Yeah, philosophical gent that he is, ole Yuval likes to take the long perspective on things, and after some hemming and hawing about what’s been going on in the House of Representatives, comes up with this conclusion: Even if the spoils of the speaker fight [i.e., the “reforms’ demanded by the far right] aren’t transformative,…
Author: Alan Vanneman
King Joe? Dictator Joe? Well, maybe. Sort of. We’ll just have to see how this plays out.
Regardless of how the current hullabaloo/Mexican standoff in the House is resolved, whether Kevin McCarthy gets the job, or some other poor emasculated schmuck takes over—a schmuckless schmuck, as it were—the odds are approximately a million to one that the House of Representatives will be all but ungovernable in 2023. Specifically, I think the Republicans…
Shorter India: “The United States of ‘America’? Isn’t that one of those little western countries?”
That’s the perspective from New Delhi, Varanasi and Chennai, as reported by NYT guy Roger Cohen in his long post, Russia’s War Could Make It India’s World, suggesting that the Biden administration’s moralizing attempt to turn the current world situation into Cold War II isn’t playing too well beyond the Atlantic community of nations, almost…
The History of Jazz Bass (in 15 Choruses)
Jazz bassist Paul Thompson, aka pdbass, salutes by imitation 15 legendary jazz bassists, over a century of pizzo n’ arco, starting with Pops Foster and concluding with Christian McBride. If these are merely names to you, well, it’s time you got yourself educated.
Carmen McRae—“Monk’s Dream”
Actually a Monk three-in-one from the incomparable Carmen: Monk’s Dream/Ugly Beauty/Rhythm A Ning. Filmed in New York back in 1990. No information on her rhythm boys. Posted by atube亨
Hypocrisy is the homage that Ross Douthat pays to virtue
If, as increasingly appears to be the case, Donald Trump’s wild career will end, not with a bang but a whimper, then, sighs NYT opinionist Ross Douthat, more in sorrow than in anger, there will not be any accountability for Trump’s soft enablers within the Republican Party. There was a certain political accountability when the…
I did not see this coming! The B-21 bomber is so dumb, even the Washington Post is making fun of it!
Hell no I did not! The Washington Post, not known for its skepticism regarding America’s military intellectual complex—because it’s a charter member!—just can’t stop snickering at the B-21 “bomber”, sounding a hell of lot like me! Noting that Congress has kept the big boy’s budget secret, and that the plane’s recent roll-out was as primly…
Karl Marx, plagiarist
Back in 2016, I wrote a post, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Donald Trump, echoing one of Karl’s greatest hits, remarking as follows: In 1852, Karl Marx wrote The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, commemorating in contempt the seizure of power of Napoleon’s nephew in the previous year and coining the immortal one-liner, “History, Hegel tells…
Alan Vanneman is very disappointed in Paul Krugman
Fuck yeah, I am. The source of my disappointment is Paul’s latest, Why America Is Getting Tough on Trade, the very title an irritant for the homage it pays to the meme that “getting tough” is always a good idea. Paul’s “nut graph” (I think that’s what it is) reads as follows: This is a…
The new B-21 Bomber? Don’t you mean B-2B?
I have been making fun of the B-21 bomber, under development by the defense firm of Northrup-Grumman, and its bumbling predecessors in uselessness, the B-1 and B-2, for years. Well, we now have gotten our first look at the newbie, shown above, and, wonder of wonders, it looks exactly like the B-2, also produced by…