Archive for 2021
June 27, 2021
OCASIO-CORTEZ DOUBLES DOWN ON DEFUNDING THE POLICE, CLAIMS CONCERNS OVER CRIME WAVE ARE ‘HYSTERIA.’
I’m so old, I can remember 2019, when AOC wanted to make everything — everything — illegal. Who would enforce those laws?
MORE LOCKDOWN CASUALTIES: Lockdown weight may have caused surge in diabetes cases in kids.
ITS ORIGIN AND PURPOSE, STILL A TOTAL MYSTERY: Man Screaming ‘Allahu Akbar’ Stabs 3 to Death, Says It’s His ‘Jihad,’ Cops Search for Motive.
THE POLITICS OF GERMANY’S STASI ARCHIVES:
While former East Germans will continue to be able to request access to the files, the headquarters of the Federal Archives in Koblenz seem a long way away. The right-wing AfD party, which is particularly popular in the former East, has tried to make political headway by claiming that the files will now be hidden away to shield the former ‘wall shooters’ — an allusion to the fact that some former GDR politicians have found a new home in the far-left party Die Linke. The argument that only 2 percent of the files are so far digitalized, something that the Federal Archives could speed up, is unlikely to cool the heated debate around the legacy of East Germany’s police state.
The head of the now-defunct Stasi Records Agency, Roland Jahn, told Spiegel magazine that the dissolution of his department was not a move to hide away from uncomfortable truths — quite the contrary. Where the focus in the 1990s was naturally on those directly affected, thirty years on Germans are beginning to think about future generations. Access to the files will need to be less personal, less ad hoc and more systematic if historians are to make sense of the bigger picture. There are fewer Gernot Friedrichs browsing through their own postcards. But private individuals will still be able to access their own files or those of close relatives.
Historians like me are happy to see Stasi files moved from their temporary department to a more permanent and professionally managed home in the Federal Archives. It is a rational way to transition painful memories into the annals of history. Germany is unique among Western nations in that it has to juggle the histories and legacies of two states within the framework of one collective narrative. The dissolution of the Stasi Records Agency is part of that painful struggle for Germany to come to terms with itself.
Earlier: Pandemic Paranoia Makes ‘The Lives of Others’ a Remarkably Timely Movie.
“WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU MIX TOXIC CRITICAL RACE THEORY WITH PROGRESSIVE ECONOMICS? THANKS TO PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN, WE MAY SOON FIND OUT:” Four Biden proposals would dole out taxpayer money based on critical race theory.
SUCKING IN THE SEVENTIES: Book Review: Rock Me on the Water Hails 1974 Los Angeles.
“The movies produced by this process were, with rare exceptions, not quirky, idiosyncratic or experimental,” Brownstein writes sadly, preferring “big-budget, mainstream productions that aimed to captivate audiences, not challenge them.” It’s a familiar lament, but why Hollywood is constantly pushed to be the one business on earth that is supposed to antagonize rather than gratify its customers remains a mystery to me. (Moreover, just 15 years later the indie-cinema revolution created a second, artistically focused track for those who prefer depressing and eccentric movies to formulaic or entertaining ones, in many cases featuring the same talents who made the blockbusters.) Brownstein tags George Lucas as the kind of artist who steered Hollywood off the track of social relevance, but Lucas would disagree strongly that his career equals escapism; Apocalypse Now was his idea, and even Star Wars was a Vietnam allegory.
I agree, however, that early-Seventies Hollywood now looks like a discrete period compared with what came before and after; even the political undertone, which had been overtly revolutionary when hippie taste ruled, turned into a less obviously dated combination of generalized youthful angst (Jackson Browne’s “Before the Deluge”) and a frustrated sense of seeping and uncontrollable corruption (the makers of Chinatown marveled at how what they were filming seemed to echo the concurrent Watergate hearings). Brownstein grieves the turn away from early-Seventies films “that fundamentally challenged America’s self-image as an equitable society and a force for good in the world,” but there has been no shortage of those in recent decades. And as Brownstein grudgingly admits, television got far better, not worse, starting in the Nineties.
And California’s been living off the fumes of the 1960s and ’70s ever since. As Reason TV asked at the start of the month: Is California Over?
Related: Must Watch: Joe Rogan Completely Deconstructs Hollywood Liberalism.
FIGHT THE POWER: Indiana University sued by students over its vaccine requirement.
“No vaccine for you. Let me know if you need a letter for the university.”
That’s what a world-class infectious disease physician told Jaime Carini, a doctoral candidate at Indiana University, who suffers from several chronic illnesses.
When she applied for an exemption from vaccination, Indiana University denied her request, and now Carini is taking the university to court over its vaccine mandate.
Carini is among seven students claiming in a lawsuit, filed Monday, that Indiana University’s COVID vaccine mandate violates their Fourteenth Amendment rights to bodily integrity and refusing medical treatment.
They say it also flies in the face of an Indiana law banning vaccine passports.
Stay tuned.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: ‘Free to Learn’ Coalition Exposes the Politicization of K-12 Schools in Brutal Ad Campaign.
FIRE THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT, THEN: Profs declare correct grammar is racist, no such thing as standard English at symposium.
NOW OUT FROM ANDREW WAREHAM: A Proper End.
A FRIEND COMMENTS: Every day they keep making the case to stop listening to them. WHO Urges Fully Vaccinated People To Continue Wearing Masks As Delta Variant Spreads.
OOPS: Police hunt for female Tour de France spectator, who is on the run and faces up to a year in PRISON after causing a massive crash with her placard… and organisers want to sue her after 21 riders were injured. I caught a clip of the crash on TV yesterday, but the overhead shot is awe-inspiring.
THE SHELDON WHITEHOUSE RACISM SCANDAL CONTINUES: Photos Show Whitehouse Attending Social Event at All-White Beach Club: R.I. senator denied he’s a member of the club earlier this week.
Last summer saw academicians and even the once-staid Popular Mechanics(!) telling vandals how not to get killed while toppling statues. As James Lileks wrote, right around this time last year:
Historians, detached from history.
Cultural guardians, detached from their culture.
Nothing to defend but the need to defend nothing.
Like I said, I’ve no love for Columbus, but once Toppling Chic is a thing, as they say, the chains come for anyone on a plinth. It’s not so much who they are, as who put them up there. The Past People. The wrong ones.
Update: remember when magazines like Popular Mechanics were about making things?
And remember when academicians were about preserving history — even bad history — from destruction? Professor of ‘art crime’ instructs protesters on better way to topple statues that offend them.
Flashback: The Taliban: an apology. “But today’s conversation about statues is not an argument about slavery or colonialism or even minorities more generally. It is an argument about historical objects, and what you do with them as values change. Values always change, and have done so for generations. But over the years, we’ve learned that our commitment to liberalism and free speech was outmoded. We won the battle over ourselves, and learned to see that the Afghan dogmatism that we wrote off as medieval was, in fact, the future.”
As de Blasio surely knew would happen once the Columbus statues were replaced with George Floyd statues.
THE PUBLIC DOES NOT SHARE THE VIEWS OF THE POLITICAL CLASS: Harvard poll: 80% see border disaster, want Trump closure restored, reject teaching critical race theory.
The political class knows this, and is doing its best to ensure that what the public wants doesn’t matter.
WELCOME BACK, CARTER: Inflation Hits Highest Record Since 2008 Under Biden.
DON SURBER: Babylon Bee stings NYT and Big Tech.
As I wrote on October 26, 2019, “In his Rules for Radicals, Saul D. Alinsky said, ‘Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.’
“Conservatives finally have a site that masters that.
“Plus it is funny.”
My second-favorite example is its story, “Multiple Sources Accuse Donald Duck Of Walking Onto Movie Sets Without Any Pants.”
But I like better, “Calvinist Dog Corrects Owner: ‘No One Is A Good Boy.’”
Religion was the focus for the site when Adam Ford launched the Bee on March 1, 2016. But a jab at the left here, a jab at Trump there, and pretty soon the site was doing political satire as well.
Baptists, Catholics, and other denominations do not complain about being mocked. The only religion that complains is Marxism because these thin-skinned twits are more self-righteous than Carrie Nation, who took axes to bars in her campaign against booze. What Would Jesus Do?
Um, turn water into wine?
No, there is another religion that gets even more prickly when mocked. As the Ayatollah Khomeini famously said in 1979, “Allah did not create man so that he could have fun. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious.”
And the scolds on the left are increasingly taking cancel culture as seriously as he did.
WHY MILLEY READ MARX: A perceptive analysis by journalist Lee Smith of the recent congressional appearance by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:
“Milley said he reads to understand what other people think, but people who boast of having read Marx are trying to shape what other people think about them. He is addressing the kind of people who think reading Marx is part of the foundation of a well-rounded education.
“In America, these are the men and women of the establishment left who not coincidentally sit on the boards of big corporations and decide who gets to earn a million-dollar paycheck simply by occupying the board seat next to them. Saying you’ve read Marx shows that you’re ok, even if you’ve spent your career with an American flag on your shoulder.”
This is the guy His Fraudulency will depend upon for strategic military advice when China invades Taiwan. And Russia completes its re-conquest of the Ukraine.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN):
Also: All the Lovely People.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Chinese Space Station a Looming Threat to US, Experts Say.
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Biden says COVID killed more Americans than US war in Iran.
Was it over when the Ayatollah bombed Pearl Harbor?
COLLUSION? COLLABORATION? DEFINITELY EVIL. Nike CEO says sports giant is ‘a brand of China and for China’ in earnings call amid concerns corporate America is too close to Beijing.
THE LOVELY PEOPLE WANT TO FIT IN, AND SINCE OUR GENTRY CLASS BELIEVES A LOT OF STUPID AND EVIL THINGS, SO DO THEY: All The Lovely People.