Category Archives: culture

The Death of the Alarm Clock

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Maybe a loss as a minor cultural item, but the loss of the alarm clock has no practical consequence, even though one of the editors of The Wall Street Journal thinks so. The opinion writer opened her piece with this:

A friend who recently joined the Medicare rolls encountered a new test at his last physical. To confirm he still has his marbles, he was asked to draw a clock face displaying the time 10 minutes after 11. He passed, but would a fourth-grader? Not necessarily, I suspect, due to the near-extinction of the alarm clock.

I suspect otherwise.

————-
| 11:10 |
————-

Easy enough for the 4th grader to do, even with AACII art. Maybe, with ASCII art, especially so for him.

The Problem with Platner

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Graham Platner has won the Progressive-Democratic Party’s Maine primary election and has become Party’s nominee to be one of Maine’s Senators in the fall general election. That’s bad enough, but that’s not all.

Party senior leadership and middle tier politicians are enthusiastically endorsing this…person.

  • California Congressmen Adam Schiff and Ro Khanna
  • Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal
  • New York Senator and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand
  • Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz
  • Minnesota Senator Tina Smith
  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren
  • Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (socialist and Independent, but he caucuses with Party)
  • Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego

All of these support Platner and are touting him to be the next Senator from Maine, replacing the Republican incumbent, Susan Collins.

This is Graham Platner:

Platner has a Nazi symbol for a tattoo on his chest that he has only lately tried to cover over with another tattoo—a move he made only when the public began objecting to his tattoo, not because it took him nearly 20 years to figure out that it was a Nazi symbol.

Platner has a long history of abusing women, including physically, and he has been caught sexting women in the last couple of years—after he was married.

Platner holds women at least partially responsible for their own rapes.

Platner openly disparages American voters, here, Maine voters, saying in plain words that rural Mainers are racist and stupid.

Platner disdains our police, saying that all of them are bastards.

Platner, himself a military veteran, has only contempt for our military men and women. He demonstrates this with his slur of a wounded, and Purple Heart recipient, soldier, insisting that the man was dumb for having gotten shot and deserved to die.

The problem for our nation isn’t a single Senator with such obnoxious and anti-American (not just unamerican) positions.

The problem is bigger than that: those positions of Platner’s–bigotry, misogyny, hatred of police and our military personnel–are, by Party endorsement, Party’s ideology and election platform.

Dominic Green Asked

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In his lede, Green asked

Which is worse, a young Englishman bleeding out in handcuffs while police ignore his cries for help, or the vice president of the United States expressing his opinion about it?

What JD Vance, the supposedly miscreant Vice President, said was this:

Henry Nowak died the same way a civilization dies, abandoned, handcuffed by authorities who neither trusted nor cared for him, and accused of hate crimes he did not commit.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer, through his spokesman (apparently because Starmer is too timid to speak for himself on this),:

accus[ed] unnamed foreigners of “trying to interfere in our democracy and seeking to stir up division on our streets….”

How does Green’s question even exist? Given the naked bigotry demonstrated by the British police and by the government that created that police department, there can be no question of relative morality here. The one is an accurate commentary; the other is naked, state-sanctioned, and this time murderous, bigotry.

Nor was Vance’s statement in any way an interference in British democracy. There was no push for the British to do anything differently, only an objection to what that government has chosen to allow on its streets. If there was any pressure from Vance’s remarks, it was only because his words struck hard into what passes for a conscience in that government’s collective mind.

There’s a hint on the whole interfere in our democracy matter, though:

The administration-adjacent Elon Musk, whose X website outflanks Britain’s speech laws, told his 28.5 million followers to share the Nowak footage “to everyone you know,” so that all can see how the police “cravenly kowtowed to his murderer.”

Outflanks Britain’s speech laws. Maybe the nation that increasingly restricts what is permissible speech and that increasingly shrivels religious freedom is becoming less and less a democracy in the first place.

A Time for Choosing

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New York’s Congressional 10th District is a microcosm of the choices we face. The Progressive-Democratic Party primary features two far Left candidates. One is Dan Goldman, who is a virulent Never Trumper, to the point his Congressional votes are based on that rather than on any real policy objections, and an increasingly strident anti-Israel politician, to the point of working with ex-President Joe Biden (D) to deny Israel’s access to some of the weapons needed to defend itself against Hamas.

The other is  Brad Lander, former New York City Comptroller and an open, enthusiastic supporter of Progressive-Democrat Mayor Zohan Mamdani. Lander shares Mamdani’s naked antipathy for Israel and is openly antisemitic.

The choices come down to this. Progressive-Democrats must choose between a Never Trumper and anti-Israel politician and a candidate who, far beyond being merely anti-Israel, is both antisemitic and pro-Palestinian, the latter with no distinction between Palestinian civilians and the Palestinian terrorists epitomized by Hamas.

After primary season, we Americans in general must choose between a Republican party whose small-government positions are eroding but still leaning that way and a Progressive-Democratic Party that is rapidly strengthening its big, intrusive government ideology; is increasingly incapable of working with Trump or anything Republican; and that is, in this context, increasingly opposed to the only Middle East democracy and staunch US ally while actively strengthening its antisemitic bigotry.

How Dare They?

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The Supreme Court overruled a district court three judge panel and allowed Alabama to proceed with a prior Congressional district map that’s skewed 6-1 toward Republican House representatives instead of that lower court’s mandated newly created map that skewed 5-2 for Republicans. This ruling came in the aftermath of the Court’s prior Callais ruling that held that racial gerrymandering was no longer allowed.

Progressive-Democrats are in their usual uproar.

Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented.

“Before the Court are two paths. Down one lies an orderly election. … Down the other lies a chaotic election, held under a never-before-used congressional map that intentionally discriminates against Black Alabamians.”
The President Barack Obama-appointed justice also wrote that the high-court’s conservative majority “chooses the second path and disregards both democratic values and the rule of law.”

And

In a public statement, [Progressive-Democrat Congresswoman Terri Sewell (AL)] called it a decision allowing Alabama to use its “racist congressional map” for the midterms, expressing frustration over the reversal of prior efforts to create additional majority-minority districts.

My irony meter is pegged, and my hypocrisy warning light is flashing. There’s nothing more racist than demanding some Americans be segregated into a separate voting district, explicitly as Sotomayor, et al., and Sewell are demanding for the protection of those singled-out Americans. How hypocritical that the politician is objecting to the possibility of losing a Congressional seat that belongs to her.

How dare those impudent Justices insist on acting on what our Constitution and the Voting Rights Act actually say instead of what those Progressive-Democrats and their subordinate activist Justices want them to say?