GENERATIONS: Seniors Can’t Cheat Death, but They Can Cheat on Each Other. “Older adults are cheating on their spouses more and more, while younger couples are cheating less, annual data from the General Social Survey (GSS) reveals. Despite 30 years of data that shows three out of four Americans are agree that extramarital sex is wrong (the number of couples who report actually doing it usually hovers around 16 percent), those 55 and older are doing it anyways. And they’ve created an odd adultery age gap that the $3 billion erectile dysfunction drug market can’t be blamed for — well, at least entirely.”
Archive for 2018
January 8, 2018
LITTLE CHIEF SPEAK WITH FORKED TONGUE: Senator Elizabeth Warren Sidesteps Questions About Oprah 2020 Presidential Run.
I can clear this up for everyone involved.
STRIKE A POSE, THERE’S NOTHING #METOO IT: Weinstein accusers claim they weren’t invited to Golden Globes.
Has anyone asked President Oprah about this glaring lack of empathy?
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE:
● Shot: Academia is Overdue for a Reality Check.
—American Greatness.
● Chaser:
Based on interviews with 8 female STEM students, two professors recently concluded that “masculine” norms are to blame for the lack of female STEM graduates.
According to the professors, these masculine norms include “asking good questions,” “capacity for abstract thought and rational thought processes,” “motivation,” “independent” thinking, and a relatively low fear of failure.
— “Profs blame ‘masculine’ ideals for lack of women in STEM,” Campus Reform.
● Hangover:
Where was one to start trying to educate an adult student who thought the Great Depression began in the 1960s; who was unable to distinguish between the First and Second World Wars; who thought that Moscow was the capital of Missouri… or who averred, in a paper on George Orwell’s Animal Farm, that “George Orwin, arthur of The Animal Firm, was heavily into natur.” You can’t make this stuff up.
—David Solway, “The Dead Letter of Modern Education,” PJ Media.
(Via Small Dead Animals.)
WAGES OF POSTMODERNISM: Michael Wolff to MSNBC anchor on his book: “If it rings true, it is true.”
“If it rings true, it is true” may be the most Orwellian defense of slovenly reporting since the immortal “fake but accurate” line from the Rathergate days. This isn’t the way journalistic ethics are supposed to work, gasps an exasperated Haley Byrd of the Weekly Standard. It is if you want to sell a million copies, I guess. In fact, “if it rings true, it is true” is about as perfect a summation as you could ask for of the concept of confirmation bias. If you already hate Trump, the mix of fact, rumor, and third-hand smear in Wolff’s book, all relentlessly damning of the White House, is a political banana split with extra hot fudge. Nothing that tastes this good could possibly be bad for you!
And as Allahpundit quips, Wolff is “the second person in a hot media spotlight in less than 24 hours to casually undermine the idea of objective truth. The other, of course, was the 46th president of the United States.”
Heh.Ben Shapiro reminds Oprah that “There is no such thing as ‘your truth.’ There is the truth and your opinion.” But then, they don’t call Oprah “the pope of American gnosticism” for nothing.
On Friday, it was announced that the first guest on David Letterman’s upcoming Netflix series will be former President Obama.
But of course – there’s no reason why America’s first postmodernist talk show host should be joined by America’s most prominent postmodern former president. (Bill Clinton was the first of course, arguing over the meaning of “is” in 1998 to save his hide during the impeachment hearings. But his equivocating over a verb didn’t directly impact millions of Americans the same way that Obama’s fables did.)
In his recent book Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night, author Jason Zinoman wrote:
In May 1985, Esquire magazine published an essay by a twenty-three-year-old Yale graduate named David Leavitt, who set out to do nothing less than explain his generation. It belonged to a long, dubious journalistic tradition in which a major media outlet sums up young people for its readers, using an envoy from their tribe. These stories follow a certain script: Mix some reported anecdotes with a few references to politics and pop culture trends, add a tone of alarm, and then draw a sweeping conclusion about wildly different groups of young people. The piece’s title: “The New Lost Generation.”
Leavitt argued that those coming of age in the Reagan era saw the idealism of the 1960s vanish and substituted a cynical and steely veneer. They sighed at political activism and rolled their eyes at passion and engagement. Unlike the hopeful kids from past decades, they were not marked by a particular cause to fight for. They were more likely to find all of politics contemptuous. What united them was a jaded outlook about not just politics but even the nature of honesty itself. “We are determined to make sure everyone knows that what we say might not be what we mean,” Leavitt wrote, building to a crescendo: “The voice of my generation is the voice of David Letterman.”
* * * * * * * *
Late Night had not become as popular as The Tonight Show, an impossibility, considering their respective time slots, but its cultural impact had surpassed it. By the middle of the decade, Letterman was the rare host who stood for something bigger than a television show. He was increasingly mentioned as the talk-show avatar of postmodernism, a movement marked by self-awareness and challenges to dominant narratives that was then shifting from academia to the mainstream press. He became the host who didn’t believe in hosting, a truth-teller whose sarcasm rendered everything he said suspect, a mocking challenge to anyone who pretended to take the ridiculous world seriously. Letterman became the face of an ironic sensibility that permeated comedy, television, and popular culture.
Andrew Breitbart famously said that “politics is downstream from culture.” In the 1980s, Letterman’s postmodernism made for fascinating and often wryly amusing late night television. But as Obama, and multiple DNC-MSM outlets have proven, it’s a lousy way to run a country or “report” its news. And of course, all of its worst practitioners are still clueless as to how they got Trumped.
‘MORNING JOE’ ACTUALLY CLAIMED MEDIA COULDN’T TALK ABOUT TRUMP’S MENTAL STATE: Until, that is, Michael Wolff came out with his increasingly discounted book and claimed everybody around the chief executive thinks he’s losing/lost it between the ears. LifeZette’s Kathryn Blackhurst points to multiple instances when Joe Scarborough and co-host Mika Brzezinski speculated at length on whether Trump is mentally stable. Reminds me of advice I read long, long ago at the dawn of the blog age: “Go ahead and claim it; we’ll fact-check your a–.”
NONSENSE. I’M TOLD THAT THIS ISSUE WAS SOLVED BY PRESIDENT OPRAH’S INAUGURAL SPEECH LAST NIGHT: On Eve Of Golden Globes, Hollywood Women Fear Backlash For Sexual Harassment & Sexual Assault Accusers.
Three months to the day after the New York Times first published its detailed exposé alleging decades of sexual harassment and sexual assault by Harvey Weinstein, a female producer, agent, actress and a showrunner all told Deadline they fear a backlash against women who initiate allegations of sexual harassment or sexual assault against A-list men — especially at the studios, networks and uber-agencies.
Indicative of that fear and despite the rising #MeToo movement, each women in the quartet would only speak anonymously about the matter.
“Hollywood’s a boys’ town and they will do what they have to do to keep their power, even if that means paying lip service for a while to stamping out misogyny,” the award-winning showrunner tells Deadline. “There are a lot of women staying quiet, worried that the boys are keeping a list for those who go public,” she added. “It’ll happen later, under the radar, a lot of it will be unspoken even, but careers will be sidetracked, promotions blocked, I just know it. That’s always been the way this town has worked.”
Why are Democrat-dominated industries such cesspits of misogyny, abuse and predation?
ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why Does Oregon Have Gas Station Attendants In the First Place?
AT AMAZON, save in Vision Care.
KISSING JESSICA STEIN HARVEY WEINSTEIN: Will This Photo Sink an Oprah Winfrey 2020 Candidacy Against Donald Trump?
NEWS YOU CAN USE: 3 Great Drills For A Home Defense Shotgun.
THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT? 2018 Golden Globes Review: Woke, Anti-Trump Lecturing.
YEAR IN REVIEW: 2017 Libertarian Films.
First and most importantly, Hollywood no longer has a lock on film content, because the film industry is rapidly being democratized by digital film production. Meanwhile theater chains no longer monopolize distribution, thanks to online streaming. Talented libertarian and conservative filmmakers — who in the past would have been sidelined by the progressive borg –now finance their own films and distribute them online or in DVD. It’s notable that a number of the 2017 libertarian films listed below were produced on shoe-string budgets and distributed mostly via Amazon streaming; these are just the kind of films that never would have seen daylight in the pre-digital world. There are hints that the new block chain technology will take this even further, and meanwhile the streaming service VidAngel, owned by libertarians, produced its first TV series.
Second, old Hollywood can no longer stake the slightest claim on moral superiority.
That’s an understatement.
WE GOT TREACHER: Is Trump Crazy, or Just a Jerk?
It can hardly be coincidence that President Trump’s election has sparked debates from certain members of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) about eliminating the Goldwater Rule. The rule was the consequence of a 1964 article in Fact magazine that published the results of a survey they’d given 12,356 psychiatrists asking whether Sen. Barry Goldwater was fit to be president.
The response was modest, but telling. Of the 2,417 respondents, 1,189, or less than half (49 percent), affirmed Goldwater was indeed unfit for office. The survey was part of an exposé on the senator entitled, “The Unconscious of a Conservative: A Special Issue on the Mind of Barry Goldwater.”
Goldwater later sued the magazine editor Ralph Ginzburg for libel, and was awarded $75,000. It seems what some psychiatrists deemed a necessary call, nay, an obligation to diagnosis from afar, turned out to be libelous. In 1973 the APA remedied this embarrassing display of amateurism by adding section 7.3 to their “Principles of Medical Ethics,” now known as the Goldwater Rule.
…
A Google search (a lodestar for informational trends) lays out a timeline that shows almost to the day when substantive opposition to the rule started. A 2015 Vanity Fair article published shortly after Trump announced his candidacy showed where opponents were heading. Not unlike the Fact article a half century before, several therapists were interviewed about Trump’s mental fitness.
You’d think the psychiatric profession would be better attuned to its own self-destructive derangement syndrome, but no.
WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Seattle Sugar Tax Raises Soda Prices by 75 Percent.
Jon Gabriel:
Where will all the new revenue go? Seattle officials expect a $15 million boost in the first year. Since this was sold as a health initiative, $2 million of that will expand a city program that gives fruit and vegetable vouchers to low-income families. Of course, only $400,000 will go to actual vouchers; the other $1.6 million stays with the government for “administrative costs.”
Philadelphia, which enacted a similar tax last year, overestimated the expected revenue. Sales of carbonated soft drinks fell 55 percent inside the city, while sales rose 38 percent in the towns that surround it. It achieved neither the financial goals nor the health goals.
When the Seattle tax was first proposed, a “racial-equity analysis” found that diet beverages should be included since they are more popular among whites and the wealthy people. The politicians shot this down since they know which constituents donate to and vote for them.
Like most of these beverage taxes hitting blue cities, what is and is not included are counter-intuitive. All meal replacement drinks, powdered mixes, and most sugary coffee drinks — such as those found at local mega-company Starbucks — are exempt.
So, if you buy a bottled lemonade, you pay the tax. If you buy Kool-Aid and mix it with water at home, no tax. If you buy a Venti Brown Sugar Shortbread Latte at Starbucks, the tax doesn’t apply. If you get a Tall Brown Sugar Shortbread Frappuccino, which has less sugar, it does.
It’s cute that Seattle actually expects to collect all that revenue, instead of driving soda shoppers outside of city limits.
“IT DOESN’T LOOK GOOD”: Intel CEO In Jeopardy For Selling Stock After Learning Of “Staggering” Flaw.
The trade, which took place on Nov. 29, has been called “a highly unusual move” that risked attracting regulatory scrutiny, according to lawyers and analysts who spoke to the WSJ. The timing of Krzanich’s sale “is really odd,” said Dan O’Connor, a Ropes & Gray attorney specializing in securities law. “The timing, the size, the unusual nature compared to prior sales—that’s going to get this a lot of scrutiny.”
While the trade took place under an SEC rule that allows officers and directors to prearrange sales of specific numbers of shares at particular times, the experts note that the rule prohibits insiders from setting up such transactions while possessing undisclosed information that might affect the stock price.
Which is precisely what happened in this case.
For what it’s worth, a friend of mine who runs data centers for a living — and whose servers might be greatly impacted by the Intel flaw — told me yesterday he bought a few shares of rival chipmaker AMD last week.
SOME THOUGHTS ON MY WALL STREET JOURNAL COLUMN, over at Simple Justice. “Without clerkships, how would anyone prove they were pretentious enough to be lawprofs? Without clerkships, academics could end up coming from the ranks of people with actual knowledge of the law from experience. It would be a disaster.”