THIS CITY IS HEADED FOR A DISASTER OF BIBLICAL PROPORTIONS. OLD TESTAMENT, MR. MAYOR, REAL WRATH OF GOD TYPE STUFF: Family Matters: Jaleel White Reviving Urkel for New Scooby-Doo Series.
Archive for 2019
June 25, 2019
WE REPORT, YOU DECIDE: Here’s a Compilation of Trump Accuser E. Jean Carroll’s Comments, Decide For Yourself.
The turning point came in 1977, when Piers Ackerman, another Australian recruit, learned that Elvis Presley’s former bodyguards might be willing to talk about his drug use in return for money. A fee of a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars was agreed upon, and Dunleavy flew out to California for a series of tell-all interviews. In just two months, he produced “Elvis: What Happened?,” a three-hundred-page book packed with salacious details about Presley’s private life. Serialization of the book in the Star began the very day before Presley was found dead at Graceland. “The circulation went from two million to three million in a week,” Ian Rae, a Fox News executive who was then editor of the Star, recalled. “We never looked back.’’ Dunleavy’s book became a best-seller, but he received only a flat fee of thirty thousand dollars, which he put toward the purchase of the house in Lido Beach. He wasn’t bitter. “Mate, I’ve never had a bad day in journalism in my life,” he said. “You win, you get drunk because you won. You lose, you get drunk because you lost.”
As Rod Dreher, who worked with Dunleavy at the New York Post writes, “Like Keith Richards, he lived on booze and cigarettes, and you didn’t think anything could kill him. Sadly, that wasn’t true. What a guy. The world is now a much less interesting place.” Read the whole thing.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Theodore Dalrymple on The Bland Leading the Bland.
A young man called Kyle Kashuv had his offer of a place at Harvard withdrawn when unnamed persons informed Harvard that two years earlier he had placed racist remarks on social media. The young man apologized as abjectly as any alleged miscreant at a Soviet show trial or during the Great Cultural Revolution in China, but it did not save him. The decision, apparently, was final.
There were undercurrents to the story. Kashuv was the pupil of a school in Florida at which a massacre took place. Thereafter, Kashuv and another pupil, David Hogg (both of whom were accepted by Harvard, though Hogg’s academic qualifications were considerably below those of Kashuv, and below those normally required by Harvard), campaigned respectively for and against the right to carry a gun. Thus Harvard’s decision to admit Hogg but not Kashuv could be, and of course was, interpreted as little more than an expression of political bias.
A great deal has been written about Harvard’s decision. The whole situation might have been avoided if Harvard admitted students strictly according to their score on tests, in which case what Kashuv wrote two years previously would have been irrelevant; on the other hand, such strict adherence to admission by test results would, or might, result in cohorts of test-passing automata.
The most significant thing about the whole wretched episode, however, is the way in which young people seem to be creating a totalitarian environment in which they denounce one another, as Kashuv was denounced. Thus the social media that were originally going to set opinion free and give voice to everyone will end by stifling expression and creating fear.
Indiscretions such as Kashuv’s can never be effaced, and it surprises me that so many public figures have not yet realized this and post comments that are certain to bring anathema down on them. It appears the world is full of people like Madame Defarge, who knitted the names of aristocrats at the base of the guillotine, contemplating their beheading with sadistic malice.
Curiously, Jacobin knitting has become all the rage of late.
(Via Maggie’s Farm.)
DID BROOKINGS BIRTH TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME? The Epoch Times’ Jeff Carlson has found something crassly partisan and almost wholly unexpected at the Brookings Institution, one of the most establishmentarian institutions of the Washington Establishment.
IT WAS ALL DARK AND EMPTY IN THERE. AND THERE WERE LITTLE MICE IN THE CORNERS AND SPIDERS HAD SPUN THIS WEB… A mental health professional diagnoses cable news anchors.
(Classical reference in headline.)
HMM: Commonly prescribed anticholinergic drugs linked to dementia risk. Maybe there’s a causal relationship. Maybe people are taking them in response to the early symptoms of dementia.
A LOT OF REPUBLICANS WILL BE WATCHING AND HOPING: Democratic bigwigs fear debates will devolve into horror show.
WEIRD — ALL THE BEST PEOPLE KEEP TELLING ME HOW CONTROVERSIAL IT IS: Chick-fil-A Named America’s Favorite Restaurant Chain — Again.
OH: Parkland survivor David Hogg says he’s been target of 7 ‘assassination attempts.’ “The vocal supporter of gun-control legislation detailed his experiences throughout the last 18 months as he went from regular high school student to one of the faces of the school safety movement in an interview with the Washington Post published Tuesday. He was not asked for further details about the threats.”
The original Washington Post story was written by KK Otteson, who seems strangely incurious for a reporter.
Democracy dies in darkness or whatevs.
It’s the Onion so it’s satire — or is it?
OFT EVIL WILL SHALL EVIL MAR: Media Gun Control Coverage Linked With Increased Gun Sales.
HOW’S THAT SPACE PROGRAM GOING? My USA TODAY column is about killer asteroids.
TO HELL WITH THE NAYSAYERS—JOSH HAWLEY IS RIGHT ABOUT BIG TECH: “The fact is that unless the tech companies are forcefully confronted, now, in the immediate, our self-governing republic will be over in less than a generation and we will be ruled by a tech oligarchy.”
Somebody should write a book about this sort of thing.
21ST CENTURY REPRODUCTION: Amid donor screening concerns, the sperm bank industry is “buyer beware.”
OLD AND BUSTED: THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL.
The New Hotness: The Pass Slipped Stitch Over is Political:
As veteran Twitter user “Neontaster” writes, “’Knitting has always been political,’ said the editor of a knitting magazine.’ Is my favorite sentence ever written.”
It’s quite a purl of wisdom that gathers no moss stitch. But how does it stack up to the politics of dancing?
DAVID MARCUS: Why Trump’s Cyber Attack On Iran Was The Right Move. “Cyber attacks are the future of warfare. By launching one against Iran, Trump has increased the threat to Iran without plunging the United States into war.”