Archive for 2019
August 8, 2019
MICHAEL YON: “Tonight I talked for about an hour with a ‘Google Snowden’ who will soon go public. A deep insider. Fascinating stuff. I cannot say much now other than pay attention to what is coming out starting in a week or so from now. Source said many interesting things about how Chinese are flooding into tech companies like Google, and some of the incredible techniques they can use to brainwash or at least mislead millions of people.”
I suppose we’ll wind up nationalizing Google, for national security reasons.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Red Flag Laws Are Stupid and Useless.
WOODSTOCK, 50 YEARS ON: At Power Line, Paul Mirengoff finds PBS “Misrepresenting Woodstock.”
Rather than pick apart the content, I’ll just focus on the title. Woodstock did not “define a generation.” Not even close.
The PBS program tied Woodstock to the radical politics of the era. That’s fair. The festival celebrated the “counter-culture,” of which radical leftism was a key element.
But radical leftism did not define “a generation” — at least not the generation of Woodstock. In the first presidential election after the festival, about half the members of that generation voted for Richard Nixon. As the Woodstock generation came into its own, it elected Ronald Reagan twice by landslides, and Reagan’s successor by a comfortable margin.
This was followed by two terms of a center-left president and two terms of a center-right one. Not until 2008, 39 years after Woodstock when that generation was on the wane, did America elect a president as far left as the one who had departed the year of the festival.
If I recall correctly, there was at least one reference to Reagan on the Woodstock stage. He was referred to as Ronald Ray-gun (maybe during Joan Baez’s segment). The Gipper also appears in the PBS retrospective. He is seen denouncing radicals during his time as governor.
So it’s ironic, I guess, that Ronald Reagan, not Woodstock, is the political legacy of the Woodstock generation.
Even at the time of the festival, its politics didn’t reflect the politics of young Americans. I’ve already noted Nixon’s standing in 1972.
In the 1960s, there really was a mainstream culture, and a much smaller counterculture. By the end of the following decade, as David Frum wrote in his history of the 1970s, their New Left worldview made massive inroads into the existing American culture. To the point where, as Nate Hochman write today at NRO, “The revolution of the 1960s isn’t dead; it has been fully realized, to the great confusion of its proponents:”
This is not [concert promoter Michael] Lang’s first attempt at resuscitating the utopian bliss of the original Woodstock. He organized revival concerts in 1994 and 1999, but they were plagued by a host of rape and sexual-assault allegations, violence, looting, fires, and the burning of American flags. In both, the original Woodstock’s atmosphere of rapturous love was replaced with petulant anger — singers such as Joan Baez were exchanged for bands such as Rage Against the Machine — and its communitarian, cost-free idealism was replaced with the corporate cynicism of $150 tickets and $12 pizza slices.
The variety of obstacles that Lang has encountered is hardly symbolic of an energized mass sociopolitical movement like the one that fueled the original Woodstock. Indeed, the collapse of Lang’s vision is not attributable to any one logistical issue, but is rather indicative of the larger corporatization of the ’60s counterculture that Woodstock represented.
At the conclusion of a post today titled “America’s Nervous Breakdown,” Rod Dreher writes:
So: what you will never hear our media say is that all these things that the left today promotes — radical individual liberty, sexual autonomy, the deconstruction of family and sex, the exaltation of anti-white, anti-male tribalism, the destruction or denaturing of Christian religion — are driving us very quickly to the brink. They seem to believe the same old discredited Rousseau-ish nonsense that insists that we will be free only when all the chains to the full expression of individual will are cast aside.
Well, guess what: we’ve got that kind of society. Happy now?
NEW SCHOOL PROF IN HOT WATER FOR QUOTING JAMES BALDWIN: Legitimate academic discussion of use of the n-word is repeatedly being silenced. But don’t worry – students can always have reasonable and informed discussions about it online, right? Right?
FLASHBACK: Why Are Voters So Angry? They Want Self-Government Back. “We have lost the government we learned about in civics class, with its democratic election of representatives to do the voters’ will in framing laws, which the president vows to execute faithfully, unless the Supreme Court rules them unconstitutional. That small government of limited powers that the Founders designed, hedged with checks and balances, hasn’t operated for a century. All its parts still have their old names and appear to be carrying out their old functions. But in fact, a new kind of government has grown up inside the old structure, like those parasites hatched in another organism that grow by eating up their host from within, until the adult creature bursts out of the host’s carcass. This transformation is not an evolution but a usurpation.”
KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON ON WHITE-BOY AL-QAEDA:
Speaking with a retired intelligence analyst a few years ago, I was surprised to hear him insist that we had, in a sense, been lucky with the horrifying attack of September 11, 2001. There are today many factions and tendencies that operate under the name “al-Qaeda,” but, as the analyst explained at the time, the group associated with Osama bin Laden was determined never to follow a spectacular terrorist atrocity with anything except a more spectacular sequel. That insistence, combined with our efforts to degrade the jihadists’ logistical and financial infrastructure after 9/11, probably prevented a series of subsequent attacks. Al-Qaeda could not manage something bigger and more homicidal than 9/11 at the time.
But it could easily have managed what many of us feared at the time: a series of low-level, paralyzing attacks on shopping malls, movie theaters, and other public places, unsophisticated and low-investment atrocities requiring very little more than a gun or some dynamite and — most important — a man of no consequence willing to carry it out. We didn’t get that from al-Qaeda.
We got it from a lot of dysfunctional young white guys from suburbia.
Read the whole thing.
NOT THE ONION, NOT THE BABYLON BEE: Facebook Denies Shadow Banning, Receives Patent for Shadow Banning.
HMM: The Big Number: 35 inch or larger waist size linked to increased health risks in older women. “A woman’s body shape, and not just her weight, may have an impact on her health. Women with a waist circumference of 35 inches (88 centimeters) or more face an increased risk for obesity-related health issues, including premature death, according to new research culled from the long-term Women’s Health Initiative study. And that was so even if a woman’s weight or body mass index (BMI) was within a normal range.”
SHOCKINGLY, TRUMP NOT ACTUALLY TO BLAME FOR SHOOTINGS:
If you look at the past 10 years, the total level of hate crime is declining in the US, as is the amount of racism and anti-immigration sentiment, and Trump’s victory has done nothing to reverse that. Sociologists at the University of Pennsylvania published a study this year showing that Americans have become less inclined to express racist views since 2016, something true of Republican voters as well as Democrats, and a Gallup poll in June 2019 found 76 percent of Americans believe immigration is a good thing, the highest number to date. The same trends are visible in the UK: the population has become less racist and more pro-immigration since the Brexit vote. The liberal narrative about the toxic effect of the rise of far-right populism turns out to be nonsense.
Well, most liberal narratives are nonsense.
I HATE IT WHEN WEB SITES PARROT RIDICULOUS REPORTS OF THE U.S. COMMISSION ON CIVIL RIGHTS W/O POINTING OUT THERE WERE DISSENTS AND THAT THE DISSENTS MADE A LOT MORE SENSE THAN THE REPORT ITSELF: But that’s what this web site has done.
My dissent is here. (Sorry to be grumpy, but this is serious ….)
WHAT? Trump on Blago: ‘I’m thinking of commuting his sentence.’
Blagojevich, the former Illinois governor, was convicted of trying to trade President Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat for personal gain.
The Times reports that Trump described the incriminating phone call in which Blagojevich was taped discussing selling the seat as mostly a minor offense and something “many” politicians have done.
“I thought he was treated unbelievably unfairly; he was given close to 18 years in prison,” Trump said aboard Air Force One during his daylong swing through Dayton, Ohio and El Paso, Texas, in the wake of two deadly shootings there over the weekend. “And a lot of people thought it was unfair, like a lot of other things — and it was the same gang, the Comey gang and all these sleazebags that did it. And his name is Rod Blagojevich. And I’m thinking about commuting his sentence.”
The Times reports the president made plans to commute the sentence this week, citing two people with knowledge of the talks.
It’s always wise to reserve judgement on what Trump says until after Trump acts, but even then this one is still a real head-scratcher.
BUT THE NARRATIVE! El Paso Anti-Immigrant Terrorist Is Also a Radical Environmentalist.
We saw a similar hodgepodge of political views in the New Zealand shooter.
COLOR ME UNSURPRISED: Recording blood pressure over 24 hours better predictor of heart ailments.
WIPE THEM OUT. ALL OF THEM. Tarantula migration expected to crawl through Colorado.
NO GUN REQUIRED: 4 People Dead After Brutal Stabbing Spree In Southern California.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: The U.S. Army Plans To Field the Most Powerful Laser Weapon Yet.
HMM: Global Markets Stabilize After China Fixes Yuan Stronger Than Expected.
It isn’t often appreciated, but Beijing in recent years has been propping up the value of the yuan, in order to avoid a capital outflow crisis. So they can allow the yuan to fall against the dollar only so far, making Monday’s surprise depreciation a bit of a bluff.
YOUR DAILY TREACHER FEATURES NEWS YOU CAN USE: Amnesty International Issues Warning to Travelers Visiting the United States.
This is my favorite part:
“Depending on the traveler’s gender identity, race, country of origin, ethnic background, or sexual orientation, they may be at higher risk of being targeted with gun violence, and should plan accordingly.”
Did Richard Spencer write this? It sounds like white-nationalist fanfic.
Funny how the well the identity-politics-obsessed mainstream left mirrors the fringe alt-right. I’m so old, I can remember when Amnesty International appeared quite rational, before, as the late Steven Den Beste spotted in 2003, they began pandering to their membership: