Archive for 2020
October 24, 2020
RICK TUMLINSON ASKS, how long before the commies go after the NewSpace phenomenon?
I think the billionaires involved expect this. Jeff Bezos has tried to protect himself by assuming lefty coloration. Elon Musk has chosen bravado and rapid movement. The Google folks have just buried their space stuff in a confusing jumble of projects.
FOUR YEARS AGO THIS WEEKEND: Clinton Vaults to a Double-Digit Lead, Boosted by Broad Disapproval of Trump (POLL). “All told, Clinton leads Trump by 12 percentage points among likely voters, 50 to 38 percent, in the national survey, her highest support and his lowest to date in ABC News and ABC News/Washington Post polls.”
WHEN THE LEFTY WASHINGTON MONTHLY IS SAYING THIS . . . Why Trump Has a Serious Chance of Winning. Really. “First, the president is actually more popular now than on the day he was elected. Yes, that’s right. His personal favorability rating around election day in 2016 was 37.5%. Now, it is 43.2%. There are, in fact, hundreds of thousands of Americans (if not millions) who have grown fonder of Trump.”
Related: Feeling pushed towards Trump. “The reason I am feeling pushed towards Trump, and at such a late date, and despite my strong inclinations otherwise, is that I no longer feel this is a Kang v. Kodos scenario. From the right, I continue to see the usual callous indifference to the lives of ordinary people, but it’s just indifference. The message I am getting from the left is that I am a target they mean to destroy. I’m not real comfortable with that.”
MEMORIES TAKE UP RESOURCES, AND MOST MEMORIES LACK SURVIVAL VALUE: To Remember, the Brain Must Actively Forget: Researchers find evidence that neural systems actively remove memories, which suggests that forgetting may be the default mode of the brain. Which raises the question of why I can remember cigarette jingles from when I was 5 years old.
Actually, I have a theory on that. For the vast majority of evolutionary history, people were preliterate, and songs were the chief means of longterm information transmission. (Rhyme and meter, etc. even serve as primitive error-checking mechanisms.) So being able to remember the songs that told you where to find famine foods, etc., had definite survival value.
ANOTHER REASON TO VOTE FOR TRUMP:
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Democrats Propose Stopping Coyotes By Distracting Them With Decoy Roadrunners.
CHAMPAGNE FOR BREAKFAST, AND A SHERMAN IN MY HAND: Nat Sherman International Closed. Manhattan Townhouse and wholesale cigar operations shuttered by end of September, ending 90-year history in New York City. “‘We worked hard to successfully transition Nat Sherman International to a new home. The Covid-19 pandemic created new challenges that were unfortunately too big to overcome,’ said Jessica Pierucki, general manager, managing director for Nat Sherman.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: How to Gain Political Influence.
DISPATCHES FROM PORTLANDIA: Seattle LGBTQ Commission wants their lesbian mayor to resign.
NOT THE BABYLON BEE: Tampax gets ratioed into outer space after tweeting “Not all people with periods are women.”
Yes, that is indeed some ratio. You can read a few of the many replies at the above link.
SO, A BITTERLY CLINGING BASKET OF DEPLORABLES, IN OTHER WORDS? Watch: Joe Biden Calls Trump Supporters Outside His Rally ‘Chumps.’
.HAVING SOLVED ALL OF ITS OTHER CRIMES, Chicago Will Start Ticketing Motorists For Going 6 MPH Over Speed Limit.
Related: Chicago weekend shootings: 33 shot, 7 fatally, in citywide gun violence.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: The Importance of Readiness for Self Defense. “I was involved in two shootings. In the first, I killed the man. In the second, I got shot down. Both of them were a total surprise.”
WHAT DIVIDES US IS CLASS, NOT RACE:
It should be noted that the backlash against immigration is often expressed within racial categories. Workers from Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and other African countries who’ve migrated to South Africa have faced terrible violence from locals who resent their competition in the job market. And in the mid-19th century, it was white Christian Irish immigrants fleeing the Potato Famine who stoked the anger of restive urban workers—as dramatically portrayed in Martin Scorsese’s 2002 masterpiece Gangs of New York. Bad economic times tend to push people into tribes—and race is just one way that such tribes self-organize.
A modern-day (and decidedly less violent) version of this intra-racial pattern is represented by London’s so-called Polish Plumbers. Something like a million Poles migrated to Western Europe since their country joined the EU in 2004. A majority settled in the United Kingdom—part of the nearly 17 million “posted workers” in the European Union who live and work in a country other than their own. For the most part, they come from Eastern Europe and seek jobs in the more affluent west.
What drives them is what drives Central American migrants who seek entry into the United States. They’re looking for higher incomes, better schools, a brighter future for their families. These are dreams that everyone shares. The difference is that posted workers are legal, while many Central American migrants who cross the border are not. The idea that whole nations—including their low-paid workers—will someday celebrate the ideal of “open borders” is a fantasy, just as Sanders told us five years ago. And given the crushing effect on the poorest members of our society, it is ironic that it is progressives who embrace this fantasy most fervently. In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who campaigned to yank Great Britain from the EU (and hence its acceptance of posted workers), can thank the Polish Plumbers for giving him the greatest Conservative majority since Margaret Thatcher—as their presence helped him sweep formerly Labour-voting working-class constituencies across northern England.
I’m not supposed to say this, but I will: Taking a knee to Black Lives Matter, or hauling down monuments, isn’t going to change any of this. Nor will corporate diversity policies, many of which are trumpeted on social media by the same conglomerates that are hiring low-cost labor in droves. What we need are policies—including trade and immigration policies—that help us carve up the economic pie in a way that sees all workers get their fair share, no matter what their ethnicity.
In America, class war is disguised as cultural war, and cultural war is often cloaked in the language of race and civil rights, to coin an Insta-phrase.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): When Rulers Despise The Ruled. “If the rulers feel neither loyalty nor empathy toward the ruled, the ruled can be expected to return the favor.”
Related: Trump is a symptom of a new kind of class warfare raging at home and abroad: “But the New Class isn’t limited to communist countries, really. Around the world in the postwar era, power was taken up by unelected professional and managerial elites. To understand what’s going on with President Donald Trump and his opposition, and in other countries as diverse as France, Hungary, Italy and Brazil, it’s important to realize that the post-World War II institutional arrangements of the Western democracies are being renegotiated, and that those democracies’ professional and managerial elites don’t like that very much, because they have done very well under those arrangements. And, like all elites who are doing very well, they don’t want that to change.”
LIFE IN DE BLASIO’S NEW YORK: The Latest: UNGA Head Concerned NY Mayor Won’t Meet on Virus. “The president of the United Nations General Assembly has expressed concern that New York Mayor Bill de Blasio rejected a meeting with him to discuss the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the work of the 193-member world organization.”
GREEN NEW DEAL SNEAK PREVIEW: PG&E to cut power to over one million people in California.
SCIENCE, UNSETTLED: Venus might not have signs of life after all, say astronomers.
MARK JUDGE IS ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Revisiting the New Romantics — Was Duran Duran more important than the Clash?
And for those looking for more deep dives into early ’80s music: