IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: Trump Administration maximum pressure targets Iran’s violent ayatollah regime. My latest Observer essay.
Archive for 2018
May 19, 2018
SOCIAL CONTAGION: The Best Explanation for Our Spate of Mass Shootings Is the Least Comforting. “Those who advocate for gun control have an immediate answer — the prevalence of guns in the United States. Yet guns have been part of the fabric of American life for the entire history of our republic. Mass shootings — especially the most deadly mass shootings — are a far more recent phenomenon. Writing in 2015, Malcolm Gladwell wrote what I think is still the best explanation for modern American mass shootings, and it’s easily the least comforting. At the risk of oversimplifying a complex argument, essentially he argues that each mass shooting lowers the threshold for the next. He argues, we are in the midst of a slow-motion ‘riot’ of mass shootings, with the Columbine shooting in many ways the key triggering event.”
Related: Social Media As Social Disease.
DIRTY TRICKS: The FBI Informant Who Monitored the Trump Campaign, Stefan Halper, Oversaw a CIA Spying Operation in the 1980 Presidential Election. “In 1980, the Washington Post published an article reporting on the extremely unusual and quite aggressive involvement of the CIA in the 1980 presidential campaign. ‘Simply put, no presidential campaign in recent memory — perhaps ever — has attracted as much support from the intelligence community as the campaign of former CIA director Bush,’ the article said. . . . In 2016, top officials from the intelligence community similarly rallied around Hillary Clinton.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: So You’ve Decided to Get a Goth Girlfriend Like Elon Musk. Meh. Been there, done that.
ROB REINER ON MORNING JOE: We’ve Never Had TV Networks Align with a President!
Movie director Rob Reiner appeared on Friday’s Morning Joe to announce his historical verdict: This is the first time in American history that “state-run TV” networks like Fox and Sinclair ever “aligned with a president of the United States.” The networks never aligned with JFK, or Bill Clinton, or Barack Obama.
Flashback: Obama White House Emails MSNBC During Joe Scarborough Show (Video).
MET OPERA ACCUSES CONDUCTOR JAMES LEVINE OF DECADES OF SEXUAL MISCONDUCT:
The company suspended Mr. Levine in December, and commissioned an outside investigation into his behavior, after reports appeared in The New York Times and The New York Post detailing accusations by several men who said they had been sexually abused by him decades ago, when they were teenagers or students of his. The Met fired Mr. Levine in March after the investigation found what it called “credible and corroborated evidence of sexual misconduct during his time at the Met, as well as earlier.” A few days later, Mr. Levine sued, accusing the company of defamation and breach of contract.
The Met’s suit says that the company “has and will continue to incur significant reputational and economic harm as a result of the publicity associated with Levine’s misconduct.” The company was already in a difficult financial position before the scandal broke, battling the high costs of putting on grand opera amid a box office slump.
On Friday, Moody’s Investors Service Inc., the credit rating agency, downgraded the Met’s bonds to Baa2 from Baa1, citing its “thin liquidity and the fact that it has not yet been able to reach its endowment fund-raising targets combined with ongoing labor costs pressures and capital needs.” One of the Met’s strengths, it noted, was its strong donor support, which the company relies on.
Regarding that last paragraph, Terry Teachout tweets, “That’s an earthquake you hear rumbling in the distance.”
QUESTION ASKED: “It’s 2018. One of the world’s most powerful married men had a 22-year-old intern perform oral sex on him in his office. He’s been accused of sexual assault by three other women. One claims, as is the case with so many of the men who have fallen from positions of power as a result, that he exposed himself to her (which always makes me, at least, pause and wonder why on earth so many men seem to want to do this). We know, too, that he lied about his tryst with the intern. So why is Bill Clinton still presiding over glamorous parties?”
Meanwhile, regarding his spouse, Hillary to Dems: We’re going to take back our country — and I’ll be there every step of the way.
Related: Fleetwood Mac’s “Albatross” in stereo.
THIS EXPLAINS A LOT, ACTUALLY: Journalists drink too much, are bad at managing emotions, and operate at a lower level than average, according to a new study.
Journalists’ brains show a lower-than-average level of executive functioning, according to a new study, which means they have a below-average ability to regulate their emotions, suppress biases, solve complex problems, switch between tasks, and show creative and flexible thinking.
The study, led by Tara Swart, a neuroscientist and leadership coach, analysed 40 journalists from newspapers, magazines, broadcast, and online platforms over seven months. The participants took part in tests related to their lifestyle, health, and behaviour. . . .
Each subject completed a blood test, wore a heart-rate monitor for three days, kept a food and drink diary for a week, and completed a brain profile questionnaire.
The results showed that journalists’ brains were operating at a lower level than the average population, particularly because of dehydration and the tendency of journalists to self-medicate with alcohol, caffeine, and high-sugar foods.
Forty-one percent of the subjects said they drank 18 or more units of alcohol a week, which is four units above the recommended weekly allowance. Less than 5% drank the recommended amount of water.
However, in interviews conducted in conjunction with the brain profile results, the participants indicated they felt their jobs had a lot of meaning and purpose.
But of course.
IT’S ACTUALLY OBVIOUS IF YOU THINK ABOUT IT: NASA confirms: In space, ‘reverse cowgirl’ and ‘doggystyle’ are the same thing.
TAMARA KEEL: “Can you kill a dude with birdshot from a 12ga? You sure can. Most of the cops I know can tell at least one story of some bad guy laying in a spreading puddle, having had a rathole chewed through his middle by a close-range blast from a low-brass #7.5 target load. But when I say ‘close range,’ I’m talking three to ten feet from the muzzle. Which is damned near gun-grab distance in a long-gun fight.”
STEGANOGRAPHY UPDATE: Hiding Information in Plain Text: Subtle changes to letter shapes can embed messages.
PLUS, SPACE FOR WINE AND CHEESE IN THE COCKPIT: France’s New Armored Car Does Not Mess Around.
C-17 FLARE STORM: The jet transport can create a rather large one. Photo snapped in Qatar during a recent exercise.
SCIENCE: Scientists Built The World’s Fastest Water Heater, And It Sounds Totally Insane: Also, it transforms water into a completely new physical state. “That violent jiggling – for all purposes what we refer to as ‘heat’ – is equal to a scorching 100,000 degrees Celsius, way hotter than Earth’s core. What’s more, it takes less than 75 femtoseconds to accomplish this, which doesn’t give the molecules making up the trickle of water much time to escape. This sudden shock creates an unusual phase of water, one that is still a liquid but has the properties of a gaseous soup of charged particles.”
ANATOMY OF A SMEAR: How the Media Lied About Trump’s ‘Animals’ Comment.
THE LONDON DAILY MAIL HAS A FEVAH, AND IT NEEDS MORE COVERAGE OF HARRY AND MEGHAN’S WEDDING!
It’s wall to wall there today, if that’s your thing.
YOU CAN ONLY BE AVANT-GARDE FOR SO LONG BEFORE YOU BECOME GARDE: ‘SNL’ Cold Opens Are Unfunny, Elitist Pieces of Liberal Propaganda — The star-studded sketches aren’t just dull, they’re limousine liberalism at its worst, says those wacky rightwingers at, err…Vice.com.
Just compare and contrast how SNL coped with the losses of leftwing presidential candidates, the hilarious “Dukakis After Dark” sketch on the eve of Papa Bush winning in ’88, versus Kate McKinnon in character as Hillary Clinton performing a cringingly melancholy version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” after the 2016 election.
When he returned for a season in 1981, original writer Michael O’Donoghue, the pioneer of take no prisoners “cut and slash humor,” believed that he was there to give the show a “decent Viking Funeral” to close things down. If only NBC had listened.
Or as fellow original writer Anne Beatts, who dated O’Donoghue when both were with the National Lampoon prior to SNL once said, “You can only be avant-garde for so long before you become garde.”
IN THE TRIBE’S USEFUL IDIOTS, Jonah Goldberg writes, “Useful idiots take an event and remove all the facts that don’t fit their desired final product:”
The people who insist that the Palestinians are unalloyed victims remove human agency from them. According to this thinking, they are not making choices; they are playing their parts. How dare you ask why someone would bring a (very sick) baby to a riot? How dare you suggest that there is subtext to the story of Palestinian righteousness? If you point out that the real villain in a shooting isn’t the inanimate object but the person wielding it, you are muddying the plot. Populists always tell a story about the righteousness of “the people,” but they invariably mean only “the right people”; the rest are barely people at all.
As the meme making the rounds today featuring Mike Pence talking with Trump goes, “I bet you can’t make the Democrats defend MS-13 and Hamas in the same week.” “Hold my Diet Coke.”
BUT OF COURSE: Gunman Who Shot Up Trump Hotel Was Former Male Stripper.
WHY TRUMP TWEETS: “More than anyone else, it is President Trump who has stood up to the swamp in the person of Bob Mueller, and is forcing the Democratic Party press to begin covering the real story of the 2016 election.”
Read the whole thing.