TAMARA KEEL: The Benefits of ‘BBQ Guns.’
Archive for 2019
November 12, 2019
CUT YOUR BEACH HOUSE BUDGET FIRST: Cut Military Budget and Apply it to Green New Deal, Jane Fonda’s Protest Advocates.
WINNING: Supreme Court appears inclined to let Trump end DACA program.. This shouldn’t be hard. What’s done by executive order can be undone by executive order. Unless you think there’s a Trump Exception to the Constitution, as apparently many of our best and brightest do.
NONE OF THIS MATTERS: HAN SHOT FIRST. George Lucas changed Han Solo’s scene with Greedo in Star Wars: A New Hope, Disney confirmed. Why can’t people leave Han Solo alone?
“People?” Endlessly editing this scene because Lucas knows he alienated fans badly with his decision to take our first glimpse of Han Solo’s badassery and neuter it away seems to be his purview alone.
THEY’LL MAKE UP THE LOSSES BY HIKING RATES AND CUTTING POWER ON THE VERY SAME PEOPLE: PG&E is offering $13.5 billion to California wildfire victims.
CUI BONO? Prediction: No Impeachment.
(Link broken, is fixed, sorry.)
I WASN’T EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: NASA Scientists Detect Huge Thermonuclear Blast Deep in Space. Okay, it’s a distant pulsar, nothing as exciting as the Chinese testing an Orion craft.
BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: Republican Mark Sanford drops out of presidential race.
AT AMAZON, save in Science Fiction and Fantasy.
THE “LOWFAT” STUFF IS ACTUALLY LESS HEALTHY: Farmers to Congress: Allow schools to serve whole milk.
SEN. MAZIE HIRONO (D-HI): We Should Believe in Climate Change as If It’s a Religion, Not a Science.
“…These are times that call for us to do those things that we believe in, and to march, and not just to march, cause that’s important to show solidarity, but then to do those things such as voter registration, get people out to vote, so that we can have people here who are truly committed to human rights, environmental rights — climate change…believe in climate change as though it’s a religion, it’s not a science — and all the things that need to be done, and there is a lot,” Sen. Hirono told the crowd.
While Nietzsche assured the Jurassic “woke” class of the late 19th century that “God is dead,” most of the branches of the “Progressivism” that followed are forms of a substitute religion to fill the void, including both radical environmentalism, and even socialist health care. As the late Tom Wolfe wrote in his epochal 1976 article, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” “It is entirely possible that in the long run historians will regard the entire New Left experience as not so much a political as a religious episode wrapped in semi military gear and guerrilla talk.” (That line was written with early ‘70s radical chic in mind, but reverberates quite nicely today, given Antifa’s current love of paramilitary cosplay.)
NEWS YOU CAN USE: A Zombie Fighter’s Guide to Strategy.
BUT I WAS ASSURED THAT IT WAS A HEALTHY LIFESTYLE CHOICE: Heavy Marijuana Use Could Double Stroke Risk for Young People, Study Suggests.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Ten Reasons Why Impeachment Is Illegitimate.
I WONDER WHAT THEY’LL TALK ABOUT: The Air Force wants the F-35 and F-22 stealth fighters to talk to the secret X-37B space plane.
FREE SPEECH IS ONLY FOR THE PEOPLE I CARE ABOUT: Empathy is Tearing Us Apart. Robert Wright on a new study showing that people who score high on the empathy scale are more likely to applaud efforts by protesters to silence a speaker from the opposing political party. They’re also more likely to be amused by reports that the protesters injured a supporter of the speaker.
Any guess on which party’s voters score higher on empathy?
NOBODY KNOWS WHAT TELEVISION IS ANYMORE:
These days, television—whatever it is—is on your phone, on your PlayStation, on YouTube, on your laptop, and even, sometimes, on your actual television, the big thing you bought from Amazon. TV is increasingly indistinct from the world of big-budget Hollywood feature films and also from big tech, which now makes shows, the things you watch, in order to sell phones, watches, diapers, plush toys, and lunch boxes. On occasion, TV even seems to be melding with video games and vice versa. You can consume as much of it as you want, from virtually any place you can imagine, on anything that has a screen. TV is everything now, and everywhere, an amorphous cultural and commercial blob backed by billions in tech and media spending. Its cultural dominance is unchecked by anything except your own time, and it is increasingly tailored to your unique interests and obsessions.
Read the whole thing. There’s a massive amount of product being created now, via all of the major players entering the streaming game, the traditional networks, and the cable outlets. But as Sonny Bunch asked last year at the Weekly Standard*, “Overload: Will any shows from the Golden Age of TV endure?”
* Another product of the digital age which met a swift demise.
CHARLES LIPSON: Bloomberg Will Hit an Iceberg.