WELL, THOSE ARE WORTHLESS, SO HIS TERMS SOUND ACCEPTABLE: Putin Plans To Make ‘Unfriendly’ Countries Purchase Russian Gas In Rubles.
And there’s an upside for us: EU looks to US to help curb reliance on Russian natural gas. Thanks, Vladimir!
Archive for 2022
March 23, 2022
FLASHBACK: Respect today’s French troops.
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE COLLEGE OF LAW, we’re hiring a Visiting Professor of Practice for Fall 2022. It’s a 9-month visiting faculty position to commence in the fall semester of 2022 to teach Business Associations, Bankruptcy, Law & Technology/Privacy Law, and other business law courses through the Clayton Center for Entrepreneurial Law. Application information at the link.
FOR A YEAR TOMMY JAMES WAS BIGGER THAN THE BEATLES. THEN THE MAFIA RUINED EVERYTHING:
On Saturday July 15, 1972 American rock legend Tommy James played a gig at the Paramount Theatre in Brooklyn. After the show, James and his friends from the group Grass Roots were driving to a party in their stretch limousine.
At exactly the same time, six blocks away, Thomas ‘Tommy Ryan’ Eboli, the acting boss of the Genovese crime family, was leaving his girlfriend’s apartment when an assassin pumped six bullets into his head and chest from point-blank range. That would be the last time he ever screwed up on a heroin deal.
The afternoon before, James and Eboli had been slapping shoulders in the off-Broadway offices of Roulette Records, James’s label. Roulette boss Morris ‘Moshe’ Levy looked on and smiled. High on drugs and dollar bills, everyone seemed hunky dory, unless you knew that Levy was ‘the Godfather of the Music Business’, a man so feared it was said there were six major crime families in New York City: Gambino, Genovese, Colombo, Lucchese, Bonanno and Moshe’s Roulette.
Levy was the nastiest person in show business. He had a radioactive personality inside a Teflon overcoat. Moshe made latter-day managers like Peter Grant and Don Arden look like wusses. If a major label had a problem with a distributor, they’d call up Mo. Radio stations playing hardball? Call Morris. For an appropriate fee, Levy and his accomplice, record exec Nate McCalla, would gather baseball bats and, whack!
Don’t mess with Morris. He was the architect behind the payola scandal that sank American DJ Alan Freed, the man who’d invented the term ‘rock’n’roll’. Back in the day, Morris’s brother Irving had been shot dead in a gambling dispute at the notorious Birdland jazz club, which they ran. Levy bided his time, then visited his brother’s killer and disembowelled him with a butcher’s knife.
And speaking of the Beatles:
John Lennon was another visitor to Levy’s farm. In 1973 Levy and Lennon had become friends, but that didn’t stop the Roulette owner from serving the former Beatle with a plagiarism writ. Lennon’s 1969 song Come Together, on The Beatles’ Abbey Road album, began with the line ‘Here come old flat top, he come grooving up slowly,’ which had been appropriated from Chuck Berry’s 1956 single You Can’t Catch Me.
Levy owned the publishing on the original. He sued Lennon and won. As part of an ad-hoc settlement, Lennon gave Morris rough mixes of a rock’n’roll album he’d worked up with Phil Spector during his ‘lost weekend’ phase. The tapes were crap, but Levy put them out anyway, with Lennon’s permission, as a shoddy mail order LP called Roots, on subsidiary label Adam V111, named after his son.
Lennon was secretly delighted at the arrangement. He thought he’d make some easy money. Capitol didn’t see it that way and counter-sued Levy. The case dragged on for two years while Lennon, who was still getting off his heroin addiction by taking vast amounts of novocaine, slumped into his habitual depression.
During a particularly nasty stage in the trial, Levy invited Lennon to his farm, ostensibly to enjoy some quality rehearsal time for the unstable musician’s Walls And Bridges album. When Lennon arrived with May Pang (Yoko Ono’s replacement at that time), Levy threatened his life in no uncertain terms.
Read the whole thing, which reads like a cross between Scorsese’s Goodfellas and his HBO series, Vinyl.
WHEN DOES TWITTER BAN ZELENSKYY? Ukraine Blocks Trans Women Refugees: “They Are Men, Must Go Back and Fight.”
NO WONDER THEY HATE DESANTIS: Florida to soon require financial literacy class for high schoolers to graduate.
WHERE’S HUNTER, FAT? Hunter Biden, the protected third rail of journalism:
So, to unpack this in retrospect, these former intel heads admitted they did not “have evidence of Russian involvement,” but all were in total agreement because of their suspicions from afar? And like seagulls at the beach, most of the press ate it up.
We heard a lot about collusion during the Trump era, but the real collusion happened between broadcast, print and social media all working together to either squash or dismiss the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Twitter and Facebook handled the squashing part, with the former locking the personal accounts of anyone who even shared the New York Post story in October 2020. The Post’s own account was locked, as was then-White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany‘s and the official handle of the Trump campaign. Again, these Pyongyang tactics all occurred just a few weeks before a presidential election.
Related: Democratic staffer on Jan. 6 committee was part of intel effort to help Biden out of Hunter jam.
UPDATE: Via W. Joseph Campbell, the origin of the “seagulls on the beach” phrase.
(Updated and bumped.)
GLORY DAYS: Andrew Cuomo’s Macabre Pandemic Nostalgia.
What but personal gratification explains Cuomo’s otherwise inexplicable dredging up of his disastrous final year in office over the other nine? After all, his conduct during the pandemic remains a drag on his political prospects.
As recently as last week, state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli released an internal audit that confirmed the Cuomo administration had undercounted Covid deaths in nursing homes by more than 4,000. “The audit details how health officials undercounted deaths in nursing homes by more than 50% at certain points during the height of the crisis,” the New York Daily News reported. The findings underscore the conclusions New York Attorney General Letitia James revealed in a January 2021 report alleging that the Cuomo administration covered up the true death toll and its contributions to the body count. Albany’s “guidance requiring the admission of COVID-19 patients into nursing homes” put long-term care facility residents “at increased risk of harm,” that report revealed. All this only corroborates the many independent journalistic probes into how the governor’s administration contributed to the pandemic’s death toll and subsequently covered it up.
“In politics, like in life, you stand on your record,” Cuomo brazenly insists at the close of his comeback pitch. But Cuomo had more than a record. He had a cult of personality around him, and he loved every minute of it. What he wants isn’t just his name cleared and his career back. He wants the “Cuomosexuals” to fall back in love with the erstwhile object of their affections. Toward that end, Andrew Cuomo is dwelling on what for him must have been one of the best times of his life. That it was also the very worst of times for the rest of us seems to have escaped him.
Read the whole thing.
WILL BIDEN BACK CAR-LESS SUNDAYS? The International Energy Agency (IEA) is proposing it and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm is pushing it, so how long before Joe tells us we can’t drive on Sunday?
SPOILER: THEY’RE RIGHT. “A few of my friends are convinced that woke activists plan on establishing a woke dictatorship. Overall, I deem this is paranoid hyperbole. Every now and then, however, I read a woke activist, and I briefly wonder if my paranoid, hyperbolic friends are right.”
SENATOR KENNEDY STUMPS SUPREME COURT NOMINEE WITH ONE QUESTION:
“When does life begin, in your opinion,” Senator Kennedy asked Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson for starters.
“Senator… um… I don’t… know,” Judge Jackson replied, followed by an uneasy, awkward laugh.
“Do you have a belief?” Kennedy pressed.
“I have, um, personal religious and otherwise beliefs that have nothing to do with the law in terms of when life begins,” Jackson responded.
“Do you have a personal belief though about when life begins?” Kennedy probed.
“I have a religious view that I set aside when I am ruling on cases,” Jackson evaded again.
Senator Kennedy pushed further on the point, asking Judge Jackson an important follow-up, “When does equal protection of the laws attach to a human being?”
“Well Senator, um… I believe that the Supreme Court… um… actually I, I actually don’t know the answer to that question — I’m sorry — I don’t,” Judge Jackson responded, again with an ill-timed grin on her face as her initially confident answer turned to another know-nothing response.
And as a follow-up to Jackson’s showstopper last night, “Democrats don’t understand that, for better or worse, every candidate this cycle, and maybe even in 2024, is going to be asked ‘How do you define the term ‘woman’?’ And [their] candidates won’t have an answer,” Pradheep J. Shanker tweets.
CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Indiana Joins the Club – Governor Holcomb Signs Constitutional Carry Into Law.
PUTTING OUT FIRE WITH GASOLINE: Democrats Mull $100 Monthly ‘Biden Bucks’ Gas Stimulus Checks to Buy Your Vote.
BRINGING THE COUNTRY TOGETHER: Jill Biden Invites Congressional Spouses to White House, Gives Unvaxxed Nasty Set of Rules.
I’M EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: Everything to know about Switchblades, the attack drones the US is giving Ukraine.
DON’T GET COCKY: Joel Kotkin: The coming bloodbath of the Democrats. Joe Biden’s woke, green agenda will cost him dearly at the ballot box.
MEGAN FOX: How One Bad Teacher Almost Destroyed a New Mexico Family Using the State as a Weapon. “Due to DuBois’ allegations, the Lowther children were removed from their home, separated from each other, and placed into foster care for eleven months while the slow wheels of justice turned.”
DON’T UNDERESTIMATE JOE’S WILLINGNESS TO F*** THINGS UP: Biden Administration Fumbles F-35, Free World’s Fighter, Despite War In Europe.
SOMETIMES THE LEFT HAND DOESN’T KNOW WHAT THE FAR LEFT HAND IS DOING: Or, two NBCs in one!
Shot: CDC study finds about 78% of people hospitalized for Covid were overweight or obese.
—CNBC, March 9th, 2021.
Earlier this month, researchers reported that a network of online “fascist fitness” chat groups on the encrypted platform Telegram are recruiting and radicalizing young men with neo-Nazi and white supremacist extremist ideologies. Initially lured with health tips and strategies for positive physical changes, new recruits are later invited to closed chat groups where far-right content is shared.
Physical fitness has always been central to the far right*. In “Mein Kampf,” Hitler fixated on boxing and jujitsu, believing they could help him create an army of millions whose aggressive spirit and impeccably trained bodies, combined with “fanatical love of the fatherland,” would do more for the German nation than any “mediocre” tactical weapons training.
—MSNBC, yesterday.
* How odd that a TV channel that wished to spread socialism nationally and believed that “your kids are not your own” would see those impulses occurring on the American libertarian “far right.”
LA ANTI-HOMELESSNESS PROGRAM SPENDING THIS ABSURD AMOUNT PER PERSON, AUDIT REVEALS: “Los Angeles has dedicated $1.2 billion to a new program fighting homelessness, but instead of maximizing the budget’s impact, the city is spending up to $837,000 per unit to house homeless people.”
As the president of the Indian National Congress once said of Gandhi, “It costs a lot of money to keep this man in poverty.”
And that’s part of the problem, as one wag observed, further up the coast. “Despite its spending more money per capita on homelessness than any comparable city, [San Francisco’s] homeless problem is worse than any comparable city’s,” SF Weekly noted a decade ago, stumbling into the Fox Butterfield effect.
THAT SEEMS TO BE THE WAY THE WIND IS BLOWING: Did The New York Times Admit Joe Biden Is Corrupt So Democrats Can Get Rid Of Him? “It is painfully obvious, as was predictable, that Joe Biden’s presidency is a dumpster fire. As demonstrated by the party’s destructive callousness towards children, the elderly, and the poor during their Covid lockdown frenzy, Democrats care about none of these real-world results of their policies. But they do care about polling, and Joe Biden’s is abysmal.”