KISS’ GENE SIMMONS REMEMBERS A 21-YEAR-OLD EDDIE VAN HALEN: ‘YOU COULDN’T BELIEVE YOUR EARS:’

“The lead singer, long hair down to his butt, looked like a wild horse, no shirt on top, doing splits and all that,” says Simmons. “He was the predominant visual representation of that band. Musically, clearly it was Edward.”

The songs played were mostly original, and all of them ignited with a guitar sound that was speedy and melodic, all bright colors and no trace of gloom.

“Everybody’s head just turned around like Linda Blair in ‘The Exorcist’: What is that?” says Simmons. “When the solo came up, you couldn’t believe your ears because all this music was symphonic, the melodies and the runs and the speed, all coming out of one guitar.”

Before Van Halen’s half-hour set was over, Simmons was backstage waiting to meet them. He ultimately signed the quartet to a contract with his production company, instantly sold on what he’d witnessed and anxious to get the band into a recording studio.

After some sessions in Los Angeles, Simmons flew the band to New York to continue work at Electric Lady Studios, fittingly the studio built by guitarist Jimi Hendrix, another singular sound-scientist. Simmons and engineer Dave Wittman guided the 24-track sessions.

“Some of the arrangements were mine, but mostly it was the guys playing their hearts out live in the studio,” Simmons says. “The great bands have a fingerprint that is unique. Even today, nobody sounds like Van Halen.”

The recordings that emerged were never officially released but have been widely bootlegged and posted online under the title “Zero Demos.”

And arguably, they sound better than Van Halen’s first album. This was a band that was clearly on its way to superstardom, and a video that brings new meaning to the old music industry cliche, “chasing the demo:”

DAMN NEAR KILLED HIM: Plane passenger caught smuggling $60,000 worth of gold nuggets in rectum to avoid taxes.

ANN ALTHOUSE:. “I guess WaPo is conceding that the Hunter Biden material really did come out of his computer. This line is just sitting there: ‘The New York Post published a story based on a trove of leaked emails allegedly found on a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, son of Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential candidate.’ That’s stood for a day and a half, uncorrected, even though the commenters over there are screaming about it.”

I still see people on Facebook — even some otherwise intelligent libertarians — who are sure that this is all fake, probably from the Russians. Seems unlikely at this point.

Flashback: Russians! Under my bed!

SCIENCE IS NEVER SETTLED: Supergiant star Betelgeuse smaller, closer than first thought.. “Once we had the physical size of the star, we were able to determine the distance from Earth. Our results show it’s a mere 530 light years from us—25 percent closer than previous thought.”

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Barrett’s Awesome Notepad Edition.

BARI WEISS: Stop Being Shocked.

No one has yet decided on the name for the force that has come to unseat liberalism. Some say it’s “Social Justice.” The author Rod Dreher has called it “therapeutic totalitarianism.” The writer Wesley Yang refers to it as “the successor ideology”—as in, the successor to liberalism.

At some point, it will have a formal name, one that properly describes its mixture of postmodernism, postcolonialism, identity politics, neo-Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and the therapeutic mentality. Until then, it is up to each of us to see it plainly. We need to look past the hashtags and slogans and the jargon to assess it honestly—and then to explain it to others.

The new creed’s premise goes something like this: We are in a war in which the forces of justice and progress are arrayed against the forces of backwardness and oppression. And in a war, the normal rules of the game—due process; political compromise; the presumption of innocence; free speech; even reason itself—must be suspended. Indeed, those rules themselves were corrupt to begin with—designed, as they were, by dead white males in order to uphold their own power.

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” as the writer Audre Lorde put it. And the master’s house must be dismantled—because the house is rotted at its foundation.

The beating heart of this new ideology is critical race theory.

Read the whole thing, although what Weiss defines as “liberalism” is really a massive stolen base by “Progressives” in the 1920s to rehabilitate the brand after Wilson had so soiled it during WWI, as Fred Siegel wrote in his 2014 history of the American left, The Revolt Against the Masses:

Liberals were those Progressives who had renamed themselves so as to repudiate Wilson. “The word liberalism,” wrote Walter Lippmann in 1919, “was introduced into the jargon of American politics by that group who were Progressives in 1912 and Wilson Democrats from 1916 to 1918.” The new liberalism was a decisive cultural break with Wilson and Progressivism. While the Progressives had been inspired by a faith in democratic reforms as a salve for the wounds of both industrial civilization and power politics, liberals saw the American democratic ethos as a danger to freedom at home and abroad.

* * * * * * * *

The best short credo of liberalism came from the pen of the once canonical left-wing literary historian Vernon Parrington in the late 1920s. “Rid society of the dictatorship of the middle class,” Parrington insisted, referring to both democracy and capitalism, “and the artist and the scientist will erect in America a civilization that may become, what civilization was in earlier days, a thing to be respected.” Alienated from middle-class American life, liberalism drew on an idealized image of “organic” pre-modern folkways and rhapsodized about a future harmony that would reestablish the proper hierarchy of virtue in a post-bourgeois, post-democratic world.

So from that point of view, “liberalism,” while changing its spots in the Trump era, is still working as the original “Progressives” redefined it.

Related exit question from across the pond: What did you do in the Great Culture War, Daddy?

“THIS WAS A KANGAROO COURT.” Student government impeaches pro-Trump Latina student senator who opposes illegal immigration.

Forget defunding police. We need to defund student government, which seems to be made up largely of smug, ignorant wannabe tyrants.

I HOPE THEY’VE LAWYERED UP: Denver news station 9NEWS hired four other unlicensed security guards in addition to far-left gunman who killed Trump supporter.

ITS ORIGIN AND PURPOSE, STILL A TOTAL MYSTERY: Teacher who showed students Muhammad cartoons decapitated in Paris terror attack.“A history teacher who had shown caricatures of Islam’s Prophet Muhammed in class was on Friday decapitated and his assailant shot dead by French police as they tried to arrest him, police and prosecutors said. The attacker shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ as he was confronted by police, a police source said. The Muslim phrase, meaning ‘God is Great,’ has often been heard in jihadist attacks.”

The attacker’s origin and purpose could really be a mystery for Reuters and New York Times readers:

Or as Jim Treacher adds:

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Ohio State prof says Clarence Thomas not ‘authentically Black.’ “Ford argued that female white teachers are ‘the problem’ and said that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is not ‘authentically Black.'”

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MICHAEL YON: Pressurized HUMINT Network in Portland: firehose with valve stuck open. “Developing a network never has been easier. Notice that yesterday I told you in advance on Twitter what ANTIFA would do last night, and I was right. I just got here and already the network is getting that good.” (Bumped).

THE 1619 PROJECT: DOWN, BUT FAR FROM OUT. Despite sustained criticism, this wretched New York Times initiative is still being promoted in schools:

Soon after publication of the 1619 Project, leading authorities on American history spoke out and exposed its multiple factual errors and unsupported assertions. Five prominent historians penned a letter to the Times in December 2019, arguing against the project’s ‘displacement of historical understanding by ideology’. One was Sean Wilentz, a liberal historian at Princeton and author of No Property in Man, which explores the issue of slavery and the founding fathers. Wilentz recently told the Washington Post about his initial reaction to Hannah-Jones’ lead essay: ‘I threw the thing across the room, I was so astounded, because I ran across a paragraph on the American Revolution, and it was just factually wrong.’ Indeed, Wilentz and others find the essay’s central claim – that the colonists’ primary motivation in fighting the American Revolution was to maintain slavery – to be patently false.

In the face of this criticism, Hannah-Jones and Jake Silverstein, the project’s editor-in-chief, refused to issue corrections and declined to engage in debate. The Times, said Silverstein, had ‘concluded no corrections are warranted’. Then in March, Leslie Harris, a professor of history at Northwestern University and a fact-checker for the Times, revealed she had identified numerous errors when reviewing the 1619 Project, but the Times ignored all of them. Harris, who is sympathetic to the project’s mission, told the Times that the statement ‘the patriots fought the American Revolution in large part to preserve slavery in North America’ was false. In response to Harris, the Times added a ‘clarification’ to Hannah-Jones’ essay, saying that ‘some of’ the colonists wanted to protect slavey – yet even this revised formulation is misleading and has little support among historians.

Silverstein doubles down in response to Bret Stephens’ pushback, mentioned at the start of the above Spiked article; here’s his lede:

The 1619 Project, which was conceived of and led by Nikole Hannah-Jones, a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine, advances a bold claim: that the date when the first enslaved Africans arrived in the English colonies that would become the United States — August of 1619 — can be regarded as the nation’s birth or point of origin. Why does the project propose this? In part because, as its essays show, the system of slavery and oppression that began on this date has led to so many of the problems that define our past and our present; in part because, as Hannah-Jones argues, the struggle against this system of oppression has been a pivotal freedom movement unfolding across many generations to advance progress for American society as a whole; and in part to advance the case that, as the heroes of both of these stories, Black Americans, whose presence in the English colonies that would become the United States began on this date, should occupy a central role in American history.

Emphasis mine. In a related development, Timesman Binyamin Appelbaum, he of the “You worked for a company that was fixing bread prices” viral fame, spoken to Pete Buttigieg in January in the tone of a Bond supervillain, tweets something as equally melodramatic sounding:

But it seems rather contradictory to see one Timesman issuing a “plea to defend the United States,” when his newspaper has gone all-in on declaring the nation as having been founded in original sin.  In any case, the last Republican president the Times endorsed was Ike in 1956, and as Iowahawk tweets, “’Are you seriously telling me the New York Times has come out against Trump? Man, I need to sit down and rethink my vote.’ — literally not one person on Planet Earth.”

BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS: Surprise: Majority of Arabs back Trump Middle East peace plan, 79% of Saudis.

CHANGE: The Significance of Macron’s War on Islamism. “That Macron even gave an anti-Islamism speech was itself a sign of how fast the debate is moving in France. Five years ago, when Fox News referred to ‘no-go zones’ in Paris, the city’s mayor threatened to sue. Now we have an avowed centrist like Macron warning that the ‘final goal’ of the ‘ideology’ of Islamism is to ‘take complete control’ of society. Anyone making such arguments just a few years ago would have been condemned by the left as an extremist.”

Part of this is the growing pressure of reality; part of it is the shift in power balance brought about by fracking.

DISPATCHES FROM THE HOUSE OF STEPHANOPOULOS: Questioner at Biden Town Hall Was a Former Obama Administration Speechwriter

FLASHBACK: New status anxiety fuels Trump derangement.

NO SEX PLEASE, WE’RE BRITISH AND IN A PANDEMIC: Sex banned indoors for Tier 2 couples living apart, Number 10 confirms.

No word yet if Neil Ferguson, England’s (former) “Professor Lockdown,” will cease his booty calls. Flashback: What Neil Ferguson’s Booty Call Tells Us About Modern Politics.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Ilhan Omar Funnels 70 Percent of Campaign Expenditures to Husband’s Company.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: They keep trying to cancel this conservative professor. He refuses to back down.

“The actual process approved by the political science department is chilling: a single faculty member with an axe to grind against another can propose a statement of condemnation against the other’s extramural statements,” Schalin wrote. “…Given this political climate, the new process is a blueprint for condemnation of legitimate scholarship based on ideological reasons.”

For his part, Gilley has the receipts — he used a Freedom of Information Act request to gain access to all his peers’ hand-wringing over him and posted them on his personal website under the heading “The PSU ‘Diversity’ Investigation.”

Also, true to form, he’s not worried.

“The key point here is this is totally illegal and unenforceable and the department knows it,” Gilley told The College Fix in an interview.

But the action is another big red flag, he added.

“The academic left has realized the revolution can only go so far, so they need to come up with technical reasons to sanction faculty who are not toeing the party line,” Gilley said.

But Gilley is not slowing down. He is working to find a new publisher for his book and also recently launched a “Critiques of BLM Reading Group” for college students. Predictably, the reading group drew backlash within academia. That hasn’t stopped Gilley from offering it.

He’s also got his share of supporters, too. A Change.org petition titled “Vindicate Dr. Bruce Gilley’s Personal and Professional Reputation” has more than 4,000 signatures.

Read the whole thing. As a wise community organizer advises, get in their faces, and punch back twice as hard.

DEMOCRAT BOSS LASHES OUT AT HIS PARTY OPERATIVE WITH A BYLINE: Biden Snaps At Reporter For Asking About Bombshell New York Post Reports, Does Not Deny.

Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden snapped at a CBS News reporter late on Friday night for asking about the bombshell reports published this week in the New York Post about the business dealings of his son, Hunter Biden, and Joe Biden’s actions as vice president.

When asked by Bo Erickson what his response was to the reports, Joe Biden said, “I have no response.”

Biden lashed out at the reporter, saying, “I know you’d ask it” and that it was a “smear campaign” that was “right up” the reporter’s “alley,” adding, “those are the questions you always ask.”

The New York Post reported that emails obtained on a laptop appeared to show that Joe Biden met an executive at Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company where Hunter Biden served on the board.

Biden snapping at both journalists and voters is a recurring theme of his career:

● Biden calls woman ‘lying dog-faced pony soldier’ at N.H. campaign event.

● How Joe Biden Gets Away With Calling A Voter A Fat, Dumb, Liar.

● Joe Biden and Kamala Harris deploy the Charlottesville hoax to stir up racial pain and anger.

● ‘Classy:’ Joe Biden Snaps At Reporter After Being Asked About Hunter’s Paternity Test.

● Bullying Biden Yells at Fox’s Doocy: ‘Ask the Right Questions!’

● Biden Accused of Sexism After Remarks to Female Moderator.

● Biden Explodes When Confronted On Lying About Charlottesville. Video Proves Biden Wrong.

● Joe Biden Says There Are Three Genders; Grabs Student’s Arm When She Asks ‘What Are They?’

And these classics from the Obama era:

● VP Biden’s Office Apologizes For Locking Reporter In Storage Closet During Fundraiser.

● Vengeance: Biden’s Office Seeks Investigation Into Unfriendly Journalist.

And of course, ground zero, from 1988: Why Joe Biden’s First Campaign for President Collapsed After Just 3 Months.

Last month, the New York Daily News quoted Biden as saying “‘Presidents of the United States should be presidential and lead by example as well as make clear exactly where they stand. Getting down in the gutter where the president does…that’s not the job of the president,’ Biden said. ‘If we were behind a barn somewhere it would be a different thing.’”

Between Biden’s evasiveness over the court packing question and anger at both journalists and reporters, he’s failed at both of his self-stated goals.