MTV’S 40th ANNIVERSARY: How Video (Sort Of) Killed the Radio Star. “At precisely 12:01AM on August 1, 1981, MTV, a.k.a. Music Television, began broadcasting via cable access for the first time. With opening shots of the Space Shuttle Columbia launch from April of the same year and of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, the inaugural episode kicked off with co-creator John Lack’s now-famous ‘Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll’ introducing the Buggles’ ‘Video Killed the Radio Star.’ And, just like that, a revolution was started. Now, 40 years later, it is nearly impossible to overstate the impact this sea change had and continues to have in both music and TV.”
Archive for 2021
August 1, 2021
WHO KNEW EVERYBODY IN WUHAN SPEAKS ENGLISH? Why Speaking English May Spread More Coronavirus Than Some Other Languages.
I’m so old, I can remember when Forbes was a sensible publication.
UPDATE: Short people at greater risk of catching COVID-19.
(Updated and bumped.)
JAMES LILEKS: Opus and Hobbes. “Berke Breathed, the creator of Bloom County, has been turning out new work. There’s no fanfare, no newspaper stories about its return. He just slipped the new stuff out at irregular intervals: here you go. It hasn’t changed at all, stylistically, although it’s aware of the passage of time. It’s a delight to see. I wouldn’t bring this up at all, except for this: Opus finds Hobbes, and vows to reunite him with Calvin. It’s a damned sweet thing. It’s all on the Twitter feed.”
DEMOCRATS ARE LITERALLY KILLING PEOPLE: Adler’s Disaster: Austin Surpasses Grim Homicide Milestone. “On August 13, 2020, Austin, Texas, Mayor Steve Adler led alongside Councilmember Greg Casar as the city council unanimously voted to defund its police department. . . . Austin just passed its entire 2020 homicide total with its 49th homicide of the year. It’s August 1st. . . . The vast majority of Austin’s homicide victims have been minorities. Due to the cuts, their killers may never be arrested.”
Plus: “Every official who defunded police and is releasing criminals is a Democrat.”
AT KING HARV’S: Uranus coffee on sale.
I’M ACTUALLY OKAY WITH THIS — THE VIRUS HAS TO HAVE BETTER TASTE IN MUSIC: Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot Delays New COVID-19 Restrictions As Lollapalooza Begins.
Related: DC mayor parties maskless — after ordering new mask mandate.
“Which raises an obvious question: ‘Was the two days notice on implementing the mask mandate so @MayorBowser could have her birthday party??? Absolutely classic.'”
UPDATE: DC Mayor Bowser officiates maskless indoor wedding after reinstated mask mandate.
As Stephen Kruiser suggested: Let’s Start Jailing Lawmakers Who Violate Their Own COVID Restrictions. “Imagine the pure, poetic justice of seeing Newsom, Cuomo, and some of the other Hitler youth (stole that from Animal House) cooling their heels in a holding cell after being caught with their masks off and their pants down.”
(Updated and bumped.)
VIDEO: Slow Joe vs. The Gipper. “I came across the following clip of a half-hour interview Reagan did in late 1987 (when he was 76) with the anchors of the three major networks plus CNN (Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, and Bernard Shaw), and I recommend scrolling to any point in this media session to note how well Reagan performs—without a teleprompter or note cards. Sure, you can say that Reagan had memorized talking points (though it seems to me he answers spontaneously to several sharp questions designed to throw him off), but right now Joe Biden can’t even seem to do that. Ask yourself this question: is there any chance that Biden could get through a half-hour interview of this kind with the anchors of the major networks?”
TEXAS FLEEBAGGER UPDATE: Texas House Democrat calls for ‘federal intervention’ as political stunt begins to collapse.
THE ALGORITHM: The media’s new business model is propaganda.
The consequences of this business model in the real world can be summed up in a word: polarization. There’s a perfect alignment of interests between the media, its consumers, and professional political agitators in stoking fear, animosity, and mutual recrimination among the public. The media industry cultivates its only remaining revenue stream. News consumers see their ideological prejudices affirmed by brand name media outlets, and comfort themselves in the belief that the media is doing its job to ensure that their worldview prevails in the public debate. Activists get free PR. Everyone benefits as we all nurture our contempt for one another over the course of a news cycle. Then, once that news cycle is exhausted, media outlets, with the help of activists, make sure that a new outrage flares up to begin the cycle all over again. The survival of an entire industry depends on it.
In the case of the Wi Spa story, it didn’t take much time at all. Within a couple of weeks, there was another violent skirmish, this time in front of the Cedars-Sinai breast cancer clinic, also in L.A.. This flare-up was over a different hot button issue, but it followed the same script.
Like every health care facility I’ve been in post-vaccination, the Cedars-Sinai clinic still had a mask mandate in place. Maybe a dozen people showed up to protest this tyrannical infringement on their liberties, aware, I think it’s safe to assume, that the action was crack cocaine to the native propagandist-journalists of the left-of-center media world. To make it even more enticing, some of the protestors wore black t-shirts that read, “COVID IS A SCAM.” Predictably, counterprotesters showed up, including members of Antifa. In short order, fist fights erupted. Lots of smart phones were on hand to document the squabbles. The tabloids pounced, as readily as if they were following stage directions. It was kayfabe, all the way down.
On an episode of my favorite podcast, Red Scare, co-host Dasha Nekrasova, describing the Wi Spa protests, passingly referred to the whole affair as “the algorithm.” It’s an apt metaphor. Just as YouTube’s digital algorithm serves us up ever more extreme content to keep us glued to our screens, the human algorithm that governs the media’s new business model scours our newsfeeds for catalysts for outrage and amplifies them. Political provocateurs, from anti-maskers to Antifa LARPers, understand the algorithm and exploit it, performing their assigned roles in the streets, in front of their iPhone cameras. The rest of us consume it with glee, every bite reminding us that we stand on the right side of history, unlike the rest of those morons with whom we’re forced to share a country. It’s a perfectly functional dysfunctional system. Everybody wins while everybody loses.
Well worth a read, but note this:
This arrangement works particularly well, of course, for activists, in precisely the way that, 13 years ago, Fox News’ exploitation of the Tea Party story worked out beautifully for the Tea Party. Like Fox’s anchors and pundits, journalists of this type effectively serve the same purpose for the activists they cover that PR firms serve for corporate clients, though the economics break down a little differently.
But what happened before the Tea Party coalesced? Plenty of PR work by Democratic Party operatives with bylines:
GOODBYE, BIGOT: Evergreen prof who berated white colleagues resigns.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Academics say fear of pit bulls is linked to… racism? I thought it was more about the biting: “Despite accounting for just 6.5% of all dogs in the United States, pit bulls were responsible for 66% of total fatal dog attacks between 2005 and 2017.”
Why aren’t these academics following the science? I think they should be banned for “spreading misinformation.”
BLM = “BEAUTIFUL LAVISH MANSIONS.” Activist Shaun King lives lavishly in lakefront New Jersey home. “King has been dogged for years by allegations of shady dealings in his charitable efforts in movements he has founded — including a lack of transparency in money he has raised for several criminal justice initiatives he has backed. . . . King co-founded the Real Justice political action committee in 2017 with former Black Lives Matter leader Patrisse Cullors, who resigned from BLM a month after The Post revealed she had spent more than $3 million on real estate in the US.”
READER BOOK RECOMMENDATION: Larry Niven’s and Jerry Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer: A Novel. (Bumped)
WELCOME BACK, CARTER: Key Inflation Gauge Posts Fastest Annual Price Gain In 30 Years.
Related: America’s surprisingly disappointing GDP growth. Unexpectedly!
WHEN YOU GO TO WAR WITH YOUR CONSTITUENTS, YOU BECOME UNPOPULAR WITH THEM: Liz Cheney in trouble: 77% GOP would not reelect, 53% call her ‘liberal’.
FLASHBACK: Reynolds’ Law:
The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.
Somebody was referencing this to me yesterday. I think it’s worth mentioning again.
PUSHING BACK AGAINST THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY: Pro-Israel Media Watchdog CAMERA Trolls NYT with Billboard Outside NYT, Accusing It of ‘Burying’ News of Attacks on Jews.
OUR LEADERSHIP HAS BEEN WORKING TOWARD DEFEAT FOR A LONG TIME: Obama/Biden Purged Pre-“Woke” Military Of Those Who Sought Victory.
BIDEN VOTERS POSTING THEIR L’S ONLINE: Biden hits resistance from unions on vaccine requirement.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. We should be fighting for the history of the Alamo, not about it.
For history organizations, these are interesting times. Today we find many people fighting over history. In my time as CEO of the Alamo, I observed more people preferred to fight about the history of the Alamo rather than fight for it.
When we fight about history, we find ourselves arguing about what we want our history to be. Often these arguments are based upon our opinions and not historical facts.
Former U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in 1983, “First, get your facts straight. Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. Second, decide to live with the facts.”
Woke history is specifically at war with that approach.