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Archive for 2018
July 15, 2018
A HEARTWARMING STORY:
WARNING GRAPHIC: Intense video shows a would-be robber getting beaten up by restaurant employees in Arizona. — https://t.co/7mRhUlCeVL pic.twitter.com/hANnF4Izz9
— Tulsa's Channel 8 (@KTULNews) July 13, 2018
NORMALIZING DOMESTIC EMOTIONAL ABUSE:
UM: “An assault revolver with high-capacity magazines and a revolver were recovered at the scene.”
No, really, that’s what it says. Here’s a screenshot in case they change it.
UPDATE: So on the one hand, I feel bad for not noticing this was from 2014. On the other, that means that this absurd error has been uncorrected for four years. So on balance, I think it’s still a loss for CBS.
OPEN THREAD: Make it count.
MICHAEL WALSH: Son of Scotswoman Insults Queen! “Somewhere, William Wallace and Robert the Bruce are laughing and toasting [Trump] with some choice mead.”
ANOTHER GENDER GAP THAT MUST BE ADDRESSED: Analysis Indicates More Boys Are Drowning Than Girls.
THIS JUST GETS BETTER: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Democratic Primary Opponent Will Remain on the Ballot Because of Some Bullshit. “Crowley received the endorsement of the Working Families Party, a group of labor unions and activists that has also backed New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s primary challenger, Cynthia Nixon. But after Ocasio-Cortez’s primary win, Bill Lipton, the state director of the Working Families Party, reached out to Crowley’s team and asked that he vacate the line. Crowley, however, declined. This means he’ll remain on the ballot, which is certainly a curious decision to make!” Well, she’s been dissing him in public, so it’s not that curious.
WE’VE COME A LONG WAY, BABY: But my piece on private space ventures from a decade ago has held up pretty well.
A FIRST AMENDMENT ISSUE OF NOTE: Judge Orders LA Times to Alter Story About Glendale Cop.
21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Sex robot addiction — clinics braced for humans hooked on cyborgs like ‘problem drinkers.’
See, I told you so, says notorious robophobe Matthew Yglesias.
RECONNAISSANCE PLANE? Perhaps they have no word in Arabic. “Palestinian sources said that an Israeli reconnaissance plane bombed the building…”
Boo freaking hoo.
NOT YOUR GRANDFATHER’S CALIFORNIA DEMOCRATIC PARTY: As a result of California’s “jungle primary” system, the two candidates for U.S. Senator on the November ballot—Dianne Feinstein and Kevin de León—are both Democrats. The L.A. Times reports that last night, the Democratic Party’s Executive Committee voted to endorse De León over long-time incumbent Feinstein. The vote was a smack down for Feinstein—65% for De León, 7% for Feinstein and 28% for no endorsement.
Democratic activists are no mood for Feinstein’s reputation for pragmatism (and many have said so). They want a real leftist like the 51-year-old De León. And (surprise!) they want someone younger than the 85-year-old Feinstein.
So far at least, California voters have a different view. The latest poll (June 29) shows Feinstein ahead of De León 46% to 24%.
21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Trump’s space force will guard US from above, NASA chief says.. He also thinks the Space Force should be modeled on the Navy, rather than the Air Force.
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RADICAL CHIC, THE GERITOL YEARS: Keith Ellison supports cop killers.
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Is There Such a Thing as ‘Traveler’s Constipation’?
WHEN POLITICS BECOMES RELIGION: The Whitney Is Not an Art Museum.
The Whitney, as it’s called, is not all bad. It has some nice Hopper, Lichtenstein, and lesser-known artists such as Henry Koerner. The long-exposure photography was excellent too. Unfortunately my pleasant memories of all these works were sullied by the exhibit on the sixth floor — An Incomplete History of Protest.
Rounding the corner to enter the exhibit, I encountered the most fascinating combination of leftism and bad taste ever assembled. There was a mosaic of anti-Vietnam signs, which displayed the hippies’ talents for zeugma (“Save Lives, Not Face”) and swearing (“F*** the Draft”). Then followed a few horrifying AIDS-related posters including genitalia and more wordplay (a picture of Reagan with the caption “He Kills Me”).
Next there was a wall full of agitprop from some organization called the Guerrilla Girls. The material in question looked like advertisements one might have taken out in Ms. magazine back when that was required reading for the fashionably radical. “Republicans do care about women’s rights to control their own bodies!” (Smaller print: “breast augmentation,” “nose jobs,” etc.) “We demand a return to traditional values on abortion!” (Smaller print: “The Catholic Church didn’t ban early abortion until 1869.”)
I truncate the epic catalogue, since by now the reader has surely gotten the point. The exhibit was an entire floor of lies, obscenity, melodrama, and a single rhetorical trick used 8,000 times. Which, to borrow a conceit from Meryl Streep, are not the arts.
This was the museum’s key weakness: It had shunned art and preferred razzmatazz. No doubt I shall be called a philistine hater of modern styles and a pseudo-cultured reactionary, but that is not really at issue here. The question is whether propaganda is art, and the answer is No.
It’s not – but what’s fascinating is how old this all is. As the late Tom Wolfe once wrote about being on a panel discussing “the style of the sixties” at Princeton university, the left’s hatred of fellow Texas-sized government-loving “Progressive” Lyndon Johnson (for largely class-related reasons) quickly and predictably overwhelmed any discussion of aesthetics:
This was the mid-1960’s. The post-World War II boom had by now pumped money into every level of the population on a scale unparalleled in any nation in history. Not only that, the folks were running wilder and freer than any people in history. For that matter, [Paul] Krassner himself, in one of the strokes of exuberance for which he was well known, was soon to publish a slight hoax: an account of how Lyndon Johnson was so overjoyed about becoming President that he had buggered a wound in the neck of John F. Kennedy on Air Force One as Kennedy’s body was being flown back from Dallas. Krassner presented this as a suppressed chapter from William Manchester’s book Death of a President. Johnson, of course, was still President when it came out. Yet the merciless gestapo dragnet missed Krassner, who cleverly hid out onstage at Princeton on Saturday nights.
Suddenly I heard myself blurting out over my microphone: “My God, what are you talking about? We’re in the middle of a … Happiness Explosion!”
That merely sounded idiotic. The kid up in the balcony did the crying baby. The kid down below did the raccoon … Krakatoa, East of Java … I disappeared in a tidal wave of rude sounds … Back to the goon squads, search-and-seize and roust-a-daddy …
Support came from a quarter I hadn’t counted on.
It was Grass, speaking in English. “For the past hour I have my eyes fixed on the doors here,” he said. “You talk about fascism and police repression. In Germany when I was a student, they come through those doors long ago. Here they must be very slow.”
Grass was enjoying himself for the first time all evening. He was not simply saying, “You really don’t have so much to worry about.” He was indulging his sense of the absurd. He was saying: “You American intellectuals—you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!”
And it has always been thus. As Glenn has written, “One of Trump’s major accomplishments has been to reveal the lack of civic virtue and self-control across our elite institutions.” But perhaps not yet enough to ask, “Are we the baddies?”
SUPERMAN ACTOR HENRY CAVILL: IF I FLIRT, ‘I’M GOING TO BE CALLED A RAPIST.’
As Glenn has noted, “After hearing nonstop from feminists about how fragile and impressionable women are, I’m beginning to think that patriarchy is a good idea.”
THE LEFT’S WAR ON PUBLIC HEALTH: Juul Madness. The smoking rate for American adults and teenagers has hit an all-time low, but public-health activists are working hard to reverse the trend. They’ve renewed their attack on the vaping industry and singled out Juul Labs, the makers of an e-cigarette so effective at weaning smokers from their habit that Wall Street analysts are calling it an existential threat to the tobacco industry (whose stocks have plunged this year along with cigarette sales). From my City Journal piece:
Activists are so determined to prohibit any use of nicotine that they’re calling Juul a “massive public-health disaster” and have persuaded journalists, Democratic politicians, and federal officials to combat the “Juuling epidemic” among teenagers.
The press has been scaring the public with tales of high schools filled with nicotine fiends desperately puffing on Juuls, but the latest federal survey, released last month, tells quite a different story. The vaping rate last year among high-school students, a little less than 12 percent, was actually four percentage points lower than in 2015, when Juul was a new product with miniscule sales.
A coalition of activists and Democratic senators, including Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren, are denouncing Juul and pressing for regulations that would outlaw most vaping devices now on the market.
You’d think that progressive activists and journalists would be cheering the small company whose life-saving product has become an existential threat to Big Tobacco. But the lower the smoking rate falls, the less work there is for anti-smoking activists at groups like the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, which has helped lead the attack on Juul and the vaping industry. The activists need a new cause and a new enemy, and they’re not about to let the public’s health get in their way.
NOT OUR CLASS, DEAR: Queen left to meet Donald Trump alone as senior royals snubbed US President.
LEGAL FRONTIERS: Laws against sex discrimination were for our benefit, not for men’s!
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS. Hillary begins speech: ‘I’m so tired, I can barely stand.’
I’m so old, I can remember when Hillary was still in no ways tired.