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Burn the Tesla Brand and Ignore the Guilt Trip
It’s all over the news. Musk trying to blame democrats for the attacks on Tesla. And republicans are humpin’ the mic, too, trying to reverse the blame, as former Wisconsin senator David Craig does in his ridiculous op-ed. Craig’s tactic is a pretty typical one among republicans. He spins the Musk outrage as being driven…
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Nothing New and Nowhere to Play
Duke Ellington emerged from the Harlem Renaissance, Charlie Parker from the Memphis jazz clubs, Coltrane from the Philadelphia jazz clubs, Chester Burnett from the clubs of West Memphis, before moving to Chicago in the early 1950s where he became Howlin’ Wolf. The New York Dolls, Ramones, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Television and The Patti…
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The Dictator’s Mask of Efficiency
Throughout history, efficiency has been touted as one of the benefits of a dictatorship. The trope “German efficiency” derives from the organized and deliberate manner in which the Nazis came to power. Hitler’s oratorical style and propaganda campaigns were highly efficient, tapping as they did into the fear, anger and insecurity of the German people…
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Reverse-Engineering the Nerd Oligarchy
The other day I was watching Bill Maher’s Club Random, and the guest was tech millionaire and anti-aging geek Bryan Johnson. Part of the conversation was about the apparatus that Johnson wears on his penis to monitor his nocturnal erections. In nerd nasal, Johnson said, “My nighttime erections are the length of the movie Titanic.”…
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Where Are the “Goddamned Liberals” Now?
In 2015, I met a retired lieutenant commander in the United States Navy who had purchased a small townhouse about a block down the road from mine. He was often in the yard doing renovations and walking by on my way home from work I’d sometimes stop to talk. From the start of our acquaintance,…
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President Pennywise and the (Un)real Reign of Terror
An appliance can become art, like Duchamp’s urinal did. But to do that it must give up being an appliance. A gallows installed on the National Mall on January 6, with a sign on it that read, “THIS IS ART,” did the reverse. It pretended to be art so that it could be an appliance,…