The New Prurient Prudes

Watch Niall Ferguson overrule Stephanie Ruhle:

link

h/t Mary Beth at TOP

Doesn't Stephanie Ruhle sound exactly like Megyn Kelly used to sound?

Hollywood Values: Spacey, Singer, Spielberg

From the Crazy Days and Nights Blog (Hat tip to Vox Popoli)

This is the holy grail. This is what is on the horizon for some actors/producers and directors that will ruin them for all time. Until two weeks ago, I would have thought the chances for anything leaking from this was zero. People kept their mouths shut before even when the feds were questioning lots of people. The thing is though, lots of those people lied to the feds. Some were granted immunity and still lied. Why? Going to jail for lying to the government gets you Martha Stewart time and a book deal. Telling the truth gets you jail for a long time and no career or friends when you get out.
Can you imagine a place where Hollywood types and rich executives from around the world can gather in one place and have sex with underage boys and girls without any interference from any governments or parents? Yeah, well there was such a place. There probably is a replacement somewhere. The problem is in finding it. When people are flying in from different corners of the globe, it can be tough. When your only choice before was to fly in a private plane to a private island, people knew where it was.

I think there is some shady stuff going down in Joe Francis Land, but nothing like the hundreds of teen boys and girls that were raped and abused and forced to be with men for weeks and months on end.

Apparently with all types of local governments looking into sexual assaults and rapes committed by Hollywood people coming into the light, the situation on the island they all thought they had carefully extricated themselves from is back. Could be barely back or could be back where everyone goes to jail.

Today I am just going to focus on three of the players. They all have been on the island. They all have done some horrible things to tween boys and girls. No one they were with on the island was anywhere close to being the legal age of consent.

Heres my plan to deal with the liberals, the news media and hipsters!

Chinese Man Allegedly Imprisoned 500 Cats to Sell Them to Restaurants

Breitbart Blog June 14, 2017 by Katherine Rodriquez 

A Chinese man allegedly imprisoned 500 cats with the intention of selling them to restaurants so they can be served as food.

The man allegedly used sparrows and caged birds to lure the cats, both stray and domestic, into tiny cages in the city of Jiujiang in China, the Washington Post reported.

Police found the cats, some that were dying, crowded in cages in the sweltering heat, located in a small truck and a hut near the highway.

A police officer told local news outlets that the man sold the cats for 30 yuan ($4.40) apiece.

Police arrested the man, who is identified only as Sun, Sunday after another man filed a complaint with police about multiple pets being stolen from him.

Police said they would release all 500 cats if no owners collected them.

KLEM TV

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I don't usually get sucked into random YouTube ads but this one made me watch all the way through.

There is more info about their true story here. 

Noam Chomsky Calls Democrat's Obsession With Russian Conspiracy a Joke

Chomsky has always been cunning in more ways than one. Link

Bernie Sanders Compares Democratic Party To Titanic

"They would rather go down with the Titanic so long as they have first-class seats"

Is America in the mood for another plain-spoken New Yorker?

KLEM FM

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Listen at least to the inspired intro.

Speaking of wearing it well...

But, let it be known that Lena Dunham has called a truce on dissing Trump's looks. link

If she keeps her word (she was supposed to move to Canada), I shall cut her ample slack.

It's A Givhan That She's Racist

WaPo's Robin Givhan moves from: It's OK to refuse to dress the First Family to: Ralph Lauren is possibly the nation's most bipartisan American designer, in less than two weeks.  I think that signals progression in a closed mind.

KLEM TV

linky

Many of us here despise the media but who exactly is "the media"?

Speaking just of TV, is it Ted Baxter, Murray Slaughter, Lou Grant, or Mary Tyler Moore?  Is it whoever owned the station they worked for? Each of them played interconnected roles.

Bonus: The MiniApple's own Hüsker Dü do Love Is All Around

KLEM FM

linky

Marlene's German lyrics closely follow the very simple English ones. Test your German familiarity. I do like one distinction, however:

Wann wird man je verstehen, [When will they ever learn,]

Wann wird man je verstehen? [When will they ever learn?]

     I put the English version in brackets, not as a translation, but for comparison. My book-learned German says that wann wird man je verstehen should translate to "when will one ever understand."  But Google translate begs to differ and translates wann wird man je verstehen as "when will we ever learn." And that's just it -- Google has vastly improved the message and the meaning of the original song. It's the pronoun, you see.

     The original phrase "when will they ever learn" grates on me because it blames others for the human condition. In the context of the original song, it was very much an "us vs. them" mentality. According to Pete Seeger and a very eager postwar generation, war was what other people did. Nowadays, war is what the US does; "others" are freedom fighters. The German version is one step closer to the truth and Google is a full measure closer to the truth:

Not "when will they ever learn"; not "when will one ever learn"; but rather -- when will we ever learn?  It's the pronoun, you see.

      Pete Seeger is credited with writing most of the song, but a lesser-known songwriter named Joe Hickerson (who is still alive?) nearly perfected it by turning the song into a circle. Another example of such a circular song is Zager and Evans' "In The Year 2525." Can anyone think of others?

The song is also an example of a now rare artistic device called Ubi Sunt.

Rod Dreher: "Cheer Up, Conservatives"

The American Conservative:  Really good column by David Brooks today, in which he looks to the GOP’s future beyond Trump. Excerpts:

This is a moment for honesty. Valuably, Trump has exposed the rottenness of the consultant culture, and the squirrelly way politicians now talk to us. This is a moment for revived American nationalism. Trump’s closed, ethnic nationalism is dominant because Iraq, globalization and broken immigration policies have discredited the expansive open form of nationalism that usually dominates American culture.

And:

This is also a moment for sociology. Reaganism was very economic, built around tax policies, enterprise zones and the conception of the human being as a rational, utility-driven individual. The Adam Smith necktie was the emblem of that movement.

It might be time to invest in Émile Durkheim neckties, because today’s problems relate to binding a fragmenting society, reweaving family and social connections, relating across the diversity of a globalized world. Homo economicus is a myth and conservatism needs a worldview that is accurate about human nature.

Read the whole thing.  Brooks says that nobody knows what the next GOP will look like, but “it’s exciting to be present at the creation.” I agree. It’s about the only good news to come out of this wretched campaign: knowing that the old model is finally smashed, and the way forward is open for new ways of thinking on the Right. (more)

h/t Michael Haz

Who is Émile Durkheim?

KLEM FM

Asked about her husband Bill's infidelities, Hillary Clinton related the story of the Prodigal Son.

I was more reminded of Waylon and Willie.

linky

What's something way more people would enjoy if there wasn't such a negative stigma surrounding it?

Top voted Reddit comments...

Therapy. It feels good to talk to someone who you don't have any personal ties to.

Running just because you want to get somewhere faster.

Work less.
Our society has an unhealthy obsession with giving a 110% and would probably benefit from encouraging a better work-life balance.

Dungeons & Dragons

Going places alone. Dancing, concerts, movies, plays and the like. I know people do this, but I know many more who will not consider these activities unless there is at least one other friend there.

Six Reasons Why Progressives Used To Be Pro-Life

The following essay by Mary Meehan was first published in The Progressive magazine in 1980:

First, it is out of character for the Left to neglect the weak and helpless. The traditional mark of the Left has been its protection of the underdog, the weak, and the poor. The unborn child is the most helpless form of humanity, even more in need of protection than the poor tenant farmer or the mental patient or the boat people on the high seas. The basic instinct of the Left is to aid those who cannot aid themselves -- and that instinct is absolutely sound. It is what keeps the human proposition going.

KLEM FM

Link in case the video don't load

OK, this was inspired by Chip's previous post.  Note the very first line and bear in mind that the song is now over 35 years old! The DK's are a special--they managed to piss-off both right-wingers and left-wingers. Band leader Jello Biafra (née Eric Boucher) took on Tipper Gore in the 1990's link, back when Tipper Gore represented the "religious right."

My, how times have changed!


lyrics after the jump

News From The Towers On High...

A California company, Electronics for Imagining, paid $1.21/hr to employees -- people brought in from India. Link

Is this true? Possible? How?

Or is the right question: why not more often?

I'd like to hear a credible defense from the usual suspects.

The Kneebone's Connected To The Heartbone

An old family friend passed away suddenly last week of a heart attack: link

I remember Dave well and what he did for me and my family. Dave was the shop steward or chaplain there where my did worked. From the beginning, he was the guy who always made sure that the Printer's Union picnic ran smoothly every summer. The picnic happened every summer at Hoyt Park in Madison and was sponsored by the union and not by the company. Dave was there for the kids and for the grown ups. I remember competing for prizes in the gunny sack races and the eggs spoon races. We thought the prizes were generous. We kids, as we got older and outgrew the games, used to sneak off to explore the old stone quarries and the rickety old Hoyt Park ski jump, now long gone.

Dave mostly hung around the beer keg with the other printers. I stopped going to the picnics around 1976 when I was around sixteen, but my last memory of those picnics was the time I won a bottle of Korbel brandy playing bingo. "You're going to give that to your Dad, right Bruce?"

A year or two later, the newspaper and the union had a big falling out. My dad lost his job prior to the strike and he got a negotiated severance. I have all the paperwork from that time. Dave Kneebone was my dad's advocate. A year or so later, I met Dave again when my father drove me to the picket line in Madison so that I could interview workers for a high school journalism project. It was a freezing cold evening and most of the guys on the picket line wanted to keep moving rather than stop and talk to a pesky kid. But Dave remembered me and I mostly got my answers from him.

We met again briefly during the short-lived run of the Madison Press Connection. I was a volunteer upstairs in the circulation department, while Dave was always doing paste-up somewhere or seeing that the offsite printing was going well. In essence, being a printer.

David Kneebone, R.I.P.

Hippies Punching Upwards

[Posted as a retort to Glenn Reynolds' disparaging post on hippies, posted here]

Hunter S. Thompson writing about hippies in 1968, well before he got really weird:

The British historian Arnold Toynbee, at the age of 78, toured San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district and wrote his impressions for the London Observer. 'The leaders of the Establishment,' he said, 'will be making the mistake of their lives if they discount and ignore the revolt of the hippies and many of the hippies' non hippie contemporaries on the grounds that these are either disgraceful wastrels or traitors, or else just silly kids who are sowing their wild oats.'

Toynbee never really endorsed the hippies; he explained his affinity in the longer focus of history. If the human race is to survive, he said, the ethical, moral, and social habits of the world must change: The emphasis must switch from nationalism to mankind. And Toynbee saw in the hippies a hopeful resurgence of the basic humanitarian values that were beginning to seem to him and other long-range thinkers like a tragically lost cause in the war-poisoned atmosphere of the 1960's. He was not quite sure what the hippies really stood for, but since they were against the same things he was against (war, violence, and dehumanized profiteering), he was naturally on their side, and vice versa.

--Hunter S. Thompson, The Hippies (1968)

More of Thompson's thoughts on the optimal timing of being a hippy from the same essay are here.

KLEM FM

Dino Valenti of the Quicksilver Messenger Service wrote the song, but The Youngbloods made it famous in 1967.

I like the '60's era celebrity footage equally cut with "normal" people footage. I think I spied Sixty Grit with Carol_Herman.

Speaking of hippies, did you know that this summer marks the 50th anniversary of Ken Kesey's 1964 west-to-east Merry Pranksters road trip?

"Religious liberty should be a liberal value, too"

"The controversy around the concept of religious liberty — whether in the form of birth control mandates resulting from the Affordable Care Act, or nondiscrimination lawsuits related to same-sex marriage — can seem like a straightforward conflict between retrograde religion and the progressive state."

But in truth the battle over religious liberty is a conflict within liberalism itself. In one corner are the liberal values of pluralism and tolerance. In the other are the liberal projects of egalitarianism and administrative efficiency. The quick and decisive defeat of Arizona's attempt to clarify its state version of the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) is evidence that our increasingly monocultural elite class is inclined to resolve these conflicts in favor of its egalitarian goals. But, it should tread carefully. Read more

Skipping down to the last three paragraphs.

There may yet be legislative compromises that satisfy the demands of both sets of values. Perhaps RFRA-style laws can be worded to assure egalitarians that religious objections are limited to certain events and actions, and not directed at entire classes of fellow citizens. And health-care mandates can be recrafted to use public institutions, rather than religious ones, as the guarantor of egalitarian goals.

But let me enter a suggestion as a conclusion. Liberalism should have the confidence to tolerate institutions, even large ones, that have competing and contrary missions to those of the state. The very liberality of the managerial state is guaranteed by real diversity, not just of skin color and sexual preference, but of religion and values, too.

Real pluralism preserves the possibility of critique emerging within a liberal state. The interplay of individuals and diverse institutions encourages liberality and understanding at the ground level of citizenship — the gratitude for people very different from you who are still very solicitous of your needs. Whereas the strict ideological hen-pecking of the state creates a kind of existential dread, and intensifies the panic of the culture war — the fear that a loss on principle in one case is the loss of all power and recourse in the future. Legislators and jurists would do best to retain these two essential liberal values, by finding solutions that deftly avoid setting them against each other.

The Week via Hot Air