September 2, 2026

September 1, 2026

ONCE MORE UNTO THE MEME, DEAR FRIENDS:

UPDATE:

ANOTHER UPDATE: And Eric S. Raymond is doing just that:

Posted at 10:08 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OPEN THREAD: Tuesday’s groovy.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Almost as much as they’re excited about this recent development in Roger Goodell’s NFL: Map Shows NFL Teams With Male Cheerleaders Amid Online Scrutiny.

In accordance with the prophecy:

Speaking of the Cowboys, the ghost of Tex Schramm weeps, wonders where it all went wrong for his beloved league.

UPDATE:

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE WAY OF THE WAR OF ART: My review of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way and Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, now up at Ed Driscoll.com.

Posted at 8:55 pm by Ed Driscoll

NOT ALL GRADUATE DEGREES PAY OFF. And you’ll never believe which ones! Just kidding, you’ll believe it, though engineering is a closer shave than you’d think.

Posted at 8:53 pm by Robert Shibley

MARTINIS AND CULTURE WAR:

In a 1978 address to the National Restaurant Association, Gerald Ford summarized: “The three-martini lunch is the epitome of American efficiency—where else can you get an earful, a bellyful, and a snootful at the same time?” Businessmen claimed that their creativity increased post-three-martini lunch. At white tablecloth steakhouses, olives were served as martini accoutrements: as an imported European delicacy, the olive added to the martini’s high-class reputation. The early martinis were smaller at around two and a half ounces, only a third as intoxicating as contemporary versions. The three‑martini lunch emerged from this environment: a perfect accompaniment to a long midday meeting where deals were made and class distinctions affirmed. One can imagine going back into the office after a 1950s three-martini lunch (now equivalent to one martini in 2025) only slightly tipsy and ready to keep working.

But as the three-martini lunch became a symbol of pinstripe-suited corporate America, a target was placed on the martini’s back (and the back of the well-heeled executives who liked to charge their long lunches to the corporate account). In the 1970s, the three‑martini lunch also became a political symbol of runaway capitalism. When stagflation plagued the American economy, President Jimmy Carter denounced business meal deductions as an abuse of the upper class, saying that the “working class was subsidizing the $50 martini lunch.” Conservative writer William F. Buckley Jr. responded that the martini had become “a code word” used not to protect tax revenue, but to attack a pro-capitalist lifestyle that personally offended Carter, an especially prescient attack during the Cold War where being branded ‘anti-capitalist’ was a political liability. . . .

But the business lunch never left, it just changed clothes. Yes, Sweetgreen is less glamorous than the white-tablecloth settings of three-martini lunches. But, the kale salad is just the martini inverted: instead of demonstrating your immunity to toxins, you demonstrate your immunity to pleasure.

How far we have fallen.

UPDATE (From Ed): In his 1980 non-fiction anthology In Our Time, Tom Wolfe wrote:

In the fifties there was the martini. In the sixties there was vodka on ice. In the early seventies there was the glass of white wine. In the late seventies there was the bottle of Perrier, a French soda water. The fashionable American expense-account lunch drink became lighter and lighter, but not cheaper and cheaper. The soda water sold for $2.50 a glass in Manhattan restaurants.

Even someone as brilliant at spotting societal tends and obsessions as Wolfe had no idea of the insane heights where this fad would end up in the 21st century: Would you pay $95 for a bottle of water?

Posted at 8:35 pm by Glenn Reynolds

QUESTION ASKED: Did Colin Kaepernick do more harm than good for the Black community?

I see a man whose entire cause… was built on a false premise.

I’m bracing for impact as I write that, because I know what the blowback for such a sentence looks like. Kaepernick is a sacred cow in the eyes of activists and much of the media, and criticism of him does not go unnoticed.

But the reality is this: Unarmed Black people were not being killed by cops en masse while Kaepernick was kneeling. They were more likely to be struck by lightning than die at the hands of a police officer. And well-intentioned as Colin may have been in his protest, the anti-police movement he helped inspire likely made things worse for the most vulnerable members of the Black community. Because when cops can’t properly do their jobs — people die.

There was a poll from 2019 that asked Americans how many unarmed Black people they thought were killed per year. They were given five choices. 1) About 10, 2) About 100, 3) About 1000, 4) About 10,000, 5) More than 10,000.

Here are the results for people who identified themselves as “very liberal,” which I think describes most of the activists who rallied behind this issue. About 10 — 15.7 percent. About 100 — 30.7 percent. About 1,000 — 31.4 percent. About 10,000 — 14.3 percent. More than 10,000 — 7.8 percent.

The actual number of unarmed Black people killed by cops that year, per the Washington Post? Twelve.

My guess is that survey would have yielded similar results if conducted in 2016, when Kaepernick first began his crusade. I say this because I was one of the people who thought the number was in the triple, if not quadruple digits. There was Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, etc. And those deaths — whether it be in mainstream media or social media — were seldom framed as one-offs but rather representative of a system crisis.

I, like millions of other Americans, bought into Kaepernick’s narrative. But then I actually looked into it.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

THAT’S HOW I REMEMBER IT:

UPDATE (From Ed): Not everything was “cool” in the 1980s, but the decade was lots of fun, particularly when compared to the one that preceded it:

Posted at 8:14 pm by Stephen Green

MEGAN FOX: Pregnancy Faker Laura Owens Pleads GUILTY! “Clayton Echard and Greg Gillespie’s long nightmare with serial pregnancy faker and fraudster Laura Owens seems finally to be at an end. On Friday, Owens pleaded guilty to four felonies related to the scheme to defraud Echard and Gillespie by pretending to be pregnant with twins while using the court system as a weapon to harm them over many years.”

Posted at 6:24 pm by Stephen Green

ABE GREENWALD: A Counterculture Without a Culture.

The left-wing counterculture of the 1960s was violent and reckless, and we’re still trying to contain its residual damage. There was no reason to believe that a right-wing version would be any more restrained. The inexorable aim of a counterculture is provocation, which is also a common hallmark of young minds and anyone who loses himself in a collective frenzy.

Nonetheless, many things pointed in this direction. The left had taken over as the country’s insufferable scolds and prudes. It was the right (including many youths) that took the lead in challenging establishment narratives around Covid. High-school-age kids were not only locked down and isolated for no reason. They were harangued by the woke establishment for being racist and privileged. And the boys were lectured on the toxicity of their sex. At the same time, young right-wing influencers were growing their audiences, and there was a newly defined class of young men, the involuntarily celibate (incels), to be hoovered up.

These incel gamers moldering away in their parents’ basements “turned on” their screens and   “dropped out” of society every bit as much as the acid-eating hippies had a half-century earlier. And they “tuned in” to an endless array of angry, populist right-wing streamers from their own generation.

As long as America remains a free country, its youth will look to transgress. And all told, it was now the right that offered the most welcoming avenue for transgression. Right-wing influencers used and promoted language proscribed by the left. The right counselled against trusting adults, revered institutions, and their account of how the world works.

Earlier: The Making of the Counter Culture. 

Beginning, of course, with the moon landing, expect retrospectives devoted to the Manson murders, Woodstock, the Chicago 7 trial, and even Altamont, representing both the apogee and perigee of Aquarian salad days. But the 50-year milestone with arguably the most enduring impact is likely to pass unacknowledged: publication that fall of Theodore Roszak’s landmark book The Making of a Counter Culture.

In an accident of timing that is every author’s dream, Doubleday released it soon after that standard bearer of mainstream culture, the New York Times, said that Woodstock “had little more sanity than the impulses that drove the lemmings to march to their deaths in the sea.” And also asked, “What kind of culture is it that can produce so colossal a mess?”

Roszak fortuitously had the answer: a counter culture. His book received serious attention from reviewers, was a topic for talk-show hosts such as Dick Cavett, found itself on university syllabi, and became a National Book Award finalist. It was a publishing sensation.

And yet, I suspect you’ve never read it. And almost certainly never even heard of it.

Why? There’s a good reason. Uniquely in history, it wasn’t the book’s content that left a permanent footprint. It was the title. Seriously. Those two words, “counter culture,” which we now write as counterculture, were Roszak’s original coinage. And yet their instantly idiomatic quality made it seem as though they’d always existed side by side. Plus, they sounded sublime in a way that “hippies” no longer did.

Which explains why, in an era when going viral meant you were contagious, the self-flattering neologism was adopted overnight by millions of boomers, from Berkeley to Cambridge and all points north and south, to describe their brave stand against the “Establishment.”

There is a poetic irony to the boomers. They were the first generation to watch itself grow up on TV. They were the primary target audience of most popular entertainments during their youth. In adulthood, they quickly seized control of mass media, journalism, Hollywood, and academia. And yet, to this day, boomers harbor a vestigial sense of belonging to a “counterculture” rather than being the dominant culture.

And have been for almost a century now, if one combines FDR’s era “old left” along with the “new left” that usurped it in the 1960s, and then made the next decade such a frenzy:

Though he writes from the perspective of a conservative (actually, given [David] Frum’s Canadian origins, one might more precisely call him a Tory, albeit a very “dry” one) and his work is an analysis of a decade in which liberalism ran rampant, Frum does not revisit the 1970s to bury them. Far from it. He makes the bold claim that the painful lessons America learned in the 1970s helped teach us how to find renewed purpose and vigor in the two decades that followed:

America won the cold war, pioneered the computer revolution, squelched inflation, and suppressed crime, yes, but only because it first underwent a decade and a half of suffering and humiliation. Those years were daunting and frightening because habits and institutions that had worked brilliantly for half a century suddenly sputtered. . . . Then [Americans] recouped. They rethought. They reinvented. They rediscovered in their own past the governing principles of their future. Out of the failure and trauma of the 1970s they emerged stronger, richer and—if it is not overdramatic to say so—greater than ever.

The most obvious change wrought by the 1970s was the libertinism that rose in conjunction with the liberation of sex from the shackles of law and tradition. After a precis of the court decisions that effectively ended two centuries of the legislation of sexual morality, Frum sums up: “Every era tacitly places one liberty ahead of all others; one that must always prevail when values conflict. For late 18th-century Americans, that liberty was freedom of religion. For late 19th-century Americans, it was the right to own and dispose of property. For late 20th-century Americans, it is sexual freedom.” One of the many unintended consequences was the devastation done to marriage: As the 1970s progressed, Frum writes, “a once-universal institution was dwindling into a middle-class idiosyncrasy, like bottled water or cotton shirts.”

And then #metoo and the left’s concurrent freakout of Brett Kavanaugh happened, transforming them into “The New Prudes.”

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Posted at 5:14 pm by Stephen Green