You can keep Thriller, the greatest rock video and it isn’t even close is It’s a Long Way to the Top (if you wanna Rock ‘n Roll)

Here is my intellectually and emotionally balanced diet of podcastery: 5 alarm chilli with 3,000,000 scoville heat index: @jpodhoretz and @AbeGreenwald Comfort food: @continetti and @EliLake High protein bar: @SethAMandel Dessert: GLOP à la mode (@noam_dworman )

As someone who has inhabited both categories I feel actual pity for those who don’t get Cheap Trick and/or AC/DC

The Gentleman has more Guy Ritchie goodness than Mob Land

The plan to bomb the LA airport was foiled by an alert female border guard who thought the man looked nervous and had him open the trunk. It looks as if the foiled terror attack in England despite authorities claiming they were on top of it was also due to a woman who noticed the men and the fact that the phone number printed on the van was missing a digit.

The Mack the Knife scene is a rip-off from Inglorious and it’s terrible in the way the entire film is terrible- the ‘updating’ of the song to try and satisfy the current mania for retrofitting the past can’t be made to work and creates a miserable thing (the actress is lovely tho)

Unlike Tarantino Guy Ritchie left what he was brilliant at behind in favor of commercial success. Even his gangsters are fake now and whatever the Ministry of blah blah Gentlemen is it’s satisfies none of the excitement/humor glands he was so good at massaging up to Snatch

The same people who say we must pause AI to prevent unintended catastrophic consequences are the same people often who say we have no choice but de-carbonize regardless of the consequences even if this means ceding our place in the world to China but in this case China won’t slow its AI

The president and Marco Rubio use 10k to stand for the number of Iranians murdered in two days by the IRGC last January. I have heard as high as 50k cited by others. Every individual death is an obscenity and 10,001 should hit us with greater force than 10,000 but Stalin was right about the numbing of statistics and a regime that will murder 10k will murder a million. Still, we should have a a better understanding of the enormity of what was done.

You can’t eat an egg when you’re dead

ChatGPT really gets me

That leaves Europe, birthplace of so many of the ideas that came to frame our nation and it too is flailing. The EU project which imagined it could create a kind of United States of Europe has only served to illustrate again why America remains singular. States are not countries. Culture, language and history matter and cannot be simply harmonized by a single currency, rail pass and a dopey flag none will die for. The effort to extinguish nationalism, seen as the inspiration for the endless wars that climaxed in 1945 has resulted in the deracination of liberals of any ability to defend themselves which in turn is driving ‘normies’ to rediscover their ancient identitarian passions. Yes, irony is a bitch. But too much of it is also deadly. And if you believe, as I do, that Jews are foundational to liberalism and it’s upkeep, then the precipitous decline of European Jewish security bodes very poorly for a liberal future if not for a ‘Progressive’ one (either right or leftwing coded) with an ever expanding charter of ‘human rights’ that leave Jews hiding indoors with the blinds drawn.

And while we can point to Taiwan and Japan and ROK as examples where, after terrible wars, liberalism managed to find purchase at least to the degree required to have stable, peaceful pro-Western democracies, China and it’s demented dwarf offspring, the DPRK, now threaten to demonstrate how that soil cannot sustain Jefferson’s idea without a massive defensive assist from America. Xi Jingping shares Solzhenitsyn and Qtub’s contempt for liberalism and democracy and he has the military and economic leverage to pry it’s still shallow roots out of Asia’s thin top soil.

Solzhenitsyn’s revulsion of American life is not so different from Sayyid Qutb’s nausea 26 years earlier, summoned when, as a visiting student at another American Gomorra, Colorado State College in 1949, he was traumatized by the sight of women’s tight sweaters, exposed calves and undulating hips lasciviously galavanting to Tommy Dorsey’s ‘The Hucklebuck’ at a sock hop. After throwing up in his mouth he returned to Egypt where he along with other (really) ‘bad brains’ formed the Muslim Brotherhood which half a century later spawned another psychotic Egyptian malcontent, Mohamed Atta, about whom we are forced to think every 9/11 and who left strict instructions no woman be allowed to touch his corpse or even be in the room with it. And today, a quarter century after Qtub’s grandkids flew into our buildings, we seem intent on electing people who argue the Muslim Brotherhood is just another version of the Elks club.

If liberalism’s universal claims are correct as I have been insisting all my life, what am I to make of the fact that Russians, whose culture, unlike say that of Pakistanis, cannot be subtracted from the wider Western one without deforming beyond recognition; who, in their great literature and music, reveal us to ourselves and as much as any other people, defined The Modern™, so steadfastly reject it, the terminus (according to me) of all modernity’s political, social, intellectual and economic progress? Every moment when they might have seized it they turned away. Every cautious step forward met with a giant stride back. Every Russian ‘Jefferson’ faced a Tsar or Lenin or Putin making sure these dreams never got out of the crib. It can’t just be bad luck. Russia is congenitally pessimistic and paranoid for the same reasons Americans are born optimists and dopes. There is just too much blood soaked into Russian earth for real hope to ever bloom there.

It turns out that the opposite of Godless Communism Inc.™ for Russians isn’t necessarily secular liberalism. Solzhenitsyn was sickened by the frivolity of Americans, by our spiritual emptiness. While to us, 1975 rural VT looked like a real life ‘Pepperidge Farm Remembers’ set, to Solzhenitsyn it was a hellscape of deformed souls writhing in agony at the local JC Penny. As soon as his Russian citizenship was restored, he returned to Moscow becoming (like our current president) an early admirer of Vladimir Putin.

As far from the Gulag and Cancer Wards of Stalin’s rusting empire as is possible to conceive, there the great man would live and write for seventeen years. Yet even in the sweet breezes that caress those gently rolling hills, stitched with stone walls and dotted with colonial era homes and barns, all nestled around a white steepled church like a Grant Wood painting, he was oppressed by the scent of cultural putrefaction and decadence. To the chief antagonist of the vast dilapidated Soviet project, America was not the answer to the gulag but its Western corollary - instead of the torture of the weak by the strong or indifferent (think Orwell’s “imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever”) it is the torture of spiritual emptiness and lugubrious sentimentality afflicted on everybody (think Lewis Caroll’s O Oysters,’ said the Carpenter, You’ve had a pleasant run! S

So it is, looking back now from the defeat of old age, baffled, consternated and afraid, I search the past for signs of what went wrong in my own ‘conceptia’ that furnished what I imagined to be a workable explanation for the world and where we were going. Let’s call it ‘liberalism’ and later, ‘neoliberalism’. Perhaps had I and other ‘neocons’ been less drunk on the collapse of the USSR and the End of History™ I might have caught the first foul whiff of things to come when the world’s greatest chronicler of the evils of Soviet totalitarianism and hero to liberals everywhere, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, came to settle, not in New York Babylon where our artists congregated trading snotty barbs with Fran Lebowitz and Norman Mailer, but in arguably America’s most bucolic of towns, Cavendish Vermont.

Link to follow