The tax bill is the gift that keeps giving, not least because it exposes the Democrats as the greedy party that thinks all America’s money is theirs.
The Bookworm Beat 11/4/17 — Day of Rage edition
As I’m still groggy from fighting migraines, Wolf Howling wrote this Bookworm Beat, a glorious potpourri showing that the good guys are mostly winning.
Today was supposed to be a big day, with Antifa raging in the streets and less-violently inclined Leftists screaming at the heavens. When I search for stories about either of these Day of Rage protests, though, I find nothing. I guess it’s hard to get up on a cold Fall morning when you live in your parents’ basement or partied hard the night before in your college dorm.
I’m a little inert today too for an entirely different reason: I’ve been adjusting my daily anti-migraine medication. The adjustment seems to be working, because I haven’t had a migraine since I made the change, but the downside is that the increased dosage makes me sleepy and dims my mental energy. Both those problems will pass with time, but for now, even though I’m paying attention to the news, I can’t seem to rouse myself to write about it.
Fortunately for the Bookworm’s reputation as a purveyor of interesting content, my friend Wolf Howling send me an email chock full of interesting information. For your enjoyment and edification, therefore, I present to you the Wolf Howling edition of today’s Bookworm Beat:
Teen Vogue is caput. Conde Nast announced today that Teen Vogue is getting the axe.
The New York-based publisher, which has instilled a hiring freeze, will slash about 80 jobs, equal to a decrease of about 2.5 percent of its 3,000-person workforce. Budgets across departments are also expected to get a haircut, with the worst-performing divisions and magazines getting cuts of up to 20 percent. As part of that mandate, Condé is reducing the frequencies of most of its titles and will shutter Teen Vogue in print.
(Bookworm here: Wolf Howling is not the only one who remembered my utter disdain for Teen Vogue — which I expressed here, here, here, and here. I got emails from several other people and am grateful to all of them for keeping that wonderful news right in front of me.)
A man who had been arrested asked for a “lawyer [,] dog” Depending upon how you read it, the man either called the police officer “dog” (which is definitely better than calling him “pig”) or asked for an actual “lawyer dog.” The Louisiana court held it was the latter and, dogs with law degrees being in short supply, concluded that the police had no obligation to the man to hunt up that particular type of lawyer before questioning him. [Read more…]
The Bookworm Beat 4-27-15 — “not yet the Apocalypse” edition and open thread
My brain is filled with Apocalyptic imagery, but it’s not because Obama is president, the Middle East is in flames, our southern border has collapsed, our economy is stagnant, Greece may drag down Europe, and Islamist’s are resurgent everywhere. It’s actually because last night, when my work load finally showed signs of a much-desired longish-term slowdown, I started reading two excellent books.
The first is Simon Sebag Montefiore’s lyrical and highly informative Jerusalem: The Biography, which takes the reader from Jerusalem’s pre-Biblical beginnings, to Old Testament and New Testament history, and then through post-Biblical history, all the way up to the 1967 War. It’s a lovely book, but I’ve just finished reading about Jesus’s crucifixion and am working my way toward’s the Kingdom of Israel’s destruction in 70 AD, so you can see why I’d be having an “end of days” feeling.
The second book that I’m reading, equally good so far, isn’t helping. It’s John Kelly’s The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time, another elegantly written book that makes you realize the speed with which civilization can collapse (as if the recent Ebola scare wasn’t reminder enough). I think too that Kelly, with a historian’s true knowledge rather than a Progressive’s fantasy-science melange, might just be a climate change skeptic. It’s this bit of information that’s the giveaway, about the changing climate and demographic conditions in Europe in the five hundred years leading to the plague: