RACHEL COOKE: Spare us the moral hysteria that threatens a new age of censorship. “People talk of a ‘reckoning.’ At last, they say, women need no longer be silent about what they’ve suffered at the hands of men; our idea of what constitutes sexual assault has changed forever. I have no problem with this. I wrote my own #MeToo column five years ago, when people were busy wondering how Jimmy Savile had got away with his crimes for so long. (Not that anyone noticed: after it was published, I did not receive a single supportive message from the sisterhood). But we need to be careful. This is a dangerous moment as well as an important one. You don’t have to look very hard to see that we’re beginning to conflate sexual mistakes of all kinds with abuse, that beneath the surface of this debate conservative forces are at work, as well as reforming, liberal ones. . . . The effect of this muddle on relationships is a subject for another time, another column. But its effect on the arts is going to be – this is my bet – grim. The mob can be whipped up in as long as it takes to hit a keyboard; institutions are risk averse, worrying about funding and audience development with freedom of expression seen as mere tinsel atop the tree.”
Archive for 2017
December 18, 2017
HOW DO I COUNT THE WAYS? How Feminism Kills Romance.
HMM: Object on tracks may be cause of deadly Amtrak derailment. “A preliminary investigation suggests maintenance problems are unlikely to blame because the incident took place on brand-new tracks, the official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.”
DON’T OVERDO IT: Vigorous Exercise Tied to Macular Degeneration in Men. “They found that exercising vigorously five or more days a week was associated with a 54 percent increased risk of macular degeneration in men. They did not find the association in women. The study, in JAMA Ophthalmology, controlled for more than 40 variables, including age, medical history, body mass index, prescription drug use and others.”
UNHINGED: ‘He Would Probably Be a Dictator by Now.’
Last year, Eliot Cohen rallied dozens of fellow veterans of Republican administrations, people like him who had served in the upper reaches of the Pentagon, State Department and National Security Council, to warn against Donald Trump winning the White House. He would become, the group open letter Cohen organized said, “the most reckless president in American history.”
A year later, Cohen, a top official in President George W. Bush’s administration, and another charter #NeverTrump proselytizer, his fellow conservative Max Boot, hardly back down when asked whether their predictions of global gloom and doom had been proven right in the first year of the Trump presidency. Both men, lifelong Republicans and historically minded policy intellectuals, offered unequivocal yeses in a joint interview for this week’s Global Politico podcast – and castigated former friends inside the party they’ve both now renounced as “Vichy Republicans” for collaborating with a president they believe is not fit to hold office.
If anything, I found the two even more terrified about the Trump presidency at the end of Year One – filled with the sort of to-the-barricades warnings I’m still not used to hearing from learned defense wonks like Boot, who’s spent a career advising politicians like Republican Senator John McCain from establishment precincts like the Wall Street Journal op-ed page and the Council on Foreign Relations. “In many ways,” Boot said, “the damage he’s doing at home is even worse, where he’s undermining the rule of law. He’s obstructing justice. He’s lending the support of the presidency to monsters like Roy Moore. He is exacerbating race relations. He is engaging in the most blatant xenophobia, racism and general bigotry that we have seen from the White House.”
An honest assessment shows that there have been a couple of real disappoints in Trump’s first year, but even more pleasant surprises. Boot and Cohen come across as unhinged.
A MEDICAL MARVEL: New Gene Called Thor May Be Secret Anti-Cancer Weapon.
CHANGE: “BESTIALITY BROTHELS” ARE SPREADING THROUGH GERMANY. “Bestiality dropped off the statute books as a crime in 1969 but in recent years the number of people believed to be participating in such acts has increased significantly.”
Huh. I wonder what’s changed in recent years?
SALENA ZITO: Why depression and suicide are rampant among American farmers.
Menn sees the crippling impact of depression several times a week at the clinic. The first thing he does is make sure visitors are getting counseling “and then we utilize medication like SSRI’s (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) . . . which makes it harder for the patient to get to the darkest point of depression,” he said.
When he heard about the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study released in 2016, which showed farmers take their lives more often than people in any other occupation in this country, including the military, he was not surprised. “There is particularly a lot of depression in rural society. It happens for a lot of different reasons. A lot of it is our roller-coaster economics. People outside of farming, I think, understand that farming is hard work. What they don’t understand is the depth of the lows that can hit you at any one time, with just one small problem that can lead to hundreds of little problems.
“I just had the discussion today with my son-in-law,” he explained. “We sold feeder steers. We missed by about 50 pounds what we were hoping to get. Well, that was about another $15,000 worth of income we’re not going to have. That’s a big deal, because the margins are so tough.”
Yet another well-told, underreported story from Salena.
BUT OF COURSE: Italian Veterans Group Ordered to Remove Christmas Tree to Avoid ‘Offending’ Muslims.
Prosciutto, anyone?
HAWAII SUPREME COURT: “There Is a Constitutional Right of the Public to Film the Official Activities of Police Officers in a Public Place.”
Well, yes. Just ask Morgan Manning.
NEW YORK TIMES: As Venezuela Collapses, Children Are Dying of Hunger.
The word “socialist” appears only twice, and only in the third-to-last paragraph — and even then, only in the context of “critics say”:
The Venezuelan government has used food to keep the Socialists in power, critics say. Before recent elections, people living in government housing projects said they were visited by representatives of their local Socialist community councils — the government-aligned groups that organize the delivery of boxes of cheap food — and threatened with being cut off if they did not vote for the government.
Of course, it isn’t exactly surprising that the onetime employer of Walter Duranty could launch a five-month investigation into Venezuela’s food shortage without ever locating the real killers.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: 7 Science-Backed Ways That Show Coffee Can Actually Be Good For You.
NEWS YOU CAN (STILL) USE: Six Tips for Getting the Right Christmas Present(s) for Your Wife.
PERSONNEL IS POLICY: Washington Bureaucrats Are Chipping Away at Trump’s Agenda.
The professional bureaucracy has turned out to be more corrupt than the spoils system it was supposed to clean up.
CUOMO, SCARBOROUGH SHOW SERIOUS SYMPTOMS OF TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME: Every day seems to bring new evidence of media folks who just cannot maintain perspective about the reality that Donald Trump occupies the Oval Office because he won the majority in the 2016 presidential contest with Hillary Clinton. LifeZette’s Kathryn Blackhurst has the details.
CLARICE FELDMAN: Midnight At The Democracy Dies In Darkness Café.
NOW THAT THE ROY MOORE ELECTION IS OVER AND THERE’S NO MORE NEED TO POSTURE, DEMOCRATS WHO CALLED FOR AL FRANKEN TO RESIGN ARE CHANGING THEIR MINDS. And Ann Althouse is unimpressed:
.Manchin was not one of the Senators who called for Franken’s resignation, but Patrick Leahy was, and he’s now saying he regrets it: “I think we acted prematurely, before we had all the facts… In retrospect, I think we acted too fast.” Oh, bullshit. The whole point was acting fast, and you knew you were acting fast. It’s not something you’re figuring out later.
I’m calling for Leahy’s resignation for acting precipitously, as he now admits, and for lying now and saying he’s only noticing the excessive speed “in retrospect.” I think the fast action was done to affect the Alabama election. What a sorry business!
Yeah, it’s like they’re all a bunch of hypocritical hacks or something.