Archive for 2023

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF SHERE HITE. This review of a new documentary concludes: “It’s a shame the doc hedges towards hagiography in the last act, with almost no space given over to an assessment of what might have been problematic about her research — questions that could be raised without diluting the significance of the work overall.” That seems a bit coy.

I thought I remembered a piece in The New Republic that raised questions about the genuineness of her research, and even of her research assistant, but searching the site brought up nothing. Anyone else remember that?

UPDATE: I think this is what I remembered, although I thought there was a research assistant involved but it’s been a while: Hite Made Up Person She Claimed Worked for Her. Thanks to Steven Fletcher in the comments.

MARK JUDGE: The Night Also Belongs to the Lord.

The left is the deadly enemy of joy. This is why Adam Kinzinger recently made fun of Lauren Boebert for dancing. You can’t attain Utopia if people are dancing and skateboarding and gardening and racing mini-bikes and having keg parties; it’s much more important to police dance clubs and censor jokes.

In his book Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Tim Mohr explores how the postwar German Stasi harassed, monitored, and beat punk rockers. As I once noted in The Stream, it’s telling how many times the word “fun” is used by the anti-Stasi punks to explain what they were doing. Between 1981 and 1985 one of the most popular bands behind the Iron Curtain was Wutanfall (“Tantrum”), a Leipzig six-piece who, Mohr writes, “represented a loose but dedicated opposition to the state.”

Read the whole thing.

RIOT SEASON SEEMS TO ARRIVE EARLIER AND EARLIER EACH YEAR: Atlanta riots erupt downtown amid ‘Cop City’ backlash.

Rioters in Atlanta set off fireworks and threw rocks at the Atlanta Police Foundation Saturday evening, according FOX 5 Atlanta.

The incident comes after an activist, Manuel Esteban Paez Teran, 26, was killed by police after allegedly refusing demands by authorities on Wednesday and allegedly fired a gun at state troopers at the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center.

“An individual, without warning, shot a Georgia State Patrol trooper,” Georgia Bureau of Investigations Michael Register told reporters earlier this week. “Other law enforcement personnel returned fire in self-defense and evacuated the trooper to a safe area. The individual who fired upon law enforcement and shot the trooper was killed in the exchange of gunfire.”

Teran was an activist working against the development of the City of Atlanta’s Public Safety Training Center, and his fellow activists vowed to protest against the facility and police after his death.

The protest began peacefully on Saturday before spiraling into chaos, according to FOX 5.

And it continued peacefully, according to a local reporter interviewed by — who else — CNN:

So according to CNN, the riot was mostly peaceful, but as the visuals playing alongside the reporter highlight, it did get more than a little fiery, to paraphrase this legendary moment from 2020:

UPDATE: CNN guest who claimed Antifa riots aren’t violent promotes GoFundMe of activist who shot state trooper.

WHEN THE HEADLINE DOESN’T MATCH THE ARTICLE: Harley-Davidson Will Soon Be All-Electric, CEO Says.

[Jochen] Zeitz’s pronouncement seems guaranteed to make a not-insignificant portion of the manufacturer’s customer base cringe. For many enthusiasts, the thing that really sets a Harley apart from other motorcycles—American-made or otherwise—is a thunderously loud internal combustion engine. But the company knows that no matter how important those large-displacement mills might be change is on the horizon.

Harley purists can take solace in the fact that the internal combustion engine seems safe for the immediate future. The brand may have been one of the first major motorcycle companies to release an all-electric model, but it plans to ease its way into electrification. The kind of evolution that Zeitz envisions for the company and its motorcycles will take time.

“It takes decades, right?” he said to the website. “But you have to also think in decades rather than just thinking about what year and the short-termism that everyone is exposed to as a public company. We have to think about the transition, and preparing for that transition is why LiveWire was born.”

Will the big electric choppers at least have a Jetsons-style bleebling sound as they zoom past?

I’M GOLDEN, THEN: Losing Focus May Actually Boost Learning, Study Finds. This is actually consistent with my experience, though: “Losing focus for a brief moment might actually help boost learning by giving our brains a quick reprieve from the task at hand.”

REPORT FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Murder rates already soaring in six cities. “Jacksonville, New Orleans, Minneapolis, the Las Vegas area, Washington, D.C. and Nashville all had more homicides or murders to start 2023 than during the same time last year.”

And last year wasn’t great. But wait, there’s a solution: “Experts advocated for reducing violent crime through strategic investments in community resources.”

Or, you know, put the violent criminals in jail and keep them there. Just spitballing here.