Biden (or rather his surrogates/puppet masters) penned an op-ed in Jeff Bezo’s miserable little newsletter that calls for Supreme Court reforms as well as a new Constitutional Amendment that would supposedly remove all presidential immunity of former presidents for crimes they committed while in office. Beyond all the obvious hypocritical absurdities of an old crook like Biden fussing about crimes committed by presidents, the frustrated impotence of a lame duck is fairly amusing.
Raging loon but his publication has been unburdened to be totally nutz
Thank you for this. It will help my walking routine and my wife definitely would benefit, if I can coerce her into doing it with me.
I had finished doing a large amount of physical therapy exercises following my knee surgery recently. So this video caught my interest. The pillow squat is a new one for me, that I’d like to try. Though I have done other more conventional squats.
I typically do the side stepping exercise with a blue rubber band around my ankles and no assist from the hands or arms.
On that WaPo front page, it also refers to the Golan Heights as “Israeli occupied.” Israel annexed the Golan Heights, and the US (Trump, of course) officially recognized Israeli sovereignty. Tantamount to referring to Texas as “US occupied Mexico.”
The WaPo is just another sign of the Left’s move from support of Israel to support of its enemies. Long ago Israel was Socialist. Then conservatives took control of the economy and Israel became successful and rich. The Left has never forgiven that.
I seem to recall a few months back there was a lame attempt to “fix” the WaPo that was hemorrhaging money that resulted in an inmate revolt. I can only assume that Jeff Bezo’s is completely fine with WaPo just being a propaganda organ of Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah as well as a silly dream journal for a demented lame duck President.
A 1950 novel by Arthur Koestler, Age of Longing, is very relevant to our present crisis of civilizational self-confidence. My review:
The past month of American politics has been utter chaos. Former president Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt by a matter of millimetres. Joe Biden went to Las Vegas, reportedly got Covid, and disappeared completely from public view. A day after his campaign team insisted he would stay in the race for president, he dropped out via a letter posted to X.
These bizarre events are shrouded in mystery. Conspiracy theories abound. Did Trump arrange for the shooter to nick his ear with a bullet so that he could rise from the ground bloodied but unbowed? Did the Democrats blackmail Biden into ending his campaign? Who, if anyone, is in charge?
Unfortunately, Western democracies require high levels of trust to survive. It’s what distinguishes us from, say, Somalia, where warring clans settle disputes by bloodshed. But we seem to be devolving rapidly into our own warring clans. Trump’s opponents have worked for years to paint him as a racist, a bigot, an antisemite, and a Nazi. They’ve slandered and libelled his supporters, too, and the poisonous fruit of these concerted efforts is now ripe for picking. What is more, the opaque machinations of the Democrats to remove Biden from the ticket are strongly reminiscent of Shakespearean hugger-mugger, with Kamala Harris playing a wheedling Regan or Goneril to Biden’s King Lear.
rtwt
An off-topic side note to Art Deco’s link. It mentions a novella, Pafko at the Wall. I know we have many baseball fans around here. It’s a story about a kid who skips school to go the Polo Grounds to see the Dodgers play the Giants. It just happens to be the game where Bobby Thompson hits his home run. It’s glorious! And now that I think about it, I must have read it in Harper’s.
“Reagan” the new biopic premieres in one month. Except for lucky VIPs at the Reagan Presidential Library. Newsweek has the details:
At a gathering of about 300 people at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library last week, cast members of the upcoming film ‘Reagan’ carefully noted that the movie is non-partisan.
X LINK [00:34 Watch a Sneak Preview of ‘Reagan’ By Paul Bond Chief Correspondent, Culture FOLLOW 0 At a gathering of about 300 people at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library last week, cast members of the upcoming film Reagan carefully noted that the movie is non-partisan.]
An appeal to be bold and exercise your First Amendment right to free speech during the current election cycle was the closest Dennis Quaid, who plays Ronald Reagan in the movie, came to partisanship.
“Everybody should really take a side during this election and be willing to talk … Republican or Democrat; pick a side and vote, and then let’s get on with it,” Quaid said.
Quaid also noted the movie is set to open at the perfect time, given how partisan things are nowadays, and noted Reagan’s friendly relationship with Tip O’Neill, the Democrat speaker of the House during the Republican’s tenure at the White House. https://www.newsweek.com/reagan-premiere-guest-list-biden-trump-harris-rfk-1931155
There was a bit of rain Saturday morning, and there were a few muddy spots and puddles when I went hiking. I wasn’t the only species on the trail that day, there were cougar prints, and maybe a bear. Lots of cougars up in the canyon but not many bears, so I’m unsure about the latter. The young, the old, and the sick is no longer a comfort 🙂 I’ll add that hiking when it is 90 degrees is a lot tougher than hiking when it is 65.
So Doug Emhoff is on Martha’s Vineyard to raise funds. Yes, if you want to raise money you go to where the money is, but isn’t this a little too much what the Democratic Party has become? With Obama and Kerry living there the island looms far too large on the Democratic Party’s map of the United States.
__________
The article in The American Conservative was a tribute from one magazine editor to another magazine editor. Does it represents the editors’ considered and comprehensive opinion of Lapham? More likely, if Rowan hadn’t come forward they’d have let Lapham’s passing go unremarked.
In the early 80s, liberal magazines like Harpers, the New Republic, and the Atlantic were briefly more open to heterodox and even conservative ideas. There was an understanding that Jimmy Carter had been a failure, Teddy Kennedy was something of a joke, and maybe Lyndon Johnson had gone too far and attempted too much. That was only a few years for Harpers and the Atlantic, but both magazines were better then than they are now. Martin Peretz kept the New Republic from going too far left. His magazine benefited from that and was certainly far better in those days than it is now. So I’d think of Rowan’s elegy more as a call for less ideology and dogmatism in media, rather than an endorsement of Lapham’s political views.
__________
There will be more premieres of the Reagan movie in Hollywood and in Dixon, Illinois, Reagan’s birthplace. Trump, Biden, Harris, and Kennedy have all been invited to the premiere. I don’t know which one and I suspect they’ll all be too busy to attend.
Reagan’s friendly relationship with Tip O’Neill
ISTR that O’Neill also said that Reagan was dumb, so maybe not that friendly. Fortunately, Reagan had a dog.
once upon a time harpers was good, that was a long time ago, maybe back when I was in high school, I read some of the back issues, like Edward Luttwaks modest proposal of seizing the Saudi oil fields, the notion made it into the Condor film,
Open Thread comment for one of our frequent commenters:
During the reign of Hezekiah of Judah in Jerusalem and Sennacherib in Assyria, the mighty Assyrian kingdom attacked Jerusalem (around 701 BC). We know it happened because of a clay prism from Nineveh, Assyria’s one-time capital, describing a great victory there. However, we also know of it because of the Bible, which describes a huge Assyrian loss rather than a victory.”
…
Good military preparation, faith in God, and divine help won the day for the Jews. Note, especially, the fact that the text says that the Assyrians besieged Lachish, west of Jerusalem.
So, which version is correct? Was Sennacherib victorious or was there a mass troop die-off? Both Berosus, a Babylonian historian, and Herodotus, the Greek historian, believed the Biblical version, which they ascribed to a plague. Indeed, Herodotus noted the prevalence of mice (rats?) in the camp. Given that the Jews prevented the Assyrians from having fresh water and that traveling troops are plague vectors, it seems possible that, whether through an angel or a bacterium, the Assyrian troops really did die en masse.
All of those, though, are tales. Now, however, there’s hard evidence of a giant Assyrian encampment at Lachish. Stephen Compton, an archeologist, contends that he has found proof that the Assyrian army under Sennacherib besieged Jerusalem just as the Bible describes:
…
The initial discovery came from a scene carved into the stone walls of the Assyrian King Sennacherib’s palace commemorating his conquest of Lachish, a city to the south of Jerusalem. Matching the landscape in this image to features of the actual landscape (using early aerial photographs of Lachish prior to modern development) created a virtual map to the site of Sennacherib’s camp. This led to ruins similar in size and shape to the camp in Sennacherib’s relief. An archaeological survey of the site found no evidence of human habitation for 2600 years, followed by pottery sherds from the exact time of Sennacherib’s invasion of Lachish, after which it was again abandoned for centuries.</b< Moreover, the ancient Arabic name for the ruins was Khirbet al Mudawwara, “The Ruins of the Camp of the Invading Ruler.”
…
One doesn’t have to believe in God to be awed by the Bible, whether as a profound moral treatise that provides an infallible guide for a thriving culture or as an accurate history covering the Ancient World up to the early years of the Roman Empire. This accuracy explains why the people in Gaza and the West Bank, whenever they stumble across ancient ruins, destroy them as quickly as possible, for they prove, irrefutably, the Jews’ ties to the land and the Muslim role as invader, destroyer, and colonizer of an ancient and continuous indigenous Jewish nation and culture.
fascinating, that was about 200 years before the babylonian captivity,
I pay strict attention to my posture, walk for 20 minutes twice a day, do daily calisthenics, and read Neo everyday.
Once or twice a week I smoke a cigar and sip a little of my favorite whiskey.
I’m somewhat if not completely out of the loop here and in need of some help.
Specifically, what’s with this coconut imagery and “coconut-pilled” reference set? Where did it come from? Where is it headed?
Is it as simple, say, as the watermelon reference, i.e. “green on the outside and red on the inside”? So, *brown on the outside and white on the inside*?
Or is it somehow connected to the Caribbean and its array of drinks or coconut cusine features?
In the dark and puzzled for answers.
her grandmother supposedly said ‘she fell out of a coconut’ what it means, we are ‘unburdened by what has been’ since she grew up in canada, that seems unlikely,
So “her grandmother supposedly said” means that Hauk Tuah Girl 2024 told some tale involving a coconut? This was in turn picked up by media and fashioned into imagery and (I don’t know what to call “coconut-pilled”) presumptively catchy slogans of “conversion” a la THE MATRIX? Yeesh.
something like that, i look around for seed pods in this circumstance, like the offices of New Yawk magazine, I put at the end of the last thread,
@sdeffr: The coconut is one of Harris’s trademark vapidities.
“Everything is in context,” Harris said, before launching into the now-famous anecdote.
“My mother … would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’ ” Harris said with a laugh. “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”
Everyone is connected to everyone else. You didn’t build that, so we get to take away your money if you have more than you “really need” and we get to make you eat your broccoli and take the bus. I think we all know the drill.
According to this, Harris said, in a speech on May 10, 2023, “My mother used to — she would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’” Harris said, while laughing. “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” This was at the end of remarks on “equity” for “disadvantaged” groups who don’t have an equal chance to succeed, according to her.
How this came to be a campaign meme, I have no idea.
except shes the farthest thing from disadvantaged, but we have to pretend all the time,
More likely she fell out of a well…
Is it ever interesting that apparently dis-included from “all that came before you” is any knowledge of great works like the Federalist Papers, or its object (y’know, that old thing), or Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, or Hobbes’ Leviathan, to say nothing of Aristotle’s Politics, Thucydides’ War Between the Athenians and Spartans, and so on?
I should hasten to add: thanks to you all for your responses filling me in!
“You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”
Yet “unburdened by what has been.”
So I’d think of Rowan’s elegy more as a call for less ideology and dogmatism in media, rather than an endorsement of Lapham’s political views.
==
You’re working on it.
==
One of the more amusing escapades of the non-dogmatic Mr. Lapham was penning a bit of ‘reportage’ on the 2004 Republican convention which was shortly discovered to have been completed before the convention even occurred. He evinced no embarrassment at having been found out.
==
Your reference to The Atlantic under Mortimer Zuckerman and William Whitworth and The New Republic under Martin Peretz incorporates an amusing omission: Harper’s was from 1981 to 1983 edited by Michael Kinsley, at which time it was a lively and humorous publication. Kinsley was dismissed by the board and his predecessor Lapham brought back. Lapham arranged for the publication to be reconstituted as a subsidiary of the MacArthur Foundation. It had its quirks and was off message now and again, which I suppose is better than naught. The editor’s own contributions were invariably unctuous.
==
NB, The American Conservative‘s obituary of Midge Decter could at least manage a phrase like ” Yes, I disagreed with her on important subjects.” It’s an obituary, so I wouldn’t expect much, but do we have to be treated to a fellatio like “It is not a compliment to say that it is the best general interest magazine in America; it is just a fact”?
I thought that was the nadir of the publication, but in the obama administration, it plumbed new depth of sycophancy, I remember some offering from kevin barry, who is a historical novelist of some note, turned horrible propagandists, he had stepped away from the editorship before the 2020 election,
The Paris Parade to insult normies is something I’ve been slow to catch up with. Leave it to the Parisian pigged French to get me longing for Italy’s Winter Games in 18 months to come ASAP — but on the first day????
Rob Schneider announced his boycott of this Olympic of insults on X.
With this fitting joke:
“Guys with their genitalia hanging out in front of children?! Drag Queens?! I wasn’t sure if I was watching the @Olympics or if I was watching a school board meeting…” he wrote to Twitter.
Parting shot to Nonapod near the top, noting Biden in the WaPo: THEY REALLY DO HATE AMERICA FIRST!
My God, McCann is staying in the game! Nuts. I guess he can breathe through his mouth.
‘In a matter of days, the Democratic Party discovered its future was actually in the White House all along.’ – Welcome to Kamalot
Had linked (?) to a story about her becoming “Kamalot” not long ago – now here she is in all her splendid glory – on top of a huge coconut surrounded by party leaders and Famous Stars!
That pic from the Drudge Report—!?!—gone from Fair and right leaning to the FAR LEFT of Obama…
Hello. Happy birthday to Alexis de Tocqueville.
Looking at the 2025 Honda Civic specs, I see that the optional safety and amenities items that were available on the Accord trims, but not the Civic ones, even last year now seem to be becoming available on the higher-end Civics as well. I appreciate this, as I’ve been resisting the badgering from my dealership to trade in my current car partly because I was holding out for precisely this development. Still, it will probably need a couple more years for the trims below Touring in the hierarchy to have what I want. Hopefully by then the EV craze will have died down enough that I can still be reasonably assured at that point of being able to buy an ICE car new from somewhere (though I suppose it’s not impossible that I might have to go out-of-state to do so).
Yesterday during the Great Litany at Matins, at the petition “For our country, the president, all those in public service, and for our armed forces everywhere, let us pray to the Lord,” I found myself wondering who exactly that is, even while answering “Lord, have mercy.” It was a little bit uncomfortable.
Harper’s was from 1981 to 1983 edited by Michael Kinsley, at which time it was a lively and humorous publication.
Kinsley was also at Slate for ten years or so, during which time it was a relatively lively and interesting online publication. It remained so for a while after he left, but went steeply downhill and is now indistinguishable from a dozen other hard left online outlets.
The New Yorker is another example of a publication that was once worth reading, even though it was always oriented to the left. It went downhill under Remnick, especially after Trump was elected in 2016 (at which point I canceled my subscription). Even the cartoons aren’t funny any more.
I miss the years when Harper’s was really worth reading, The Atlantic became a must-read when Michael Kelly was running it, and The New Republic was the left-leaning magazine that I didn’t agree with but made arguments well and usually in good faith. And the Sunday New York Times was worth reading too, as long as you threw out the A section.
Quoting here: “Chuck Norris wears James McCann pajamas.”
S’truth.
He took a 95mph fastball in the first inning off his left cheek below his eye and flush into his nose (breaking it); he caught the whole 9 innings, went 1 for three, scored a run and with the hbp, drove in a run.
Oh, and his wife and kids were there and witnessed the whole thing.
@ArtDeco
I remember that Harpers was a very lively and unorthodox magazine in the Eighties. I didn’t know or didn’t remember that Michael Kinsley was editor for two years — forty years is a long time. I also remember that Harpers was lively and unorthodox in the Seventies. Those who find omissions “amusing” and obsessively collect them should note that you omitted to say that Lewis Lapham was managing editor of the magazine from 1971 to 1975 and editor from 1976 to 1981, as well as from 1983 to 2006. The spritely, iconoclastic spirit of the magazine owed at least as much to Lapham as to Kinsley.
Of course, Lapham grew old, got pompous and querulous, and stopped listening to people. I don’t like what he did with the magazine later, but selling out to the McArthur Foundation did help keep the magazine going and made it possible to avoid selling out to the kind of people who took over the Atlantic and the New Republic.
Nic Rowan’s contributions to the the American Conservative have been mostly light — on things like Pandas, Beatrix Potter and Peter Rabbit, subways, football, Calvin and Hobbes (the comic strip characters, not the theologian and philosopher). He did come down harder on Martin Peretz than on Lapham, but Lapham died and Peretz only wrote a book, and Rowan actually knew Lapham. I would guess that the magazine published Rowan’s article because they remembered that they had been on the same side as Lapham during the Bush wars.
The Paris Parade to insult normies is something I’ve been slow to catch up with
T J:
Yes, I didn’t realize how bad it was either. The Last Supper in drag. And the non-apology apologies plus outright lies (it wasn’t The Last Supper).
According to a poll, 70-80% of Americans were offended. I hope Paris takes a serious hit on viewership.
Re: More Olympic decadence
A Dutch volleyball player and convicted child rapist is in the Olympics:
__________________________________
In 2014, van de Velde, aged 19 at the time, corresponded with a 12-year-old girl who sent him a friend request on Facebook…
He served 13 months of a four-year sentence. He is being protected by the Olympics from speaking to journalists.
On the trans front — brave XY boxers taking on XX women.
____________________________________
The International Olympic Committee has confirmed that two boxers who were disqualified from the world championships last year for failing gender eligibility tests will be allowed to fight in Paris.
Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu?ting of Chinese Taipei (Taiwan)…
It sure sounds like they are chanting Heil Hitler too.
Slightly off topic, the view from the window of the PT’s office looks very much like the backside of Diamond Head.
Of course, Lapham grew old, got pompous and querulous,
==
He was that way in 1985.
== you omitted to say that Lewis Lapham was managing editor of the magazine from 1971 to 1975 and editor from 1976 to 1981
==
I guess you thought the phrase “Kinsley was dismissed by the board and his predecessor Lapham brought back.” meant something other than what it does mean.
== and made it possible to avoid selling out to the kind of people who took over the Atlantic and the New Republic
== The Atlantic was bought by the Widow Jobs and The New Republic by gay tech investors. Neither was on the horizon as magazine patrons ca. 1983. (Mortimer Zuckerman made his money in real estate, Martin Peretz married his and made more investing in radio and television licenses &c, Victor Navasky married his, and Arthur Carter made his in casino banking).
== The spritely, iconoclastic spirit of the magazine owed at least as much to Lapham as to Kinsley.
==
It disappeared within weeks of Mr. Kinsley’s departure.
== He did come down harder on Martin Peretz than on Lapham
==
A more precise way of putting it was that he pissed on one and blew the other.
==
I’ll say that you could find things worth reading in Harper’s 25 years ago. The notion the publication did not merit criticism or that it was the best general interest magazine evah is just tommyrot.
== I would guess that the magazine published Rowan’s article because they remembered that they had been on the same side as Lapham during the Bush wars.
==
Yeah, they’re jerks that way.
Take 1 minute and 57 seconds to watch this brilliantly acid-parody of Kamala Harris (it’s hilarious and deadly, both) and then scroll up to see what Gov. Gavin Newsome thinks he will do about it: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1817775398047937009?t=G_ntl5bT462WcOVvStoOcA&s=19
Oh, and here’s the WaPo frontpage today, just evenhandedly “reporting” the news of the weekend. Yeah. Sure.: https://x.com/JohnAshbrook/status/1817900589344268436?t=ssY-tQSnXuqJjRk7KztRqA&s=19
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/rest-in-peace-lapham/
==
Not one critical sentence fragment. Soi-disant ‘palaeoconservatives’ are not your friends.
Biden (or rather his surrogates/puppet masters) penned an op-ed in Jeff Bezo’s miserable little newsletter that calls for Supreme Court reforms as well as a new Constitutional Amendment that would supposedly remove all presidential immunity of former presidents for crimes they committed while in office. Beyond all the obvious hypocritical absurdities of an old crook like Biden fussing about crimes committed by presidents, the frustrated impotence of a lame duck is fairly amusing.
Raging loon but his publication has been unburdened to be totally nutz
Thank you for this. It will help my walking routine and my wife definitely would benefit, if I can coerce her into doing it with me.
I had finished doing a large amount of physical therapy exercises following my knee surgery recently. So this video caught my interest. The pillow squat is a new one for me, that I’d like to try. Though I have done other more conventional squats.
I typically do the side stepping exercise with a blue rubber band around my ankles and no assist from the hands or arms.
On that WaPo front page, it also refers to the Golan Heights as “Israeli occupied.” Israel annexed the Golan Heights, and the US (Trump, of course) officially recognized Israeli sovereignty. Tantamount to referring to Texas as “US occupied Mexico.”
The WaPo is just another sign of the Left’s move from support of Israel to support of its enemies. Long ago Israel was Socialist. Then conservatives took control of the economy and Israel became successful and rich. The Left has never forgiven that.
I seem to recall a few months back there was a lame attempt to “fix” the WaPo that was hemorrhaging money that resulted in an inmate revolt. I can only assume that Jeff Bezo’s is completely fine with WaPo just being a propaganda organ of Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah as well as a silly dream journal for a demented lame duck President.
A 1950 novel by Arthur Koestler, Age of Longing, is very relevant to our present crisis of civilizational self-confidence. My review:
Sleeping with the Enemy
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/71237.html
Jacob Howland, UnHerd, “The grizzly truth about the West — We have forgotten the basic principles of civilisation”: https://unherd.com/2024/07/the-grizzly-truth-about-the-west/
A small taste of the matter:
rtwt
An off-topic side note to Art Deco’s link. It mentions a novella, Pafko at the Wall. I know we have many baseball fans around here. It’s a story about a kid who skips school to go the Polo Grounds to see the Dodgers play the Giants. It just happens to be the game where Bobby Thompson hits his home run. It’s glorious! And now that I think about it, I must have read it in Harper’s.
FBI charging Trump with making False Statements to a Federal Investigator about an assassination attempt!?!
Just kidding, but certainly possible, huh. Article is actually about Trump agreeing to an FBI interview on it…
yes they caned the brit, who had the audacity to sail starboard instead of port,
Further video evidence from the immediate scene of the Butler assassination attempt emerges, shot from beneath the shooter’s position and the stage, I’d say 50 to 60 feet from the shooter.
https://x.com/_johnnymaga/status/1817964301283651702?t=kIH2nG0GFg4gX7GD00HZmg&s=19
“Reagan” the new biopic premieres in one month. Except for lucky VIPs at the Reagan Presidential Library. Newsweek has the details:
At a gathering of about 300 people at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library last week, cast members of the upcoming film ‘Reagan’ carefully noted that the movie is non-partisan.
X LINK [00:34 Watch a Sneak Preview of ‘Reagan’ By Paul Bond Chief Correspondent, Culture FOLLOW 0 At a gathering of about 300 people at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library last week, cast members of the upcoming film Reagan carefully noted that the movie is non-partisan.]
An appeal to be bold and exercise your First Amendment right to free speech during the current election cycle was the closest Dennis Quaid, who plays Ronald Reagan in the movie, came to partisanship.
“Everybody should really take a side during this election and be willing to talk … Republican or Democrat; pick a side and vote, and then let’s get on with it,” Quaid said.
Quaid also noted the movie is set to open at the perfect time, given how partisan things are nowadays, and noted Reagan’s friendly relationship with Tip O’Neill, the Democrat speaker of the House during the Republican’s tenure at the White House.
https://www.newsweek.com/reagan-premiere-guest-list-biden-trump-harris-rfk-1931155
There was a bit of rain Saturday morning, and there were a few muddy spots and puddles when I went hiking. I wasn’t the only species on the trail that day, there were cougar prints, and maybe a bear. Lots of cougars up in the canyon but not many bears, so I’m unsure about the latter. The young, the old, and the sick is no longer a comfort 🙂 I’ll add that hiking when it is 90 degrees is a lot tougher than hiking when it is 65.
So Doug Emhoff is on Martha’s Vineyard to raise funds. Yes, if you want to raise money you go to where the money is, but isn’t this a little too much what the Democratic Party has become? With Obama and Kerry living there the island looms far too large on the Democratic Party’s map of the United States.
__________
The article in The American Conservative was a tribute from one magazine editor to another magazine editor. Does it represents the editors’ considered and comprehensive opinion of Lapham? More likely, if Rowan hadn’t come forward they’d have let Lapham’s passing go unremarked.
In the early 80s, liberal magazines like Harpers, the New Republic, and the Atlantic were briefly more open to heterodox and even conservative ideas. There was an understanding that Jimmy Carter had been a failure, Teddy Kennedy was something of a joke, and maybe Lyndon Johnson had gone too far and attempted too much. That was only a few years for Harpers and the Atlantic, but both magazines were better then than they are now. Martin Peretz kept the New Republic from going too far left. His magazine benefited from that and was certainly far better in those days than it is now. So I’d think of Rowan’s elegy more as a call for less ideology and dogmatism in media, rather than an endorsement of Lapham’s political views.
__________
There will be more premieres of the Reagan movie in Hollywood and in Dixon, Illinois, Reagan’s birthplace. Trump, Biden, Harris, and Kennedy have all been invited to the premiere. I don’t know which one and I suspect they’ll all be too busy to attend.
Reagan’s friendly relationship with Tip O’Neill
ISTR that O’Neill also said that Reagan was dumb, so maybe not that friendly. Fortunately, Reagan had a dog.
once upon a time harpers was good, that was a long time ago, maybe back when I was in high school, I read some of the back issues, like Edward Luttwaks modest proposal of seizing the Saudi oil fields, the notion made it into the Condor film,
Open Thread comment for one of our frequent commenters:
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/06/an_archaeologist_has_apparently_found_sennacherib_s_2_700_year_old_camp_outside_of_jerusalem.html
fascinating, that was about 200 years before the babylonian captivity,
I pay strict attention to my posture, walk for 20 minutes twice a day, do daily calisthenics, and read Neo everyday.
Once or twice a week I smoke a cigar and sip a little of my favorite whiskey.
I’m somewhat if not completely out of the loop here and in need of some help.
Specifically, what’s with this coconut imagery and “coconut-pilled” reference set? Where did it come from? Where is it headed?
Is it as simple, say, as the watermelon reference, i.e. “green on the outside and red on the inside”? So, *brown on the outside and white on the inside*?
Or is it somehow connected to the Caribbean and its array of drinks or coconut cusine features?
In the dark and puzzled for answers.
her grandmother supposedly said ‘she fell out of a coconut’ what it means, we are ‘unburdened by what has been’ since she grew up in canada, that seems unlikely,
So “her grandmother supposedly said” means that Hauk Tuah Girl 2024 told some tale involving a coconut? This was in turn picked up by media and fashioned into imagery and (I don’t know what to call “coconut-pilled”) presumptively catchy slogans of “conversion” a la THE MATRIX? Yeesh.
something like that, i look around for seed pods in this circumstance, like the offices of New Yawk magazine, I put at the end of the last thread,
@sdeffr: The coconut is one of Harris’s trademark vapidities.
Everyone is connected to everyone else. You didn’t build that, so we get to take away your money if you have more than you “really need” and we get to make you eat your broccoli and take the bus. I think we all know the drill.
According to this, Harris said, in a speech on May 10, 2023, “My mother used to — she would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’” Harris said, while laughing. “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” This was at the end of remarks on “equity” for “disadvantaged” groups who don’t have an equal chance to succeed, according to her.
How this came to be a campaign meme, I have no idea.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2024/07/21/kamala-harris-coconut-tree-quote-explained-what-she-meant-and-why-its-going-viral-as-biden-drops-out/
except shes the farthest thing from disadvantaged, but we have to pretend all the time,
More likely she fell out of a well…
Is it ever interesting that apparently dis-included from “all that came before you” is any knowledge of great works like the Federalist Papers, or its object (y’know, that old thing), or Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, or Hobbes’ Leviathan, to say nothing of Aristotle’s Politics, Thucydides’ War Between the Athenians and Spartans, and so on?
I should hasten to add: thanks to you all for your responses filling me in!
“You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”
Yet “unburdened by what has been.”
So I’d think of Rowan’s elegy more as a call for less ideology and dogmatism in media, rather than an endorsement of Lapham’s political views.
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You’re working on it.
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One of the more amusing escapades of the non-dogmatic Mr. Lapham was penning a bit of ‘reportage’ on the 2004 Republican convention which was shortly discovered to have been completed before the convention even occurred. He evinced no embarrassment at having been found out.
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Your reference to The Atlantic under Mortimer Zuckerman and William Whitworth and The New Republic under Martin Peretz incorporates an amusing omission: Harper’s was from 1981 to 1983 edited by Michael Kinsley, at which time it was a lively and humorous publication. Kinsley was dismissed by the board and his predecessor Lapham brought back. Lapham arranged for the publication to be reconstituted as a subsidiary of the MacArthur Foundation. It had its quirks and was off message now and again, which I suppose is better than naught. The editor’s own contributions were invariably unctuous.
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NB, The American Conservative‘s obituary of Midge Decter could at least manage a phrase like ” Yes, I disagreed with her on important subjects.” It’s an obituary, so I wouldn’t expect much, but do we have to be treated to a fellatio like “It is not a compliment to say that it is the best general interest magazine in America; it is just a fact”?
I thought that was the nadir of the publication, but in the obama administration, it plumbed new depth of sycophancy, I remember some offering from kevin barry, who is a historical novelist of some note, turned horrible propagandists, he had stepped away from the editorship before the 2020 election,
The Paris Parade to insult normies is something I’ve been slow to catch up with. Leave it to the Parisian pigged French to get me longing for Italy’s Winter Games in 18 months to come ASAP — but on the first day????
Rob Schneider announced his boycott of this Olympic of insults on X.
With this fitting joke:
“Guys with their genitalia hanging out in front of children?! Drag Queens?! I wasn’t sure if I was watching the @Olympics or if I was watching a school board meeting…” he wrote to Twitter.
https://dailycaller.com/2024/07/29/rob-schneider-boycott-2024-olympics-drag-performance-demonic-satan-christianity/
Parting shot to Nonapod near the top, noting Biden in the WaPo: THEY REALLY DO HATE AMERICA FIRST!
My God, McCann is staying in the game! Nuts. I guess he can breathe through his mouth.
‘In a matter of days, the Democratic Party discovered its future was actually in the White House all along.’ – Welcome to Kamalot
Had linked (?) to a story about her becoming “Kamalot” not long ago – now here she is in all her splendid glory – on top of a huge coconut surrounded by party leaders and Famous Stars!
That pic from the Drudge Report—!?!—gone from Fair and right leaning to the FAR LEFT of Obama…
Hello. Happy birthday to Alexis de Tocqueville.
Looking at the 2025 Honda Civic specs, I see that the optional safety and amenities items that were available on the Accord trims, but not the Civic ones, even last year now seem to be becoming available on the higher-end Civics as well. I appreciate this, as I’ve been resisting the badgering from my dealership to trade in my current car partly because I was holding out for precisely this development. Still, it will probably need a couple more years for the trims below Touring in the hierarchy to have what I want. Hopefully by then the EV craze will have died down enough that I can still be reasonably assured at that point of being able to buy an ICE car new from somewhere (though I suppose it’s not impossible that I might have to go out-of-state to do so).
Yesterday during the Great Litany at Matins, at the petition “For our country, the president, all those in public service, and for our armed forces everywhere, let us pray to the Lord,” I found myself wondering who exactly that is, even while answering “Lord, have mercy.” It was a little bit uncomfortable.
Harper’s was from 1981 to 1983 edited by Michael Kinsley, at which time it was a lively and humorous publication.
Kinsley was also at Slate for ten years or so, during which time it was a relatively lively and interesting online publication. It remained so for a while after he left, but went steeply downhill and is now indistinguishable from a dozen other hard left online outlets.
The New Yorker is another example of a publication that was once worth reading, even though it was always oriented to the left. It went downhill under Remnick, especially after Trump was elected in 2016 (at which point I canceled my subscription). Even the cartoons aren’t funny any more.
I miss the years when Harper’s was really worth reading, The Atlantic became a must-read when Michael Kelly was running it, and The New Republic was the left-leaning magazine that I didn’t agree with but made arguments well and usually in good faith. And the Sunday New York Times was worth reading too, as long as you threw out the A section.
Quoting here: “Chuck Norris wears James McCann pajamas.”
S’truth.
He took a 95mph fastball in the first inning off his left cheek below his eye and flush into his nose (breaking it); he caught the whole 9 innings, went 1 for three, scored a run and with the hbp, drove in a run.
Legend.
https://x.com/Orioles/status/1818048763530826194?t=d1bnylg4QNkmb9P1KAudcg&s=19
Oh, and his wife and kids were there and witnessed the whole thing.
@ArtDeco
I remember that Harpers was a very lively and unorthodox magazine in the Eighties. I didn’t know or didn’t remember that Michael Kinsley was editor for two years — forty years is a long time. I also remember that Harpers was lively and unorthodox in the Seventies. Those who find omissions “amusing” and obsessively collect them should note that you omitted to say that Lewis Lapham was managing editor of the magazine from 1971 to 1975 and editor from 1976 to 1981, as well as from 1983 to 2006. The spritely, iconoclastic spirit of the magazine owed at least as much to Lapham as to Kinsley.
Of course, Lapham grew old, got pompous and querulous, and stopped listening to people. I don’t like what he did with the magazine later, but selling out to the McArthur Foundation did help keep the magazine going and made it possible to avoid selling out to the kind of people who took over the Atlantic and the New Republic.
Nic Rowan’s contributions to the the American Conservative have been mostly light — on things like Pandas, Beatrix Potter and Peter Rabbit, subways, football, Calvin and Hobbes (the comic strip characters, not the theologian and philosopher). He did come down harder on Martin Peretz than on Lapham, but Lapham died and Peretz only wrote a book, and Rowan actually knew Lapham. I would guess that the magazine published Rowan’s article because they remembered that they had been on the same side as Lapham during the Bush wars.
The Paris Parade to insult normies is something I’ve been slow to catch up with
T J:
Yes, I didn’t realize how bad it was either. The Last Supper in drag. And the non-apology apologies plus outright lies (it wasn’t The Last Supper).
According to a poll, 70-80% of Americans were offended. I hope Paris takes a serious hit on viewership.
Re: More Olympic decadence
A Dutch volleyball player and convicted child rapist is in the Olympics:
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In 2014, van de Velde, aged 19 at the time, corresponded with a 12-year-old girl who sent him a friend request on Facebook…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_van_de_Velde
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He served 13 months of a four-year sentence. He is being protected by the Olympics from speaking to journalists.
On the trans front — brave XY boxers taking on XX women.
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The International Olympic Committee has confirmed that two boxers who were disqualified from the world championships last year for failing gender eligibility tests will be allowed to fight in Paris.
Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu?ting of Chinese Taipei (Taiwan)…
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/article/2024/jul/29/boxers-who-failed-gender-tests-at-world-championships-cleared-to-compete-at-olympics
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Oh, and now the Palestinians are predictably acting up.
–“Olympics: Arabs Do Nazi Salute as Israeli Anthem Plays”
https://pjmedia.com/catherinesalgado/2024/07/29/olympics-arabs-do-nazi-salute-as-israeli-anthem-plays-n4931173
It sure sounds like they are chanting Heil Hitler too.
Slightly off topic, the view from the window of the PT’s office looks very much like the backside of Diamond Head.
Of course, Lapham grew old, got pompous and querulous,
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He was that way in 1985.
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you omitted to say that Lewis Lapham was managing editor of the magazine from 1971 to 1975 and editor from 1976 to 1981
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I guess you thought the phrase “Kinsley was dismissed by the board and his predecessor Lapham brought back.” meant something other than what it does mean.
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and made it possible to avoid selling out to the kind of people who took over the Atlantic and the New Republic
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The Atlantic was bought by the Widow Jobs and The New Republic by gay tech investors. Neither was on the horizon as magazine patrons ca. 1983. (Mortimer Zuckerman made his money in real estate, Martin Peretz married his and made more investing in radio and television licenses &c, Victor Navasky married his, and Arthur Carter made his in casino banking).
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The spritely, iconoclastic spirit of the magazine owed at least as much to Lapham as to Kinsley.
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It disappeared within weeks of Mr. Kinsley’s departure.
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He did come down harder on Martin Peretz than on Lapham
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A more precise way of putting it was that he pissed on one and blew the other.
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I’ll say that you could find things worth reading in Harper’s 25 years ago. The notion the publication did not merit criticism or that it was the best general interest magazine evah is just tommyrot.
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I would guess that the magazine published Rowan’s article because they remembered that they had been on the same side as Lapham during the Bush wars.
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Yeah, they’re jerks that way.
Olympic surfing is taking place at Teahupo’o in Tahiti – A perfect 10 pose for an (almost) perfect 10 wave goes viral
Gabriel Medina deserved a 10 just for the end of that ride…
@ Karmi – that was an outstanding picture, it looks like AI or photoshopping!
But, when did THIS become an Olympic sport??
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/28/sport/rayssa-leal-street-skateboarding-olympics-spt-intl/index.html?iid=cnn_buildContentRecirc_end_recirc
And get off my lawn!
https://www.pressreader.com/uk/the-scottish-mail-on-sunday/20240728/281642490431103
whats the world coming to,
https://instapundit.substack.com/p/jd-vance-the-new-york-times-and-decency?utm_campaign=reaction&utm_medium=email&utm_source=substack&utm_content=post