Monday Night Musings

Just trying, but failing, to keep up with the news.

• From the looks of Joe Biden’s pathetic media appearances last week, he’s not only gunning to overtake Jimmy Carter as America’s worst modern president, but also Carter’s title as America’s worst ex-president.

• Feel Good Story of the Day: the subtext is that leftism is killing late night comedy/talk show TV, though good luck getting the NY Times to admit it:

Ratings for late-night talk shows are down, and advertising revenue has plummeted. . . As recently as 2018, the five broadcast network late-night shows — hosted by Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, James Corden and Seth Meyers — drew an estimated $439 million in combined advertising revenue, according to Guideline, an advertising data firm.

By 2022, that figure had fallen to $277 million, Guideline said. Last year, it plunged to $220.6 million, nearly a 50 percent decline from 2018.

Go woke, go broke.

• Questions no one is asking (except me):

Here’s how Grok AI explains it, with completely obsolete personal data (so much for AI):

I can’t grok to this.

• Oh please, please make it so! Can you say “McGovern 72”?

• I’ve lately been re-reading some old writing of Walter Berns for a book chapter I’m working on. If you know Walter’s story, he resigned from Cornell University (along with Allan Bloom) in 1969 when Cornell shamefully capitulated to armed black radicals who had shut down the campus and occupied administration buildings. It was a preview of our universities in recent years.

Here’s one of his succinct observations:

“The popularity of the capitulation could not conceal the fact that Cornell had proved to be an institution incapable of defending itself because, as it turned out, it had nothing to defend. In institution that lacks strength of purpose will readily be what its most committed constituents want it to be.”

Separately Berns reflected on the decay of the faculty under the assaults of the 1960s:

“The professors have nothing to teach their students. The younger ones have joined the students and have come to share their tastes and their political passions; the older ones are silent, and together they are in the process of abdicating to the students their authority to govern the university, to enforce parietals, to prescribe the curriculum, and even the right to teach them.”

Explains Columbia, Harvard, etc., after October 7.