2024 KEEPS GETTING WEIRDER BUT THIS ONE MIGHT PROVE TO BE USEFUL: Mutant wolves roaming Chernobyl Exclusion Zone have developed cancer-resilient abilities.
Archive for 2024
February 9, 2024
DEI ISN’T ABOUT DIVERSITY, IT’S ABOUT CONTROL: Troy University Proves You Don’t Need DEI to Achieve Campus Diversity.
KRUISER: Trump Derangement Syndrome Meltdown of the Week — Dem Broads Are the Real Misogynists Edition. “Women hating women is nothing new, of course. They can whine about misogyny and the Patriarchy all they want, but the biggest roadblocks in almost every woman’s path to bigger and better things are other women. The notion of a modern day sisterhood that is going to take over the world is persistent fiction.”
THIS ISN’T THE JETSONS 21ST CENTURY I WAS HOPING FOR: Best at-home syphilis tests of 2024, according to health experts.
IT WAS SIXTY YEARS AGO TODAY: The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, 60 years later: “Life went from black and white to color.”
The most culturally significant musical performance on television of all time, February 9, 1964 pic.twitter.com/pL7P0joWvn
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) February 9, 2024
How radically did the Beatles change the zietgiest? This radically:
Here’s one weird anomaly to start with — the article [inside the February 24th, 1964 issue of Newsweek with the Fab Four on the cover] about the four musicians we know as John, Paul, George and Ringo is called “George, Paul, Ringo and John.” Go figure. And, boy, did Newsweek just not get it. They started that article like this:
“Visually they are a nightmare: tight, dandified, Edwardian-Beatnik suits and great pudding bowls of hair. Musically they are a near-disaster: guitars and drums slamming out a merciless beat that does away with secondary rhythms, harmony, and melody. Their lyrics (punctuated by nutty shouts of “yeah, yeah, yeah!”) are a catastrophe, a preposterous farrago of Valentine-card romantic sentiments.”
It’s hard to believe, isn’t it? The Beatles generation became so mainstream that nobody can imagine that people felt that way, but Newsweek wasn’t just being stuffy, they were representing the overwhelming feelings of the vast majority of people over, say, twenty.
Indeed; my dad, whose teenage years and early 20s was spent listening to big bands, Crosby and Sinatra expressed similar views of the Beatles long into the ’70s. Others who had the same take in 1964 include:
Los Angeles Times
Feb. 11, 1964
With their bizarre shrubbery, the Beatles are obviously a press agent’s dream combo. Not even their mothers would claim that they sing well. But the hirsute thickets they affect make them rememberable, and they project a certain kittenish charm which drives the immature, shall we say, ape.
William F. Buckley Jr.
Boston Globe
Sept. 13, 1964
An estimable critic writing for National Review, after seeing Presley writhe his way through one of Ed Sullivan’s shows … suggested that future entertainers would have to wrestle with live octopuses in order to entertain a mass American audience. The Beatles don’t in fact do this, but how one wishes they did! And how this one wishes the octopus would win….
The Beatles are not merely awful; I would consider it sacrilegious to say anything less than that they are god awful. They are so unbelievably horribly, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art that they qualify as crowned heads of anti-music, even as the imposter popes went down in history as “anti-popes.”
Not surprisingly, Newsweek predicted little future for the group after their Sullivan appearance:
“The big question in the music business at the moment is: will the Beatles last? The odds are that, in the words of another era, they’re too hot not to cool down, and a cooled-down Beatle is hard to picture. It is also hard to imagine any other field in which they could apply their talents, and so the odds are that they will fade away, as most adults confidently predict.”
Flash-forward to last November: ‘Now and Then:’ How the Beatles Created Magic on Their New ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ Albums, Via a Little MAL-ware.
GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: Progressive Culture and the Crisis of the American Male.
As I look out at that culture, I notice a few critical things. I notice that it was not Trump who launched campaigns to eliminate toxic masculinity, mansplaining, manspreading, microaggressions and the Patriarchy (whatever that is). It is not agents of Trump who write articles with headlines like “Workout Culture Is White Supremacy”or even “Straight Black Men are the White People of Black People.” It was not Trumpian comic book executives who attacked their mostly male audience by “re-centering comic art to defeat the male gaze”… as if there were something definitionally wrong with an appreciation of the female form. It’s not Trumpian education officials telling young naturally hyperactive boys that they must sit still in one place for eight hours or else be put on dangerous psychoactive drugs, and then making good on the threat. It wasn’t Trump who shamed and cancelled an accomplished rocket scientist for celebrating the first landing of a spacecraft on a comet while wearing a shirt featuring whimsically drawn sci-fi comic book-style women in bikinis. It was not Trumpian studio executives who decided movie stars should be built like Timothee Chalamet rather than Arnold, Bruce and Sly. It was not Trump who declared that certain popular video games like Call of Duty, table-top games like Dungeons & Dragons, or the Lord of the Rings series of novels… things enjoyed primarily by men… represent right-wing extremism, toxic male culture or both. It was not a right wing publication which labeled OPPENHEIMER’S Golden Globe win “a troubling return to Hollywood’s macho ‘dad movie’ days.” And it was not the Trumpian Right who browbeat NFL quarterback Drew Brees so badly that he felt the only way to recover his reputation and career was to put the name of a violent man with a history of alleged sexual assault on his football helmet. All for the crime of telling an interviewer that because of his family history of military service, he did not agree with disrespecting the American flag by kneeling for the National Anthem.
These were all humiliation rituals… struggle sessions aimed at traditional American men and their favorite pastimes. All of them engineered and prosecuted by the Progressive Left. And they are working precisely as they were intended, which is to say badly, for American men.
No wonder so many men are leaving the Democrat Party… it has been an abusive relationship for quite some time now.
Read the whole thing.
PLEASE DON’T STOP UNTIL THE JOB IS DONE: Netanyahu Claims That Israel Is ‘Just a Touch Away’ From Declaring Victory Over Hamas.
FASTER, PLEASE: Fusion research facility’s final tritium experiments yield new energy record.
The Joint European Torus (JET), one of the world’s largest and most powerful fusion machines, has demonstrated the ability to reliably generate fusion energy, while simultaneously setting a world record in energy output.
These notable accomplishments represent a significant milestone in the field of fusion science and engineering.
In JET’s final deuterium-tritium experiments (DTE3), high fusion power was consistently produced for five seconds, resulting in a ground-breaking record of 69 megajoules using a mere 0.2 milligrams of fuel.
Not exactly commercial grade but maybe it’s time to reset the “ten years to cheap fusion power” clock once more.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Two more research misconduct scandals hit Harvard.
I’M SURE SOME HAMAS FANS ARE VERY FINE PEOPLE: Jewish leaders slam White House for meeting with activist who defended Hamas, Hezbollah.
HERE’S WHY SENATE BORDER DEAL BLEW UP: That Lankford-Murphy-Sinema border security compromise went nowhere for several reasons. The only surprise is that anybody was surprised that the proposal had such a short, unhappy life.
THEY SHOULD BE LAUGHED OUT OF THEIR OWN COURT: Hawaiian Court Cites Little-Known ‘Spirit of Aloha’ Clause to Deny Gun Rights. “It is my overly amused duty to tell you today that those are not the words of a well-meaning but ignorant-as-toast 10th grader — those words are an exact quote from a decision written by the State Supreme Court of Hawaii.”
WHY IS THE NEW YORK TIMES SUCH A CESSPIT OF SEXISM? “Why is it okay to articulate these stereotypes… and what’s so bad about them? Anyone who hopes to be seen as a possible President must be steely and no-nonsense. What’s ‘demeaning’? These adjectives only sound demeaning when attached to the nouns the New York Times writer chose: ‘vixen’ and ‘broad.’ Those terms are used to divide the women into 2 groups based on looks. And Trump is supposed to be the sexist here? The writer is expressing contempt for women if they glam up and if they don’t. And that’s in a column expressing the hope that all the female options are rejected.”
Of course, it’s a female writer, Pamela Paul. Because no one puts down women like other women.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Small Banks Are Teetering. Expect More Failures. “There is a systemic risk of large-scale bank failures in the U.S. in 2024 due to charge-offs and write-downs emanating from the commercial real estate sector. Bank regulators have been vocal about their concerns that the too-big-too-fail banks would have sufficient capital to cover losses and a recession. However, they do not appear to be as concerned about how the projected losses will impact the large number of community banks in the country.”
As expected by the regulators who work hand-in-glove with the too-big-to-fail banks that will scoop up the failed regional and community banks as they grow even more too big to fail.
THE RECRUITING CRISIS CONTINUES: ‘We Take Old People’ – Air Force Trying Anything to Get Somebody in a Uniform These Days.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: RIP Jurisprudence — President Séance Judged Too Senile to Get in Trouble. “Of course, the notion that Biden is presenting himself to anyone is absurd. He is whatever his handlers decide he needs to be in a given situation. They’ve got a situational ‘upper/downer’ combo chart that has precise dosages for what they need him to achieve at the time. The problem that they’ve been running into lately is that there doesn’t seem to be enough Adderall in the world to get Biden through more than 45 seconds before he goes into full Max Headroom glitch mode.”
THESE INCIDENTS ARE BECOMING MORE FREQUENT: JetBlue plane clips second JetBlue plane at Boston’s Logan International Airport.
SO THE SECRET SERVICE IS PRO-ASSASSINATION NOW? Secret Service orders ‘no response’ to RFK Jr.’s protection plea.
TO BE FAIR, THEY HAD NO CASE: Kavanaugh Destroys Colorado’s Case to Kick Trump Off Ballot.
SOON THE REST OF US WILL BE TRYING TO FORGET WHEN HE WAS PRESIDENT: Biden Can’t Remember When He Was Vice President Or When His Son Died: DOJ.
LIGHTNING DEAL: 3 Pack Reading Glasses. #CommissionEarned
IF IT ISN’T ONE DAMN THING…: China to export deflation to the world as economy stumbles.
Global investors expect falling prices in China to push down inflation rates worldwide this year, as excess capacity in its slowing economy prompts Chinese exporters to cut prices on goods they sell abroad.
Prices of Chinese exports have been falling at their fastest rate since the 2008 financial crisis, indicating the world’s largest exporter is starting to send deflation outward to developed economies that have been battling high inflation.
“China will be exporting deflation to the rest of the world, and you will find various countries dealing with the fact that China has built up overcapacity,” said Chetan Sehgal, lead portfolio manager at Templeton Emerging Markets Investment Trust, a UK-listed fund.
But then there’s this: The Global Tremors From China’s Real Estate Crisis Are Only Just Starting.
Chinese investors and their creditors are putting up “For Sale” signs on real estate holdings across the globe as the need to raise cash amid a deepening property crisis at home trumps the risks of offloading into a falling market. The prices they get will help finally put hard numbers on just how much trouble the wider industry is in.
The worldwide slump triggered by borrowing-cost hikes has already wiped more than $1 trillion off office property values alone, Starwood Capital Group Chairman Barry Sternlicht said last week. But the total damage is still unknown because so few assets have been sold, leaving appraisers with little recent data to go on. Completed commercial property deals globally sank to the lowest level in a decade last year, with owners unwilling to sell buildings at steep discounts.
Regulators and the market are nervous that this logjam could be concealing large, unrealized losses, spelling trouble both for banks, who pushed further into bricks and mortar lending during the cheap money era, and asset owners.
Interesting times…
BUT TOO YOUNG TO FIRE! Special Counsel Finds Biden Is Too Damn Old to Be Charged in Classified Docs Scandal.