Ehhh, I don’t buy it. Trump goes away if he doesn’t win. Not sure which GOPers would pick up where he left but, well, the posturing/ninny pearl-clutching on display last week was not impressive. Our deathless zombie Nevertrump ego-before-country cult is going to renew the copyright on Conservatism and they were always favorites of the globo-lib elite anyway. MAGA lives or dies in a month’s time; if there is hope, it lies in the AM Talk touts (who frankly can be kind of idiotic too)

I don’t derive the paranoid, Alex Jonesian flashlight-under-your-chin message from the New Yorker article that you seem to, Steve. It’s saying Hillary had an opportunity to align herself with, I dunno, whatever % of the Trump supporters would possibly be amenable to such a gesture, and she blew it (whether due to lack of political foresight/skill, or abundance of politicized inclination). I tend to doubt she had a real option there — Hillary is too “defined” as they say — but the title is “Coming Struggle With” not “Coming FEMA Extermination Camp Program For”

This article above is the kind of thing op-ed columnists write when they are only somewhat but not very successful in the wider world. They’re not big enough to be on TV; yet still past that threshold of “eminence” to sniffily put down the colleagues who are either more or less circulated than themselves, with woeful smug ennui (note that a truly obscure blogger doesn’t bother with “passing scene” crap, he or she tries to write about something personally interesting; might as well). I feel as if I have read the rough basic complaint reproduced for this post, at least 100 times– but those were all the unique perspectives of precious individuals, right, Fred?

[Choose one handle and stick to it or use Anonymous/Anon. Otherwise your comments may get trashed.]

The school did not, last year, do anything for Black History Month… They do things like training girls in tech… Do you know Bella Abzug… I went to see a play on Governors Island… I worked on a film about underground female fight clubs… Financially I’m not doing very well but socially and emotionally I’m doing really well…

Obscurity: many are born into it, but few truly earn their deserved share

He who controls the hummus supplier, controls Western demography…

Would Isaac Mizrahi be termed a designer of color

Several years ago I marked the Hillelites at this institution as out & proud but also a bit behind the curve. They draw from NYC suburbs, Long Island, southern Maryland. The school admissions process itself has a youngish tradition of raised-fist ACLU-type Jews (e.g. Hillary’s friend Ira) but in recent decades has been shaking the Rich Gulf Arab tree and Rich Brazilian Politico-Dynast árbol. That is true of Boston-Cambridge as well, arguably more so. The urbs of Providence has an obviously Irish-Italian labor-union overculture that is not purist-left (could be why it turned into a picaresque Hogan’s Alley during the 70s). Brown Hillel probably have a better received knowledge of that, vs. the modern multiculture on the campus which itself has always been historically insular in town/gown terms.

When the self-driving trucks are finally perfected we won’t have these kind of Fringe Accidents. Any libertarian can tell you how technological progress fixes all suffering, viz. the self-chopping vegetables/sandwich bread and self-extinguishing inflammable chemical barrel

Have many professional-blackish street thespians already cattily tweeted that furrener jeehawd has once again distracted precious supplies of media attention from Their Movement? Anything short of “F Paris” [wrong city intentional -ed.] is a definite walk-back, they’d be losing face in front of everyone else in Narrativeville

Yes, its offensive in the sense of “The Best Defense”

If a Westerner (“Prospero”) finds it funny, that’s almost guaranteed an nth-generation Bedouin herdsman won’t. MENA Muslims are “differently humored.” It’s not that they don’t have jokes — they have plenty — but what’s funny to them is horrifying to us, and vice versa.

The Chinese-water-army effort to drum up Cal GOP votes for Sanchez is mystifying. Both candidates are frankly terrible, and I’d expect either one to vote consistently how the (D) whip tells her to. You’re saying I’m supposed to identify with Loretta because she’s not as polished, read: dumber… And by the way, Rob Ford-level tacky. I haven’t checked but it seems like the Sanchez sisters have been in the game of milking the public fisc as long as Harris has.

Though it would feel good to flip off Harris there’s something to be said for not ratifying another incompetent Hispanderer in a state chock full of them at the municipal, county, and capital strata. With each passing year more formerly-major California cities are becoming rotten boroughs a la New Mexico.

I believe Drum is from L.A. People who lived in the state during the Prop 187 campaign tend to have a different, accurate recollection of it (i.e. it was obviously popular) compared to how it’s remembered by New Yorkers, New Englanders, north Virginians, etc. having watched maybe a 15-second spot on the news with Dan Rather or Peter Jennings. The Arizona drivers license law brought back the same media playbook.

I don’t remember much doubt about the vote, just that Wilson shillied/shallied as a “moderate Republican” before endorsing. The L.A. Times described the measure as Hitler II. The most screeching revolved around a poorly attested putative mandate to emergency rooms to turn away any Central American vibrant people bleeding out at the curb (portraying this as a bad thing). I remember much level-headed debate about exactly how high dead Mexicans would begin piling in the streets after it became law, because of restrictions on the ER docs to be enforced by stormtroopers. It was basically the opposite of “seeking compromise” civic discussion. Also, the number 187 in CHP context had been made famous by gangsta rap recently.

Frum had a good write-up on the same question/theme– our present laissez-faire system is almost ideologically anti-selective at every level of command, sort of like the Prime Directive on the old “Star Trek” series — but w/ bonus Somali content:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/12/refugees/419976/

Merkel accidentally set it off when a jocular morning tweet in honor of Von Steuben Day (“Bring me more muesli”) was poorly transliterated by certain Internet providers in the near Orient… yes, Unicode has screwed us over once again

Happy German-American Day btw — unless you’re in Australia of course.

He was not caught here being visionary, or counter-visionary, or anything besides imitative. That stuff he said in Australia is of a piece with the boosterish Davos-to-Aspen singularity cant our social betters were spewing around the time of the mystical Y2K Zeitgeist. On substance it was half-baked at the time, as if picked it up from a smudged review of a Babelfish excerpt of Kenichi Ohmae; yes, “idea people” will latch onto stupid fads & freshly declare themselves experts, it was true then too.

Briefly after 9/11 the comic-con libertoids quit blabbing: “Humanity has evolved out of nation stage, let’s don giant mech suits & have weekend bisexual rave-orgies in Antarctica” because from taking a quick look around, it was obviously out of step. Yet the non-cosplay-geek version of it, the four-quadrant “diversity is strength” spiel, not only weathered 9/11 but bulked up its artillery for a new round of greatly leaping forward. If anyone should alight upon the inkling that diversity vitiates national institutions, the elites strenuously reject it either because a) as typical schmoes they believe their own ideological horse manure, or b) actually you just spelled out their objective, or c) it can be both of course. Katrina was a pretty serviceable example for the continuation of the overarching post-2000 anti-judgment Nobody In Charge ethos; more bipartisanly the Obama administration racked up impressive bureaucratic SNFUs from Snowden to the strange Ukraine posture to the OPM’s Oops-I-accidentally-everyone’s-credit-report Act of 2015. On one hand national greatness is safely ensconced in irony, meanwhile there is an ongoing pursuit of defining national incompetence down, in view of all of which it’d just seem cheeky for globalists to openly sniff, “Outdated racist concept anyway; firmware update coming soon,” about your untrendy belief in borders, separation of powers, what have you. Hence we get that snooty lecture in smaller doses from the online equivalent of crazed clocktower snipers, the dorkier econ professor blogs.

I think it is funny he can write this:

Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 at the foot of the Statue of Liberty…

and follow it — literally, the *next* sentence — with this:

…endorsed by Republicans and Democrats in an era when cooperation was still possible.

Either nobody reads these columns before clicking “Publish;” or the post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc spirit animating all these dumb Weisbergism immigration press releases has a hard range restriction of 1945 to about 1966 — after which point, NOTHING changed. Except the level of cooperation, lol

I always laugh when I see the “creates more heat than light” cliche — an obvious tell that whatever policy position the journo is hoping to slide across the tabletop, card facing down, is a dead-bang loser for popular acceptance.

“Overheated Light-Deficient Debate Over Slavery Reparations / news analysis / by David Broder”

“LEGALIZE CANNIBALISM / opinion / by Ellen Goodman — `Though the coverage of this thorny subject seem to produce far more heat than light…’”