AT AMAZON, deals in Office and School Supplies.
Plus, save on Software.
Archive for 2019
May 12, 2019
I SAY SOMETHING SIMILAR IN MY FORTHCOMING BOOK ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Deplatforming the Platformers: Why Antitrust Legislation Is the Way to Go. Though I think existing legislation will do the job; we just need antitrust enforcement.
OPEN THREAD: No haiku assignment this time.
RIGHTISH COMEDIAN EVAN SAYET’S NEW BOOK MOCKING LEFTY APOCALYPSE FEVER, Apocali Now! is #1 in New Releases in Political Humor at Amazon.
COULD THERE BE LIFE ON MARS TODAY?
Well, I certainly hope not.
BREXIT UPDATE: British EU Parliament elections set to deliver a surprise.
You might assume that the backers of Remain would be ascendant, given what a hash the government has made of the process so far. And that would mean that the Labour Party and the Lib-Dems would be cleaning up. But the latest polling from the Isles tells a very different story. This was highlighted during a recent interview with former Prime Minister and Remain advocate Tony Blair.
Read the whole thing.
Related: Prime Minister Nigel Farage? “It would be unwise, we sense, to make too much of these polls. We all learned anything in 2016, it was that polls are fickle. A lot can happen in two weeks; the Brexit Party wasn’t even formally registered until February of this year. Yet it would also be unwise, we sense, to make too little of this. Come May, Britain’s biggest delegation in Strasbourg could be the party that doesn’t want to be there at all.”
TESTOSTERONE IS EVIL, EXCEPT WHEN USED BY WOMEN TRANSITIONING TO BEING MEN: Caster Semenya and the Twisted Politics of Testosterone. But Semenya isn’t just a woman with naturally high testosterone, she’s intersex: XY chromosomes but a female-appearing body.
YOU’VE GOT TO ROLL WITH THE PUNCHES AND GET TO WHAT’S REAL: Why You Feel the Urge to Jump — The science and philosophy of looking down from a high place.
I THINK I POSTED THIS LAST YEAR, BUT I’M POSTING IT AGAIN BECAUSE IT’S A GREAT STORY: This Plane Accidentally Flew Around the World: After Pearl Harbor, the crew of Pan Am flight 18602 was forced to do the impossible.
BILL ALLOWING ILLEGAL ALIENS TO WORK IN CONGRESS APPROVED BY HOUSE COMMITTEE: “The crazy part of this effort is that even if it passes the full house, it won’t pass through the Senate. It’s political Kabuki theater. There is no way the bill gets the sixty votes for cloture and a final vote on the Senate floor. I suspect that the supporters of the bill in either house doesn’t expect it to come up for a Senate vote either.”
CLEVER MARKETING: The Range Rover Astronaut Edition Is Only for Virgin Galactic’s Commercial Astronauts. “Are you signed up to fly to space on Virgin Galactic when the first commercial flights begin later this year? Are you in need of a new car for when you’re not in space? Do you like British SUVs? Are you very rich? (Okay, if you’re signed up for Virgin Galactic you definitely are very rich, we didn’t need to ask that.) Well, have we got the car for you. It’s called the Range Rover Astronaut Edition, and it’s only available to the ‘Future Astronauts’ who have signed up and paid to go to space.”
If I were an astronaut, I’d be hoping my spaceship was more reliable than a Range Rover.
CURRENTLY $2.99 ON KINDLE: Gary Taubes’ The Case Against Sugar.
Evans’ view is that Hobsbawm was a historian first and a communist second. He did not take his allegiance to the party to the extent of lying, distorting evidence or using his professional work for propaganda, the way many communists in other fields certainly did. Indeed, Evans makes good use of the transcripts of MI5’s wiretaps of CPGB’s London headquarters, which reveal that the party bosses saw Hobsbawm as more of a problem than an asset; for instance, he stubbornly refused to follow the party line on Hungary in 1956. Hobsbawm himself acknowledged that as a communist “you were supposed to write a straightforward line, and whatever I said did not fit in.” He noted that “not a single one of my books was ever published in Russia in the Soviet period”: His defenses of bandits as freedom fighters hardly matched the Soviet vision of total state control.
At the same time, Evans tends to discount—precisely because it is so obvious—the way that Hobsbawm’s communism informed his vision of modern history, particularly in his bestselling Age series. For Hobsbawm, capitalism was the great evil and disaster of the modern world, and communism a noble and necessary, if sometimes misguided, attempt to cure it. No amount of communist atrocity could change this equation. Late in life, Hobsbawm was interviewed by the Canadian intellectual Michael Ignatieff, who asked him whether “the loss of fifteen, twenty million people” would have been justified if the Soviet Union had succeeded in creating a world revolution; he unhesitatingly answered “Yes.” Unlike the repentant ex-communists he despised, Hobsbawm never gave up the barbaric doctrine that the end justifies the means.
This core conviction of the essential goodness of communism colors Hobsbawm’s interpretation of key moments in modern history, particularly when the Soviet Union is involved. When he comes to write about the Russian Revolution in The Age of Extremes, for instance, Hobsbawm romantically praises communist revolutionaries, who were responsible for untold amounts of suffering and death, as “the necessarily ruthless and disciplined army of human emancipation.” He chastises England and France for appeasing Hitler at Munich, but barely mentions Stalin’s alliance with Hitler to divide Poland between them. And he blames the origin of the Cold War, not on Stalin’s actual aggression in Eastern Europe, but on a putative American attempt to “turn an exhausted and impoverished U.S.S.R. into yet another client region of the U.S. economy.” Hobsbawm’s history may be legitimate left-wing interpretation rather than culpable communist propaganda, but clearly the line is a thin one.
As blogger Moe Lane once wrote, “Marxism is intellectualism for stupid people; it tends to attract the sort who can’t understand that an economic system that cannot feed its own population reliably has failed at the game of Life. Literally.”
ONE OF THE PRETTIEST KIT CARS EVER MADE.
MAYBE I SHOULD MOVE SOMEWHERE ELSE: California may go dark this summer on windy days.
And, of course, California with its many wind mills doesn’t do well on windless days either.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21st CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Fastest Way to Get to New York City Airports? A $195 Helicopter Flight.
PERSUADING PARENTS BY BRAINWASHING THEIR CHILDREN WORKS: Somehow that doesn’t fill my soul with joy.
CLOWN NOSE ON: Ocasio-Cortez Rebuffs ‘Fact-Checkers,’ Says The World Ending In 12 Years Was ‘Dry Humor.’
But those responsible for the 2018 UN report on climate change — from which Ocasio-Cortez drew her “12 years left” conclusion — did not consider their work to be an attempt at “dry humor.”
And during a live stream in April, Ocasio-Cortez mocked critics who blew off the claim as a joke, making it clear that she was serious when she said, “We have 12 years left to cut emissions by at least 50%, if not more, and for everyone who wants to make a joke about that, you may laugh, but your grandkids will not.”
She went on to compare those who ignore climate change with those who sat on the sidelines during the Civil Rights movement. “So just know that while a lot of people can hide that their grandparents did that in the civil rights movement, you should also know that the internet documents everything,” Ocasio-Cortez warned. “And your grandchildren will not be able to hide the fact that you fought against acknowledging and taking bold action against climate change.”
She concluded by saying once more that it was not a joke. “And for those of you who are trying to mock and delay this moment, I mean, I just feel bad for you. I pity you for your role in history right now,” she said. (RELATED: Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal Is So Urgent That She’s Mad The GOP Wants To Vote On It)
As Jim Treacher wrote of Jon Stewart, “once I saw through his Clown Nose Off/Clown Nose On routine — ‘You should listen to me because what I’m saying is important, but I’ll brush off your rebuttal by insisting I’m just a comedian’ — it was like the optical illusion with the cows.”
Cows, you say? Awfully prescient of Treacher to anticipate AOC’s bête-noire.
21st CENTURY HEADLINES: It’s Easier to Track One Man Through His Cellphone Than a 110,000-Ton Aircraft Carrier.
RETURN OF THE PISTOL-CALIBER CARBINE.
PROFOUNDLY: How Viagra revolutionized the erectile dysfunction market. When will it go over-the-counter?