Bring Back Tech Central Station!
Another milestone in the death of parody, from the National Review cruise:
That prompted a tall, extremely tanned blonde named Kay, from Old Greenwich, Connecticut, to ask Hassett, the co-author of the 1999 book Dow 36,000, “So what do we do with our money?”
The contact list from the people who paid money for this cruise has to be among the most valuable set of leads in history. I’m pretty sure Mitch and Murray have already given NRO a six-figure bid.
“A-B-C. A, always. B, be. C, cruising. Always be cruising with NRO.”
Dano, at this same e-mail address, was one of the first commenters on TCS to deconstruct their BS, including exposing Alex Avery’s lies about Tyrone Hayes.
Those were the days, when there were only a few outfits shilling for the corporations. Now they are every 7th website on the Internets.
Best,
D
I once set off a major freakout on that site. The Chair of the Iowa Republican Party wrote a column in which he made a reference to “the Southern strategy of focusing on law and order issue.” I commented, “Excuse me, sir, but is this your elephant in the living room?”
Cue fireworks. How dare I call them racists? How dare I?
I also caught several big names using sockpuppets to push their agenda (borderline lies), including Chris Horner. I wish I had gotten screenprints before it was disappeared so I could complain to the Bar.,..
Best,
D
This charming bit of insight into Australian race relations from Mrs. John O’Sullivan has been quoted elsewhere:
But I haven’t seen anyone quote the punchline yet:
Elsewhere in the article, James Lileks can’t understand why people stereotype Republicans as “the stupid people… the yokels… the dumb… the racists… the hicks… against everything that’s hip and cool.” Slander, of course: us groovy Republicans are still with it! Unless “it” is metaphorical miscegenation or drunken, lazy ape-brutes. We’re not with that at all.
Why’s everybody looking at me like that?
I think it’s very much in character for a racist defender of the British colonial empire to have married an Alabama belle….
Still, the whole event seems like the 3% to 1% on parade, with all their fear and prejudice hanging out like flab at the beach.
Correction, they used to be with it. Now what they’re with isn’t it anymore, and what’s it seems weird and scary to them.
It’ll happen to you!
James Lileks? Wow, there’s a name I haven’t seen in a good long while.
Yeah my thinking exactly. I think it was Sadly, No! (or The Poor Man) in 2005 or 6.
Edroso still mocks him semi-regularly.
He has a regular column in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, though it’s Dave Berry-style humor column largely free of political content. I hate to admit it, but sometimes it’s pretty funny.
He’ll go down in history with Petroleum V Nasby as a comic writer of his time and no other.
Now you’re on the trolley. That Mrs. Grundy was getting all spifficated on the giggle water, shame she ain’t got It. 23 Skidoo
Copying and pasting my comment from the alicublog thread where this was linked.
Oh, Jimmers:
Can’t you just imagine Bob Hope or John Wayne saying the exact same thing at the ’72 RNC? (Of course, these days it’s the likes of Newt Gingrich that’s raring to get up there, but anyway.) Or check this out:
It’s not as if I need anything more to add to the pile of things that I can point otherwise-sensible people to when they stick up for Lileks on account of past glories such as the Gallery of Regrettable Food or guesting on Rifftrax, but that will do nicely. He’s about right for something like an NRO cruise, and I suppose that it makes for a nice break from his important duties writing things like this, sprinkled throughout with imitation humor bits and–I know that this will come as a shock to you all–getting yet another post out of his trip to a retail outlet and out of his daughter.
“tightly wound,” “energetic,” “apoplectic,” “Minnesotan”… Gee, sounds like a fun guy to be around.
important duties writing things like this
Shorter Lileks link: old man yells at clouds.
I did say sometimes.
The best part is when one of the cruisers tells the writer to write how scared they all are.
Yes, we know.
The stains in the back of their pants tell the whole story.
That would be good. They should be after the way they have acted.
I got a catalog in the mail with $1000 coffee table books they claim can go up in value. I told my friends it was a sign that there would be a violent revolution in America soon. I didn’t know about the cruise with wealthy folks trying to figure out what to do with all their money.
The only way I would spend $1000 on a coffee table book is that if the book became its own coffee table.
I wouldn’t even spend that much, as I tend to use coffee tables as a) footrests and b) a place to put my Chinese food during an especially difficult bit of a video game.
Check out Kosmo Kramer
Cosmo Kramer on line one for you.
….and then turned into a giant robot that would smite my enemies and do my grocery shopping.
The contact list from the people who paid money for this cruise has to be among the most valuable set of leads in history.
Okay, everyone here who would have enjoyed going on the cruise (not alone: I wouldn’t be able to do that) in order to see how long it would take before you’d burst out laughing raise your hands.
Mine is up. Look, am I the only person here who spends some of their money on entertainment?
I would have been snickering as I walked up the gangway.
Humanity produces an inexhaustible supply of easy marks. Conservatives in America know this.
See this brilliant Rick Perlstein piece from a couple months ago.
That was a very interesting piece. Perhaps the greatest restraint on political spending after Citizens United will be conservatives’ inability to resist ripping people off.
That IS the organizing principle of the conservative movement
Anybody else hear Rush peddling the new conservative e-mail nonsense? for $40 a year, you get a Reagen.com e-mail account. I can only imagine that it’s sold exclusively to those old coots whose forwarded lunatic e-mails have completely alienated their tech savy grandchildren.
Yay, makes it easier to filter them out if they use a distinct domain.
Anybody can get a .com account. I’m holding out for reagan.reagan.
I think I would have been mutinying fairly soon after arriving. The idea of being TRAPPED ON A BOAT with people of that ilk makes me pants-crappingly uncomfortable.
As I remember, One Market Under God by Thomas Frank contains about 31 percent just mocking that stupid Dow 36,000 guy. But, if anything, liberals don’t hate him enough.
I remember the line Krugman often used during the market collapse in 2008 (I don’t know if it was his originally) about how the prediction made in the title of Dow 36,000 might be correct except for containing an extra digit – and we had better hope the extra digit was the “3″ and not the “6″ or one of the “0″s.
Hassett’s 36,000 Dow prediction was supposed to come true somewhere around 2003-2004. Missing the mark didn’t stop John McCain from making him senior economic adviser to his 2008 campaign. However, the prize for investment wrongness must go, as usual, to the Blowy Kudload. Larry’s “conservative forecast” in 1999 was a Dow of 50,000 by the year 2020. Still 7 years left to go on that one, but it doesn’t look good.
The forecast was not numerically conservative but conservative in the sense of being for conservatives.
How DOES the 1% hang on to their money?! What a bunch of morans.
There’s a sucker born every minute. PT Barnum
Just further proof that, despite what their PR people in the press tell you, the rich really are not all that bright.
My dad, who was pretty good at business and who liked to do crossword puzzles, said the puzzle in the Wall Street Journal on Fridays was pretty easy because business men aren’t very smart.
Inheritance gets bestowed on both the brilliant and the stupid.
There’s lots of answers to this, but one of the most important is that they spend a lot of money to create nerf capitalism for themselves. Golden parachutes, understanding regulators, government contracting, etc.
Donald Trump is a special case because of his media celebrity, but that guy is pretty terrible at business and he wouldn’t be out on the street even if people didn’t like to watch him yell at other minor celebrities.
nerf capitalism
Excellent.
A freind kind of admired Donald Trump — I mean, the dude is an obvious hack, but he built a business empire out of selling his name to people with more money than taste, so that shows a certain Barnum-like venality worth admiring, right? I pointed out that he had inherited a real estate business worth hundreds of millions from his dad. It talks a business genius like Trump to turn a real estate empire worth hundreds of millions to a real estate-and-Atlantic City casino empire worth hundreds of millions in only forty years.
The 1% are often the relatives of the 0.1%.
Simple. Those people on the cruise are not the 1%; they’re the 25% or so.
John Yoo had to bring his Mommy?
What, his Mrs didn’t want to be seen with him, while he trolled for bucks on this “Ship of Fools?”
Either that, or she backed out when she saw him packing a whip, a blindfold, some handfuffs and thumbscrews, a Taser, and a 5 gallon water bottle, for the trip.
That’s why I couldn’t go. Nothing would stop me from punching John Yoo in the face
For Stacy McCain’s “readers,” that was hyperbole
It wouldn’t be hyperbole for me.
The more appropriate, reasoned response would be to crush his testicles in a vise.
Crush his testicles in a vise, with votes.
OK, I need a little help here. I hate not being aware of all Internet traditions, and I’m not getting the “with votes” meme (and Google isn’t helping with this one). Help an uncle out, somebody?
I think it’s a version of adding “metaphorically speaking”. As in, “when I said that I wanted to see all that you loved rendered unto nothingness and to see you wracked with despair, I mean that I wanted your side to lose a fair vote, for your ideas to be crushingly rejected by the electorate”.
Oh. I meant his literal testicles, literally crushed, in a literal vise. But not his child’s testicles, because unlike Yoo, I’m not a monster.
Assumes glands not in evidence.
But merely because you wanted to make sure you were getting accurate directions to the washroom.
I’m pretty sure that this is a reference to Obama saying “don’t boo! Get your revenge by voting!” and the wingnuts getting all apoplectic about Obama calling for the resurrection of Nat Turner.
I think you’re right, brewmn, thanks.
I thought of that, but where would I get a vise on board? Who would help tie the Professor down?
And, remember, it’s supposed to be his child’s testicles and I ain’t messing with Peter Arnett’s grandkids
I thought of that, but where would I get a vise on board?
Easily folded for transport and storage
Who would help tie the Professor down?
Just promise anybody on board a tax cut. It seems likely that that crowd will sell out anybody for a tax cut.
And, remember, it’s supposed to be his child’s testicles and I ain’t messing with Peter Arnett’s grandkids
As I said, unlike Yoo, I’m not a monster.
Can you keel-haul someone from an ocean liner?
Hypothetically speaking of course.
Not only did he bring his mommy, but shes’s a distinguished geriatic psychiatrist, and appears to have concluded that the cruisers were all crazy.
His marriage must be on solid ground…
If there were a benevolent, or even a little bit just, God running this universe that cruise ship would have hit a reef, an iceberg and Cuba simultaneously.
Not at all hyperbole and it contains no metaphor.
We could also wish for Legionnaire’s Disease, but no one on the trip even served in the military, let alone the Legion.
I’d settle for a harsh strain of norovirus.
A reefer*, a head of iceberg lettuce, and Cuba is more likely.
*Belonging to a crew member, of course.
She is definitely the hero of the piece. Or co-hero, with the gay smoking caregiver.
I like hating on the rich.
Yeah, I hate those actors that demand (and get) millions per picture that only takes them a few months to complete.
LaBron James makes $53 million a year and God knows what some of the higher paid sports starts earn.
And then there’s Oprah Winfrey that makes more than a quarter billion a year. What does George Soros earn in a year? Who knows but it’s HUGE!!
What do the successful music stars make? Christina Aguilera? Rascal Flatts?
Successful New York artists that command hundreds of thousands for just one painting!!
The list is endless and they’re all capitalists. They aren’t wage earners. They’re all selling a product.
I like hating on the rich.
And I like waffles. Let us come together in a spirit of comity at this holiday season.
The Rich hate you and want you to die in the gutter so they can have another ivory backscratcher
No matter how much the rich hate Mr. Twoofy, Mr. Twoofy will always love the rich. He knows his place, like a good prole.
Julia! Cut the social safety net of Julia!
Julia! Cut the social safety net of Julia!
+100
Your chocolate ration will be increased.
Boot leather is a hell of a drug.
Boot leather? Koch smegma, more like.
I prefer to feed Jen with pancakes, although the suggestion of waffles makes me happy.
Maybe we can compromise on Belgian waffles?
That depends – exactly how socialistic are the Belgians, really?
I’m rather enjoying laughing at terrified white supremacists.
You can laugh at the protein wisdom exile while we snack on pancakes and some link sausages….anyone who loves Goldstein is a white supremacist
At least half the people you list by name, and most of the professions, are by definition wage earners. Athletes earn wages. They are LABOR. So are actors. They exchange their labor for financial remuneration. They are only capitalists inasmuch as you consider labor a product to be sold, which is laughable.
To paraphrase the great philosopher Christopher Julius Rock III, the guys you see playing professional sports may be rich, but the guys signing their checks are WEALTHY.
Finally, nobody at this blog has any problem with people adding value to the economy by using their capital to produce things to be sold. I would be surprised if you could produce a quote to that effect.
You know nothing. They are contractors and as such, independent business people.
Nope, they’re paid a salary, Speak Lies. That’s why they have their own association or union depending on the sport under discussion. Some players use their earnings to start businesses on their own, but they are usually considered for tax purposes as employees, unless they do something like set up a business entity to which their salaries are paid out instead of themselves.
You really are pulling things out of your a** these days.
So to summarize you are pro-Union
And except for George Soros and maybe those “New York artists”, they’re all in a union.
Lebron James, Xtina, movie stars, etc., are all wage earners. LeBron gets paid a negotiated salary in exchange for his services. The guy paying LeBron that salary is way richer than he is, and actually did way less than LeBron has done to get his fortune (it’s Mickey Arison, CEO of Carnival Corporation, whose father founded Carnival Corporation).
They get paid a high salary, yes a salary, because their skills are very much in demand.
it’s true that a lot of these people have “brands” that take them into quasi-capitalist territory, but in the end their “capital”, their “assets”, are the exact same thing they are earning a salary with – their in-demand skills.
How’s this any different from the presidents of large corporations, hedge funds and Wall Street Banking institutions?
They also get paid well for the skill sets they have. Lawyers, Doctors all get paid pretty well for their skills.
But liberals seem to think that people with no skills should do as well as those who do.
Why would anyone think that?
Athletes don’t set their own salaries, or those of their peers, where the corporate CEO/Board class in society does.
I drew my brother’s attention to the NRO cruise story. He expressed surprise that John Yoo felt bold enough to venture into international waters. We found ourselves giggling over the notion of commando frogmen from The Hague spiriting him overboard of a moonless tropical night and taking him east to face justice in the International Criminal Court. Maybe next year?
Perhaps LGM members can apprehend him next year? I’m thinking Johnny wouldn’t put up too much a fight. His mom, on the other hand, seems like she’s really with it
Does the ICC even work with Deep Ones like that? Oh, you didn’t mean those frogmen. Never mind.
A NRO cruise to Innsmouth just makes all kinds of sense.
I’m sure the boat has an on-board complement of husky 14 year-olds, who will repel any attempt at boarding with human wave attacks.
I was hoping for a similar scenario except involving Somali pirates.
The lesson I take away from this is that these rich conservatives have terrible taste in clothes, which doesn’t surprise me.
Everybody wins.
(Except the crew.)
It’s called “Survival of the Fittest” and Jonah’s solution makes that easier
No, it’s called envy of those who are doing better than you.
Yes, we libruls hate anyone making 1$ or more per year than us hair-shirt impoverished ideologists.
Envy Jonah Goldberg? That is the dumbest thing I ever read on the internet in the last five minutes
I was kind of wishing, as I read this piece, that David Foster Wallace had been there. With his Spider-Man hat. He would’ve given the staff a bit more attention.
This may be the smartest (an admittedly low bar) thing Jonah has ever uttered.
… Goldberg concluded, stuffing more human body parts into his mouth.
Given that they were probably coated in neon-orange, Cheetoh dust, who could really blame him?
Longer investment-confused wingnut on the NRO cruise: “Where can we invest that won’t be impacted by our continuing efforts to destroy the country in retribution for electing one of THOSE PEOPLE to the Presidency?”