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Saturday Review

30 Years On: There are two aspects that make 2018 so different from 1988: Numero Uno: Nothing is considered funny for the sake of being funny. If you make a joke about Oprah, you must hate Oprah. If you quote Trump, you must love Trump. If you lampoon something idiotic on the left, you must live on the right.

And the result is always “I will never read/watch/listen to you again,” “Unsubscribe me immediately,” and, in my particular case, a woman who posted to all her friends, “I can’t believe I once dated that guy”—meaning, now that my true colors have been exposed, her eyes are opened to what a loser I was all along.

Numero Two-o: I’ve never seen a generation so convinced that there should be punishment for speech. And not just public scolding. Loss of job. Loss of livelihood. Permanently labeled as a jerk. A soap opera friend of mine was disinvited to the network’s reunion show because of some tweets about NFL players not standing for the National Anthem. We all know at least one example of a teacher or professor booted because of an unpopular statement.

The Vibrancy: If you look back at the population mix of cities like Baltimore and Detroit, they thrived up to the point where their vibrancy crossed the 25% line. At that point, the infrastructure started to crack under the strain of keeping the vibrancy under control. As the vibrancy spilled into white areas, whites began to flee, the vibrant-to-plain ratio began to quickly tilt to the former and the die was cast.

Propaganda Means Never Having to Say You Were Wrong: neo-neocon » Blog Archive » Crossfire Hurricane: the FBI spied on Trump. Hemingway lists a whole bunch of egregious errors, things that could easily have been ascertained with simple fact-checking. But I disagree with two points she makes here. The first is that it is surprising how many errors the story contains. It is not surprising; it is the Times’€™ modus operandi. What’€™s more, they are not actually errors. IMHO, they are purposefully and knowingly misleading. This is propaganda, not reporting, and the Times is very good at it.

Apparently, in order to drink so much cooking oil, Florida Man had to have his neck surgically removed.

A Diagnosis Of Liberalism, 1964 – What is certain is that a majority, and a substantial majority, of those who control or influence public opinion is liberal, that liberalism of one or another variety prevails among the opinion-makers, molders and transmitters: teachers in the leading universities—probably the most significant single category; book publishers; editors and writers of the most influential publications; school and college administrators; public relations experts; writers of both novels and non-fiction; radio-TV directors, writers and commentators; producers, directors and writers in movies and the theater; the Jewish and non-evangelical Protestant clergy and not a few Catholic priests and bishops; verbalists in all branches of government; the staffs of the great foundations that have acquired in our day such pervasive influence through their relation to research, education, scholarships and publishing.

Six Paces, Turn, and Fire: Dueling, American Style The chance of dying in a pistol duel was relatively slim. Flintlocks often misfired. And even in the hands of an experienced shooter, accuracy was difficult. Generally, pistols had to be discharged within three seconds; to take aim for a longer time period was considered dishonorable.

A Man, a Blade, an Empty Road |Zatoichi is a blind masseur who carries a sword within his cane. He often refers to himself as a gangster (yakuza), but he is more akin to a sly opportunist, a man whose handicap and lowly status drove him to become a person for whom skill with the blade became a way to come out on top in a brutal world.

Gaming the Minnesota System is So Simple Somalis Play:Somalis Are Just Like…Somalis Surveillance videos from a case prosecuted by Hennepin County show parents checking their kids into a center, only to leave with them a few minutes later. Sometimes, no children would show up. Minnesota scandicucks bilked out of $100 MILLION by their pet rapefugees.

Democrat Foreplay: Another element I pondered was one of the accuser’s statements that a) Practically every time they had sex he beat her, b) the sex with him, which she continued to have for months to years, was entirely consensual, c) the beatings were entirely nonconsensual. Are these logically tenable positions? If X=Y, as it did per her own statement, then what range of activities was she knowingly consenting to upon climbing in bed over and over and over? Are her revealed preferences consistent with her stated preferences? Is her tongue saying one thing and her something else?

SMILE! Earliest Portrait Photos Ever Taken Bring Americans From the 1840s to Life After Being Colorized

Silence Please. People crave silence, yet are unnerved by it.  Silence is not just the absence of noise. It is something in itself. For some writers it has substance, like sand that blocks the ears or water slipping over the body. For others it is a counter-sound, the “still small voice” Elijah heard after a tumult of wind and storm, or the speaking silence heard by Percy Bysshe Shelley on Mont Blanc. It may also be, as Rilke wrote, a medium through which we enter the hidden reality of things.

Free Popcorn Iz Verboten!“The Health Department came in,” said San Carlos True Value manager Danielle Matheny, “and told us if we wanted to continue giving away free popcorn and coffee we’d have to install a bigger vent system, a bigger and better sink in the break room — a lot of rules and restrictions they put on us.”

Schlong Song — Despite the geoduck’s likeness to the “wrinkled schlong of a deformed hippopotamus,” locals consider these hulking mollusks a prized asset to uniquely Washingtonian culture and cuisine.

The GLOB! The GLOB! Locals believe this giant ‘globster’ that washed up on a beach spells impending doom ”An earthquake is heading for Oriental Mindoro. The big globster is a sign of something bad coming. Please pray for us.” “Globster” is what people have taken to calling the mystery carcass, but it’s a term that’s actually been used since 1962. Scottish-born biologist Ivan Terence Sanderson reportedly devised it to describe decomposing tissue, corpses, or other stranded dead animals that come ashore—and inspire a lot of tales of sea monsters.

Not That There’s Anything Wrong With Seinfeld: Seinfeld’s legacy stems in no small part from its unforgettable phrases—“yada, yada, yada”, “not that there’s anything wrong with that”, “no soup for you”—that still feel relevant 20 years later. But don’t call them catchphrases, says Armstrong. “I wish there was a different word for it,” she says. Catchphrases, like Erkel’s “Did I do that?” or JJ’s “Dy-no-mite!”, are more like comedic filler that less inspired writers can return to throughout a show’s run. Seinfeld’s enduring phrases, on the other hand, tended to appear throughout a single episode and then never again—our memory of them is not so much a function of their repetition as of their brilliance

Preening and the Preening Preeners Who Preen : All the moral preening done by smug journalists in the White House briefing room is just that: melodramatic acting on screen. The sanctimonious prattle about norms and integrity are worn-out script lines, painfully and insincerely regurgitated from the era of Lippmann and Schlesinger.

The Black Gods of Racism: Sultan Knish: The religion of racism has become a twisted creed that has perverted its own origins. What began as a unitary effort to bring together different races around religion has instead become a cult that uses its beliefs to divide us with white people as perpetual sinners and black people as unstained saints. Its fetishization of black victimhood is bad for black people and its conviction that white people are inherently sinful is bad for everyone. As real racism has diminished, its conviction in the ubiquity of this particular sin has not. Fighting the overt discrimination of segregation turned into hunting for covert bigotry by working backward through disparate impact creating a guilt through lack of association.

The trouble is that the hunt for this particular sin has come to pervade our legal system, taint workplaces, terrorize campuses and unleash social media mobs on random offenders. We are not in a libertine age just because sexual morality is as dead as disco and drugs are on the verge of being legalized. The sins of traditional morality have been replaced by an even more ruthless moral code.

Faking It With Freud: He might’ve been a snake-oil salesman, but he sold a potion to cure what ailed the world: disgust at life disenchanted. That explains why Freud’s influence grows in inverse proportion to his credibility. The post-religious world is not in the market for clinical proof or historical consistency. What it wants is a palliative for the hysterical misery it derives from unrestricted sexual gratification and arbitrary self-invention.

Trump’s Triumphs  Trump the anti-semite is the best friend Israel has ever had. Trump the racist has instituted policies that have produced the lowest unemployment figures in decades for black and hispanic Americans. Trump the misogynist had a woman running his campaign (no, not Mrs. Putin), has a woman as Ambassador at the UN, another as the head of DHS, another as head of Education, yet another as White House spokesman, and now has made a woman the head of the CIA. Trump the oligarch has instituted tax and other policies that are putting more money into more ordinary people’s pockets than has happened in many years.

Time to Put Them Down: Raconteur Report: Leftism Is A Mental Disease We’re dealing with madness in rabid dogs.That always ever has only one recourse, of unfortunate necessity.

“Get woke. Go broke.” “People’s Heads Are Blowing Up”: As Fox News Installs a Meditation Room, Staffers Worry the Conservative Network Is Going Full Woke

A Woman of Many Parts: The Robot Next Door

The Big Apple Is Rotten: New York City is overrated. In fact, New York City sucks. One would be hard-pressed to find a more soulless, globohomo place than the “Big Apple.” The very sidewalks reek of careerist and barren women, effeminate, slump-shouldered men, and whining anti-American types who treat our once verdant shores as a monstrous piggy bank.

1st Amendment Blues:If the freedom of speech culture in America were to go the way of many of European countries (and to a lesser extend, the way things are here in The North,) then the Left will have total freedom to pull the trigger, and cast out all right-leaning opinions as totally verboten. In this scenario, the Left will finally achieve their goal of putting the sad and miserable types at the NRO, and other republican Conservatism™ voice, out of their misery. All right-leaning students will be banished from the universities, the sky will open wide, all opinions outside of established mainstream doctrine, all conservative and even moderately center-right publications and media outlets, including youtubers and independent bloggers, will suddenly be swept away into oblivion.

Superstition in the 21st Century: G.K. Chesterton observed that people who rejected the Gospel as “€œsuperstition”€ were most commonly themselves believers in fairies, séances, or something equally peculiar. This is still true today; between DIY witchcraft, “€œno-religion-but-spiritual”€, and lucky jerseys, the paranormal perspective on the world is flourishing in the twenty-first century like never before.

Monkey’s Dances: Women can’t distinguish between the monkey dance and the monkey reality. For a women, the monkey dance is the reality. Soaps are a bunch of very pretty monkeys in pretty clothes performing dances on steroids. Of course they love it.

April 1954. New York. “Actress Cloris Leachman at home with baby.

The American Town Survives: There are sixteen churches in town. The high-school graduation rate is ninety-eight per cent, the unemployment rate is two per cent. There is little crime. The median home price is around a hundred and sixty thousand dollars, which buys a three- or four-bedroom house with a yard, in a town where the median income is close to sixty thousand.

The Female Fool: What kind of fool would major in Women’s Studies? The kind of fool who loses her virginity at 14, goes off to Tulane, sleeps with her ex-boyfriend’s roommate, flunks out and then transfers to SUNY-Albany, that’s who. The only career possible for a Women’s Studies major is as a professional feminist, and there are only so many full-time gigs at non-profit “pro-choice” organizations to go around.

The success of 1990s TV shows like Seinfeld, Friends, and Sex and the City served as an advertisement for the idea that all the cool kids live in New York, having zany adventures with their colorful cast of attractive friends. The urban hipster lifestyle — tribes of carefree single buddies hanging out together in their cool apartments — is now as blatantly promoted by TV as was the suburban idyll of Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver in the 1950s. For all the media criticism that has emerged from the latest feminist resurgence, no one seems to notice this particular elephant in the room, i.e., the way TV sitcoms sell a particular way of life. Because this urban hipster lifestyle is in fact pursued by feminists themselves — all those ambitious 20-something girls in Brooklyn — they don’t notice it for the same reason fish don’t notice water.

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • BillH May 19, 2018, 8:23 AM

    Scream Franchise: It’s the akeitt t̶a̶l̶k̶i̶n̶g̶ painting.

  • Fred May 19, 2018, 11:49 AM

    Some’n ‘taint right. A person cannot drink 25 gallons of anything in one night.

    Leachman looks like an evil clown that lives in alleyway and snatches babies for dinner.

  • BlogDog May 19, 2018, 12:52 PM

    Does Florida Man have a congealed carry permit?

  • PA Cat May 19, 2018, 3:12 PM

    Having just visited Neoneocon’s site and read the comments, I eagerly await Gerard’s takedown of “when Harry wed Meghan.”

  • Vanderleun May 20, 2018, 8:14 AM

    And it is Blog Dog for the win.

  • Casey Klahn May 20, 2018, 8:15 AM

    The answer to the meme question of future man is, “yes, everyone in the future (now) is retarded.” Present company accepted, of course.

    Non Neocon: I, and I think many here, identified the FBI-Trump campaign nexus as worse than Watergate many months ago. That the Left doesn’t get this is astounding. And evil.

    The antebellum colorized pics are a look into the deep past. No, wait. The 170-180 year ago past is, in some ways, not incredibly long ago, when you take history into consideration. But, the faces. Holy shit. These people are not to be messed with. Wasn’t there a short-lived show in the 70s, where Monte Markham played a time-jumped fellow who didn’t like the taste of pasteurized milk? Now, take these jaw-set characters from 1840 and place them in downtown Baltimore on a contemporary parade day. Shit would get real instantly.

    Silence. I have exactly that where I live. No, you can’t have any of mine, but thanks for asking.

    Geoduck. Try one raw some time. They aren’t all over Washington, but Razor and Butter clams are plentiful. Dang. I live away from the ocean now, and my family wonders why I find the Atlantic farmed salmon from Costco to be tasteless. Coastal Washington is truly a place of wonder; we didn’t realize how much so when we were growing up there. I thought everyone had monster trees and impenetrable forests.

    Edvard Munch; the founder of Expressionism. A spiritual father to me. He never married, and was considered the handsomest man in Norway in his day. Models would interrupt him trying to paint and…okay, this is too salacious for a Sunday morn. Let’s just say old Edvard had trouble with women. I will let out that he’d try to live a hermit’s existence, but even in his doting young models would appear at his door to pose naked for the master artist. He was a living legend, who never expected, not intended, to live into old age. His famous Scream paintings sold for record prices not that long ago, express, in part, his mortal fear of just about everything. Life. Illness. Love. Chemicals. Politics. He was the ultimate neurotic, and The Scream has been dubbed the Mona Lisa of the 20th Century because it feels like the 20th Century. It was prophetic. Also, it was his father’s face, and somewhat his sisters’ (one died in youth and one went to the asylum). Also somewhat autobiographical.

    If I still have your attention, a great story about Munch is how his art was named degenerate by Hitler and considered officially excremental by the Nazi state in the 30s. Jump-forward to the old keener’s death in occupied Norway in 1944. The reclusive but famed artist was dug up by the Nazis, and in a play for popular sentiment, his body was paraded around Oslo in a scream-worthy spectacle.

    And his art was shit. Don’t forget that part.

  • pbird May 20, 2018, 9:21 AM

    Coastal Washington is still pretty Otay Casey. I don’t really think about ever leaving.

    Never cared for that painting.

  • Ishmael May 20, 2018, 1:25 PM

    Revealing comment about your ex amidst the quips about extreme reactions to criticisms. All this coming from Gerard is ironic to me- I once called out Trump here because of Trumps occasional clownish, careless statements (even though I support him overall) and Gerard insulted me personally, questioning my sucess in life vs. Trumps, etc.

    Woe to the person here that expresses an opinion different from the party line. Like ” Trump obviously acts like a dick sometimes” or “most Democrats are not bad people”.

    Hypocracy sublime today from Gerard, who despite all of his prolific cereberal discourse, seems unable to stop talking and listen with an open mnd to opinions that might not align with his. Sad to me, because he is a sharp person. And it puts a shadow of bigoted intolerance over the blog.

  • Jaynie May 21, 2018, 5:53 AM

    Once, in the late 1980s, right after my husband was first stationed at FtLewis in Washington, after moving there from Boston (and being delighted by the giant trees and two story tall rhododendrons) I took a drive up to the city. Seattle. Because I didn’t know anyone yet, and because my husband’s work was long hours and wee little time off, I drove up there by myself.

    So, I went into the famous Seattle Public Market. The place where the guys throw the fish to one another and do fun things for tourists.

    Moseying along and absorbing the atmosphere, I was having a good ole time. That is I was until my eyes fell upon the display of geoduck clams out on ice. What the heck?! No kidding, I thought that this must be a vulgar version of Candid Camera! And I actually did stop and look around. Having grown up with three brothers, my mind naturally went right to grade school boy humor. But no one else was pointing and laughing. And, of course, I had no local with me to tell me what those phallic clams were all about, so I just went on my way. But those clams sure do make a wildly strong first impression.

  • Vanderleun May 21, 2018, 9:59 AM

    And,needless to say, a lasting one. For me too.

  • Casey Klahn May 21, 2018, 10:08 AM

    Can I retract the comment above where I might’ve alluded to eating geoduck raw?

  • Vanderleun May 21, 2018, 11:12 AM

    No, and if you don’t behave I’m putting up the video of the event on PornHub.

  • Casey Klahn May 22, 2018, 6:29 AM

    Now, let’s talk about oysters…