OPEN THREAD: Disport yourselves in the comments.
Archive for 2024
April 21, 2024
WELCOME TO THE PARTY, PAL. IT’S ONLY BEEN OBVIOUS SINCE THE 2016 ELECTION. Two Former High-Profile Trump Critics Now Admit It: His Foes are the Real Threat to Democracy.
FUNNY, EVEN THOUGH NOT REALLY FUNNY:
Columbia is basically now Hamas with a bad football program
— Kamel Amin Thaabet (@K_AminThaabet) April 21, 2024
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Slovenia signs Artemis Accords. “Slovenia signed the Artemis Accords outlining best practices for sustainable space exploration April 19, the third European country to do so in five days. . . . The Artemis Accords, unveiled in 2020, describe practices that signatory nations should follow in space exploration, building upon the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and related international agreements. They include provisions on transparency and interoperability as well as preservation of space heritage, utilization of space resources and deconfliction of space activities.”
The Accords also recognize the right to engage in commercial extraction of space resources, via mining, etc. I’m delighted that this Trump-era diplomatic initiative continues to flourish.
SAILORS HAVE BEEN REPORTING THEM FOR YEARS, BUT LIKE PILOTS’ REPORTS OF SPRITES AT HIGH ALTITUDE, THEIR REPORTS WERE DISCOUNTED BY EXPERTS. Giant Rogue Waves Could Happen Much More Often Than We Realized.
TRUTH:
They didn't miss it.
They helped foment it. https://t.co/j8g2EhkFso
— Sunny (@sunnyright) April 21, 2024
Related:
Biden says the tiki torch whites in Charlottesville was the reason he ran for President. Now he can’t even be bothered to have a Sister Souljah moment with his own side over their antisemitism at Columbia, Harvard, MIT, etc. He’d rather burden the working class with their debt.
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) April 21, 2024
Plus:
We should see @mkraju asking every member of the Squad about this, and when they refuse to condemn or obfuscate, he should ask every person in Democratic leadership what they think about those responses. https://t.co/Cb8TY5XmdI
— Jay Caruso (@JayCaruso) April 21, 2024
And:
Why are people surprised about this? Socialist revolutions are always led by the brat children of the rich. https://t.co/7X3W0E1Fxt
— James Lindsay, full varsity (@ConceptualJames) April 20, 2024
A depressingly plausible look ahead by @michaelbd @NRO:
Rehearsal for Revolution https://t.co/eS4mKMSIwW pic.twitter.com/q709sBL6Ud
— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) April 20, 2024
Gird your loins. I will say, they may try something like that, but the country as a whole is sick of this bullshit, and I don’t think they’ll get much sympathy if they get a beat-down from blue-state police departments. And if they don’t, it’ll probably just throw the election to Trump.
VITAMIN D HAS HELPED ME: Medicines Aren’t Very Effective for IBS: Scientists Found What Works Better. The low-carb high protein diet is good too.
HOW STORIES ABOUT HUMAN-ROBOT RELATIONSHIPS PUSH OUR BUTTONS.
READER FAVORITE: VIKING Garden Hose Nozzle. #CommissionEarned
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Why America’s Richest Universities Are Protecting Hate-Filled Foreign Students.
Behind this increase lies the simple reality that only a comparatively small number of Americans can afford the mind-numbingly high fees that American universities extort from their captive domestic market. Foreign students, the overwhelming majority of whom are either the children of wealthy foreign elites or directly sponsored by their governments, represent a serious source of funding for American colleges, public and private alike. These students often pay full or near-full tuition and board, and help public universities balance the books in the face of budget cuts. More broadly, they augment revenue by helping to fill federally funded programs that are based on racial and ethnic quotas.
Depending on how you look at it, American universities have made either an exceedingly clever or else exceedingly reprehensible bargain: Quota-filling at a profit. While this practice is generally covered with asinine bureaucratic language such as “promoting diversity” and “fostering a cosmopolitan culture” for a “global community,” it is in fact a racket by which universities take slots presumably intended for members of groups that are held to be economically and culturally deprived—and on which the universities would be obligated to take a loss—and instead sell them at a profit to the families of some of the more privileged people on Earth, while also continuing to sell identity-politics platitudes as institutional ideology.
It seems obvious enough that foreign students who can afford the cost of full tuition and board without financial aid often come from the elite segment of their societies, which in authoritarian countries often translates into overlap with the ruling regimes. When it comes to the Middle East especially—though hardly exclusively—this privileged class is both outwardly “Westernized” and soaked in the antisemitism prevalent in their home societies.
Thus leading to headlines such as this: Pro-Hamas Protests Rage Into the Night at Columbia University.
As Roger Kimball asked yesterday of Columbia, “The whole unseemly spectacle raises at least two large questions. One, why are American colleges and universities such hotbeds of virulent antisemitism? A corollary to that question is why the antisemitism is more pronounced and reflexive the more elite is the institution? Right on cue, Yale was on board announcing its ‘solidarity’ with the Columbia protests, as were other tony institutions.”
MORE: Box ticked by John Gill’s handlers:
Biden has his own Twitter. Why no message from him? https://t.co/PWNqTHq9yD
— Pradheep J. Shanker, M.D. (@neoavatara) April 21, 2024
NOT ANTI-WAR; JUST ON THE OTHER SIDE:
They don’t just hate Israel. They hate us. https://t.co/oCSPFOFfz5
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) April 21, 2024
FROM COMPUTERS: Where do all those colors in space telescope images come from?
‘OUT OF THE FRYING PAN AND STRAIGHT INTO HELL:’ Glen Campbell’s wild ride from poverty to insanity.
On April 11 1966, Glen Campbell was drafted in as a last minute rhythm guitarist for a recording session with Frank Sinatra. Unable to believe that he was in the presence of his idol, he spent much of his time at the studio on Sunset Boulevard, in Los Angeles, gazing worshipfully at the man laying down the vocal for Strangers In The Night. The attention did not go unnoticed. “Who,” Sinatra hissed, “is that f______ guitar player?”
By the time his anonymous sideman had become a superstar in his own right, just two years later, Old Blue Eyes might well have remarked that Glen Campbell’s talents as a singer, no less, were equal even to his own. Along with an impeccable knack for phrasing and interpretation, the then 30-something Arkansan’s sense of implacable mournfulness – a quality later described by his fourth wife, Kim, as “a special sense of longing that lived in the centre of [his] soul,” – lent gravitas to the most unlikely material. In his telling, even the impossibly camp Rhinestone Cowboy sounded oddly forlorn.
In 2024, this ghostly quality is real. The new album Glen Campbell Duets: Ghost On The Canvas Sessions sees a man who has been dead for knocking on eight years now joined by a bevy of notables on a spirited reimagining of his final studio album, Ghost On The Canvas, from 2011. With contributions from Dolly Parton, Eric Clapton, Carole King, Elton John and Daryl Hall (among others), the cast list is indeed stellar. Inevitably, though, Campbell’s own oak tree of a voice refuses to be cowed into anything approaching shared-billing.
Campbell’s music wasn’t really my favorite genre, but he was a brilliant guitarist and singer who made it all look so easy — while quietly fighting numerous demons inside him. Read the whole thing.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Man Sets Himself On Fire To Show How His Side Is The Sane And Rational One.