LOCAL HERO: On the Rocks: The Primadonna Story. I just finished reading the fascinating saga of Joe Costanzo, a mailman turned restaurateur turned prisoner. Joe was a classmate of mine and a basketball star at Central Catholic School in Pittsburgh. Against the advice of his family, he gave up his secure job with the Postal Service and opened an upscale restaurant in a very down-and-out place, McKees Rocks, a blue-collar town outside Pittsburgh that had fallen on hard times with the collapse of the steel industry.
It was a struggle to survive at first, but in the 1990s his Primadonna restaurant became a hot spot thanks to Joe’s family recipes for Italian food, his personality (he’d been the friendliest guy in our high school, greeting everyone by name as he walked down the halls), and his indefatigable marketing efforts. The place got rave reviews from restaurant critics, had two-hour-long lines of customers waiting for a table, and inspired visiting pro athletes and celebrities to make the trek down the Ohio River to sample the wares of Joe and his wife, Donna. Then Joe tried going into politics, spending too much money on a losing campaign for county commissioner. His financial woes led to trouble with the IRS (for tax evasion) and a stint in prison — where Joe again made friends with everyone. The book, written by Joe’s daughter, Maria Costanzo Palmer, and Ruthie Robbins, is an inside look at the restaurant business — and a well-told story of American entrepreneurship.
Voting in the Russian presidential election began this morning and will end Sunday. At that point, Putin’s victory will be announced and he will start his 5th term as president. The vote tally doesn’t really matter. It will be whatever the Kremlin decides it should be. Having killed off his only two real opponents in the past year, Navalny and Prigozhin, he probably feels like he earned it.
The presidential vote in Russia, which began Friday and lasts through Sunday, features the trappings of a horse race but is more of a predetermined, Soviet-style referendum.
President Vladimir V. Putin, 71, will undoubtedly win a fifth term, with none of the three other candidates who are permitted on the ballot presenting a real challenge. The main opposition figure who worked to spoil the vote, Aleksei A. Navalny, a harsh critic of Mr. Putin and the Ukraine war, died in an Arctic prison last month…
Two candidates opposed to the war were disqualified. A veteran politician, Boris Nadezhdin, alarmed the Putin administration when tens of thousands of people across Russia lined up to sign petitions required for him to run. The Kremlin invalidated enough signatures to bar him.
Seen on Twitter-X the other day: “How did people get airplane tickets before the internet? Did you call the airline and they mailed you the tickets physically?” The author’s bio said she was a neuroscientist. Apparently there’s a difference between knowing how the brain works and using it.
Well, miss, lemme tell you. We’d crank up the crystal radio set and see if we could raise anyone down at the aerodrome. “Hello, Hank? You got a seat on the midnight pond-jumper there? Put me down for one.” They’d mail you a key, and you used it to open the plane door. In those days, you know, you could smoke on a plane. In fact it was mandatory. Couldn’t take off unless everyone’d lit up. There were no in-flight movies, but the back of the seat had a pamphlet glued to it, and it described something funny Charlie Chaplin did. For dinner they had a pig on a spit, and they’d roll it down the aisles and carve off a piece.
Okay, I’m kidding. It went like this. You went to the travel agency, which was an office with posters of places you’d never go, and you’d ask —
Ick, seriously, like, talk to people?
Yes. You would tell them where you wished to go, and they would call you up later and give you options. You would write a check, put it in an envelope, affix a stamp — am I going too fast for you here? — and a few days later a ticket would arrive in the mail. Then you would get on the plane and be skyjacked to Cuba. Simpler times, and by gum, we liked it.
You see tweets like the neuroscientist’s all the time from the young and the baffled, the generation who grew up with the internet all around them like a benevolent god who asked nothing of them except watching five seconds of an ad before the video starts.
When you like drove from one state to another state, how did you know where to go??? Were there like signs or things?
Well, you know that word, “maps,” below the icon on your phone that calls up a strange abstraction of lines? We had actual maps. You’d unfold a map, refold it into a rectangle, and then follow a line to the end of the rectangle.
Unlike today, where the vast majority of today’s hit songs are but a few clicks away, the music world of the past would be utterly terrifying to the Gen-Z world:
Let’s start with the background. Economics 101 teaches us that when supply is low and demand is high, then prices will rise. The past few years have offered a perfect storm in this sense.
The pandemic throttled supply chains around the world (as workers isolated and manufacturing slowed), while at the same time governments handed-out stimulus checks (ie, free money) to large swathes of the population.
That was just the start, though. As the world moved out of the pandemic, other shocks have hit global supply chains and, in turn, the guitar industry.
Like most manufacturing in the 21st century, guitar firms are dependent on a complex network of suppliers based all over the world. Even a handmade US instrument needs electrical components, plastics and tone woods – and most of these will come from foreign suppliers.
In a recent conversation, Fender’s Justin Norvell related to GW the issues the firm had faced just procuring tubes for its amp builds at the time.
“During the supply chain [crisis], it would be like the factory could make tubes,” explains Norvell.
“But the glass comes from Germany, and they couldn’t get the glass. And then that goes back up the tree, to [issues sourcing] the silicon that makes the glass. It was really problematic, because there could be one small thing that was preventing us from getting anything.”
Fender’s tube supply is, we’re told, “pretty dialed” at this point, but it’s a neat illustration of the nightmare scenario that faced all manufacturers.
Fast-forward to 2024 and war in Ukraine and the Middle East, crumbling relations with China, increasing piracy on the world’s oceans (as the US pulls back on the world stage) and all manner of other fun-things-that-you-don’t-want-to-read-about-on-Guitar-World – continue to affect global manufacturing/shipping costs.
The guitar industry has some sizeable players – from Fender and Gibson, to PRS, Yamaha and Ibanez – but they are all at the mercy of these global forces.
Of course, the effects of inflation have not been felt equally across society, or the guitar industry.
Talk to an economist (oh OK, don’t) and they’ll tell you that luxury goods sales remain weirdly stable during tough economic periods. This seems counterintuitive at first – why would we keep buying luxuries when we have less spare cash in our pockets?
It is because the wealthy are not so exposed to the effects of inflation. Take a look at the slew of record-breaking prices at the Mark Knopfler guitar auction last month and you’ll see the vintage and high-end guitar sales sector remains in good health.
“In terms of the really huge-dollar, vintage stuff, still trading hands, you have to realise the people who play in that market are really not hit by the price of milk and eggs,” Gibson’s Director of Brand Experience – and vintage guitar expert – Mark Agnesi, told us last year.
“I’m sure Ferrari is not having any trouble with new releases sitting on the lot for a while, and Rolex doesn’t have any problems – you still can’t get one of those. It’s a different market, with different players.”
Fender’s CEO Andy Mooney also made a similar point to us in 2023: “We still get very high demand for Custom Shop guitars,” said the Fender chief. “Generally, in some ways, it’s almost as if the higher the end of the guitar, the more robust the demand is.”
Including Gibson’s latest reissue: 50 hand-signed clones of Jimmy Page’s iconic doubleneck EDS-1275 for $50k each, modeled after the six and 12-string twin-necked electric guitar he used throughout the 1970s to play songs such as “Stairway to Heaven,” “The Song Remains the Same,” and “The Rain Song” on stage:
Plenty of “Blues Lawyers” and “Blues Doctors” will likely snap this run up fast.
IF VEGANISM WERE HEALTHY, VEGANS WOULD LOOK HEALTHIER: Harvard doctor says animal products are essential for mental health – in blow to veganism: ‘The brain needs meat.’ “One study published in 2022 surveyed 14,000 Brazilians between 35 and 74 years old and found those who followed a vegan diet were twice as likely to be depressed — even if they had similar nutrient intakes to carnivores. And a meta-analysis published in 2020 and including 160,000 meat-eaters and 8,500 meat-abstainers also found those who cut meat from their diet were significantly more likely to be depressed.”
That vegans have mental health issues isn’t exactly a shock.
The horrific murder of Laken Riley by a repeated felony offender and illegal alien Jose Ibarra, 26, a Venezuelan citizen, was preventable — had federal immigration laws simply been enforced by the Biden administration.
When called out in his recent State of the Union address, President Joe Biden referenced the deceased Riley. But Biden misidentified her as “Lincoln Riley” –the USC football coach!
Biden only accurately noted that she “was killed by an ‘illegal.'”
True — but almost immediately the left was infuriated over Biden’s accurate use of the supposedly insensitive “illegal” for the murderer Ibarra.
Biden soon apologized for correctly identifying her killer as an illegal alien — but not for misidentifying the victim.
He left the callous impression that he was more upset about offending his open-borders base than about the savage beating of a young 22-year-old American nursing student.
Biden’s woke open-borders agenda supersedes any worry over the subsequent mounting number of Americans who have fallen victim to foreign gangs and criminals. He seems oblivious to the nearly 100,000 Americans who die from fentanyl imported across open borders.
* * * * * * * *
At Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport, a United plane simply taxied off the runway and got stuck in the grass. Another United flight from San Francisco lost a wheel while taking off!
Yet another United flight from Houston to Florida was forced to make an emergency landing after one of its engines caught fire. At about the same time, a United flight bound for San Francisco from Hawaii experienced an engine failure in mid-flight.
Dozens were injured on a Boeing jet during a Chilean airline flight from Australia to New Zealand due to what officials called “a technical event during the flight which caused a strong movement.”
Anytime ideology and dogma trump merit, logic, and safety, the result is predictably scary and dangerous.
America needs to recalibrate its priorities to protect the lives and aspirations of all its citizens, regardless of their race and gender.
If our elites do not stop playing god and mandating their visions of heaven on earth, then they will surely ensure hell for us all.
Danielle Lalonders is an associate narrative designer for Cliffhanger Games, a subsidiary of Electronic Arts, a gigantic video game company with nearly 13,000 global employees taking in over $7 billion in revenue per year.
According to her own website, Lalonders is working on a video game version of Black Panther, the Marvel movie about a specifically black superhero living in an ethno-state.
As it turns out, Lalonders has allegedly made a series of comments about whether or not white people can experience racism and even said she would prefer not to work with white people.
During a 2021 video conference for the Game Devs of Color Expo, a YouTube page dedicated to the celebration of game developers based on the color of their skin, Lalonders commented on the team she worked with for another project.
“But who is your team?” Lalonders read along with a slideshow. “All people of color. We have no white people on our team. I did that because I wanted to create a safe environment,” she explained.
“I know the best way for the environment to be safe is to be around people who are just like me, and I’m not saying that white people in the industry are creating unsafe environments. I’m not saying that. That is not what I’m saying. I am saying that sometimes, it is hard to work with white people because they think that something may [be] okay, but it was really a microaggression, and no one wants to deal with that while you’re trying to make a game that they love.”
I’m sure that Lalonders is creating an environment that’s both separate, and yet entirely equal from other teams at Electronic Arts. Something like that has never been tried in America, I’m sure!
NBC NEWS: “Conservatives are OUT OF LINE suggesting there are Haitian cannibals!!”
NBC NEWS (same article: “There are…um, gangs that are eating people, including The Cannibal Army. But it is unacceptable for those on the right to notice!” https://t.co/bgrBZHitv8pic.twitter.com/0Sr0eWpqjl
— Brad Slager – Scrubbing Down In a Bloodbath (@MartiniShark) March 14, 2024
Amazing — NBC must have just gotten back from Lake Pahoe: “May I take this opportunity of emphasizing that there is no cannibalism in the British Navy, absolutely none. And when I say none, I mean there is a certain amount!”
No word yet the level of cannibalism in “the Port-Au-Prince Of America” just yet, but I’m sure that story is still developing.
[Band of Brothers, The Pacific and Masters of the Air are all] epic productions. Masters of the Air had a $250 million budget. And yet, there’s a single scene from the series finale that I can describe without giving anything away, and that almost any leader in any context should consider.
It comes as one of the main characters begins to believe he might actually survive the war and make it home to his wife and child. Neither he nor his colleagues has any qualms about killing Nazis, but he does worry about what it might have done to his psyche.
“It reminds me of this quote I read in college from Nietzsche,” the character, Major Harry Crosby, says. “He said, ‘Whoever fights monsters should take care not to become a monster himself. Because if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes right back at you.’ ”
While the based-on-real-life characters in Masters of the Air were battling real-life monsters (again: Nazis), I think this quote also applies in less-dire circumstances.
Consider the technology business leader who ultimately winds up a virtual slave to his or her devices.
Or else, the CEO who is committed to shareholder value but gets so focused on the short-term that they neglect things that make a business grow over the long run.
Or, just to show that I can see myself in this: Imagine a writer who values the written word and who then finds himself staying up late crafting an article after watching a TV show.
Honestly, it might turn out to be the most important lesson in leadership. Don’t let the thing you set out to control wind up controlling you.
Look, I’m going to be a critic here for a minute. I think Masters of the Air is the Return of the Jedi of this three-series series; it’s definitely worth watching if you’re into this kind of thing, but it’s not as good as the two before it.
Which is a fair point. As I said previously, too many episodes of Masters of the Air felt like the old 1960s TV series 12 O’Clock High, but with ILM-produced digital special effects instead of grainy black and white newsreel footage. But time may change how the new series is perceived. Band of Brothers and The Pacific were recently added to the Netflix roster, and for those tuning in to those series for the first time, they can now identify many of the actors from the big screen and TV roles they went on to do. Look, there’s Ron Livingston from Office Space! There’s David Schwimmer from Friends! There’s Tom Hardy from The Dark Knight Rises! There’s Rami Malek from Bohemian Rhapsody and Die Another Day! 20 years from now, after the young Masters of the Air cast go on to make their share of hit movies, that may change dramatically how new viewers appreciate the series.
But for those who watched the last episode Thursday night or yesterday, I don’t think I’m giving away a major spoiler to note that one of the operations featured near the end of the episode was the subject of a Mark Felton video from the fall of 2020 on using the Americans’ B-17s as “food bombers.” (Which neatly answers the Nietzsche quote above about “not becoming a monster himself.”) As Felton wrote on his video’s YouTube page, “By 1945, the German-occupied Western Netherlands was starving. Concluding a secret truce with the Nazi leader of the Netherlands, the Allies undertook dangerous behind-the-lines missions to feed 3 million people. This is the story of [Operations] Manna, Chowhound and Faust:”
I was not the only public health scientist speaking out against school closures and other unscientific countermeasures. Scott Atlas, an especially brave voice, used scientific articles and facts to challenge the public health advisors in the Trump White House, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci, National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins, and Covid coordinator Deborah Birx, but to little avail. When 98 of his Stanford faculty colleagues unjustly attacked Atlas in an open letter that did not provide a single example of where he was wrong, I wrote a response in the student-run Stanford Daily to defend him. I ended the letter by pointing out that:
Among experts on infectious disease outbreaks, many of us have long advocated for an age-targeted strategy, and I would be delighted to debate this with any of the 98 signatories. Supporters include Professor Sunetra Gupta at Oxford University, the world’s preeminent infectious disease epidemiologist. Assuming no bias against women scientists of color, I urge Stanford faculty and students to read her thoughts.
None of the 98 signatories accepted my offer to debate. Instead, someone at Stanford sent complaints to my superiors at Harvard, who were not thrilled with me.
I had no inclination to back down. Together with Gupta and Jay Bhattacharya at Stanford, I wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, arguing for age-based focused protection instead of universal lockdowns, with specific suggestions for how better to protect the elderly, while letting children and young adults live close to normal lives.
With the Great Barrington Declaration, the silencing was broken. While it is easy to dismiss individual scientists, it was impossible to ignore three senior infectious-disease epidemiologists from three leading universities. The declaration made clear that no scientific consensus existed for school closures and many other lockdown measures. In response, though, the attacks intensified—and even grew slanderous. Collins, a lab scientist with limited public-health experience who controls most of the nation’s medical research budget, called us “fringe epidemiologists” and asked his colleagues to orchestrate a “devastating published takedown.” Some at Harvard obliged.
A prominent Harvard epidemiologist publicly called the declaration “an extreme fringe view,” equating it with exorcism to expel demons. A member of Harvard’s Center for Health and Human Rights, who had argued for school closures, accused me of “trolling” and having “idiosyncratic politics,” falsely alleging that I was “enticed . . . with Koch money,” “cultivated by right-wing think tanks,” and “won’t debate anyone.” (A concern for those less privileged does not automatically make you right-wing!) Others at Harvard worried about my “scientifically inaccurate” and “potentially dangerous position,” while “grappling with the protections offered by academic freedom.”
Though powerful scientists, politicians, and the media vigorously denounced it, the Great Barrington Declaration gathered almost a million signatures, including tens of thousands from scientists and health-care professionals. We were less alone than we had thought.
Even from Harvard, I received more positive than negative feedback. Among many others, support came from a former chair of the Department of Epidemiology—a former dean, a top surgeon, and an autism expert, who saw firsthand the devastating collateral damage that lockdowns inflicted on her patients. While some of the support I received was public, most was behind the scenes from faculty unwilling to speak publicly.
The US has held secret talks with Iran this year in a bid to convince Tehran to use its influence over Yemen’s Houthi movement to end attacks on ships in the Red Sea, according to US and Iranian officials.
The indirect negotiations, during which Washington also raised concerns about Iran’s expanding nuclear programme, took place in Oman in January and were the first between the foes in 10 months, the officials said.
The US delegation was led by the White House’s Middle East adviser Brett McGurk and its Iran envoy Abram Paley. Iranian deputy foreign minister Ali Bagheri Kani, who is also Tehran’s top nuclear negotiator, represented the Islamic republic.
Omani officials shuttled between the Iranian and American representatives so they did not speak directly, the officials said.
The talks underline how the Biden administration is using diplomatic channels with its foe, alongside military deterrents, in a bid to de-escalate a wave of regional hostilities involving Iranian-backed militant groups that was triggered by the Israel-Hamas war.
LOSS OF TRUST: People Aren’t Buying the Boeing Whistleblower ‘Suicide.’ “It’s been almost a month since Boeing whistleblower John Barnett was found dead in a car outside of his hotel in Charlotte, South Carolina. He died of a single gunshot wound to the head and was found with a pistol in his hand. Authorities tentatively attributed the death to suicide. But friends and family members, along with some investigators are raising doubts about that explanation. Barnett had been in the midst of testifying as part of a lawsuit against Boeing over safety shortcomings at their production facilities. A close friend recounted a disturbing conversation earlier this year when he said that he could potentially wind up dead because of his whistleblowing activities and that if anything happened to him it would not be suicide.”
After Jeffrey Epstein, people are deeply suspicious.
The city of Toronto has a car theft problem, and it doesn’t sound like police have much of a clue as to how to combat it. In a recent safety meeting, one officer even gave advice that basically boiled down to: If thieves come knocking to steal your car, just let ’em have it.
As reported by blogTO, Toronto Police Service Constable Marco Ricciardi said, “To prevent the possibility of being attacked in your home, leave your [key] fobs at your front door because they’re breaking into your home to steal your car. They don’t want anything else.”
On the one hand, I totally understand the very rational, self-preserving stance of not risking life or injury over what is, at the end of the day, an insured, inanimate object. It is, however, the sort of advice you’d expect from a well-meaning parent or spouse. Hearing it come out of the mouths of the very people whose taxpayer-funded, gun-toting job it is to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the first place, however, is arguably less OK and frankly kind of crazy.
Outkick the Coverage’s Joe Kinsey asks the question we’re all thinking reading the above: “Can’t you just shoot home invaders in Canada to end the threat?”
Hahahahahaha. Let’s go back to 2023 and the case of Ali Mian, a 22-year-old who watched a scumbag break into his home and attack his mother. Mian shot one of the lowlifes.
The Canadian government arrested Mian on a second-degree murder charge that was eventually dropped by the government, but not before the man had to deal with the fiancial and emotion toll from such a case.
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