READER FAVORITE: DEWALT 20V MAX Cordless Drill and Impact Driver. #CommissionEarned
Archive for 2024
May 10, 2024
TO BE FAIR, THE TWO VANDALS ARE OLD ENOUGH TO BE AMONG THE ORIGINAL SIGNERS: Just Stop Oil Tries to Destroy Magna Carta.
The Just Stop Oil tactic of attacking priceless works of art and other artifacts is an attempt to duplicate the Taliban campaign to erase non-Muslim culture in Afghanistan. It is a tactic of cultural terrorists and, in my view, should be treated in exactly the same manner.
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Two protesters, aged 85 and 82, cracked the glass case surrounding the royal charter at the British Library in central London on Friday morning.
The library holds two of the four surviving copies of the Magna Carta, with the others at Lincoln Cathedral and Salisbury Cathedral.
Flashback: Beyond the Culture of Repudiation:
As a modern conservative, [the late Roger] Scruton defends a form of democracy unknown to Aristotle. Following David Hume and Edmund Burke, however, he opposes the idea that the “political order is founded on a contract.” For Scruton, the state of nature is a chimera—an invention of modern political philosophers who had forgotten the debt and gratitude owed to our predecessors. The fictitious state of nature—so central to philosophical liberalism—obscures the fact that membership in a community, with its requisite duties and obligations, is a precondition for meaningful freedom. “Absolute freedom”—doing whatever one wants—is always an invitation to anarchy or tyranny. In the modern world, the nation is the political form that guarantees membership and self-government.
In all of his political writings, Scruton takes on the Left for scorning existing norms and customs, and for promoting a “culture of repudiation.” The Left is “negative.” It dismisses “every aspect of our cultural capital” with the language of brutal invective: accusing every defender of human nature and sound tradition of “racism,” “xenophobia,” “homophobia,” and “sexism.” Like 1984’s “two minutes of hate,” this language tears down, intimidates, and can never build anything humane or constructive—it is nihilistic to the core. At the same time, Scruton wants to reach out to reasonable liberals who eschew ideology and who still believe in civility and the promise of national belonging. His conservatism can discern the truth in liberalism (another Aristotelian trait) while the partisans of repudiation see half the human race as enemies.
And from 2019, VDH: Waging War Against The Dead. “Not since the iconoclasts of the Byzantine Empire or the epidemic of statue destruction during the French Revolution has the world seen anything like the current war on the past. In 2001, the primeval Taliban blew up two ancient Buddha statues in Afghanistan on grounds that their very existence was sacrilegious to Islam. In 2015, ISIS militants entered a museum in Mosul, Iraq, and destroyed ancient, pre-Islamic statues and idols. Their mute crime? These artifacts predated the prophet Mohammed. The West prides itself on the idea that liberal societies would never descend into such nihilism. Think again.”
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Nanotech opens door to future of insulin medication.
OLD AND BUSTED: “Think Different.”
The new hotness? Apple downplays the value of human achievement.
Meet the new iPad Pro: the thinnest product we’ve ever created, the most advanced display we’ve ever produced, with the incredible power of the M4 chip. Just imagine all the things it’ll be used to create. pic.twitter.com/6PeGXNoKgG
— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) May 7, 2024
Then the press begins to lower as a Sonny and Cher song plays. A piano is smashed and splattered with paint buckets. An arcade machine, a drawing figure, record player, trumpet, vintage film and stock cameras are destroyed. A Greek bust is smashed, and eventually the press, drooling with several different colors of paint, closes completely. When it lifts up, the new iPad rests in the middle with a voiceover bragging about how thin it is.
As several people noted on X, the ad was a direct inverse of the Nineteen Eighty-Four ad and representative of the destruction of physical media and the culture that made America. One poster on X wrote, “Apple’s new ‘Crush’ ad (let’s call it ‘2024’) is a visual & metaphorical bookend to the 1984 ad. 1984: Monochrome, conformist, industrial world exploded by colorful, vibrant human 2024: Colorful, vibrant humanity is crushed by monochrome, conformist, industrial press.”
Wall Street Journal tech reporter Katie Deighton noted, “This ad perfectly encapsulates the insight that people think technology is killing everything we ever found joy in. And then presents that as a good thing.”
In 2014, the Huffington Post noted, “Everything From This 1991 Radio Shack Ad You Can Now Do With Your Phone.” But the iPhone and iPad were touted as great value for money because they combined all of those products into one sleek handheld device, not that they literally pulverized their predecessors into a fine paste.
Or as James Lileks writes: “We know the experience of tapping a picture of a keyboard to get a note: it isn’t real. We know the experience of striking an actual key, the way it yields but has its own presence that reacts to dynamics, the way the note comes from a soundboard of wood hewn from a tree instead of a tiny speaker. Painters know how committing a brush to a canvas is commitment you may or may not fulfill, but how noodling on glass on one of an infinite set of virtual canvases is underscored by the knowledge that nothing need be finished, and anything can be abandoned without cost. It’s like an ad that shows the press crushing the family Fido, and ends with an iPad that shows a video of the dog.”
UPDATE: Apple apologizes for ad that crushes the sum total of human artistic endeavor.
BUT IT’S (D)IFFERENT WHEN THEY DO IT: Biden Administration Is Now Under Investigation for ‘Election Interference.’
THE 21ST CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: AI ethicists warn of ‘digital hauntings’ from dead loved ones: The ‘ghostbots’ are coming.
THEY HAD NO BUSINESS JUMPING IN THE FIRST TIME: Corporate America Is Sitting Out the Trump-Biden Rematch. “Some CEOs are privately drawing up plans to tell employees not to expect comments on political matters in all-hands sessions. Others are reconsidering common election initiatives, such as get-out-the-vote drives, fearing those could be viewed in the current moment as partisan. A number of companies are also taking a harder line on workplace activism after long tolerating dissent.”
“JUST STOP OIL” ATTEMPTS TO DESTROY THE MAGNA CARTA. There are some acts that are utterly unacceptable in a civilized society, or any society, and trying to destroy the freaking Magna Carta is one of them. This is futile, purposeless destruction of the heritage of mankind, sponsored by millionaires and billionaires.
KRUISER: Trump Derangement Syndrome Meltdown of the Week: Pity Poor Mexico Edition. “Word of Mexico’s success in shipping people northward spread, and now people from all over the world are jockeying for position at our porous southern border. They’re all in a dead panic now about the prospect of Trump hanging a sign that says, ‘Go home, the other guy is gone,’ next January.”
MOTHER’S DAY GIFT OR GIFT FOR YOURSELF: 5-Minute Core Exercises for Seniors: Daily Routines to Build Balance and Boost Confidence. #CommissionEarned
I ORDERED A BACKUP 28-OUNCE BOTTLE LAST NIGHT JUST IN CASE: Sriracha shortage coming? Company pauses production until after Labor Day.
ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY: Col. Steve Austin – M2-F2 Crash.
ROBERT SPENCER: Biden Regime’s Department of Education Sues Columbia University, But Not For What You’d Expect. “Its civil rights investigation is not about the mistreatment of Jewish students, but of Palestinian students.”
Honestly, that’s exactly what I expected.
BIGOTRY: The liberal proponents of Occupy Wall Street are often the same people who think Southerners are inbred and Walmart shoppers slovenly miscreants. “A century ago, du Bois wrote: ‘The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the colour line.’ The problem of the 21st century is that of the class line.”
I HAD BEEN ASSURED BY THE VERY SMARTEST PEOPLE THAT MOUTH-BREATHING RED STATERS DIDN’T HAVE THE ATTENTION SPAN TO MAINTAIN A BOYCOTT: Bud Light sales still falling as Modelo, Coors fight to keep their gains.
Revenue for Anheuser-Busch jumped 2.6% to $14.55 billion from higher prices, but volume sold dropped 0.6%, though it was less than Wall Street anticipated. The largest decline came from North America, where volume dropped 9.9%, largely due to sales of Bud Light.
Sales to retailers and wholesalers were down 13.7% and 10.7%, respectively, in the US.
“We’ve lost a whole generation of hardcore Bud Light shoppers,” Bump Williams of Bump Williams Consulting told Yahoo Finance. “It’s going to take us at least 10 years to try and recapture what we lost in one year.”
Williams said AB InBev will have to “buy” shoppers. As Gen Zs grow up and turn 21, they’ll turn to brands that made an impression on them in their younger years.
“They’re not going to remember any of that stuff [regarding the boycott]. When they come into the marketplace, they’re going to say, ‘Oh, boy … I know that I liked their advertising … I’m going to go grab one,” Williams added.
They could start by moving their marketing division back to St. Louis from New York — and hire locals.
ONE NEVERTRUMPER EVEN SAID HE’D BUY THE RED HAT AND GOLD SNEAKERS: Did Biden’s Love for Hamas Just Lose Him the Jewish Vote?
DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH, NETHERLANDS EDITION: Girl, 14, ‘gang-raped by up to ten children aged 11-16 was taken to a park by her boyfriend to be “loaned out” for sex assaults more than once, with the attacks filmed on their phones’ “Prosecutors arrested ten suspects aged between 11 and 16 – all reported by local outlets to be boys of ‘immigrant origin’ – and hauled them in for interrogation.”
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT [VIP]: Somebody Needs to Sanction Biden for His Support of Terrorism.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Columbia University makes no mention of Jews in Holocaust Remembrance Day post.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Boeing files notice to lay off more than 100 employees in Huntsville, Alabama. “Local media outlet WHNT said Boeing, which employs more than 3,000 people in Huntsville, planned to cut jobs because of delays related to the SLS Artemis mission, with NASA reportedly pushing back its Artemis II and III launches.”
CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Ninth Circuit Panel Rules Nonviolent Felons Don’t Lose Their Gun Rights. I believe this decision is correct, but expect unsympathetic en banc review by the Ninth Circuit as a whole.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Netanyahu Is a Magnifying Glass on Biden’s Pathetic Weakness. “We can blame age-related dementia all we want, but Joe Biden would have been a weak president even if his last brain cells hadn’t taken a permanent vacation. The predictable by-product of the leader of the world’s lone (for the moment) superpower being weak is that the worst people in the world find new ways to be awful.”