ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: If Hipsters Became Zombies, Could We Tell the Difference?
Archive for 2019
June 11, 2019
JOEL KOTKIN: California’s Progressive Betrayal — The Golden State’s left-wing policies hurt working-class and middle-class residents.
Betrayal? The system is working as advertised. As Fred Siegel wrote in his 2014 history of the American left, The Revolt Against the Masses, “The best short credo of liberalism came from the pen of the once canonical left-wing literary historian Vernon Parrington in the late 1920s. ‘Rid society of the dictatorship of the middle class,’ Parrington insisted, referring to both democracy and capitalism, ‘and the artist and the scientist will erect in America a civilization that may become, what civilization was in earlier days, a thing to be respected.’ Alienated from middle-class American life, liberalism drew on an idealized image of ‘organic’ pre-modern folkways and rhapsodized about a future harmony that would reestablish the proper hierarchy of virtue in a post-bourgeois, post-democratic world.”
Gavin Newsom (at least tacitly) approves that message.
NOW THAT THEY’VE ENDORSED ‘FULLY AUTOMATED LUXURY COMMUNISM,’ NO WONDER THEY SEE HIM AS EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN: New York Times Thinks Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman Is the Gateway to the Alt-Right.
AKA, STAR TREK: “The World Is a Mess. We Need Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” screams a headline at the New York Times. (Link safe; goes to US edition of the London Spectator):
This time, our maximum leader is Aaron Bastani. Instead of Marxist-Leninism or Mao Zedong Thought, it’s what Bastani calls ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’.
‘Asteroid mining. Gene editing. Synthetic meat,’ Chairman Bastani writes. ‘We could provide for the needs of everyone, in style. It just takes some imagination.’
Cockburn, unlike the Times, can take a political joke. He often sits down of an evening with a half-bottle of whiskey, a family bag of Doritos and a volume of Karl Marx. Bastani is selling an updated version of Marx’s sales pitch that communism is a better way of managing the technology and output of capitalism. Aaron has asteroids, and Karl had hemorrhoids, but both promise the workers that automation and centralized redistribution will give a life of comfort for all.
I’m so old, I can remember when other New York-area fully automated luxury communists wrote manifestos telling the world it needed to ban airplanes, let alone asteroid mining.
NEW SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” MAKING NEW FRIENDS ACROSS THE AISLE: “I’m a libertarian and I agree with AOC on over-the-counter birth control,” Glenn writes in his latest USA Today column.
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Plus, deals on Toys and Games.
BABYLON BEE SATIRE: “Progressive Mom Proudly Declares Son to be Transgender After He Walks Through Barbie Aisle.” (Naming the child in the story “Kale” is a nice touch.)
HEY, IF YOU’RE GOING TO STEAL, STEAL FROM THE BEST: Joe Biden Plagiarizes Disgraced Michael Avenatti During Iowa Speech.
UPDATE: Eugene Volokh notes that the phrase ‘Let’s Make America America Again’ “isn’t originally Avenatti’s — it had been used by Ted Kennedy, Anita Hill, Rick Santorum, and (as ‘Let America be America again’) by Langston Hughes in 1935.”
GOD AND SJW MAN AT TWITTER: ‘Let the smiting begin!’ Twitter locks God (no seriously!) annnd we’re officially dead now.
“AND THE ANSWER IS: NONE. NONE MORE SEATTLE:” Seattle Yoga Teacher Offers ‘Undoing Whiteness’ Class.
With that level of racial obsession, it’s like the identity politics left is the mirror image of the alt-right or something.
DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA, PART ZWEI: “CNN runs Pride Month essay by married mother of two (a former CNN reporter) who watches Saturday Night Live, decides to leave her husband and break her family up to live as a lesbian. No, really, this is a thing that happened.”
SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE COULD NOT BE REACHED FOR COMMENT: Vietnam says that China is mislabeling products as Vietnamese to avoid U.S. tariffs.
The fire that swept across the backlot of Universal Studios Hollywood on Sunday, June 1, 2008, began early that morning, in New England. At 4:43 a.m., a security guard at the movie studio and theme park saw flames rising from a rooftop on the set known as New England Street, a stretch of quaint Colonial-style buildings where small-town scenes were filmed for motion pictures and television shows. That night, maintenance workers had repaired the roof of a building on the set, using blowtorches to heat asphalt shingles. They finished the job at 3 a.m. and, following protocol, kept watch over the site for another hour to ensure that the shingles had cooled. But the roof remained hot, and some 40 minutes after the workers left, one of the hot spots flared up.
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The monetary value of this loss is difficult to calculate. Aronson recalls hearing that the company priced the combined total of lost tape and “loss of artistry” at $150 million. But in historical terms, the dimension of the catastrophe is staggering. It’s impossible to itemize, precisely, what music was on each tape or hard drive in the vault, which had no comprehensive inventory. It cannot be said exactly how many recordings were original masters or what type of master each recording was. But legal documents, UMG reports and the accounts of Aronson and others familiar with the vault’s collection leave little doubt that the losses were profound, taking in a sweeping cross-section of popular music history, from postwar hitmakers to present-day stars.
Among the incinerated Decca masters were recordings by titanic figures in American music: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Al Jolson, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland. The tape masters for Billie Holiday’s Decca catalog were most likely lost in total. The Decca masters also included recordings by such greats as Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five and Patsy Cline.
The fire most likely claimed most of Chuck Berry’s Chess masters and multitrack masters, a body of work that constitutes Berry’s greatest recordings. The destroyed Chess masters encompassed nearly everything else recorded for the label and its subsidiaries, including most of the Chess output of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, Bo Diddley, Etta James, John Lee Hooker, Buddy Guy and Little Walter. Also very likely lost were master tapes of the first commercially released material by Aretha Franklin, recorded when she was a young teenager performing in the church services of her father, the Rev. C.L. Franklin, who made dozens of albums for Chess and its sublabels.
Read the whole thing — and remember to regularly back up your data and store it someplace off-site.
WHERE WERE YOU THE DAY THE INTERNET DIED?
Brilliant thread filled with dire predictions which somehow, completely unexpectedly, never came to pass.
NEW SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” MAKING NEW FRIENDS ACROSS THE AISLE: “I’m a libertarian and I agree with AOC on over-the-counter birth control,” Glenn writes in his latest USA Today column.
Update: Since original publication, USA Today changed their headline from “conservative” to “libertarian” to accurately reflect Glenn’s ideology, and we’ve adjusted our version as well above.
ARE WE A BAD INFLUENCE ON WORLD HIGHER ED, OR VICE VERSA? As a pro-America chauvinist when it comes to law and philosophy, I generally see Europe, Canada, etc. as a bad influence on our commercial republic of yeoman farmers. But when it comes to clamping down on academic freedom in higher ed, the influence really looks to be going the other way.
DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: ‘Desmond Is Amazing’ Needs Saving — An eleven-year-old drag performer should inspire fierce protest.
Further thoughts here: Is Desmond amazing?
IT’S COME TO THIS: Pinterest bans pro-life Live Action — after blocking it as porn?
JUST IN TIME FOR PEAK SUMMER ROADTRIP SEASON: Gasoline prices set to plunge at the pump.
Last year at this time, the average price nationally for regular gas at the pump was $2.92 a gallon, according to AAA. Now, following an 18% drop in crude oil prices in New York, the average sits at $2.75 at a time of year — spring time — when the price usually peaks in anticipation of more drivers on the road.
“We did see a 7-cent decline in the national gas price last week, and I think you can look for another decline this week, so motorists would not be advised to be so fast to fill their tanks,” said Patrick DeHaan, a GasBuddy.com analyst, by telephone. “I could see the national average down around $2.60 a gallon or even $2.59 gallon this week.”
That low a price would be an 11.3% drop from a year earlier, getting close to the size of the decline in crude prices over the same period. Still, some are paying much more than the average. While drivers in parts of Texas get to pay about $2 a gallon, motorists in parts of Northern California are forking over more than double that.
Californians have no one to blame but themselves.