BREAKING: Biden’s DOJ files NEW letter allowing Hunter’s ex-business pal Devon Archer to testify in Congress Monday.

#JOURNALISM:

Meet Aaron Berman: who spent his entire adult life working at @CIA, only to leave to become a top Facebook official responsible for censoring political speech.

Among other things, Aaron was the key Facebook official who censored Brazil's debates before its 2022 election: 🇧🇷 https://t.co/KeF57xjISE

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 31, 2023

OPEN THREAD: It’s me. Hi. I’m the blogger it’s me.

QUESTION ASKED: Where Have You Gone Woodward and Bernstein?

“We are looking forward very much to hearing from Devon Archer about all the times he has witnessed Joe Biden meeting with Hunter Biden’s overseas business partners when he was vice president, including on speakerphone,” said Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the committee chairman.

Remember that for years the Democrats and their media lickspittles have insisted–and Joe Biden has himself stated emphatically and publicly before the last presidential election, that he knew nothing of his son Hunter’s shady overseas business deals. Of course he knew.

He was the muscle. And Hunter, like his Uncle Jim before him, was the bagman. The guy who carried the treasure to “The Big Guy” or “President Ten Percent.”

Those of you who know Chicago know how this works–The Delaware Way is the American Way is the Chicago Way. And how do you keep the suckers from ‘beefing’ or ‘complaining?’ You control the media to suppress problematic facts. And do they ever control it.

Now you understand why the Democrat Media Complex was so furious with voters after the mid-term elections. They would be exposed. All the rocks would be turned over. There were no moist corners in which to hide.

The great heavyweight champion Joe Louis had a saying, “They can run but they can’t hide.” Eventually they’d be trapped and take a public beating.

Joe did it the hard way — he got into the ring with his opponents and actually fought them. The new methods are much easier: ‘Obstruction of Justice:’ DOJ Sends Letter on Archer’s Jail Time Just Before Meeting With House Oversight. “The DOJ is trying to arrest Devon Archer ahead of his bombshell testimony Monday about Joe Biden’s involvement in his son Hunter’s Ukraine business when he was VP.”

UPDATE: Joseph Campbell on “The hero-journalist trope: Watergate’s go-to mythical narrative.”

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Moon mining gains momentum as private companies plan for a lunar economy. “This is now becoming so real.”

WILL HE OR WON’T HE? Trump Flirts With Participating in August Debate.

OVERTHINKING THE GREATNESS OF GATSBY (WHICH IS STILL GREAT):

In Taking Things Hard: The Trials of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Garnett doesn’t take the side of the fledgling philistine in the back row of your AP Lit class. But Garnett, professor emeritus of English at Gettysburg College, is hardly sympathetic to Fitzgerald scholars whose Talmudic readings of Gatsby often veer into the absurd. Instead, he offers a refreshingly intuitive explanation for Gatsby’s greatness and its author’s precipitous decline.

Part biography, part literary criticism, Taking Things Hard brings the reader through Fitzgerald’s life and career but always comes back to the book at the center of both. Supplementing extant scholarship with a close-reading of the author’s unduly neglected short stories, Garnett brushes away a century’s worth of analysis to show it was Fitzgerald’s raw talent and emotional sensitivity that both helped him write The Great Gatsby and caused his tragic descent into alcoholism and hackery shortly after its publication. By looking past the accepted narrative and focusing on what Fitzgerald actually wrote, Garnett offers a refreshingly intuitive case for what makes Gatsby great.

Taking Things Hard opens with an act of creative destruction. Garnett notes that during Fitzgerald’s lifetime, “Gatsby was neither his best-known nor most popular” book. After an initial printing of 21,000 copies flew off the shelves in April 1925, a smaller, second printing of just 3,000 units “failed to sell out” until after Fitzgerald’s death—15 years later. It was around that time, in the wake of World War II, that Gatsby first became popular “with ordinary readers.”

The novel’s rapid success puzzled the midcentury literati, who quickly set about searching for “weighty meaning in a melodrama of mushroom millionaires.” Eventually, they “happily discovered” that Gatsby “was about ‘the American Dream,’” a term coined six years after the novel’s publication, and with which Fitzgerald would have been wholly unfamiliar. Once “the professors had what they needed,” the book became “classroom fodder,” and, ever since, the idea of the American dream in The Great Gatsby “has been poured or knocked into the heads of generations of students.”

As Kyle Smith wrote on The Great Forgetting: “Maybe we’ll remember one rock act. Who will it be? Maybe none of the obvious answers. It certainly wasn’t obvious at the time of Fitzgerald’s death that The Great Gatsby would be the best-remembered novel he or anyone else wrote in the first half of the 20th century.”

THE 21st CENTURY IS NOT WORKING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: Philadelphia is hosting FatCon, the first conference to celebrate overweight people.

Philadelphia is known for its cheesesteaks, hoagies, roast pork sandwiches, scrapple, pizza, water ice, soft pretzels, or any culinary treat sold at one of the city’s zillion Italian bakeries. No one needed a conference to know there are many fat people here. It is something anyone could realize by taking a stroll around the city. I say this as a resident of the area and someone who has struggled with weight.

The organizers aimed for the conference to be a “judgment-free event focused on creating a community for fat people by fat people, recognizing those who are ‘often overlooked because of their size’” and an opportunity to “navigate this fatphobic world and society in a different way.” The conference will supposedly feature panels discussing fashion, navigating fatphobia, social media influencing, and a keynote speaker known as “The Fat Sex Therapist.”

Because, obviously, fat people need to learn more about social media influencing than about health, exercise, and losing weight. This thing sounds like an indulgent disaster of rotund proportions.

“People just want to be able to be themselves — that’s the dire need for something like Philly FatCon,” one of the organizers said.

Flashback: Regular Exercise Can Help Shield You From Severe COVID.

SOYBEAN OIL IS BAD: Popular Cooking Oil Can Lead to Gut Damage.

Olive or avocado oil are better. Or the secret behind McDonald’s (former) fries, beef tallow. I notice it’s making a comeback as people notice that seed oils, once touted as healthy, are anything but. Someone should sue the Center for Science in the Public Interest and the various state AGs for bullying McDonalds into switching from beef tallow to deadly seed oils.

BE CAREFUL, it’s hotter than a pistol out there.

DOMINIC GREEN: Delta Force.

If the Delta style has a supreme originator, it was not Robert Johnson. It was Lonnie Johnson (no relation) who created the Delta template by transposing Jelly Roll Morton’s piano jazz onto the acoustic guitar. (I discussed this with King on a 2018 podcast). The primitivist legend, King argues, puts the Delta cart before New Orleans jazz. The blues flowed upriver, like investment and technology, not downriver, like the current. It is as if, as in Huckleberry Finn, the Mississippi as metaphor carries away the subject.

Robert Johnson’s music supports this argument. New Orleans music was piano music. Jazz pianists invented the bass boogie. Jazz pianists pitched the vocal between their left-hand boogie and their right-hand ornaments. When Johnson split the low-string pulse from the high-string ornament, he was adapting the piano to the guitar, like Lonnie Johnson had done before him. Both Johnsons “made it new” by making a complex, two-handed style simple.

Johnson’s “Kind Hearted Woman Blues” echoes W.C. Handy’s archetypal and synthetic “St. Louis Blues“: the first nationwide blues hit. On “Walking Blues,” Johnson uses hammered-on ornaments like a two-fingered pianist. The key is B; at 1:45, he pulls against the pulse by striking the dominant F# like Count Basie was then doing with his left pinky. And something else that only comes from New Orleans piano structures the rhythm of Johnson’s playing. Listen to his fills and you hear the left-hand “rumba” pulse of the pianist spread across the guitar.

This explains the paradoxes at the heart of the Johnson legend. He is said to have invented it all, but everything he played had already been invented in New Orleans, and then developed in Memphis and Chicago. He is said to be fons et origo, yet even his biographers admit that the history of the blues would not be greatly altered if he had never lived. The blues migrated to Chicago in the 1920s, when Johnson was a boy. Look at it this way and Delta blues wasn’t the first at all. It was one of several regional responses as jazz spread out of New Orleans.

Adapting piano licks to guitar also created the groundbreaking sound of an even bigger musical legend: Rock ‘n Roll Has Two Daddies? New Revelations from Johnnie Johnson vs. Chuck Berry Lawsuit.

At some point, former Rolling Stone Ian Stewart told Keith Richards, “Don‘t forget that Johnnie Johnson is alive and well and still playing in St. Louis.”

That’s the first domino. Keith told Ian he was going to be the bandleader for the film Chuck Berry: Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll directed by Taylor Hackford, with a climactic performance at the Fox Theatre for Chuck’s 60th birthday. So Ian Stewart made that statement to Keith Richards, and when Keith came to St. Louis he said, “Is Johnnie still around?” Chuck said, “Yeah, I’ll get in touch with him,” and Johnnie appeared in the film and afterward began to perform much more often, and get much more exposure, whereas before he had been playing smaller local gigs and getting by, by driving an eldercare van. During the filming Keith was talking to Johnnie, and they were discussing how the songs were created. Keith has said that he told Johnnie what he did was “songwriting” and “you should get credit for that if you can.” Johnnie said after that he talked to Little Richard and Bo Diddley and they told him roughly the same thing: he should get credit and money for it.

Richards discusses how Berry based his distinctive chugging low-riff double-stop sound from Johnson’s piano playing in the aforementioned documentary, but I can’t seem to find that clip online.

NANCY MACE’S HOT SUMMER:

South Carolina congresswoman Nancy Mace has been floated as a potential vice presidential pick for Donald Trump. If her remarks at a prayer breakfast this week are anything to go by, she’d be a great fit, as she shares the Donald’s knack for scandalizing evangelicals.

“I woke up this morning at 7,” Mace told the group Thursday morning. “Patrick, my fiancé, tried to pull me by my waist over this morning in bed and I was like, ‘No baby, we don’t got time for that this morning. I gotta get to the prayer breakfast, and I gotta be on time.’”

An online furore followed, with some puritans pearl-clutching over the fact that Mace, a divorcée, was bragging about having premarital sex. “I go to church because I’m a sinner not because I’m a saint! Glad those in attendance, including @SenatorTimScott and our pastor, took this joke in stride,” she tweeted in her defense. “My fiancé is not upset but he did suggest I go to church twice this Sunday. See y’all at the 8:30 and the 11:30!”

Cockburn, however, is grateful to Mace for ushering in DC’s summer of love. Hopefully the reading on Sunday is from the Song of Songs…

As America’s Newspaper of Record reports: Nation’s Wives All Announce They Too Have To Get To A Prayer Breakfast. “Husbands have noted a drop-off in wives having headaches coinciding with the sudden explosion in prayer breakfasts. ‘Ashley’s evening headaches just suddenly stopped, right as she’s had this apparent spiritual awakening,’ said Mr. Jones. ‘I’m really grateful she’s rediscovered her prayer life, but the timing of these breakfasts has been the absolute worst.’”

BIDEN VOTERS POSTING THEIR Ls: Oliver Stone is way sorry he voted for the guy that “may get us in WWIII.”

MOVE ALONG, NOTHING TO SEE HERE: Photos Show Barack Obama Playing Golf With Bandaged Hand, Black Eye. “Just days after his personal chef and friend died in a very mysterious paddle boarding accident, Barack Obama appears to have injured fingers and a black eye. We still don’t know who the other person was and Obama loves paddle boarding.”

MSNBC COMPARES SOCIALLY CONSERVATIVE ITALIAN PM TO STALIN:

The liberal President of the United States recently invited the conservative Prime Minister of Italy to the White House to discuss matters of mutual concern including the war in Ukraine. Such pairings are not exactly new or uncommon, but MSNBC’s Friday edition of The Last Word used the opportunity to compare Giorgia Meloni to Joseph Stalin for her social conservatism.

Addressing Prof. Ruth Ben Ghiat, who wrote a book entitled Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, guest host Ali Velshi began by portraying President Joe Biden as some sort of master alliance manager, “Ruth, let’s talk about the people that Joe Biden has brought together. This is a world in which we weren’t sure five years ago whether NATO was really a functional organization under Donald Trump’s leadership. Now we’ve got NATO. But we have these issues, right? We’ve got Meloni, we’ve got Poland which really wasn’t on the side of much since the war began, but they have been solidly and staunchly in favor of Ukraine.”

If Velshi thinks internal NATO disagreements began with Trump, he shouldn’t be talking about foreign policy and his shot at Poland was as gratuitous as it was wrong. Velshi also threw in the non-NATO example of India’s Narendra Modi, whose close relationship with the U.S. predates Biden, before asking Ben-Ghiat to “Tell me about the alliances we have to form to fight Russia there would otherwise be considered unsavory.”

Of all the individuals and countries Velshi mentioned, Ben-Ghiat chose to single out one, “Yeah, this is very tricky and, I mean, we have a blueprint: World War II allying with us, you know, thinking of Stalin from his Great Patriot phase. You know, what’s, from the point of view of democracy, what is tough is take Meloni, who’s kind of playing a double game.”

Meloni hasn’t killed her political opponents or had them deported to the gulag. She hasn’t committed genocide in Ukraine and she hasn’t invaded the Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Finland, or Poland. It is an absurd analogy, but Ben-Ghiat proceeded to try to tie conservatism to Stalin more specifically[.]

And comparisons to Stalin are a problem on MSNBC, why? It’s all pretty rich coming from a network that believes your children are not your own, has a weekly show hosted by a legendary anti-Semite, and has another host who famously said:

“I am not a progressive. I am not a liberal who is so afraid of the word that I had to change my name to progressive. Liberals amuse me. I am a socialist. I live to the extreme left, the extreme left of you mere liberals, okay.”

—That’s the host of the aforementioned Last Word, Lawrence O’Donnell, on November 5^th, 2010.

I AGREE — NOW DO GENDER AS WELL: NBC News: People think they can change their race — that’s just crazy!

FLASHBACK:

Maybe the reason one set of politicians was so eager to tar other politicians as Russian lackeys is because they were Chinese running dogs.

— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) December 9, 2020

THE TIMING ISN’T AT ALL SUSPICIOUS: Biden DOJ Threatens to Arrest Devon Archer Before Bombshell Testimony.

DESANTIS CRUSHES SCOTT FOR ECHOING KAMALA HARRIS’S LIES:

Instead of working with DeSantis to push back against Harris’s lies, Scott repeated her attack, telling reporters, “The truth is that anything you can learn, any benefits that people suggest you had during slavery, you would have had as a free person. … I would hope that every person in our country, and certainly running for president, would appreciate that.”

Asked by a reporter to respond specifically to Scott’s attack, DeSantis responded, “Part of the reason our country has struggled is because D.C. Republicans all too often accept false narratives, accept lies that are perpetrated by the Left. And to accept the lie that Kamala Harris has been perpetrating even when that has been debunked, that’s not the way you do it. The way you lead is to fight back against the lies, is to speak the truth. So I’m here defending my state of Florida against false accusations and against lies. And we’re going to continue to speak the truth.”

It’s a huge own goal by Scott. What was he thinking? Exit quote: “Tim Scott siding with Kamala Harris, wasn’t on my bingo card, but in retrospect, it probably should’ve been.“

HAVING SOLVED OUT OF CONTROL HOMELESSNESS, SHOPLIFTING AND DRUG USE, SAN FRAN AUTHORITIES ARE FOCUSING ON THE CITY’S REMAINING MAJOR ISSUES: ‘X’ logo installed atop Twitter building, spurring San Francisco to investigate permit violation.

SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: The Lancet’s Scientific Chicanery on Mortality Exposed by CO2 Coalition.

A deception perpetrated by The Lancet is another example of how once respected institutions of the scientific community are not above abandoning principle to advance the fearmongering of a planet warming to purportedly dangerous levels.

As reported in the CO₂ Coalition’s online newsletter, The Lancet published a study showing that cold-related deaths account for 10 times the number of deaths due to heat – a comparison similar to other research findings about the relative danger of temperature extremes.

However, The Lancet pulled a sleight of hand when depicting the data in a chart to accentuate deaths due to heat and diminish those from cold.

The Lancet politicizing the news? Unexpectedly! Discredited Lancet study gets even more discredited. “The British medical journal Lancet published a study of civilian casualties in 2006 that estimated Iraqi civilian deaths at more than 2% of Iraq’s pre-war population, around 655,000.  Later studies produced numbers of less than a quarter of Lancet‘s totals, and the authors of the study were largely discredited.  Now a research association has publicly rebuked Gilbert Burnham for not disclosing his methodology, and Burnham may face action from his employer, Johns Hopkins[.]”

QUESTION FOR INSTAPUNDITEER LOGICIANS: The Principle of Non-Contradiction holds that A cannot at one and the same time also be Non-A. Does that mean trans-gendering violates this first principle of logic? Asking for a friend.

EV DISAPPOINTMENT: What Happens When a Rivian EV Runs Out of Battery Charge? “If you read nothing else, read this: Don’t do it. If you have the range to reach a charger, no matter how slow, go there. If you do not have the range to reach a charger, pull over while you still have some battery left. Running an EV until it’s completely dead will only make your day worse and the recovery take longer. We’ll get to why, exactly, deeper in the story.”

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD, WITH NEWS YOU CAN USE: Are You At A Nursing Home Or The U.S. Senate Chamber? Nine Clues To Look For.

WELL, AI BIKINI BABES ARE ALREADY STARTING TO REPLACE INFLUENCERS: Artificial Intelligence as a Game-Changer for the Travel Industry. A Closer Look.