More Alien Sharks (VIDEO)

It's still shark week, heh.



Previously, "Alien Sharks: Close Encounters (VIDEO)."

The Myth of Cosmopolitanism

It's Ross Douthat, at the New York Times.

Not bad:

The myth of cosmopolitanism: Ross Douthat on the global elite, a tribe like any other. https://t.co/lOveYA0SJT pic.twitter.com/Hxb7oRur23

— NYT Opinion (@nytopinion) July 3, 2016

@DouthatNYT Douthat on the Global Elite Tribe. https://t.co/psSE3KwKpQ pic.twitter.com/SxRxEIvzK0

— Instapundit.com (@instapundit) July 3, 2016

"But no less than Brexit-voting Cornish villagers, our global citizens think and act as members of a tribe." https://t.co/HApwkMxmY6

— (((Mark Krikorian))) (@MarkSKrikorian) July 3, 2016

"more genuine cosmopolitanism in Rudyard Kipling & TE Lawrence & Richard Francis Burton than in 100 Davos sessions"https://t.co/HApwkMxmY6

— (((Mark Krikorian))) (@MarkSKrikorian) July 3, 2016

When all my friends are sharing an article on the dangers of tribalism I feel I should share it too... Oh, wait https://t.co/d9B1Vb7Bu5

— Walter Olson (@walterolson) July 3, 2016

This overstates and simplifies, as op-eds tend to do, but there's a lot of truth in here. https://t.co/tYYnAUrj6F

— Andrew Exum (@ExumAM) July 3, 2016

Articulates what I've always thought: liberal "global citizens" live in a bubble that is only superficially diverse. https://t.co/1Y8qtcSGfa

— Derek Hopper (@derekmhopper) July 3, 2016

Kristen Keogh's July 3rd Forecast

It's cool beach weather with patchy fog.

I'm not planning any big July 4th outings. I might head over to Irvine's Heritage Park fireworks show, but I think my wife just wants to lay low this year, so we'll see.

Here's Kristen:

Lindsey Pelas Tiny Bikini Rule 5 for Fourth of July (PHOTOS)

She's great!

🙂☀️ pic.twitter.com/Pn8fn8pu4p

— Lindsey Pelas (@LindseyPelas) July 1, 2016

Every beach day is a scene from Baywatch....
And I'm 100% okay with it. ☀️😋🌴
👙@twentysauce pic.twitter.com/WGfGU0CThy

— Lindsey Pelas (@LindseyPelas) June 29, 2016

More in Instagram.

BONUS: At London's Daily Mail, "Fitness star with natural 30H breasts (and 3.5 million Instagram followers) details the downsides of being so busty, from fashion fails to awkward 'boob sweat'."

Joshua Clover, The New Era of Uprisings

We teach just lower-division courses at community college, but I'm about to get an entry-level "Diversity, Ethnicity, and Inclusion" course into the curriculum approval pipeline. Santa Monica City College offers a pretty hip course commensurately, so there's that. All I have to do is make sure that such a course is transferable to UC/CSU as measured by the CCC Chancellor's Office, so we'll see.

In any case, if y'all are wondering why I'm reading all these far-left tomes, my abiding watchword (or "watch-phrase") is "Know Your Enemies," but frankly, I need to help pull my department into the 21st century vis-à-vis all the hipster "intersectional" literature, heh.

It's fun at least.

Here's Joshua Clover, at Amazon, Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings.

Red Sox's David Ortiz Hits Home Run No. 522, Passing Ted Williams on All-Time List (VIDEO)

It was awesome, although he hit it against my Angels, unfortunately.

The Halos are 19 and a half games back in the AL West. Probably one of their worst seasons ever.

Here's the Ortiz homer. He's 41 years-old and still smashing the ball like it's nothing.

ICYMI: Naomi Schaefer Riley, The New Trail of Tears

Pre-order at Amazon, The New Trail of Tears: How Washington Is Destroying American Indians.

Patriotic Bikini Hotties

A roundup, at Egotastic, "Patriotic Bikini Hotties and Other Fine Things to Ogle."

And of course the annual posting of the fabulous Angie Harmon:

'You've got the music in you...'

I had this song on the brain the other day for some reason, and then it came on the satellite radio out of nowhere.

The New Radicals, "You Get What You Give."

Health insurance, rip-off lying
FDA, big bankers buying
Fake computer crashes dining
Cloning while they're multiplying
Fashion shoots with Beck and Hanson,
Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson
You're all fakes , run to your mansions
Come around, we'll kick your ass in...

'The Purge: Election Year' is Pretty Cool

Heh, this was a cool flick.

It hits really close to home, which of course is the plan.

I hesitate to link Rolling Stone, but compared to the MSM newspaper reviews, it's more accurate:

Despite the left-leaning ideology embedded into the series' DNA, it's still a bit of a political Rorschach test: You can look at [Joseph Julian] Soria's [hard-working Mexican immigrant] hero as an example of pro-immigration tendencies, and see the roving packs of Euro "murder tourists" as pandering to the xenophobic crowd ("Foreigners coming to our country," intones a news reporter, "to kill!"). And for all of its protagonists' anti-Purge liberalism, the story sure gives a lot of ammo to the pro-Second Amendment, "the only way to handle a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with gun" crowd.

Rather, the film's real currency is simply a nonpartisan free-floating us-vs-them anger, in which a put-upon underclass finally gets payback and a one-percenter upper class finally gets its comeuppance. You can be a pissed-off Tea Partier or an Occupy advocate and find something here to stoke your fat cat hatred; either way, catharsis is doled out not in a dusk-til-dawn homicidal free-for all but two harmless hours in a theater. Election Year's only real stance — besides be sure to vote in November — is that America is violence. God bless the U.S.A. God save us all...

It's indeed leftist in its DNA, but there's a vector of ideological story lines, overlapping with more crystallized good vs. bad trajectories, and I found myself working out the real-life possibilities raised by the film. Most realistic "it could happen here" is the street-level race-war the propels most of the purging violence that's the background to the election year ideological story. You have good and bad minority antagonists, and one of the best scenes of the criminal urban purging is when Laney (the triage ambulance driver) blows away the entitled black-bitch thug with a shotgun blast to the face. That was gloriously freakin' satisfying!

That said, I was disappointed in the overly simplistic Nazification of the horrible, terrible no-good right-wingers (and their idiotic paint-by-the numbers neo-Nazi mercenary militiamen). For a moment I thought we'd have some real, truthful moral equivalence, when the far-left urban army is about to assassinate the right-wing presidential candidate backed by the NFFA (the New Founding Fathers of America). But since that story line gets cut short, the movie reverts back to the default good vs. evil leftists memes, with Roan, the leftist presidential candidate, affecting a Jesus-like "don't do it or we'll be no better than they are" routine.

You get the picture without me giving away too much more of the story. No matter what, it's a fun flick. Someone should do a remake with the ideological bad guy roles reversed, just to piss off the cultural intelligentsia of the mainstream media juggernaut.

India Reynolds

Seen on Twitter:

Morning @buquet1000 @GloverWatts @iworshipstaceyp @LoveLucyP @pindemusse @weedod26 @vulcan1959 @65000silver pic.twitter.com/njDfaapA5D

— Glamour Obsession (@Dan_Cums247) June 28, 2016

Nice Selfie

Lovely little lady:

#RealBoobs @orgasmia752 @Boobs_4_You @CharlieNoodz @TheBoobExpert @BabeTastic777 @GIF_HOT pic.twitter.com/cqj0TKn5k9

— Imperio Tetas (@imperiotetas) June 30, 2016

Tyranny With a Happy Face

Via Tabitha on Twitter:

I always say the same thing. It's evil. It's statism. @ItsaGusher pic.twitter.com/m860Kab2Ba

— Ƭαвιтнα Ɓℓιѕѕ ❤ (@BlissTabitha) June 29, 2016

'The Coming Insurrection'

I'm actually getting a kick out of this book.

It's been out for a while. I picked up a copy a couple of months ago, but just this week have been really plowing through it. It's an extremely radical and violent manifesto of revolution, but the amazing thing about it is how bonking-good sense it makes about the crises facing advanced industrialized democracies. The authors are the Invisible Committee, who frightened the bejesus out of French authorities, who cracked down and arrested them for fomenting an incipient revolt. I love the anarchism, which to me is radical libertarianism, especially on the fraud of mindless unchecked consumerism, social media worship, and hipster environmentalism.

Of course, I'm out for non-violent change. These guys call for taking up arms and burning everything down.

Even Glenn Beck ran with a long segment on his show back in the day, with his usually overwrought hyper-freak hysteria. Watch, "FOX NEWS [Glenn Beck] reviews 'The Coming Insurrection'."

There's a fascinating interview of "The Tarnac Nine" (the alleged members of the Invisible Commitee) at Vice, "Vive Le Tarnac Nine!":

Robespierre, the moral arbiter of the French Revolution, coined the word “terrorism.” It is strange that the first person to use this word was a Frenchman and a revolutionary. It is also strange that a word that, in our times, conjures images of bomb-strapped, Allah-worshipping fundamentalists, was first used by the state against its own citizens. Robespierre felt the French needed the Terrorisme to buttress the tenuous revolutionary state against the counterrevolutionaries and aristocrats—both real and imagined—that he saw everywhere. Robespierre was the ruthless vegan straight-edger of his time—he didn’t hesitate to behead his friends to uphold the virtues of revolutionary purity. After the French Revolution had killed off all its real enemies, it went through an internal cleansing, trying to purify the stained, bourgeois revolution with the liberal use of the guillotine. Perhaps it is because the French Revolution was so heavy-handed with the judgmental moralism that the French have developed such an intransigent love of sinful bourgeois pleasures like red wine, beef tartare, and satin sheets. But at the same time, the French have an innate hatred of the police and authority. They love to see outlaws break the rules and get away with it. In 2009, an armored-truck driver named Toni Musulin became a French folk hero when he drove off with a cargo equal to $17 million in cash. Fan groups sprouted up on the web, and the entire country rooted for him and seemed disappointed when he was eventually tracked down and caught.

In fact, sabotage and antisocial behavior are rampant in France. In 2007, an investigation by the French newspaper Le Figaro uncovered that the French rail system had been attacked 27,000 times that year by malicious vandals and sabotage. If you’ve ever flown or taken a train in France, you know that all of the major industries routinely go on strike. Militant union employees also stage wildcat strikes and conduct acts of sabotage or trash the offices of their bosses. It is in this social and political atmosphere that the Tarnac Nine are suspected, with tenuous evidence, of being terrorists.

In a rare published interview with Julien Coupat (often labeled as the leader of the Tarnac Nine), in Le Monde, he responded to the question “Why Tarnac?” by writing, “Go there, you will understand. If you don’t, no one could explain it to you.” The forgotten, heavily wooded area around Tarnac is the French equivalent of the Zapatistas’ mysterious Lacandon Jungle. Tactically, it is an excellent location to hole up and forgo capitalism. It is not easy to get to Tarnac. From the rail station in Limousin’s capital, Limoges, I boarded a bullet-shaped shuttle train bound for Eymoutiers, a small village 30 miles down the mountain from Tarnac. The two-car train looked like a rail magnate’s private chariot, decked out from ceiling to floor in beige carpet and soft-lit lamps. The only other passengers on board with me were two Methuselah-esque old ladies who got off at snowy, abandoned-looking villages on the way up the mountain. The train ratcheted through the snow and frost, a desolate landscape of ice-crystal rivers, looming mountains, centuries-old stone houses passing in the fading light out the window. When it hissed to a stop, I was the last person on board aside from the conductor. I stepped out into the cold. Eymoutiers twinkled with pale Christmas lights. A steep, ice-covered stone staircase led up into a desolate public square. An old lady on the town’s main street pointed the direction to Tarnac and I tried to hitchhike, but it was too dark and cars blew past me, throwing up gray slush from the road. While standing in front of one of Eymoutiers’s two bars trying to figure out what to do next, I met a French guy named Matthieu. Like millions of other college students across the world, Matthieu was back home for the Christmas holiday. He said he had nothing to do and, sensing my predicament, offered to give me a lift up to Tarnac in his truck. The ride that followed can easily be ranked among the most terrifying automotive experiences of my life. Matthieu swerved us up the snow-covered mountain on a one-lane road around precipitous switchbacks where one wrong move would have sent us over a sheer cliff. The darkness was total except for a thin little sliver of sunset that lingered near the horizon.

Matthieu was familiar with the unfolding drama of the Tarnac affair. “A lot of us around here feel like those people were singled out,” he told me. When I asked him whether the residents of the neighboring towns felt threatened by the presence of the insurrectionists, Matthieu shook his head. “No one cares much or feels strongly about them except for a handful of right-wing students.” After one last sharp grade up the mountain, the road leveled us out into Tarnac, past the dark, shuttered stone houses of the little village’s main street. Matthieu dropped me off at a dimly lit bar with two old gas pumps rusting in front of it. Inside, a bucolic village scene transpired—old men drinking wine and young French parents playing with their babies in the beery haze. The bar was plain, with little decoration other than a withered Christmas tree in the corner and a taxidermied warthog head hanging on the back wall. The only notable cultural ephemera that distinguished the space from an average French drinking establishment were a couple of large glossy “Support the Tarnac Nine!” posters that advertised protests in Paris and Limoges, and a wall pasted with a smattering of photocopied black-and-white fliers for radical-movie nights and collective spaghetti dinners. Most people in the bar were partnered off into hetero couples. Like some caricature of the back-to-the-land movement, the men were ruggedly handsome in a traditionally French way, with their wool sweaters and cigarettes; the women were plain and severe, worn-looking, as if they had been prematurely aged from the butter-churning and child-rearing that revolutionary discipline demanded of them. I was approached by an astringent woman in her 30s with curly hair and steely eyes who introduced herself as Gabrielle. “It’s a peculiar time for you to come visit here,” she said coldly, “I just got back yesterday.” Gabrielle explained that she had been one of the Tarnac Nine and for the past year had been shuttled between prison and judicial probation...

Keep reading.

Pick up a copy at Amazon, The Coming Insurrection.

Kim Kardashian and Chrissy Teigen Star in Fergie's M.I.L.F. $ Clip (VIDEO)

At London's Daily Mail, "MILFs, assemble! Kim Kardashian and Chrissy Teigen get drenched in milk as they join Fergie's VERY racy mother's club squad for new video clip."

And here's the YouTube, "Fergie - M.I.L.F. $."

Loretta Lynch Regrets Private Meeting with Bill Clinton (VIDEO)

It's almost unbelievable that this went down, but then, it's the Clintons and the Democrats we're talking about.

It's going to be a huge campaign issue, especially if Trump plays it right.

At FrontPage Magazine, "Hillary Fix is In? Atty Gen Lynch Meets w/Bill Clinton, Will Back FBI Recommendation." (Via Memeorandum.)

Also at Hot Air, "Loretta Lynch: Come to think of it, my meeting with Bill Clinton has cast a shadow over the e-mail investigation."

Still more, at the New York Observer, "EXCLUSIVE: Security Source Details Bill Clinton Maneuver to Meet Loretta Lynch":

An exclusive interview with a security source who was present at the unplanned meeting Monday night on a Phoenix tarmac between former President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Lorretta Lynch has shed additional light on an unusual summit that is embroiling the AG in charges of favoritism. As attorney general, Lynch heads the Department of Justice just as it is deciding whether to proceed with charges against Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server during her tenure as President Obama’s secretary of state.

The source has decades of experience providing security to government officials. The source spoke to the Observer for 20 minutes and answered follow-up questions via text message on the condition that no further details be revealed, including even gender, given the possibility of losing his or her job as an active overseer of security arrangements. This person was on-hand for the entirety of the meeting and some of its aftermath.

According to this source, whose credentials were checked and confirmed by the Observer with sources inside both the FBI and the United States Secret Service, the attorney general was caught completely off guard by the meeting and the source dismisses suggestions that have been raised alleging that she waited there to see Bill Clinton or accommodated his request to see him. In fact, it seems from this source that it was Bill Clinton who was maneuvering for face time with the attorney general, because his plane had been scheduled to leave before hers arrived.

“Fair is fair. I’m a conservative-leaning [person] [gender-identifying word redacted]. I don’t support anything this administration does. I don’t know much about the attorney general’s past, except she has a good reputation. But I really don’t like this executive’s office, so that said, politically, that’s where I’m at. But I just happened to be in a position to know firsthand what went down that day.”

Keep reading.

Hat Tip: Austin Bay at Instapundit.

In the Mail: Naomi Schaefer Riley, The New Trail of Tears

This just came today.

From the wonderful Naomi Schaefer Riley, The New Trail of Tears: How Washington Is Destroying American Indians.

The book hits the shelves July 26th, but pre-order today!

Deal of the Day: Poulan Pro 40V Electric Start Dual Blade Mower

At Amazon, Poulan Pro 967044401 40V Electric Start Dual Blade Mower, 20".

Also, Summer Event: OUTDOOR POWER TOOLS.

And, Sports & Outdoors : Save on Coleman's Top Summer Products.

Plus, KIND Bars, Dark Chocolate Nuts & Sea Salt, Gluten Free, 1.4 Ounce Bars, 12 Count.

More, Motorola Moto E Android Prepaid Phone with Triple Minutes.

Still more, Mervyn King, The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking, and the Future of the Global Economy.

Martin Wolf, The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned - and Have Still to Learn - from the Financial Crisis.

BONUS: Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy.

'The Purge: Election Year'

I'll be heading out to this a little later.

At LAT, "Review: Pulp gets political, and messy, in 'The Purge: Election Year'":

The end is nigh in “The Purge: Election Year.” Not the end of the world as we know it (another apocalypse? Ho-hum), but possibly the end of the Purge itself — that cruel annual rite that, for one night only, allows all Americans to vent their bloodlust in the name of continued national health and prosperity. Pitting a heroic female presidential hopeful against a shadowy cabal of gun-toting one-percenters, this is a crudely opportunistic, engrossingly pulpy extension of a franchise that, as ludicrous as its setup has always been, seems increasingly in step with the violent absurdity of the times. That much is clear from the new movie’s cutthroat political rhetoric, as well as a ghastly scene of a church being peppered with bullets.

An image like that can’t help but give you pause, as it was clearly designed to do. Even more than in the series’ first two films, the writer-director James DeMonaco wields his satirical ideas and topical reference points with a recklessness that similarly informs his murkily shot scenes of knife-to-knife combat and sniper fire. At times the experience of watching “Election Year” is a bit like scanning a few years’ worth of alarming headlines while someone sets off firecrackers under your desk. Black Lives Matter, drone warfare, local protests, home-grown militias, predatory capitalism, the Florida electorate, pop pop, bang bang.

In this frenzied B-thriller context, where thinking too much could easily get you killed, a hit-or-miss approach works better than you might expect. What once seemed like design weaknesses in DeMonaco’s speculative fiction — the willful incoherence of his allegory and the scattershot quality of his satire — now feel like a natural extension of his schlock-and-awe sensibility. He isn’t concocting an alternate reality so much as sending out crazy dispatches from our own, and he knows that a jab doesn’t have to be subtle in order to land...

Keep reading.

The Changing Lines Between Left and Right on Both Sides of the Atlantic

From Ron Brownstein, at the Atlantic, "Culture Is Replacing Class as the Key Political Divide":

Democrats now rely on an urbanized coalition of Millennials, minorities, and socially liberal college-educated and single whites (especially women). Republicans thrive among older, non-college educated and religiously devout whites, especially outside of major cities. In 2012, President Obama carried less than one-fourth of America’s counties; he won fewer counties than any presidential winner since at least 1920. But because Obama so dominated the nation’s population centers, he triumphed by 5 million votes.

Not only was the distribution of the British vote familiar, so was the motivation. [the British pollster] Ashcroft’s poll found that leave voters were characterized by pessimism about the next generation’s economic prospects, and deep hostility to immigration, multiculturalism, and the changing role of women. Fully 80 percent of leave voters said immigration negatively affected the U.K. That exactly equaled the percentage of Trump supporters who called immigration more of a burden than benefit in a major new US national poll. Stanley B. Greenberg, a long-time pollster both for U.S. Democrats and the U.K. Labor Party, says a post-referendum survey he conducted for the British Trades Union Congress found that among those who voted to leave, “the biggest rationale, and the strongest arguments, were opposition to immigration.”

In these ways, the British vote showed the power of the Trump-like anti-immigration, anti-globalization argument for white, older, non-urban and non-college-educated voters who feel marginalized by economic and cultural change. The key difference is those voters represent much less of the U.S. electorate. In particular, while whites comprised about 90 percent of British voters, they will likely cast only around 70 percent of American ballots. In the U.K., Ashcroft found 53 percent of whites voted to leave; because Trump faces so much opposition from minorities, if he wins the same percentage of whites, he will lose in a landslide. He will likely need well over 60 percent of whites to win.

If anything, the resistance to the leave campaign’s nativism from college-educated and urban U.K. whites underscores the headwinds Trump will face reaching that number. Since 2000, every Democratic presidential candidate has run better among college-educated than non-college-educated whites. But even so, in modern polling tracing back to 1952, no Democratic presidential candidate has ever carried most of those college-educated whites. Yet the last five national surveys have shown Clinton leading Trump with them. Greenberg predicts that as the GOP is tugged more toward the resistance to immigration (and diversity more broadly) of its culturally conservative blue-collar wing, more college-educated voters will defect, perhaps lastingly. “They drove their college-educated voters out by the nature of this primary,” he said.

Revolving around these cultural differences, the Trump-Clinton contest seems certain to accelerate the two parties’ long-term re-sorting into a cosmopolitan, urban-centered Democratic coalition comfortable with demographic and cultural changes and a primarily non-urban traditionalist Republican coalition mostly resistant to them. That ongoing shift’s most immediate 2016 effect may be to reorder the states at the tipping point of U.S. elections...

Still more.