October 21, 2024
"I fear that Harris is every bit as vacuous behind the scenes as she seems to be on the public stage."
Said Bret Stephens, endorsing Kamala Harris, in "Kamala Harris Has an Unexpected Ally" (NYT).
"Once European fashion houses stopped pretending that they were ignorant of Black culture, they began to openly feed on it."
"Is this rightward drift among young men simply a short-lived, Trump-inspired episode or a more permanent transformation?"
Writes John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, in "Trump’s Bro-Whispering Could Cost Democrats Too Many Young Men" (NYT).
"The book’s first sentence now feels brutally prescient: 'Dying really didn’t hurt,' Navalny wrote."
From "How Aleksei Navalny’s Prison Diaries Got Published/In his posthumous memoir, compiled with help from his widow, Yulia Navalnaya, Navalny faced the fact that Vladimir Putin might succeed in silencing him. The book will keep 'his legacy alive,' Navalnaya said" (NYT)(free-access link).
"Each time we argue my girlfriend will go away and discuss the argument with chat gpt, even doing so in the same room sometimes."
From "My girlfriend uses Chat GPT every time we have a disagreement. AITAH for saying she needs to stop?" (r/AITAH). Via "Couples are using AI to fight — and win — arguments: 'ChatGPT says you’re insecure'" (NY Post).
"There were way too many kids and it seemed to her that since they didn’t speak the language, or didn’t understand what was going on, they were getting more attention."
Said the mother of a 16-year-old who dropped out of public school and enrolled in an "online homeschool," quoted in "In Logansport, Indiana, kids are being pushed out of schools after migrants swelled county’s population by 30%:/'Everybody else is falling behind'" (NY Post).
The Washington Post Editorial Board pushes Kamala Harris to pay attention to the upcoming 250th anniversary of the United States.
Efforts are already underway to plan the semiquincentennial, but they got off to a slow start, mirroring much of the country’s political dysfunction.
The federal commission appointed to oversee the proceedings, writes the Atlantic, “swiftly descended into a morass of charges and countercharges over process, favoritism, hiring, gender discrimination, and budget decisions.”
So here's what cued up the issue. There's an article in The Atlantic, published a week ago: "America Is Suffering an Identity Crisis/In two years, the U.S. will mark its 250th birthday, and the left doesn’t seem to care—giving up on America’s symbols and its very meaning."
The left doesn't seem to care. But if Trump is elected he will preside over the occasion, and he certainly seems to care. I can now understand the WaPo editors' decision to forefront this issue. There's a horror of the Donald Trump Birthday of America Extravaganza and a chilling realization that his Make-America-Great-Again theme fits enragingly perfectly with the occasion. Quick! Present a left-wing alternative vision!
The WaPo editors lamely suggest that Kamala Harris "try to persuade skeptics on her side of the political spectrum that the United States is indeed something worth celebrating." It's a little late for that. But the editors say she's "well-positioned to make this pitch, because as the child of immigrants and a woman of color, she represents in her very candidacy the progress the country has seen." As if this big occasion should revolve around her: Celebrate me! Because I embody what's worth celebrating!
The Atlantic article says that Biden dealt with the "meltdown" at the commission by appointing Rosie Rios as the commission chair. Under her, the key concept seems to be a "radically decentralized" social-media concept called "America's Stories" — a website where anybody/everybody writes anything. This would be inclusive, but it would include all the hostility against America that we expect from the left. Would they resort to censorship? They would have to!
The Atlantic writer, the Yale historian Beverly Gage, says:
For the past 60 years, much of American historical scholarship has been about exposing a darker story behind self-congratulatory myths.
Next time you propose a toast at a birthday party, try exposing a darker story behind the self-congratulatory myths.
As a believer in that effort, I have long shared the left’s ambivalence about patriotic symbols: the flag, the Founders, the national anthem, the Fourth of July. Today, though, I feel an urgency to reclaim and redefine all these things, lest they be ceded to those darker forces historians like to write about.
So you and your fellow historians devoted yourself to telling the "darker story" and now, as the people look to celebrate a big birthday, you are worried that they aren't going to frame the event around your dark story but will look to the kind of characters — the "darker forces" — that you've been disparaging all these years? People are drawn to the good — to an uplifting idea of what the country means — and you see that very optimism as an embrace of the darkness.
Nearing the end, the historian comes out with: "[N]ow that I think of it, why not wear the hat and fly the flag?" Well, for one thing, flying a U.S. flag at your house is regarded as equivalent to having a Trump yard sign.
We have a U.S. flag at our front door. But I'd consider bringing it inside for the next few weeks, because I don't like exacerbating the anguish in the neighborhood as the impending Make-America-Great-Again victory comes into focus.
October 20, 2024
Who better than Alec Baldwin to play the role of Bret Baier as a complete jerk in last night's "SNL" cold open?
"We expect our would-be tyrants to command a certain gravitas, to be earnest, play it straight. But Donald Trump almost never does."
Writes Sam Adler-Bell, in "The Music Man/Trump’s kitschy nostalgia is the point" (NY Magazine).
Trump said Abraham Lincoln was only "probably" a great president, because "Why wasn’t that settled?" ("That" = the Civil War.)
Meanwhile, there's only one article about Kamala Harris on the front page of the NYT at the moment, and it's not about problems with the way she speaks. It's not that she said "It's real," when someone asserted that Israel is committing genocide. It's not that she taunted "You guys are at the wrong rally" when somebody yelled "Christ is Lord."
October 19, 2024
Bill Maher has to — tries to — explain freedom of speech to Mark Cuban and Joe Scarborough.
Bill Maher warns Democrats like Mark Cuban and Joe Scarborough that their unfair treatment of Elon Musk is proving Republicans' point that Democrats do not care about free speech:
— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) October 19, 2024
Bill Maher: "He launches his rockets from Vandenberg Space Force Base, used to call the Air Force… pic.twitter.com/ATx5At09XG
"Liam Payne was just 14 when he took his first shot at the big time, trying out for the hit star-making show, 'The X Factor.'"
Writes Jennifer Weiner, in "There Is No Safe Way to Turn Teenagers Into Megastars" (NYT).