Props to Amy, this is a right proper pile-on. It's only been a few hours, but Lebron appears to be blowing up real good.

Y'know, just as a selfish matter, we might expect Lebron to cut the NBA loose here. James has already made his NBA money. Even if it were a betrayal, and I don't think for a minute that it would be, he'd collect tremendous popular headspace as a hero for renouncing the NBA's shameless pandering to the Chinese.

James is not a small, humble personality. At some point, reputation has to mean more to him than do a few million incidental dollars… Unless you think some of the NBA's businessmen have asked him if he'd like to invest in a Chinese ball franchise someday.

Meanwhile—

Here's Celine at her lungsy, nuanced, heart-rendering best.

This is a list of things which I believe to be true. Three or four generations of Americans have been told grotesque lies about carbohydrates.

Rending.

Sorry, too much time waiting for video software to deliver the goods.

Seven hours after his tweet, the rest of Twitter still seems annoyed with Lebron, but that affirms my priors. It's difficult to tell whether or not he'll be pressed to retract his comments. Because of the way the Twitter people warp the discussions, shadow-banning and so forth, it's a horrible venue for measuring public sentiment, as is Google News, etc.

From Crid's "annoyed" link:

It leaves one to question how much of their domestic activism is mere performative wokeness.

I have a new mock phrase: performative wokeness.

They should have tried to bury the Ukraine story, but they chose to pick it up and run with it.

This was at a time when Democrats were waging a war on fossil fuels, opposing fracking, and trying to shut down U.S. energy production. American natural gas was bad for the environment, but Ukrainian natural gas was good for the campaign coffers when it involves Hunter Biden’s business interests and John Kerry’s former chief of staff. As Hilton points out, Sen. Markey’s hypocrisy runs particularly deep:

Sen. Ed Markey was the Senate sponsor of the Green New Deal! He wants to shut down gas production in America. Yet he personally intervened with the Obama administration to send your tax dollars to boost Ukraine's gas production. And not just once.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/10/corrupt_senators_took_ukraine_cash.html

https://twitter.com/melissakchan/status/1183930979821543425

Made you jump.

https://nypost.com/2019/10/11/lion-appears-to-smirk-at-photographer-after-scaring-him-with-loud-roar/

Turks, Kurd, YPG, PKK, and an obsolete AUMF.

What if Turkey should invoke Article 5 now, in response to what it sees as a terrorist threat? US forces are withdrawing from areas of combat in northeastern Syria now, but can we see ourselves obligated to a fight on the sides of the allied Turks, against partner Kurds?

Rather than threatening sanctions, Congress should update an AUMF they’ve been dithering on for 16 years. Better still, let Congress declare war on Turkey, on behalf of the Kurds, as Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the Constitution authorizes them to do.

Don’t bet on either. We’ll just continue to play fast and loose with the law.

https://www.militarytimes.com/opinion/2019/10/14/in-supporting-the-kurds-in-syria-us-has-been-playing-fast-and-loose-with-the-law/

RIP Harold Bloom, age 89.

Here's the post I created in June where I mentioned both him and Walt Whitman. (Bloom claimed, back in 2003, that it was "insufferable" for anyone to claim that Whitman was racist.)

http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2019/06/linkerama.html#comments

Part of the NY Times obit:

...Professor Bloom was frequently called the most notorious literary critic in America. From a vaunted perch at Yale, he flew in the face of almost every trend in the literary criticism of his day. Chiefly he argued for the literary superiority of the Western giants like Shakespeare, Chaucer and Kafka — all of them white and male, his own critics pointed out — over writers favored by what he called “the School of Resentment,” by which he meant multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, neoconservatives and others whom he saw as betraying literature’s essential purpose.

“He is, by any reckoning, one of the most stimulating literary presences of the last half-century — and the most protean,” Sam Tanenhaus wrote in 2011 in The New York Times Book Review, of which he was the editor at the time, “a singular breed of scholar-teacher-critic-prose-poet-pamphleteer.”

At the heart of Professor Bloom’s writing was a passionate love of literature and a relish for its heroic figures.

“Shakespeare is God,” he declared, and Shakespeare’s characters, he said, are as real as people and have shaped Western perceptions of what it is to be human — a view he propounded in the acclaimed “Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human” (1998).

The analogy to divinity worked both ways: In “The Book of J” (1990), Professor Bloom challenged most existing biblical scholarship by suggesting that even the Judeo-Christian God was a literary character — invented by a woman, no less, who may have lived in the court of King Solomon and who wrote sections of the first five books of the Old Testament. “The Book of J” became a best seller...

(snip)

I once heard that he HAD to write one or two of his books - and had to make sure they would sell better than usual - to raise money to help his middle-aged, schizophrenic homeless son. A Canadian (can't find the exact source, unfortunately) said: "I mention this whenever anyone tries to praise the American health-care system."

And:

Back in 2005, when I got to talk briefly, alone, with George Carlin, I asked him that since everyone knew that Carlin hated cliches, and the Harry Potter books were loaded with cliches, did he have any sympathy for Bloom, who, in 2003, got clobbered by the general public for arguing that kids who read Harry Potter are no better off than kids who don't read at all?

Carlin rolled his eyes and said "Harold Bloom lives on another planet."

Iran abducts leading anti-regime journalist—who runs a massive Telegram channel for news from inside Iran. @washingtonpost and @nytimes , whores for Qatar and Iran, can’t spare a moment from their Khashoggi vigils to take notice.

https://twitter.com/davereaboi/status/1183887685775179777

"I mention this whenever anyone tries to praise the American health-care system."

Well, then you can do without all the American health care inventions. Surely that will be easy?

Understatement, Darth. Ninety percent of Canadians live within 100 miles of the United States. And when their socialist little health care fantasies falter, they pick up their keys or bus passes and ride on down here to get business taken care of. And of course, if they were patrolling their own shores and security as we might expect the nation with the most coastline to do, there'd be no room in the budget for such idiocies anyway. Canadians, as a rule, are repellent.

Okay, that last sentence was a bit much.

But Shatner pisses me right off. Baby Truedaux is even worse.

Drudge is dunking on Lebron, banner and five links.

Message to the progressives:

John Hope Bryant, an advocate of economic empowerment through Operation Hope, wants Democratic presidential candidates Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., to know that he would not have been successful without capitalism.

“I think Bernie and Elizabeth mean well,” Bryant said on CNBC on Monday, regarding their criticism of how capitalism has led to wealth inequality. However, he said, “We got to stop with the prosperity-or-pitchforks conversation.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/14/operation-hope-founder-john-hope-bryant-defends-capitalism.html

Drudge is dunking on Lebron, banner and five links.

That's something I wouldn't have even imagined as possible. I guess there is something new under the sun!

Related, Vietnam has some thoughts China's maps intruding into entertainment:

http://news.trust.org/item/20191014052132-hmcpu

Elsewhere, in 2013, I wrote:

...while Bloom implied in his introduction that his collection (Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages - it's mostly pre-WWI literature) is not meant for kids under 5, that hardly justifies not including ANY pictures, for crying out loud! I, personally, would start introducing 5- to 10-year-olds to poetry with many other collections WITH illustrations, including The Golden Treasury of Poetry (1955, ed. Louis Untermeyer). BTW, the illustrator for that book, Joan Walsh Anglund, is almost 90 and living in Connecticut!
_______________________________________

I just found out, he also edited THIS book, in 1997 - "Women Writers of Children's Literature."

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/harold-bloom/women-writers-of-childrens-literature/
(review)

And (from 2013):

Anonymous: He claims to have the divine foresight to know that no child who ever reads Harry Potter will ever go on to "The Wind in the Willows" or Lewis Carroll.'
_____________________________

Me: I think what Bloom was saying is that candy, by itself, doesn't lead to a passionate appetite for non-candy, though he would never phrase it that way. Smart parents don't just sit back and wait for kids to take an interest in books that actually challenge their brains when all they've EVER picked up is trash.

On that, I can agree. After all, as Miss Manners once said (she was talking about volunteer work, as it happened): "Reverse psychology is all very well, but Miss Manners doubts that removing the algebra requirement, for example, would inspire otherwise dilatory students with an interest in algebra."

What I DON'T agree on is Bloom's unspoken idea that TEACHERS should have no sympathy for neglected kids, per se, who have no books at home and no adults who read to them. To get kids to read for fun, after all, you have to convince them that reading CAN be fun and not a miserable, unsocial, solitary chore. If they're over a certain age and have never read for fun, the teacher clearly has to suggest books that are highly popular NOW, whether those titles have had the chance to stand the test of time or not.

Neglected kids are not spoiled kids, period. Not to mention that Bloom can't seem to grasp that even before television, there were always parents and kids who didn't like to read and had to be enticed to enjoy it, one way or another. (If he seldom or never meets people outside of Ivy League families, it's no wonder he doesn't care much about such neglected kids.)

Reviews of the book:

https://www.google.com/search?ei=TwqmXYKWK6W3ggej-KLQAg&q=%22stories+and+poems+for+extremely+intelligent%22&oq=%22stories+and+poems+for+extremely+intelligent%22&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0i30.1178.1816..2053...0.0..0.74.147.2......0....1..gws-wiz.1dN2k-UHVQs&ved=0ahUKEwjC-dqW7Z7lAhWlm-AKHSO8CCoQ4dUDCAo&uact=5

One critic said:

Grades 3-8--Bloom believes that his intended audience needs few, if any, selections written after World War I. Most stories and poems in this collection come from the 19th century and earlier. Authors represented include Aesop, Rudyard Kipling, Edward Lear, Christina Rossetti, Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson, Christopher Smart, William Shakespeare, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and many more. In his introduction, Bloom states: "-`Children's Literature'-is a mask for the dumbing-down that is destroying our literary culture. Most of what is now commercially offered as children's literature would be inadequate fare for any reader of any age at any time." Emotionally intelligent readers of all ages should be aware that Bloom's taste runs to black humor. Some of his selections, like Hans Christian Andersen's "The Red Shoes," O. Henry's "Witches' Loaves," or Mark Twain's "Journalism in Tennessee," are darkly cruel or savagely ironic. The selections are arranged thematically by the four seasons; there is no index. This collection of classic authors might be useful in a small library in need of poetry and prose from the Western canon. Libraries still owning Walter de la Mare's distinguished Come Hither (Knopf, 1923; o.p.) may pass, as may others who own works by the authors included or various Oxford collections of poetry. Bloom's collection is clearly not aimed at children's librarians, but at book-buying parents. Its consumer-flattering title recalls those conning tailors Hans Christian Andersen described in "The Emperor's New Clothes," a story conspicuously absent from this volume.

Margaret A. Chang, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, North Adams

LeBron to Adam Silver: “Don’t worry, I’m about to end this China mess.”

https://twitter.com/ClayTravis/status/1183931298538242056

Lenona, I can't help but wonder how many children have actually read the Harry Potter books. I'm guessing not many. Some years ago, there was a set that we were passing around at work. The last two books in particular would be a fairly challenging read for today's young readers, in terms of sheer length, the complexity of the various plot and sub-plot lines, and the twisted morality of some of the characters.

"The last two books in particular would be a fairly challenging read for today's young readers, in terms of sheer length, the complexity of the various plot and sub-plot lines, and the twisted morality of some of the characters."

Ahem. The audience grew with the characters - what are you calling a child?

You have a pretty low opinion of children, even if they didn't buy the five hundred thousand per hour that JK sold on the first day the last three appeared.

I've seen this theme repeated ad nauseum: "That's a pretty long book for a {insert description of challenged wit here}."
What matters is what is IN the book. A kid will make time for a story that works!

The Lebron numbers we've been looking for.

2019 will not be a year he remembers fondly.

Meanwhile a raccoon made off with a pair of cantaloupes whilst suffering numerous bee stings to the lip region.

Kardashians In The Make-Believe News Cycle Again

I like the way Kanye expresses his outrage at the attention paid to her bewbs by drawing attention to her bewbs.

Brilliant PR work, that.

Okay, so LeBron is good at dribbling a basketball; he should consider stopping the dribble coming from his mouth.

LeBron, of course, gave money to elect Obama. He has supported the jerk who kneels during the US National Anthem.

But, God forbid, someone else speaks out in favor of non-black people's freedom or struggles and quite simply put; LeBron is a very uneducated ass who only thinks of himself and money.

Oh, and what has he done for the coach & family who took him in when his teenage mother and criminal father couldn't do right by him?

LeBron is sounding rather ungrateful for what he has in life and showing little empathy for others. So, like I said; LeBron is a very uneducated ass who only thinks of himself and money. It doesn't surprise me at all.

Cousin Dave...

First of all, I have never, ever heard of average adults wanting to read the HP books MORE than average kids wanted to read them. (Leaving aside those adults who grew up reading them.) Or even of parents who ran out and bought the books for their stubborn kids, only to find the kids wouldn't read them.

(Of course, plenty of average kids snatch up popular books and read them in their free time just because all their classmates are doing that - and at least some are disappointed by those particular titles or authors. I also admit to meeting at least one young man - maybe 20 - some years ago, who said "Harry Potter sucks!" But maybe he was simply old enough and smart enough to recognize pulp fiction when he saw it. Most kids under 15 are not.)

Second, when you leave out the semi-literate kids who are ten and older but who still can't handle chapter books or books that have few pictures in them, what in the world makes you think most of the OTHER kids that age wouldn't enjoy the first book in the series?

Which brings me to the obvious fact that if you read the books in order - the logical thing to do, after all - you'd find that they GRADUALLY get more complicated (but not more "sophisticated"). Not to mention that the books were published over an 11-year period, so why WOULDN'T Rowling have chosen to make her books grow along with her characters and her readers? Yes, some preteens today might have to read all seven of them over the course of more than a year or two before they can grasp them. But why would anyone start with #5 if there were no compelling reason to do that? (Btw, the "Little House" books follow the same pattern - and they were published over a 12-year period.)

And, while I have to say that almost ANY series that starts with a kid's realizing that his parents were murdered is bound to be pulp fiction, there can still be benefits to that. As I said about 15 years ago, elsewhere:

If nothing else, any kid old enough to read 300 easy pages of HP is old enough to read a 100-page book with a harder vocabulary and less excitement, and there lies the fork in the road. I.e., candy may not, in itself, lead to a love of vegetables, but unlike that scenario, parents CAN push kids towards higher literature once they actually learn to like reading HP as much as playing video games. Assuming, that is, the parents don't dislike reading. Or that we're not talking about parents who are too chicken to nag kids even slightly towards mature reading for fear of turning them off completely to books - as if kids' egos were fragile Humpty Dumptys.

And, while I have to say that almost ANY series that starts with a kid's realizing that his parents were murdered is bound to be pulp fiction,
__________________________________________

What I really meant to say after that, but forgot, was that the books did actually get better and better - until #4, when any sharp person could sense that Rowling's imagination was starting to come apart.

(That is, I've never heard anyone try to deny that #3 is better than the first two volumes. Plus, even the more grisly scenes in #4 are...well, laughable.)

OK, no one will likely read this.

But, I just found that the U.S. Poet Laureate Howard Nemerov (1920-1991) once said, of Harold Bloom:

"His form is logic but his essence is confusion."