Worthwhile Reading

Cold Spring Shops:  Losing the Intellectual Tradition.  He cites Joy Pullman, who in turn quotes Hillsdale College president Larry Arnn:

We’re living in a time as if some blight has come across the earth. Something fantastic, something deep, something old, something elevated, something high is basically being obliterated.

Also from Cold Spring Shops:  Collaboration creates mediocrity.  I would rephrase this to say that collaboration can create mediocrity, especially when used as an unthinking buzzword and deployed as a pseudo-religion…after all, the purpose of basically all organizations is to allow people to collaborate, in various ways, to do what they could not do individually.  But shallow thoughts about collaboration and de-leveling and de-siloing and de-hierarchicalization are indeed in many cases detracting from the serious work that needs to be done on organizational design.

At Politico: The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook.  See also a response to this story from The DiploMad.

Related, from Roger Simon:  Iran protests expose mainstream media as reationary, not liberal.

Three from Sarah Hoyt:

Childhood memories:  The things that stay

The importance of feedback:  Breaking the Gears

Of course they do:  When the Left bullies, they pose as anti-bullies

Week of Tantrum

Well, this has been a festival of tantrums, has it not? What with ISIS/ISIL/Whatever is now huffing and puffing, threatening to blow our Christmas cottage down, and to execute President Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. Might have some luck with some sub-normally-intelligent specimen of Muslim humanity with delusions of adequacy walking into a public place with a badly-constructed pipe-bomb, but looking on the most recent fearless lone-wolf jihadi warrior, who only managed to semi-eviscerate himself in trying to blow up … which reminds me, have the usual suspects begun winging on about the anti-Muslim backlash which, miraculously, never seems to descend? I’ve been sick as a dog all week with a seasonal cold, so it might have actually happened, and I never noticed. Meanwhile, the Palestinians and their fellow-traveler-symps in the Western world have declared another day of rage with regard to President Trump following through on the ever-so-tentative concept agreed upon by how many previous administrations that the US embassy in Israel should be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

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Oh, My!

Seriously, I am stuck for a reaction to the news this week that both Matt Lauer and Garrison Keillor have both been let go, with appropriate force, by their employers for sexual conduct unbecoming and unprofessional in the extreme with women in their respective workplaces. Earlier in the week it was howls for the heads of John Conyers and Al Franken, giving the impression of those gentlemen holding on to their congressional seats by their bare fingertips, while Cokie Roberts confesses that ‘everyone’ knew not to get into an elevator with Congressman Conyers. Jeez Louise, is there anyone in the higher levels of show business, the media and the government who isn’t a total woman-mauling pig? Anyone? And is there anyone in the media specifically charged with covering show biz and politics who isn’t complicit in covering these matters with a pillow, until they stop moving, in the deathless phrase of Iowahawk? Can we wait until our fearless media fifth-column representatives are cornered like a rat and forced to ‘fess up to deliberately looking the other way? Oh, and thanks, Cokie for sitting on that bit of intelligence regarding sexual abuse on Capitol Hill. Just couldn’t bear to tear yourself away from the sweet, sweet source of social power in Capitol City, and face the prospect of never being invited to the good cocktail parties again, could you? Between you and Garrison Keillor, I feel like demanding a refund of every single dollar in pledges I ever made to public radio and television. I will keep the Blake’s 7 tee shirt and the La Madelaine cookbook, though. (The tee shirt is trashed, and the cookbook is pretty well-worn.)

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Meltdown

Unchristian though it is to confess to such a feeling, I have been taking a very mean-minded satisfaction in the ongoing meltdown of both the NFL, the mainstream Hollywood establishment, and now the Democratic National Committee has come due for their share. Paraphrasing P.J. O’Rourke just desserts, just hors de oeuvres, a just main course of crow! So, the NFL is continuing to go down the road to hell paved with social justice warrior good intentions, the list of male power-brokers among the Hollywood glitterati accused of sexually-exploiting women, other men, teenagers of both sexes and ornamental potted plants is expanding geometrically, and now it seems as if Hillary Clinton and her campaign advisers did quite the number on her own political party during the campaign which ended exactly a year ago. Even as Hillary Clinton toured the country, explaining “What Happened”, it seems that the former chair of the DNC, Donna Brazile has penned her own memoir of the campaign. I suppose that in the wake of a political upset of the magnitude we experienced last election day, everyone involved at the highest level is obligated to sing some version of the old song “If only they had listened to me.”

In the linked story,

“Brazile writes that she inherited a national party in disarray, in part because President Obama, Clinton and Wasserman Schultz were “three titanic egos” who had “stripped the party to a shell for their own purposes.””

So, if I am understanding this whole imbroglio correctly, Hillary’s people took over the national Democrat establishment after Little Debbie ran it into the ground, and diverted most all of the funds raised jointly by the DNC and Hillary into Hillary’s campaign coffers, thereby cutting out Bernie Sanders. I am not the least surprised at Sanders’ lack of fiduciary sense the man barely scraped a living until he went into politics still, I thought he had been in politics long enough to have learned something like how not to get blindsided by avaricious scumbags. Well, at least he got a vacation house out of it all, so perhaps he did learn something.

The real surprise is that Donna Brazile is coming out swinging at Hillary and even landing the crushing blow or two. Does this signify a fracture in Party unity? Is Hillary and the Clinton Machine being thrown out of the window and under the bus, and not a moment too soon? What have the fracture-lines been drawn, who has control of the Party now, and who among the Party faithful will be rewarded? Discuss. I’ll make popcorn lightly salted and with real butter, not that orange-oil gack that they put on popcorn in the movie theaters.

Aftermath

Of course, it’s a given that the cries for tighter gun control would become ever louder and more intense after the Mandalay Bay massacre of attendees at an outdoor country music festival. It happens after every such event … although I’m under the impression that such cries were fairly muted after the attempted assassination of Republican baseball team members two months ago by a disaffected Bernie Bro named … what was his name, anyway? Oh, yeah James Hodgkinson. I had to look it up. Funny way that he went down the memory hole, wasn’t it? It was almost as if it never happened, and James Hodgkinson became an un-person in the eyes of the Establishment News Media. There are just some crises that just aren’t worth wheeling out the big anti-guns for, it would appear.

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