RIP Teri Garr

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Actress Teri Garr has died at 79, with her cause of death listed as multiple sclerosis. Garr started as a dancer but became known for mostly comic roles:

Garr’s big break came with her role as Inga, Frankenstein’s assistant, in Mel Brooks’ 1974 comedy horror “Young Frankenstein.” …

That same year, Garr starred in Francis Ford Coppola’s thriller “The Conversation.” She followed that up with Steven Spielberg’s 1977 sci-fi film “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

Come the 1980s, Garr landed a role opposite Dustin Hoffman in the satirical rom-com “Tootsie.” Her performance as Sandy Lester earned Garr her first and only nomination for an Academy Award.

Garr was in many more movies as well. She had a deft comic touch that was often subtly deadpan. I think most people might remember her best from “Young Frankenstein,” but for me it was “After Hours,” the quirky and somewhat surrealistic Scorcese film about a really bad night in New York:

Israel makes life hard for the Iranian regime

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Israel continues to do some very impressive things:

Reports are that somewhere between one-third and one-half of the IAF took to the skies on Friday night — a remarkable feat in itself if you know anything about what it takes to ready and arm a sophisticated warplane — and every single one of them returned home safely.

An open-source intelligence writer who uses the handle Raylan Givens — I’ve followed and trusted him for a couple of years now — gave the rundown on the operation, “courtesy of IDF Radio and with the approval of the military censor.”

“The attack destroyed ALL of Iran’s long-range surface-to-air missile batteries,” according to Givens’ translation of the IDF Radio report. “All long-range detection radars were also destroyed. Iran is left with only short-range batteries of local Iranian models.”

Again bowing to Western pressure, Israel left Iran’s oil and nuclear facilities intact, but the IAF brutalized Iran’s missile production sites. While “Iran possesses more than 2,000 long-range ballistic missiles,” by most estimates, “the production of new missiles was crippled. From now on, Iran will operate with a finite supply because the stockpile it has will not be able to grow for months or years.”

In addition, reports are that Iran’s strategic defense was set back 2-3 years – and with the Ukraine war on its hands, Russia will have trouble stepping up to the plate and re-supplying Iran. In addition, a site that was struck was involved in nuclear weaponization, and there were strikes in Syria and Iraq which I’ve read had to do with disabling some of their ability to detect Israel’s airplanes overflying those countries.

All in all, quite an undertaking. It points out that Israel probably could have done all of this some time ago, but was apparently holding back until it could be fully justified. The other message it must send to terrorist sympathizers and enablers in Iran, Syria, and Iraq is: “we can get you any time we want.”

Truncated quotes from both sides now: “with a swipe of my pen”

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Please watch this ad:

Horrifying, right? As far as I can tell, about 90% of the ad is factual; Harris did arrest and prosecute some parents of truant children in California – twenty in all. In addition:

However, as the San Francisco District Attorney, Harris sponsored a state Senate bill — SB 1317 — that was introduced by state Sen. Mark Leno, who is also from San Francisco. The state bill was modeled on her truancy initiative in San Francisco, and did result in some parents being jailed.

So it’s not that part of the ad I want to dispute – it’s the interspersion of a speech Harris gave about “with a swipe of my pen.” You can see that part from 1:19 to 1:55. I had read about that “swipe” speech some time ago, and it occurred to me that it actually might have been a speech about the dangers of prosecutorial powers (it’s from 2019). And sure enough, when I looked it up, I discovered this sort of thing:

We found that rather than bragging about her prosecutorial power, Harris was discussing the importance of leaders using power responsibly because of the potential for harm if power is misused. She said that it was something she realized early in her 20s when she started work as a prosecutor.

In her 2019 speech, Harris sought to describe then-President Donald Trump as using his power irresponsibly. The viral clip ends before a crucial part of her speech.

“And I was just a lowly deputy DA,” she went on to say to laughter from the audience. “Yet we have a person in the White House who holds the office of president of the United States, who does not fully, or even partially, understand what it means to have power,” she said of Trump. “When you truly understand what it means to be powerful, you understand that the greatest measure of your strength is not who you beat down, it is who you lift up.”

You don’t have to agree with Harris’ comments about Trump to understand that her speech was meant to be a caution about power, and that in the ad it’s the right using the technique of the truncated quote in order to mislead. This is something the left does constantly and all-too-effectively, in particular against Trump but also against any other GOP candidate they see as vulnerable to it. The right uses the truncated quote much less often, but it still uses it at times.

It’s wrong to do it when anyone does it, but once one side uses it, what’s the other to do? “We can’t play by Marquess of Queensbury rules” and all that. “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its boots.”

So how do you fight such techniques – or any other duplicity – effectively if you play by the rules against an opponent who doesn’t? Must you fight fire with fire? Does airing the truth really work? Isn’t the truth always just getting its boots on?

I actually think that this particular ad would work nearly as well with just the truancy evidence, and that there’s enough footage of Kamala saying awful things without the need to use the “with a swipe of my pen” quotes. But the “swipe” footage intensifies the rest, and it must have felt like a nearly irresistible temptation to make use of it.

Beyoncé at the rally, versus Kundera: to dream the impossible dream of circle dancing

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Whose decision was it that Beyoncé appear at Harris’ Houston rally to endorse her but not to sing? Not even one little itty bitty song? After all, isn’t Beyoncé like, you know, a singer? And when singers appear at political rallies, don’t they usually like, you know, sing a song? After all, Willie Nelson – that quintessential old white guy – did some singing at the very same Houston rally where Beyoncé merely spoke.

There have been many articles mentioning the fact that Beyoncé didn’t sing and that some fans were disgruntled about it, and even booed Harris as a result. But I haven’t been able to find anything about why Beyoncé didn’t do even a bit of singing, and whose decision that was.

You may think this is an exceptionally trivial question on which to waste any time. But I think the phenomenon is emblematic of a certain general tone-deafness in Harris and her aides, although I actually think it happened because Beyoncé herself wanted to appear as a person rather than an entertainer. She said as much, although of course she wasn’t there because she was some Everywoman wife and mother. She was there because she’s a famous star. Here’s what she said, though:

“We are at the precipice of an enormous shift,” Beyoncé told the crowd. “I’m not here as a celebrity. I’m not here as a politician. I’m here as a mother, a mother who cares about the world our children live in, a world where we have the freedom to control our bodies, a world where we are not divided, our past or present or future.”

No, Beyoncé – you’re addressing the crowd because you are a celebrity, and a Harris supporter of course. Otherwise you wouldn’t be there.

The rest of her quote is interesting, too. We’re at the precipice? That doesn’t sound good; a precipice is a very high cliff with a sheer drop that would be calamitous if one more step forward were to be taken. And a precipice of a shift doesn’t make sense – unless the “shift” means to do a 180 and go back from whence you came. But that wouldn’t be the precipice of a shift, it would be a precipice that causes a shift in the opposite direction.

Then there’s the usual phrase about “freedom to control our bodies.” Texas still allows people to come and go as they please, get tattoos or piercings, have sex, get contraception, eat a lot or a little – well, you get the drift. Once a woman is pregnant there are two bodies involved, however. Whether you’re for or against Texas’ particularly restrictive abortion law, it’s misleading to pretend it’s only about women controlling their own bodies. But that’s the rhetoric of modern abortion, and abortion is the biggest selling point of the Democrats today by far. In fact, abortion was the theme of the Houston rally. And I believe the Dobbs ruling was why Democrats did much better than predicted in the 2022 midterms. They are counting on it in 2024 as well.

The rally was held in Houston because Texas abortion law is one of the most restrictive in the US. Abortion is not allowed starting with conception, unless pregnancy threatens the life of the mother (that was the standard in a lot of states when I was young, by the way). However, the law criminally punishes the abortionist and not the woman, and so in Texas – although abortion by pill is also illegal – a woman can actually get mail order abortion pills (which work till around week 11) as long as the provider is out-of-state. This article describes the situation, as well as this one.

Abortion is a complex topic I’ve written about many times before (see this). So all I’ll add here is that I believe that it is the Democrats’ strongest issue these days, and it especially resonates with women.

Which brings me to Beyoncé’s stated hope for “a world where we are not divided.” What does that really mean? Is there any issue on which people aren’t going to be divided? I can’t quite think of one offhand. But of one thing I’m fairly certain: that issue would not be abortion, one of the most inherently divisive issues of our time.

Whether Beyoncé wrote her own words or not, what is really being said? I think the world she’s describing is the world of Lennon’s fairy-tale “Imagine”. Or, rather, it’s the sentiment author Milan Kundera describes with great eloquence in his masterpiece The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, published in 1979:

Circle dancing is magic. It speaks to us through the millennia from the depths of human memory. Madame Raphael had cut the picture out of the magazine and would stare at it and dream. She too longed to dance in a ring. All her life she had looked for a group of people she could hold hands with and dance with in a ring. First she looked for them in the Methodist Church (her father was a religious fanatic), then in the Communist Party, then among the Trotskyites, then in the anti-abortion movement (A child has a right to life!), then in the pro-abortion movement (A woman has a right to her body!); she looked for them among the Marxists, the psychoanalysts, and the structuralists; she looked for them in Lenin, Zen Buddhism, Mao Tse-tung, yogis, the nouveau roman, Brechtian theater, the theater of panic; and finally she hoped she could at least become one with her students, which meant she always forced them to think and say exactly what she thought and said, and together they formed a single body and a single soul, a single ring and a single dance.

Kundera revisits the idea in the same book, expressing it this way:

Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise– the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. Andre Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way. and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer.

And Kundera treats the theme once more in the same book:

…human beings have always aspired to an idyll, a garden where nightingales sing, a realm of har­mony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man nor man against other men, where the world and all its people are molded from a single stock and the fire lighting up the heavens is the fire burning in the hearts of men, where every man is a note in a magnificent Bach fugue and anyone who refuses his note is a mere black dot, useless and meaningless, easily caught and squashed between the fingers like an insect.

Love-gone-bad songs

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If you look at the topic broadly, probably more than half of popular songs are about heartbreak or love gone bad. But I was thinking about a particular sort of heartbreak – the lover who was never sincere, the one who was always fooling you right from the start, and you were the fool. I can think of three such songs that remind me of each other although they’re quite different musically:

The lyrics tell you right at the beginning:

Here the disillusionment takes a tiny bit longer. I love the biting quality Thompson puts into his voice:

And of course there are the Bee Gees, kings of the broken heart. They’re not quite as bitter, but still – when the singer wakes up, she’s gone, and he didn’t see it coming and doesn’t have a clue why. Maybe you can tell him:

This isn’t exactly about the same theme. But hey, I love it, and it’s close enough:

Back to the Bee Gees – as songwriters, anyway. The great Dionne Warwick here:

So, why did the LA Times and the WaPo decide not to endorse anyone this year for the presidency?

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The easy answer would be: they hate Trump and his deplorable supporters, but they’re too embarrassed to endorse Kamala Harris because she’s performed so poorly.

Of course, that didn’t stop them from endorsing Joe Biden in 2020 or carrying water for him right up to the point of his disastrous debate in June with Trump. Nor has it stopped them from continuing to cover the news – including, of course, the presidential race – with their usual leftwing bias. So, why not an endorsement of Harris?

I don’t think it’s because they fear Trump retaliation if he’s elected. They probably realize that (a) he wouldn’t really be doing much to hurt them because in general his past threats have been just bluster, or (b) Trump already has plenty of motivation to do whatever he might be doing to them if he became president, and a Harris endorsement would hardly add anything to it.

So, what is it? The WaPo says it’s “returning to its roots” of non-endorsement prior to 1976. That’s nearly fifty years of endorsements, though. One would think that, since Trump is Hitler, the WaPo picked a funny time to end the endorsement practice. It really does seem a slap in the face to Harris, the only person who might have been reasonably expecting a WaPo endorsement for president this year.

Typical of other papers is this article in the leftist Guardian, in that they all seem to mention that owners Patrick Soon-Shiong (LA) and Jeff Bezos (Post) are billionaires. Well, yes, but they previously were billionaires who owned papers that endorsed Democrats for president. The Guardian writer, Margaret Sullinvan, opines:

All of this may look like nonpartisan neutrality, or be intended to, but it’s far from that. For one thing, it’s a shameful smackdown of both papers’ reporting and opinion-writing staffs who have done important work exposing Trump’s dangers for many years.

It’s also a strong statement of preference. The papers’ leaders have made it clear that they either want Trump (who is, after all, a boon to large personal fortunes) or that they don’t wish to risk the ex-president’s wrath and retribution if he wins. If the latter was a factor, it’s based on a shortsighted judgment, since Trump has been a hazard to press rights and would only be emboldened in a second term.

When Sullivan uses the term “press rights,” I believe it’s actually a code for “the right of the press to lie about Republicans and to suppress any news unfavorable to the left or deemed disinformation by the left.” Any actual free speech advocate, especially involving social media, is a great danger to the left.

However, there is a kernel of truth in the “Trump is a hazard to press rights” accusation, and that is that in 2022 Trump did advocate jail time in order to pressure reporters to reveal sources in cases of perhaps criminal leaks, such as the leak of the Dobbs draft long before the decision was officially issued. But reporters’ privileges to protect sources are not absolute; read this for a discussion of the legal issues. And quite a few reporters have indeed been jailed for refusing to reveal sources; one you might recall was Judith Miller. And I can’t find a record of any reporters actually jailed by Trump for anything during his administration.

More about the WaPo‘s decision [emphasis mine]:

Colleagues were said to be “shocked” and uniformly negative. Editor-at-large Robert Kagan, who has been highly critical of Trump as autocratic, told NPR he had resigned from the editorial board as a consequence.

Former Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron, who led the newsroom to acclaim during Trump’s presidency, denounced the decision starkly.

“This is cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty,” Baron said in a statement to NPR. “Donald Trump will celebrate this as an invitation to further intimidate The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos (and other media owners). History will mark a disturbing chapter of spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”

“Democracy dies in darkness” – I guess Baron really took that slogan to heart. But it’s been quite a long time since the WaPo was “famed for courage,” and it’s interesting that that “courage” was demonstrated by the paper’s role in taking down a previous Republican president, Richard Nixon.

Trump and Rogan, sitting and schmoozing

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I listened to all three hours of Trump’s interview with Joe Rogan out of curiosity. As is my habit when listening to a podcast or the like, I was double-tasking, mainly doing chores while wearing a wireless headset, and I increased the audio speed for much of it.

But I didn’t really need three hours of a Rogan interview to be familiar with Trump’s personality. He’s been doing talk show interviews since the 1980s (or earlier?) back when he was slim and handsome. And then he had his own hit TV show for years later on. Trump’s got the gift of gab (if you like him) or is a master BS-er (if you don’t).

Rogan has an enormously popular podcast which I hear is especially appealing to youngish males. I’m clearly not a member of that demographic, but I’ve seen a few excerpts from his show over the years, and I know the format. It’s tailor-made for Trump, who’s ordinarily quite relaxed on camera especially if there’s a friendly interviewer. Trump has a sense of humor as well. Those things were on display during yesterday’s interview, and I think he probably gained some voters from it – people who didn’t see a moment of the Hitler they’ve repeatedly been told he’s channeling.

The basic messages Trump conveyed in the interview were these:

I have stamina – therefore those who say I’m going gaga are lying through their teeth.
I’m likeable – unlike a certain candidate whose initials are KH.
I’m able to think and talk at the same time – unlike a certain candidate whose initials are KH.
I’m actually able to answer questions – unlike a certain candidate whose initials are KH – and although I ramble at times, it’s purposeful and I know exactly what I’m doing.

Here’s the video. I noticed just now, as I went there for the embed code, that it’s got about 16 million views. That’s in less than 24 hours and on YouTube, a subsidiary venue for Rogan (Spotify is where most people watch his show):

Kamala Harris, on the other hand, went the star-studded route and got the Beyonce nomination. Harris’ entire campaign is focused on appealing to women, of course, although apparently some watchers were mighty upset yesterday that Beyonce didn’t sing a note although a short concert had apparently been hinted at and certainly was expected. There were even boos from the crowd. Certainly not the look Harris was aiming for.

Harris isn’t planning a Rogan interview. It’s obvious that she wouldn’t do well in such a venue, or that she’s actually frightened of it. Then again, maybe it would have helped her to do something like it, if she could relax enough to be herself. It’s a big “if,” of course. But I’d be curious to see what that self might be. Is there no there there? Is that self something equally off-putting as what we’ve seen so far of Harris, or worse?

Then again, maybe Harris will win anyway, for all the usual reasons: demographics, “rigging,” press help, identity politics and wokeism, actual fraud, who knows?

Critical Legal Studies: the radical assault on truth in American law was already apparent many decades ago

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I became interested in Critical Legal Studies long ago, in the 1980s. I had been to law school in the 1970s, so it didn’t affect my own legal education. To the best of my recollection, although my law school had conservative and leftist professors, their politics never entered the classroom. There, it was strictly legal reasoning, and a meritocracy.

Critical Legal Studies changed all that and was alarming right from the start. Twenty years or so ago, I bought a book about it called Beyond All Reason: The Radical Assault on Truth in American Law. It had been published in 1997. Here’s an excerpt, which proves how long ago it was possible to see the writing on the wall for those who were looking. And by the way, co-authors Daniel A. Farber and Suzanna Sherry were liberals rather than conservatives. But they were alarmed nevertheless and wrote this:

We can now summarize the fundamental tenets of the new radical multiculturalism. If the modern era begins with the European Enlightenment, the postmodern era that captivates the radical multiculturalists begins with its rejection. According to the new radicals, the Enlightenment-inspired ideas that have previously structured our world, especially the legal and academic parts of it, are a fraud perpetrated and perpetuated by white males to consolidate their own power. Those who disagree are not only blind but bigoted. The Enlightenment’s goal of an objective and reasoned basis for knowledge, merit, truth, justice, and the like is an impossibility: “objectivity” in the sense of standards of judgment that transcend individual perspectives, does not exist. Reason is just another code word for the views of the privileged. The Enlightenment itself merely replaced one socially constructed view of reality with another, mistaking power for knowledge. There is naught but power.

They saw all of that back then.

The next chapter of the book is entitled “Transforming the Law.” It begins with the idea that these movements in the humanities departments of universities were as yet still limited to the universities, which may have been the case in the 1990s but certainly is no longer true, as graduates of such courses have taken the helm in many professions such as journalism. The authors were correct in stating that when the movement spread to law schools, it became far more influential in the immediate sense.

The rest of the chapter is extraordinarily insightful although hard to summarize, but it describes how the Critical Legal Studies proponents teach that law is about power and so reason has little to no place in it and is merely a convenient facade for power plays. For example, here’s a description of the work of Derrick Bell, the first black law professor to get tenure at Harvard and a very influential voice in the movement:

As Derrick Bell puts it, law is “not a formal mechanism for determining outcomes in a neutral fashion – as traditional legal scholars maintain – but rather a ramshackle ad hoc affair whose ill-fitting joints are soldered together by suspect rhetorical gestures, leaps of illogic, and special pleading tricked up as general rules, all in the service of a decidedly partisan agenda that wants to wrap itself in the mantle and majesty of law.” Specifically, Bell argues that although courts proclaim a veneer of high principle, judges rule in favor of black interests only when the interests of whites are thereby served; the ultimate agenda is white self-interest.

This idea of Bell’s and of Critical Legal Studies in general – that law is a sham and only about power – is an excuse for subsequently making it a sham in pursuit of power, as we see today with lawfare. After all, if law is inherently only about power and always was, why not play the game better and boldly use it to empower your team? Of course, you may sometimes have to pretend to fairness and logic for a while, to fool the plebeians. But the left seems to have given up on objectivity and fairness as a goal for which to strive when dealing with one’s political opponents. People such as Alan Dershowitz, a liberal who still believes in those goals – however imperfectly realized – of legal objectivity and fairness to both sides, are considered dinosaurs at best and traitors at worst to the leftist cause, and have been treated as such by the left in recent years.

These trends in law are the result of close to forty years of careful nurturance, and that has borne very ripe fruit. And no, of course law was never anywhere near perfect, but objectivity and fairness were goals towards which most law professors taught their students to respect and strive, and it was often achieved. There are still some professors of that type around, but they are getting more and more rare, and that is no accident.

Oh, and by the way, Kamala Harris is best buddies with the owner of The Atlantic, Laurene Powell Jobs

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Laurene Powell Jobs, the very deep-pocketed owner of The Atlantic, is an extremely close friend of Kamala Harris and a big supporter.

Surely that had nothing to do with the Atlantic’s publication of a poorly-sourced hit piece on Trump by Jeffrey Goldberg two weeks before Election Day. The allegations in the article have been denied by almost everyone involved except for Goldberg’s anonymous sources and the Trump-hater John Kelly.

Here’s some of the history of Powell Jobs and Harris:

Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs, has been friends with the Democratic presidential nominee for years. In fact, these two powerful women are so close Harris has referred to Powell Jobs as part of her family.

In 2017, then-vice president Joe Biden swore in Harris as a U.S. senator, and right after the ceremony they posed for a photo in the Capitol with her family. Then she asked Biden to take a picture with her “extended family,” according to a report from The New York Times. Powell Jobs—one of the richest women in the world—was quick to jump in.

Powell Jobs and Harris have been friends for two decades, and she’s also made other “quiet” donations amounting to millions of dollars to an organization backing Harris, three people briefed on the gifts told The New York Times. Powell Jobs also allegedly played a “key role” in helping usher Biden out of the race, making room for Harris to step up.

There’s a great deal more at the link, but you get the idea.