Category Archives: America

UPDATED (2/14): Heavenly Al Jarreau, Rest In Peace And Rock The Heavens

America, Art, Human Accomplishment, Music

Al Jarreau retired from performing last week. And then he died. Poetic.

Al Jarreau was perfection. A giant of music, in general, and of the soul-jazz genre, in particular.

By comparison, Gaga (who is indubitably the best in a bad bunch), Beyonce and Madonna are circus animals—nothing more than crass entertainers, who more often than not assault the ear.

You realize how rotten popular music is when you listen to this man.

Young in Spain:

Older in Spain. Al Jarreau is still perfection, as is Steve Gadd, both are sublime, better than anything that ululates and twerks on stage these days, and is nothing without the almighty Auto-Tune.

What a sweet sweet soul.

UPDATE (2/14): Facebook thread.

The Fate Of Wild Life In The New, ‘Improved’ South Africa

America, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, South-Africa

There’s a chapter in “Into The Cannibal’s Pot” about the fate of animals in the new, “improved” South Africa. It’s titled “Killing God’s Creatures.”

In the local vernacular, “witchcraft potions” are known as “muti.”

“Three lions poisoned, beheaded and chopped up ‘for witchcraft potions.’”

We’re importing animal abusers.

UPDATED (1/9): The Unbearable Banality Of Fox News (Tucker Carlson Excepted)

America, Conservatism, Intelligence, Media, Politics, Pop-Culture, Republicans

“Tocqueville in the 19th century, and Solzhenitsyn in the 20th, noted that conformity of thought is powerfully prevalent among Americans.” Thus, the possibility that a lonely voice telling an unwanted, original truth might be heard on Fox News is small.

With this in mind, I couldn’t resist bringing you the “mind-blowing” Fox headlines for December 22, 2016, the kind of insights that are off-the-charts brilliant (cynicism alert):

“Germany’s Refugee Policy Has Been a ‘Complete Disaster.'” [You don’t say!]

“Gutfeld Slams ‘Divisive, Alienating’ YouTuber Who Claimed Racism on Plane.” [Yawn.]

Meghan McCain, one of the dumbest women on TV: “‘I’m So Blown Away’ That Some Dems Want a 3rd Hillary Run.”

“‘Russia Didn’t Elect Trump, America Did'” [OMG!]

Prepare for the clincher: “‘Tolerance Is One-Sided’ on the Left.” [The truly brilliant Christopher Hitchens must be tossing in his grave. His brilliance has finally been bested.]

Mediocrity.

UPDATE (1/9):

A President Who Doesn’t Hate Those People Clinging To Guns & God

America, Britain, Donald Trump, Elections, History

A President Who Doesn’t Hate Those People Clinging To Guns & God” is the current column, now on The Unz Review. An excerpt:

Did Donald Trump unite the American Silent Marjory behind things true and shared?

These are economic prosperity, national pride and unity, recognizable neighborhoods—a yen that demands an end to the transformation of neighborhoods through centrally planned, mass immigration—and an end to gratuitous wars.

Those were the questions asked in “The Trump Revolution The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June 29, 2016), and answered in the affirmative.

Unlike America’s self-anointed cognoscenti, some of us saw this coming. The former recognize truth only once card-carrying members arrive at it independently, grasp and broadcast it, sometimes years too late. Not so America’s marginalized writers. Not in 2012, but in 2002 did we pinpoint the wrongness of the Iraq War. And not in 2016, but in July of 2015 did some of us, not fortuitously, finger Trump as “a candidate to ‘kick the crap out of all the politicians’” and “send the system’s sycophants scattering” (August 14, 2015). His appeal, as this writer has contended since late in 2015, transcended left and right.

Conversely, vaunted statistician Nate Silver “calculated, last November, that Trump’s support was ‘about the same share of people who think the Apollo moon landings were faked.’” (Professor Tyler Cowen of George Mason University properly downgraded wonder boy Silver’s intellectual prowess. His prose, wrote the good teacher, was a sprawl that “evinces a greater affiliation to rigor with data analysis than to rigor with philosophy of science or, for that matter, rigor with rhetoric.”)

Given the disparate groups that rooted for Mr. Trump’s candidacy, it would appear that he did in fact awaken a historic majority. You could say Mr. Trump was an “omnibus candidate,” a concept floated by historian David Hackett Fischer …

… Read the rest. “A President Who Doesn’t Hate Those People Clinging To Guns & God” is now on The Unz Review.

UPDATE: An interesting perspective on “The Trump Revolution” from a betting man: “I thought this was an interesting read last summer,” writes David Taggart at Amazon.com, “now I realize it was a work of genius. Wish I’d paid closer attention and bet when the bookies were offering 7-2.”