LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Here’s One Reason Flu Vaccines Are So Lousy: They’re Grown in Eggs.
Archive for 2017
November 7, 2017
HARD DAY’S NIGHT: Solving a Beatles mystery with mathematics.
“This is the one chord that everyone around the world knows,” says Randy Bachman, a rock star in his own right from The Guess Who and Bachman Turner Overdrive.
It dates to July 1964 — the height of Beatlemania. The band was about to release its third album.
For the first time, it was all original music. Plus, the Beatles were shifting away from their rock ‘n’ roll roots to a more poppy sound, and this album was to be the soundtrack for their first feature film.
They needed to make a statement.
After a lot of experimentation, the band come up with a wondrous, jangling cacophony of sound: the opening chord to the song, album, and film A Hard Day’s Night.
“I don’t think there’s another song with an opening like that. It’s just an indescribable chord of beauty.”
Indescribable and — as it turns out — really rather mysterious.
Because for decades, no-one could figure out exactly how those two seconds of music were made.
Until now.
RADICAL WORDS THESE DAYS: ‘I Am a Man With Down Syndrome and My Life Is Worth Living.’
HORSE, BARN DOOR: Air Force Reviewing All Records After Error Let Texas Shooter Buy Guns.
DUE PROCESS IS IMPORTANT: Welsh Labour politician under shadow of unspecified allegations about harassment of women takes his own life.
HMM: Amazon Has a Risky Strategy for Cutting Prices This Holiday Season.
If you find more goods than usual on Amazon are discounted as the holiday season starts, that may not be because the sellers have chosen to cut their prices.
Instead, as The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday, Amazon itself has started briefly discounting certain items sold by sellers, by as much as 9%. This only seems to apply to third-party sellers who ship their products through Amazon’s distribution centers.
Until Amazon started doing this in “recent weeks,” it only controlled prices on the goods it sold directly to consumers. Some brands, such as The North Face, therefore avoid selling directly to Amazon, in order to control their own pricing strategies.
In its new discounting push, Amazon is absorbing the amount of the discount itself, in order to tempt customers away from other retailers.
That means the third-party sellers get the same amount they usually would—and indeed, it seems Amazon isn’t even telling them about its discounting. This last point could prove problematic for sellers who have signed agreements with brands or other marketplaces, to maintain a minimum price on the goods they sell through all platforms.
This is not going to win Amazon any friends at the premium brands the discount retailer has always struggled with.
WELL, FOR ONE THING, HIS HEART IS IN A JAR INSTEAD OF HIS BODY: Chopin’s Heart, Pickled in a Jar, Offers Clues to His Death.
OUT ON A LIMB: Jon Gabriel is defending Steve Martin’s “King Tut” from an attack by James Lileks.
To modern eyes, “King Tut” was cheesy and lame. But in 1978, that was the point.
That decade served up a slew of “important” stand-up comedians who were edgy, cynical, and highly political. George Carlin issued diatribes on capitalism and religion. The far-funnier Richard Pryor was laser-focused on racial injustice. Andy Kaufman intentionally alienated club crowds with his anti-comedy. Robert Klein and David Steinberg were high-brow intellectuals. And nearly every comic lectured America about Vietnam, Richard Nixon, and the hollow hypocrisy of bourgeois life.
Then along came Steve Martin. Sick of the conventional joke formula, he spent years crafting a stand-up act without punchlines. And the way to make audiences laugh sans jokes was by acting silly. He paraded around in bunny ears and a fake arrow through his head, embarrassingly contorting his body to sell the act. All the while, he pretended to be just as self-important and overly earnest as his fellow comics. The juxtaposition is what made it funny. (See his intro to the song above.)
The tastemakers took themselves far too seriously to risk looking silly; they had to be smarter than the audience. Although highly intelligent, Martin presented himself as the dumbest, least self-aware guy in the room. Instead of educating Americans on their evils, he brought back comedy to its actual function: making people laugh.
In a way, he was doing what the original Star Wars did in 1977. After a decade of bleak, dystopian sci-fi, George Lucas revamped the old Flash Gordon serials into a fun, popcorn-friendly escapism.
If there’s one good thing that came of the Carter administration, it’s that having to lay off a Democratic president temporarily forced Saturday Night Live into a much more apolitical stance than its first season, and as a result, the show created some of its most accessible, timeless work. In the show’s early episodes, the cast openly campaigned on air for the ERA and went after Gerald Ford, history’s original greatest monster, which such intensity when his press secretary stupidly agreed to host an episode that one of its writers (and then-wife of producer/creator Lorne Michaels) later admitted, “The president’s watching. Let’s make him cringe and squirm.”
As Michael J. Lewis wrote at Commentary in 2010, you can see the temporary interregnum in the culture war via the show’s choice of hosts: the openly political George Carlin hosted SNL’s very first episode; by the third season, Martin’s repeated apolitical appearances on SNL made him a superstar.
WRONG QUESTION: Did Hillary commit any crimes in ‘rigging’ the Democratic primary?
The more important question, at least for the DNC, is whether they broke faith with their own voters — and how to restore it.
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: It’s good to make men feel fear, and this is something women absolutely have the power to do.
Entirely, 100% totally unrelated: Sex robot Samantha goes into ‘mass production’ as punters flock to kinky doll.
DR. TIM BALL AND TOM HARRIS: In Bonn, a Global Warming Propaganda Tsunami Is Triggered.
HAVING SPENT THE LAST 50 YEARS DESTROYING THE GUARDRAILS OF BOURGEOIS CULTURE, CURIOUSLY, BROADWAY DOESN’T LIKE LIVING IN THE WORLD THEY’VE CREATED: Actors say rude audiences are destroying Broadway.
While linking to a post by “Tax Prof” Paul Caron titled “Paying The Price For Breakdown Of The Country’s Bourgeois Culture,” Glenn noted in August that “Bourgeois culture is bad because it limits the flexibility of the elites. When the middle class was ascendant, it had the power to force bourgeois norms on elites, and even many of the poor. This led to social goods that people miss now, but it was also experienced as confining by those so constrained.”
STEPHEN MOORE: Why the Left Has Been So Wrong About the Trump Boom.
But so far the Trump haters have missed the call on the economy’s trajectory. Doubly ironic is that the same Obama-era economists who are trashing Trump’s increasingly realistic forecast of 3 percent growth are the ones who predicted 4 percent growth from the Obama budgets. Obama never came anywhere near 4 percent growth, and at the end of his second term, the economy grew at a pitiful 1.6 percent.
Under Obama, free enterprise and pro-business policies were thrown out the window. What was delivered was the weakest recovery from a recession since World War II, with a meager 2.2 percent average growth rate. Middle America felt it, which is why Trump won these forgotten Americans.
One reason that economist Larry Kudlow and I and others assured Donald Trump that 3 to 4 percent growth was achievable was that Trump could capitalize on the underperformance of the Obama years. Under Obama, business investment fell almost two-thirds below the long-term trend line — thanks to higher taxes on investment. Now, partly in anticipation of the tax cut, business spending keeps climbing.
“Get the hell out of my way!” the wise man once said.
THE NOT-SO-FRIENDLY SKIES: Air Travelers Resisting the ‘Incredible Shrinking Airline Seat.’
TRY THIS HEADLINE WITH ANY OTHER ETHNICITY AND SEE HOW WELL IT PLAYS: Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel looking at white people with ‘new intensity’ after Trump’s election.
If Weigel’s old intensity at the Post was any indication, I’d hate to see him dial the amps up to 11:
In a thread with the subject line, “ACORN Ratf*cker arrested,” Journolisters discussed how James O’Keefe, whose undercover reporting showed officials from activist group ACORN willing to help a fake prostitution ring skirt the law, had been arrested in another, failed operation at Sen. Mary Landrieu’s (D-LA) office.
Weigel’s response: “HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH.”
“Deep breath.”
“HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHHAHAHA.”
“He’s either going to get a radio talk show or start a prison ministry. That’s was successful conservative ratfuckers do for their second acts,” Weigel wrote, likely alluding to Nixon aide Charles Colson who converted to Christianity after a stint in prison for obstruction of justice and founded Prison Fellowship.
Republicans? “Ratfucking [Obama] on every bill.” Palin? Tried to “ratfuck” a moderate Republican in a contentious primary in New York. Limbaugh? Used “ratfucking tactics” in urging Republican activists to vote for Hillary Clinton in open primaries after Obama had all but beat her for the Democratic nomination.
So just to recap, in 2008, voting for Hillary in the primaries was “ratfucking.” In 2016, voting against her was racism.
And note that the ratfucking stuff on the JournoList was written by Weigel back when he was still posing as the token young conservative at the Post. Choose the form of your destructor, indeed.
BILL WHITTLE: Guns, CNN, and Sutherland Springs.
IN THE MAIL: From Mark Hasara (Author) & Rush Limbaugh (Foreword), Tanker Pilot: Lessons from the Cockpit.
Plus, fresh Gold Box and Lightning Deals.
EVERYBODY’S TRANSITIONING THESE DAYS: The US is Saudi Arabia Now, Roger L. Simon writes.
But back to Saudi Arabia. They’re the bad ones here, not us. They behave in a manner that civilized people must condemn. We know this because Donald Trump approves of what King Salman is doing, cleaning house from characters like Bin Talal, and Trump, as we know, is not an honorable man.
How do we know? Because he has disgraced our country in Japan. He is uncouth and does not even know how to feed koi. How bad is that! He could have killed the poor… Oh, wait….
Heh. Read the whole thing.
SEVEN US NAVY AIRCRAFT CARRIERS ARE NOW SIMULTANEOUSLY UNDERWAY:
Seven out of 11 U.S. nuclear aircraft carriers are underway simultaneously for the first time in several years, USNI News has learned.
Three are on operational deployments in the Western Pacific with full air wings and carrier strike groups — USS Ronald Reagan (CVN-76), USS Nimitz (CVN-68) and USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71).
Four more are out for short training missions as part of training operations or workups ahead of deployments. USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70) and USS John C. Stennis (CVN-74) are operating in the Eastern Pacific. USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) and the Navy’s newest carrier USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) are operating in the Atlantic.
A Navy official confirmed the basic details of the carrier moves on Monday, to USNI News.
The Reagan, Nimitz and Roosevelt strike groups are all operating in the U.S. 7th Fleet area of operations. Reagan is operating in the Sea of Japan near the Korean peninsula while Nimitz is returning to its homeport at Naval Station Kitsap-Bremerton, Wash. after a deployment to the Persian Gulf to conduct air strike against ISIS targets. Roosevelt deployed from San Diego, Calif. on Oct. 7 set to replace Nimitz as part of the continued U.S. operation against ISIS.
The carriers in 7th Fleet could converge for the first simultaneous three-strike group training operations in a decade, defense officials have told USNI News.
“These three carriers are not there specifically targeting North Korea,” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Joseph Dunford said last week. “This is a routine demonstration of our commitment to the region.”
Routine, huh? GEN Dunford is soft-pedaling it. It’s a major show of force.
Here’s Carrier Strike Group 5 at sea (photo taken in June 2017). This one records a “dual aircraft carrier strike group operation” conducted in 2016. Navy carrier strike groups receive USAF support. Here are two examples. (1) A USAF E-3 Sentry AWACS operating with the USS Theodore Roosevelt. (2) A USAF B-1B strategic bomber in formation with a USN F/A-18E.
Read this post for background on the AWACS.
THE PEOPLE’S FLAG IS DEEPEST RED: It is the Centenary of the October Revolution today (owing to Russia using the old Julian Calendar then). Here’s David Satter in the Wall Street Journal:
The Bolshevik coup had two consequences. In countries where communism came to hold sway, it hollowed out society’s moral core, degrading the individual and turning him into a cog in the machinery of the state. Communists committed murder on such a scale as to all but eliminate the value of life and to destroy the individual conscience in survivors.
But the Bolsheviks’ influence was not limited to these countries. In the West, communism inverted society’s understanding of the source of its values, creating political confusion that persists to this day.
RTWT. It is probably because of the lasting effect of that second consequence that we see that more Millennials would prefer to live in a socialist country than a capitalist one. As the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation notes,
It seems that the majority of America’s largest generation would prefer to live in a socialist or communism society than in a free enterprise system that respects the rule of law, private property, and limited government. This is even more disconcerting when coupled with the fact that, despite Millennials’ enthusiasm for socialism and communism, they do not, in fact, know what those terms mean.
We have a lot to do.
DEROY MURDOCK: Diversity-Visa Lottery Is a Jackpot for Immigrants from Terror States.
Last fiscal year alone, Washington’s breathless quest for diversity admitted to America 7,224 individuals from this baker’s dozen of terrorist-infected nations. (Saipov’s native Uzbekistan is not among these countries of concern.) From the start of FY 2007 through FY 2016, such visa-lottery admissions totaled 65,144.
The State Department officially designates only Iran, Sudan, and Syria as “State Sponsors of Terrorism.” Regardless, under this diversity scheme, 2,788 Iranians, 1,833 Sudanese, and 164 Syrians won the lottery, scored green cards, and came to America in FY 2016. From FY 2007 to FY 2016, this program brought into our borders 20,739 Iranians, 7,232 Sudanese, and 812 Syrians.
The federal government couldn’t even properly vet a single convicted domestic abuser in Texas.
TROLL LEVEL: MASTER. ‘It’s okay to be white’ signs spark outrage on campuses.
Signs declaring “It’s okay to be white” have been spotted on college campuses across America and even in Canada over the last week, prompting outrage and racial tension.
The signs were launched through a coordinated 4chan campaign, whose users spelled out their “game plan” on the anonymous Internet forum board instructing people to post the signs on campuses to prompt the media to go “completely berserk.”
The ultimate goal was to show what 4chan users called “normies” that “leftists & journalists hate white people,” in turn prompting these middle-of-the-road folks to turn on them in a “massive victory for the right in the culture war.”
So far, the signs have indeed prompted major media coverage and some anger on campus. Others have questioned why saying “it’s okay to be white” is automatically racist.
Colleges such as Harvard, Princeton, Tulane, Western Washington, Auburn, the University of Kansas and Concordia College have had the posters appear on campus. The University of Alberta and the University of Toronto also saw the signs, as did a high school in Maryland.
The signs are typically quickly removed by campus officials or students after they’re discovered.
Even though the campaign has been widely identified as a troll attempt, many took the bait.
Of course, 4Chan folks have been masters at trolling for a long time.