EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: The first case of a ‘highly contagious’ ringworm infection spread through sex has arrived in the US, researchers say.
Archive for 2024
June 8, 2024
READER FAVORITE: HexClad Hybrid Nonstick Frying Pan, 12-Inch. #CommissionEarned
FIRST THE MURDER HORNET LETDOWN, NOW THIS DISAPPOINTMENT: No, ‘flying’ venomous spiders are not coming for you this summer.
SOMEBODY’S GOT A LOT OF ROGER WATERS’ ALBUMS ON HER PLAYLIST: Pelosi “Sad” That Netanyahu Was Invited to Speak. “She added that the invitation would absolutely not have been made if she were still the Speaker. So we at least know where she stands on the matter.”
CHANGE: U.S., Germany double down on space exploration. “Future collaborations include gravity studies, information sharing on Earth-surface changes and national threat assessments regarding possible hostile uses of space.”
GREAT MOMENTS IN PRIORITIES: Chicago’s progressive mayor Brandon Johnson spent $30,000 on MAKEUP during his first year in office.
THAT’S DISAPPOINTINGLY LOW: Half of people would reveal STD to new sex partner.
SPRINGTIME FOR NETFLIX: Netflix’s new WWII series is New York Times* approved: Hitler and the Nazis Review: Building a Case for Alarm. Joe Berlinger’s six-part documentary for Netflix asks whether we should see our future in Germany’s past.
Hitler’s project: “Making Germany great again.” The Nazis’ characterization of criticism from the media: “Fake news.” Hitler’s mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden: “It’s sort of like Hitler’s Mar-a-Lago, if you will.”
Donald Trump’s name is not mentioned in the six episodes of “Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial,” a new historical documentary series on Netflix. But it dances just beneath the surface, and occasionally, as in the examples above, the production’s cadre of scholars, popular historians and biographers can barely stop themselves from giving the game away.
As the conclusion of this series of quotes on the Weimar Republic from early in the series’ second of six episodes demonstrates:
BENJAMIN CARTER HETT, Author, The Death of Democracy:
Hitler comes out of prison into a Germany which is really politically much less favorable terrain for him than it had been in the crisis year of 1923. Hitler was really a crisis politician; he needed a crisis to be able to get oxygen. By late 1924, when he comes out, things have stabilized: The economy is doing better. The political system is sort of settling down.
ANNE BERG, Professor, University of Pennsylvania:
Between 1924 and 1929, this period is kind of often described as the golden age of the Weimar Republic. The good life slips into view, even if it isn’t quite reachable for the majority of people.
CHRISTIAN GOESCHEL, Author, Mussolini and Hitler:
The Weimar Republic was a progressive liberal democracy.
BERG:
We have relative political stability. We also have a thriving cultural sphere; filmmakers, [and] cabaret.
LISA PINE, Author, Hitler’s ‘National Community:’
We think about abstract and expressionist artists, the Bauhaus architectural movement. Germany was becoming more accepted in the international arena, so she wasn’t a pariah anymore. And so there’s this kind of quite liberating and modernizing aspect to the 1920s. Women were able to vote for the first time.
TIFFANY N. FLORVIL, Professor, University of New Mexico:
There were sex reform movements with individuals like Magnus Hirschfeld, who did studies about homosexuality and was conducting some of the first transgender surgeries in the Weimar Republic. And so you see all of this dynamism emerging. But on the other hand, the Nazi Party, Hitler in particular, recognizes that there are so many German citizens that are distrustful of this fledgling democracy that is supposed to be this new beacon of hope, but it rather is a beacon of disillusionment for many.
HETT:
Outside of Berlin, large numbers of Germans are living in small communities, rural communities where the artistic experimentation, the innovation, the sexual experimentation of Weimar Berlin is utterly foreign to them. And indeed, they are somewhat hostile to it.
BERG:
It’s a group of people who feel shunned. So, if we want to make a contemporary analogy, we can see the sort of forgotten people in America, there is a sense that the system has dealt them a bad hand, and Hitler kind of taps into a fundamental disillusionment with the Weimar Republic. And this is the concept that he will return to repeatedly, even after he is in power.
Hey, if we’re going to go full Godwin, what about these recent headlines?
- Dem Congressional Candidate Wants Nazi-esque ‘Reeducation Camps’ for MAGA Supporters.
- Look On Biden’s Face After Journo Asks About Trump Being A ‘Political Prisoner’ Is Chilling (Watch).
- Biden Spreads Misinformation About Trump Calling for a ‘Unified Reich.’
- Did Biden’s Love for Hamas Just Lose Him the Jewish Vote?
- Former Biden DOJ Official Prosecuting Trump Was on DNC Payroll.
- Biden’s favorite historian says images of Trump on trial are ‘reassuring.’
- USC Jewish center vandalized, glass door smashed: video.
- Maniac screams ‘I’m gonna kill all the Jews’ as he tries to run down students outside NYC Jewish school in antisemitic hate attack.
- N.J. mayor opposed hiring Jews, warned of ‘guys in big hats and curls’ in secretly recorded meeting, suit claims.
- Rewarding Fascism: “So now we know what it takes to become a state: the murder of Jews. Rape, kill and kidnap Jews and seven months later, the leaders of Ireland, Spain and Norway will recognise your statehood. That’s the lesson of today’s coordinated spectacle of virtue-signalling in Dublin, Madrid and Oslo: pogroms work. The butchery of civilians gets results. Fascism has its rewards. This is ‘diplomacy’ at its most dangerous.”
Or as Tom Wolfe has written:
The Great Depression of the 1930s gave our version of this new breed, the intellectual, plenty of material to get wholesomely indignant about. For a change, America did look dreadful. But even then things weren’t as blissfully vile as they were in Europe, the birthplace of the intellectual. Europe, after all, now had the Depression plus fascism. The solution was what became the specialty of our colonial intellectuals: the adjectival catch-up. Europe had real fascism? Well, we had “social fascism.” And what was that? That was the name Left intellectuals gave to Roosevelt’s New Deal. Roosevelt’s “reforms” merely masked the fascism whose dark night would soon descend upon America.
“Fascism” was, in fact, a Marxist coinage. Marxists borrowed the name of Mussolini’s Italian party, the Fascisti, and applied it to Hitler’s Nazis, adroitly papering over the fact that the Nazis, like Marxism’s standard-bearers, the Soviet Communists, were revolutionary socialists. In fact, “Nazi” was (most annoyingly) shorthand for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. European Marxists successfully put over the idea that Nazism was the brutal, decadent last gasp of “capitalism.”
* If only the New York Times had gotten Hitler right when he was actually in power. Or as Ann Althouse wrote in October: In 1922, The New York Times published its first article about Adolf Hitler. The reporter, Cyril Brown, was aware of his subject’s anti-Jewish animus but he wasn’t buying it.
‘Several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded,’ Brown wrote, ‘and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers.’ Two years later, the Times published another news item on the future architect of the Holocaust: ‘Hitler Tamed by Prison.’ The Austrian activist, the piece said, ‘looked a much sadder and wiser man,’ and ‘his behavior during his imprisonment convinced the authorities that [he] was no longer to be feared.’
If only the Gray Lady was still heeding that alarm. Also from October: Why has the New York Times hired a Hitler sympathizer?
Adolf Hitler is back in vogue at the New York Times. I never thought I’d live to see the day.
Until now, the very nice liberals who run the newspaper were probably quite relieved that the world had mostly forgotten about that time in the 1930s, when it had a Nazi-loving Berlin bureau chief called Guido Enderis. Among his many failings, Enderis wrote a puff piece about chief Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, calling him ‘an outstanding go-getter’. But the New York Times leadership kept him on, despite complaints from colleagues, because they considered his high-ranking sources in the Nazi Party too good to lose.
Of course, this is not to say the New York Times editors and the family that owns it are now or ever have been Nazi supporters. Rather, it shows that despite all the protestations of moral virtue and speaking truth to power – and other tired, self-aggrandising journalistic clichés – at its heart, the Gray Lady answers only to its own agenda, which has consistently been focussed on keeping proximity to power.
Today, keeping proximity to power means serving the new master in elite circles: radical woke ideology. The fact that this ideology is a petri dish for anti-Semitism, as we have seen with the outrageous support across the West for the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October, does not seem to matter.
This is why the news this week that the New York Times has rehired a Palestinian freelancer who has praised Hitler on social media was shocking but not surprising. In fact, anyone who is aware of what has been happening to American journalism will know that this is the inevitable, even logical, outcome of the thorough radicalisation of the once respected newspaper, and of the industry as a whole.
In the worldview the New York Times has adopted, no white person, Jews very much included, can ever be anything other than an oppressor or an ‘ally’. And no brown or black person can ever be anything other than a victim or a heroic freedom fighter. That’s it. No other details matter.
That the grown-ups who work at the world’s most famous newspaper are willing to adopt such a childish moral framework is startling, I grant you. But they have. And this Hitler episode is just the latest evidence in a long trail.
Exit quote: “Someone should call James Bennet and Donald McNeil Jr to ask how they feel about Mr [Soliman] Hijjy’s continued work for the paper.”
And if only the Gray Lady had gotten Stalin right when he was concurrently in power: How The New York Times Helped Hide Stalin’s Mass Murders in Ukraine.
Or when he had died in 1953: Stalin Rose From Czarist Oppression to Transform Russia Into Mighty Socialist State.
And don’t get them started about all of the sex in the swinging Soviet Union.
GET IN SHAPE: COOFANDY Men’s 2 Pack Gym Workout Shorts. #CommissionEarned
MARK JUDGE: I Can’t Let Go of My UPS Box.
The mailbox saved my life in 2018. I was swept up in a political hit when a high school friend of mine was nominated to the Supreme Court. Extortionists, psychotics, the media and Congress called for my head. The Washington Post slimed me, even if they couldn’t find me. My only known address, wrote Marc Fisher, was “a UPS box in Georgetown.” Fisher also noted that I was “a rebel” who was “outspoken, profane, sometimes boorish, but also surpassingly loyal to his friends.” Up your ass, Marc.
During the height of the fall 2018 insanity I drove by to pick up my mail. Out front was a reporter with a camera. She was casually pacing up and down the sidewalk, waiting. Waiting for me. I slowly parked in front of the store and just watched her. I was her prey, and just feet away. I silently drove away. It was several weeks before I picked up my mail. There was a stack of it, and I didn’t know what I would find—death threats? I was relieved to see it was mostly normal stuff. It lifted my soul to see several issues of The New Criterion and DownBeat. There was also a marriage proposal. Civilization might survive after all.
Read the whole thing.
AND THEY THOUGHT ELON WAS RETRO WITH STAINLESS STEEL SPACESHIPS: Wooden Satellites.
PULITZER INCOMING: Spokane Reporter OUTRAGED That Kids Are Riding Their Scooters on the Street.
Adam, that’s called a street. If you are concerned with skid marks, don’t paint your religious symbols on it. https://t.co/CVVzI2natO
— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) June 7, 2024
Still though, think of the possibilities!
🚨BREAKING: American citizens paint 1,954-mile long Pride flag along the U.S./Mexico border so the government will finally arrest those walking over it. pic.twitter.com/qrsMu4ISXl
— U.S. Ministry of Truth (@USMiniTru) June 7, 2024
STARSHIP VS. STARLINER: Jim Meigs: Can Boeing Catch Up with SpaceX? The aerospace giant’s long-delayed Starliner finally flies astronauts, while Elon Musk’s enterprise pushes into the next frontier. The new space race is on. “The mission Starliner is finally conducting—carrying astronauts to the ISS—is one that Elon Musk’s SpaceX has been doing routinely since 2020. Now, Musk’s team is working on a much bigger breakthrough in space travel.”
Related thoughts here. Personally, I’d be happy to see SpaceX face real competition. I think even Elon might feel that way. But at present if it comes from anyone it’s probably going to be from the Chinese.
NAYIB BUKELE, PHILOSOPHER KING? “He is, without a doubt, the most popular democratically elected leader in the world. . . . In his first five years as president, Bukele has transformed El Salvador. The country that was once the most dangerous in the world, overrun by criminal gangs such as MS-13, now has among the lowest murder rates in the world. The turnaround has been so profound that Salvadorans who left the country to live abroad now want to return home.”
The plane, a vintage Air Force T-34 Mentor owned by Anders, went down into the waters off the San Juan Islands, according to flight data and FAA records obtained by FOX 13 Seattle.
* * * * * * * *
Anders snapped the iconic 1968 “Earthrise” photo of the Earth in December 1968 while on Apollo 8, the first lunar orbit mission.
The Air Force veteran spent 26 years working for the government, including as the executive secretary for the National Aeronautics and Space Council and as the lead commissioner for all nuclear and non-nuclear power for the five-member Atomic Energy Commission.
From me last year, First to the Moon: Documentary Commemorates Apollo 8, First Flight to Leave Earth Orbit. “As Charles Murry and Catherine Bly Cox wrote in their brilliant 1989 book Apollo, it can be argued that [Apollo 8] was an even more historic mission than [Apollo 11,] the first manned moon landing: ’Reflecting on it years later, Mike Collins wondered whether the most historic moment in the Apollo Program might have occurred not on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men on the moon, but at 9:41 A.M. C.S.T., December 21, 1968. On that morning, Collins was CapCom. If it hadn’t been for a bone spur requiring surgery the preceding July, Collins would have been up there himself—he had been a crew member on Apollo 8 until the surgery had made him lose too much training time. Collins had been reassigned to a later mission, Apollo 11.'”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Gen Z goes to work instead of college – ‘you can make really good money.’
If only there had been some sort of warning.
PAUL MIRENGOFF: Washington Post’s new chief to staff: “Your audience has halved; people are not reading your stuff.”
More than half a century ago, ABC Sports assigned Howard Cosell, the Stephen A. Smith of his day, to be part of the broadcast team for its brand-new Monday Night Football program. A family friend and football fanatic thought Cosell was ruining the broadcasts and complained to ABC. The response? We’re inundated with complaints. Cosell will be gone soon.
But ABC kept Cosell and Monday Night Football flourished. So began the movement to color commentators who make the games about themselves. Bill Walton was the reductio ad absurdum of that unfortunate development.
This episode in media history came to mind when I read that the Washington Post’s new CEO and publisher, William Lewis, told Post staffers that the paper needs a fast turnaround because it’s losing huge amounts of money ($77 million in the past year) and has lost half of its audience.
There are similarities between the two episodes. In both cases, a media mainstay has bucked the desire of a big chunk of its audience — ABC by imposing a blowhard on football fans; the Post by eschewing objective journalism and becoming a hyper-partisan left-liberal organ. In both cases, the media mainstay didn’t yield to consumer pressure. ABC stuck with Cosell. The Post has persisted with its badly slanted journalism.
But there’s also a big difference. ABC got away with, and indeed prospered from, its decision to stick with Cosell. The Post, as its CEO admits, is suffering.
Sports fans, it seems, are willing to tolerate annoying announcers in order to watch the games they love. News consumers have no incentive to tolerate organs that openly favor ideologies they don’t like.
It’s true, of course, that there are important reasons for the Post’s woes in addition to its decision to discard objectivity in reporting. The media landscape has changed to the detriment of all newspapers.
But when a large bloc of longtime readers who don’t share the Post’s biases becomes too disgusted with a paper to keep reading it, that’s a big problem for the paper.
Read the whole thing, though I’m not sure if Howard Cosell is the most appropriate angle to frame the Post’s myriad woes. In the last decade of mass media, when there still only three commercial television networks, Roone Arledge’s decision to have three announcers in the booth, one of them being Cosell, helped to make Monday Night Football a ratings powerhouse for ABC, the first step in turning that network from a perennial third-place loser into, beginning in 1976, the number one watched channel in America for about the next five years.
Cosell became so big that in 1975, the network had the staggeringly ill-advised idea to build a weekend variety show around him, which is why for its first couple of seasons, what we now call Saturday Night Live was simply “NBC’s Saturday Night.” The classic “Not Ready for Primetime Players” tag about the show’s original cast was invented by original-SNL writer Herb Sargent to lampoon Cosell’s troupe being dubbed the “Primetime Players.”
Cosell was also smart enough to parody himself and ride the gravy train. He’d complain bitterly about “the jockocracy” of athletes turned sportscasters whom he believed lacked his own skills. And then he’d eagerly host every ridiculous Battle of the Network Stars episode that ABC wanted to air. Given how wokeness kills comedy, it’s difficult to imagine someone having the same mercurial talent that Cosell had – at least before it all came crashing down for him, and ABC sentenced him to television Siberia for his last years in a variety of backwater shows.
Because there are now so many sports-themed TV channels and Websites, it’s likely impossible for someone to become as dominant a figure in the media as Cosell was in the 1970s — though I’m sure every sportswriter at the Post thinks he’ll be the next celebrity sports announcer.
But Mirengoff is likely right that “even if Trump loses, the Post won’t reform. Its hyper-partisan reporters will continue on their current path,” based on this article at the Wrap: Washington Post Publisher Pitches His ‘Leadership’ and ‘Humility,’ Denies Pressuring Editor to Drop Story.
The Washington Post’s new publisher, Will Lewis, sent a conciliatory memo to staff Friday (shared with TheWrap) after Lewis sparked deep concerns from both inside and outside his newsroom this week with announcements of leadership changes and a restructuring of the newsroom. The Post also issued a statement disputing some of the coverage from other outlets it’s received this week.
The statement also defends Lewis from criticism of his journalistic integrity, noting, “As a highly experienced Publisher, and an ex Editor and Editor-in-Chief, William is very clear about the lines that should not be crossed and his track record attests to that.”
Whether that is the case will likely remain in dispute following NPR reporting this week how Lewis offered its media reporter David Folkenflik an exclusive interview in order to spike a story about Lewis’ involvement in the United Kingdom’s phone hacking scandal.
“In some quieter moments this week, I have been reflecting on leadership styles, trust and humility,” Lewis wrote in his own statement, before going on to write about broad ideals including leadership, authenticity and integrity.
He shared two emails he’d received from colleagues this week, with one slightly critical but kindly supportive, while the other expressed complete support despite the “disenchantment” of others.
The executive then got to the point, writing, “So, time for some humility from me. I need to improve how well I listen and how well I communicate so that we all agree more clearly where urgent improvements are needed and why.”
I hope this is a brilliant case of misdirection on Lewis’s part. Because otherwise, this sounds like more of the same therapeutic language that doomed Dean Baquet and other editors dealing with their crybully staffs in 2020.
Further thoughts on the collapse of the Post, its efforts to rebuild, how wokeness guarantees a boring newspaper, and the role of the MSM as the Democrats’ palace guard at the Commentary podcast from John Podhoretz, Eli Lake, Abe Greenwald, and Seth Mandel.
THEIR CONCERN WITH FREE SPEECH IS HIGHLY SELECTIVE: FBI defends ‘First Amendment rights’ of LA student group whose fundraising poster features terrorist logo.
THEY’RE ACTUALLY AGAINST OUR DEMOCRACY, NOT DEFENDING IT: The Left’s Attack on the Secret Ballot and on Same Day voting.
IT’S SKED FOR 10:30 EDT THIS MORNING: Virgin Galactic launching final commercial spaceflight on VSS Unity spaceplane today.
ROBOCOP SMILES: Suspect apprehended following police standoff, highway closure.
[Granbury, TX homeowner Jane] Gilbreath said she watched as the SWAT team deployed drones to break the back window of the truck.
“When they broke the window, they shot tear gas in. He didn’t give himself up. He only exited the truck because they shot tear gas through the truck window, and then they were able to apprehend him from that,” she said.
One of the drones, Gilbreath said, was also equipped with cameras and was told by the GPD officers that the driver was “high.”
“Even when he was sitting in his truck, the drone with the camera could see him and he was smoking a crack pipe,” she said.
The suspect was identified as 63-year-old Barry Harrell out of Fort Worth, the news release reports. Harrell is charged with possession of cocaine, evading arrest in a motor vehicle, tampering with evidence and accident involving damage.
Perhaps the Granbury drone can teach the Denver drones how it’s done: Denver police say DRONES will respond to 911 calls instead of cops after city defunded the force by millions.
MEANWHILE, IN A PART OF AMERICA THAT STILL WORKS:
Falcon 9 lands for the 300th time pic.twitter.com/syimP1jcxl
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) June 8, 2024
Related:
With the success of Starship, it’s important to realize how important and counter-intuitive it was for @elonmusk to overcome his team’s resistance and use stainless steel. https://t.co/XesQwYgGIK pic.twitter.com/fmTt2Dkfbl
— Walter Isaacson (@WalterIsaacson) June 7, 2024