The blood lead levels of yesteryear!

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2019

Looking in, once again, on the devolving culture:
Luckily, the people at Slate keep "working while other folk sleep. We say that because they offered these posts, in rapid-fire succession, on today's "Recently in Slate" basic contents page:
STOYA / OCT 23, 2019 / 5:55 AM
My Hang-Up in Bed Is So Basic that I Feel Like a Freak

JAMILAH LAMIEUX / OCT 23, 2019 / 6:00 AM
Dear Care and Feeding: My Boyfriend's Daughter Forbids Us From Having Sex

SLATE PLUS
JAMILAH LAMIEUX / OCT 23, 2019 / 6:01 AM
I'm 23, and My Mom Wants Me to Visit Every Weekend

STRATEGIST EDITORS / OCT 23, 2019 / 6:30 AM
My Secret Winter Moisturizer Is Meant for Pregnant Ladies

DANIEL MALLORY ORTBERG / OCT 23, 2019 / 8:00 AM
Help! My fiancé falls asleep on the couch almost every night.
At that point, the people of Slate scattered in maybe three reports about actual news topics. Soon, though, we were returned to our floundering tribe's rapidly evolving idiocratic culture:
NICHOLAS CANNARIATO / OCT 23, 2019 / 10:55 AM
Celebrity Food TV Has Gone Too Far

METCALF, STEVENS AND TURNER / OCT 23, 2019 / 11:15 AM
Dolly Parton May Be the Least-Disliked Famous Person in the World

MARISSA MARTINELLI / OCT 23, 2019 / 11:15 AM
Here's What's Disappearing From Netflix in November

SLATE PLUS
DANIEL MALLORY ORTBERG / OCT 23, 2019 / 12:00 PM
Help! I Need My Mom to Start Wearing Underwear When She Visits
At that point, the afternoon shift took over! Question: Does anything about this topic selection seem peculiar to you?

Then too, we have the Here's to Help section in today's New York Times. Kidding you not, the feature today on the paper's page A3 (hard-copy only) starts exactly like this:
Here to Help
HOW TO CHOOSE THE RIGHT HOBBY

How do you decide on a hobby? Here are some ways to figure out what is best suited to you. TARA PARKER-POPE
Parker-Pope is back to puzzle the world again with her never-ending advice about the various complexities involving in selecting and maintaining a hobby.

Today, she offers an array of suggestions about how to choose a hobby. Her suggestions seem so inane that it's hard to know what to say about them. Here's one example, exactly as it appears in today's print editions:
Increase your reading. You might decide to collect rare books or make it a point to explore independent bookstores. You can take a writing course, attend story slam events or start a blog.
You might decide to collect rare books! Who knows? Maybe that inexpensive hobby would be "best suited to you!"

Aristotle is widely said to have said it: "Man [sic] is the rational animal."

The Times has been working very hard to debunk this time-honored bromide. Day after day, we think of the things we've learned from Kevin Drum's work about the very high blood lead levels which prevailed, all over the country, when today'a adults were kids.

"Idiocracy," Mike Judge said.
To us, he's the new Aristotle!

Full disclosure:
We were assisted in this analysis by Future Anthropologists Huddled in Caves, a despondent group of international experts who report from the years which follow the global conflagration they describe as Mister Trump's War.

They report through the nocturnal transmissions the haters refer to as "dreams."

15 comments:

  1. "Dolly Parton May Be the Least-Disliked Famous Person in the World"

    Huh. Makes sense, eh?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. One thing’s for sure. The NYT can ever-so-helpfully make the lives of their readers so banal as to generate a need for instructions in jumping off a building.

      Delete
    2. And now a newspaper is being blamed for making people’s lives banal.

      In my case, it was The Sacramento Bee that made me give up my dream of being a platinum recording artist.

      Delete
    3. The NYT doesn’t think highly enough of you to address such ambitions. It only aspires to make you hate hobbies and reading

      Delete
    4. Antiquarian books may be the least-disliked objects in the World.

      Delete
    5. The point is that Here To Help could make anything sound as fun as a grade school reader.

      Delete
    6. It certainly keeps Bob occupied. Without the Here to Help section, he might have to focus on actual news stories, and we all know how much work that can be.

      Delete
    7. The NYT publishes some fluff, yes. The fluff is likely what keeps the paper running. I even remember Somerby bitching about the NYT covering the best hot dog in town on the eve of JUly 4th -- as if NYC readers wouldn't be interested in that topic.

      Somerby would doubtless prefer that the NYT do what he himself does -- attack liberals, defend the likes of Ron Johnson, Turner, Roy Moore and DJT.

      Delete
  2. 'The Times has been working very hard to debunk this time-honored bromide'

    Not as hard as Somerby, who, when he isn't defending Roy Moore, Donald Trump and Ron Johnson, is proving himself to be an irrational Trumptard.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Ro Khanna, who was present, described the Republican stunt yesterday as follows:

    "It was a scene not in the United States but at a fraternity. You had about twenty Republicans come in, they were yelling, they were basically disrupting the entire proceedings. They brought in their phones into the SCIF, which everyone knows is against the law. And then they started ordering pizza. There were pizza boxes strewn all over the SCIF. They didn’t clean up. It was really just an embarrassment. It’s almost out of the Animal House movie."

    Meanwhile, Somerby is busy defending the antics of frat boys who rape drunken women at frat parties (e.g., Turner) or attempt gang rape (e.g., Kavanaugh), because that's what conservatives do.

    Frats are about the kind of blind loyalty Trump is now demanding of his party, despite obvious evidence that he is guilty of numerous crimes and busy selling our country down the river. Bros stick together, including Somerby.

    What will today's craven defense of wrongdoing be about? Can't wait for Somerby's next conservative meme (disguised as a complaint against the media). I can bet it will feature an attack on some female journalist or professor. Because frat guys just don't feel manly unless they are attacking women, and they need to band together in groups to do it, because women are scary. And so are those mean Democrats who are picking on Trump for no reason at all.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Here is the evidence that Hillary Clinton is right about Tulsi Gabbard:

    https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/heres-the-overwhelming-evidence-hillary-clinton-is-right-about-tulsi-gabbard/

    ReplyDelete
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