Archive for 2023
February 12, 2023
EXPERTS ARE BUZZKILL SPECIALISTS: Experts warn of TV tip-over risks ahead of Super Bowl.
DEAL OF THE DAY: USB Wall Charger, Surge Protector, QINLIANF 5 Outlet Extender. #CommissionEarned
NOBODY GOES THERE ANYMORE; IT’S TOO CROWDED: Taliban fighters who moved to Kabul are ‘bored’ and fed up with traffic.
THE BEST SUPER BOWL COMMERCIALS OF ALL TIME:
Super Bowl 57 will be broadcast to the world on Sunday, February 12, offering hours of high-impact sports, and perhaps more importantly, hours of multi-million dollar commercials. It’s been like this for a long time, and often what products are successful during the Super Bowl carries over into what are successful in the real world.
Super Bowl commercials are there in part to attract the non-football-loving crowd, which is why they have to be engaging in the first place. It’s also why we remember so many advertisements, even the ones we weren’t around to witness. Most ads are time capsules for a specific moment in pop culture history.
Flashback to 2002: The Rebel Sell.
What American Beauty illustrates, with extraordinary clarity, is that rebelling against mass society is not the same thing as rebelling against consumer society. Through his rebellion, Lester goes from being right-angle square to dead cool. This is reflected in his consumption choices. Apart from the new car, he develops a taste for very expensive marijuana—$2,000 an ounce, we are told, and very good. “This is all I ever smoke,” his teenaged dealer assures him. Welcome to the club, where admission is restricted to clients with the most discriminating taste. How is this any different from Frasier and Niles at their wine club?
What we need to see is that consumption is not about conformity, it’s about distinction. People consume in order to set themselves apart from others. To show that they are cooler (Nike shoes), better connected (the latest nightclub), better informed (single-malt Scotch), morally superior (Guatemalan handcrafts), or just plain richer (bmws).
The problem is that all of these comparative preferences generate competitive consumption. “Keeping up with the Joneses,” in today’s world, does not always mean buying a tract home in the suburbs. It means buying a loft downtown, eating at the right restaurants, listening to obscure bands, having a pile of Mountain Equipment Co-op gear and vacationing in Thailand. It doesn’t matter how much people spend on these things, what matters is the competitive structure of the consumption. Once too many people get on the bandwagon, it forces the early adopters to get off, in order to preserve their distinction. This is what generates the cycles of obsolescence and waste that we condemn as “consumerism.”
But last week, Virginia Postrel republished a speech from 2012 noting that we need to take shopping seriously: “The good news is that there is a significant group of scholars who do understand that shopping has something to do with freedom. They are feminists. Not all feminist scholars take this view, of course. Plenty subscribe to Marxian or Freudian or status explanations. But nearly all the scholars who write about consumer culture in a way that appreciates its relation to freedom are feminists. What they teach us is that the growth of what is sometimes called the ‘consumer society’ was good for women. Poor girls could become shop clerks instead of servants. They could go shopping themselves and forge careers as buyers and even store detectives. Middle-class ladies could get out of the house into a new and respectable public sphere. They could meet friends for conversation in department-store tea rooms. Magazines supported by ads for cosmetics and fashion could argue in favor of women’s rights and give readers new images of female achievement. Businesses that wanted to sell things to women had to pay attention to what they wanted. That meant goods and services, but it also meant the environments, institutions, and behaviors that surrounded those things. The consumer society made women public and independent in new and powerful ways—not through politics, at least not at first, but through the marketplace.”
OVERPRODUCTION OF ELITES: DEI credentialing ‘explosion’: Dozens of colleges offer new qualifications in diversity.
THAT’S NO ORDINARY PENGUIN! THE BONES, MAN, LOOK AT THE BONES! Fossilized remains of the largest penguin ever discovered in New Zealand.
TOP BIDEN LEGAL ADVISER SAYS ELECTION WAS STOLEN:
Leading Democrats and their supporters in academia, journalism, and entertainment have an exceptionally long track record of peddling stolen-election theories and denying the legitimacy of American elections, as I’ve most recently summarized here and here regarding House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and his contention that the 2016 presidential election was stolen. They’re at it again. Here is Harvard Law professor emeritus Laurence Tribe on Wednesday:
It certainly looks like Putin, with the help of Manifort [sic] and Trump, stole the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton but, more importantly, from the 65.8 million people who voted against the Thief in Chief, Donald Trump, who, btw, won just 62.9 million votes despite Putin’s efforts.
Is Tribe simply some random Twitter crackpot? A Twitter crackpot, yes, but not a random one. He has 1.3 million followers. He wrote what is still treated as the leading constitutional law treatise (disclosure: I worked as one of his army of research assistants on one edition of it). He is still regularly treated as a serious commentator on MSNBC and in other media outlets.
Here are numerous other leading Democrats denying elections:
PRODUCING A NATION OF SITZPINKLERS IS THEIR GOAL: New Hampshire school district bans… urinals?
NICHOLAS WADE: Where Covid Came From.
RON KLAIN AND THE DEMISE OF MODERATE DEMOCRATS:
But the main conclusion to draw from Klain’s time as chief of staff is that his decisions and actions demonstrate the way the Democratic Party establishment has undergone a fundamental shift since the 1980s and 1990s. Someone with Klain’s background might have been expected to despise his party’s radicals and their ideological obsessions with climate change, open borders, and intersectional myths about race. But as chief of staff, he wound up leaving little daylight between the White House and the rhetoric of the congressional “Squad” and other hardcore progressives.
Rather than being the expression of the normalcy and moderation of the Democratic Party that had governed successfully during the Clinton presidency, Biden and Klain’s White House signaled the death of that wing of their party. After BLM and Jan. 6, there was no resisting the “resistance” even if they had wished to do so. Klain’s successor, Jeff Zients, another veteran establishmentarian, is unlikely to think differently. If this was his last government job, Klain’s career may have epitomized the career path of a Democratic insider, but it also demonstrated that the era of Democratic moderates is over. Instead of cooling down political rhetoric, Klain fueled the continuing decline of public discourse into bitter vituperation. Rather than healing the country’s post-Trump and post-pandemic wounds, the Biden administration’s hard-left turn that he helped oversee has made clear that bipartisanship is dead and the era of partisan culture wars is just beginning.
Still though, we’ll always have these show-stopping moments to look back on during President Klain’s time in office:
And from the previous year: White House Christmas message to unvaccinated: You’re looking at a winter of death for yourselves and your families:
From earlier in December of 2021: Biden’s Chief of Staff Can’t Stop Embarrassing Himself On Twitter:
The president’s chief of staff is arguably the most demanding job inside any White House. President Joe Biden’s top staffer, Ron Klain, isn’t making things easier for himself lately with the absurd things he’s posting on Twitter.
Klain is what we can only call a Very Online person. He is constantly tweeting and sharing other people’s posts to his half-million followers in an incessant effort to cheerlead for his boss and the Democratic Party more broadly. While this is the role of any outward-facing political staffer, Klain is taking his shilling so far that he’s now just making embarrassing public statements on the regular.
For example, Klain recently tweeted that “America is back at work” alongside this graph, which shows the opposite.
The Biden staffer boosted the graph hoping to show that the labor force participation rate, the percentage of people working or seeking work, is back to normal after the pandemic. Yet it actually shows that it’s still significantly below pre-pandemic levels, even a year and nine months later. Anyone with eyes can clearly see this.
In actuality, we are 8.2 million jobs below the pre-pandemic trend, according to economist Aaron Sojourner. So much for America being “back at work.”
From August of 2021: White House chief of staff Ron Klain retweets Paul Begala saying Biden’s handling of Afghanistan has been ‘Trumanesque.’
And from July of 2021: The Mark of Klain. “[A]ll in all, things have worked out pretty darn well for Ron Klain. For America? Not so much.”
JAPAN’S WAR ON SPACE JUNK.
LIGHTNING DEAL: Outdoor Ventures Men’s Waterproof & Windproof Fleece Lined Pants. #CommissionEarned
BUT TRUMP HIMSELF ONCE SUPPORTED IT: Trump rips DeSantis for once supporting privatizing Social Security.
WE DO NOT KNEEL: A Letter to My Newborn Son.
You see, son, the world is full of people who mistake passion for extremism, confidence for arrogance and drive for selfishness and ambition. No matter who you are or what you do, you will encounter this over and over again.
It is not their fault. Most people, me included, have been trained to fit in. The very genes we carry have shaped us to fear stepping outside the group. As your grandmother used to say to me when I was a little boy:
“If you spit society in the face, society will wipe it off and carry on. If society spits you in the face, you’ll drown”.
And your grandmother was right — if you want to live a comfortable life this is good advice. Fit in, don’t ask too many questions and keep your head down.
But son, if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that comfort is overrated. You did not come into this world to consume as much food, pleasure and entertainment as you can. A fulfilling life is one of purpose and the meaning of your life is to identify that purpose and pursue it with every fibre of your being.
Most people never get there. They don’t even try. Don’t blame them – no one ever told them that giving up on their dreams was a recipe for misery. As little kids, they were trained to do what they were told, to think how others told them to think and to avoid standing out at all costs.
Read the whole thing.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Why 65 Percent of Fourth Graders Can’t Really Read.
Many parents saw America’s public education system crumble under the weight of the pandemic. Stringent policies—including school closures that went on far too long, and ineffective Zoom school for kindergarteners—had devastating effects that we are only just beginning to understand.
But, as with so many problems during the pandemic, COVID didn’t necessarily cause these structural breakdowns as much as it exposed just how broken the system was to begin with.
How broken? Consider the shocking fact that 65 percent of American fourth-grade kids can barely read.
American Public Media’s Emily Hanford uncovers this sad truth with her podcast, Sold a Story. She investigates the influential education authors who have promoted a bunk idea and a flawed method for teaching reading to American kids. She exposes how educators across the country came to believe in a system that didn’t work, and are now reckoning with the consequences: Children harmed. Tons of money wasted. An education system upended.
Intellectual monocultures are prone to fads and mass hysteria, and resistant to contradictory evidence.
UPDATE: Link was bad before. Fixed now. Sorry!
OUT ON A LIMB: Tyre Nichols’ Death Doesn’t Prove White Supremacy, It Proves A Need To Inflame Fear Of White Supremacy.
CNN analyst Van Jones penned an op-ed arguing “racism” likely “drove” the officers to beat the man. The New York Times attributed a “system” that “fosters racism and violence” against black people to the death.
Struggling author Jemele Hill told a group of young black Vanderbilt students Nichols’ killing demonstrated how the police force is “designed” not to protect black Americans. The Boston Globe cited systemic racism as the cause of the death.
MSNBC, Al Sharpton, the Washington Post, and the increasingly large group of usual suspects echoed the same sentiment: that Tyre Nichols is evidence that the blue turns even black officers into vile white supremacists.
One might wonder what evidence exists to support that narrative. After all, outlets continue to say what happened in Memphis was racially motivated but don’t provide any proof the officers exercised brutality based on race.
That’s because there isn’t any proof. The portrayal of the incident is a diversion, a means to stoke racial hostility.
Tyre Nichols’ death does not demonstrate white supremacy. Rather, Tyre Nichols’ death demonstrates a need to inflame the fear of white supremacy.
That’s because the demand for white supremacy in today’s america vastly exceeds the supply, to coin an Insta-phrase.
AS I’VE SAID, I THINK A MORE ADVERSARIAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN U.S. NEWS AND THE SCHOOLS IT RANKS IS A GOOD THING: With Connecticut And Pittsburgh, 42 Law Schools Are Boycotting The U.S. News Rankings.
February 11, 2023
LIFE AMONG THE STUPID: WUT and LOL: Nikole Hanna-Jones asks about Thomas Sowell’s expertise in slavery and history.
OPEN THREAD: Giddyup.