Archive for 2021
August 28, 2021
SOD OFF, SWAMPY: Vox: It’s time to reconsider air conditioning for the sake of ‘cooling justice.’
Of course, if Vox would like to test their theories out, why not start here? Ban A/C for DC!
MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Denmark To Scrap All Covid-19 Restrictions.
TO BE HONEST, THIS DOESN’T SOUND LIKE A LOT: 1 in 5 people with COVID-19 pass it to others in household, study finds.
ANOTHER NEW BOOK: Crisis Preparedness Guide: How to Survive the Coming Collapse.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Taliban Opens Chain Of U.S. Army Surplus Stores.
FIFTH GEAR: Behind the scenes of Aston Martin’s immaculate restorations (video).
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Daily Show Hilariously Mocks ‘Epic News Bro’ Chris Cuomo. “Yes, ladies and gentlemen, THAT Daily Show.“
AN ODE TO CHARLIE WATTS, THE POLITEST MAN IN ROCK MUSIC:
Watts himself was later to remark, ‘Part of my problem was that I was never a teenager. I’d be off in the corner talking about Kierkegaard. I always took myself too seriously, and thought Buddy Holly was a great joke.’ It’s true that there was something a bit melancholic about the London lad with the long, Buster Keaton face who only ever wanted to read about cowboys or play the drums. He acquired his first kit at Christmas 1955, after at least a year of practicing nonstop on his mother’s pots and pans. At 18, Watts had only one ambition, which was to somehow find himself at Birdland in New York, wearing a hipster suit and sitting in behind the likes of Stan Getz or Miles Davis. Instead, he drifted in to a smoke-filled suburban London blues club one evening, to be confronted by the embryonic Rolling Stones. They courted him for about two years before he agreed to join, and even then he contained his excitement. The Stones’ roadie and sometime piano player Ian Stewart remembered that he’d simply driven up to the Watts’s front door one night in his van. ‘I said to Charlie, “Look, you’re in the band. That’s it.” And Charlie said, “Yeah, all right, then, but I don’t know what my mum’s gonna say”.’
Amid all the subsequent stories about Mars Bars, drug busts and Margaret Trudeau, Charlie remained the calm eye of the storm. He bought the former Archbishop of Canterbury’s home, raised sheepdogs and collected American Civil War memorabilia. He was the politest man in rock music. Once, in Detroit, a record executive named Mo Schulman invited the drummer up for a drink in his hotel suite, which was awash in champagne, caviar and an impressive variety of recreational drugs. When Schulman was then urgently called away on business, he affably told his guest to help himself from the display. ‘Anything you want,’ he stressed. Charlie took a bottle of beer, leaving both a five-dollar bill and a polite thank-you note on the counter. A few years later the Stones were yukking it up one night in the pinball room of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion with its underwater bar and hot and cold running Bunnies. Charlie took one look at the Satyricon-like scene, rolled his eyes, said, ‘Uh-oh, this is star situation’, and retired alone with a good book.
Still though, there were limits to Watts’ politeness, as this classic Stones story recalls:
One night in Amsterdam in the 1980s, when Richards was celebrating his marriage, he and Jagger stayed up most of the night drinking. At 5 a.m., Jagger called Mr. Watts’s hotel room, according to Richards’s autobiography, and said, “Where’s my drummer?” “About twenty minutes later,” Richards went on, “there was a knock at the door. There was Charlie Watts, Savile Row suit, perfectly dressed, tie, shaved. . . . I opened the door and he didn’t even look at me, he walked straight past me, got hold of Mick and said, ‘Never call me your drummer again.’ Then he hauled him up by the lapels . . . and gave him a right hook. Mick fell back onto a silver platter of smoked salmon on the table and began to slide towards the open window and the canal below it. . . . [I] caught Mick just before he slid into the Amsterdam canal.”
Here are some thoughts from Stewart Copeland of the Police, another brilliant drummer, about Watts’ drum technique, and how he drove the Stones:
https://youtu.be/N3ZH3PEjTLE
As for the surviving Stones, not surprisingly for a band led by Mick Jagger, the show (read: the money machine) must go on: Rolling Stones ‘moving ahead’ on tour despite Charlie Watts’ death.
On the other hand, as Mark Hemingway responds to the above story, “Watts was on record saying he wanted and expected The Stones to continue without him. ZZ Top is also playing this fall and Dusty wanted them to continue. Also, Stones tours employ hundreds of people who likely were out of work all pandemic.“
IN STAND ON ZANZIBAR, “NIPICAPS” LET WOMEN CONTROL THIS PHENOMENON: “The Effect of Nipple Erection on Intended and Expected Altruism.”
ONE MORE TODAY FROM YOURS TRULY FOR OUR VIP SUPPORTERS: Trump and the Chicago Way: How We Used to Strike Back at Terrorists.
SPENGLER: The Federal Reserve Is in the Monetary Equivalent of the Kabul Airport.
Real income is falling and families are losing ground. [Federal Reserve System, Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s] performance recalls Groucho’s line, “Who are you going to believe — me or your own eyes?” Anyone who has tried to buy a pound of hamburger, rent a house, buy a used car or a household appliance, or any other item in the consumption basket knows that inflation is out of control.
Note to Republicans: Stay on message. It’s the Biden inflation, and it’s theft. He’s taking food off the table of middle-class families to hand out bribes to his favorite constituencies.
Along with his administration’s unspeakable incompetence and mendacity in Afghanistan, this sets up a Republican landslide for 2022.
Don’t get cocky.
PJ MEDIA VIP ROUNDUP: Don’t forget that VODKAPUNDIT promo code if you’ve been thinking of joining us.
AJ Kaufman: Is State Department Spokesman Ned Price Gaslighting All of Us? “According to the 38-year-old Georgetown and Harvard graduate Price, barbaric Al-Qaeda-allied jihadists like the Taliban are our partners, yet the equally barbaric Al-Qaeda-allied jihadists of the Haqqani network are not.”
Bryan Preston: Who’s Really Driving the Afghanistan Disaster? Here’s a Clue. “It clearly says the State Department is driving the operation and DoD is merely providing support.”
Yours Truly: Even the Soviets Managed to Achieve Something in the ‘Graveyard of Empires’ That Joe Biden Couldn’t—Or Chose Not To. “The Soviet effort to withdraw in good order was well-executed and can serve as a model for other disengagements from similar nations.”
ALWAYS THE LAST TO KNOW: New York magazine’s shocking revelation: The liberal media are biased!
In defending President Biden’s debacle in Afghanistan, New York magazine’s Eric Levitz has come to an earth-shaking revelation. You ready? The liberal media are biased. They “manufactured” the crisis.
Levitz is shocked, shocked to discover that “straight news” stories in the New York Times are laden with judgmental adjectives and the writers’ own opinions.
Who knew? Flashback: Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper? Of course it is.
—Headline and lede, The New York Times, July 25, 2004.
THAT’S GOOD, BUT THE OFFICIALS SHOULD BE PERSONALLY LIABLE: Baltimore Might Be Liable for Riot Damage to Businesses: A federal court so holds, applying Maryland’s Riot Act, and quoting the Mayor’s famous line that the City “gave those who wished to destroy space to do that.”
FOR THE NATION, CERTAINLY. THE RULING CLASS HASN’T PAID MUCH OF A PRICE THOUGH. Conrad Black: Evicting Donald Trump was clearly a catastrophe. “Despite the frenzied, wall-to-wall, linked-armed international effort to present Trump as a brutal, crooked, moron, he almost eliminated unemployment and illegal immigration, did eliminate energy imports, and by identifying and incentivizing “enterprise zones,” he created conditions in which the lowest 20 per cent of American income earners were gaining income in percentage terms compared to the top 10 per cent on the income scale. President Trump, without demagogy or hyperbole, attracted American attention to the commercial and geopolitical threat from China. He incited NATO to stop sponging off America and raise the national defence commitments to figures much more closely approximating their long-standing promises to the United States.”
Plus: “There is open discussion of trying to reconstruct the Western alliance without American leadership. Biden’s own partisans are silent as his standing in the eyes of his countrymen crumbles. Is there any sane person who in the dark and quiet of their bedroom in the dead, vast, and middle of the night would not prefer Trump with his gaucheries to this horrifying immolation of American national credibility and of the unbroken right of the West over 2500 years to be the preeminent influence in the world? Possibly, but they are no longer numerous or outspoken.”
GRANHOLM GOT MILITARY JET DURING AFGHAN EVAC: Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm had a summit to get to in Ukraine, so, naturally, her minions dialed up the Pentagon and presto! There was a U.S. military jet that could possibly have been better utilized a good ways further east of Ukraine.
“C’MON NOW” WITH BRYAN PRESTON: Gen. Mark Milley’s Bagram Blunder Should End His Military Cosplay Act.
AFGHANISTAN IS BIDEN’S SLAUGHTERHOUSE: Who knew His Fraudulency would become the procurement chief for the Taliban. If you doubt that, consider this Issues & Insights:
“The country is now a modern arms bazaar, overflowing with designed-to-kill equipment for the Taliban to use on Americans and anyone else they choose to murder, or sell to unsavory characters who want to massacre Westerners. Remaining in Afghanistan after the U.S. quits will be nearly 76,000 military vehicles, 208 American airplanes and helicopters, and almost 600,000 arms.”
MICHAEL BYRD IS A HERO FOR KILLING ASHLI BABBITT, HAVE YOU NOT HEARD HIM SAY? “Ask yourself: when was the last time you celebrated a cop for killing an unarmed man or woman? If your answer is ‘never’ — which is likely — why have you made an exception for Ashli Babbitt? Before you answer, hopefully, NBC can explain its doubled standard. So keep all of this in mind as Michael Byrd makes the rounds on CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS, and then gets rich off a tell-all book. Byrd will have a lot to tell, by the way. He’s been a victim for years. Just ask him.”
HOW ABOUT “SHUT UP, BAIZUO!” Brandeis University expands list of ‘oppressive’ words and phrases to avoid using.
If you’re at Brandeis University and want to tell someone they’re “killing it” or to follow a “rule of thumb,” you better bite your tongue.
The phrases, among many others, are considered violent according to a recently expanded “suggested language list” put together by the Prevention, Advocacy and Resource Center at the Waltham university.
Instead of “killing it,” the group recommends saying “great job” because, “If someone is doing well, there are other ways to say so without equating it to murder.”
The phrase “rule of thumb” should be replaced with “general rule,” because the saying allegedly comes from an old British law allowing men to beat their wives with sticks no wider than their thumb.
But even Brandeis concedes that “no written record of this law exists today.”
Dumb, bossy rules based on fake history: Academic leftism as usual.
HE’S GONE WAY PAST CARTER ALREADY: Biden morphs into Carter faster than Jimmy did.