The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Phony ‘Gun Violence Epidemic’

Posted on | March 25, 2018 | 2 Comments

“Today we are going to start a revolution. We will change America with or without these politicians.”
— David Hogg, March 24, Good Morning America

Promising a “revolution” to “change America” by disarming citizens is rather a radical ambition, but ABC News and other liberal media organizations promote this propaganda without offering any critical analysis or providing access to facts that contradict Hogg’s claims.

The liberal media did not produce news coverage of Saturday’s protests. Instead, they produced one-sided publicity for gun-control activists. The media have uncritically amplified the claim that events like last month’s Parkland massacre represent an “epidemic” of “gun violence.”

Facts contradicting this rhetoric are not difficult to find, and any journalist who ignores these facts has failed his professional duty.

America’s schools are not experiencing an “epidemic” of shootings. In fact, as Northwestern University researchers James Alan Fox and Emma Fridel recently reported, school violence is declining:

Since 1996, there have been 16 multiple victim shootings in schools, or incidents involving 4 or more victims and at least 2 deaths by firearms, excluding the assailant.
Of these, 8 are mass shootings, or incidents involving 4 or more deaths, excluding the assailant. . . .
Mass school shootings are incredibly rare events. . . . [O]n average, mass murders occur between 20 and 30 times per year [in the United States], and about one of those incidents on average takes place at a school.
Fridel and Fox used data collected by USA Today, the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Report, Congressional Research Service, Gun Violence Archive, Stanford Geospatial Center and Stanford Libraries, Mother Jones, Everytown for Gun Safety, and a NYPD report on active shooters.
Their research also finds that shooting incidents involving students have been declining since the 1990s.
Four times the number of children were killed in schools in the early 1990s than today, Fox said.
“There is not an epidemic of school shootings,” he said, adding that more kids are killed each year from pool drownings or bicycle accidents. There are around 55 million school children in the United States, and on average over the past 25 years, about 10 students per year were killed by gunfire at school, according to Fox and Fridel’s research.

If school shootings are a rare phenomenon that is actually declining — that is to say, the opposite of an “epidemic” — why did the February shooting at Parkland High School inspire more than a month of saturation media coverage advocating gun control? The answer can be summarized in two words: Partisan politics.

Donald Trump is president, Democrats are angry, we are a few months away from a midterm election, and the Democrat-controlled liberal media organized a propaganda campaign to demonize Republicans, by blaming them as responsible for the deaths of students in Parkland. A coalition of Democrat-aligned organizations, including Planned Parenthood, spent millions of dollars to fund Saturday’s protest rallies.

Like the “Occupy Wall Street” protests of 2011 and the “Black Lives Matter” movement of 2014-2016, the post-Parkland gun-control crusade is a “battlespace preparation” campaign by Democrats and their liberal media allies, who seek to establish a narrative that makes Republicans the scapegoats for a social problem. With “Occupy Wall Street,” the problem was economic inequality; with “Black Lives Matter,” the problem was racism and police brutality; with David Hogg and the Parkland crusaders, the problem is gun owners and the NRA. But like other political crusaders, the anti-NRA protest mobs are advancing a false narrative about an alleged “crisis” that does not actually exist. Ryan McMaken emphasizes the need to reject this phony “crisis” narrative:

In the wake of last month’s Florida shooting, many opponents of gun control made the mistake of simply accepting the claim that school shootings are getting worse, and are more deadly overall.
According to Fox’s research, though, this is simply not the case. . . .
Maybe American society is in a more perilous position that in the 1980s. But if we’re looking for evidence of that, the homicide data won’t help the argument.

If there is not actually an “epidemic” of school shootings, there is no need for new gun laws to prevent such shootings. And, as Ann Coulter has suggested, maybe guns aren’t the real problem:

There have been about 34 mass shootings since 2000. Forty-seven percent — 16 — were committed by first- and second-generation immigrants, i.e. people who never would have been here but for Teddy Kennedy’s 1965 immigration act.
And the immigrant mass shootings have been some of the most spectacular ones, such as Fort Hood and San Bernardino. Two of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history, at Virginia Tech in 2007 and at the Pulse Nightclub in 2016, were committed by first- and second-generation immigrants. . . .
On account of the Rule of Journalism that permits the word “immigrant” to be used only in sentences with the word “valedictorian,” you may not have heard of some of these mass shootings at all.

Omar Mateen (Orlando), Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik (San Bernardino), Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech), Nidal Malik Hasan (Fort Hood) — Coulter’s list of immigrant killers goes on and on. If anyone at CNN or a major newspaper was willing to look seriously at this data, the question of why immigrants commit so many mass murders might arouse their curiosity. You don’t have to be a xenophobic bigot to wonder about the underlying causation. It could be that social alienation is a major contributor to mass violence, and that immigrants and their children experience higher levels of social alienation.

Democrats and their liberal media allies, however, aren’t interested in any facts or statistics or analysis about school shootings except those that support their narrative of an “epidemic” that can be blamed on gun owners, the NRA and Republicans. So they convey a distorted propaganda designed to appeal to emotions, and ignore (or demonize) anyone who cites facts that contradict the liberal narrative.



 

Category: Crime

FMJRA 2.0: Voices Carry

Posted on | March 24, 2018 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Rule 5 Sunday: Gal Gadot
Animal Magnetism
Proof Positive
EBL
A View From The Beach
Ninety Miles From Tyranny

Jeff Sessions Fires Andrew McCabe
A View From The Beach

Crazy People Are Dangerous
EBL

FMJRA 2.0: Warriors
The Pirate’s Cove
EBL
A View From The Beach

Illegal Immigrant from El Salvador Arrested on Child Exploitation Charge
EBL

The Other Podcast: Episode 4
EBL

What Is ‘Hate Speech’?
EBL

Africans Riot in Madrid
EBL

‘Europe Is Already Under an Invasion’
EBL

California vs. America
Proof Positive
EBL

In The Mailbox: 03.19.18
Proof Positive
EBL
A View From The Beach

Our So-Called ‘Allies’
EBL

‘Consciousness-Raising’ as Advertisement
Welcome To My Playpen
EBL

Crazy People Are Dangerous
EBL

‘Social Justice’ Indoctrination Is Now Mandatory for Future K-12 Teachers
EBL

In The Mailbox: 03.20.18
Proof Positive
EBL
A View From The Beach

UPDATE: Austin Bomber Reportedly Dead After Shootout in Round Rock
Rotten Chestnuts
EBL

Will Democrats Self-Destruct?
Pushing Rubber Downhill
EBL
Texas Bomber Identified
EBL

Don’t Mess With the USA
Nebraska Energy Observer
EBL

In The Mailbox: 03.21.18
Proof Positive
EBL
A View From The Beach

McCabe Targeted Sessions in ‘Coup’ Conspiracy by Obama-Era DOJ Officials
EBL
A View From The Beach

California Democrat Is Unemployed
Pushing Rubber Downhill
Proof Positive
EBL

In The Mailbox: 03.22.18
Proof Positive
EBL

Worst. Omnibus. Ever.
EBL

In The Mailbox: 03.23.18
Proof Positive
EBL

Top linkers this week:

  1. EBL (25)
  2. Proof Positive (8)
  3. A View From The Beach (7)

Thanks to everyone for the linkagery!


Featured Digital Deals
Amazon Warehouse Deals
Amazon FreeTime Unlimited Free Trial

Category: FMJRA Award

The ‘Controversial’ Kevin Williamson

Posted on | March 24, 2018 | Comments Off on The ‘Controversial’ Kevin Williamson

 

If you want to know what excellent journalism looks like, go read “The White Ghetto,” Kevin D. Williamson’s 2014 travelogue of Appalachia:

There used to be two movie theaters here — a regular cinema and a drive-in. Both are long gone. The nearest Walmart is nearly an hour away. There’s no bookstore, the nearest Barnes & Noble being 55 miles away and the main source of reading matter being the horrifying/hilarious crime blotter in the local weekly newspaper. Within living memory, this town had three grocery stores, a Western Auto and a Napa Auto Parts, a feed store, a lumber store, a clothing shop, a Chrysler dealership, a used-car dealership, a skating rink — even a discotheque, back in the 1970s. Today there is one grocery store, and the rest is as dead as disco. . . .

Read the whole thing. It’s both highly informative and highly readable, because Williamson is an elegant writer. Instead of clobbering readers over the head with political talking-points, he just tells the story and lets readers draw their own conclusions. It’s what used to be called New Journalism, the stuff that Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson started doing in the 1960s. An unsuspecting reader might not realize that the purpose of Williamson’s expedition to Booneville, Kentucky, was to illustrate a point made 20 years earlier by a Harvard University psychology professor and a famous political scientist.

On pp. 520-521 of The Bell Curve, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray briefly explore the topic of “The Emerging White Underclass.” Because their 1994 book was denounced as “racist” (facts are the new “hate”), no journalists at that time bothered searching for anecdotal evidence to illustrate their thesis about the correlation between intelligence and various socioeconomic problems. Williamson never invoked Herrnstein and Murray’s work in his 2014 article about the hopeless poverty of Owsley County, Kentucky, but anyone familiar with The Bell Curve could see that “The Emerging White Underclass” has now definitely emerged — and this is an important political fact.

The election of Donald Trump shocked our nation’s decadent elite, and Williamson’s work for National Review qualified him to explain the otherwise inexplicable phenomenon of Trumpism to the elite, most of whom have never set foot in a place like Owsley County, Kentucky. It is interesting to note that Trump got 84% of the vote in Owsley County, a bellwether of the Fear and Loathing in post-Obama America.

Kevin D. Williamson was announced Thursday as one of two new columnists for The Atlantic, a publication read by our decadent elite, and Williamson’s hiring immediately provoked howls of outrage:

It’s obvious why The Atlantic hired Williamson, however. First, more than most other imitators, Williamson has really nailed the Buckleyite tradition of espousing virulent racism while convincing some liberals that he’s got something important to say. Second, Williamson is an anti-Trumper, which fits in nicely with the trend of hiring the kind of conservatives who are completely irrelevant within their own movement anymore.
For Goldberg, hiring Williamson and a radical black thinker like Kendi at the same time seems like a coup that proves The Atlantic is a publication that fosters debate between people who subscribe to opposite ideological views. (From the Atlantic’s advertising materials: “We reach thinking people — and make them think harder.”)
But much of Williamson’s writing is just a better articulated version of thoughts that MAGA types say on a regular basis.

Well, what shall we say to this? Isn’t everybody to the right of Bernie Sanders now subject to denunciation as a “virulent racist”? And isn’t this a basic reason why Trump was elected in 2016? After eight years of Obama, a lot of white people in America are sick and tired of being called “racist” merely for disagreeing with Democrats. Voting for Trump was a symbolic middle finger waved in the faces of all those snooty Ivy League liberals — Obama with his Harvard Law degree, Hillary with her Yale Law degree — who have prospered while presiding over the decline of their nation. Is Williamson, despite being an “anti-Trumper,” merely offering “a better articulated version” of the “thoughts” behind Trumpism? Or is it rather that Williamson is interested in the facts which (a) explain Trumpism, but which (b) liberals prefer to ignore?

We are living through a Buffalo Springfield “For What It’s Worth” moment in our history. There’s something happening here, and what it is ain’t exactly clear. Williamson’s reporting helps us make sense of why there’s a man with a gun over there telling us we’ve got to beware.

The quality of his reporting, however, means nothing to liberals, who consider Williamson unacceptable because of his opinions. During a 2014 Twitter quarrel with Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, Williamson tossed out the suggestion that, because abortion is homicide, it ought to be criminalized as such and, because he supports the death penalty, Williamson proposed death by hanging as the penalty.

When arguing moot points — because obviously, the Roe v. Wade ruling relegates such a debate to the realm of hypothetical speculation — the participants cannot be presumed to be advocating policy in a serious manner. It’s not as if any state legislature is likely to defy federal authority, enact the policy Williamson described, and begin hanging women who get abortions. Therefore, intelligent people must regard Williamson’s Twitter remarks as provocative sarcasm.

It’s like debating what the age of consent should be for the daughters of future settlers of a proposed colony on Mars. Unless and until Elon Musk actually manages to get his space colony project going, speculations about laws to govern human life on Mars have no practical effect. If an eminent space lawyer like Professor Glenn Reynolds were to declare that, in the interest of rapid growth of the colonial population, it should be legal for Martian girls to marry at age 12, no intelligent person would accuse him of being an advocate of child molestation. Similarly, if I were to propose that child molesters should be exiled to Mars, no one could accuse me of advocating a breach of the Eighth Amendment, because such a punishment is not (yet) possible. Some imaginative science-fiction writer might be inspired to write a novel exploring these ideas (“Pedophiles in Space! Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture!”) but in the meantime it’s all moot — a hypothetical debate, in the same way Williamson’s idea of hanging women for abortion is hypothetical.

On the other hand, Williamson has more recently argued, abortion is definitely wrong, and is related to other social problems:

You mustn’t kill your children.
Many Christians believe that in separating sex from its procreative function contraception has deformed the family, fatherhood and motherhood, and sex itself. There is something to that, I think.

Insofar as Williamson’s Twitter remarks were an error, it was because he made the mistake of arguing with a fool. No wise person would bother arguing with Charles Johnson about anything, as I’m sure Williamson must now realize. He’s no longer on Twitter anyway, so unless anyone fears that his editors at The Atlantic would hit the “publish” button on some such egregious opinion piece, advocates of abortion can relax.

Americans have more important problems to worry about, like how to keep our daughters away from science-fiction fans . . .



 

 

Category: Culture, Fear. Loathing., Media Bias, Neutral Objective Journalism

In The Mailbox: 03.23.18

Posted on | March 23, 2018 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 03.23.18

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Congress Goes Hog Wild
Twitchy: Must-See TV – Watch Roseanne Rip Into Jimmy Kimmel Over Trump
Louder With Crowder: David Hogg – The NRA Just Wants To Murder More Children
Reason: The Real Reason Zuckerberg Is Calling For Regulation Of Facebook (h/t NeoWayland)
According To Hoyt: Clean Your Room
Monster Hunter Nation: March Update Post
Vox Popoli: The End Of The Republican Party

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: He Gets It
American Power: Trump Administration Announces $60 Billion In Tariffs On Chinese Imports, also,  Fifteen Years After The Iraq War, A Veteran Reflects
American Thinker: Is Governor Jerry Brown Mentally Ill?
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five NRA Founding Friday
BattleSwarm: Ted Cruz On Why He Voted Against The Omnibus Spending Bill
Da Tech Guy: South Africa About To Do The Zimbabwe, also, Voices Of CPAC 2018 – Debra (Nice Deb) Heine
Don Surber: No, Citigroup, You Must Bake The Gay Wedding Cake
Dustbury: Replicator 0.9
Fausta: The U.S. Latest Export To Brazil? Sperm
The Geller Report: Muslim Gunman Kills Butcher, Takes Hostages, Shoots Cop In French Supermarket, also, Schweizer Says Obama Administration Regulations Were Crony Capitalism
Hogewash: The Gilmore LOLSuit, also, Team Kimberlin Post of the Day
JustOneMinute: McMaster Out, Bolton In
Legal Insurrection: Administration Slaps Sanctions On Nine Iranians, Company, For Hacking Universities, also, Facebook Changes Starving Conservative Media
Power Line: Thoughts From The Ammo Line, also, Trade War? Not So Fast!
Shark Tank: Trump Picks Bolton As New NSA, Democrats Blow Head Gasket
Shot In The Dark: Still Waiting For The Winning
STUMP: States – Let’s Sue The Evil Gas Companies! Gas Companies – How About We Sue You For Securities Fraud?
The Political Hat: Soviet Ape-Men Vs. Catgirl Nuns
This Ain’t Hell: Explosion At Travis AFB Gate, also, ACLU Sues Police For Arresting Illegal Immigrant
Victory Girls: John Bolton Named National Security Advisor, And The Pearl-Clutching Is Epic
Weasel Zippers: Oregon Initiative Would Ban “Assault Weapons”, Require Owners To Surrender Guns, also, DNC Vice Chair Keith Ellison Calls For “Maximum Wage” In America


Featured Digital Deals
Amazon Warehouse Deals
Outlet Deals

Category: Linkagery

Worst. Omnibus. Ever.

Posted on | March 23, 2018 | 2 Comments

How bad is the $1.3 trillion “omnibus” deal Congress passed yesterday? It’s an abomination, a swindle, a political failure, a fiscal catastrophe, a crime against God and man — an omnibus that will live in infamy.

Mitch McConnell and the other so-called “Republican leaders” in Congress who “negotiated” this disaster do not deserve to be in public office. They deserve to be in Guantanamo Bay, subjected to waterboarding or whatever. Here’s the Senate roll call so you know who to hate. In the House, 90 Republicans voted “no,” and you can find the roll call here to see how your representative voted.

One of the “arguments” (actually, excuses) offered in defense of this corrupt pork-laden deal is that it increases funding for the military. In other words, we are expected to believe, it is patriotic for Republicans to betray the voters who elected them. As bogus as this excuse is in terms of policy, however, it’s absolute folly as politics. This “we-support-our-troops” defense of the budget disaster will also be exploited by Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer who not only got a GOP-approved patriotism certificate from this deal, but also got Republicans to abandon any pretense that they ever intend to do anything to stop the immigration invasion. It was a complete sellout by the GOP, as Dan Stein says:

“This omnibus was an appropriate vehicle to provide full funding for the construction of a border wall — an essential tool for regaining control of our borders and stopping illegal immigration, drug smuggling, and terrorism. Instead, it contains a paltry $1.6 billion for repairs, drones, and pedestrian fencing — no wall construction. Even worse, the measure explicitly restricts funding for any of President Trump’s border wall prototypes, only allowing spending for designs deployed before the prototypes were constructed. If Congressional leadership told the president he was getting money for his signature campaign promise, he was lied to.
“And while adequate funding for the wall was not included, powerful business interests are inappropriately using the must-pass spending bill to expand their access to cheap foreign labor. Congressional leadership included a provision in the omnibus that allows the Department of Homeland Security to double the number of H-2B visas available in the current fiscal year. Opening the door for a significant increase in guest workers is not only unwarranted, but harmful to the interests of American workers. Moreover, this controversial provision has no place in a spending bill and should instead be debated openly along with other unsettled immigration matters after the government is funded. . . .
“The bottom line is this: there are no immigration-related provisions in the omnibus that are consistent with what President Trump and congressional Republicans told the American people they would do when they were sent to Washington.”

Everybody who voted for President Trump has been stabbed in the back by the Republican “leadership” in Congress. At this point, I don’t know why anyone should care if Democrats win the November midterms. If the GOP is so worthless, why should conservatives even bother voting?

 

 

Category: Budget, Immigration

In The Mailbox: 03.22.18

Posted on | March 23, 2018 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 03.22.18

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
First Street Journal: Never Apologize If You Don’t Mean It
EBL: John Bolton Replacing H.R. McMaster As National Security Adviser
Twitchy: Ted Lieu Tries To Pull “Classified Info” Rank On Alan Dershowitz, Gets Slapped Down Hard
Louder With Crowder: Rand Paul Tweets About 2018 Omnibus Spending Bill, Finds Crapton Of Waste
NPR: Jennifer Palmieri Claims Hillary Ran “With Half Her Humanity Tied Behind Her Back” (h/t NeoWayland)

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Podcast #77 – The Sacred Cows Episode
American Power: Conservative Amnesia
American Thinker: Amy Wax And Free Speech At Penn
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily New Confederates News
BattleSwarm: Congress Caves On Sanctuary Cities
CDR Salamander: Penny Wise? Pound Sand
Da Tech Guy: White Privilege Is A White Elephant, also, Musings On Ridicule
Don Surber: Why Creepy Uncle Joe Attacked Trump
Dustbury: How To Distract A Driver
Fausta: Peru – President PPK Resigns
The Geller Report: Muslim Migrant Screaming “Allahu Akbar” Rushes Angela Merkel, also, 100 French Intellectuals Warn About Islamic Totalitarianism
Hogewash: The Moon, 360 Degrees, also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
Joe For America: CitiBank Announces It’ll Force New Gun Control Rules On Its Customers
JustOneMinute: Corporate Fascism, But In A Good Cause!
Legal Insurrection: San Francisco Bans Fur Sales, also, Pence Family Shows Grace In Face Of John Oliver’s Childish Antics
Power Line: Anti-Semitic And Dumb As A Rock, also, The Senate’s Worst Boss?
Shark Tank: CNN In Center Of Controversy Again
Shot In The Dark: The Elephant In The Classroom
STUMP: McCabe’s Pension – Story Roundup, Pension Details, & A Little Bit Of Stats
The Political Hat: Woke Sexuality – Problematic DNA, Problematic Sperm, Problematic F**king
This Ain’t Hell: TSGT Phillip Dyer Saving The World, also, Arthur Jones The Illinois Nazi
Victory Girls: Ivanka Trump In A Lab Coast Triggers Hysteria
Weasel Zippers: Australian Nurses Forced To Announce Their “White Privilege” Before Treating Abos, also, Terrorist Attack At Travis AFB
Megan McArdle: Facebook Is America’s Scapegoat Du Jour
Mark Steyn: The Shadow Over Our Heads, also, Spoiling For A Fight


Featured Digital Deals
Amazon Warehouse Deals

Category: Linkagery

‘The Last Song Nearly Killed Me’

Posted on | March 22, 2018 | Comments Off on ‘The Last Song Nearly Killed Me’

 

On this date in 1963, the Beatles released their first album, Please Please Me, an event memorialized by the poet Philip Larkin:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me)
Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.

The story of how that LP was recorded in a single 10-hour session is told in a fascinating article by Jordan Rutagh. The Beatles had already released two 45-rpm singles — “Love Me Do” and “Please Please Me” — which along with their B-sides (“Ask Me Why” and “P.S. I Love You”) gave them four songs already recorded. A 33-rpm vinyl album in those days typically featured 14 songs (seven on each side), so after “Please Please Me” went to No. 1 on the British charts and their label wanted to capitalize on this success by rushing an LP onto the market, the group needed to add 10 more songs to make the required total. The Liverpool-based quartet arrived at EMI’s London studio on the morning of Feb. 11, 1963, and by 10:45 a.m., the tape machine was rolling.

If you are familiar with the album, you know that there are really only three good songs on it. The title track was a sexual double-entendre, a plea for reciprocation the matter of what was then euphemistically called “heavy petting,” written cleverly enough that the censors couldn’t suppress it, but everybody knew why teenage girls went wild for it.

When the frenzy known as “Beatlemania” took hold in England that year, one newspaper assigned its classical music critic to analyze the group’s oeuvre. He obliged with a review that described the pentatonic structure of “Please Please Me,” and reading that review was the first time the song’s composers ever saw the word “pentatonic.”

It is often wrongly claimed that John Lennon and Paul McCartney were self-taught prodigies. In fact, Lennon as a boy had sung in the local Anglican church choir, and McCartney had been taught the basics of piano and trumpet by his father, who’d played in jazz bands. However, as songwriters, they’d mainly learned by imitating what they heard on their favorite rock, pop and country records. With no formal lessons in music theory, Lennon and McCartney lacked the vocabulary that permitted the highbrow critic to name such a thing as a pentatonic scale, but simply wrote and sang what they liked — and they did OK.

“Please Please Me” sounds incredibly corny and simple to us now, but in 1963 it was ground-breaking and innovative, a fresh new sound that was much different from anything previously heard in pop music. The Beatles’ producer, George Martin, was a classically-trained musician who had never recorded a rock band, but the way he mixed their sound made the drums cut through with tremendous clarity. It was Martin’s production skill that gave such emphasis to the beat in the Beatles.

For rock music fans, however, the title track is arguably only the third-best song on the Please Please Me album. It is eclipsed by the manic energy of “I Saw Her Standing There.” With McCartney on lead vocals, and playing a bass riff lifted from an old Chuck Berry tune, “I Saw Her Standing There” just flat-out rocks. Jordan Rutagh explains that the famous count-off at the start of the track — “One, two, three, FAW!” — was actually recorded on the ninth take. The first take ended up on the album, but Martin had them keep trying for a better version, which never worked out. After the band halted midway through the eighth take because Ringo had flubbed a drum part, Paul was becoming irritated. So he put some of his irritated energy into the count-off of the next take. Martin liked that so much, he spliced it onto the start of take one.

The process of repeated retakes and overdubs rapidly chewed up the studio time allotted to the Beatles’ sessions that day, and the band actually worked through their lunch break, rehearsing in an effort to get their sound together. To make matters more difficult, Lennon was suffering with a head cold that day and kept gobbling throat lozenges to prevent his voice from shutting down completely. By the time they finished recording their next-to-last tune of the day (the Burt Bacharach ballad “Baby It’s You”), it was 10 p.m., everybody was dead tired, and there was some question as to whether Lennon’s voice could hold up through their last number, a cover of a minor hit by the Isley Brothers. They had to get it right in one take and, wow, what a take it was!

Every after more than half a century, the savage intensity of “Twist and Shout” is still exciting. The simple three-chord riff (the same used in the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie” and Richie Valens’ “La Bamba”) isn’t anything special, and the Isley Brothers’ version had only reached No. 17 on the U.S. charts in 1962. Compare that version to what the Beatles recorded in 1963, and the difference is remarkable, mainly because of the raw sound of Lennon’s voice. “The last song nearly killed me,” he later said of that late-night session, but what an incredible sound!

It’s one of the greatest rock-and-roll records of all time. Later that year, the Beatles were invited to headline the Royal Command Performance, with Queen Elizabeth in attendance. They played three songs, and then Lennon made a joke: “For our last number, I’d like to ask your help. Would the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewelry.” Of course, it was “Twist and Shout.”

 

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

 

Category: History, Music

California Democrat Is Unemployed

Posted on | March 22, 2018 | Comments Off on California Democrat Is Unemployed

 

Gregory Salcido is a Democrat. A member of the city council in the Los Angeles suburb of Pico Rivera, Salcido ran for Congress as a Democrat in 2002, but lost the primary. Salcido’s politics are relevant to the repeated controversies that have plagued his career as a history teacher at El Rancho High School. In 2005, a parent complained that Salcido had initiated a classroom discussion of masturbation. In 2010, Salcido was suspended after reportedly telling a student, “shut up Kelly before I kill you.” In 2012, Salcido was again in trouble for hitting a student and allegedly making fun of the boy’s obesity. These incidents could be regarded in hindsight as “red flags” warning that Salcido was headed toward the self-destruction he reached in January this year:

A Southern California high school teacher was caught on camera denigrating the intelligence of people serving in the US military.
In the videos, which were stealthily recorded in class by a student at El Rancho High in Pico Rivera, California, history teacher Gregory Salcido, 49, can be heard making a variety of unflattering remarks about service people, at one point calling them the ‘lowest of the low.’ . . .
In one of the clips, Salcido can be heard saying, ‘Think about the people who you know are over there. Your freakin’ stupid Uncle Louie or whatever. They’re dumb s***ts. They’re not like high-level thinkers. They’re not academic people. They’re not intellectual people.’
He then says that overseas service people are ‘the freakin’ lowest of our low. Not morally — I’m not saying they make bad moral decisions — they’re not talented people.’ . . .
‘The data is in, we don’t have a good military,’ Salcido says.
The 17-year-old high school senior who shot the videos . . . said that his brother and uncles were Marines who fought in Afghanistan, Desert Storm and Vietnam, and that Salcido’s comments were ‘so disrespectful.’

Now, the “disrespectful” anti-American teacher is unemployed:

A California school district fired a teacher on Tuesday following his viral rant where he called the military the “lowest of our low.”
The El Rancho Unified School District voted unanimously to fire history teacher and Pico Rivera councilman Gregory Salcido, reported Fox News.
“[Salcido’s] comments do not reflect what we stand for, who we are,” El Rancho board of education president Aurora Villon said. “The classroom should never be a place where students feel that they are picked at, bullied, intimidated.” . . .
Aside from making headlines, Salcido’s screed earned him attention from White House chief of staff John Kelly, who said the former teacher “ought to go to hell.”
“I just hope he enjoys the liberties and the lifestyle that we have fought for,” Kelly, who retired from the Marine Corps, told Fox News.

California Democrats hate America.

 

Category: California, Democrats, Education, Military
« go back — keep looking »