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Ok, so it’s a recycled yacht. That makes it environmentally responsible.

2024 Met Gala: The Good, the Cringe, the Weird and the Pathetic

The arrivals looks.

I'm not going to try to break down the list, but Truly Stupendously Awful looks are in the minority. But the people who actually look good -- good as in classy -- are also in the minority. The usual pathetic categories are much in evidence: older women trying to dress like 30-something sex goddesses; fat people in tight, revealing outfits; men -- not all of them gay -- going for the queer freakshow look; the beautiful young women who would draw stares if you dressed them in a burlap bag wearing the desperate "look at me, look at me" costumes.

The Met Gala has become a parody of itself. The Kartrashians. Notorious society whores. The dozens of people none of us have heard of who are supposed to be "celebrities" of some sort.

Anna Wintour controls the guest list and is said to approve every outfit. I can only wonder how a list like this gets compiled. I suppose it's all a matter of the checks being written, which makes me wonder what the money people think they are getting from this kind of display. I don't fault runway models for wearing outlandish costumes on the catwalk; it's a job, they are walking mannequins, and if the check is big enough, I'm ok with it as long as there's not nudity involved. But follow the money. How does this sort of thing raise money for the Metropolitan Museum?

Once upon a time, the Met Gala used to have traditional big donors, high powered professionals and business people who could write big checks. Maybe those people still contribute, but they're not the people being photographed and put forward as the face of the event. The Hollywood people are a minority, and I wonder if they're looking at each other and whispering, "what the heck are we doing here?" Being invited to the Met Gala used to be a thing. Maybe the event is still coasting on its past reputation, sort of like elite universities that have gone over the side and are now discovering how fast their stature can erode.

Anna Wintour is 74. How much longer will she stick around? And I wonder if the Met Gala will reset once she steps down. Credit where credit is due: she has raised a ton of money for the Museum.

I don’t follow fashion, but due to my recent renewed interest in movies, the various film awards shows come into my peripheral vision. These overlap in turn with fashion centric events like the Met Gala and with the awards shows in other entertainment domains (e.g. the various music awards). In today’s world, the big money people who are pulling the strings are looking for synergies and crossovers, and there are a lot of odd appearances. Basically I keep a side eye out for actors that I like to see if they are particularly stunning or, sometimes, to see how badly they’ve humiliated themselves. The big fashion houses sign celebrities to big contracts to moonlight as runway models at these big events, and some of the outfits are truly cringe inducing.

Anyhow, the Met Gala has been off in bizarro world for a long time. It is a fundraiser for a branch of the Metropolitan Museum. Serving as chairman of the annual big dollar fundraising event for a major nonprofit organization is a thankless job. Usually the chairman’s duty consists of sitting with the staff to decide on the general contours and then working one’s rolodex to relentless twist the arms of friends and business associates to write a big check. I’ve done enough political fundraising to respect the people who are willing to take on these jobs and do them well. In many organizations this is the kind of task that gets rotated through the up and coming members as a thankless task that you do to get your ticket punched on the march through the offices. Sometimes, if an organization is lucky, it will find someone who has a knack for the job and who sticks around for a few years.

Without pretending to understand this particular domain, my layman’s sense is that the Met Gala is an outlier (at least in part, but I think it’s a substantial part) because Anna Wintour took it over many years ago and has made it her own. By all accounts, she has turned it into a fundraising juggernaut for the Met. Kudos to her for that.

At some point, however, the Met Gala morphed into becoming The Anna Wintour Invitational. She is who she is. She runs Vogue and is wholly in bed with the big fashion houses. She clearly has an appetite for the outlandish edge of high fashion. She seems to like shocking for the sake of shocking, and there seems to be a standing invitation to the name designers to use the Met Gala as an opportunity to let their freak out. This happens in some of the other fashion shows as well, but those are events organized by the fashion industry itself. The Met Gala, in the final analysis, is run by the Metropolitan Museum — but the Museum has apparently gotten drunk on the money that Anna Wintour raises, and it has let the lunatics take over the asylum.

She worked her way up from being a Trump campaign volunteer to paid aide during his successful 2016 run, then moved on to political activism as a founder of Exodus Movement, a PAC fighting antisemitism.

The model got married at Mar-a-Lago in December 2018 to Darren Centinello, who she met on the 2016 Trump campaign. Centinello currently works for the Trump campaign.

The story buries her credentials for the job -- gotta lead with the cheesecake, ya'know -- but at least they are finally acknowledged. She started modelling at 17 but then earned degrees from Harvard and Penn. She's worked in politics since 2016, paying some dues at low level jobs and working her way up. She's still young which the RNC can use to advantage, but the RNC and Trump campaign need to be careful not to push her out of her depth. I don't say that as a negative -- conservatives need to be reaching out effectively to younger voters -- but experience matters. Trump is leading a populist parade, but precisely for that reason, he dodges some huge issues with the deficit and entitlement reform at the top of the list. Those things will destroy the country if open borders don't do it first. Young voters, correctly, don't see the geriatrics at the head of the ticket as the future of anything. Young people do know, however, that their futures are being sabotaged, and conservatives need to preparing that battlefield now, even if Trump isn't interested.

Per the story, Ms. Elizabeth identifies as a religious Jew. That makes her a natural for outreach to both the religious and Jewish communities. The story doesn't say anything about her three books, but at the risk of scandalizing some freepers, these consist of two books of poetry and "Finding My Place: Making My Parents' Dream Come True," written in 2020. Assuming that it's autobiographical, she was younger that El Baracko the Magnificent when he wrote "Dreams From My Father."

If she's up for it, I'd find a way to have fun with that. (I already know the question I'd plant and the answers I'd have queued up; the key is to keep the answer humorous and self-deprecating.) But substantively, there's an opportunity there. I wouldn't just use her to reach out to young people and especially young women. I'd use her to speak broadly to the legal immigrant community with an emphasis on coming to America in the right way with the right intentions, with gratitude for the opportunity to build a new life in a land of freedom. Obama's book was basically a self-reverential indictment of America for its failure to be as perfect as His Magnificence considered himself to be; hers is (I hope and expect) a traditional immigrant's story of hope and faith, with reverence for the promise of America. If I were running the RNC/Trump campaign messaging, I know how I'd want to deploy her.

Subject, of course, to her own strengths and comfort level.

Harvard, Penn, religious Jew, three books ... heck, there should be a running challenge to the talk shows to get her on with KJP for a duel of the young female spokeswomen.

I also hope she speaks up about the importance of children and building a family. Young women today are being relentlessly indoctrinated against both. That's going to kill the country too unless we turn it around soon.

Training in the hills? Heh, heh, heh ... the disinformation campaign is working. They’re not in the hills ....

They’re in her basement.

And her garage.

In the attic and under her bed.

And now they’ve clearly infiltrated into the shadowy wasteland between her ears.

They’re everywhere. Maybe she should barricade herself with AOC in a restroom in one of the congressional offices.

Has the patient put in for species confirmation surgery? The hair and tooth implants are well within reach for modern technology, and bath salts would probably handle the psychological issues. I’m sure health insurance is mandated to cover this sort of thing.

These "best places" lists can be interesting, but the devil is always in the details. Everything depends on the metrics chosen for scoring. This one seems pretty sensible:

Ranking Criteria

In recent years, many such lists have been cooked up regularly by lefties high on Wokeium who are scoring for myriad lefty indicators. Not so here, at first glance.

"Income inequality" and "school quality" are the two metrics where there is a potential to go off the rails, but there are perfectly sensible ways to measure these as well. With regard to income inequality, I suspect most of us would agree that a broadly middle class community -- especially a community without a great concentration of the very poor -- is a good place to live. And if school quality is measured in terms of academic achievement scored on the basis of standardized tests of core academic subjects, it is of course an important factor.

“The religion of the mentally ill.”

Yes. And that makes it common currency in the various settings in which the lunatics run the asylum. Modern academia being a foremost example.

Marxism is a rationalization of the will to power. It is intellectually incoherent, but neurotic, angry people often don’t care about that.

The African delegates blamed the UMC establishment for failing to properly invite 70 African delegates in time for them to travel to the General Conference, further biasing the proceedings.

"That is roughly 25% of our delegates. Ten months ago we began sending letters and emails and making phone calls, alerting the Commission on General Conference and some of our bishops that there was a problem. Many of these communications never received a single response," the statement alleged.

So the homosexual junta procedurally disenfranchised the African Methodists to rig the vote in favor of the homosexual takeover? That should become a landmark in the evolution of Intersectional Theology. Homosexuality trumps race.

As a practical matter, we can probably be more specific: WHITE homosexuality trumps basic procedural fairness to black people.

The woke dragon will devour its own. It's always good to know who is on top at any given moment.

We have traditionally regarded aging in place as a good thing. Old timers are part of the fabric of any balanced community. They (we) provide a sense of continuity and provide a neighborhood’s “institutional memory.” They think and build for the long term. The preference for rootless people endlessly on the move probably serves our would-be lords and masters, who regard the middle class as worker drones, more akin to serfs than to fellow citizens, but those of us who have been in our homes for decades don’t consider ourselves riffraff to be shoved aside to accommodate the incoming swarms of entitled cubicle rats who don’t want to pay their dues, pitch in, and build good neighborhoods over time.

I live in DC, which has had gentrification on steroids ever since we finally got rid of Marion Barry. Our current braindead mayor and city council are backsliders, doped up to their eyeballs on wokeium and oblivious to the damage they are causing, but the straighthinkers among the younger set are doing what we now-aging boomers did back in the day. They are colonizing and reclaiming the still affordable neighborhoods, especially those that are relatively close in. In DC, that means some newly gentrifying neighborhoods north of downtown, in far Northeast, the Anacostia River corridor, and close-in PG County that my generation had regarded as no-go areas. Clearing out the old folks is not the solution. Reclaiming neighborhoods from Section 8 and public housing project types is the solution.

Tsay admitted that they are being guided by activist groups, but refused to tell KOMO the name of the groups.

Deport them. If the Biden junta insists that they stay, put them in tents in a barbed wire compound, provide water but no food, and tell them their feeding is the responsibility of the activist groups who are supporting the invasion. They can starve, go home, or give up their enablers.

And then we should go after the activist groups to recover every penny spent on this catastrophe.

Mushrooms, along with garlic, onions, anchovies, ground beef and tomato sauce, rank among God’s great gifts to mankind.

I’m willing to give this a taste. In the long run, industrial scale production of cultured foods will be essential for any deep space exploration and human colonies on the moon or beyond. And it will help in tight patches on Earth as well.

Just keep the WokeWorld commissars from turning it into a mandate and let the free market work it out.

Czech was reportedly "going in and out of consciousness" while in police custody, and later told officers that he is homeless and had been awake for "five days straight" because something was "possessing him."

Sounds like he was being possessed by bath salts, though there are other possibilities.

He should've done this in LA or San Francisco, where the local authorities are pro-criminal and drug tolerant. And he should have stayed away from public transportation. Murder and cannibalism at a bus stop may be something the lefties are reluctant to accept.

However, the administration’s support for mass migration reduces the pressure on state governments and companies to train the next generation of Americans for skilled jobs. The government’s inflow of cheap migrants also provides CEOs and investors with an easy excuse to avoid the difficult task of raising per-person productivity.

Just don't call it the great replacement. That would be racist.

What jobs do the liberals want the next generation of Americans to be doing? Baristas and social media influencers?

The left will say that all it wants is the separation of church and state.

But the left also believes the legitimate scope of state action is total, extending to the moral formation of children, the policing of the language we use, and the right to redefine terms — including foundational legal principles — on an ad hoc basis.

The left is grudgingly willing to grant dissidents, including but not limited to Christians, the right to exist and practice their beliefs in whatever safe havens exist outside of a totalitarian control structure.

But since the left considers open expression of a dissenting view to be potentially hateful, hurtful or harmful misinformation, even the communication of dissenting views in private conversations is potentially actionable.

You are still free to dissent in the inner recesses of your own mind. But don’t say anything to anyone else.

Does the marriage have to be consummated?

At the rate we’re going, pretty soon every leftist activist will be executing a pro forma “marriage” to get papers for an illegal.

And since the states enact the laws on marriage, California will probably allow it all to be done online with all fees waived and no records checks or blood tests required. The partners might not even have to meet.

Green card marriages are nothing new but have never been normalized and affirmatively promoted. That will change.

Divorce will be equally easy so that the process can be repeated every couple of months.

Wow. That's deep. (/s)

But if the author doesn't understand Arrival, it is hard to take it seriously.

Not that Arrival got the paradoxes of time time travel manipulation right either.

I don’t know about these particular cases, but it is a well established trick to do this in the last year before retirement to spike the pension at stratospheric levels. This requires the collusion of supervisors, but since they are all in on the scam, collusion is routine. The federal formula is one percent of an employee’s high three. In Cali, unless it’s been changed recently, it’s based on the highest single year of service, and iirc, it’s higher than one percent.

Bennie Thompson can’t tie his own shoelaces. He is not the mastermind of anything. In this matter, he is either a puppet on a string or simply a clown.

Exactly right. These people live their lives on little screens. Increasingly they are shocked when they get off TikTok or their other drug of choice long enough to encounter reality, and they feel entitled to be outraged when reality is not as infinitely malleable as the PixelVerse. Some of them are now in full fledged revolt against the reality principle itself.

For the last couple of years, I’ve been arguing — only half tongue in cheek — that TikTok is a halfway house in the descent into the incubators filled with the blue pill people in The Matrix. The tech companies have already fielded wraparound headsets for 3D viewing. When those get a little better, the TikTokers will dive in and never come out.

When we reach the point at which their votes no longer need to be harvested, the controllers will pull the plug.