MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN: Today is National French Fry Day.
Archive for 2019
July 13, 2019
NEW CIVILITY WATCH: Man Armed with Rifle and Molotov Cocktails Tries to Set Fire to ICE Center in Washington.
Earlier: Bernie Bro James T. Hodgkinson, Attempted Assassin Of Steve Scalise, Already Being Erased From History. And additional examples of leftist violence and eliminationist rhetoric at the link.
BLAME FEDERAL REGULATION: If you bought a Whirlpool, Maytag, GE or any other dishwasher manufactured and sold in the U.S. in the last five years, you could be waiting up to four hours before that washing cycle stops. Even then, there’s no guarantee your dishes are clean. But the Trump Administration’s deregulatory process offers hope.
OLD AND BUSTED: “Can Greeks Become Germans?”
The new hotness? Syrian Refugees in Germany Are Returning to the Country They Fled for Vacation—While on the Gov’t Dole.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: What That Giant Asteroid of Gold Would Really Do to the Economy. “Harvesting Psyche would not cause an economic collapse. If that much gold could cheaply be brought to market it would be a boon, not a bust.”
YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Trump Kisses Staffer Alva Johnson on the Cheek (Video).
Speaking as a cuck RINO NeverTrumper who probably wanted Hillary to win, this looks utterly unremarkable. Johnson told Trump how great he is, which is his favorite thing in the world, so he gave her a very chaste kiss on the cheek. She responded to it by continuing to compliment him. Then he moved on, slapping backs and shaking hands. This isn’t even as bad as a typical Biden interaction. Calling it some sort of assault is simply insane.
Speaking of insane, has anybody heard from E. Jean Carroll lately? That whole thing just sort of faded away, didn’t it? The more she talked, the less anybody believed her.
Sexual assault is a very serious accusation, and people like E. Jean Carroll and Alva Johnson aren’t doing real victims any favors. Trump has driven his opponents so insane that they’re leaping on every accusation, whether there’s any evidence or not. And now, there’s evidence disproving an accusation.
Related (very much related): A Mississippi Politician Refuses To Be Alone With Women Who Aren’t His Wife. Here Is Why That’s Smart.
RICK PERRY: NOW THAT ROSS PEROT IS GONE, I CAN TELL THIS STORY.
During my time as governor of this great state, I had the honor and privilege of knowing countless warriors who stepped forward to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan and returned home with horrific wounds of war. U.S. Army Cpl. Alan Babin Jr. is one such hero.
While serving in Iraq in 2003 as a medic in the 82nd Airborne, Alan was shot in the abdomen while tending to a fallen comrade. While Alan survived his injury, he faced a long and difficult road to recovery, complicated by the onset of meningitis and a stroke-induced coma that left him confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
On the one-year anniversary of his wounding, I joined Alan and his family for a small gathering. He was still in very bad shape, neurologically and physically incapacitated. When I asked his mother, Rosie, what I could do to help, she said she was eager to get him out of the hospital and back home, but struggling with the prospect of transporting Alan to his many medical visits.
I knew there was one person to call: Ross Perot. What happened next still amazes me to this day.
Read the whole thing.
PURL JAM: Finland hosts heavy metal knitting championship.
Armed with needles and a yarn of wool, teams of avid knitters danced to the deafening sounds of drums beating and guitars slashing at the first-ever Heavy Metal Knitting World Championship in eastern Finland.
With stage names such as Woolfumes, Bunny Bandit and 9” Needles, the participants shared a simple goal: to showcase their knitting skills while dancing to heavy metal music in the most outlandish way possible.
“It’s ridiculous but it’s so much fun,” said Heather McLaren, an engineering PhD student who travelled from Scotland for a shot at the ‘world title’. “When I saw there was a combination of heavy metal and knitting, I thought ‘that’s my niche.”’
And sumo wrestlers and kabuki performers – there’s something for everybody!
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: When Did Librarians Get Woke?
About the same time dictionaries did, since for the left, the goal is no escape from the Gleichschaltung.
THAT’S NICE BUT IT’S NOT ENOUGH TO GET ME STARTED MARATHONING: Running even extreme distances won’t damage heart, study shows.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: House Democrats Nuke AOC’s Chief-Of-Staff On Twitter, Meltdown Ensues. Saikat Chakrabarti, “who seems to have a soft spot for followers of Adolf Hitler, has been under intense fire from Democrats in recent days as a senior Democratic aide recently told The Washington Post that top Democratic lawmakers want him fired. Chakrabarti admitted in a recent interview to The Washington Post that Ocasio-Cortez’s far-left $93 trillion “Green New Deal” was about implementing socialism in the United States.”
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SEINFELD’S 30TH ANNIVERSARY: How It Revolutionized the Sitcom Genre.
If the show centered on characters, its chief subject was mores, or etiquette. Etiquette is a Sierra Nevada of comedy gold, and nobody else had staked much of a claim on it. Should a note making reference to the arrival of a baby employ an exclamation point? What is the minimum distance someone should maintain while engaging in conversation? Is it okay to sleep with the cleaning lady at work? Should you spare a square for your desperate neighbor in the adjoining bathroom stall? Can you re-gift a present? Seinfeldian misunderstandings are grounded in reality, not the contrived dumb-guy misconstructions of Friends’ Joey Tribbiani.
In an exchange related almost verbatim in episode ten of season five, one Seinfeld writer asked a Chinese postman if he knew where a nearby Chinese restaurant was, and the postman took this as a racial inference. But the writer didn’t think Chinese people knew where all the Chinese restaurants are, he thought letter-carriers knew. Such is the fractious nature of this city and its inexhaustible pool of umbrage. Seinfeld captured it beautifully, in the Talmudic spirit of tearing a situation apart from every angle, with such concision that it popularized lots of neologisms and phrases for its various embarrassments and predicaments. Close-talker! Double-dipper! Shrinkage!
Of course, Seinfeld was made in an era when left-leaning Democrats laughed at political correctness, and even warned of its dangers. Today, they embrace it fully to devour each other: ‘C’MON MAN’: Biden Criticized Over Use Of ‘Gendered’ Phrase.
Earlier: ‘Seinfeld:’ The Ultimate ‘Show About Nothing’ at 30.
NANCY ROMMELMANN IN TABLET: Portlandization: It Can Happen to a Place Near You. When the crazies took over the city I loved, I knew it was time to get out:
“We’ve heard this resolution is mostly symbolic, we’ve heard this resolution will solve nothing,” Wheeler said, making what he was proposing sound not very sweeping at all, a show of earnestness on the part of the government to keep its people safe, and who could argue with that? And if the details of the resolution were not in place, maybe that was OK, you could craft it as you went, could apply it as needed to anything you deemed hateful, a prospect that seemed to alarm only a few people in the room, who may have sensed the resolution could be used on a whim, or as revenge, or to limit personal freedoms.
“Who is going to determine who these [hate] groups are?” one member of the public asked.
Mayor Wheeler responded, “This last testimony does not reflect anything in the resolution.” The resolution passed unanimously.
This invitation to shut up for the greater good might seem quaint, compared with the liberties being sacrificed elsewhere daily, the publishers who pulp books based on fictional characters not displaying subjective standards of cultural verisimilitude, The New York Times ceasing to run political cartoons lest someone take offense, the designer Carolina Herrera being called out for designing a gown with a floral pattern inspired by indigenous weavings. I get we live in an overheated environment where words and food and flowers can get you burned, and have myself been burned in Portland. Still, a city can develop a cast, a tenor, and when that tenor becomes law, you might have reservations about where the place is heading, might sense people taking undue pleasure in stoking their suspicions, might not think the environment one you want to spend any more of your life around. Did I mention I am moving back to New York?
At the end of June a colleague of mine, Andy Ngo, was beaten by a group of left-wing activists at a rally here. I say “left-wing activists” because they were said to have shown up in reaction to a protest staged by groups the city considers alt-right. At this point people in Portland march to aggress the “other” side, to goad others into fistfights, to use milkshakes as weapons, the latter a trend bizarrely receiving celebration, the former evergreen, violence seen by people on all sides as somehow necessary to the times.
The attack on Andy, who spent the night in the hospital, was instantly politicized. Michelle Malkin started a GoFundMe that in 17 hours raised more than $91,000. Laura Ingraham misinterpreted a tweet enough to make it seem a fact that the milkshake thrown on Andy contained cement. Those seen as progressive insinuated that Andy had provoked people into hitting him; that he was asking for it; some variation of pulling a Jussie Smollett. A friend who posted photos of one of Andy’s alleged attackers online messaged me that people were telling her to “call Laura Loomer. … I personally want to pack up my kids and dogs and leave my house for a week. I have a bad feeling about all this.”
Me too. Nothing comes out of the blue, and if you don’t think Portlandization can happen to a place near you, you have not been paying attention.
Read the whole thing.
JAMES LILEKS: Remembering a WWII vet, an American original, a father. “I don’t know where he bought his Sunday Strib to read my column, but there will be one unsold paper today. Ralph Lileks — father, husband, up-from-nothing businessman, veteran, sportsman, aviator and by-God American original, died at his home this week [at age 93]. I found his WWII cap on the seat of his Harley in the garage. Thank you for reading, and if you see a man with that hat, thank him, too. We owe them the world.”
Read the whole thing.
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Liberalism’s Ethical Morass Makes the Deplorables Seem Not So Bad After All.
Yet perhaps the biggest hurdle virtue-based liberalism faced was the problem of elite morality or the lack thereof. The Jeffrey Epstein teenage trafficking case, coming on the heels of numerous celebrity and media sex scandals, reminded everyone that the aristocracy was as fallible as anyone else. That the Justice Department sat on evidence for more than 10 years made it even worse because the rot was bipartisan — and widespread. The scandal touches “numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known prime minister and other world leaders” who were exploiting the weak, the troubled, the runaways.
In this ethical morass, the Deplorables don’t seem so bad at all. One reason why virtue-signaling attacks against Donald Trump have proved ineffective is that many are convinced the liberal elite appear no better and good deal less competent than the knuckle-draggers they denounce. Consequently, not a few are willing to go with a president who has boosted the economy, defeated ISIS, rebuilt the military and even — as an article in Foreign Policy claims — done more for the millions of Uighurs in camps than any Islamic leader, even if he has done this not out of virtue but self-interest, simply because he wants to be re-elected or wants the America which he leads to be number one. Trump cultivates this narrative, making only a shambolic nod to respectability while ceaselessly stressing his ability to win.
Read the whole thing.
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JON GABRIEL: YOU’RE OFFENDED BY THIS COLUMN? SO (BLEEPING) WHAT?
Here’s an interaction I had on Twitter, the Algonquin Round Table of the digital age. One interlocutor noted that vaccinations might cause autism. (They don’t.) Another wondered if a government can mandate immunization. (Sure.) But shouldn’t parents have the right to say no? (Not if they put the community at risk; at least that’s how I see it.)
All fair questions and a fine debate to have. And on it went until one person replied with what he felt was the trump card: “That really offends me!”
To which I said, “So what?”
A brusque response, but the anonymous stranger’s taking of offense is not my or anyone else’s concern; public health is. Harrumphing “that offends me!” has no bearing on any argument, pro or con. It’s a non sequitur revealing naught but a delicate constitution.
I don’t intend to argue the pros and cons of vaccination; that specific debate isn’t the point. As our culture has slid to the so-called “social justice warriors” of the left and the trolls of the “alt-right,” activists on all sides believe that their being offended carries some sort of moral authority as a victim. Does their sense of grievance make their arguments more compelling? It does no such thing.
That really offends me! But read the whole thing anyway.
END OF AN ERA: Volkswagen Just Built Its Very Last Beetle. I saw a “Cloud Blue” 1969 model — the same as my first car — the other day, and realized you don’t see vintage beetles out and about much anymore. The singing of the valves, though, is still instantly recognizable. The newer ones, of course, don’t have that.
HEY, YOU GOT IDENTITY POLITICS IN MY MOVIE REVIEW!
● Beware: ‘Lion King’ Is ‘Fascistic,’ ‘White Supremacist,’ Says WashPost.
● ‘The Lion King’ is a lie that erases the female pride: scientist.
Along with Nike, Disney is arguably the wokest of the woke megacorporations, and they’re still being devoured as fascistic, sexist, white supremacists, by the very people they aim their product at. Perhaps Disney didn’t gin up fake social media controversies sufficiently on this one, unlike their planned live-action remake of the Little Mermaid.