HIS NAIVE AND QUAINT BELIEF IN ELECTIONS IS TOUCHING, AFTER 2020: Lindsey Graham: “I don’t know how Kamala Harris doesn’t get impeached” If Republicans Retake House in 2022.
SO, LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE THE OCCUPYING JUNTA DOES? Biden’s climate ‘fix’ is fantastically expensive and perfectly useless-Bjorn Lomborg.
And oh, it’s only useless if you think its purpose is to fight anthropogenic global warming. climate change. It’s very useful in reducing America and fulfilling the dreams of their Chinese masters. (Spoiler, it’s okay. They’re not getting away with it.)
I’VE BEEN SEEING THIS STUFF SINCE MY ADULT SONS WERE TODDLERS: Creepy Children’s Climate Video: What if Humans Disappeared?
The left has a passion for suicide. But are too cowardly to just do it. Whenever they make projects like this, we should send everyone responsible a plastic bag and a rubber-band.
MAYBE. BRIEFLY. AND THEN IT FLIPS: Could American culture and society undergo “verzuiling” (pillarization, ‘silo-fication’)?
BILL CASSIDY SHOULD LAY OFF THE METH: Louisiana Republican Senator Bill Cassidy Believes Trump’s MAGA Movement is Over – Boy Are They In For A Surprise.
MAGA didn’t start with Trump MAGA found Trump. And Trump isn’t done. For which the left should be thankful. If they really get rid of Trump, they won’t like what comes after.
AND SPEAKING OF MIRRORS: The Left and the Mirror.
SO, WITHOUT NUMBER GAMES, IT WILL KILL AS MANY PEOPLE AS A BAD FLU SEASON? Updates on CCP Virus: UK Study Finds New Variant May Be More Deadly.
Thanks muchly. The human species has survived worse.
WASTEFUL AND CRIMINALLY STUPID: $32 Billion for Public Transit in COVID-19 Relief Bill Wasteful: Researcher.
This was not a real virus emergency. Had this been a real virus emergency, though, public transit systems would rapidly have become what’s known as “virus transmission centers.” Well, in countries that use them. The US, by and large doesn’t, with notable exceptions like NYC where Billy the Red and Fredo’s Brother reduced the number of trains, so they could pack people in and maximize infections.
BECAUSE THEY DON’T OWN MIRRORS: Tossing Hitler Around Like Candy.
SURE. DESTROYING UBER IS WHAT THEY INTEND: The Democrats Just Reintroduced a Labor Law that Would Destroy Uber—And It Could Actually Pass This Time.
But the left doesn’t get — and probably never will — unintended consequences. This will also kill most of the arts. HARD. And a lot of things like, people who read books to make audio books.
The left has this dream that they can take us, kicking and screaming to the 30s. the 1930s. And they’re not going to let tech, reality or sanity stand in their way.
This is going to end badly. For them.
OR A SAD ONE, OR A RAGEY ONE: Be A Happy Warrior.
Just don’t cower under the bed. Not if you care what comes after us.
HEY, NOW, I DIDN’T KNOW MY ANALYSIS OF THE CURRENT SITUATION HAD HISTORICAL PRECEDENTS! The Thirty Tyrants.
Don’t tell dad I didn’t spot the parallel. He’d probably disown me. Or laugh at me.
Seriously, the next year or (tops) two are going to suck. But they’re going to suck far worse for them than for us. And in the end we win, they lose. Most of what they’ve done for the last year amounts to a messy, public suicide. They keep twisting the knife in their own guts, while thinking they’re hurting us.
PROOF POSITIVE THAT ALEXANDRIA OCCASIONAL CORTEX IS NOT THE STUPIDEST HUMAN BEING ALIVE: Yeah, I know, I was surprised too.
Here at Puppy Blending HeadquartersTM we have only two questions: a) What if we followed velvet instead? b) How does this man stay alive? You’d think once having inhaled, he’d forget to exhale, right?
Exit stage right singing Knights in White Satin.
February 14, 2021
THERE’S NOTHING BETWEEN AMARILLO AND THE NORTH POLE BUT A BARBED-WIRE FENCE. AND THE BARBED-WIRE FENCE IS BLOWED DOWN. Justin Michaels Demonstrates Just How Cold it Is in Amarillo, TX.
Two eskimos are crossing the Arctic ice when one falls through. He freezes immediately, but his friend manages to pull him out and chip off the ice. After he’s warmed in an igloo, his first words are “I’ll bet it’s cold in Amarillo today.”
These jokes are decades old, but still work. . . .
PAUL MIRENGOFF: “The Lincoln Project was a fraud from its inception.”
Plus: “Those who founded the Lincoln Project had various motives. George Conway was a disappointed office seeker. He had wanted not just to serve Trump administration, but to be its Solicitor General — the man in charge of defending the administration’s legal positions on behalf of the government in the U.S. Supreme Court. Only after losing out on this bid, and maybe others, did he turn against Trump.”
Also: “I’m fairly confident that the Republican Party will have a reasonably bright post-Trump future. I’m quite confident that this future will not include the frauds and vicious grifters who spearheaded the Lincoln Project.”
CERTAINLY IF KAMALA HAS HER WAY:
I suspect that Trump would regard a 2020 loss as a setback, not a defeat. Grover Cleveland came back to win a second term after losing the White House, Trump might reason. Why not me?
Especially looking at the competition.
TWO YEARS AGO, A PARODY ARTICLE: The conceptual penis as a social construct.
Now, in Scientific (Ha!) American: It’s Time to Take the Penis off Its Pedestal: A culture of phallus worship has slanted the science in crucial and sometimes unexpected ways.
JOHN HINDERAKER: Should Republicans Impeach Biden and Harris?
The day I read Liberal Fascism (and it was really a single day or, rather, a single night; on a flight 13 years ago across the Atlantic, I was supposed to rest, sleep if possible, but I couldn’t put the massively enlightening — and deeply troubling — eye-opener down), I went from simple admirer of Jonah Goldberg to fervent follower of Jonah Goldberg.
His regular NRO articles, which I started reading pretty much religiously, confirmed his insight into all manners of subjects — as well as his refusal to bow before the Left while setting them, and their ideas, straight (see half a dozen examples a couple of paragraphs down that have been linked through the years on this blog).
That is why I have been so dumbfounded by his attitude in the past four or five years.
By all means, eviscerate President Donald Trump all you want (although “a bane of humanity”! — really?!) — in 2016 I too was among those who were suspicious of the New York billionaire’s intentions — and go after the (rare) Republican who shows signs of delusion and/or derangement.
But can it really be that Jonah himself might be among the latter? Doesn’t he realize that the entire left is anti-Jewish (with numerous examples of antisemitism in the past decade(s)) and anti-Christian to boot — not to mention… anti-American?! . . . As I wrote in my book, the attitude (that of a gentleman, whether truly gentlemanly or simply virtue signalling) is akin to refusing to see the beam in your brother’s eye, because of your focus, indeed your obsession, with a mote (real or alleged) in your own eye.
Read the whole thing. No one has disappointed me more over the past four or five years.
AS A GENERAL RULE, PEOPLE WHO MAKE STRONG CLAIMS OF MORAL SUPERIORITY ARE GARBAGE: Inside the Lincoln Project’s ‘toxic’ workplace.
RIP: Rupert Neve 1926-2021.
We are very sad to report the death of Rupert Neve, perhaps the most important and influential designer in recording-studio history. Mr. Neve passed away at the age of 94 in his adoptive home of Wimberley, Texas, but his name will be forever associated with the British company he founded in 1961. He was quick to see the potential of solid-state electronics, designing his first all-transistor console in the mid-’60s, and would go on to create seminal designs such as the 1073 and 1084 preamp/EQ modules. Neve consoles became first choice for recording studios and broadcasters all around the world, and by the time he and wife Evelyn sold Neve Electronics in 1975, the company employed over 500 people.
In the early 1970s, Neve designed the $75,175 mixing console that was the centerpiece of Los Angeles’ famed Sound City studio, where artists as diverse as Barry Manilow, Fleetwood Mac, Pat Benatar, and Nirvana recorded many hits. There’s a hilarious scene 15 minutes into the eponymous 2013 documentary about the studio’s life and death in which the courtly Neve explains in detail to a befuddled Dave Grohl (of Nirvana and the Foo Fighters) the engineering principles behind the studio’s desk. When Sound City closed, Grohl would buy the desk for his own studio.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I didn’t know Rupert well, but he and I were friends on Facebook for over a decade, and he was a lovely, well-rounded and generous guy. I had, of course, admired his technical skills for decades before.
STILL WAITING FOR MY ACCOUNT TO BE ACTIVATED: SpaceX plans to boost Starlink network with launch.
DEATH TO ME! The New York Times and the creepy personal and ideological logic of public confessions.
If I were Donald G. McNeil Jr., I would want to tell The New York Times, and its publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, to go jump in a lake. Instead, McNeil chose to declare his love for the paper and proclaim his guilt for having “hurt” many hundreds of people. For McNeil’s professional death to have meaning, the party—or the paper—must be infallible. Death to me!
* * * * * * * *
Reporting for The New York Times about the Moscow Trials of 1936, Walter Duranty commented that “it was unthinkable that Stalin and Voroshilov … could have sentenced their friends to death unless the proofs of guilt were overwhelming.” Other newspapers signed off on Stalin’s executions, too. In fact, the New Statesman (Sept. 5, 1936) argued, the defendants had demanded the death sentence for themselves! Surely they must have been guilty.
Stalin’s most celebrated victims were themselves used to humiliation and self-abasement. As Robert Conquest writes in his indispensable book The Great Terror, “Their surrender was not a single and exceptional act in their careers, but the culmination of a whole series of submissions to the Party that they knew to be ‘objectively’ false.” Conquest tells of a former member of the Soviet Supreme Court who was informed by an interrogator, “Well, the Party demands that you, as a Bolshevik, confess that you are an English spy.” The man responded: “If the Party demands it, I confess.”
These days we repeatedly confess our racism and misogyny, suppressing any sense that we are perhaps not as sinful as we are told. Maybe we haven’t harassed, demeaned, or insulted anyone—but the very impulse to defend ourselves indicates our guilt. After all, we are all part of “the system,” and only a thoroughgoing racist would dispute the idea that the system is guilty.
Of course, America is not Soviet Russia, or, for that matter, Xi’s China. Our new political commissars don’t use torture, prison cells, and executions. Today’s woke ideology can be publicly attacked, unlike communism in the Soviet Union. Its critics are in fact legion: According to polls, most Americans of all genders and ethnicities think political correctness is a problem. But people are afraid for their careers, and so they remain silent—no matter how much “power” or “privilege” they ostensibly have.
And speaking of power and privilege: New York Times Defends Star Journalist Who Doxxed Free Beacon Reporter on Twitter.
Eileen Murphy, a senior vice president of communications for the Times, wrote in an email to National Review that “The inclusion of the phone number was inadvertent and when it was brought to Nikole’s attention, she deleted it.”
However, a Twitter exchange on Saturday – two days before she deleted the tweet – indicates that Hannah-Jones was aware even then that she’d posted Sibarium’s phone number. In the exchange, Uché Blackstock, a Yahoo News medical contributor, replied to Hannah-Jones, “Lol, and he included his phone number and thought you would actually call him,” to which Hannah-Jones replied only “Girl.”
According to the Times’ social media guidelines, “newsroom employees should avoid posting anything on social media that damages our reputation for neutrality and fairness.” According to the guidelines, Times employees are to “always treat others with respect on social media” and avoid making “offensive comments or do anything else that undercuts The Times’s journalistic reputation.” Employees who tweet an error or something inappropriate and wish to delete the tweet are directed to “be sure to quickly acknowledge the deletion in a subsequent tweet.”
Washington Free Beacon Editor in Chief Eliana Johnson told National Review in an email that “The behavior and the Times’s disingenuous response speak for themselves.” Sibarium similarly responded that Hannah-Jones’s “behavior speaks for itself.”
As does this:
In general, the New York Times is really delivering the goods these days:
● What has the New York Times got against Ayaan Hirsi Ali?
● N.Y. Times Doxxes Scott Alexander Because They Hate Free Speech.
● New York Times Turns Vital School Re-Openings Into Cynical Republican ‘Seizure.’
● The New York Times Retracts the Sicknick Story.
One author makes a modest proposal to solve the Times’ myriad woes: Starve the octopus. “The first step to ridding ourselves of the octopus is to stop being afraid of it. Oh my how terrified people are of the octopus. What if it comes down on you? What if it attacks you? What if you are cancelled and your reputation is ruined and your name dragged through the mud and you can never again get a job or a friend or enjoy a meal in peace. That is just another deception. The New York Times does not have guns and tanks to send against you. It cannot really hurt you. The next step of ridding ourselves of the octopus is to stop feeding it. Stop feeding the octopus. Just stop. Stop reading the New York Times. Right now. Never again visit that awful web site or look at that awful paper or that tweet or that awful article. Do not have that conversation. Do not click or press on the link your friend sent you who is trapped in its clutches. It is a boogeyman and if you fear it it will only get stronger and if you ignore it it will go away.”
UPDATE: Half of New York Times employees feel they can’t speak freely: survey.
More:
Hannah-Jones (and Stelter) stumble over Michael Crichton’s Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.
OLD AND BUSTED: Minneapolis City Council Calls for Defunding the Police.
The New Hotness? Minneapolis to spend $6.4M to recruit more police officers.
But why become a cop for a city whose government doesn’t have your back?
KEVIN WILLIAMSON: Ezra Klein Misapprehends California’s Problems.
A newspaper editor once described journalists as people who have the bad taste to learn in public. Ezra Klein, a rhetorician who poses as a policy analyst, is doing some learning in public, and learning the hard way.
But what would we do without him? Who but Ezra Klein could survey the wreck left-wing Democrats have made of California and conclude that the state’s problem is its excessive conservatism?
* * * * * * * *
Klein and others of his ilk like to present themselves as dispassionate pragmatists, enlightened empiricists who only want to do “what works.” Conservatives have long understood that our choice is not between a bundle of prejudices and enlightened scientific management but between a bundle of prejudices and a different bundle of prejudices. Klein mocks San Francisco for renaming schools (Begone, Abraham Lincoln!) while it has no plan to reopen them, but he cannot quite see that these are two aspects of a single phenomenon.
Klein is a practitioner of what Michael Oakeshott called “rationalism in politics.” What is meant by “rationalism” there is not “reason,” but rather the cultic conviction that all social arrangements and sources of human unhappiness are subject to scientific improvement through (generally) inductive methods. It is a superstition. It is also a cover for ideology and camouflage for bias.
Read the whole thing.
Related: California Exit Interview: Fleeing $17 salads and ‘general lawlessness.’
Kieran Blubaugh dreamed of living in California when he was growing up in Indiana. He played the Tony Hawk Pro Skater video game and envisioned himself skateboarding down San Francisco’s crazy hills.
After paying off his student loans four years ago, he landed a job with a tech company and moved to San Francisco. At first, life was heavenly. He had a seven-minute commute on his motorcycle. He could pay $30 to see Incubus, one of his favorite bands, a short walk from his apartment.
Soon, however, his California dream soured. Thieves broke into his locked garage and did $8,000 worth of damage to his motorcycle, doubling his insurance rates. His dog nearly died after eating human feces on the sidewalk. Seeing people either getting arrested or being treated for an overdose outside a nearby building was a regular occurrence.
“And I live in a nice part of town,” said Blubaugh, 33.
Not anymore. On Saturday, Blubaugh moved out of the $4,000-a-month two-bedroom apartment he shared on Russian Hill and moved to Dallas, where he will pay $1,300 a month for a place the same size.
It’s not that he set out to ditch San Francisco for Dallas. “But it was the financially responsible thing to do,” he said. Fortunately, his employer has an office there.
I’m eagerly looking forward to reading new developments in Glenn’s Welcome Wagon project, because this state really needs it.
HMM: Study: Zinc, vitamin C have no effect on COVID-19 infection. This, however, was a study in which already-sick patients were given zinc and vitamin C for ten days. “For this study, Cleveland Clinic researchers treated 214 patients with confirmed COVID-19 infection with either 50 milligrams per day of zinc, 8,000 mg. per day of vitamin C, both or neither for 10 days.”
The buried lede is that everyone in the study, in either the study group or the control group, was better after 6 days.
SHOWING MORE BACKBONE THAN I HAD EXPECTED: White House cites ‘deep concerns’ about WHO COVID report, demands early data from China.
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in a statement that it is imperative that the report be independent and free from “alteration by the Chinese government”, echoing concerns raised by the administration of former President Donald Trump, who also moved to quit the WHO over the issue.
A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy fired back with a strongly-worded statement, saying the United States had damaged multilateral cooperation and the WHO in recent years, and should not be “pointing fingers” at China and other countries that supported the WHO during the COVID-19 pandemic.
China welcomed the U.S. decision to reengage with the WHO, but Washington should hold itself to the “highest standards” instead of taking aim at other countries, the spokesperson said.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Friday said all hypotheses were still open about the origins of COVID-19, after Washington said it wanted to review data from a WHO-led mission to China, where the virus first emerged.
A WHO-led mission, which spent four weeks in China probing the origins of the COVID-19 outbreak, said this week that it was not looking further into the question of whether the virus escaped from a lab, which it considered highly unlikely.
The extent to which China had acquired deep influence within the W.H.O. — amounting almost to a takeover — before the coronavirus outbreak is a bit of circumstantial evidence that they were planning something nefarious.
Anyway, I’m delighted to see the Biden Administration making a stink about this, and hope they’ll continue to press the subject.
NOTICE THE DEAFENING SILENCE ON WOMEN LEAVING THE WORKFORCE? Michael Hartman of the Capital Research Center did, and in fact he predicted last summer that it would happen, thanks to the teachers unions.
NO. NEXT QUESTION? If The GOP Wins The House Should They Try For Impeachment Revenge?
ROLLING BLACKOUTS — THEY’RE NOT JUST FOR CALIFORNIA, ANYMORE: With a near record cold spell, Texas power grid warns of rotating outages if electricity demand overwhelms supply.
THOSE ARE MY PRINCIPLES, AND IF YOU DON’T LIKE THEM… WELL, I HAVE OTHERS:
STACY MCCAIN: N.Y. Times Doxxes Scott Alexander Because They Hate Free Speech.
Liberals once insisted that the First Amendment protected everything from the right of Communists to teach in public schools to the right of pornographers to produce films of women getting gang-raped. If you wanted to burn the flag? Cool — the First Amendment protected that “free speech,” too, according to liberals.
Liberals are still in favor of Communism, flag-burning and pornography (some things never change), but the kind of First Amendment absolutism that once characterized liberalism (e.g., the ACLU insisting Nazis had a right to march through Jewish neighborhoods) is long gone.
Destroying anonymity on the Internet for bloggers who stray outside the prescribed lines of acceptable opinion was a project undertaken last year by Cade Metz of the New York Times when he decided to dox the proprietor of Star Slate Codex (SSC). When Metz contacted the (inarguably brilliant) blogger known as Scott Alexander, the SSC proprietor immediately shuttered the blog and put up a post explaining what the New York Times was doing, i.e., trying to destroy his private life in order to punish him for allowing free discussion on his site.
Why? Because Star Slate Codex had become influential among certain computer geeks and venture capitalists in Silicon Valley.
See, that’s the thing about Internet anonymity — you can create a blog or a Twitter account using a pseudonym to say whatever you want, and this probably won’t get you in trouble unless you are so good at it that you attract a following and having real influence on public opinion, in a way disapproved by the liberal Thought Police. People like Oliver Darcy of CNN work more or less full-time to dox conservatives, and this is to say nothing of the SPLC’s massive research staff, which specializes in what Laird Wilcox called the “links-and-ties” smear method.
Indeed.
WON’T THAT JUST ATTRACT MORE? To keep backyard animals safe from cats, offer more meat and play.
NEWS FROM THE AMERICA THAT WORKS: SpaceX rolls last Starship off the assembly line ahead of “major upgrades.” “After an unusually long ~6 weeks of testing, SpaceX declared Starship SN8 ready for flight and ultimately pulled off a high-altitude launch that made it just a dozen or so seconds (~5%) away from a complete success – far further than anyone really expected. That surprising level of success appeared to lead SpaceX to reevaluate its plans and the strategic design of its test plans. . . . Ultimately, after Starship SN8’s spectacular success and last-second failure, SpaceX seemingly concluded that it was unlikely to need a full seven prototypes to achieve the first soft landing(s) and effectively killed Starships SN12, SN13, and SN14 in the cradle.”
IN MUST-WATCH CLIP, TRUMP ATTORNEY “MICHAEL VAN DER VEEN, CITIZEN” DESTROYS MEDIA:
[CBS News anchor Lana Zak] seemingly didn’t know what to say, and wanted to follow up on van der Veen’s assertion that the House managers doctored evidence.
To be clear for our viewers, what you’re talking about now is a checkmark that’s a verification on Twitter that did not exist on that particular tweet, a 2020 that should have actually read 2021, and the selective editing, you say, of the tapes. Is that how — is that the doctored evidence of what you’re speaking?
At that point, van der Veen is all of us when he lost it on her.
Wait, wait, wait, wait…that’s not enough for you? That’s not enough for you?
Zak indignantly jumped in to argue with him, not believing that he dared to question her.
It’s not okay to doctor a little bit of evidence. The media has to start telling the right story in this country. The media is trying to divide this country. You are bloodthirsty for ratings, and as such, you’re asking questions now that are already set up with a fact pattern. I can’t believe you would ask me a question indicating that it’s alright just to doctor a little bit of evidence. There’s more stuff we uncovered that they doctored, to be frank with you, and maybe that will come out someday.
To be fair, accepting faked evidence from the government par for the course from the network that brought you Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Katie Couric, and Scott Pelley.
THE GROWNUPS ARE BACK IN WASHINGTON! Pelosi Crashes House Impeachment Managers Presser, Melts Down Over Acquittal and Blames McConnell.
THANKS, PRESIDENT TRUMP: U.S. Troops Go One Year Without A Combat Death in Afghanistan.
MARDI GRAS MADNESS: The mayor said come to New Orleans, then the parades were canceled.
For the first time since 1979, there are no parades rolling through the streets and no stories of craziness from the parade-goers this year. In 1979, the reason was a new mayor and a police department that didn’t want to be led by his newly appointed police chief. A police strike was involved and the krewe captains canceled the parades themselves rather than be used as a pawn in the strike negotiations. It was a political battle. Now it’s a health issue.
Up until now, Mayor LaToya Cantrell and other city officials have welcomed tourists and encouraged visitors to the city. The welcome came with a request to respect the restrictions in place due to the plague. However, there is criticism that city hall has done little to enforce the restrictions. With Mardi Gras rapidly approaching – next Tuesday, February 16 – the mayor is cracking down. On Saturday she issued new restrictions to remain in place for five days, from Feb. 12 through Fat Tuesday, besides the other Phase 2 restrictions already in place.
On Saturday the mayor announced that the city shut down four bars that were violating coronavirus restrictions. Calls were made to city hall, alerting officials to the bad behavior. This came one day after her administration will ban all bar services and limit access to popular streets in the final days of Carnival beginning late this week. The big day is coming and they have to get serious about public safety.
Making a hash of Mardi Gras during the pandemic seems to be what Cantrell does. Though unlike last year, she can’t blame the Bad Orange Man for whatever happens. Flashback to last March: “Just so we are clear, the Mayor of New Orleans is blaming the president for her not acting as the Mayor of New Orleans. The amazing part of her delusion is how she launches into a long diatribe about ‘leadership’, all while discussing something that transpired as a result of her lack of leadership.”
As I wrote back then, “Mardi Gras was on February 25, and the partying starts at least two weeks earlier in New Orleans, a period when Trump’s travel ban was still considered racist and xenophobic by the news media. Oh, and speaking of which: [Local] ‘Health official says risk of coronavirus in New Orleans is ‘very, very low’ but warns of flu cases,’ the New Orleans Gambit, part of the Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate group of publications, reported on February 26th.”
JOHN NOLTE: The Gloriously Inappropriate and Problematic Blues Brothers (1980).
We live in a literal Woke Police State run by Big Corporations. Ironically, this was something Hollywood frequently warned us about — and now Hollywood is one of our most fascist enforcers. McCarthyism and blacklists have returned with a vengeance.
Well, as the (soon-to-be-blacklisted) Python boys famously suggested, you should “always look at the bright side of life.”
So, yes, there are some benefits to Woke McCarthyism… First off, it’s kind of fun to feel like an outlaw just for daring to enjoy a movie. Secondly, we certainly live in interesting times. Finally, now that movies like Animal House and The Blues Brothers have become the forbidden, like all things forbidden, you cherish and enjoy them all the more.
The Blues Brothers was always a terrific movie, a legitimately great musical-comedy. It’s aged into something even more beautiful, though, and not just because of Woketardism.
You see, in the 41 years since its release, we’ve lost all the legends the movie paid such affectionate tribute to: Aretha Franklin, Cab Calloway, Ray Charles, James Brown, and John Lee Hooker. They’re all gone now, and what a treat it is to watch them up on the screen strutting their magic. Each of their numbers, most especially Aretha’s “Think” and Calloway’s “Minnie the Moocher,” is a total show-stopper. You can’t help but sit with a big grin on your face mixed with an ache in your heart.
Yes, Giants once walked the earth … including John Belushi.
Best of all, you can sense the reverence John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd (who co-wrote the script with director John Landis) have for these giants. Not only are they eager to introduce their idols to a new audience, but during their respective musical numbers, Aykroyd and Belushi stay almost entirely out of the way. They generously (and appropriately) allow their musical heroes to shine alone in the spotlight.
Both the movie and musical history are better for it.
It’s a massively bloated Hindenburg of a musical comedy, redeemed by the goodwill of its two SNL stars, their brilliant backing band, and the film’s stellar guest artists. And as Nolte writes, “because of all that goodness and good humor and colorblindness and ennobling of the human spirit, The Blues Brothers could never get made today — at least not without everyone involved getting blacklisted by today’s Woke Nazis.”
KATHY SHAIDLE ON THE 1966 ROCK HUDSON/JOHN FRANKENHEIMER FILM SECONDS:
Much has been written about the multiple subtexts of Seconds — the Hollywood “blacklist,” as well as Hudson’s then-secret (more or less) gay identity; the crazy “Brian Wilson connection”; the extraordinary lengths to which Wong Howe and Frankenheimer went to realize their vision: For one thing, to thin out a section of Grand Central Station to capture their opening shots, they hired a woman in a bikini to create a crowd-forming spectacle at the other side of the terminal.
And all these factors do indeed add invisible yet palpable depth to a film that is in and of itself a stunning feat of storytelling, acting and technical prowess.
Liberal fans of Seconds praise it as — you guessed it — a chilling condemnation of shallow materialistic American consumerism and conformity. Yet few of them mention that when Hamilton gets his twice in a lifetime opportunity to savor the idealized progressive lifestyle instead, he’s miserable then too. Actually more so.
In fact, coming out as it did in that pivotal year between the early Sixties New Frontier/Mad Men era, and the late Sixties of Woodstock and Manson, Seconds could just as easily be read as a critique of the then-nascent youth “drop out” counterculture.
Read the whole thing.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: A professor at the University of Iowa tweeted that certain academic fields, specifically the classics, should be “dismantled and burned” in order for “white supremacy to be smothered.”
You know, if they keep this up, people might start judging “white supremacy” by its enemies. Is that a good idea?
WELL, NOW THAT THE ELECTION’S OVER AND TRUMP’S OUT: Democrats in rebellion against Cuomo’s nursing-home coverup.
Related: Cuomo creates COVID-only homes — after thousands died.
BLOWBACK: Louisiana GOP censures Sen. Cassidy over impeachment vote to convict Trump. Unanimously. That was fast. “We condemn, in the strongest possible terms, the vote today by Sen. Cassidy to convict former President Trump. . . Fortunately, clearer heads prevailed and President Trump has been acquitted of the impeachment charge filed against him.”
UPDATE: Not just Louisiana. Also fast.
REPORT: White House lawyers tell Meena Harris to stop using aunt Kamala to build brand.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ social-media-influencer niece has long used her aunt’s fame to boost her own personal brand — but now that Harris has entered the White House, aides have become increasingly concerned about the ethical implications of the promotional pattern, according to a report.
“Some things can’t be undone,” a White House official, speaking about niece Meena Harris, 36, on the condition of anonymity, told The Los Angeles Times.
“That being said: Behavior needs to change,” the official said of the niece Harris, whose ventures have reportedly become a sensitive issue in the newly formed Biden-Harris White House.
Isn’t that SOP for the Biden White House? Earlier: Biden brood already cashing in on Joe’s presidency.
MICHAEL BARONE: The Republican Party won’t fall apart this time either.
ROGER KIMBALL: Yes, Acquittal is Vindication. “The pandemonium at the Capitol was not the cause but merely the pretext for the unprecedented second impeachment by the U.S. Congress of a single individual.”
It was informative to see our rulers’ reaction when — after a long summer in which cities burned, businesses were destroyed, and people were beaten or murdered — just the tiniest taste of civil disorder came home to affect them.
Plus:
I think that an acquittal is a vindication. I know that there are some intermittently conservative organs that disagree. They believe, or at least they say, that Trump’s acquittal does not mean he was vindicated. The proposition that Donald Trump is in the wrong is an analytic truth for them. Like the proposition “all bachelors are unmarried,” they regard it as a necessary truth. It is something inarguable.
It is worth noting, however, that these are the same organs that couldn’t stop berating Trump—the most pro-life, pro-Israel, pro-prosperity, pro-middle class, and pro-American president in decades (maybe ever)—while he was president. And they are also the same organs that, come tomorrow, will be wringing their hands over Joe Biden’s pro-abortion, pro-China, pro-totalitarian attacks on American freedom and prosperity. They prefer whining to wielding power, I suspect, and actually seem to believe that an incompetent mannequin-like Mitt Romney is somehow more preferable as president than someone like Donald Trump.
And poor Peggy Noonan must be really unhappy.
No doubt. Also:
That touches on one of the two main reasons that the Democratic machine wheeled out their impeachment wheeze yet again. They are terrified of the voters—all those embryonic “domestic terrorists” Joe Biden’s Stasi is tracking—who, ignoring the wisdom of their betters, might actually get together and vote someone else like Donald Trump—if not the Bad Orange Man himself—into office again. That mustn’t happen.
They do seem really afraid, don’t they?
CHARGE THE DEMOCRATS AND MEDIA — BUT I REPEAT MYSELF — WITH INCITEMENT: Lawyer says his home, family ‘under siege’ as retaliation for representing Trump in trial.
When prominent “White Shoe” law firms represented accused Al Qaeda members, for free, we were told that everyone deserves a defense. But lawyers representing Trump have been repeatedly mobbed.
Remember, though, it’s all about protecting “decency” and “our democracy” and our institutions from that bully Trump.
Earlier: Biden Deputy Press Secretary TJ Ducklo Threatens Reporter: ‘I Will Destroy You.’
Joe Concha of The Hill tweets,”WH Press Secretary Jen Psaki announces the resignation of Deputy TJ Ducklo: ‘We are committed to striving every day to set the standard set by the president in treating others with dignity and respect.’ Note: Psaki was aware of the Palmeri harassment for 3 weeks and did nothing. Psaki, along with senior aide Anita Dunn, was made aware of Ducklo’s sexist tirade on Jan. 21. Only after the Vanity Fair story on Feb 12 did Psaki/the administration act because they had to. Without the VF story, nothing happens here. This accountability statement is laughable.”
I’m so old, I can remember last month when Biden claimed, “‘I will fire you on the spot’: President Joe Biden warned White House staff that disrespect would not be tolerated.”
KAROL MARKOWICZ: Cuomo Didn’t Protect Seniors From COVID-19. But it Was the Media That Covered it Up.
Things are not looking good for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. After receiving an Emmy “in recognition of his leadership” and writing a bestselling book called American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic, the toll Cuomo’s leadership has taken is finally emerging. On Thursday, the New York Post broke the story that Melissa DeRosa, one of the governor’s top aides, apologized to Democratic lawmakers for fudging the number of nursing home deaths from COVID for fear of being investigated.
Such an investigation was long overdue. One of the biggest scandals of the pandemic has been the number of nursing home deaths in New York City, many of them possibly linked to a March 25 directive from the Cuomo administration forcing nursing homes to take in people even if they had tested positive for COVID-19. It would prove a death sentence for thousands of seniors. And to fend off an investigation, the Cuomo administration underestimated the number of nursing home deaths by 40%. The true number was 15,000, not 9,056.
But this isn’t just a government scandal. It’s a media scandal. For while the Cuomo administration was sentencing seniors to death, the media was busy fawning over Cuomo in a series of softball interviews, many of them conducted by his own brother.
Cuomo has been a television mainstay throughout the crisis, particularly on CNN where his brother, Chris Cuomo, is a host. But it wasn’t just his brother who fawned. A June interview with CNN’s Chris Cilizza provided Cuomo an opportunity to tout his performance while criticizing that of then-president Donald Trump and Republican governors who had not gone along with economy-crushing lockdowns. Cilizza was more than happy to assist.
Exit quote: “‘Obviously, I’ll never be objective. Obviously, I think you’re the best politician in the country,’ Chris Cuomo said during a June 24 brotherly interview.” Though as Markowicz notes, “This embarrassing lack of objectivity had spread well beyond family ties. Cuomo-love affected almost all of the governor’s coverage.” Read the whole thing.
JOHN FUND: California’s Coming Recall Election.
GOODER AND HARDER: Gas up 18% since election, could surpass $4 under Biden.
RETURN TO NORMALCY:
● ISIS: We’re baaack!
● Houthis Bomb Airport in Saudi Arabia After Being Removed From Terror List by Biden Administration.
● Biden Makes History: First President in 40 Years to Punt on Contacting Israel.
● Biden Will Close the Guantanamo Bay Military Prison After ‘Robust Review’
● Nevertheless, Xi persisted.
GOOD ADVICE IN THIS ERA OF CENSORSHIP:
I BLAME RON DESANTIS: Will New York Lead the Way in Screwing Up School Reopening?
Related: New Biden K-12 Plan Will Cancel Sports For Nearly 83 Percent Of Counties.
Why, it’s as if “the president is abdicating his responsibility by outsourcing education to his benefactors in the unions, all while teenagers continue to take their lives, begging for help the Democrats are dragging their feet to provide.”
All of which is why: The GOP must hammer the Democrats on school reopenings.
DON SURBER TO NIKKI HALEY: Nikki, they still hate you and want you to die.
I see where Nikki Haley showed all the loyalty of a Mitt Romney as she dumped on Donald Trump. That’s the thanks he gets for appointing her ambassador to the UN, even though she virulently opposed his nomination in 2016.
How cute. She thinks this will endear her to the press.
That will never happen.
They hate her and want her to die.
Well, sure. She’s a Republican.
February 13, 2021
GRIFTERS UNDER PRESSURE: Maher To Schmidt: “Where Did The Other Money Go?”
INTERESTING BOOK ON ANTI-AGING: I am reading David Sinclair’s book Lifespan: Why We Age―and Why We Don’t Have To and am finding the suggestions he makes to live longer very helpful. The book is a bit technical but his tips seem to boil down to taking NAD boosters in the morning along with Resveratrol, Vitamin D, K and 83 mg. of aspirin. He also skips a meal a day or has a very small one, lifts weights and jogs a bit and goes in a sauna at the gym before dunking into a cold pool. I guess one could live longer with this regimen (perhaps) but being cold and hungry doesn’t sound all that fun. If you have tried some of these techniques, have they worked for you?
DEMOCRATIC IMPEACHMENT CHAOS: Schumer blindsided by Democrat impeachment managers: He didn’t want to call witnesses in the trial.
UPDATE: From a friend.
TRUMP ACQUITTED, AND THE LINCOLN PROJECT IMPLODING ON THE SAME WEEKEND. Seems like an inflection point.
THE NEW YORK TIMES HAS BEEN AFTER SLATESTARCODEX FOR A WHILE:
But if you strike him down, he will only become more powerful than you can imagine.
Plus, a Fisking of the NYT article. “This seems like a weirdly brazen type of falsehood for a major newspaper.” Only if you haven’t been reading them lately.
Plus: “The journalist involved hasn’t known about Slate Star Codex for three years, so this is undoubtedly the version he read, and he still chose to make this attack. I have 1,557 other posts worth of material he could have used, and the sentence he chose to go with was the one that was crossed out and included a plea for people to stop taking it out of context.”
Also: “I don’t want to accuse the New York Times of lying about me, exactly, but if they were truthful, it was in the same way as that famous movie review which describes the Wizard of Oz as: ‘Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.'”
MORE: You are writing about one of the most prolific and talented writers of our generation. How the hell do you not actually quote them? It’s kinda obvious, really.
IS THERE AN ANALOGY TO COLLEGE CAMPUSES? A Peculiar Side Effect of Prozac: Fish Swimming in Our Waste Lose Their Individuality.
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: ACQUITTED:
Up next: the battle to define conservative politics as Biden faces a new world. . . .
The ancien regime needed a Blue Tsunami to effect a restoration. But they achieved a mild and perhaps doubtful electoral surf despite a maximum effort. The impeachment was a second chance at pursuit. Its failure means the populists will be back.
Trump and the Democratic leader’s age means a new cast of characters will be coming on for Season 2. The Blue failure to smash the populists means people are now refiguring the odds. Expect new political startups.
The reason why threats to go after Trump in court are pointless is because the Biden administration, like every incumbent, will soon be on the political defensive. New challenges are going to put Biden between the hard rock of the left and even more obdurate reality.
Hang on: It’s going to be fun.
NEWS YOU CAN USE THIS WEEKEND: N.C. station airs viewer’s gravy and sweet tea advice for driving in the snow:
NO, MR. RASKIN, WE DIDN’T GIVE YOU OUR SOVEREIGN POWERS: James Bovard, writing for the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), points to something Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said during one of his numerous Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump:
“In his final pitch to senators on Thursday, Raskin included the usual hackneyed references to Abraham Lincoln and the Declaration of Independence. Then Raskin recited the first ‘We the People’ sentence of the preamble of the Constitution and declared: ‘You see what just happened? The sovereign power of the people … flowed right into Congress.’”
Maybe Raskin missed class that day at Harvard Law when the concepts of sovereignty and public servant were covered.
JONATHAN TURLEY: Did The Democrats “Tank” The Second Trump Trial?
IS IT IN COFFEE, TOO? Green tea compound aids tumor-suppressing, DNA-repairing protein.
TRUMP 2, IMPEACHMENT 0. The Democrats have converted impeachment from a measure of “high crimes and misdemeanors” to simply an indicator that the House of Representatives is controlled by the opposition party. Once again, people claiming to stand up in favor of institutions and traditions against Donald Trump have actually wrecked those institutions and traditions out of pique. This has done lasting damage to the Republic, and they don’t care. They never care.
As I told my twentysomething Con Law students, they have now lived through 75% of America’s presidential impeachments. Of course, if they were one year old, they would still have lived through 50%.
That’s not normal, and the source of the abnormality isn’t Trump.
UPDATE:
THAT’S DIFFERENT BECAUSE SHUT UP: BEFORE INCITING RIOTS, KAMALA HARRIS JOKED ABOUT KILLING TRUMP, PENCE.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Why You Should Practice Drawing From Concealment.
THE 21st CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: Yes, There’s a Safe Way to Have a Cannibalism Fetish. The Armie Hammer Story’s Not It.
QUESTION ASKED: What Happened to Officer Brian Sicknick?
ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: How much chocolate would you have to eat for it to kill you?
THE EMERGENT URBAN ANTI-PROGRESSIVISM:
Democrats have puzzled over why Biden did not perform as well in cities as expected, and conversely, why Trump seemed to overperform in them. Overall, Biden won major metro areas, but his slippage compared with Trump’s gains was notable.
Trump gained in every borough of New York City except Staten Island (where he was already a favorite) compared with 2016, recording a gain of 12 percentage points in his share of the total vote in the Bronx and 9 points in Queens. He improved his margin by more than 18 points in largely immigrant and working-class assembly districts encompassing Elmhurst, Corona, and Jackson Heights. New York City as a whole swung toward Trump by 7.6 points between 2016 and 2020, more than any single state swung in the election, as Trump picked up support in 58 of the city’s 65 assembly districts. Compared with 2016, he gained votes in cities such as Philadelphia and Detroit, the latter of which gave Trump 5,000 more votes than in 2016 and Biden 1,000 fewer than Hillary Clinton won. As pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson has noted, even though Joe Biden won major metros as expected, closer scrutiny of a number of blue cities reveals blue doughnuts: As Democrats increased their command of the suburbs, their hold on inner cities weakened.
No one expected this, and there certainly isn’t much about Donald Trump’s policies on trade, immigration, tax cuts, or conservative judges that explains it. It seems obvious instead that in the age of COVID and violent protests, progressive cities overplayed their hand. When you ask your residents to pay too much for subpar housing, pledge to defund the police as crime soars, and force parents to do things they thought their taxes paid teachers to do, you shouldn’t be surprised at the backlash.
Read the whole thing.
RECALL GAVIN NEWSOM CAMPAIGN REACHES NEEDED 1.5 MILLION SIGNATURES.
A major upgrade could be in order for California: Grenell lays groundwork for California gubernatorial run.
GOODER AND HARDER: San Francisco supervisor says lack of tourists has criminals now targeting residents.
Flashback: San Francisco’s New Socialist, Soft On Crime D.A. Is The Last Thing The City Needs.
Why doesn’t San Francisco make it official and simply elect Bane to be their D.A.?
Related: Down south, Los Angeles County Deputy DA Filing Defamation Lawsuit Against DA George Gascon.
THIS IS PLAUSIBLE, SINCE YOUR IMMUNE SYSTEM IS ALREADY PRIMED: One dose of COVID-19 vaccine may be good for recovered patients. Of course, it’s still not clear that people who’ve had it need to be vaccinated. I had an antibody test run and my levels were high.
BREAKING: Senate Votes To Hear Witnesses In Trump Trial.
Ted Cruz has some thoughts on potential witnesses:
UPDATE: Or not! Senate strikes deal, bypassing calling impeachment witnesses.
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