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Ricochet Podcast Question Time!
Good people of Ricochet, lend us your Qs!
For this week’s flagship podcast, our world famous (right?) hosts will be answering the questions. And they’ll be coming from you. Unfortunately Peter is off this week, but are there any inquiries you’ve had for Rob, James and Charles Cooke – who’s subbing for Mr. R? Whether you’re wondering about their take on hot button issues or their thoughts on culture; maybe you’d like to know about what they do when they aren’t podcasting, or how they got into their line of work. If you wanna know, we wanna know that you wanna know.
Hit them with your best shot in the comments to hear their answers this Friday, July 15th.
Published in General, Podcasts
It would have to be Nevada. You can’t build anything for lower cost in New Mexico.
Ding Frikkin Dong. Didn’t want to be the first.
I don’t see what that factoid has to do with my policy point.
You folks in Georgia need to quit screwing this up. Quit blaming Trump. There is no way any Republican is worse than the Democrat. Pick your poison. You are already a purple to blue state, and if you get Abrams, then you deserve her.
Writing in a candidate is a half vote for the Democrat. Hardly the way to go. And I say that as a Georgian.
Don’t vote Democratic, and don’t’ vote third party. Vote for the winner of the Republican Primary.
Ah, I see. I thought I’d missed n announcement or something.
The “experts” who crafted our national COVID policies have turned out to be spectacularly wrong in almost every respect. The bulk of published commentary on recent SCOTUS decisions is brain-dead–or is it true that every woman in America is now required to be pregnant, everyone in NY state must now carry a gun and the EPA has been disbanded? And of course, we already knew that the leading cause of death in the African-American community is the police.
My question is this: For all the talk and concern by conservatives about the Deep State, isn’t the real enemy Deep Stupid? And is there anything we can do about that?
Conservatives seem to keep dissing Lincoln and the American Founding, including by Continetti and DeMuth. Lincoln understood the American Founding far better than either. Apparently, they don’t want to be the Party of Lincoln any longer–too passe’?
DeMuth says there is a “tension” between the Declaration and the Constitution. Never mind that many of the same individuals participated in the drafting of both documents. And both keep calling America a “creedal” nation.
To me that indicates that they both have no idea what they are talking about.
America is NOT a creedal nation, whatever Martin Luther King, Jr. said. America is an AXIOMATIC nation. The Declaration (beyond being a litany of abuses of the Colonials by the King and Parliament–they clearly understood they were being treated as inferiors without the rights of Englishmen) contains the AXIOMS–Get it through your heads, people–AXIOMS!!!!Not Propositions–that underpin the entire structure of the Constitution, as Euclid’s axioms underpin his Geometry (which happens to be logically perfect)–and the US founding documents, Declaration and Constitution together, comprise the most logically perfect statement of axioms of governance, applied in the structure of the Constitution, as human kind will ever see. Conserving the American Founding is equivalent to conserving Geometry, indeed Reason itself, which Conservatives seem more and more to disdain. George Will is right on that score (wrong on many others). No one seems to understand either geometry or logic these days.
Any of the podcasters that wish to comment on this issue (tirade) would be more than welcome to do so.
Also, COntinetti says that the immigration restriction law of 1924 was supported by Conservatives. That totally misconstrues history. That act was based on Eugenics, the Ur-Progressive project of the first half of the 20th Century, and still, unfortunately with us (I know–I’m a member of that ‘basket of deplorable’). Unfortunately, many of those “conservatives” were actually Progressives (William Howard Taft comes to mind, Chief Justice when Buck v. Bell was decided allowing forced sterilization of the “unfit”, majority opinion, obscene as it was, written by the preposterous Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ur-Progressive–Taft was a member of a Eugenics organization, set up by Dr. Kellogg and including such luminaries as Alexander Graham Bell–and, no, that does not make Eugenics valid or moral or anything else) as were most so-called ‘Conservatives’ at the time. The words have changed meaning so many times it’s virtually impossible to clearly characterize the term “Conservative”. The lines are blurred, and intentionally so. But forced sterilization (as with abortion) is NOT a Conservative bedrock principle. Never was (although Buck v. Bell still stands, and was not overturned by Dobbs, so forced sterilization for public health purposes remains a federally approved action). And so with a myriad of other issues. The point was for politicians to create divisions and gain supporters, and the sands shifted over and over again.
As someone who identifies as Louise, a petite lesbian of color (she/her) on weekdays but as Raoul (he/him), a young 6″2 Latino bodybuilder on weekends and holidays, what can I do to make people use the correct pronouns on the correct days? Do I have a legal case to compel people get it right? And secondly, would it be wrong for Raoul to wear his usual assless chaps to a kindergarten graduation ceremony? Louise seems to think so.
All chaps are assless. Otherwise they’re just pants.
Mr. Charlotte and I have discussed this at great length (!) and agree with you. We’ve decided, though, that it’s just really fun to say “assless chaps”.
I have never wanted to wear something called “chaps”. I use lip balm do avoid chapped lips. Chaps also seems too close to “chaff”. All seems so uncomfortable to me.
Oddly, their purpose is protective, like the lip balm. People wear them over pants to protect them while riding horses or motorcycles. Since the bum is protected by being in the seat, chaps don’t need to cover it. That’s my understanding anyway.
I just hope that if they discuss this on the podcast, @ejhill makes cover art of the guys in biker leathers.
@roblong, @jameslileks, @charlescwc, @blueyeti – The People have spoken! Their clear wish is for you to kick off tomorrow’s show with an extended discussion of assless chaps.
Gentlemen, my question is technical, not topical.
Since all three of you are prolific professional writers, I wonder what software you prefer for writing. Are there any special apps you go to for particular formats or special projects? Perhaps your various publishers require that you use various in-house systems. Thanks!
Just to get in here, my first “exposure” to them was in the person of Jim Dandy Mangrum of Black Oak Arkansas, close to 50 years ago. The image remains to this day.
Deep Stupid has always been with us. This is new (to us).
Please, please do…
For the pannel:
After the riots of 2020, the increasing violent crime rate, and certain failures to act, by police forces, is the public ready and willing to accept more “concealed carry-outside of home armed” status in our everyday lives?
If certain blue states restrict-fight “concealed carry-outside of home armed”, will otherwise lawful people still arm themselves, for their own self-protection?
Question for Charles – what are your thoughts on Peter Jackson’s Get Back? Did it change the way you think of the Beatles during that period of their career?
In my world of conversation, I’ve seen three translations for this shortened word: demolition (our local contractors, HGTV. and This Old House); demonstration; and demographic. Sentences are starting to sound like my kids’ Mad Libs from their middle school days. :-)
It wasnt worded quite clearly, but I was making the comparison between the current Sony Pictures back lot located at 10202 West Washington Boulevard, Culver City CA. That building a production facility in New Mexico would be cheaper than the current (massive) buildings used in LA CA. (the property taxes on the place alone – must be mind boggling)
Nevada has a natural advantage because of the no property taxes – but with Lake Mead running so low – water use restrictions can’t be far off…
Does it take a lot of water to make movies?
Depends on the movie I guess. But you have hundreds of people (possibly outdoors) working a movie set… Iron Man 3 for example set the record with 3300 crew… But most Hollywood films have around 500… So yea that sounds like a lot of water…
Maybe a lot of gourmet bottled water, but that has to come from France anyway. :-)
I write everything in Pages, a Mac program. But remembering how the death of MacWrite eventually orphaned a lot of docs, I convert everything I write to pdfs and plain text at the end of each month, since that seems to be the best defense against platform rot.
National Review columns are submitted in Word. At the newspaper, we have a new browser-based system (developed and sold by Vox media, which is interesting) that’s just gloriously simple, and is capable of importing formatted text from any program. I write something in Pages, select-all / copy-all / paste, and everything appears in the text field exactly as required.
It is a grand improvement over our old program, Saxotech, which had so many fiddly-bit options and buttons it was like trying to conduct a symphony in a straightjacket. Before that, we had some Content Management System I have wiped from my memory. Before that, it was the green horror of ATEX, with its amazing heavy keyboards that looked like Soviet products designed to survive a nuclear strike.
My idea writing program is a simple blank sheet with no buttons, no sidebars, by default. I wrote in a Markdown program called Focused for a while that provided all those things, but stopped using it for reasons I cannot remember, but must have impeded the workflow.
Wikipedia:
1980s
In 1980 Atex developed a news pagination system for the Star Tribune. The resulting product, Atex News Layout, delivered ‘parallel pagination’, which allowed layout changes to automatically flow between copy editors and layout editors.
An April 1981 story in Computerworld magazine announced a new ATEX “System 7000” suitable for “medium-sized daily newspapers” and supporting up to 64 news and advertising terminals, with dual central processing units and system prices starting at $250,000. [3]
Many of America’s major dailies adopted Atex systems at some point, including The New York Times, Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Daily News, Louisville Courier-Journal, Columbus Dispatch, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Indianapolis Star, and Seattle Times. [4] The Associated Press also used Atex to create and edit stories and to send them to its members over telephone circuits and via satellite.
The company was eventually acquired by Eastman Kodak for $77 million.[2] Kodak thought Atex would help them access the commercial industry and build a strong customer based in emerging computer based technology.
In 1979 Atex for the first time expanded its operations outside the United States with implementation at the West Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (WAZ), which was headquartered in Essen Germany and which had five different titles throughout the North Rhine-Westphalia Region. Early in 1980 Atex quickly expanded its operation in Germany with Axel Springer Verlag Hoerzu, Bild Zeitung, Abendblatt, and Die Welt. This was the official release of the Integrated Advertising System, which introduced another major milestone and revolutionized newspaper advertising deadlines.
In the mid-1980s Atex for the first time expanded its operations outside the United States with an implementation at The Economist and Maclean’s Magazine in Toronto, La Tribune de Geneve in Geneva, La Suisse in Geneva, Le Nouvel Economiste in Brussels. This was followed by major installation at Rupert Murdoch’s News International in 1985 and a $23 million contract with The New York Times in 1987.
Paul Brainerd left Atex in 1984 to found the Aldus Corporation and lead the creation of PageMaker.
I loved PageMaker.
Thought of one for Charlie. I’ve heard the Boris Johnson scandal referred to as Partygate. Why are the British using our played out, fifty year-old suffix? Don’t they have something classy to use instead?
The Democrats and their media trash Republican candidates and the Republican voters soak it up like a sponge. What will convince voters in states like Georgia that the alternative, the Democrats in change, would be worse? This is a loser mentality.