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Let’s Review 55: “Curate” Ate My Lists

The sudden ubiquity of the verb “curate” gives one the feeling that a sort of linguistic occupation force crept in and took over in the dead of night. It is as if everyone else went to a workshop on the subject while you were fast asleep, and then you awoke, like Rip Van Winkle, to a changed world, full of new locutions you were expected to adopt instantly, without the benefit of explanation or justification. When, and why, did break-ins become “home invasions”? When, and why, did the weatherman begin referring to rain and snow as “precipitation events”?

It’s Probably Nothing 1: Facebook failing, Zuckerberg and Sandberg absent: Meanwhile, executives are selling shares like crazy, including a plan by Mark Zuckerberg to sell almost $13 billion worth of shares by mid-2019.

It’s Probably Nothing 2: China is banning people with bad ‘social credit’ from using planes and trains

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. ~H. L. Mencken

President Trump: Rocking the Swamp With Who’s Next The president’s administration was in chaos in a time of national crisis, one in which the very fate of our free republic hung in the balance. There were internecine battles inside his cabinet, which was composed of many who opposed, and in some instances sought, his position. There were vitriolic condemnations of him as a “tyrant” and a “baboon” (among reams of other epithets) from the opposition party and the enemy. And, yes, there was a hostile press to report every scurrilous charge, juicy rumor and latest defeat regarding the president. Yet, while irritating, this was not the president’s primary concern. What mattered was saving America; and finding the generals he needed to do it.

‘They’ll squash you like a bug’: how Silicon Valley keeps a lid on leakers “You go into Facebook and it has this warm, fuzzy feeling of ‘we’re changing the world’ and ‘we care about things’. But you get on their bad side and all of a sudden you are face to face with [Facebook CEO] Mark Zuckerberg’s secret police.”

Forget Watergate. It will be the distant past once the Inspector General’s reports—there apparently will be more than one—start to come out. This will be the “Gate of Gates.” The Reckoning of the FBI Has Begun | Roger L. Simon

Don’t Let Liberals Win By Making You Care I guess this means we don’t meet your exacting moral standards anymore. Oh wait, we already failed that test – all of us have the blood of children on our hands because a school got shot up by some creep who wasn’t us that Democrat-led government agencies knew about and failed to stop.

Vegas Update – Lotta Good Questions, Still No Answers Upstairs could have held an entire terror cell unencumbered and unseen, done the entire deed, and walked out at their leisure hours or days later

The Problem with Diversity Empires:Multiethnic empires are always tiered, undemocratic societies because it is impossible for empires to be other than tiered, undemocratic societies. Empires are always undemocratic because the diverse peoples making up the empire have nothing in common to serve as the foundation for the empire’s laws -no common mythology, no common language, no common culture, no common history, and- most important no common vision of the empire’s future. Therefore, the laws of an empire are always unpopular with most of the empire’s subjects, who would certainly either take over the empires’s government, or set up their own new nation on a portion of the empire if they could do so democratically. Therefore, the people must be denied democracy in order to hold the empire together and force must be used to keep the resulting undemocratic and unpopular imperial government in power.

Elon Musk Ridiculed over Latest ‘Invention’  Musk’s vision amounts to little more than an underground bus network, only with the shuttles rising to the surface very slowly on expensive lifts – then back down again.

Smoking, Toking and Midnight Joking – But my more important question, Maurice, is why the space cowboys get a free pass on medical safety research. Every year Philip Morris, Reynolds American, Imperial Tobacco and British-American Tobacco come out with new products designed to a) reduce nicotine, b) increase flavor, and c) diversify away from smoke inhalation.

A Former Afrofuturist Look at Wakanda – Where is the Vibranium required to clean up the actual City of Oakland’s violent ghettos? Where is the ritual combat that puts down the shamefaced fatherless son bent on destruction? Where was the wisdom of elders and assisting tribes that kept the integrity of the actual Black Panthers from tyranny?

The problem is Chronic Negro Fatigue. Most of us have had it with Jesse, Al, and the rest of the Reverends, not to mention Colin Kaepernick, gentle giant Michael Brown, mouth-frothing lunatic antisemite Farrakhan, and the rest.

Here Are 8 Stubborn Facts on Gun Violence in America 4. The perpetration of gun-related murders is often carried out by predictable people.

Bring out your dead So put these two factors together on San Francisco streets engulfed in human shit€‘ and immigrants from countries overrun with infectious diseases €“ and what do we get? We get a blast from the past.  We get a taste of urban life in the 18th and 19th centuries.  We get a form of terror unwitnessed by any living American. We get a cholera epidemic.

In the West, particularly America, universities are theological centers, more like madrassas than places for open debate. If an academic starts talking frankly about observable reality, especially when it comes to the human sciences, they are either committing career suicide, headed for retirement or having a breakdown. Honesty gets even the best scholars hurled into the void.

Is It Possible For A Dictatorship To Be A Top World Power? After tremendous GDP growth in the past three decades, China’s GDP is now up to over $11 trillion, nearing two-thirds the size of the U.S. economy.  But don’t forget that they have more than four times the population, which means that their per capita GDP is only about $7000.  That’s less than one-eighth the per capita GDP of the U.S., and less than places like Mexico ($9700) and Brazil ($10,800).  For that matter, it’s well less than one-third the per capita GDP of democratic Taiwan ($26,000). 

On “Curate:” In the demimonde of Facebook and the like, everyone is in the public relations racket, and everyday life takes on the texture of a real-estate commercial, with constant inflation of language and imagery in the service of self-presentation. Why is it no longer enough to say that a store stocks a fine assortment of important and interesting titles? Is “selection” not a fancy enough word anymore? Does it not convey in plain and accessible English the central idea—that this is not a Barnes and Noble or any other cookie-cutter franchise operation, but that the proprietors have instead exercised independent taste and judgment in assembling their offerings? Why do we need to have the pretentious and mystifying notion of “curation” drifting in and fogging up the air?

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  • Casey Klahn March 19, 2018, 11:13 AM

    re: the antifascists with the rosy hats and girl push ups. On this 4th anniversary of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, I recall that he, too, was after “fascists.”

    The bullshit. It swells in the heat…