Today in 1964, the Rolling Stones recorded their “12×5” album at Chess Studios in Chicago:
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Today in 1972, Elvis Presley recorded a live album at Madison Square Garden in New York:
An outstanding newspaper reports:
Sixty years after what’s been called southern Wisconsin’s first rock and roll band started playing, its founder and members of the band are holding a concert in Avoca Sunday.
The band started by Vilas Craig of Richland Center was called the Kollege Kings when it was made up of members of the Richland Center High School band cornet section.
What’s being billed as Vilas Craig and the Nu ViCounts … will perform a free concert at Legion Park in Avoca Sunday at 1 p.m. In addition to the Nu ViCounts, Craig’s son Timothy, a Nashville recording artist, will be performing.
That, of course, is …
… the performers of:
(Side note — get it? — the last video pictures the first iteration of the band, which didn’t record that song. So two people in the video get credit for something they didn’t do.)
I have written about this band previously on this blog. Most people, I suspect, think of their parents as something from the previous century (which is actually true in our children’s case) who have been boring old adults as long as you’ve known them. Of course, if your parents weren’t once your age, you wouldn’t be reading this now. And to find out that your parents were once cool is, well, cool.
Irrelevant side note: The piano player also plays accordion. This is National Accordion Awareness Month.
I will be on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Ideas Network’s Joy Cardin Week in Review segment today at 8 a.m.
Joy Cardin and all the other Ideas Network programming can be heard on WLBL (930 AM) in Auburndale, WHID (88.1 FM) in Green Bay, WHWC (88.3 FM) in Menomonie, WRFW (88.7 FM) in River Falls, WEPS (88.9 FM) in Elgin, Ill., WHAA (89.1 FM) in Adams, WHBM (90.3 FM) in Park Falls, WHLA (90.3 FM) in La Crosse, WRST (90.3 FM) in Oshkosh, WHAD (90.7 FM) in Delafield, W215AQ (90.9 FM) in Middleton, KUWS (91.3 FM) in Superior, WHHI (91.3 FM) in Highland, WSHS (91.7 FM) in Sheboygan, WHDI (91.9 FM) in Sister Bay, WLBL (91.9 FM) in Wausau, W275AF (102.9 FM) in Ashland, W300BM (107.9 FM) in Madison, and of course online at www.wpr.org.
My opponent is Eugene Kane, like myself a member of the Former Journal Communications Employees Club. (That club now totals every past Journal employee, since as you know the company doesn’t exist anymore.)
In addition to Donald Duck Day, today is National Strawberry Rhubarb Pie Day. Saturday is Iced Tea Day, and Sunday is National German Chocolate Cake Day and National Corn on the Cob Day, the latter of which is difficult to celebrate in Wisconsin given that we are several weeks away from locally grown sweet corn.
Melanie Phillips after yet another terrorist attack in Britain:
Even now, with Theresa May saying “enough is enough” after the London Bridge atrocities, we are still refusing to identify correctly the threat that has already claimed so many lives.
These attackers are not “evil losers”. They are not “sick cowards”. I They are not nihilists or psychiatric cases or lone wolves. They are devout and ecstatic Muslim fanatics who are waging a war of religion against us.
Mrs May correctly referred to “Islamist” terrorism. Yet she also said this was a “perversion of Islam”. How can it be a “perversion” when it is solidly rooted in religious texts and theological doctrine validated and endorsed by the world’s most powerful Islamic authorities?
In his article in The Times yesterday, the communities secretary Sajid Javid tied himself up in knots. He rightly said it wasn’t enough for Muslims merely to condemn terror attacks; they must ask themselves “searching questions”, and issue challenges.
Yet he also said the perpetrators were not “true Muslims” and that it was right to say the attacks were “nothing to do with Islam”. Well if that’s so, why should Muslims need to do anything at all?
The West views Islam through its own cultural prism, which equates religion with spirituality. The problem is that Islam is as much a political ideology as a source of spiritual guidance.
In 2010 a German study, which involved intensive questioning of 45,000 Muslim teenagers from 61 towns and regions across the country, found that the more religious they were the more likely they were to become violent.
Sheikh Mohammad Tawhidi, a Shia cleric in Australia who campaigns against Sunni extremism, has said: “The scriptures are exactly what is pushing these people to behead the infidel. Our books teach the beheading of people.”
Of course, millions of Muslims don’t subscribe to any of this. Some are merely cultural Muslims who observe no religious practices. Some, such as the Sufis or the Ahmadiyya sect, are pious Muslims who are truly peaceful (and are themselves victims of the Islamists).
But political, aggressive, jihadist Islam, constrained for so long by both the Ottoman empire and western colonialism, is now dominant once again in the Muslim world. Which is why in 2015 Egypt’s President Sisi remarkably told the imams of Al-Azhar university in Cairo — the epicentre of Islamic doctrinal edicts — that Islam’s corpus of sacred texts was “antagonising the entire world”, that it was “impossible” for 1.6 billion Muslims to “want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants”, and so Islam had to have a “religious revolution”.
We should be promoting and defending such Muslim reformers in the desperate hope that they succeed. Instead we knock the ground from under their feet by saying Islamist attacks have nothing to do with Islam. Until and unless Islam is reformed, we need to treat its practices on a scale ranging from extreme caution to outlawing some of them altogether.
Mrs May said we need to make people understand that our “pluralistic British values” were “superior to anything offered by the preachers and supporters of hatred”.
The problem is, though, that Islamists believe their values represent the literal word of God. So to them, no other values can possibly be superior. As a result, you can no more deradicalise them than you could have deradicalised the priests of the Inquisition.
We must require Muslims to take responsibility for the actions of all in their community. An ICM poll of British Muslims two years ago found that nearly a quarter wanted Sharia to replace British law in areas with large Muslim populations.
Four per cent — equivalent to more than 100,000 British Muslims — said they were sympathetic to suicide bombers fighting “injustice”.
In other words, we must see jihadist Islam as at the extreme end of a continuum of beliefs which are themselves incompatible with British society.
So we shouldn’t just be stopping people coming back to Britain from Syria or Libya, or detaining terrorist suspects through control orders. We should also be closing down radical mosques, deporting those born in other countries who are involved in extremism, stopping foreign funding for Muslim institutions and banning the Muslim Brotherhood.
We should also outlaw Sharia courts because, since Sharia does not accept the superior authority of secular legislation, it inescapably undermines the core British value of one law for all.
The message should be that British Muslims are welcome citizens but on the same basis as everyone else: that they subscribe to the binding nature of foundational British laws and values. If not, they will be treated as subversives.
The chances of any of these measures being taken, though, are slim. There will be inevitable claims that judge-made human rights law, which has often protected the “rights” of extremists rather than their victims, cannot be set aside without “destroying British values”.
Jihadist terrorists, however, are not trying to divide us, destroy our values or stop the general election. They are trying to kill us and conquer us.
“Us,” by the way, includes Muslims. The Religion of Peace has been keeping a daily Ramadan Bombathon count. As of this morning, the website counts 73 bombings with 809 dead, mostly Muslims.
Unlike some people I know on the right, I am not reflexively anti-Muslim or anti-Islam. Nor is Donald Trump, who unlike his predecessor is willing to condemn radical Islam by name. But there are facets of Islam that are incompatible with Western values (for instance, this), and unless you count the wack jobs at Westboro Baptist Church to be Christians (they’re not), Islam is the only major world religion with adherents killing in the name of their religion today. Like it or not, it is up to Muslims to defeat radical Islam.
Benjamin Zycher is entertained:
Now, this is entertainment. “This” is The Washington Post’s Fact Checker “analysis” posted online less than four hours after President Trump ended his speech announcing the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change. It appeared in the print edition the next morning, on the front page and above the fold: “Explanation for Paris exit is based on spurious claims.”
It has to be read to be believed. Or, actually, not believed, as the bylined authors, Glenn Kessler and Michelle Ye Hee Lee, demonstrate themselves to be true modern-day journalists who must believe that “research” is a quick glance at Wikipedia. And that is where the entertainment dimension inserts itself; their arguments are so devoid of analytic content and so factually incorrect as to raise the question of whether there still exists an editorial process at The Washington Post. To wit:
“[Mr. Trump] often ignored the benefits that could come from tackling climate change, including potential green jobs.” Kessler and Lee are not economists, obviously, so they do not understand that “jobs” — the use of labor resources — are a cost rather than a benefit for the economy as a whole. If climate policy yields an employment shift into “green” sectors — as an aside, there is nothing “green” about them — that would be great for the workers hired. But for the economy in the aggregate, using labor resources automatically means that they cannot be used elsewhere, the classic definition of an (opportunity) cost.
You might call this a transition day in rock music history. For instance, one year to the day after the Rolling Stones released “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” …
… Brian Jones left the Stones, to be replaced by Mick Taylor.
Nine years after Barack Obama accused small-towners of clinging to guns or religion, nearly three years after Jonathan Gruber was shown to have attributed ObamaCare’s passage to the stupidity of the American voter, and eight months after Hillary Clinton pronounced half of Donald Trump’s voters “irredeemable,” Democrats are now getting some sophisticated advice: You don’t win votes by showing contempt for voters.
In the last week or so a flurry of articles have appeared arguing for toning down the looking-down. In the New Republic Michael Tomasky writes under the heading “Elitism Is Liberalism’s Biggest Problem.” Over at the New York Times, Joan C. Williams weighs in with “The Dumb Politics of Elite Condescension.” Slate goes with a Q&A on “advice on how to talk to the white working class without insulting them.” Stanley Greenberg at the American Prospect writeson “The Democrats’ ‘Working-Class Problem,’ ” and Kevin Drum at Mother Jones asks for “Less Liberal Contempt, Please.”
None of these pieces are directed at Trump Nation. To the contrary, they are pitched to progressives still having a hard time coming to grips with The Donald’s victory last November. Much of what these authors write is sensible. But it can also be hilarious, particularly when the effort to explain ordinary Americans to progressive elites reads like a Margaret Mead entry on the exotic habits of the Samoans.
Mr. Tomasky, for example, informs progressives that middle Americans—wait for it—“go to church.” They have friends (“and sometimes even spouses”) “who are Republicans.” “They don’t feel self-conscious saluting the flag.” Who knew?
Most of these writers allow that there is at least some fraction of Trump voters who are not deplorable. What they do not appreciate is how condescending they can be while advising their fellow Democrats to be less condescending. Exhibit A: Mr. Drum’s recommendation that Democrats can “broaden [their] appeal” because these are “persuadable, low information folks.”
Still, Mr. Drum comes across as Gandhi when set against the writer at Slate who interviews Ms. Williams. The following question conveys the tone: “What attitude should we be taking toward people who voted for a racist buffoon who is scamming them?”
Ms. Williams, a University of California law professor who has written a new book on the white working class, generously avoids telling her interviewer he is a perfect instance of the problem. But the larger progressive dilemma here is that contempt is baked into the identity politics that defines today’s Democratic Party.
When Mrs. Clinton labeled Trump voters deplorable (“racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it”) she was simply following identity politics to its logical conclusion. Because identity politics transforms those on the other side of the argument—i.e., Americans who are pro-life, who respect the military, who may work in the coal industry—from political opponents into oppressors.
Which is precisely how they are treated: as bigots whose retrograde views mean they have no rights. So when the Supreme Court unilaterally imposes gay marriage on the entire nation, a baker who doesn’t want to cater a gay reception must be financially ruined. Ditto for two Portland women who ran a burrito stand that they shut down after accusations of cultural appropriation regarding their recipes.
No small part of the attraction of identity politics is its usefulness in silencing those who do not hew to progressive orthodoxy. This dynamic is most visible on campuses, where identity politics is also most virulent. It’s no accident, in other words, that the mob at Middlebury resorted to violence to try to keep Charles Murray ; after all, he’s been called a “white nationalist.” In much the same way identity politics has led Democrats to regard themselves as the “resistance” rather than the loyal opposition.
The great irony here is that this has left Democrats increasingly choosing undemocratic means to get what they want. From President Obama’s boast that he would use his pen and phone to bypass Congress to the progressive use of the Supreme Court as its preferred legislature to the Iran and climate deals that made end runs around the Constitution, it all underscores one thing: The modern American progressive has no faith in the democratic process because he has no trust in the American people.
Here it helps to remember the tail end of Mr. Obama’s snipe about guns and religion: it was a crack about voters clinging to “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.” Sounds like a pretty accurate indictment of contemporary American liberalism, judging by all these articles begging progressives to be a little more broad-minded.
So good luck with the idea that the Democratic Party can restore its relationship with Middle America without addressing the identity politics that fuels it. Especially when it starts from the premise that the Americans they are condescending to will remain too stupid to figure it out.
Exhibit A would be the Wisconsin Democratic Party, whose seething contemptuous hatred of Gov. Scott Walker has been so successful that their party has been losing elections left and left since Recallarama, which culminated in …
Bleacher Report reports:
After a photograph of future Hall of Famer Peyton Manning departing the White House after reportedly golfing with President Donald Trump circulated over the weekend, some in the NFL, busy with OTAs and other offseason shenanigans, started talking about it.
When I asked one AFC general manager his thoughts about the picture, he texted back, succinctly: “Peyton Manning will be president one day.”
He suggested, as did others, that one day America could see a Republican nomination fight between Manning and Tom Brady. Another NFL voice even went so far as to predict a Manning-Brady faceoff against LeBron James for the presidency.
Sure, for now that sounds like science fiction, but it is a fact that some of Manning’s former teammates, and others around football, believe Manning would make an excellent politician. Pat McAfee, who joined the Colts before Manning’s last three years in Indianapolis and is now with Barstool Sports, said he believes Manning would be a great political leader.
“If he was to become a politician, I assume he’d be incredible at it,” McAfee told B/R. “He’s a leader, a tireless worker and a fabulous communicator. I don’t know much about politics, but I think if you have those three traits, you have a chance of being a real world-changer. I hope he gets into it someday; would be great for our country.”
Some of you may love the idea of a Manning presidency. Some of you may have just thrown up in your mouth a little. But before a fight breaks out in this edition of the 10-Point Stance, let’s back up a little to understand why this is even a debate.
TheHill.com reported over the weekend that Manning, Trump and Sen. Bob Corker, a Republican from Tennessee, were seen returning from one of Trump’s golf courses. Other reports noted that Manning was later seen on the White House South Lawn with Corker.
As photos of the outing went viral, I texted various players and team executives to get their thoughts, and the responses basically were the same: No one was surprised. …
Around the league, one of the worst-kept secrets was that Manning would go into politics and eventually make a run at the presidency as a Republican. The Trump photo only bolsters that speculation.
Now it’s possible that all Manning was doing was showing respect for the office of the president by golfing with Trump when asked. Maybe it’s as simple as that. Manning has often publicly denied any interest in pursuing politics, and when asked in March about speculation that in 2020 he would run for the Senate, he said he had “no interest in the political world.” Even McAfee told me Manning never mentioned politics to him when they played together, and the two “shared a few beers back in the day,” McAfee said.
But few in football buy it. I’ve heard from former teammates how much Manning actually loves the idea of getting into the political world. Many feel as McAfee does—that Manning would be an excellent politician, and that one day he’d get into it not only to serve but also because it would appeal to his ego.
Republican leaders in the past have said that if Manning ran for office in Tennessee, he’d be a dominant candidate.
“He is a Tennessee hero, and if he should ever choose to use his legendary determination, knowledge and drive in politics, he would be an extremely formidable candidate,” Scott Golden, the Tennessee state party chairman, told the Commercial Appeal in March.
Manning is seen as someone who, in a locker room, united many different kinds of people from all different types of backgrounds. His backers think he could do the same with a city or a state or even the country. (Though he likely would lose the “idiot kicker” vote.) And with Manning’s smarts and leadership ability, some around the league argue he couldn’t do any worse than some of the politicians we see now.
I’m just relaying what I’m hearing. Don’t @ me.
There is, of course, a precedent for athletes getting into politics—Bill Bradley, Lynn Swann, Jack Kemp and former President Gerald Ford, just to name a few (and, interestingly, a lot of them are former quarterbacks). There’s even precedent for a former Tennessee quarterback doing it. Heath Shuler played for the Volunteers and in the NFL before he became a U.S. Representative from 2007-13 for the state of North Carolina.
What I think we’re seeing is Manning perhaps testing the political waters, using Trump as a temperature gauge. Another Michael Freeman (he’s the smart one), a speechwriter and communications consultant, made the point to me on Twitter—and I think he’s right—that Manning wanted the picture with Trump as a way of saying: “If he can do it…”
While a Manning run at the White House is what has some in the NFL talking, it seems unlikely he would start there. More realistic may be a run at a lower level, even for a statewide office, and to then build up, the way Kemp did.
Either way, we might want to start getting used to the idea that Manning may be on CNN a lot more than ESPN in years to come.
Brady vs. Manning, with the winner taking on James in a presidential election? Start writing the speculative fiction now.
Let’s remember, though, that the current president had never run for office before, and the most successful Republican president of my lifetime, Ronald Reagan, was an actor for most of his professional life, though he was governor of California for eight years before running for, then becoming, president.
The Rolling Stones had a big day today in 1963: They made their first TV appearance and released their first single:
The number one song today in 1975:
Five years later, Gary Numan drove his way to number nine:
Rich Galen didn’t favor Donald Trump’s pulling the U.S. out of the Paris global climate change treaty. (In contrast, I think it was Trump’s best decision since U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch.)
However, Galen points out:
Assuming you believe that less is better — as almost everyone does, save for a few people in Mingo County, West Virginia — then the more difficult question is: How do we pay for it?
We have a history of paying more for things we believe to be healthy. Organic foods come to mine even though there is almost zero evidence that organically grown foods and organically raised animals have any — any — health benefits.
A reporter from NPR — yes, that NPR — in 2012 wrote about a study that had been released in The Annals of Internal Medicine:
“When the researchers looked at the body of evidence, they found no clear benefits” [from eating organically grown foods].
In fact, one of the researcher made it even clearer: “There’s a definite lack of evidence” to support the advantages of organic food.Dear Mr. Mullings:
What about being poisoned by the pesticides in conventional food? What about that?Signed,
The National Association of People Who Demand Everyone Agree with ThemGlad you asked. That same article stated that the investigators:
“found that the vast majority of conventionally grown food did not exceed allowable limits of pesticide residue set by federal regulations.”
I am not a climate denier. If gigantic sections of Antarctica are breaking off and floating away, I think that deserves some attention and concern. What I don’t understand is why the issues of whether the climate is changing and if it is, whether it is man-made, have taken on such a religious fervor.
You don’t think climate change is real? Fine. Smoke cigars in your house while the kids are playing on the floor in front of you.
You think climate change is the biggest existential threat since the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs? Fine. Drive an electric car and only recharge it at a place that gets its electricity from wind or solar farms. And, by the way, don’t take a federal subsidy to offset the cost of the vehicle.
President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Accords did not make me look for a high window out of which to jump.
I don’t agree with his decision, but it was but one of many in the first 136 days of his Presidency.
The long list of CEOs who also disagree with him on this decision can voluntarily abide by whatever rules the Obama Administration imposed while we were party to the Accords.
Easy Peasy.
There is some level of hypocrisy that attends to the outrage expressed by some of them. Tim Cook, the chairman of Apple (whose phones and tablets I swear by) wrote a letter to Apple employees after the President’s decision:
“Climate change is real and we all share a responsibility to fight it. I want to reassure you that today’s developments will have no impact on Apple’s efforts to protect the environment. We power nearly all of our operations with renewable energy, which we believe is an example of something that’s good for our planet and makes good business sense as well.”
All well and good but most, if not all, of Apple’s products are assembled in China and now India.
The biggest polluter on the planet? China. Coming in at number four? India. (the U.S. and the EU are two and three).
Elon Musk made a big deal about quitting some panels he was on. The raw materials for Tesla batteries come from many places including the aforementioned China (graphite), Congo (cobalt), and the golden triangle of democracy and good governments Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia (lithium).
Maybe they should stop supporting polluters and dictatorships along with their legitimate concern for the global climate.
And, in Musk’s case, return all the taxes he didn’t pay through the tax breaks his companies have enjoyed.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds has several answers for all this hypocrisy:
But if climate change is really such a crisis, and if sacrifice on our part is needed to stop it, then why aren’t we seeing more sacrifice from people who think it’s a problem?
That’s what one person asked on Twitter: “What if climate scientists decided, as a group, to make their conferences all virtual? No more air travel. What a statement!” And what if academics in general — most of whom think climate change is a big deal — started doing the same thing to make an even bigger statement?
Well, okay. Since some states and cities are promising to live by the Paris agreement anyway, and since Trump’s rejection of that agreement doesn’t mean that Congress is forbidden to act, I have some proposals for legislation that will take climate change seriously indeed.
It would be big. And what if politicians and celebrities stopped jetting around the world — often on wasteful private jets instead of flying commercial with the hoi polloi — as a statement of the importance of fighting climate change?
And what if politicians and celebrities lived in average-sized houses, to reduce their carbon footprints? What if John Kerry, who was much put out by Trump’s action, gave up his yacht-and-mansions lifestyle?
What if, indeed? One reason why so many people don’t take climate change seriously is that the people who are constantly telling us it’s a crisis never actually act like it’s a crisis. They’re all-in for sacrifices by other people, but never seem to make much in the way of sacrifices themselves.
Well, some might say, that’s why we need laws. Even people who are deeply concerned about climate change lack the self-discipline to change their behavior. So we need discipline to be imposed, by the force of government.
First, we need to tax the “blue zones.” That is, we need to impose steep taxes on property in coastal areas that will be flooded by the sea-level increases that global warming is supposed to bring. By discouraging people from living or building there now, we’ll save ourselves from big problems in the future. Sure it’ll drive down property values, but those values should go down — they’re values for property that’s going to be flooded anyway, remember?
Second, we need to ban taxpayer-funded air travel to conferences. State legislatures could ban reimbursement for travel outside their states; Congress could require that no federal grant money be spent on air travel to conferences and similar events. A lot of academic conferences would fail, but that’s a small price to pay for saving the planet. And besides, it will encourage the development of Internet-based conference alternatives. A whole new industry might result: Green jobs!
Third, we need to ban private jet travel. At first I thought about just taxing it heavily, but with the planet at stake, that might not be enough. It’s nice that John Travolta can have his own Boeing 707, or that Leonardo DiCaprio can jet around the world speaking against climate change, but the carbon emissions involved set a bad example that outweighs anything he might say. So no more private jets. Bigshots will just have to fly commercial like everyone else, the way they did in the 1950s. (And sorry, Leo, but massive yachts have to go, too). Politicians, too, should have to fly commercial. No more government-funded “executive jets” for them.
Fourth, we need a luxury tax on mansions. Any home more than twice the size of the average American home should be taxed at 25% of its value per year. Celebrities and the rich enjoy great powers of persuasion — but with great power comes great responsibility, and they have a great responsibility to set a good example for the rest of us on climate change!
These proposals are just the beginning, and I’m sure that enterprising members of Congress and various state legislatures can come up with more. But the important thing is to set a good example: Treat climate change like the crisis you say it is, and maybe more people will believe that it really is a crisis.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 