HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO THE COAST GUARD: The Coast was founded on this day, August 4, 1790. My great, great, great, great grandfather William Cooke was a very early Coast Guard officer. I’ve never been to Wilmington, NC, but I understand from this video that he died mysteriously and that his house is part of the Wilmington ghost tour. I guess I ought to go.
Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. released a bizarre video on X Sunday, in which he tells comedian Roseanne Barr about the time he dumped a dead bear cub in New York City’s Central Park a decade prior.
In the video, RFK and Barr are situated around a dinner table in a home, as the independent candidate tells his story. He explains that he’s trying to get ahead of a story The New Yorker is working on.
RFK says he was taking a group of people falconing in Goshen, New York, about a two hour-drive north of New York City.
RFK tells Barr he was on his way there when a woman in a van in front of him hit a young bear and killed it.
“So, I pulled over and picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van because I was going to skin the bear… and put the meat in my refrigerator,” RFK says, as a visibly shocked Barr listens. He notes that the practice is legal in New York State under certain conditions.
RFK says he continued hawking with his group of acquaintances and ended up staying late. Instead of going home, RFK says he had a dinner obligation in New York City.
RFK then admits, without elaborating, that he had to go the airport after dinner and couldn’t go home.
“I didn’t want to leave the bear in my car because that would have been bad,” RFK says.
As Kate Hyde quips, “All of a sudden we’re supposed to act surprised that a Kennedy would leave a dead body behind.”
In any case, I really much preferred this story when it was an old Woody Allen standup joke from the ’60s.
VIRGINIA POSTREL: The Technocratic Temptation. Just sweep everything away and build from scratch….What could possibly go wrong?
Right now, I’m happy to ally with people who want to jettison the precautionary mindset that demands ever-increasing regulation and continually multiplies veto players. But eventually we’ll have to fight about just how much leeway the would-be builders get.
Many of our current problems stem from the backlash against the sweeping redevelopment efforts done by government at all levels in the mid-20th century. We replaced the top-down redesign of cities with procedures that made voluntary building more difficult. Simply going back to the “good old days” doesn’t solve the underlying problems of knowledge and permission. For that, you need to leave most building to markets and demand a high burden of proof—and true market pricing for eminent domain purchases—from government projects.
When today’s critics equate techno-optimism with techno-fascism, this is what they’re afraid of: Progress means smart people sweeping away whatever you value and deciding how everyone will live. Don’t be like that!
My favorite image of technocratic progress glamour, from a 1930 radio ad. See The Power of Glamour for more.
As I wrote in April, it’s all fun and games until you turn 30, your lifeclock starts blinking, and it’s time to don the doomsday hockey masks of Carousel:
Something extraordinary happened in the UK this week: the murder of three working-class girls was turned into a moral panic about working-class communities. Ruthlessly, with something approaching relish, the media elites dragged the public gaze from the frenzied stabbing of girls in a seaside town to the supposed frothing bigotries of the seaside town itself. In elite circles, angst over the evil visited on the children of Southport gave way to a foreboding over what lurks within Southport. In those terraced houses, with their white working-class inhabitants, so susceptible to online lies, so given to racial animus. These people want us to fear not the wicked individuals who terrorise our towns, but the towns themselves.
It has been a chilling spectacle. I am struggling to recall the last time the moral narrative around a horrific event was so mercilessly rewritten by those with cultural power. The week started with the grim news that a young man had invaded a Taylor Swift dance class in Southport in north-west England and used a curved kitchen knife to assault its attendees, leaving three girls dead and others seriously injured. And it ends with the elites focussing their fury and energy almost exclusively on the civil unrest that followed that act of barbarism. On the ‘moral deviance’ less of the killer who laid waste to three precious lives, than of those small sections of working-class society that erupted in fury at his killing. The establishment is back in its comfort zone – fretting over the alien morality and unwieldy energy of the white working class.
As this awful week draws to a close, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we are ruled by people who fear the anger of the masses following acts of inhumanity more than they do the acts of inhumanity themselves. You can deplore the riotous disorder that followed the Southport massacre, as I do, and still ask why that disorder elicited a more zealous reaction from the opinion-forming classes than did the slaughter that provoked it. To my mind, the street violence in Southport, Hartlepool, Sunderland, Manchester and central London was wholly destructive. Groups of men hurled projectiles at cops and, most despicabably, threw bricks at mosques. This was a betrayal of the quiet dignity the good people of Southport have shown following the horror that befell their community. And yet it is curious, concerning in fact, that this criminal behaviour seems to be occupying Britain’s moral guardians and policymakers more than the murderous nihilism inflicted on Southport’s girls.
The country is like a melting-pot, yes — but a melting-pot of molten anger. The government has laid the blame with everyone from “the far-right” to “the Russians” but this is to woefully and willfully misunderstand the unprecedentedly fractious and factional nature of modern Britain.
Vast levels of immigration — bringing cheap labor for the rich and decreased wages for the poor — is at the core of much of this anger. “White Riot, I want a riot of my own,” the left-wing Clash sang back in the day, but now any white rioter will be called “right-wing” simply because of the color of their skin.
This is exacerbated by the two-tier policing we have had for some time here. When non-whites riot, police tend to retreat, whereas when whites riot, police tend to charge. Prime Minister Starmer’s first in-office nickname is “Two-Tier” Keir — not an auspicious start for a man who promised to bring national unity.
White working-class boys are currently the most likely to fail at school and the least likely to succeed in life, yet they are told that their skin color confers “privilege.” Now they’re being told by the liberal establishment that their riots are the “wrong” kind of riot — but after applauding the riots of Black Lives Matter, it’s hard to put the genie back into the bottle just because he’s paler than they would prefer.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I disagree with Brendan O’Neill that “quiet dignity” is an appropriate response to atrocities. The government should fear the mass of ordinary citizens, especially when it’s treating them with such contempt.
Although the real buried lede here is San Fran Nan defending Teddy Roosevelt. Doesn’t she know that after decades of being the Democrats’ only acceptable Republican president, her party completely memory holed him during their cultural revolution in the summer of 2020?
The one thing that could have prevented collapse, headed it off at the pass, the one thing democracy was designed to do was warn of the danger through free speech. This was ruthlessly suppressed by prohibitions on "hate speech" which will now be prescribed even more forcefully.
This is called dual hatted: a trusted, non biased journalist who also engineers weapons or tunnels (presumably, I mean what else does Hamas engineer?) for Hamas. Fair and balanced. https://t.co/hUexEXhyLI
EVEN ZUCK WILL NOTICE THIS: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton Wins $1.4 Billion Settlement. “Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton recently announced that he won a $1.4 billion settlement from Meta, the parent company of Facebook, over privacy-related issues dealing with Facebook acquiring Texan users’ facial and biometric data without their knowledge or getting their consent.”
