Archive for 2019
June 1, 2019
LONG LIVE ROCK: One lesson from the Met exhibit is that rock matters — or at least that it mattered.
The instruments of Bruce Springsteen, Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend, the Edge, Keith Richards, Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, and many other rock musicians make for a thrilling collection (running through October 1) that has drawn upwards of 200,000 visitors to the Met. Curators were expecting the crowd to consist mainly of Baby Boomers but have been pleasantly surprised by the enthusiasm shown by young adults, teens, and even children. As I was departing on Wednesday, the galleries were filling with fascinated high-school students. None of them were looking at their phones. Rock is not dead.
The power of the display hits you straight away, as forcefully as the opening chords of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.” The guitar upon which Berry played them serves as the introduction to the exhibition, mounted on a plinth that cheekily refers to the similar ones upon which the facing Roman statues rest in the adjacent hall. Berry, Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix: contemporary analogues for the Roman gods.
Read the whole thing, which is certainly worth a visit if you’re headed to the Big Apple. I reviewed the Met’s exhibit in April, accompanied with plenty of photos, at the PJ Lifestyle section: The Met ‘Plays It Loud.’
FASTER, PLEASE: New treatment enables removal of ‘inoperable’ pancreatic cancer.
FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS: Why vegans must not own cats.
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THE USUAL SUSPECTS ARE MOCKING, BUT GIVEN THAT IT REDUCES DEPENDENCE ON RUSSIAN GAS, THAT’S A FAIR APPELLATION: Natural Gas Is Now Being Referred to as ‘Freedom Gas’ by The US Department of Energy.
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Beyond Jussie Smollett: Police Union Rep Condemns the ‘Obscene’ Anti-Police Corruption in Chicago.
YES: It’s Time For The Supreme Court To Make States Stop Ignoring The Second Amendment.
As I mentioned the other day, I and some other law professors have an amicus brief in this case.
I’M NOT SURE I AGREE WITH THIS: The Ocasio-Cortez–Cruz Bill Would Almost Certainly Be Unconstitutional. There’s a first amendment right to petition the government, but there’s not a first amendment right to lobby on behalf of paying clients when you have a conflict of interest. I’d have to think about this more, but I find Cooke’s invocation of the right to petition unpersuasive. You have a constitutional right to engage in sexual intimacy, too, but you don’t have a constitutional right to work as a prostitute. It’s certainly not as open-and-shut a case as some of my libertarian friends are suggesting.
But don’t worry: There are no constitutional problems with my revolving-door surtax!
NONSENSE. “HUMAN RIGHTS” CONSISTS OF WHATEVER A WOKE MOB IS DEMANDING AT THE MOMENT. State Dept. panel to redefine human rights based on ‘natural law and natural rights.’
Meanwhile, I have a proposal.
CHANGE: Illinois GOP Lawmakers Want to Cut off Chicago, Create New State. There’ll be a chance to cut a deal when Illinois goes broke enough to need a federal bailout. But it’ll require GOP control of the White House and Congress to get it through. I do like their invocation of the Guaranty Clause, something I’ve written about in this context myself.
Related: Splitsylvania: State Secession And What To Do About It.
ONE GIANT LEAP FOR LEGOKIND: Lego released a new Apollo 11 Lunar Lander, and it looks pretty great.
#TIMESUP: I’m an MLK scholar – and I’ll never be able to view King in the same light. Bear in mind, though, that the information comes from the FBI which, as we’ve recently learned once again, often conducts its spying with a political agenda in mind.
HACKS GONNA HACK: Liberal Group With Recent Racism Scandal Claims to Be a Modern ‘Underground Railroad.’ It’s the Southern Poverty Law Center, of course.
MORE ON THE UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA DEBACLE: Former Student Files Class Action Against University Of Oklahoma For Submitting False Data To Inflate Its U.S. News Ranking For 20 Years.
Given that he was president for most of this period, I think David Boren has to bear a lot of the responsibility here.
IN THE MAIL: The Virtue of Nationalism.
ROGER SIMON: Exploiting the MSM: Barr Uses CBS to Speak to America.
AS HOLLYWOOD THREATENS TO BOYCOTT SHOOTING IN GEORGIA AND OTHER ANTI-ABORTION STATES, I’M REMINDED ON THIS WSJ PIECE OF MINE ON WHY PURSUING HOLLYWOOD IS FOR CHUMPS ANYWAY: The Hollywood Tax Story They Won’t Tell at the Oscars: It’s easy to demand higher levies on the ‘rich’ when your own industry gets $1.5 billion in government handouts.
With campaign season over, you’re not likely to hear stars bringing up taxes at this weekend’s Academy Awards show. But the tax man ought to come out and take a bow anyway. Of the nine “Best Picture” nominees in 2012, for example, five were filmed on location in states where the production company received financial incentives, including “The Help” (in Mississippi) and “Moneyball” (in California). Virginia gave $3.5 million to this year’s Oscar-nominated “Lincoln.”
Such state incentives are widespread, and often substantial, but they don’t do much to attract jobs. About $1.5 billion in tax credits and exemptions, grants, waived fees and other financial inducements went to the film industry in 2010, according to data analyzed by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Politicians like to offer this largess because they get photo-ops with celebrities, but the economic payoff is minuscule. George Mason University’s Adam Thierer has called this “a growing cronyism fiasco” and noted that the number of states involved skyrocketed to 45 in 2009 from five in 2002.
In its 2012 study “State Film Studies: Not Much Bang For Too Many Bucks,” the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that film-related jobs tend to go to out-of-staters who jet in, then leave. “The revenue generated by economic activity induced by film subsidies,” the study notes, “falls far short of the subsidies’ direct costs to the state. To balance its budget, the state must therefore cut spending or raise revenues elsewhere, dampening the subsidies’ positive economic impact.”
Sometimes it is even worse, as demonstrated by Michigan’s effort, begun under former Gov. Jennifer Granholm, to woo the motion picture industry with an expensive state-of-the-art studio facility built on the site of a former General Motors factory in Pontiac. State leaders ballyhooed the plan as a way of moving from old-style industry to new. . . .
Despite tens of millions of dollars in state investment, the promised 3,000-plus jobs didn’t appear. As the Detroit Free Press reported last year, the studio employed only 15-20 people. That isn’t boffo. That’s a bust. The studio has defaulted on interest payments on state-issued bonds, and the guarantors—the state’s already stressed pension funds—may wind up holding the bag. “In retrospect, it was a mistake,” conceded Robert Kleine, the former state treasurer who signed off on the plans in 2010. . . .
The $1.5 billion in subsidies that states provide, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “would have paid for the salaries of 23,500 middle school teachers, 26,600 firefighters, and 22,800 police patrol officers.” Or it could have gone to cut taxes on small businesses, which, as Ms. Longoria noted in her DNC speech, produce two out of three jobs in the economy.
In her words: “It’s the suburban dad who realizes his neighborhood needs a dry cleaner. It’s the Latina nurse whose block needs a health clinic—and she knows she’s the one to open it! It’s the high school sophomore who is building Facebook’s competitor. They are the entrepreneurs driving the American economy.”
And they are the people who aren’t receiving the kind of special tax treatment that states dole out to Hollywood.
Repeal the Hollywood tax cuts — at both the state and the federal levels!
THE CONSERVATARIANS PODCAST: Charlamagne, Cherokees, and a Purse Full of Hot Sauce.
Hosted by Jon Gabriel, Stephen Miller, who discuss Elizabeth Warren running into the brick wall of leftist identity politics.
OKLAHOMA NEEDS A GOOD HOUSECLEANING: University of Oklahoma faces class-action lawsuit for inflated donation reports.
TRACKING TIMESPEAK THROUGH TIME:
Media Analytics is a fun site that allows you to chart how frequently the New York Times has used a particular word through the years. The data begin in 1970 and go through 2017. All you have to do is plug in a word, and the site generates a frequency chart. Thus, for example, we can see how “gender” went from a boring word that was a prissy way of saying “sex” to a leftist battleground, in a very short period of time. Click all charts to enlarge:
More here: American Pravda.
PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: University of Illinois Sued Over Unconstitutional Policies.
“On a regular basis, the University of Illinois sends a clear message to students who wish to engage in political and religious speech: there are some views that are welcome, and others that are not,” Speech First President Nicole Neily said in the press release. “Students deserve to be able to express themselves and voice their opinions without fear of investigation or punishment – which is why these policies must be reformed.”
Yes.
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