Archive for 2017
March 12, 2017
AT AMAZON, save in Sports Nutrition.
Plus, deals in Baby and Child Care.
And browse the Amazon Sexual Wellness Shop.
WELL, HE IS A SMART LAWYER: Ted Cruz may have discovered a way to totally change Obamacare without 60 Senate votes.
NO. NEXT QUESTION? DOES NEW VIDEO IN THE MICHAEL BROWN CASE CHANGE ANYTHING? “So that’s the gist of the new claim: Mike Brown was trading drugs for cigarillos but, for some reason, walked out without his part of the deal that night and came back the next day to get them…In other words, a series of very bad decisions by Michael Brown after he left the store the 2nd time played a far more proximate role in his death. Curiously, the NY Times doesn’t mention any of those details.”
SJWs RUIN EVERYTHING: ‘Game of Thrones’ Actor Quits Twitter After Getting Blasted in Diversity Debate.
J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: Federal Judge Blasts Unprofessional Behavior of Justice Department Lawyers: “Another federal judge has scalded the unprofessional conduct of Justice Department lawyers inside the Civil Rights Division. The first time it was perjury. After that, it was unethical conduct in a trial against New Orleans police officers. Now it’s unprofessional behavior and bigotry toward the South in a federal court trial challenging Texas legislative districts.”
Read the whole thing.
LATE-NIGHT LEGEND DAVID LETTERMAN’S UGLY PERSONALITY NO LAUGHING MATTER, FORMER COLLEAGUES SAY:
The tale of Tim Long, one of several head writers hired during the show’s run, was typical. Unable to deal with the host’s constant rejections and dark moods, Long took to chewing Coke cans — and swallowing pieces of tin.
* * * * * * * *
Comic Rich Hall, a writer for Letterman’s NBC show, was floored by the host’s new, abrasive nature when he appeared as a guest. Hall followed actress Andie MacDowell, who had just flopped in her segment. Before the cameras came on, Letterman leaned over and snarled, “How’d you like to be married to that c—?”
* * * * * * * *
The feeling of foreboding was exacerbated by the 1980 cancellation of his NBC morning show, “The David Letterman Show,” within months of its debut.
His girlfriend at the time and for years to come, Merrill Markoe, was a brilliantly inventive comedy writer and instrumental in shaping the show…[Markoe] told the author about the resulting fallout.
“If it weren’t for you and your crazy ideas,” Letterman shouted at her on the street, “I’d still have a talk show like John Davidson!”
It’s a comment funny only in retrospect.
“A veteran staffer who served under Letterman through both his late-night shows” quoted in the article “observed that getting close to the boss was perilous: ‘There comes a moment when he turns on you.’”
Shades of Letterman’s idol turned boss Johnny Carson, who, by the end of the 1980s had dispatched both Joan Rivers and longtime business advisor Henry Bushkin to the Los Angeles-equivalent of Siberia, and whose inner-circle at the time of his retirement, at least as depicted by biographer Laurence Leamer was down to his wife Alexis and Ed McMahon. Both Leamer and later Bushkin describe Carson as a miserable man when the cameras weren’t rolling. As Rob Long, who knows a thing or two about television, wrote in his 2014 review of Bushkin’s book:
We’re all primed to hear stories of movie stars and celebrities and their creepy emotional problems. But for actors—who, after all, appear only on screen, in character, or in a few carefully stage-managed publicity appearances—it’s easy to cover up the seams of a psychotic or broken-down personality.
But Johnny appeared on television every weeknight. He was playing himself—or, rather, an idealized version of himself: jovial, chummy, witty, warm. The strain of that kind of acting must have been monumental. It’s no wonder that real movie stars—Jimmy Stewart, Michael Caine, a whole bushel of A-listers—respected him so much. In one of the best stories in a book filled with great stories, when Johnny arrives late to a very exclusive industry event filled with movie stars, he lights up the room. He wasn’t just the king of late night television. He was the king of managing not to appear like the rat bastard he clearly was.
Of course, in the ‘60s, every guy in America wanted to be as cool, handsome, and outwardly charming as Carson. (My businessman dad, who never missed at least the first half-hour of every episode of the Tonight Show during its entire run also owned a couple of Carson-branded sportcoats in the early 1970s, as I recall.) I doubt few guys watching Letterman, even during Late Night’s mid-‘80s peak, wanted to be Letterman, with his famously prickly on-air persona and all of its weird tics. But the brand of irony that Letterman’s show launched is absolutely omnipresent in American culture. Or as Markoe warned Salon in a 2015 interview:
More broadly: Does the knowing, ironic style you and the others traded in in the ‘80s seem to have filtered more deeply into comedy in specific and American culture in general? Do you see or hear echoes of it now as you go through your day?
Yes. It’s frequently the language of advertising and corporate P.R. now. It is the voice of what [musician Andy Prieboy of the rock group Wall of Voodoo, her longtime companion] calls “Your buddy the corporation.” Everyone’s hip. Everyone’s ironic. Everyone who is selling you something wants you to know they have the same limitations and daily strife that you do. You definitely should be wary when you hear this voice now. It’s not to be trusted. Unless you’re in the market for an aluminum cookware set or an Apple watch.
And politics as well – to those of us who didn’t drink the Second Coming Kool-Aid in 2008, Obama’s eight years frequently seemed like a postmodern Letterman or Saturday Night Live sketch come to life, from his Ten Commands-like shtick while receiving the Democratic nomination to his interviews with YouTube “stars” who bathe in milk and Cheerios to his vicious “The 1980s are now calling” Letterman-esque putdown of Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential debate, when Romney warned of the geopolitical dangers of Russia. And Obama flashed more than a hint of Jerry Seinfeld’s “it’s a show about nothing” detached wry bemusement throughout it all. (Perhaps the apocalyptic doomsday-fury of the hypersensitive SJW screaming campus garbagebabies* is in part explained as a reaction to a generation of detached leftwing irony — or nihilism with a happy face, to paraphrase Allan Bloom.)
And yet, between the earlier, funnier SNL of the 1970s, the 1980s-era Letterman, and Jerry Seinfeld in the ’90s having set the tone of the American overculture, the left seemed astonished that another veteran of NBC television could have bested the plonking Hillary Clinton. Funny, that.
* A registered trademark of Iowahawk industries.
PROGRESS: Why Your Dad’s 30-Year-Old Stereo System Sounds Better Than Your New One. “The receiver engineers have to devote the lion’s share of their design skills and budget to making the features work. Every year receiver manufacturers pay out more and more money (in the form of royalties and licensing fees) to Apple, Audyssey, Bluetooth, HD Radio, XM-Sirius, Dolby, DTS and other companies, and those dollars consume an ever bigger chunk of the design budget. The engineers have to make do with whatever is left to make the receiver sound good.”
MATTHEW CONTINETTI: Republican Health Care Bill ‘Is Basically a Place Setter.’
Continetti explained that the bill shows a move away from Obamacare and a shift toward “a more center-right model.”
He reiterated the importance of Trump continuing with other reforms that he promised during the 2016 campaign.
“But, it’s important that Trump follow through with some of the other reforms that he called for on the campaign trail, including the critical reform of being able to shop for your insurance across state lines,” Continetti said.
Yep. Trump’s base will stick with him through anything, except a feeling that he’s betrayed them.
MCCARTHYISM UPDATE: “Rep. Keith Ellison (D., Minn.) claimed on Friday there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, although he admitted he had no evidence to back his claims.” I think Keith Ellison is on the payroll of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, though I admit I have no evidence to back my claims. But I think it needs to be investigated.
ELI LAKE: Trump’s Run Of Dumb Luck: “This time his wild accusation inadvertently prompted an Obama senior intelligence official to puncture a narrative that was consuming his presidency. Economists call this kind of thing a moral hazard. In politics we call it dumb luck.”
Maybe he’s not so dumb. Naw, I’m assured that’s crazy talk.
THE HUNT FOR JOSEPH KONY CONTINUES: Green Berets continue to support operations to capture the commander of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).
Kony is still thought to be hiding in Kafia Kingi, known as “K2” by the U.S. military, moving into uninhabited parts of CAR when pursuit comes too close. In K2, seasonal markets buy and sell the spoils of poaching, funneling them to international smugglers. Much of it ends up on the black market in Asia.
The fight to end this trade is intertwined with the fight against the LRA…
Here’s some background from 2012.
THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: Flashback. The New York Times Uses Science to Predict Trump Election 2016 Loss.
ONE OF THESE THINGS IS NOT LIKE THE OTHER:
“The Deep State Is a Figment of Steve Bannon’s Imagination.”
—Headline, the Politico, Thursday.
“Rogue Twitter Accounts Fight to Preserve the Voice of Government Science.”
—Headline, The Intercept, yesterday.
As Melissa Mackenzie of the American Spectator tweets, “Find them. Fire them,” adding, “Dear President Trump, It’s time to go Sherman on these unelected government bureaucrats. Sincerely, Taxpayers.”
Faster, please.
I HOPE IT’S BETTER THAN DETROIT’S: Report from the 2017 Geneva Auto Show.
AT AMAZON, deals in Car Care.
Plus, save in Wellness and Relaxation.
Plus, today only at Amazon: Up to 20% off on Lucid 5″ Gel Memory Foam Mattress.
And, also today only: Save on Wilson X Connected Basketballs.
Also, Spring forward with select Kindle books at 80% off.
And, don’t forget, brand new Lightning Deals, updated every hour.
THEY’RE ALWAYS IN THE LAST PLACE YOU LOOK: NASA Just Found a Lost Lunar Spacecraft After 8 years; We’re now capable of finding the exact location of a small car orbiting the moon.
SEE, I’VE NEVER TRUSTED ANDROID: Malware found preinstalled on 38 Android phones used by 2 companies.
A small group of Jews was assigned to a factory owned by Oskar Schindler. They, too, expected to die within months. But as viewers of the film Schindler’s List know, the stern-faced boss saved more than a thousand of his employees.
The remainder became part of the Six Million murdered by the Nazis. Most were ordinary Jews like those in Finkel’s account. If their tragedy is to have any meaning some 70 years after the fall of the Third Reich, it is because in their very ordinariness they represented a recognizable humanity—tradespeople, laborers, professionals, shoppers, neighbors. On the other side of the ledger, by employing all the modern means of propaganda, barbarism, and genocide, the Nazis have become the very definition of evil.
These facts are documented online, in countless films, in grade-school textbooks, in voluminous histories, in contemporary accounts, and in biographies. Those who refuse to acknowledge the truths of these works we know as Holocaust deniers, but those who persist in comparing Adolf Hitler with any U.S. politician reveal themselves as members of a group just to the side of the Holocaust denier—the Holocaust trivializer. There are no lower categories.
Which brings us to this Tweet from Slate, the last journalistic redoubt of the Graham family, which once owned the Washington Post and Newsweek. File under “Questions Nobody is Asking:”
BECAUSE THEIR WEBSITE HAS TILTED LEFT FOR YEARS? Why Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary is Trolling Trump:
On Inauguration Day, they simply tweeted “Welp,” a word used to convey dismay or disappointment. When they announced they were adding 1,000 new words, they emphasized one in particular: snollygoster, “a shrewd and unprincipled person, especially an unprincipled politician.”
They’ve needled Betsy DeVos, taunted Sean Spicer, derided Steve Bannon, and stung Kellyanne Conway not once but twice. Most notably, when Conway said she struggles to call herself a feminist because it’s “anti-male and pro-abortion,” a widely-held perception, Merriam-Webster fired back a definition of feminism as simply “the belief that men and women should have equal rights.”
The list goes ever on. Make no mistake, Merriam-Webster has become a political machine.
The dictionary has gone political? Winston Smith and Guy Montag just emailed to assure me that nothing could wrong with that notion.
ANDREW KLAVAN: What Logan Means.
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: New nanofiber marks important step in next generation battery development.
YOU WENT FULL NEO-CONFEDERATE, MAN. NEVER GO FULL NEO-CONFEDERATE. The American Left Discovers Its Inner George Wallace:
Our liberal governors and mayors are in the tradition of their Democratic predecessors in Arkansas and Alabama. They have interposed themselves between the federal government and their sanctuary states and cities, ordering their police to refuse to allow federal agents do fulfill a federal mandate to remove illegal aliens, especially felons, from the country. If statues could smile, those being removed from public places would be grinning from marble ear to marble ear at the resurrection of their legal theory. Ike was famous for his grin, Jack for his cool. But both understood a challenge to federal authority when they saw it, and didn’t hesitate to use the threat of force to face down challenges to that authority. Your move, Donald.
“Who would have imagined that it would come to this?”, Irwin M. Stelzer asks rhetorically at the Weekly Standard, but Victor Davis Hanson has been noting the left has adopted the Confederate concept of nullification for quite some time.
WELL, THAT’S BECAUSE WE LIVE IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION: Physicists Find That as Clocks Get More Precise, Time Gets More Fuzzy.
The good news is that, whatever you may think about 2016 and 2017, we’re probably keeping it interesting enough that the aliens won’t pull the plug just yet.
SOME YEARS AGO, SACRAMENTO DECLARED WAR ON POVERTY, AND POVERTY WON: California Democrats’ Never-Ending War on the Poor.
Related: California exports its poor to Texas, other states, while wealthier people move in.
(Classical allusion in headline.)