The Flintstones lived in a little bungalow with a flat roof. I had forgotten this. I thought they lived in a cave. The BC Characters live in caves but the Flintstones do not.
Anyway, what sent me on that little dive was this short piece on the Stone House in Portugal. It's apparently rumored to be modeled on houses on The Flintstones. It doesn't really look like them, though. It doesn't look like anything else I've seen, really. Probably an interesting place to live.
There are a couple of people I know who sent away to get their genetic results from 23andMe. Basically for them it was just curiosity. Okay, whatever.
For some others it seems to have been a way to prove they weren't white, or at least not just white. The year 2020 and a few of the other years surrounding it saw a peak in the idea that being part of a "privileged" group was inherently shameful. Finding stray chromosomes that might belong to some other group was a way to ride the identity train without doing weird gender stuff.
Now the company is going bankrupt and erstwhile customers are worried about their data security. There's a lesson here. We're all better off just treating race as irrelevant rather than trying to litigate it.
I know little enough about Conrad Felixmüller's life story. That he was born Conrad Felix Müller and chose to combine his middle name and surname into one, yes. And of course that he was German. He was German and lived at just the right time to live under Nazi rule. This was a miserable circumstance, as you might guess. The Party deemed him a degenerate artist, something that no one of any artistic discernment would agree with, but who needs taste when you have power?
"Children's Carnival Bustle"―given the mouthful title of "Kinderfastnachtstreiben" in its original language―is a sprightly bit of nighttime color. There's also a bit of doubleness to it. While we're looking at them, the children are also looking out at us, at the adult world. Perhaps this is why the small boy in the lead is decked out in oversize grownup clothes, accessorized with clown nose.
Not to put too fine a point on it: capital is happy to grant your pronoun requests — and equally happy to throw Roman salutes — so long as wages and unions are kept down and antitrust regulators are brought to heel.
Sohrab Ahmari is very perceptive in this piece. I think it's true that conservatives in the recent past were starting to question whether unfettered corporate power was a good thing. At the very least they were realizing that CEOs and tech high rollers didn't share their values. But now everyone's gotten distracted and the suits have gotten away with just making some tacky gestures.
It's still possible and important for right and left populists to cross barriers and hash things out between themselves. But some people who seemed into that before now aren't.
Not sure if I've talked about this here before. A number of years back I was out on a corner waiting for the bus. The bus came and let some people off, and when they were done I started boarding. But the driver spaced out and didn't think about new passengers getting on, just those getting off. So he closed the door on my arm.
I don't know if you've ever had the full force of a hydraulically operated door on one of your limbs, but I'm not ashamed to say that I screamed. The driver woke up and opened the door again.
But what sticks with me about that experience is that the girl standing behind me never took a break from the conversation she was having on her phone, or took any notice at all. I've held onto this because it supports some ideas I have about how technology can take some already present tendencies in society and make them worse.
Okay, so, Khalil Mahmoud.
Putting aside, for the moment, the specifics of the Israel/Palestine/Gaza issue, which is a lot to put aside...
And put aside as well the question of whether Green Card holders have First Amendment rights. It seems pretty clear to me that they do, and most reputable attorneys would agree, but never mind that.
The thing about this arrest and the serious attempt to deport Khalil is that it rests on the premise that publicly disagreeing with the government is itself grounds for legal punishment, even in the absence of an actual crime. Twitter randos are the only ones making any criminal accusations. The Departments of State and Justice are not.
Conservatives should be very wary of giving the government that kind of power. Do the last five years―COVID, January 6―really leave any doubt that Democrats would also use this kind of power to crush their enemies? Think ahead five minutes, please.
On a related note, Columbia University is continuing its record of being an absolute quisling. What do they have left to sell?
