In his introduction to The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, the 1999 update of Ayn Rand’s early 1970s anthology originally titled The New Left, Peter Schwartz, the editor of the new edition, wrote:

Primitive, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, means: “Of or belonging to the first age, period or stage; pertaining to early times …” With respect to human development, primitivism is a pre-rational stage. It is a stage in which man lives in fearful awe of a universe he cannot understand. The primitive man does not grasp the law of causality. He does not comprehend the fact that the world is governed by natural laws and that nature can be ruled by any man who discovers those laws. To a primitive, there is only a mysterious supernatural. Sunshine, darkness, rainfall, drought, the clap of thunder, the hooting of a spotted owl— all are inexplicable, portentous, and sacrosanct to him. To this non-conceptual mentality, man is metaphysically subordinate to nature, which is never to be commanded, only meekly obeyed.

This is the state of mind to which the environmentalists want us to revert.

If primitive man regards the world as unknowable, how does he decide what to believe and how to act? Since such knowledge is not innate, where does primitive man turn for guidance? To his tribe. It is membership in a collective that infuses such a person with his sole sense of identity. The tribe’s edicts thus become his unquestioned absolutes, and the tribe’s welfare becomes his fundamental value.

This is the state of mind to which the multiculturalists want us to revert. They hold that the basic unit of existence is the tribe, which they define by the crudest, most primitive, most anti-conceptual criteria (such as skin color). They consequently reject the view that the achievements of Western— i.e., individualistic— civilization represent a way of life superior to that of savage tribalism.

Both environmentalism and multiculturalism wish to destroy the values of a rational, industrial age. Both are scions of the New Left, zealously carrying on its campaign of sacrificing progress to primitivism.

In addition to the shocking Islamic terrorist attack yesterday in London, a troika of pop culture-related stories making the rounds today reminds us that reprimitivization is well on its way.

First up,  “Movement to Normalize Pedophilia Finds Its Poster Girl,” Stacy McCain writes in the American Spectator:

In January, Rush Limbaugh warned that there was “an effort under way to normalize pedophilia,” and was ridiculed by liberals (including CNN’s Soledad O’Brien) for saying so. But now liberals have joined a crusade that, if successful, would effectively legalize sex with 14-year-olds in Florida.

The case involves Kaitlyn Ashley Hunt, an 18-year-old in Sebastian, Florida, who was arrested in February after admitting that she had a lesbian affair with a 14-year high-school freshman. (Click here to read the affidavit in Hunt’s arrest.) It is a felony in Florida to have sex with 14-year-olds. Hunt was expelled from Sebastian High School — where she and the younger girl had sex in a restroom stall — and charged with two counts of “felony lewd and lascivious battery on a child.” The charges could put Hunt in prison for up to 15 years. Prosecutors have offered Hunt a plea bargain that would spare her jail time, but her supporters have organized an online crusade to have her let off scot-free — in effect, nullifying Florida’s law, which sets the age of consent at 16.

Using the slogan “Stop the Hate, Free Kate” (the Twitter hashtag is #FreeKate) this social-media campaign has attracted the support of liberals including Chris Hayes of MSNBC, Daily Kos, Think Progress and the gay-rights group Equality Florida. Undoubtedly, part of the appeal of the case is that Hunt is a petite attractive green-eyed blonde. One critic wondered on Twitter how long activists have “been waiting for a properly photogenic poster child of the correct gender to come along?”

Portraying Hunt as the victim of prejudice, her supporters claim she was only prosecuted because she is homosexual and because the parents of the unnamed 14-year-old are “bigoted religious zealots,” as Hunt’s mother said in a poorly written Facebook post. The apparent public-relations strategy was described by Matthew Philbin of Newsbusters: “If you can play the gay card, you immediately trigger knee-jerk support from the liberal media and homosexual activists anxious to topple any and all rules regarding sex.”

Meanwhile, giant cable television conglomerate Viacom must be especially proud of MTV today, as we’ll discuss right after the page break.

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“Feminist shenanigans or satire?” Take the test proffered by Christina Hoff Sommers of the American Enterprise Institute last month. “Below are five stories about feminist antics. One is pure invention, the others are true. Can you tell which one is false?”,  Sommers asked.

At the risk of spoiling someone’s fun before they take the test, this is one is true, according to Sommers:

2. Observation by a feminist musicologist concerning rape and sexual abuse themes in Beethoven’s last symphony:

The point of recapitulation in the first movement of the Ninth is one of the most horrifying moments in music, as the carefully prepared cadence is frustrated, damming up energy which finally explodes in the throttling, murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release.

In the answers section, Sommers writes:

The quote about rape themes in Beethoven’s Ninth is real. It is from a 1987 article by feminist musicologist Susan McClary that appeared in the Minnesota Composers Forum Newsletter. McClary, formerly a provost at UCLA, is now professor of musicology and feminist music criticism at Case Western Reserve.

You know what else isn’t satire? Time magazine asking today, “Is Mother’s Day Sexist?”

Clearly, Sexism is everywhere. But then, so is racism, as James Taranto noted in an item at the bottom of his Best of the Web column:

Have you seen that awesome video of Charles Ramsey, the hero neighbor who rescued three kidnapped Cleveland women? If you have, Slate’s Aisha Harris disapproves of you, you racist:

It’s difficult to watch these videos and not sense that their popularity has something to do with a persistent, if unconscious, desire to see black people perform. Even before the genuinely heroic Ramsey came along, some viewers had expressed concern that the laughter directed at people like Sweet Brown plays into the most basic stereotyping of blacks as simple-minded ramblers living in the “ghetto,” socially out of step with the rest of educated America. Black or white, seeing Clark and Dodson merely as funny instances of random poor people talking nonsense is disrespectful at best. And shushing away the question of race seems like wishful thinking.

Do you enjoy the comic stylings of Richard Pryor or Chris Rock? The acting of Denzel Washington or Halle Berry? The music of Thelonious Monk or Beyoncé? The athletic feats of Jackie Robinson or LeBron James? If so, you too may be a racist.

Perhaps Slate is looking for racism in all the wrong places.

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Nobody covers breaking news like NPR, which is still obsessed over the 2003 story of the Dixie Chicks and GWB. As Tim Graham writes this weekend at Newsbusters, “NPR Exaggerates How the Dixie Chicks Were ‘Effectively Blacklisted’ Under Bush:” while promoting a new solo album from Dixie Chick Natalie Maines:

When Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks said on stage in London days before the Iraq War began in 2003  that she was ashamed to be from the same state as President Bush, it caused a firestorm of protest among country music fans. But among the liberal media, they became the hottest property going. Their tour continued, they were naked on the cover of Entertainment Weekly to mark the protest and starred in a Lipton Iced Tea commercial spinning off the controversy.

When their next CD came out in 2006,  CBS’s 60 Minutes hailed them and their new album. Time put them on the cover and called them women “with the biggest balls In American music.” On Thursday’s All Things Considered, anchor Melissa Block told a much different tale – that they were “effectively blacklisted,” which drove Maines to take time off:

MELISSA BLOCK: But then came the collapse, after what the Chicks call the incident. It was 2003, just before the Iraq War. And on stage in London, Natalie Maines said the Dixie Chicks were ashamed to be from the same state as then-President George W. Bush. In a flash, country radio turned on them. They were effectively blacklisted. Angry fans smashed their CDs.

Later, they had to cancel concert dates when tickets didn’t sell. Natalie Maines decided to take time off from recording to be with her husband and two young sons.

Maines soon apologized for the insult,  and  President Bush took no offense and said it was a free country (unlike Saddam’s Iraq).

As Graham writes at Newsbusters, “The media wanted to paint the controversy only about hating war – because that doesn’t sound as oafish as saying you’re ashamed to be from Texas like that guy Bush.” But isn’t there a paradox here? Particularly given this self-serving line currently in the lede of Maines’ Wikipedia bio:

Maines considers herself a rebel who “loved not thinking in the way I knew the majority of people thought.”

Uh-huh. But if leftists really do believe that “the personal is political,” as they claim, then why feign anger at those who don’t share their politics, when they take the left’s political insults personally? Why all the moral indignation? (Of course, as Marshall McLuhan once said, “Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity.”)

On the other hand, as I wrote in a post on the 2006 Grammys:

Regarding the Dixie Chicks’ Grammy wins last night, Lorie Byrd highlights this unintentionally hilarious quote by former Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart:

I think people are paranoid,” former Grateful Dead member Mickey Hart told Reuters. “I think that if they speak out, they think they’re gonna get whacked by the government. It’s pretty oppressive now. Look at the Dixie Chicks. They got whacked.”

They did? Let’s see: magazine covers, Grammy Awards, a documentary movie. As Mary Katharine Ham wrote about the Dixie Chicks last fall, “Man, it’s rough being silenced”.

* * * * *

The current career path of the Dixie Chicks equals that of anti-American and/or anti-Bush actors such as Sean Penn, Danny Glover, Danny DeVito, Alec Baldwin, et al. Those actors have given up the brass ring of superstardom on the level of Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger during his pre-governator days, and Mel Gibson and Tom Cruise prior to their recent meltdowns. But they’ll never be without work. In a town as reactionary as Hollywood, it literally pays to toe the company line.

Incidentally, if the Dixie Chicks were ashamed of GWB for Iraq, imagine how much they must loathe the current president.

(As with NPR’s story, headline also recycled from the GWB-era.)

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Just when you think pop culture can’t descend any lower.

I’m guessing Don Draper would not have approved the above ad, even after the heaviest of all-nighter Seagram V.O. benders with Roger Sterling. Here’s James Lileks’ take, beginning with a link to a New York Post article on the commercial, the very definition of ill-conceived:

What is wrong with these people?

PepsiCo is once again learning the risks of celebrity partnerships after an ad for Mountain Dew was criticized for portraying racial stereotypes and making light of violence toward women. The soda and snack food company said it immediately pulled the 60-second spot after learning that people found it was offensive.

The ad was part of a series developed by African-American rapper Tyler, The Creator, and depicted a battered white woman on crutches being urged to identify a suspect out of a lineup of black men.

“For brands that are going after a young demographic, they’re always walking that fine line between getting in trouble and appealing to their audience,” said Laura Ries, president of Ries & Ries, a marketing firm based in Atlanta.

Oh, such a fine line.

* * * * *

If it had won awards and impressed many people with its “edgy” humor, they’d be proud to let you embed it. By all means! Yes, enjoy our sharp, brave ads – we’re always pushing the envelope, and you can help!

But they misjudged it, somehow. Really? How? Did they think the source of the idea innoculated them?

I wonder if anyone lost their job over this.

Yes, the liberal postwar overculture of the 1950s through the mid-1960s was “plastic,” as The Graduate claimed. Yes it was full of “phonies” and hypocrites as Holden C. warned. On the other hand, it had enough common sense — read, good taste — to instinctively reject a commercial such as this. Not only would it never have been aired, it would have never left the ad agency’s presentation boardroom.

But even if the above commercial wasn’t pulled by Mountain Dew — or, more conspiratorially, wasn’t designed to be deliberately banned to create that all-important “edgy” “buzz” — epater those bourgeois with that nostalgie de la boue! — what fine associations to make with your product.

However, Lileks couldn’t be more in error, when he writes, don’t bother looking for the ad on the Internet:

Pepsi went through the web and made sure it went down the memory hole. The ad no longer exists. The ad never existed. Those of us who saw it when it was permitted to be seen will be dragged screaming off to the loony bin. But it was real! There were fat white men and a line-up of frightening racial archetypes! And a talking goat! Uh huh.

Actually, the ad is all over the place. I found a copy on an Australian video aggregation Website; veteran blogger Pat Dollard has a copy; we have one above; and no doubt, so do countless others. So from that perspective, Mission Accomplished, right, Pepsi? The left-leaning Mediaite Website has a copy as well, embedded in a post titled, “Watch The Mountain Dew Ad Pulled After Critics Called It ‘Arguably The Most Racist Commercial In History.’”

But given how the left thoroughly maxed out the R-word beginning in 2008, what difference does it make to PepsiCo, to paraphrase a recent former secretary of State?

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T. M. frickin’ I.:

“When Jagger splashed some of his drinking water into the crowd, I got drenched — and then like any true fan, wiped the water all over my head, licked my lips to get some into my mouth. (This morning I feel like I’ve got some of Jagger’s DNA in my system.)”

– Randall Roberts, the Los Angeles Times’ pop music critic, yesterday.

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In a post titled “Anger Management,” Mark Steyn writes, “Former brother-in-law Elmirza Khozhugov explains Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s grievances to The New York Times“:

So he blew up an eight-year old boy and a couple of hundred other Americans.

And now the media are full of stories about how the Tsarnaevs were all-American kids and “beautiful, beautiful boys” and maybe it was the boxing or the Ben Affleck movies or the classical music but, whatever it was, it was nothing to do with Islam. Nothing whatever.

I blame The Catcher in the Rye. Particularly after the New York Times‘ Michiko Kakutani did, too, on their front page, to boot. (Link safe; goes to Newsbusters):

Given the layers of irony, sarcasm and joking often employed on Twitter, it can be difficult to parse the messages of a stranger. Yet some of them can seem menacing or portentous, given what we now suspect: “a decade in america already, I want out,” “Never underestimate the rebel with a cause” or “No one is really violent until they’re with the homies.” But others suggest a more Holden Caulfield-like adolescent alienation: “some people are just misunderstood by the world thus the increase of suicide rates.”

As Ace notes, Kakutani is “the writer they usually trot out when they need to have a conservative’s book reviewed for their book review.  Oddly enough, she doesn’t drip with such conspicuous sympathy for law-abiding people who haven’t murdered anyone.”

Presumably Kakutani will be calling for a parole of Mark David Chapman in tomorrow’s edition of the Times. He also had a Holden Caulfield-like adolescent alienation, which he publicly expressed in a manner as nearly as effusive as the Tsarnaevs.

Update: At Twitchy, “Bomber in the Rye.” And at the Breitbart.com Conversation, Iowahawk runs into Muggeridge’s Law, which posits that there is no way a satirist can compete with reality for its sheer absurdity. Or the New York Times, whichever strikes first:

Guy sends 268 people to the hospital, and the NYTimes want to rewrite him as the new Holden Caulfield. #BomberInTheRye

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) April 24, 2013

Over twenty years ago, Tom Wolfe wrote:

While Malcolm Muggeridge was the editor of Punch, it was announced that Khrushchev and Bulganin were coming to England. Muggeridge hit upon the idea of a mock itinerary, a lineup of the most ludicrous places the two paunchy pear-shaped little Soviet leaders could possibly be paraded through during the solemn process of a state visit. Shortly before press time, half the feature had to be scrapped. It coincided exactly with the official itinerary, just released, prompting Muggeridge to observe: We live in an age in which it is no longer possible to be funny. There is nothing you can imagine, no matter how ludicrous, that will not promptly be enacted before your very eyes, probably by someone well known.

Or as Iowahawk writes today, “When I tweeted that last night, it was in response to the Times’ bizarre stream of ‘poor little misfit alienated immigrant teen’ profile puff-pieces. It was (as satire is suppose to be) an intentional exaggeration meant to make a point. As God is my witness, I swear I had no idea they would ACTUALLY LIKEN HIM TO HOLDEN CAULFIELD.”

Too bad there aren’t any grownups left at the Times who would have seen such a passage and edited it out before the writer embarrassed herself; Gray Lady Down, indeed.

(Bumped to top.)

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For many, Richie Havens’ powerful voice and unique strummed acoustic guitar style (he tuned his guitar to a chord, which only requires one finger to voice. In Havens’ case, that one finger was his giant left thumb) was one of the highlights of Warner Brothers’ Woodstock documentary. As Bloomberg News notes in Havens’ obit today, he would later earn a comfortable second income as a vocal artist for TV commercials:

He graduated from street-corner doo-wop groups to singing with the McCrea Gospel Singers as a teenager. Fired from his job as a portrait artist in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village after missing work one day, he began performing music. His first album, “Mixed Bag,” was released in 1967.

He formed his own record label, Stormy Forest, which released six of his albums. They included “Alarm Clock,” which featured Havens’s biggest hit single, his cover of George Harrison’s “Here Comes the Sun.”

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Havens recorded television commercial jingles for companies including Amtrak, McDonald’s Corp. (MCD) and Cotton Incorporated, according to the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll.

Long active in causes related to the environment, Havens performed at the Environmental Inaugural Ball, one of the festivities associated with the inauguration of President Bill Clinton in January 1993.

He played a sold-out concert in 2009 at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, on the site of Woodstock, as part of events to mark its 40th anniversary.

Havens, 72, “died yesterday of a heart attack at his home in Jersey City, New Jersey,” Bloomberg reports. RIP.

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“Talking to your plants is supposed to be good for them,” the London Daily Mail reports, covering the important news in time for “Earth Day.” However, “if you really want the best blooms, you should blast them with heavy metal music:”

That’s the unlikely finding of a study by horticultural students who tested the effects of music on plants.

TV gardener Chris Beardshaw tells told Radio 4′s Gardeners’ Question Time that a constant diet of Black Sabbath worked wonders – but plants exposed to Cliff Richard songs all died.

Panellist Beardshaw, who has also been a familiar face on BBC2’s Gardener’s World over the years, said using rock music as a nutrient appeared to create larger flowers.

And although the plants themselves were shorter, they were more disease-resistant.

The test came about because one of his horticultural students wanted to write a dissertation based on the effects of music on plants.

He said: ‘We had one greenhouse that was silent and we had one that was played classical music, one that was played Cliff Richard and one that was played Black Sabbath.

‘The ones with Black Sabbath – great big, thumping noise, rowdy music — they were the shortest, but they had the best flowers and the best resistance to pest and disease.

But what happens, as musician Neil Smith asked in the mid-1980s, if you play your Ozzy records backwards?

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

By the way, am I only the person who’s ever heard this song? I remember it getting several airplays on WMMR or WYSP in Philadelphia back then.

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“Farmers Kicked Out of ‘Gasland’ Sequel After Questioning Director, Anti-Fracking Celebrity Yoko Ono.”

“Any farmer who had the temerity to question Yoko Ono or Josh Fox wasn’t allowed in,” McAleer says. “These film festivals want to be edgy, they want to be controversial and they want people to be passionate about film … but they only want a certain kind of passionate people.”

But then, we all knew her husband’s “Power to the People” shtick was just that:

“I dabbled in politics in the late 1960s and 1970s, more out of guilt than anything. Guilt for being rich and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn’t enough and you have to go and get shot or something, or get punched in the face to prove I’m one of the people. I was doing it against my instincts.”

Noted. So why is Yoko trying to hurt poor people and farmers by keeping energy prices unnecessarily inflated?

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A quarter century ago, in The Closing of the American Mind, Alan Bloom wrote:

A few years ago I chatted with a taxi driver in Atlanta who told me he had just gotten out of prison, where he served time for peddling dope. Happily he had undergone “therapy.” I asked him what kind. He responded, “All kinds— depth-psychology, transactional analysis, but what I liked best was Gestalt.” Some of the German ideas did not even require English words to become the language of the people. What an extraordinary thing it is that high-class talk from what was the peak of Western intellectual life, in Germany, has become as natural as chewing gum on American streets. It indeed had its effect on this taxi driver. He said that he had found his identity and learned to like himself. A generation earlier he would have found God and learned to despise himself as a sinner. The problem lay with his sense of self, not with any original sin or devils in him. We have here the peculiarly American way digesting Continental despair. It is nihilism with a happy ending.

This popularization of German philosophy in the United States is of peculiar interest to me because I have watched it occur during my own intellectual lifetime, and I feel a little like someone who knew Napoleon when he was six. I have seen value relativism and its concomitants grow greater in the land than anyone imagined. Who in 1920 would have believed that Max Weber’s technical sociological terminology would someday be the everyday language of the United States, the land of the Philistines, itself in the meantime become the most powerful nation in the world? The self-understanding of hippies, yippies, yuppies, panthers, prelates and presidents has unconsciously been formed by German thought of a half-century earlier; Herbert Marcuse’s accent has been turned into a Middle Western twang; the echt Deutsch label has been replaced by a Made in America label; and the new American life-style has become a Disneyland version of the Weimar Republic for the whole family.

Which brings us to the Dresden Dolls, whom Wikipedia describes as follows:

The Dresden Dolls are an American musical duo from Boston, Massachusetts. Formed in 2000, the group consists of Amanda Palmer (lead vocals, piano, harmonica, ukulele) and Brian Viglione (drums, percussion, guitar, bass guitar, vocals). The two describe their style as “Brechtian punk cabaret”, a phrase invented by Palmer because she was “terrified” that the press would invent a name that “would involve the word gothic”. The Dresden Dolls are part of an underground dark cabaret movement that started gaining momentum in the early 2000s.

* * * * *

The band’s first name was Out of Arms. At some point, the name became The Dresden Dolls. The name, according to Palmer, was “inspired by a combination of things,” including the firebombing of Dresden, Germany and the porcelain dolls that were a hallmark of pre-war Dresden industry; an early song of the same name by The Fall; and a reference to the V. C. Andrews novel Flowers in the Attic, where the classically blond-haired and blue-eyed protagonists are called “the Dresden dolls”. The name also evokes Weimar Germany and its cabaret culture. Additionally, Palmer “liked the parallel between Dresden (destruction) and Dolls (innocence, delicacy), because it is very much in keeping with the dynamics of the music, which sometimes goes from a childlike whisper to a banshee scream within a few seconds.”

You know what else can go from a whisper to a banshee scream in a few seconds? A pressure cooker bomb being detonated:

I honestly don’t understand why liberals run so quickly to sympathize with terrorists.

Amanda Palmer is a very quirky alternative rock artist who gained some fame while playing in the Dresden Dolls, and has since turned into an extremely un-traditional unorthodox performance artist with a loyal following and an interactive online presence.

This afternoon she tweeted out this sympathetic poem for the captured terrorism suspect Dzhohhar Tsarnaev:

“a poem for dzhokhar” – read it at bit.ly/blog042113#Boston #poetry #AFPblog

— Amanda Palmer (@amandapalmer) April 21, 2013

Blogger SooperMexican adds:

I was trying to remember a saying that Dennis Prager quotes often in relation to this post, and my good friend ConservativeLA found it for me:

The wise — as opposed to most of the highly educated — know, among many other things, that when you give people something for nothing, you produce ungrateful people; that when you obscure the differences between men and women, you end up with many aimless men and angry women; that when you give children “self-esteem” without their earning it, you produce narcissists who enter adulthood incapable of handling life; that if you do not destroy evil, it will proliferate; and that if you are kind to the cruel, you will be cruel to the kind.

Exactly right… the kind of hand-wringing overly emotional existential ennui that inspires these responses to evil disable us to look at it squarely and defeat it.

Not all evil can be “understood” – some of it just needs to be extinguished.

Sorry hippies.

Also, some of her followers have taken a very surprisingly unsympathetic view to my criticism!! Yes, you see, because I criticize their emotey-god, I am the hater, and should be reviled!

Huh. You’d think they’d have more empathy for an alternative point of view.

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When actual Elvis impersonators are doing actual ricin attacks, satire is officially dead. #BeamMeUp

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) April 18, 2013

And how. Here’s a news article today from the Ganett-owned Clarion Ledger of Jackson, Mississippi:

Who is Paul Kevin Curtis, the Mississippi man the FBI arrested Wednesday in connection to letters with traces of ricin sent to President Barack Obama and Sen. Roger Wicker?

Curtis, a Corinth resident, might be better known to some as a celebrity impersonator.

According to GigSalad.com, a website dedicated to booking live entertainers, Curtis does impersonations of “70 of the biggest names in music history,” including Elvis, Johnny Cash, Prince, Bon Jovi and Kenny Chesney.

On the website, Curtis goes by the stage name “KC,” which was used in the letters sent to Obama and Wicker and to Lee County Justice Court Judge Sadie Holland.

“I am KC and I approve this message,” the letters read.

The Blaze adds a photo apparently of Curtis, pointing a thumbs-up to a bumper sticker on his(?) Lexus that states, “Christian and a Democrat,” for what it’s worth. Plus this:

In a separate 2007 post on RipOffReport.com, a man going by the name “Kevin Curtis” references sending several letters to Sen. Wicker and other lawmakers about some legal troubles. He also claims he ran into Sen. Wicker on another occasion:

I sent letters to State Representative Roger Wicker, Senator Trent Lott and Thad Cochran. I never heard a word from anyone. I even ran into Roger Wicker several different times while performing at special banquets and fundraisers in northeast, Mississippi but he seemed very nervous while speaking with me and would make a fast exit to the door when I engaged in conversation leading up to my case against NMMC.

The Kevin Curtis from Mississippi who wrote the post on RipOffReport.com is clearly disgruntled over allegedly being fired years ago from the North Mississippi Medical Center after he claims he found “dismembered body parts” and a “severed head” backing up the hospital’s drainage system. He claims he received death threats and was threatened by police over the incident.

Want even more weirdness? If this astonishing story proves out, Curtis won’t be the first Elvis impersonator to be associated with ricin in Google. A search — and here are two words I never thought I’d be typing into Google — using the words Elvis and ricin brings up this item from February of last year at the Huffington Post: 

You ain’t nothin’ but a diabetic bomb hoaxer, cryin’ to the cops.

Michael Conley, a 64-year-old Elvis impersonator, allegedly locked himself inside a Florida motel Monday along with his 28-year-old son, after Ft. Pierce cops came to arrest him on an outstanding warrant.

Authorities say Conley held up a vial filled with white powder, claiming that it was Ricin, a poisonous plant byproduct that could kill a human with very little exposure. The suspect also claimed to have C-4 explosives.

A day later Conley allegedly blamed his behavior on diabetes, The Miami Herald reported.

“[The alleged Ricin] was just salt,” Conley told the Herald in a jailhouse interview. “I apologize to the public. I was disoriented.”

Right about now, I know exactly how feels. Well, maybe not exactly.

In any case, Malcolm Muggeridge, call your office…

While Malcolm Muggeridge was the editor of Punch, it was announced that Khrushchev and Bulganin were coming to England. Muggeridge hit upon the idea of a mock itinerary, a lineup of the most ludicrous places the two paunchy pear-shaped little Soviet leaders could possibly be paraded through during the solemn process of a state visit. Shortly before press time, half the feature had to be scrapped. It coincided exactly with the official itinerary, just released, prompting Muggeridge to observe: We live in an age in which it is no longer possible to be funny. There is nothing you can imagine, no matter how ludicrous, that will not promptly be enacted before your very eyes, probably by someone well known.

…Stat:

Bombing at Boston Marathon, mushroom cloud over Texas, Elvis ricin attack, presidential temper tantrum. #newsinbrief

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) April 18, 2013

Update: Through the looking glass, indeed:

Update: “Where Greta discovers alleged Ricin letter sender is a member of Mensa:”

Through. The. Looking. Glass.

By the way, we should send a link to the Lady Liberty blog, for apparently going down the rabbit hole first on this absolutely surreal story.

(Thumbnail image on PJM homepage by nito / Shutterstock.com.)

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John Hayward of the Breitbart.com group blog explores “Six Degrees of Steven Seagal:”

Could Steven Seagal be any more awesome?  I’ll bet every major event in human history can be linked to Seagal by no more than six degrees of separation.  Okay, maybe seven for the stuff that happened before he was born.  Well, the date he claims he was born.  I’ve seen period art from previous centuries that included background figures who looked suspiciously like him.  Especially during eras when ponytails were common on men.

“Every major event in human history can be linked to Seagal by no more than six degrees of separation.” Including PJ Media; I was assigned to interview Seagal for Guitar World — yes, Guitar World in late 2006, and having realized that I had reached the apogee of old media, I thought that clearly this was the moment to bow out on top, and maximize my efforts in the Blogosphere.

(That, and Roger Simon called, and asked me to produce PJM’s podcasts and Sirius-XM radio show.)

Click to enlarge. (If you think you can handle the awesomeness of it all, that is.)

Here’s the page in the February 2007 issue of Guitar World in which the article appeared. I had two other articles in the magazine that month, but they pale in comparison to experiencing the power and the six-strong glory of…Seagal:

I wonder if I have the tape or the WAV file of the interview I did with Seagal? It felt very much akin to interviewing Brando as Col. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now; Seagal whispered every answer; I kept waiting for him to say, “I watched a snail crawl along the edge of my Stratocaster. That’s my dream. That’s my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a Stratocaster … and surviving.”

Fortunately, I survived this one as well. At least I think I did.

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Matt Walsh delivers what “seems like a pretty airtight case,” Mollie Hemingway quips at Ricochet.

Perhaps I simply miss the stillborn John Cougar Mellencamp run for the Indiana Senate in 2010 — if only to hear his deep, deep thoughts on American foreign policy in a time of war.

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Don’t look at me, I gave up on Michelle Shocked the first time I heard her music on MTV around 1989 or so. At last, a much more reactionary audience in San Francisco has finally caught up with my cutting edge opinion:

In the annals of the Most Disastrous Shows Ever, there is a new entry. Folk-rock singer Michelle Shocked had the plug pulled on her concert Sunday night after launching into an anti-gay-marriage speech that led most of the audience to walk out.

Did we mention that her fans largely lean well to the left, thanks to the liberal politics that previously infused much of her music, and that the gig where she chose to come out (so to speak) as an Old Testament-citing preacher on homosexual issues was in the heart of San Francisco?

Word of the debacle began spreading via social media even before the operator of Yoshi’s interrupted Shocked’s performance to announce that, as a gay man, he could not allow the show to continue and she would have to leave the stage. Ironically, Shocked had spent much of the show asking the crowd to engage with her and even pick her set list via Twitter. It’s unclear whether she had any idea that, within hours, outraged former fans would be using that same forum to declare that they believe her career is over.

From all accounts, the first set had gone great, but when Shocked returned for the second set, she began talking about the evils that will result if California’s Proposition 8 is overturned by the courts, to allow gay marriage in the state. Shocked cited verses from the Old Testament condemning homosexuality, first in English and then, puzzlingly, in Spanish. She even told the crowd that they “could go on Twitter and say ‘Michelle Shocked says God hates f–s’,” although that particular line was interpreted differently by some on hand, as either ironic or completely sincere.

Sheryl Crow-style botched joke defense in 3..2…1..?

Also just in: wait, Michelle Shocked is straight…?!

Update: Related thoughts from Big Hollywood, which notes that “More cancellations pile up for Shocked’s current tour.”

More: A reminder from Jim Treacher, “Michelle Shocked and Fred Phelps are both Democrats, by the way.” Treacher asks, “Oh, and she also hates George Bush and was arrested at an Occupy rally a while back. Will those lefty bona fides help her now? Ha ha, just kidding.”

Heh. Perhaps Bob Woodward will write the obit for her career.

Speaking of which, Ace asks what he dubs a “difficult question:”

If her music was previously worthy, has it become unworthy now that she’s a homophobe?

Left wing people claim that it doesn’t matter, and relentlessly mock the right for our boycotts and refusal to buy into entertainments made by people who clearly hate us. At least, left wing people claim this so long as it’s right wing values being gored; the moment someone gores the left wing’s ox, they boycott like crazy.

So: Does it matter or not?

I think the word he’s looking for is: Siberia.

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Where are they now? Why, right here. twitter.com/SteveMartinToG…

— Steve Martin (@SteveMartinToGo) March 8, 2013

“Steve Martin’s ‘where are they now’ photo will make you feel old.”

That it does, that it does. (And yes, I immediately recognized everybody in the photo, since I stopped watching the latter editions of SNL, other than occasional YouTube clips, about 15 years ago.)

Speaking of SNL, I meant to link to this New York Times article on aging rock stars hitting their sixties (or older — Mick Jagger will be 70 on July) when it originally ran in December. One of the recurring vignettes in Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live by Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad are moments where the cast of the original SNL roll their eyes or openly trash an aging show biz pioneer if they spotted him wearing a toupee, or (in the case of Milton Berle), spraying paint onto his forehead to hide his bald spot, or wearing lifts in his shoes. Apparently twenty-somethings in the 1970s didn’t believe that age would ever catch up with them, or their idols.

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Naturally, all obituaries must reference “Going Home,” either in the headline or lede. “Alvin Lee Is Going Home: ‘Ten Years After’ Guitarist Dies,” NPR reports:

Guitarist Alvin Lee, whose incendiary performance with the British band Ten Years After was one of the highlights of the 1969 Woodstock festival, has died.

He was 68. Lee’s website says he “passed away early this morning [Wednesday] after unforeseen complications following a routine surgical procedure.” An assistant to his daughter also confirmed the news to NPR.

His band’s biggest hit — “I’d Love to Change the World” — came a couple years after Woodstock. We’ll embed a clip from that.

Of course you will. “Tax the rich, feed the poor, ’til there are no rich no more,” is practically the NPR theme song; although “except for me — I’m special and should be exempted” is sung tacitly afterwards by each member of NPR’s core audience.

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Great moments in Drudge juxtapositions:

• INCOMES DROP MOST IN 20 YEARS…
• Money left over after taxes biggest plunge since 1959…
• Bloomberg: Don’t Panic, USA Has ‘Infinite Amount of Money’…
• Obama Adds $6 Trillion to National Debt…
• Justin Bieber to teach kids about responsible spending…

Hey, The Bieb couldn’t do any worse than whoever is teaching our future politicians about “responsible spending.”

Related: From Stacy McCain: “Malaysians, and Other Foreigners I Might Be Able to Give a Damn About, If You Could Pay Me $389,724.70 to Care.”

OK, somehow, this has to be related. Create your own juxtaposition!

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“Hey Kids: Tonight You’re Young, Tomorrow You’re Unemployed,” Nick Gillespie writes at Reason on “The Grammys, Obama’s State of the Union, and What’s Really Wrong with Today’s Youth:”

…if a New York Times story that came out the same day as the Grammys is to be trusted, the kids today support the personification of wet blanket government – Barack Obama – far more than any other age range and the under-30 crowd is the only group who ardently believes government “should do more to solve problems.”  Which is really tantamount to saying that government should do more to cause problems.

In fact, in Tuesday’s State of the Union speech, Obama even proposed at least two new programs that promise only to make things slightly worse for American youth. All things being equal, his proposed mininum wage hike – from $7.25 an hour to $9.00 an hour – will only push under-30 joblessness upwards (mandating higher pay for unproven employees doesn’t make them desirable). And his bold proposal for universal preschool means that the four-year-olds of the future will have one less year to roam free (Obama also sketched plans to warehouse still more young people in colleges and vocational schools as well).

So knock yourselves out, kids, when it comes to boozy hook-ups at bars – or the ballot box for that matter. Set the world on fire, burn bright, and all that. Tonight, you’re young. Tomorrow, you’re either unemployed or working to pay for the retirements of the folks who are cleaning out the buffet tables before you’re even out of your seats.

Until you realize that the older generation is scamming you – contra the Who, they didn’t die before they got old – and you channel your inner Johnny Rotten, your future looks a lot less promising than that of fun. (who were also named Best New Artist last week) and a lot more like that of defrocked Grammy winners Milli Vanilli. Until you stop lip-synching along to the policies that are limiting your futures, this could be as good as it gets for you.

Read the whole thing.

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“Justin Bieber on SNL Emails Picture of His Penis to Hillary Clinton,” Noel Sheppard writes at Newsbusters. “So the folks at SNL actually wrote a skit wherein an eighteen-year-old boy sends a picture of his penis to a 65-year-old former first lady, former Secretary of State, and possible future president,”  Noel adds. “And people wonder why our society is in such a state of decline.”

Well, people may argue why — but that society is actually in decline seems like very much a given. Forward! — into oblivion.

Hey, maybe Jon “Peace in Our Time” Favreau wrote the sketch!

Related: “SNL cuts sketch in which GOP senators ask Chuck Hagel to fellate donkey [VIDEO].”

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As Ed Morrissey writes, “Maybe we should define ‘progress:’”

I find it rather amazing that the Washington Post can decry the decline of feminism and in the same sentence complain that CBS wants to avoid having women displayed as sexual objects with their breasts and buttocks on display for entertainment.  Talk about clueless irony ….

After visiting a “modern”* “art” exhibition in 1998, Theodore Dalrymple wrote, “modern sophistication demands a sensibility that nothing can offend or even surprise, that is ironclad against shock or moral objection. To be a man of artistic taste now requires that you have no standards at all to be violated: which, as Ortega y Gasset said, is the beginning of barbarism.”

Though perhaps the headline on Dalrymple’s essay on DH Lawrence gets a bit too close to the mark to sum up the view of the worldview of the Washington Post: “What’s Wrong with Twinkling Buttocks?”

Dalrymple’s lede to that article also sums up the Post’s current enfeebled mental state rather well: “A crude culture makes a coarse people, and private refinement cannot long survive public excess. There is a Gresham’s law of culture as well as of money: the bad drives out the good, unless the good is defended.”

* By “modern,” I mean, “art” designed to achieve the 19th century concept of épater le bourgeois – that is, the shocking the members of bourgeoisie who are not specifically of the bourgeois artist class themselves, by employing concepts that are themselves almost a century old. (Speaking of “Progress.”)

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