WELL, IT IS 2019, YOU KNOW: The Sexbot Apocalypse.
With a headline like that, I had to make sure the article wasn’t written by notorious robophobe Matthew Yglesias.™
Archive for 2019
June 17, 2019
OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND, THAT LAND OF MAGICAL THINKING: British Police Propose Fighting Domestic Violence By Distributing Less Pointy Knives.
AT AMAZON, save in Car Care.
WHO’S YOUR DADDY? ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO KNOW? Twisting Ladders chronicles five families dealing with DNA surprises: people discovering who their biological parents are and meeting siblings they never knew about. Jayne Riew tells their riveting stories in words and photographs. If you think your relatives are complicated, check out these families’ joys and sorrows.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Harvard is more racist than Kyle Kashuv.
YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Domino’s Is Testing a Pizza-Bot.
Skynet licks his virtual lips in anticipation.
THE NARRATIVE MUST BE PRESERVED AT ALL COSTS: Venezuela: A Humanitarian Crisis The Left Couldn’t Care Less About.
THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: How Pete Buttigieg Entered the Anti-Israel Echo Chamber, and adopted Obama’s foreign policy.
BIG STATE, BIG MISTAKE: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has been signing a lot of bills into law that are good news for fans of limited government (like re-legalizing lemonade stands), but he made a big mistake signing these campus sexual harassment bills. In Texas, not only is sexual harassment now officially up to the most sensitive person on campus (no “reasonable person” requirement), but if you are a professor who doesn’t report this defective form of “harassment” to the campus Title IX apparatchiks, you can actually go to jail (Class B misdemeanor, up to 180 days in the slammer). Texas can, and must, do a lot better, because this just enshrined unconstitutional speech codes into state law.
TWITTER IS A VIRUS OF THE MIND: An excerpt from Glenn’s new book, The Social Media Upheaval.
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for June 17, 2019. “The lineup for the first two debates are set, Warren pulls ahead of Sanders for second place in early states, Castro and Klobuchar can’t even crack the top three in their own states, and Gabbard’s childhood in a white surfer dude’s Hari Krishna cult.”
RIP: Gloria Vanderbilt Dies at 95.
Vanderbilt was the only daughter of railroad magnate Reginald Vanderbilt and his second wife. As such, she and a half-sister, Cathleen Vanderbilt, each stood to inherit a share in a trust after the executive died when Gloria was just eighteen months old. Her paternal aunt would eventually win custody over the girl and her share in the trust. The trial around who would take control of young Vanderbilt’s life and finances was a tabloid sensation at the time.
But the woman’s life of adventure had only just begun. She studied acting and art and also became a top international fashion model, having been in the public eye starting at a very young age.
In the 1970s, she was among the first to grab hold of the craze for designer jeans, launching a line with her signature stitched on to one of the back pockets. Vanderbilt would go on to launch lines of dresses, perfumes, dresses, accessories – even liqueurs. She also turned to the literary world, writing novels and memoirs. In 2016, she and Cooper, the son of her fourth husband, published an account of their relationship, “The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son On Life, Love, and Loss.” A two-hour documentary produced by Liz Garbus, debuted on HBO that same year.
Vanderbilt first married in 1941 to Pat DiCicco, an agent to actors with a rough reputation. The marriage would last just four years. Within weeks of its end, she married conductor Leopold Stokowski. They had two sons, Leopold Stokowski and Christopher Stokowski, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1955. Vanderbilt was married to director Sidney Lumet between 1956 and 1963. She married author Wyatt Cooper on Christmas Eve, 1963. The marriage ended when Cooper died during surgery in 1978. The couple had two children: Anderson Cooper, and Carter Cooper, who died in 1988.
Her jeans commercials were ubiquitous on network TV in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including this one, which mixes blue jeans, Bobby Short, and Cole Porter, in a classic example of Tom Wolfe’s “funky chic” paradigm. As Wolfe wrote, “Everybody had sworn off fashion, but somehow nobody moved to Cincinnati to work among the poor. Instead, everyone stayed put and imported the poor to the fashion pages:”
JUSTICE: Supreme Court avoids new case over same-sex wedding cake in Oregon. “The Supreme Court is throwing out an Oregon court ruling against bakers who refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. The justices’ action Monday keeps the high-profile case off the court’s election-year calendar and orders state judges to take a new look at the dispute between the lesbian couple and the owners of a now-closed bakery in the Portland area.”
OLD AND BUSTED AT THE WAPO: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
The New Hotness? Democracy Dies with Chinese Propaganda. “The Post, since at least [2011], has carried reporting from the China Daily paper under an advertising deal they call ‘China Watch’. But it should – as Julian Baum from Richmond implies – be called ‘China Botch’ since it is nothing like accurate or contextualized reporting on the region. That’s because China Daily is a fully-owned subsidiary and propaganda arm of the Communist Party of China i.e. the government.”
NEW SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” CONTINUES TO PROMISE FREE DIVIDENDS: Chris Christie: AOC Is “Misleading” People By Promising Free College And Healthcare Without A Plan To Pay For It.
DISPATCHES FROM GROUND ZERO OF THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Student journalist: Shoplifting at Gibson’s Bakery was part of Oberlin College’s “Culture of Theft.”
Jane’s Addiction’s “Been Caught Stealing” is a fun earwig from the last years that anybody still wanted their MTV. But to paraphrase Monty Python and the Holy Grail, dodgy videos about shoplifting are no basis for a system of education. Supreme academic achievement derives from a careful study of the classics, not from some farcical $1.98 rock video.
AT AMAZON, save on Men’s Grooming.
HMM: Calpers’ Dilemma: Save the World or Make Money? “California’s public pension system wrestles with new doubts about divestments based on social concerns.”
In the last two years, its directors have opposed proposals to sell stocks in private prisons, gun retailers and companies tied to Turkey because of the potential for lost revenue and skepticism about whether divestment forces social change. One of these directors is now urging the system, also known as Calpers, to end its ban on stocks tied to tobacco, a policy in place since 2000.
“I do see a change,” said that director, California police sergeant Jason Perez, in an interview. “I think our default is to not divest.”
Calpers isn’t the only system wrestling with these new doubts. Rising funding deficits are prompting public officials and unions across the U.S. to reconsider the financial implications of investment decisions that reflect certain social concerns. The total shortfall for public-pension funds across the U.S. is $4.2 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve.
New York state’s Democratic comptroller and unions representing civil service workers oppose a bill in the Legislature to ban fossil fuel investments by the state pension fund. In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, vetoed legislation last year that would have forced divestment of state pension dollars from companies that avoid cleaning up Superfund sites by declaring bankruptcy.
There is some evidence that divesting from certain holdings can be costly for systems that oversee retirement savings for millions of public workers.
No bailouts.