I DUNNO, I’VE NEVER FELT ANXIOUS AFTER A PLATE OF RIBS: Eating a High-Fat Diet May Increase Your Anxiety, Study Warns.
Archive for 2024
June 26, 2024
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Welcome to “S*x with the Universe.”
READER BOOK PLUG: From my former student turned Naval Intelligence officer and naval historian, Nathan Canestaro, The Mighty Moo: The USS Cowpens and Her Epic World War II Journey from Jinx Ship to the Navy’s First Carrier into Tokyo Bay.
W. JOSEPH CAMPBELL: What people say today about the first televised presidential debate, between Nixon and JFK, doesn’t match first reactions in 1960.
What the public is often told nowadays about that first-of-its-kind debate, which took place without an audience in a television studio in Chicago, does not quite square with reactions and perceptions that circulated at the time. As the debate’s aftermath made clear, first assessments can be fleeting and prone to dramatic revision.
I examined scores of newspaper articles, editorials and commentaries written in the debate’s immediate aftermath in researching a chapter for “Getting It Wrong,” my 2017 book about media-driven myths. There was, I found, no unanimity among newspaper columnists and editorial writers about Nixon’s appearance. Not all of them thought Nixon’s performance was dreadful or that Kennedy was necessarily all that appealing.
The Washington Post, for example, declared in an editorial two days after the debate: “Of the two performances Mr. Nixon’s was probably the smoother. He is an accomplished debater with a professional polish, and he managed to convey a slightly patronizing air of a master instructing a pupil.”
The debate moderator, Howard K. Smith of ABC News, later was quoted as saying he thought “Nixon was marginally better” than Kennedy.
Flashback to Campbell in 2017: No, ‘Politico’ — Viewer-listener disagreement is a myth of JFK-Nixon debate.
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: I Was Content With Monogamy. I Shouldn’t Have Been.
IT’S COME TO THIS: Hawk Tuah girl ‘in talks with Hollywood talent agency UTA after going viral with crude sex tips.’
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Crude, not necessarily wrong:
AS ALWAYS, ESCHEW COCKINESS: Nate Silver’s First Presidential Election Forecast Is Out, and Democrats Are Losing Their Minds.
PAULA BOLYARD: The Most Important Supreme Court Case You’ve Probably Never Heard Of. “As I write this, we await the Supreme Court’s ruling on the so-called Chevron deference (or doctrine). It concerns the power of federal agencies to interpret laws and promulgate them into regulations that affect nearly every American in one way or another. It’s not sexy, but it could end up being the most significant case the court will rule on this year—maybe in any year.”
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: Matt Yglesias on ‘Elite Misinformation.’
The last section of his piece has a subhead that reads “Lying to people is bad.”* I agree but I think at this point Yglesias underestimates what capable liars some people are. He writes, “the political system is too large…to operate on a conspiratorial basis.” Maybe that’s true on a longer time scale but I’ve personally seen the left try to operate on a conspiratorial basis too many times to shrug off the possibility that it can work sometimes.
I won’t rehash the old days at great length but Democrats did their very best to trick Americans into accepting a version of Obamacare that was intended to lead inevitably to a single-payer program that progressives really wanted. Within their own ranks they were explicit that this was their goal, but to Americans in general they just lied. There was a genuine conspiracy to mislead people. Instead of telling the truth they went with “if you like your plan, you can keep it.”
And frankly, you could look at the more recent claims about Donald Trump and Russia. The Steele Dossier was given credibility by a lot of reporters who later walked away from it when it became clear it was mostly a dumpster fire of misinformation funded by the Hillary campaign as an October surprise. But for at least two years a lot of people were leaning hard on it.
* Like I said, past performance is definitely no guarantee of future results: Liberal blogger Matt Yglesias advocates lying on Twitter.
But what set off a flurry of Tweets today – and Yglesias’s advocacy of lying – was a charge by Yglesias via Twitter that Washington Times reporter Eli Lake has a “deserved reputation for dishonesty.” Hemingway, Lake and others confronted Yglesias on Twitter about the charge, pointing out that Yglesias himself had actually advocated dishonesty.
Then, Yglesias dug in, saying lying was a necessary part of politics.
Yglesias’s Twitter opponents also charged he does not take criticism well.
“When [Yglesias] gets frustrated because he can’t counter an argument, he calls people ‘dishonest’,” Lake said, also calling him “a child.”
In concluding his interview with The Daily Caller, Yglesias said “go f**k yourself” and hung up the phone.
Good times, good times:
DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: Politics Over Science: Biden Administration Pushed to Remove Age Limits for Gender Surgery.
JAMES PIERESON: The Nobel Laureates Strike Out. In a letter released just in time for the presidential debate, a group of prize-winning economists speak up for President Biden’s economic policies—the same policies these same economists predicted would ease inflation and spur growth when they endorsed Biden’s Build Back Better agenda in 2021.
How did it all work out? The expert economists were badly mistaken on inflation. They said that Biden’s spending packages would “ease inflationary pressures,” but everyone understands today that those same policies stoked inflation. When they signed their 2021 letter, the consumer price index stood at 273; since then, it has surged by at least 15 percent, to its recent level of 313. This is called “being wrong.”
Interest rates have also surged since then, much to the detriment of prospective homebuyers and those planning large expenditures for autos, home appliances, and school and college tuitions. The interest rate on 30-year mortgages has more than doubled since the 2021 letter, from 2.8 percent to above 7 percent today. The prime lending rate, used by banks for most loans, swelled from 3.2 percent in 2021 to 8.5 percent today. The economists would do well to ponder their performance as forecasters.
We have no evidence to suggest that Biden’s spending packages promoted economic growth. Real GDP surged in 2021 to 5.8 percent, mostly a bounce-back from pandemic era lockdowns, but it has declined and levelled off since then, to 1.9 percent in 2022 and 2.5 percent in 2023. In a recent forecast, the Conference Board projects that growth in 2024 is likely to slow to less than 1 percent (year over year). Contrary to what our Nobel laurates would have us believe, it is more likely that Biden’s policies have caused inflation and rising interest rates that have retarded economic growth.
Read the whole thing.
A VERY PERSONAL REQUEST FROM BEARING ARMS’ CAM EDWARDS:
Update on Miss E and a request for your help in giving her something to smile about.
It's been eight years since the docs first discovered a mass in her lungs, and she's been fighting like hell ever since. Her last scans showed the tumors are growing once again, so next week…
— Cam Edwards (@CamEdwards) June 26, 2024
I voted.
WILL PRO-PALESTINIAN MOB DISRUPT THE DEBATE? Richard Pollock, the former riot trainer of the 60s and 70s radicals says he won’t be surprised if the radical leftist activists posing as Pro-Palestinian demonstrators do something to disrupt Thursday night’s Grudge Match of the Geriatric Presidents.
I HAD BEEN ASSURED THAT INFLATION WAS OVER ALREADY: Good Luck Trying to Rent an Apartment in Biden’s Economy.
WITH GOOD REASON: Survey: Most People Are Uncomfortable With Sharing Their Driving Data.
Related: Don’t Track Me, Bro.
BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: McDonald’s points to soft customer demand for plant-based food options.
Beyond Meat (NASDAQ:BYND) traded lower on Wednesday after McDonald’s (NYSE:MCD) U.S. President Joe Erlinger highlighted at a business forum that the restaurant chain’s plant-based burger tests failed in the San Francisco and Dallas markets.
Erlinger said customers simply were not showing strong demand for plant-based options on the company’s menu at participating locations. Expectations have already been dialed back for Beyond Meat (BYND) and Impossible Foods (IMPF) due to similar feedback from other restaurant companies.
If McDonald’s can’t sell fake meat in San Francisco, the fad might finally be ending.
ACTUALLY, YOU WILL: You’ll Never Believe Who Biden Is Using Now to Buy Votes in November.
READER FAVORITE: LEGO Creator Expert NASA Apollo 11 Lunar Lander. #CommissionEarned
SOME PARTS OF AMERICA STILL WORK:
Two Falcon Heavy side cores landing after NASA's GOES-U launch. pic.twitter.com/AGyvted7Ye
— Star✦Fleet Tours (@StarFleetTours) June 25, 2024
Watching these landings never gets old — these twin landings, doubly so.
ATHENA THORNE HAS THE RECEIPTS: All Three of Trump’s Debate Opponents Have Compared Him to Hitler
PRETTY WEIRD HOW MUCH TIME “LAW” ENFORCEMENT SPENDS ENFORCING NON-LAWS. Not just the FBI, either – Vermont State Police are paying this FIRE client $175,000 for violating his First Amendment rights, not just over the stupidest thing imaginable but in the stupidest way imaginable. (Video at link.)
PHRMA FUNDS TRANSGENDERISM: Tom Jones’ American Accountability Foundation (AAF) documents three-quarters of a million dollars in support from Big Drug for the movement pushing kids and adults to go under the knife to “correct” their gender. That and more in my latest PJMedia column.