert when possible – and the chances to do that began to dwindle off sadly all too quickly. For me, a somewhat regular occurrence growing up in the 1970s was trundling out of bed and wandering into the kitchen for breakfast, and asking my dad why he had a somber look on his face, and being told:
- “Because I just heard on the Today Show that Louis Armstrong died.” (1971)
- “Because I just heard on the Today Show that Gene Krupa died.” (1973)
- “Because I just heard on the Today Show that Duke Ellington died.” (1974)
- “Because I just heard that Ozzie Nelson died.” (1975)
- “Because I just heard that Bing Crosby died.” (1977)
- “Because I just heard Guy Lombardo died.” (1977)
As the deaths in short succession of Lemmy, Bowie, and Frey spotlight, we’re now at the age where the stars of our teenage years will be heading off to the big after-party in the sky as well.
And just as my dad heard little in the music of the British Invasion that measured up to his tastes as a swing jazz aficionado, there are very few artists today that I’m hearing that equal what the best artists of the ‘60s and ‘70s were able to accomplish. We were very lucky that the Beatles (thanks to a powerful assist from George Martin) were as talented and as adventurous as they were; their collective shadow over rock music basically lasted from 1963 until about the time of Live Aid, to reference my post from last week.
As for the Eagles themselves, they weren’t really my bag, baby, as the star of the legendary British group Ming Tea would say. And I had a chuckle watching their recent documentary on Netflix last year hearing what Frey claims ostensibly broke up the band in 1980 – a fight between Frey and “Hotel California” songwriter Don Felder, because the latter musician wasn’t respectful enough of future Keating Five star Alan Cranston and his wife at a fundraising gig the Eagles played to line that California Democrat’s campaign coffers. Wikipedia claims Felder sneered, “You’re welcome – I guess,” to Cranston’s wife “as the politician was thanking the band backstage for performing a benefit for his reelection.”
So let me get this straight: throughout the documentary, a running leitmotif is that the band was desperate to add some decent rock under their soaring harmony vocals. The band fires British superstar engineer-producer Glyn Johns (whose previous resume included the Stones, the Who, the Beatles, and Led Zeppelin’s first album) because he emphasized their harmonies and country sound. In response, they bring in Joe Walsh to rock out. And finally, when their other guitarist does something that’s actually rock and roll and utters a punk rock-style sneer to corrupt power, the entire band implodes?
Perfect.
So while the Eagles were often country-flavored pop (especially in their pre-Walsh recordings), their brilliant harmonies and Beatles-esque ability to push the boundaries in the recording studio was nothing to sneeze at. Like the Beatles, their last album before splitting up in 1980 was essentially recorded at gunpoint and the exhaustion is palpable to the listener. And like the Beatles, their solo careers often seemed to pale compared to their group output. Frey did well out of the gate early, scoring a big hit with “Smuggler’s Blues” that producer Michael Mann liked so much, he built a memorable Miami Vice first season episode around and gave Frey a meaty supporting acting role as a mercenary drug smuggling pilot. This was followed by “The Heat is On,” which he contributed to the Beverly Hills Cop soundtrack in 1984. “You Belong to the City,” which he wrote the following year for Miami Vice’s second season debut, focusing on Philip Michael Thomas’s Manhattan expatriate Ricardo Tubbs character, only to watch Don Johnson steal the song for that episode’s show-stopping MTV video sequence. Though by the late ‘80s, Frey’s career seemed to be crashing to earth, and he starred in at least one Jack LaLanne’s Fitness Club TV ad in 1989.
And while I think even their most diehard fans would admit that their recorded output after their 1994 reunion for MTV equaled their highs in the 1970s, at least they were allowed the opportunity to see the band touring once again, before Frey’s untimely death today.
The past month has been a tough one for show-biz deaths. Let’s hope the pace slows down a bit. But sadly, just as my dad was forced to come to grips with 40 years ago, we need to start getting used to the musical stars of our youth checking out on an unfortunately regular basis.
January 18, 2016
METAPHOR ALERT: Building where Bill of Rights was born partially demolished. “A Pennsylvania building believed to be the birthplace of the Bill of Rights was partially demolished earlier this month because developers didn’t know the origin of the site.”
VIRTUE-SIGNALLING IS BECOMING MORE COSTLY: Pro-Immigration Filmmakers Go To Refugee Camp, Get Robbed. “Journalist Maaike Engels and photographer Teun Voeten were attacked at knife point while obtaining footage for their documentary ‘Calais: Welcome to The Jungle.’ The video shows Voeten getting tackled down by three masked men, before one man threatens Engels with a knife.”
WHAT IS HERBAL VIAGRA, ANYWAY? Well, it really could be anything.
NOBODY TELL BERNIE SANDERS ABOUT THIS: Martin Luther King on Marxism.
A NISSAN ROGUE with tracks instead of tires.
LOOKING AT The Nixon Effect.
INTERESTING CO-BRANDING: Jay Leno Drives The First Harley-Davidson Ford F-150.
IF THERE’S A ROCK AND ROLL HEAVEN, You Know They’ve Got A Hell Of A Band.
KURT SCHLICHTER: We Are Sick of Paying the Price for Elitists to Feel Smug.
A lot of us complain that our elite betters are ignoring our concerns, but nothing could be further from the truth. They have heard us all right. They have gotten together to come up with a solution to the many problems we have brought to their attention. And that solution is for us to shut up and keep sucking up whatever abuse they choose to heap upon us.
It’s all about empowering the elite to feel smug. And about sticking us normal with the check.
Upset about establishment virtue signaling that requires us to take limitless numbers of Third World denizens into our country? Mad when they take our jobs? Of course, aliens don’t take the elite’s jobs – for example, we lawyers get to bar people who don’t pass the Bar from horning in on our action, but if you’re an American who wants to build houses for a decent wage, well, too bad and so sad!
And if these uninvited guests change your neighborhood so that you can’t read the window signs, well, learn to accept diversity. Of course, these visitors never change what’s inside the elite’s gated communities – except when they change the rich kids’ diapers. . . .
Your life is not a priority. It’s not even a consideration.
Hence the Trump phenomenon. The GOP could have coopted it if they’d been smarter — but it would have interfered with the smugness.
BRING BACK DDT: Zika Warning Spotlights Latin America’s Fight Against Mosquito-Borne Diseases.
In the campaign against mosquitoes, Brazil has deployed soldiers to destroy habitats where the insects thrive. Colombia is releasing swarms of mosquitoes treated with bacteria that limit their capacity to spread disease. Mexico is testing the first vaccine against dengue fever, a mosquito-borne virus raging throughout the region.
Yet at each turn, mosquitoes are outwitting their human opponents, a challenge highlighted by the United States’ decision to advise pregnant women to postpone traveling to more than a dozen Latin American or Caribbean countries and Puerto Rico where mosquitoes are rapidly expanding the reach of Zika, the virus linked to a surge in cases of infants born with brain damage.
Our treatment of DDT suggests that there were some brain problems already.
FIGHTING INEQUALITY by making Harvard free! “The idea of free tuition paid for by endowment income has also gained traction in Congress. College endowments held $516 billion in 2014, with 74 percent of the money held by 11 percent of institutions, according to a Congressional Research Service report in December. The average return in 2014 was 15.5 percent, the report said, but the colleges spent only 4.4 percent. By law, those are tax-exempt earnings. Lawmakers have proposed requiring that about 90 colleges with endowments of $1 billion or more spend about 25 percent of their annual earnings for tuition assistance — or forfeit their tax exemptions.”
Gosh, what an interesting idea.
IT MAY NOT BE A SMOKING GUN BUT, BOY, IS IT GONNA HURT! New email release shows Hillary resisted urging by careerists at State Department to use state.gov email and equipment. Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross has the story, based on a document release forced by federal court.
MUSLIM TEENS STONE TRANSGENDER WOMEN IN GERMANY: ‘THEY ARE BARBARIANS.’ “Yet the LGBT crowd and the U.S. media is pretty much silent. Weird, that.”
As Mark Steyn wrote a decade ago, “So you’re nice to gays and the Inuit? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of fellows like that, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti masochists.”
WELL, THIS IS COMFORTING: “The last time the major political parties disintegrated, back in the 1850s, the nation had to go through a bloody convulsion to reconstitute itself. The festering issue of slavery so dominated politics that nothing else is remembered about the dynamics of the period. Today, the festering issue is corruption and racketeering, but none of the candidates uses those precise terms to describe what has happened to us.”
RACIAL SENSITIVITY AS CONDESCENSION: At Commentary, Michael Rubin reprints a letter in Yale Alumni magazine by Robert Hinton, Yale Ph.D., and father of a class of 2011 alumnus:
As soon as my daughter was accepted into the Class of 2011, she began receiving communications from various offices at Yale that sent her three unintended messages: as an African American, (1) you don’t really belong at Yale; (2) you will never be comfortable at Yale; and (3) to survive the Yale experience, you will have to separate yourself culturally and psychologically. Of course, being my daughter, she ignored this stuff and spent four years having more fun than I usually allow.
If you tell people, before they arrive, that they are moving into a racist experience, you shouldn’t be surprised if they begin looking for racism the moment they land on campus and find it, even where it may not exist. The kinds of black students who come to Yale have already developed strategies to survive “white” situations.
A heavy-handed, paternalistic effort to make them “comfortable” at Yale may create more problems than it solves. When these students move on beyond Yale, they won’t find a “black house” where they can hide.
Now that there is “minority” bureaucracy in place, it will fight for its continued existence even after it has achieved obsolescence. Someone needs to ask if what was necessary and appropriate in 1969 is still necessary and appropriate.
Read the whole thing.