Archive for 2021
May 22, 2021
THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Why Won’t Biden Condemn Anti-Semitic Attacks In America?
Related: Jews Attacked All Over the U.S. – Where is the mainstream media on the anti-Semitic attacks?
Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and their silence makes perfect sense.
Evergreen:
SAD THAT THIS IS NEEDED, BUT GOOD: Texas Becomes Third State To Pass Free-Range Kids Law.
Amazingly, the bill became law on the 11th anniversary of “Take Our Children to the Park and Leave Them There Day,” a holiday created by Free-Range Kids and once considered so wacky—so dangerous—that it was splashed across the pages of The New York Daily News. The paper quoted the mother of an eight-year-old, saying: “Never in a million years would I do something that stupid. When the kid turns 18—fine. Until then you watch them.” And it spoke to an “expert”—the chief psychologist at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn—who said that “a seven-year-old shouldn’t be left alone in a backyard, much less a park.”
Too bad for that shrink. When the Texas law goes into effect in September, more than one tenth of all Americans will live under laws passed with the help of Let Grow, the nonprofit that grew out of Free-Range Kids, that insists our kids are smarter and safer than our cowering culture gives them credit for.
HB 567 enjoyed bipartisan support, sailing through the Texas Senate unopposed, and winning the House with a vote of 143 to 5.
The statute enshrining childhood independence is part of a bigger children’s services bill ensuring Texans that the state will not intervene and remove kids from their homes unless the danger is so great and so likely that it outweighs the trauma of entering the foster care system.
“Removing a child from his or her family causes immense harm to the child and should only be done when absolutely necessary,” said Rep. James Frank, a Republican who was one of the bill’s co-authors. This new law—”the product of years of work from stakeholders of all types and legislators of both parties,” he said—gives the authorities those marching orders.
It does so because it “changes our definition of neglect,” Rep. Gene Wu, a Democrat, told the assembly. From now on, kids will be removed only when “they’re actually in danger, and not just the possibility of danger.”
That’s how it always should have been.
FASTER, PLEASE: Pfizer and AstraZeneca ‘highly effective’ against India Covid variant.
It is curious however to see the Grauniad use the I-word in a headline, based on their headline from March of last year: Trump sparks anger by calling coronavirus the ‘Chinese virus.’
OCEANIA HAS ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH BODY CAMERAS: The Left Wanted Body Cams on Cops, Until They Saw the Truth. “Body cams have shown an inconvenient truth: #ACAB — all cop aren’t bastards. Leftists are actually disappointed that body cameras show police officers are NOT oppressing people of color. What we HAVE seen is heroic police work while officers deal with horrific criminal behavior.”
IMMIGRATION: Spain returns people who swam from Morocco, adds troops to border. They call it an “invasion.”
PEOPLE FLEE SOCIALIST STATES: The California Exodus is Real.
We were already in the middle of a cultural skirmish over Blake Bailey’s Philip Roth: The Biography—the key issue being, Was Roth a misogynist?—when both book and biographer spilled over from the review pages to Page One. “Sexual Assault Allegations Against Biographer Halt Shipping of his Book,” the New York Times announced in April. Several women accused Bailey of predatory behavior. At a Louisiana private school where he had once taught English, he was said to have “groomed” eighth-graders for later of-age seductions to rape. And a woman said that Bailey had raped her at the home of a mutual friend who—in one of the scandal’s myriad ironies—was a book reviewer for the New York Times. In no time, W.W. Norton yanked the book out of print. An 861-page tome proudly displayed in the window of my local independent bookstore just days earlier had been abruptly cancelled. “The Roth bio goes meta,” the novelist Lucinda Rosenfeld posted on Facebook.
The knock on the biography, as expressed in the New Republic among other legacy organs striving for wokeness, is that Bailey went soft on Roth’s sexual history. The magazine’s reviewer, Laura Marsh, echoed the prevailing view that Roth regarded women as necessary evils to service his outsize ego/libido, and he was a philanderer who stretched the limits of May–December romances to… whatever you call it when he’s 73 and she’s 29. Then dropped the manna from Roth-hater heaven: Of course Bailey was okay with Roth’s “misogyny”—he’s a perv himself! Which somehow “proved” Roth’s guilt as well. As if he chose Bailey as his authorized biographer because he saw him as a kindred spirit.
Plenty to unpack here. Starting with the old lit-crit canard, Can you separate the artist from his art? It’s been a longstanding question about Roth, but now must also include Bailey, his benighted Boswell. Before all this, Bailey had written acclaimed biographies of John Cheever, Richard Yates, and Charles Jackson (author of The Lost Weekend). Do his transgressions—which, if true, are inarguably disgusting—negate those books, too? No one has said that. Perhaps because while Bailey’s previous subjects shared a common masculine pre-1960s malaise, none of them polarized readers like Roth did for the entirety of his 31-book, 55-year career. Posing a second question: Can we separate the biographer from his subject, when it comes to women?
Roth himself knew a thing or two about cancelled authors: The Tourist — Philip Roth’s Czech KGB file:
Kundera would dramatize this in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in which his protagonist Tomas is demoted from doctor to window washer, as would Klíma in his novel Love & Garbage, about a writer who composes essays on Kafka in his head while working as part of a cleaning crew. Klíma’s novel is strewn with meditations on the nature of waste, on the things that are carved and discarded. The garbage here is more than just metaphoric. Kundera called it “Totalitarian Kitsch”––“the absolute denial of shit.” Klíma called it “jerkish,” a propagandized pidgin whose shrinking lexis was suitable only for communication between men and monkeys. And it was this piffle that W.H. Auden described in a hotblooded octave he fired off after the events of August 1968:
About a subjugated plain,
Among the desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.To counteract this, in 1975, Roth helped launch the Penguin paperback series “Writers from the Other Europe,” which published 17 titles (mostly by Czech and Polish authors) until 1989, the first two of which were Vaculík’s novel The Guinea Pigs and Kundera’s collection Laughable Loves. According to Roth, the goal of the project was to “bring together outstanding and influential works of fiction by Eastern European writers … who though recognized as powerful forces in their own cultures are virtually unknown in America.”
Kundera, who’d defected to France that same year, quarreled slightly with Roth’s description of the “Other Europe,” which (in Kundera’s mind) conflated the history and intellectual tradition of central Europe with the Russo-influenced states of the East. Kundera was himself trying to straddle the perspective required of a Czech writer who was now living in another country and writing for an international audience. He was worried that Roth was unknowingly reinforcing the Soviet Union’s effort to bisect Europe, as well as contributing to American notions of there being “two worlds.” Kundera was also concerned that such a diverse set of writers would be grouped together as a single cringing minority, whose works were more significant for being samizdat than being innovative fiction.
Roth may have been guilty of knowing less than he could have about regional history, but he wasn’t guilty about fetishizing the sufferings of others. As a serious, blood-conscious Jew, he was all too aware of the impending threat of persecution, something that Klíma affirmed in his memoirs: “However much he [Roth] had managed to evade it in a free country he harbored a feeling of solidarity with those being persecuted in a country that had been deprived of its freedom.”
I wonder if Roth ever thought that censored authors would become an issue in America?
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UPDATE: The Hard Man Novels are on sale this week for .99 cents.
YOUTUBE IS RUN BY GARBAGE PEOPLE: Reno May Demonetized for Aiding Neighbors.
LORI LIGHTFOOT’S TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, VERY BAD WEEK CONTINUES:
● Tulsi Gabbard calls on Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot to resign for ‘anti-Whiteness.’
● Chicago: Vote of no confidence in Lightfoot, police superintendent.
● Did Lori Lightfoot Just Get Busted for a Little More Hypocrisy on Masks?
● 17 shot in 5 hours overnight in Chicago, shootings now up 36% over last year.
And earlier, from America’s Newspaper of Record: Lori Lightfoot Flees In Terror After Thomas Sowell Takes Her Up On Offer For Black People To Interview Her.
THERE’S PROBABLY A COAL PLANT AT THE OTHER END: What You Need to Know About Charging Before You Buy an EV.
ROGER KIMBALL: The Capitol ‘armed insurrection’ narrative is crumbling.
Yet the crumbling sound you hear in the distance is the sound of the Capitol armed insurrection narrative falling to pieces. It was supposed to be the gravest threat to ‘our democracy’ in the long history of the Republic. But the more we know, the less we see. It had long been rumored that the Capitol police actually opened the doors to protestors and welcomed them in. I had heard from one reputable source that it was because January 6 happened to be a day in which the Capitol was open for visitors. That might explain why so many of the ‘insurrectionists’ stayed between the velvet ropes as they walked through The National Statuary Hall. Did they really know what was going on?
I have also seen the recently released footage showing Capitol police welcoming in the protestors.
I saw that footage thanks to the independent reporting of Julie Kelly at American Greatness. She has been tenacious and uncompromising. Anyone who has followed this depressing story is much in her debt.
One of her leitmotifs has been the cruel and vindictive treatment of protestors by the Biden Department of Justice, abetted by the Capitol police. Hundreds of people have been arrested. Some have been languishing for months in solitary confinement without being formally charged.
This, as Kelly points out, is police-state behavior on the part of the Biden DOJ. The FBI and the CIA have been operating more like the Soviet NKVD than the storied agencies of yore.
And it could lead to this: Partisan January 6 Commission Vote May Doom the Filibuster. “Republicans are digging in their heels in the Senate and will not budge on creating such a commission. It may cost them dearly. The only way Senate Republicans can stop the commission from being created is by refusing to even take the measure up in the first place. And that will give Democratic radicals ammunition to convince the few remaining holdouts to vote to eliminate the filibuster.”
NOT WHEN THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION IS IN THEIR POCKET: Could the ransomware crisis force action against Russia?
JEFFREY EPSTEIN DIDN’T KILL HIMSELF: Officers Guarding Epstein During Death Admit They Falsified Records, Cut Pending Deal With No Jail Time.
HOW TO SHOCK CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY: Motherhood and Babies are Good, Actually. “And if it comes to that, there is nothing wrong with putting your professional opportunities on hold for the sake of your family—temporarily or indefinitely.”
Related: Bourgeois is the new transgressive.
IT’S COME TO THIS: Everything Is Sexualized: LEGO Now Features an LGBTQ+ Set With a Drag Queen.
Which figure is actually gendered, you ask? And how exactly are you supposed to know? According to the set designer, Matthew Ashton, the purple minifig donning a beehive wig “is a clear nod to all the fabulous drag queens out there.”
Once again, even in a gender-bending word, males somehow come out on top. Right, Bruce “Caitlyn” Jenner?
So, who exactly is gonna buy this set? Despite being a children’s toy company, LEGO has fans of all ages, and they’ve put out extravagant sets in a variety of themes, many of which target adult collectors.
But some don’t see this as a set for just adults who need another outlet to shove their sexual identity down your throat.
“Having LGBT-inclusive toys creates a space for families to let LGBT children know that they are loved and accepted,” Joe Nellist from the UK’s LGBT Foundation, told CNN. “Growing up in a world which often tells you there is something ‘wrong’ with you can lead to a person developing a deep sense of shame — something we know can have a long-lasting impact on both mental and physical health.”
You see? Gay LEGOs are “for the children.”
Or as America’s Newspaper of Record reports the above news: LEGO Unveils New Genderless Bricks With No Male/Female Connectors.
GUESS I’D BETTER STOCKPILE MORE! Manufacturers Say Ammo Shortage Will Stretch Out for Years.
ANTI-SEMITIC ATTACKS ON THE RISE AS THE LEFT CONTINUES TO INCITE VIOLENCE.
No word yet whom Joe Biden blames for these attacks:
FATHER’S DAY IS COMING UP: Get a gift for Dad like this Wood Multi-Tool with 10 functions. Glenn and I are trying out the Books-a-Million affiliate program. If you would like to try it, click the link and we get a small fee for anything you buy which supports this site. The company head quarters is located in Birmingham, Alabama and we have a store here in Knoxville that seems to support all types of books and merchandise.
MARK JUDGE: JFK’s Death Split the American Psyche.
In his brilliant book Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, James Piereson argues that Kennedy’s death shattered American liberalism. Unable to face the fact that Kennedy was murdered by a communist, liberals became intolerant, prone to hysteria and conspiracy theories, and intent on punishing America for the sins of its past. Feminism transformed from a quest for quality to hating men, particularly the darker impulses of men. For fifty years conservatives have fought against this hostile cultural takeover by the left. But the right has also accepted a central premise of liberalism, which is the religion of progress. While liberals believe that happiness lies in ever-expanding rights, total sexual freedom, and the eradication of tradition, conservatives claim that if taxes are cut low enough consumption will increase and the economy will expand indefinitely. Ultimately, everyone—or at least most people—will be rich. When told that Richard Nixon argued that the West would win the Cold War because we had more color televisions, Kennedy replied that he “would prefer to have his TV be black and white.” We’re more than consumers. Difficult to imagine President Trump making the same argument.
In his book The True and Only Heaven: Progress and It’s Critics, Christopher Lasch noted that the fact that both left and right believe in the idea that societies move towards perfection would have been considered bizarre to the ancients. He also argued that people need more than progress. ”If humanity thrives on peace and prosperity,” Lasch wrote, “it also needs an occasional taste of battle. Men and women need to believe that ‘life is a critical affair,’ in Reinhold Niebuhr’s words.”
These words are an echo of Jung’s belief that to feel whole men need to feel that they are partaking in a “cosmic destiny.” To be equipped to partake in that destiny, men need to be not just procreators and providers, but warriors, poets and artists. They need to be empathetic, well-spoken, and wise leaders. They can’t just preach virtue and cut taxes. That have to be in touch with their shadow. Conservatives, while doing the long and hard work of beating back the punitive left and tying to maintain the institutions that had made civilization possible, and with the possible exception of Ronald Reagan, never really spoke to America’s soul. On the right there is a demand for a kind of plutonic perfection in men, who are expected to got to school, work, raise a family, then die. Any manifestations of the shadow, of lust, anger, and dangerous risk-taking that has been a part of the male psyche for millennia, and that was so much a part of Kennedy, is rejected. (An exception might be the alt-right, although theirs is a celebration rather than an acceptance of the shadow, resulting in screeds that lack Kennedy’s wit.) Conservatives often partake in what Jung called “shadow projection,” condemning another for your own darkness. Thus it was no surprise when several of the men who were leading the 1998 impeachment of President Bill Clinton wound up being guilty of sexual misconduct. Sen. Robert Livingston and Newt Gingrich had extramarital affairs, and Speaker Dennis Hastert was found to be a “serial child molestor.” Shortly after, William Bennett, Dr. Virtue himself, got busted for a gambling problem.
Read the whole thing.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Lori Lightfoot Flees In Terror After Thomas Sowell Takes Her Up On Offer For Black People To Interview Her.
SOON IT WILL BE SO FAST IT WILL ARRIVE BEFORE IT’S LEFT: Elon Musk confirms the new Tesla Roadster’s 1.1-second 0-60 mph acceleration.