“EAT YOUR HEART OUT ALEX JONES:” Democratic Socialists of America Call for Confiscating Energy Industry Assets.
Archive for 2018
September 11, 2018
NEW YORK’S OTHER NEW SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” CONTINUES TO PAY DIVIDENDS: Citizens Union drops endorsement of Julia Salazar, citing ‘not correct’ information about her academic credentials. “Salazar’s campaign materials had implied she graduated from Columbia University, but when questioned by the New York Times, she said she had completed her coursework but never graduated.”
UPDATE: “Earlier today, Salazar announced on Twitter that she was the victim of a sexual assault by a spokesman for Israeli PM Netanyahu…This is obviously horrible if it’s true, but given the frequent rewriting of her own history it’s a bit hard to take claims about her past at face value. That doesn’t mean she’s lying, it just means it’s hard to judge the veracity of this claim without additional information. For his part, [David] Keyes has denied the claim. I’m sure we’ll be hearing much more about this in the coming days.”
BUT IT IS HIDEOUS: Mercedes-Benz’s Hideous New Mobility Concept Isn’t All That New.
NICHOLAS BALLASY: Professor Warns of Grave Consequences for ‘Trying to Shut Down the Opinions of Others.’ “‘In the middle of a growing culture war, our education system created to cultivate a national civic culture is only making things worse,’ author says in D.C.”
WHY WAS DISCO EVER POPULAR? BLAME FAKE NEWS: As Mike Konrad writes at the American Thinker, the media cooked the books long before it amplified Hillary’s “fake news” meme to explain away her defeat:
Three months before disco’s demise, a Newsweek April 2, 1979 cover confidently proclaimed that disco had won the culture wars.* Rock ‘n’ roll was dead. But a few months later, by the fall of 1979, disco was gone. What happened?
What happened was that the disco culture was a house of cards. The signature statement of that culture, Saturday Night Fever, was a total fraud.
The movie, and the disco fad, were based on an article, “Inside the Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” that appeared in New York Magazine in June 1976.
Over the past few months, much of my time has been spent in watching this new generation. Moving from neighborhood to neighborhood, from disco to disco, an explorer out of my depth, I have tried to learn the patterns, the old/new tribal rites.
The problem was that the story was mostly made up.
Twenty years later came a bombshell. In December 1997 New York magazine published an article in which Cohn confessed that there never was a Vincent. There was no “Lisa”, “Billy”, “John James”, “Lorraine” or “Donna” either. While 2001 Odyssey existed, it wasn’t the way the writer described it in 1976. The whole scene of disco-loving Italians, as mythologised in Saturday Night Fever, was exaggerated. The most bizarre detail was that his disco protagonists were in fact based on mods Cohn had known in London.
One image stayed with the writer, though, that of a figure in flared crimson pants and a black body shirt standing in the doorway of the club and calmly watching the action. There was a style about him, Cohn said, a sense of his own specialness that reminded the writer of a teen gang in his hometown of Derry and a mod named Chris he’d met in London in 1965.
When Cohn went back to Odyssey he didn’t see the young man in the doorway again. “Plus, I made a lousy interviewer,” he wrote. “I knew nothing about this world, and it showed. Quite literally, I didn’t speak the language. So I faked it. I conjured up the story of the figure in the doorway, and named him Vincent. Taking all I knew about the snake-charmer in Derry and, more especially, about Chris the mod in London, I translated them as best I could to Brooklyn. Then I went back to Bay Ridge in daylight and noted the major landmarks. I walked some streets, went into a couple of stores. Studied the clothes, the gestures, the walks. Imagined how it would feel to burn up, all caged energies, with no outlet but the dancefloor and the rituals of Saturday night. Finally, I wrote it all up. And presented it as fact.”
Michael Crichton, call your office.
* It’s Business Week’s 1979 “Death of Equities” cover in reverse — not to mention Newsweek’s own 2009 cover, “We Are All Socialists Now.”
Joel Engel wrote to me with some additional details and corrections to the American Thinker piece:
That the NY Mag story had been made up was more than certainly known to the studio and producers, who’d have been warned by legal that they had to buy the life rights of the principals involved. Second, Saturday Night Fever didn’t start the disco craze; it capitalized on it. Disco, in my recollection, started with the Love Unlimited Orchestra in 1973, when I was living in Paris and discos began opening everywhere. By the time I got back to the States, Neil Bogart was already a multimillionaire from his label Casablanca that had dozens of disco acts, from Donna Summer to the Village People. (Casablanca was where I met my wife in 1979. She was head of the editorial dept, and I was a freelancer churning out bios and sales sheets at exorbitant rates, while at night I was a DJ at the Malibu Inn, which had transformed itself into a thriving disco–music I hated.) Thank God It’s Friday, by Casablanca’s film division (which also produced Peter Guber’s The Deep and put Jacqueline Bissett in a wet t-shirt), had been a huge hit in theaters. But what killed disco with a stake through the heart in 1980, I’m happy to say, was another Casablanca movie: Can’t Stop the Music, a work of such unremitting awfulness (directed by Rhoda Morganstern’s onscreen mother, who’d had no directing experience) that it’s worse than anything Ed Wood imagined. (Forgive me for invoking Gell-Mann here.)
Heh, indeed.™
MARK STEYN: The Lost Frontier.
Those “Space Age” astronauts were men of boundless courage and determination: they strapped themselves in and stared not just death in the face but death in hideous and unknown ways. Yet they were also ordinary men, who were called upon to do extraordinary things and rose to the challenge. These days we are unmanned in more than merely the sense of that Luna 2 expedition. Glenn and Armstrong are gone, and their surviving comrades are old and stooped and wizened, and yet the only giants we have. Space may still be the final frontier, but today, when we talk about boldly going where no man has gone before, we mean the ladies’ bathroom. Progress.
Read the whole thing.
(Via Maggie’s Farm.)
AT AMAZON, Under Armour Men’s Porter 3-in-1 Jacket.
A GENERATION PLANS AN EXODUS FROM CALIFORNIA:
Since the recovery began in 2010, California’s net domestic out-migration, according to the American community survey, has almost tripled to 140,000 annually. Over that time, the state has lost half a million net migrants with the bulk of that coming from the Los Angeles-Orange County area.
In contrast, during the first years of the decade the Bay Area, particularly San Francisco, enjoyed a renaissance of in-migration, something not seen since before 2000. But that is changing. A recent Redfin report suggests that the Bay Area, the focal point of California’s boom, now leads the country in outbound home searches, which could suggest a further worsening of the trend.
The GOP needs to get going on Glenn’s “welcome wagon” idea — stat.
CREDIT WHERE IT’S DUE: Heaven knows, PEN International often sounds like it was written by the old TASS editors, and they often have trouble with allowing viewpoints that differ from theirs (libertarian, conservative) but when they’re right, they’re right. PEN’s Chief Executive Officer Suzanne Nossel wrote in Foreign Policy magazine that:
In demonstrating that a company as mighty as Google was unable to resist the allure of the Chinese market, despite the terms of entry, Beijing will advance its campaign to remake global internet governance on its own terms. The utopian notion of an internet that unifies people across borders, fosters the unfettered flow of information, and allows truth and reason to triumph is already under attack on multiple fronts. The trade-off, to date, has been that countries insistent on controlling the internet have had to forfeit access to the world’s most powerful and innovative online services in favor of local providers.
To be fair, Google is not the only company to sell its soul to China for filthy lucre. Faux social justice warriors Apple and Starbucks come to mind, as does Bloomberg, who happily agreed to filter out delivery of news to China that made the government uncomfortable, despite a spate of editorial resignations.
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Plus, Emergency Food Supplies.
TONI AIRAKSINEN: OCR Investigating ‘Financial Discrimination’ Against Men at Tulane. “It’s patently unfair.”
NOW THAT’S THE 21ST CENTURY I’VE BEEN DREAMING ABOUT: The United States Army wants to power drones with lasers, keeping them in the air indefinitely.
By placing a photovoltaic cell on the bottom of the aircraft, ground units could effectively aim a laser at said piece to charge the drone. This would, in turn, convert the light from the laser into electricity, thus powering the aircraft. The Army’s goal as of right now is to shoot this laser at an aircraft that is 500 meters (0.31 miles) above the ground.
By early 2019, the Army plans on being able to power a grounded drone via a laser beam, thus proving the technology can work. They hope to be powering airborne drones by 2020 as long as the necessary regulatory process is approved.
Get the damn regulators moving already.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY YOU KNOW: New Space Robots Will Fix Satellites, or Maybe Destroy Them.
MATT MARGOLIS: The Top Five Ways Obama Attacked the Free Press.
But his trousers were nicely creased, so it’s OK.
JEFF DUNETZ ON 9/11/01: Have You Forgotten The Day That Changed The World?
GENE MUNSTER: If Tesla doesn’t overhaul the board right now, it could spell the end for the company.
The best scenario is for Musk to stay at Tesla, but something has to change.
It seems the core problem for Musk and Tesla is that he’s surrounded by people unwilling or unable to stand up to him, as can easily happen with powerful people. At worst, this appears to be true of his board.
We think Tesla’s board needs an overhaul. There are too few independent directors and too many directors with long-term relationships to Musk as investors, overlap with other companies like SpaceX, family or otherwise. There’s no one on the board that has Musk’s ear to truly influence him to fix these self-inflicted wounds.
It’s an interesting piece, but what’s most interesting is that Munster has been bullish on Tesla for a long time now.
ANDREW BOSTOM: Leo III’s 1300-Year-Old Lesson: Understand Islam to Defeat Jihad. “Would that U.S. and other ‘Western’ leaders reconsider their largely feckless policies against the jihad depredations of our era.”
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CHANGE: The Government May Want to Buy Your Dying Mall. “Local governments worry that dying malls will blight the landscape, so they are buying them up.”
While malls in wealthy neighborhoods continue to attract shoppers and tenants, growing government involvement with shopping centers in less affluent areas is another sign that private investors may be losing interest in the worst performing malls, even ones that can be had at cheap prices.
“It’s a new issue,” said Thomas Dobrowski, executive managing director of capital markets at real-estate services firm Newmark Knight Frank . “When a mall gets to a point of no return and when no private buyer is willing to reinvest in it, it comes down to the value of the dirt.”
Still, government takeovers face many challenges. Malls and department stores often have large, unwieldy footprints, making it tougher to propose another use for them.
“For big boxes in particular, there are limited uses of that space,” said Michele Wildman, executive director at Genesee County Land Bank.
The Genesee County Land Bank in Flint, Mich, currently has a list of 58 commercial properties for sale, including a 101,900-square-foot former Kmart store. But the lack of windows and the large floor plate makes it difficult for such properties to be converted to other uses such as housing.
Plans to reposition malls can also get bogged down if city council members and residents don’t agree to proposed new uses. Some could also be razed when structures are found to be unsound. It can also be complex and time-consuming to buy back malls if multiple parties own different portions of the real estate.
If you’ve never driven past one of these abandoned malls, they’re sad sights to see.
DOG BITES MAN: Ken Starr Makes Makes Explosive Revelation About Hillary Clinton In New Memoir.
In Starr’s memoir, which was obtained in advance by Fox News, Starr recounts his investigation into the death of White House adviser Vince Foster and other matters related to the Whitewater investigation.
“I was upset over Mrs. Clinton’s performance, and was even considering bringing the matter before the Washington grand jury for possible indictment on perjury,” Starr wrote, according to an excerpt of “Contempt: A Memoir of the Clinton Investigation” reviewed by Fox News.
“In the space of three hours, she claimed, by our count, over a hundred times that she ‘did not recall’ or ‘did not remember,'” Starr continued. “This suggested outright mendacity. To be sure, human memory is notoriously fallible, but her strained performance struck us as preposterous.”
Starr said that he ultimately decided not to bring charges against the then-first lady because it would be difficult to prove that she lied when she said “I don’t recall” and “I don’t remember.”
“What was clear was that Mrs. Clinton couldn’t be bothered to make it appear as if she were telling the truth,” Starr concluded.
She still can’t.