One of my prized possessions is an electric guitar painted and signed by Green Day. My father won it at a charity auction and gave it to me. Growing up, at least one of the albums Dookie, Nimrod, or American…

In the wake of their hasty substitution of Joe Biden with Kamala Harris as their presumptive nominee for president, the Democrats have cooked up a fresh line of attack against former President Donald…

Culture Is the GOP the Party of Normal, or Is It Punk Rock? In 2024, there is a basic incoherence in the establishment/anti-establishment split. Geoffrey Clowes via Shutterstock One of my prized possessions is an electric guitar painted and signed by Green Day. My father won it at a charity auction and gave it to me. Growing up, at least one of the albums Dookie, Nimrod, or American Idiot were loaded up in the CD player in Dad’s truck at all times.  I went to college in Berkeley, California, where the band came up in the ’90s. Three decades on, the punk-rock trio still has their mark on Berkeley. One local doctor known for liberally writing certain prescriptions has a signed Green Day record on the wall. Legend has it he once performed the same service for Billie Joe Armstrong. For me, the pandemic ended when a group of college buddies and I saw Green Day at San Francisco’s Oracle Park on a beautiful summer evening in 2021. On Monday, I saw them again at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C. I knew going in that Billie Joe and the boys would have some silly anti-Trump display. I was right. At one point, Armstrong held up a Trump mask with “IDIOT” sharpied across the forehead. Lyrics to the band’s hit song “American Idiot” were changed to “I’m not a part of the MAGA agenda.”  Those kinds of digs don’t really really bother me.  But it got me thinking about what Vivek Ramaswamy said at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee: Our message to Gen Z is this: You’re going to be the generation that actually saves our country. You want to be a rebel? Show up on your college campus and try calling yourself a conservative. Say you want to get married, have kids, and teach them to pledge allegiance to your country. Give it a try, I bet it’ll be pretty liberating. There’s another side to the GOP’s messaging. In the 2024 election cycle, Trump and the GOP has leaned into the label “common sense” rather than “conservative.” Similarly, others have suggested that the left, with its trans-kids, race-essentialist-education, and abortion-on-demand agenda, is waging a war on normality, and the GOP is the only party standing in the breach. Which is it? Is the American right at its core countercultural, or is it the natural expression of the American political tradition?  Many political commentators on the right suggest the former. They certainly have a point, given the left’s stranglehold on almost all major American institutions public and private. From Hollywood to Harvard, from the United Auto Workers to Wall Street firms, liberalism is in the driver’s seat. The only way to take these institutions back, these commentators believe, is by acts of radical infiltration or subversion—depose or destroy. The left is the machine. To be on the right means to rage against it. Green Day’s antics on Monday night, however, suggest that the right still represents normal America. I tend to agree; I think that’s a good thing.  Admittedly, punk rock emerged in the 1970s America with strong anti-establishment and anti-authoritarian themes. With its punchy lyrics and distorted sounds, punk is at its core non-conformist. Its non-conformity was always focused more on the cultural order, specifically traditional American values, rather than the economic order. Take “American Idiot”: While the lyrics present as a rebellion against a corporate and media establishment (“one nation controlled by the media”), it’s the normies who are portrayed as brainwashed “idiots.” Green Day rages on behalf of the machine rather than against it because the liberal machine in America today is fundamentally non-conformist—or, more properly, anti-normal. One’s gender can change on a whim. Americans with wives and kids are “weird” while 40-year-old cat ladies on SSRIs are heroines. A presidential candidate can go from publicly identifying as Indian to identifying as black when it seems politically convenient, and no one in the corporate media blinks an eye. The left makes no bones about the need for their cultural agenda to be enforced from the top down—parents have no right to know about what their child learns in the classroom, much less their child’s gender transition. It knows the American people will never go for it on their own. In our current system, playing to the interests of normal people seems a pretty good way for the GOP to win elections. There’s always a place for punk rock on my Spotify, but I guess you can count me among the normies. The post Is the GOP the Party of Normal, or Is It Punk Rock? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics ‘Weird’ Tales Donald Trump, so far from a cultural outlier, is the last champion of the middlebrow. In the wake of their hasty substitution of Joe Biden with Kamala Harris as their presumptive nominee for president, the Democrats have cooked up a fresh line of attack against former President Donald Trump. In a respite from their endless hysterical warnings over the fate of democracy, the Democrats now insist that Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, are merely “weird”—a rather random, confusing, and, indeed, weird formulation. With its strong suggestion of the absurd or uncanny, the adjective inadvertently calls to mind the comedy musician “Weird Al” Yankovic or the old pulp magazine Weird Tales.  Yet the designation is not only unartful but unbelievable. In fact, in one very meaningful way, Donald Trump is an aggressively conventional, defiantly middle-of-the-road figure: In his cultural and aesthetic tastes, Trump is arguably one of the last tribunes of American middlebrow culture, which peaked sometime in the last century and which is arguably extinct in the current. Indeed, part of what makes the Democrats’ “weird” stamp so pathetic is the context in which the charge arises: Virtually every day, mainstream culture grows more bizarre, off-putting, and outlandish. Modern art is intentionally incomprehensible, many contemporary movies and TV shows are soaked in wokeism, much of pop music is noisy and profane, and even the Olympic Games are an occasion for blasphemy.   By contrast, the middlebrow culture of 50 or 60 years ago aimed to induce intense but relatively uncomplicated emotions as clearly as possible and to as wide a swath of the public as possible. Think of the middlebrow novels of Herman Wouk, James Michener, or Ayn Rand, the middlebrow musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein or Lerner and Loewe, or any number of middlebrow Best Picture Oscar winners: West Side Story, A Man for All Seasons, The Sound of Music, Rocky, or Chariots of Fire. These works may or may not have been examples of great art, but they were made with the noble goal of passing the reader’s or viewer’s time in entertainment and edification—in fact, a conception of art fully in keeping with Emily Dickinson’s famous poetic observation that “there is no Frigate like a book / To take us Lands away.” Where does Trump fit into the picture? Although his sense of aesthetics often seems to run no deeper than the décor at Mar-a-Lago or Trump Tower, he has, over the years, revealed a definite preference for what I would consider to be middlebrow music—lush, grand, melodic, sometimes quasi-operatic, sometimes legitimately operatic, and always very, very easy to listen to. Viewers who watched Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention last month were treated to perhaps the definitive illustration of his idea of good music: After he finished speaking, and the giant red, white, and blue (and gold) balloons were being tossed about, a recording of Puccini’s aria “Nessun dorma” was heard. Trump was in his element. True, Trump seemed appreciative of the live performance of Kid Rock, but this sort of thing—in all of its ostentatious schmaltziness—was far more in keeping with his personality. Longtime Trump watchers will note that his appreciation of pop-opera, or opera-ish, artists is nothing new: During his inauguration in 2017, Jackie Evancho sang the national anthem.  Also last month, in a widely viewed video on the YouTube channel of golfer Bryson DeChambeau, Trump was asked for his “top five songs of all-time.” Without missing a beat, Trump cued up the “playlist” on his golf cart, which began—predictably, even inevitably—with Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman’s “Time to Say Goodbye”—a piece that, along with the concerts and recordings of The Three Tenors, exemplifies that moment in the 1990s when pop opera seemed to be everywhere. For Trump, it still is. “Nice and soothing, right?” Trump said, smiling, to DeChambeau. As it happens, Sarah Brightman—the former wife of Andrew Lloyd Webber—has a cameo appearance in the 2023 book Letters to Trump: While they were married, Webber and Brightman were residents of Trump Tower, and included in the book is a letter in which Webber invites Trump to the Broadway premiere of a certain blockbuster musical. “It was such an honor to go to opening night of The Phantom of the Opera because it turned out to be one of my all-time favorites,” Trump writes. “The writing and music is that of genius.”  Letters to Trump is a remarkable record of the former president’s tastes when he was still the future president. Above and beyond Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Lloyd Webber, Trump reveals himself to be a fan of many key middlebrow entertainers: Bob Hope, Tony Bennett, Jackie Mason (“His comedy made people happy”), Paul Anka (“He is also aging well and still entertaining the crowds!”), and “The Great Michael Jackson!”  Similarly, anyone who has ever watched the pregame or postgame of a Trump rally will be familiar with the sort of pop music usually piped in: Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer,” James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” And who can forget the scoring of Trump’s exit from Washington, D.C., on the day of Biden’s inauguration, to Frank Sinatra’s “My Way”? Nothing weird here! In a world under siege by Lady Gaga, Swifties, and “brat summer,” the fact that Trump is fond of such openly emotive, melodic, and altogether enjoyable music speaks well of him—something that, in a far graver and more profound register, Melania Trump expressed in her letter to the American people following the assassination attempt against her husband: At one point in the letter, the former First Lady referred to Trump’s “laughter, ingenuity, love of music, and inspiration.”  That “love of music” surely represents one of Trump’s most sincere links to the average American. The post ‘Weird’ Tales appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Real Reason You Can’t Afford A House. Wall Street Has Cornered The Market 8-1-2024 - 109,720 views Aug 1, 2024 More Perfect Union - Wall Street is buying up neighborhoods and communities across the U.S. In 2022, big investors bought more than one in every four single family homes sold nationwide. It’s wrecking the housing market, driving up rents, and making it nearly impossible for working people to afford to buy a home. ----- More Perfect Union’s mission is to build power for working people. Here’s what that means: We report on the real struggles and challenges of the working class from a working-class perspective, and we attempt to connect those problems to potential solutions. We report on the abuses and wrongdoing of corporate power, and we seek to hold accountable the ultra-rich who have too much power over America’s political and economic systems. We're an independent, nonprofit newsroom. - To support our work: - Help fund our reporting: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/mpu... - Substack: https://substack.perfectunion.us/ - TikTok:   / moreperfectunion   - Twitter:   / moreperfectus   - Facebook:   / moreperfunion   - Instagram:   / perfectunion   - Threads: https://www.threads.net/@perfectunion - Website: https://www.perfectunion.us - FAIR USE FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES - Mirrored From: https://www.youtube.com/@moreperfectunion

Was the Unabomber Right? High Technology Has Indeed Been Proven To Be Harmful To Society 7-32-2024 - At least Those Who Control Technology and Society are Evil, so it is Applied to Evil Ends. - 235,768 views July 31, 2024 Whatifalthist *** TheWarAgainstYou - I Remember When all of this happened when I was a young. I couldn't understand how someone could think that Computers were Evil? Now, every day I live with a sober understanding of how Ted Kazinsky was Far More Right than I could ever have imagined way back then. - Actually even as a Computer/Network Technician many years later, it took a long time to fully understand the True Agenda of Big Tech and how Evil it all was. - I actually left the Tech World as a Career. I will be damned if I am going to help Build and Maintain the Internet of Things and the Internet of Bodies. - Lol. If I had access and control of Google's Backbone I would find it irresistible to notq NUKE THE ENTIRE DATA CENTER. *** Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code WHATIFALTHIST at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/whatifalthist - Link to my second podcast on world history and interviews:    / @history102-qg5oj   Link to my cancellation insurance: https://becomepluribus.com/creators/20 Link to my Twitter-https://twitter.com/whatifalthist?ref... Link to my Instagram-https://www.instagram.com/rudyardwlyn... - Bibliography: The Unabomber’s Manifesto by Kaczynski The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker A Hunter Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st century by Weinstein The History of Manners by Norbert Elias The Total State by Auron Macintyre Tyranny Inc by Ahmari The Revolt of the Elites by Lasch The Anxious Generation by John Haidt The Happiness Hypothesis by Jon Haidt The Righteous Mind by Jon Haidt The Myth of Normal by Gabor Mate The Elephant in the Brain by Simler Europe Emerges by Reynolds Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber Debt by David Graeber The Dictators by Richard Overy The Geography of Nowhere by Kunstler The Story of Work by Lucassen The Lonely Crowd by Riesman The Origins of Ideology by Imannuel Todd Lineages of Modernity by Immaneul Todd Ultrasociety by Peter Turchin Seeing like a State by James Scott Leviathan and its Enemies by Sam Francis The True Believer by Eric Hoffer After Liberalism by Gottfried A Secular Age by Charles Taylor The Decay of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama The WEIRDest people in the world by Joseph Heinrech The Story of Philosophy by Bertrand Russel The Founder Effect by Samo Burja - FAIR USE FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES - Mirrored From: https://www.youtube.com/@WhatifAltHist

UTL COMMENT:- His pole got in the way of the pole? In Chinese it says something like "Winner in Life"!!! ??? Loser of medal but winner in life??!! Lucky I never took up pole vaulting!! ? ?? More one liners below please!! ??

"I was really, really into that band." The post Dry Cleaning recommends the records that made them: “They’re cool as hell” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.