NOBODY KNOWS MUCH YET, AND THIS NUMBER SHOULD BE REGARDED AS UNCERTAIN: 18 people shot inside El Paso Walmart. No doubt further details will emerge. Regardless, it’s awful.
UPDATE (From Ed): “Sgt. Enrique Carrillo, a police spokesman, said a suspect was in custody and there was no longer danger to the public,” CBS News reports, adding that “Multiple people were killed.”
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Forget moderates vs. radicals. The debate was a left vs. far left brawl.
WAY BACK IN 2015, WHEN THE WASHINGTON POST WAS RACIST: 14 Baltimore neighborhoods have lower life expectancies than North Korea.
And this week, CBS’s Baltimore affiliate is being equally racist by reporting the truth: CBS Baltimore: By golly, our murder rate actually is higher than Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
Baltimore’s last Republican mayor left office over 50 years ago.
ON THE OTHER HAND, WHAT THEY CALL “BINGE DRINKING” NOW IS WHAT IN COLLEGE WE JUST CALLED “DRINKING.” More than 1 in 10 U.S. elderly are binge drinkers.
JENNIFER LOPEZ, LIONEL RICHIE IN ISRAEL:
Maybe Jennifer Lopez should run for Congress. That’s our reaction to her performance in Israel. Some 57,000 Israelis came out to hear “Jenny From the Block” sing in Tel Aviv’s Hayarkon Park. She was having such a good time, the Daily Algemeiner reports, that, after getting a translation from a member of the audience, she called out “I Love You” — in Hebrew. The crowd went wild.
What a contrast to the sour socialism of another famous figure from the Bronx, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Since getting elected to Congress, the congresswoman has done little in respect of Israel except kvetch. The other day she agreed with an interviewer who’d suggested, “What’s going on with Israel and Palestine, while it’s very, very, deep, it is very, very, criminal, and it is very, very unjust.”
“Absolutely,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez shot back. Which is in keeping with her support in the House for the movement to pressure Israel through boycotts, divestment, and sanctions. She voted for a pro-BDS measure that was also backed by two of the most anti-Israel Democrats in Congress, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. Fortunately, the measure was rejected.
In any event, the contrast on the topic of Israel between Ms. Lopez and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez couldn’t be greater. Ms. Lopez came under pressure from BDS-backing groups to cancel her plans to sing in the Jewish State. She faced them down. “There was nothing that was gonna stop us from being in Israel,” Miss Lopez’s manager, Benny Medina, told Israeli television.
The Squad and Roger Waters hardest hit.
AT AMAZON, save on Packaging and Shipping Supplies.
RICHARD PETTY’S ONCE LOST NASCAR PLYMOUTH SUPERBIRD IS HEADING TO AUCTION AND THE SKY’S THE LIMIT: “‘A car like this, there’s just no way to predict what will happen at an auction,’ he said. ‘If you’re older, you remember it from the racing, but to younger people it’s the Dinoco car from ‘Cars’ that was voiced by Richard Petty. Either way, everyone has a connection to it in some way.’”
“PAY GAP” EXPLAINED: Female doctors trade work hours for family time. This also means that if you want a medical work force that’s half female, you’ll need significantly more doctors overall to provide the same amount of patient care.
MYSTERIOUS VIDEO SHOWS BULLDOZING OF HUNDREDS OF GIBSON FIREBIRD X ELECTRIC GUITARS:
A mysterious video that started circulating on the internet today seems to show just that. (Apparently, as you can read more about below, a video of the destruction first surfaced months ago, though the video above was uploaded to YouTube Tuesday night.) In it, a large, tracked construction vehicle of some sort runs over rows of hundreds of Firebird X models.
It’s not clear from this video if this is Gibson itself doing the destruction, hiring a contractor to do the destruction, or some independent entity that happens to have hundreds of these guitars lying around and no longer wants to play them. It could be that Gibson’s not involved in any way shape or form, though it’s hard to believe someone would do this entirely of their own volition. (Again, as you can read in Gibson’s response below, these guitars are in fact Firebird X models, which Gibson says had defective, unsafe components.)
The YouTube channel BJ’s World previously posted a separate video of a construction crew tearing down Gibson’s Memphis guitar factory, which closed in 2018.
No telling how many guitars are in this video, but let’s estimate there are 250. On the used market, these can reasonably go for $1,600 USD a pop, so that’s about $400,000 of inventory.
While the original video was pulled, this slightly edited version illustrates the destruction in question. It’s like mid-‘60s-era Pete Townshend guitar destruction on a massive scale:
I felt a great disturbance in the Force. As if hundreds of really mediocre Gibson guitars cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.
RUSSIANS! UNDER MY BED! Harris Campaign Blames Russia for Humiliation by Gabbard.
IN THE MAIL: The Military History Book.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Equal, Not the Same: Identity Politics Is Toxic to Our Republic.
SOHRAB AMARI: Trump’s foreign policy only creates crises for fictions establishment loves. “President Trump hasn’t, in fact, pursued disorder for its own sake. What he has done is to discard various false foreign-policy dogmas — mostly to salutary effect.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Of the 200 top-paid public employees in Arizona, 199 work in higher ed.
BILL MAHER: Bill Maher: 2020 Dems just need to ‘come off less crazy’ than Trump — and ‘they’re blowing it!’ “Coming across as unserious people who are going to take away all your money so migrants from Honduras can go to college for free and get a major in ‘America sucks.’”
He’s not wrong.
THE POPULIST PARABLE OF ELIA KAZAN’S A FACE IN THE CROWD:
Miller’s rumination at the end of Rhodes’s meteoric career provides the film’s moral: “we get wise to them, that’s our strength. We get wise to them.” This sentiment is a hopefully populist notion, since it assumes that the average person’s ability to call out frauds and hucksters is in itself a bulwark against their rise to power. I hate to say it, but today this sounds almost naively optimistic. Perhaps Lincoln was right that you can’t fool all of the people all of the time, but we can never be sure that the unfooled will be in the majority. And numbers are what matter.
What’s most disturbing about today’s crop of media-hyped demagogues isn’t that they are adored despite their faults—such as vulgarity, spite, ignorance, egomania, and greed—but precisely because of them. Embracing one’s mendacity is what passes for authenticity to many nowadays, as much as class signifiers like a twangy country accent and wearing denim used to do for the Rhodes types of yesteryear. Plenty of people in the public eye nowadays are just as venal as Rhodes is, but many no longer feel the need to even bother to disguise it.
A film like A Face in the Crowd is intended to be the antidote to this kind of demagoguery and media manipulation, and its searing ironies might open some eyes. But the key variable with satire isn’t always the artist—it’s the audience. No matter how keen the wit or jaundiced the eye, there’s simply no telling how many people will bother to pay attention long enough to hear the alarm bell that the satirist is ringing. The fact that the movie flopped when it came out in the summer of 1957 might have something to do with Kazan’s reputation at the time, but it doesn’t bode well for the prescription that it tries to offer to the body politic. If anything, with the benefit of hindsight, A Face in the Crowd seems more like a desperate prophecy than anything else, as its trenchant message goes unheeded even as it becomes freshly relevant with every election cycle.
While Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg were careful not to spell out “Lonesome” Rhodes’ ideology, other than as a man with an unquenchable id, the character they created for Andy Griffith was partially inspired by Arthur Godfrey, who demolished his good guy image in 1953 by firing sidekick Julius LaRosa on the air. Less than 20 years later, Godfrey would reveal himself as yet another “Progressive against progress” when he spoke out against American supersonic passenger plane development in the early 1970s on the Dick Cavett Show, adding nastily that the US needs “that gook in the atmosphere about as much as we need another bag of those clunkers from the moon,” according to Cavett himself in a 2010 New York Times article. As for Andy Griffith, he would veer back towards his “Lonesome” Rhodes persona in his last years, by shilling for Obamacare in 2010. As Kathy Shaidle asked of Media Matters (who routinely compared Glenn Beck at the height of his superstardom to Rhodes), “What? No ‘Lonesome Roads’ references when they’d actually be appropriate?”
CLARK NEILY: Kamala’s Conundrum. “The real significance of Gabbard’s critique, however, lies not in the proposition that Harris was a particularly unprofessional or malign prosecutor, but rather in the fact that she seems to have been a rather ordinary prosecutor who simply did her job the way most prosecutors do. And if that makes a former-prosecutor-turned-presidential-candidate look like a monster, then perhaps that says more about prosecutors in general than it does about Kamala Harris in particular. Gabbard’s gut-punch underscores the difficult position that modern prosecutors find themselves in as the key players in a substantially immoral and increasingly indefensible criminal justice system.”
CANCELING MARIO LOPEZ: “Now it’s considered potentially career-killing simply to say that three-year-olds shouldn’t be allowed to make life-altering decisions about their sex. Note that he didn’t say that transgenderism was bad. Lopez simply said that three year old kids are in no position to make this call on their own, and that parents should recognize that. For this ordinary, commonsense opinion, Mario Lopez has been compelled to apologize. You watch: that will be the end of his Hollywood career.”
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