Ryan Ritchie penned a letter to billionaire Sir Paul complaining about his ticket prices.

Let’s, Paul, for the sake of argument, say I want my parents to, you know, actually see you, so I buy three seats in section C129. Those seats are $450. Each. And, as Ticketmaster reminds me, “+ fees.”

I can’t surprise my parents with tickets to see Sir Paul freakin’ McCartney only for them to sit halfway to LAX. That’s like giving a child a toy without batteries. A $600 toy, mind you.

That $600 doesn’t include parking. I’ve yet to visit SoFi Stadium, but let’s pretend parking is $20. We both know it’s not $20, but let’s pretend. That’s $620. My parents don’t drink alcohol, so I’m definitely saving money on beers, but — and I know you don’t live here — have you any idea of current gas prices? You probably don’t because if I wrote “The Long and Winding Road” I wouldn’t know gas prices, either. Paul, gas is expensive. Like, so expensive that I’m writing to you and wasting space by talking about gas.

Conservatively, if I bought the cheapest tickets, I would be looking at $700 to take my parents to your show and sit far enough away that we will not be able to see you. To be frank, Paul, that sucks. I don’t want to spend that kind of money to stare at the big screens that I am sure will be on stage. Certainly, you’ve heard of YouTube. My parents and I can get the same experience tomorrow morning for much less money.

Paul, serious question: What the fuck?

Can I take a guess before you answer? You probably have no idea how much tickets are to your show in Inglewood or any show on your “Got Back” tour. You also probably have no idea how many tickets are being sold by Ticketmaster as “Verified Resale Tickets,” which appears to make the prices increase and fluctuate. But what about the tickets that are not resales? Why are those so expensive? Surely someone in your camp knows how much tickets cost to your shows. And surely they can be cheaper.

The COVID-19 lockdown meant lots of people didn’t make money. I’m assuming your band members fall into this category. If so, I sympathize with them just like I sympathize with everyone whose income suffered due to the pandemic. What about them, Paul, your fans? What about people like me, people who want to see you, to take their parents out for a night to hear the music of their youth, the music of my youth, the music of all our youths?

Should that night cost $700?

Call me naïve, but I don’t think any three people should have to pay $700 to attend any concert that doesn’t include Elvis walking onto the stage and confirming he faked his 1977 death. That is worth $700.

Sure, you are Paul McCartney, but I grew up going to five-dollar punk shows where the musicians were two feet away from me and my friends. Those were the best bands I’ve ever seen and the best times of my life. You wrote the soundtrack to my life, to my parents’ lives, to so many people’s lives, but even you, Paul, can’t convince me that any concert is worth $190 a ticket to sit as far away as physically possible.

I’m a bass player and songwriter and I’ve been vegan for 18 years (vegetarian for seven before that), which means there’s pretty much nothing you could do to get me to stop loving you and your music. If this letter means anything to you, hopefully it’s this: The idea of seeing you in concert is worth every cent in my bank account and for the first time in my life, I can afford $700 and not worry about how I’m going to eat for the next three months. But I shouldn’t have to. I should be able to see you at a reasonable price, especially from a mile away.

Signed,

Ryan Ritchie

RTWT

HT: Ed Driscoll.

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Peter Lay (obviously more of a Stones man) contemplates, and rejects, critical hyperbole extolling the greatness of the Fab Four. They’re pretty darn good at their best. Sergeant Pepper was wildly over-rated. And they do not rank with Schubert.

In his review of The Beatles (aka “The White Album”) published in the Observer in October 1968, the filmmaker Tony Palmer hailed Lennon and McCartney as “the greatest songwriters since Schubert”. The White Album, he insisted, “should surely see the last vestiges of cultural snobbery and bourgeois prejudice swept away in a deluge of joyful music making”.

Palmer was not the first, nor will he be the last, commentator to abandon critical faculties in order to claim a place on the “right side of history”. The previous year Kenneth Tynan declared the release of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band a “decisive moment in the history of western civilisation”.

There are those who still cling to that claim and, as the gushing response to Peter Jackson’s Get Back, an eight-hour film of salvaged material from the 1969 Let it Be sessions, suggests, the popularity of the Beatles and the affection in which they are held shows no sign of abating. But Palmer’s Schubert comparison is a telling one, not least because The White Album does contain one Schubertian masterpiece: Paul McCartney’s “Blackbird”.

A comment, it is claimed, on the US civil rights struggle, “Blackbird” was inspired by JS Bach’s “Bourée in E minor”, a piece for lute with which McCartney was acquainted. No other song distils his melodic genius down to its purest form and even the lyrics are a notch above the Beatles’s often banal musings.

The problem, apart from the fact that Schubert wrote scores of superior songs, is that The White Album — a double LP which is best edited down to a shortish two-sider — also contains what might be McCartney’s nadir: “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”, a song of “desperate levity” so hated by the other band members, that they vetoed its release as a single. Its irritatingly ingratiating melody took it to number one anyway, covered by Marmalade.

It’s the pattern with Beatles LPs — that frustrating mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous. Even Revolver — widely regarded as their masterpiece — contains a couple of duffers, courtesy of George Harrison. Similarly, his contribution to The White Album, along with the portentous “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”, is “Piggies”, a grimly twee attack on bourgeois conformity that undermines all the trippy sentiments of peace and love and karma that Harrison preached to his immature end. One is reminded of the Twitter trolls who remind us to “be kind” while spewing misanthropy left, right and centre.

Nowhere is this inconsistency as striking as on Sgt Pepper. Despite its treasures — McCartney’s “She’s Leaving Home”, a heartbreaking narrative of intergenerational misunderstanding set to a rising melody of instant memorability; and “A Day in the Life”, perhaps their finest hour, with verses by Lennon, detached and dreamy (“I’d love to turn you on”) married to McCartney’s jaunty middle section celebrating banality and routine (a psychiatrist could make much of it) — the rest is mediocre: “When I’m Sixty Four”, “Lovely Rita”, “Fixing a Hole”, all fine and dandy, but Schubert? Sgt Pepper has aged horribly in its psychedelic whimsy, especially in comparison with its great contemporary, the Beach Boys’s Pet Sounds. …

They don’t like the framers or the Constitution. They subscribe to the ridiculous radical leftist version of American History in which the United States was founded as a conspiracy to benefit rich White men exclusively. They oppose Free Speech and are eager to punish anyone who disagrees with them.

These are the best and the brightest, the creme of the crop, the elitest of the elite, the final product of the American system of Meritocracy, hand-picked to study at Yale Law School, the Number One, top-rated law school in the United States. These are the rising stars who will clerk for Supreme Court justices, who will be hired with six figure signing bonuses by the top law firms in the country. These are the people who will teach Constitutional Law at Harvard and Yale. These people are members of the tiny group from which one day in the future the next Supreme Court justice will be selected.

Jesus wept.

Washington Free Beacon:

It’s been a rough couple of weeks for students at Yale Law School, who are responding to news that the Supreme Court may overturn Roe v. Wade with calls to accost their conservative classmates through “unrelenting daily confrontation” and toss the Constitution by the wayside.

Members of the law school’s conservative Federalist Society, first year law student Shyamala Ramakrishna said in an Instagram post, are “conspirators in the Christo-fascist political takeover we all seem to be posting frantically about.” Why, she asked, are they still “coming to our parties” and “laughing in the library” without “unrelenting daily confrontation?”

Some of her classmates were less moderate.

“It’s not time for ‘reform,’” first-year law student Leah Fessler, a onetime New York Times freelancer, wrote on Instagram. “Democratic Institutions won’t save us.” It is unclear how Fessler will apply that view as a legal intern this summer for federal judge Lewis Liman. Judge Liman did not respond to a request for comment.

Fessler isn’t alone. “Neither the constitution nor the courts—nor the fucking illusion of ‘democracy’—are going to save us,” first-year student Melisa Olgun posted. “How can we possibly expect a document, drafted by wealthy, white, landowning men, to protect those who face marginalization that is the direct result of the very actions of the founders?”

Contacted for comment, the students decried “leaks” of their social media posts and said the Washington Free Beacon was not “authorized” to publish them.

“This was posted PRIVATELY, on a private story, and was clearly leaked to you,” Fessler said in an email, adding that the Free Beacon was “in no way authorized” to use the message.

“The post was on a private account on a private story that was sent to you without my knowledge,” Olgun said. “You are in no way authorized to use it or my name in your story.”

The replies may have been a tacit invocation of copyright laws that ban the dissemination of photos without their owner’s consent. Publishing private Instagram posts, a lawyer might argue, violates intellectual property rights, though Adam Candeub, an intellectual property expert at Michigan State University College of Law, called that argument “bullshit.”

“It’s not clear copyright would even apply,” Candeub said. “I wonder what they’re teaching at Yale Law School.”

Eugene Volokh, a professor of First Amendment law at UCLA School of Law, said the copyright argument was a stretch. Jack Balkin, a First Amendment professor at Yale Law School, did not respond to a request for comment.

The reactions at Yale Law School, long ranked the top school in the country, reflect the radicalism of a younger generation of law students—and, some have speculated, of the leaker himself—who believe that long-standing legal norms perpetuate oppression.

Olgun, for one, lamented that the “‘liberal’ legal discipline will continue to bend over backwards to uphold the decorum, norms, and the sanctity of an institution that serves only those who benefit from originalism.”

Such sentiments are widespread at Yale Law School. In March, nearly two-thirds of the student body signed an open letter condemning the Federalist Society for hosting a bipartisan panel on free speech.

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The Washington Post follows the standard elite media policy of publishing (with apparent approval) the most outrageous and irrational expressions of Black racial chauvinism, insolence, and entitlement. The author was a senior of color.

Last year, George Washington University’s Cloyd Heck Marvin Center — named for a segregationist — was renamed the University Student Center in response to student calls for a name change. The name change streamlined with calls for racial justice in a modern era in which students across the country are demanding change. As our nation’s history of slavery, Jim Crow, red lining and other discriminatory policies toward African Americans has never been fully addressed or atoned for, these pleas for racial justice are a reflection of a shifting paradigm in American politics in which compromise and intolerance are no longer an option. However, the renaming of the University Student Center falls short in addressing the main issues of systemic racism and inequality still present on campus.

Racism has always been a problem at GW. At the university’s founding in 1821, enrollment was restricted to White men. In 1954, then-university president Marvin employed numerous efforts to preserve segregation, arguing for a “homogenous” group of White students. In 1987, Black students organized to demand more visibility in a predominantly Black city where Black students were outnumbered by huge majorities. Today, with Black enrollment at about 10 percent, Black students on campus continue to struggle for community. Despite alleged efforts by administration to enhance diversity, the admissions office continues to fail to ensure a student body with adequate minority representation.

Black professorship also remains low, especially in the university’s International Affairs program. Limited Black professors teaching African and African American courses and the continued neglect of Black academia and Black professorship create a campus culture in which European studies and White perspectives are favored over Black perspectives. No African languages are taught at the university, and calls for reforms are often ignored.

These problems are rooted in systemic racism, institutional inequality and white supremacy. There are at least four ways the university could achieve progress: Decolonized university curriculum, increased Black enrollment, the renaming of the university and the selection of an African American President.

In the university’s 200-year history, GW has never had an African American president. The search for a replacement for interim president Mark S. Wrighton is the perfect opportunity for the university to dissociate with its racist history by selecting a strong Black leader.

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The goal of Liberalism in combating segregation was presumably a color-blind America with good will toward all men. Liberalism more recently has metastasized into a depraved and rancid Leftism which masochistically endorses the grievance-based revision of American History, the cancellation of of our national heroes, and the limitless flattery of minority vanity and egotism to the point of the replacement of the majority population and the whole of Western Civilization. Couldn’t these people just commit suicide without bothering the rest of us if the burden of guilt they bear for history past is just too much?

Breitbart:

The latest marketing campaign from Calvin Klein features a pregnant transgender man as an underwear model, with the fashion brand saying it wanted to spotlight the “realities of new families” in honor of — ironically — Mother’s Day.

The campaign includes shirtless photos of Roberto Bete, a female-to-male transgender reality TV star from Brazil who was pregnant at the time of the shoot. The photos show Bete posing with exposed stomach and top-surgery scars alongside spouse Erika Fernandes, a tattoo artist.

“We can reproduce biologically or from the heart… our place is to love and be loved,” an unattributed quote reads in the campaign.

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Someone actually made a David Attenborough style voiceover for this video of a destroyed Russian tank. pic.twitter.com/NBmEazYb4F

— Christian Borys (@ItsBorys) May 9, 2022

The College Fix explains how a tiny minority of deranged communists are misusing university platforms in a really offensive way.

A group of professors and researchers identified 960 places within 16 of the country’s 62 national parks that contain “racist” names that promote “white supremacy,” “racism,” “settler colonialism” or “anti-Indigenous ideologies.”

Authors on the People and Nature research article included Grace Wu and Kurt Ingeman. Wu teaches at the University of California Santa Barbara and Ingeman is a postdoctoral researcher.

The research team “examined the origins of over 2,200 place names in 16 national parks in the United States” and found all of the locations “have place names that tacitly endorse racist or, more specifically, anti-Indigenous ideologies.” There are a total of 62 national parks.

These names are “thus perpetuating settler colonialism and white supremacy at the system scale for future generations.” …

The professors and other researchers split up the offensive place names into categories.

Of the 960 offensive names, 324 were considered offensive due to their descriptive, “neutral-seeming” names, including Crater Peak.

“Seemingly innocuous names, and names of forgotten or obscure individuals are perhaps just as pernicious as names for outright racist or violent individuals,” the study stated.

“Neutral-seeming settler names build a white-normative culture in the place,” the article stated. These names also “perpetuate the invisibility of Indigenous people on landscapes” and “demonstrate that settlers have the power to suppress deep Indigenous knowledge with relatively shallow Eurocentric names.”

The study also identified 254 names that support white supremacy, such as Roys Peak in Texas’ Big Bend National Park. These names “erase Indigenous knowledge” and support white supremacy.

The study also reported that 214 names appropriate Indigenous language, 205 names replace an Indigenous place name with a colonizer name, and 52 names honored violent individuals. Others, such as Yellowstone National Park, were “the work of white urban power elites,” including Teddy Roosevelt. The former president helped grow the National Park Service.

The researchers wrote that “white hegemonic symbols embedded in parks can contribute to a perception that white people are the primary stewards and knowledge keepers of nature” and as a result make racial minorities feel excluded. “Black people are 13% of the US population yet they are only 1% of US national park visitors, while white people are 76% of the US population and 96% of visitors,” the paper noted.

By renaming the “offensive” national park names, marginalized groups will become empowered, according to the study.

But, the new names cannot be neutral as it would still support “white dominance.”

RTWT

Yesterday was a flagship day in corporate media. It was the day they were forced to explicitly state what has long been clear: they not only favor censorship but desperately crave and depend on it.

Even if Musk doesn't buy Twitter, never forget what yesterday revealed.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 15, 2022

He’s right.

Entrance to the Capela dos Ossos [Chapel of Bones] in the Igreja de São Francisco, Évora, Portugal.

The inscription reads : ” Our bones are here waiting for yours to join us.”

– Daniel Jupp

Imagine at one and the same time being paid 17 million dollars per year for your supposed knowledge, skill and intellect

AND

Being so childish, so unused to adversity in any form including the mildest of viewpoints divergent from your own, and so fucking massively unprofessional that you cry in a meeting when the company you work for is purchased by somebody with no plans to close it down.

This combination of spoilt entitlement and infantile lack of self control, of excessive reward for excessively adolescent behaviour, explains more than anything why the woke corporate business model is only possible via massive corruption.

These children couldn’t earn above the minimum wage if being judged solely on the basis of competence. And deep down, they know it too.”

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Politico:

Twitter’s top lawyer reassures staff, cries during meeting about Musk takeover

Vijaya Gadde, a key executive involved in decisions to remove former President Donald Trump and ban political advertising, expressed uncertainty about the future of the platform.

Monday was an emotional day at Twitter — even for its executives.

Shortly after billionaire Elon Musk bought the powerful social media platform, top Twitter lawyer Vijaya Gadde called a virtual meeting with the policy and legal teams she oversees to discuss what the new ownership could mean for them.

Gadde cried during the meeting as she expressed concerns about how the company could change, according to three people familiar with the meeting. She acknowledged that there are significant uncertainties about what the company will look like under Musk’s leadership. …

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Gerard van der Leun remembers partying with Hunter Thompson back in the Day. Good times!

Warren liked to drink and spend other people’s money on himself and writers. Naturally, such a honey pot was going to attract Hunter Thompson. Thompson liked to drink, snort coke, and spend other people’s money on articles he might or might not write. A favorite item from the day was the time Hunter rented a car on Scanlan [Magazine]’s credit card. He then parked it next to one of his North Beach Beatnik bimbo’s apartments and went to and fro with it for a number of months. When the time came to return the car it was discovered that the rental fee would be much much more than Hinkle and Scanlan’s wanted to spend. Their solution? After a night of beer, bourbon, and bongs, they drove the car out to the end of a pier in San Francisco, stepped out, and let it drive itself into the bay. Then they reported it stolen.

Beer. Bourbon. Bongs. Bay. What can I say? Good times.

Sometimes the small staff working with me at Organ and the larger staff working the con with Warren at Scanlan’s would decide to drink together. We liked to drink at our bar of choice up at the end of the alley, Andre’s.

One night, when Hunter was in town, we all went up to Andre’s for a non-stop night of drinking.

Andre was an elegant French-Canadian who ran an elegant bar and restaurant. He was old-school and could mix any drink anyone could name and it was always perfect. He was polished, polite, and a good listener. But he was a pro and usually knew when you’d had enough. Then he politely asked you to leave. If you ignored him, he had a very large mallet with a three-foot handle behind the bar and you didn’t ignore that.

So there we were, eight or ten of us I think, hanging around and drinking with “Hunter S. Thompson, man!” And, as they would, Warren and Hunter got into a drinking contest — sort of like watching a match between Ali and Frazier in their prime.

It went on and on long past the point where I could or would keep up. It was getting late and Andre announced to the assembled cross-eyed drunks, that he was giving us our last round. The regulars took him at his word, but Hunter had to push the envelope. Except with Andre, there was no envelope. Just a polite, “Non.”

The next thing I know there’s a gun in Hunter’s hand and three rounds blasted into the ceiling of the bar. (Did I mention that there were apartments where people were sleeping above the bar?)

Then I think there was a blur of Andre, in suit and tie, coming over the bar with the mallet. Then more blurs and everybody is out on the street dragging a semi-conscious Hunter back down the alley mumbling something about getting his gun back. After that I don’t remember much and, frankly, haven’t thought all that much about Thompson in the nearly 50 years that have intervened.

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Vijai Maheshwari, in the World edition of the Spectator, finds ordinary Russians in Moscow full of belligerence and resentment and concludes that Westerners had better get out of Russia before it’s too late.

Most Russian men consider Ukrainian women to be more beautiful, feminine, and kind than Russian women. Ukraine’s embrace of America and hatred of Russia thus strikes them as supremely tragic, because in many respects warmer and romantic Ukraine represents the best of Russia. Putin has always channelled Russia’s dark subconscious, and his obsession with Ukraine springs from a shared yearning for a lost paradise.

Ukraine is his Helen of Troy, seduced by the cunning Americans; the military build-up on his country’s border in February was his Trojan Horse. He had been certain that he would overrun the weaker Ukrainians with his surprise attack and subdue them with the shock and awe of his sophisticated missiles, but things haven’t gone to plan. He might not even be able to capture the Donbass, given his failure to take over Mariupol after weeks of brutal shelling. His economy is tanking, and he might have to eventually settle for an unpopular peace deal.

But now that the beast inside Russians has been unleashed, it can’t be corked back again. Most Russians floundered under capitalism. The average salary outside Moscow was just a few hundred dollars a month. They could handle the poverty but missed the glory of being a superpower that dominated the world. Russia’s great poet Anna Akhmatova summed up their thinking this way: “If I can’t have love, if I can’t have peace, give me a bitter glory.”

Since the onset of war, Russians have given up on capitalism and are now braying for empire again. And as Western brands scramble for the exits and time runs backwards, many will welcome a return to the past. They will not stop now despite the mounting costs. They have been primed for victory and Putin must deliver.

Moscow’s Westernized women are horrified but helpless to stop their grandfathers from turning back time. By the time I left Moscow for Dubai, and eventually New York, sixteen days after the invasion, Russia already smelled like the Soviet Union of yore.

Moscow was eerily silent, like New York during the pandemic, and felt again like the city I remembered from the early 1990s, its restaurants and public spaces deserted as its people stayed home and pondered the future darkly. The cinemas had stopped showing Hollywood films, the city’s gleaming modern art museums had paused exhibitions, the Westerners had mostly fled, and the only foreigners were from “friendly” countries like China or India. It was back to “vodka and selyodka” (vodka and picked herring), and I knew by then that a majority preferred this reality to a Russia enthralled by Western consumerism. Even the jokes now had the self-deprecating irony of those from the late Soviet era.

“Do you know why we’re now going to be the healthiest nation on earth?” joked my taxi driver on the way to the airport. “That’s because we don’t eat American fast food anymore.”

I called my landlord in Moscow from New York two weeks later to inform him that I wouldn’t be renewing the lease on my pricey flat in central Moscow. He wasn’t pleased that I’d left Moscow on such short notice but answered without missing a beat.

“You’ll come back to Russia. Life is better here.”

His confidence sent a chill through me, and I realized that neither Ukraine nor the West will live in peace so long as Russia remains proud and defiant. It’s clear that sanctions won’t change Russia’s mind; they’ll just encourage a backlash against the West. The recent meme of Russian glamor girls cutting up their expensive Gucci bags in protest over the luxury brand’s “Russophobia” is a symptom of this angry pushback against the West and its desire to cancel Russia.

RTWT