Rush Limbaugh's Worst Comments, The "Pearl Harbor of Hacking, The Loneliness of Major Cities, Jezebel Gives Takes Click-Bait Journalism to a New Low, "Disney's "Joker"?! (The Five for 02/19/21)
Hey,
This one’s a little different. I got such positive feedback on the last email, I’ve (slightly) tweaked the format on this one…to focus a bit more on analysis and I’ve broadened the scope of what’s normally covered here in The Five.
Let me know what you think.
Before we begin, some quick hits.
An Iranian ship got busted smuggling machine guns and rockets, likely to terrorists in Yemen as Iran’s Cold War with Turkey and Saudi Arabia on who will be King of the Hill of the Middle East continues.
Heavyweight boxer George Arris could be shaping up as the greatest American heavyweight since Mike Tyson. Yes, I know you don’t care about boxing…this was my feeble attempt to help the sport regain some footing in the U.S. [sighs, fails].
The House is voting on H.R. 464 to bar “twice impeached” Presidents from being buried at Arlington National Cemetery, which is probably more important than that next round of stimulus checks since the news broke that more Americans are living in cars and RV’s as COVID evictions escalate. [Slow clap for our national heroes in Congress].
A school board in California got caught mocking parents who want schools to re-open. On the call, a board member says “are we alone” before going into a profanity laden rant against parents. Here’s a good rule of thumb. You’re never “alone” in internet communication (but you can communicate more privately, see story #2).
And on that note, let’s get into the news.
[one]
The death of Rush Limbaugh continues to escalate on social media. In the last newsletter, I briefly mentioned listening to Rush as a kid. After seeing a video from my friend (and successful YouTuber) Chris Sanders called How Do Conservatives Feel About Limbaugh’s Racist and Sexist Quotes?, I thought the topic was worth further exploration here in The Five.
Before we get into the negatives, here’s what I remember about Limbaugh, listening to him from roughly 4th grade to college:
The top bit I’ll always remember from Rush was him talking to a young boy who’s dog had just been killed by a car.
He was funny. He spoke to the common man.
And he wasn’t negative or downtrodden.
He believed in common decency (even if he had a less than perfect record on the airwaves with the comments below. Rush took calls from those who disagreed with him and treated them well. Compared to the name-calling that President Trump ushered in to modern politics, Rush was a saint by comparison.
He always painted a hopeful picture of the future, which stands in sharp contrast to the disaster porn of modern journalism where everything is “literally going to kill” somebody.
Chris raises the following quotes in questioning Limbaugh’s career. I’m going to take each one individually.
In the 90’s, Rush called Georgetown College student a slut for wanting free contraceptives from Georgetown University.
This one doesn’t bother me at all. If you’re old enough to bang strangers at frat parties, you’re old enough to get yourself to Walgreens for appropriate birth control solutions.
And if you make any choice, somebody's gonna call you names? Hook up with half your school's football team? "Slut."
Refuse to drink alcohol or consume drugs? "Buzzkill."
Consume more alcohol and drugs than the crowd deems appropriate? "Burnout."
If you're breathing, somebody is gonna say something negative about you.
Rush said that when a gay man turn his back on you, it's an invitation.
Horrible and inexcusable. Full stop.
Rush told a black female caller to "take the bone out of her nose."
Horrible and inexcusable. Full stop.
Rush said that the NBA was becoming the Thug Basketball Association and that an NFL game often looked like a war between Crips and Bloods with no weapons.
I'd like to know some context here. To me, it sounds like he may have been criticizing specific incidents (such as Allen Iverson and Patriot's player Aaron Hernandez, both of whom kept their gang activities up while playing in the league).
It's a crass and stupid statement, but only racist if Rush was applying it to all players across the leagues due to race.
Also, I played a year of college basketball, and 1/3 of the team had done jail time for gang related activities. Its anecdotal, but worth mentioning in this context.
What I believe many conservatives are saying in the wake of Rush’s death can be understood in three parts:
A). Rush re-invented radio, single handedly. He was the Tom Brady of the talk format.
B). Rush made a lot of us in the middle of the country feel less alone when we were alienated by the mainstream press. (Keep in mind, my opinion of the mainstream media comes from working with people at CNN, USA Today, The Washington Post, ESPN, and a lot of contacts in Hollywood. From everything I've seen, most people in media really do hold significant animosity towards "flyover America.")
C). The standard by which Rush is judged is quite different from the likes of Nick Cannon, who was more openly racist, more recently and was defended by the media. He now has his job back.
With the exception of the Sandra Fluke comment, I'd never heard these more controversial statements from Rush until after his death. The sadness I felt was a mix of the loss of the person who got me interested in radio (my career for all of my twenties) and the host who served as the soundtrack to riding in the car with my parents and working on the farm with my grandparents and uncles. My sadness over Rush’s is more about missing simpler times and the people I spent them with than the man himself.
I'm not sure if it changes the tint of the glasses you view Rush's legacy through to learn that he did apologize for the Sandra Fluke and the "bone in the nose" comments. He was also a prolific tipper (often leaving $5,000-$10,000 tips on standard priced meals) and has been remembered by multiple liberal broadcasters fondly during the times they met.
I'll close this section with this. I was on the radio in Chicago for 10 years, three hours a day, five days a week. I also recorded shows for other stations and did 7 years of syndicated TV. If my "back catalog" of work were closely scrutinized, I have no doubt you'd find stuff I deeply regret in my 25,000+ hours of broadcast content. Nothing as extreme as Rush, but I promise you I wouldn't come out clean.
So, do I view Rush as a hero or a villain?
I don't think I want to play the role of accountant tallying up a celebrity’s positive impact vs. sins, so I'll just say, one former broadcaster to another…
...there, but for the grace of God, go I.
[two]
In light of the Texas power grid going down this week, it’s a good time to cover…hacking. (Hang with me for just a sec).
You might be old enough to remember December 17th, 2020, when a major (under-reported) story was covered here at The Five on Russian hacks into US infrastructure.
E&E News reported:
Electric utilities are grappling with the fallout from one of the most significant cyber intrusions in years, as the far-reaching impact of a sophisticated hacking campaign comes into sharper focus.
Four days after the supply chain cyberattack on IT service provider SolarWinds was revealed, details on its global victims — from federal agencies to oil and electricity companies — are still emerging (Energywire, Dec. 15).
The SolarWinds software hijacked by suspected Russia-linked hackers was widely used by U.S. power providers, experts say, leaving many companies scrambling to find out if they're affected by the breach. And sources say a simple software update or patch won't erase the threat from the "Sunburst" malware: Organizations targeted by the hackers will likely have additional malware installed that could be difficult to find.
That’s pretty tech-y, so let’s run it back:
The Russians infiltrated American electricity and oil companies through selling bogus software with a “back door” in, and also intentionally pre-installed malware.
This came close to taking the power grid offline in Texas. This week, we saw how bad that is.
NY Times Cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth details other scenarios we’re very close to in an age when Russia, Iran, North Korea and other hostile nations are escalating the “Cyber arms race.
When Russian hackers “ransomed” a hospital in Florida (locked all computer systems, demanding a large payment in Bitcoin), cancer patients were unable to receive chemo, which was measured and distributed via internet-enabled devices, which we’re locked, and no analog backup existed.
The Russians also came very close to accessing the controls of a dam in Oregon, and could have flooded an entire region of farm land and homes with a few mouse clicks.
Scary, huh? So what can you and I do about it?
This is a huge problem that needs national attention, but here are a few suggestions for you and me:
Have food, water and a way to defend yourself on hand. If infrastructure goes down, make sure you can eat and drink and stay alive in the event there’s no Wal-Mart or 9-1-1. Store water and/or keep camping/hiking/survival water filters on hand like these. Better yet, go do some camping/hiking/hunting etc. and build up some skills to keep yourself breathing without the conveniences of the suburbs.
Stop voting for people in Congress (or, POTUS) who are 104 years old. If you watch the hearings on any kind of tech issues you’ll be humiliated for the republic. Many in Congress can’t even understand how Facebook is different from Twitter, which is probably a good microcosm of why we’re so vulnerable to cyber attack.
At the very least, for your own cybersecurity first steps: A). subscribe to NordVPN (or other Virtual Private Network) to make yourself “invisible” on public wifi B). get an RFID blocking wallet, so some yahoo at Starbucks can’t skim your credit card numbers right through your wallet/purse and C). sign up for a free Protonmail account, and do any sensitive business in your life via encrypted email.
I have no control over this, but for the sake of argument, what can the government do?
Upgrade our aging power grid.
Build systems with secure coding.
Stop hiring subpar employees. An audit of CIA security found that the most common password in the SPY DIVISION OF THE GOVERNMENT WAS “PASSWORD.”
For a really deep dive on this, you can pick up Nicole Perlroth’s Book, This is How They Tell Me the World Ends. If 505 pages of Cybersecurity journalism doesn’t excite you as much as it does me, here’s a 48 minute interview with Nicole on NPR.
To summarize, Seal Team 6 (who are also featured in #5), the super soldiers who killed Bin Laden in 2011, looked like this:
With guys like that watching your back, no nation (or group of nations) in the world would risk a physical invasion of the United States. The 1980’s cult classic Red Dawn isn’t happening any time soon in real life.
But we’re not ready to defend against the new “super soldiers” looking to bring down the country 2021, who probably look something like this:
[three]
In one of the most absurd examples of reactive clickbait I’ve ever seen, Jezebel decried the “removal” of female Asian character Chun-Li from the Mortal Kombat movie trailer (which I cover in #5). Chun-Li is not in the movie because she’s a character from the rival Street Fighter movie/video game franchise. Jezebel is getting roasted on Twitter, but the blatantly inaccurate article is still up (at the time of this writing, early on 02/18/21)…because Jezebel is still making money with every click.
If journalism was healthy, I wouldn’t bother with this newsletter. But it seems to be getting sicker and more twisted with each passing week.
[four]
The best piece of writing I came across this week was in Evie Magazine, entitled “What I Learned Moving to a Big City After College.”
Cities are transient places. While you may meet a lot of people there, none of them stick around for long. It can be hard to form the deep, trusting friendships we got used to having in high school and college. Everyone seems to be on their way out, not planning to stick around for the long haul.
There are a few reasons for this. One, most young people are in cities for just a few years so they can seize career opportunities, make money, and build a resume. Two, cities are expensive, so it’s hard to put down roots there or to buy property. And three, lots of people are there simply to consume the more materialistic things the city has to offer — clubs, cafes, restaurants, shopping, the party scene. Eventually, they tire of this and move on to the next major city everyone’s talking about — Austin, Denver, Miami, Berlin.
The turnover in cities was way more significant than my rural hometown, where people have been rooted for 30 years or more. Cities are places of atomized transience. With so few people rooted for the long haul, you feel little incentive to make deep connections with people or get emotionally invested in their lives. It’s always in the back of your mind that someone you meet is likely going to leave. You can feel there’s little point to relying on anyone.
Writer Julie Mastrine also points out that she spent a great deal of her time in San Francisco feeling unsafe and (rightly) fearing becoming a victim of violent crime or property theft and that she had to pay people to do the kind of things her family and friends would help with for free back in her hometown in Pennsylvania.
Beyond being good writing (and sound advice), I believe this is “news” because for decades, the only advice found in magazines targeting younger people revolved around “get out of your hometown and away from those stupid, small minded people.”
Now, as lingering COVID restrictions make urban density unappealing and remote work is skyrocketing, there’s a movement happening…if not to return home, at least to find a place more like it.
Long term neighbors, gardens and a less frantic, dense pace of life are on the upswing as an unexpected byproduct of COVID. I would never tell you how to live your life…but I would (and do) gently suggest that now is a great time to give mid-sized cities and smaller towns a second look.
Much of the richness of life can only be harvested if you stick around long enough to see the seeds of friendship, service and community grow to full bloom.
[five]
It’s Friday, let’s land the plane with a little pop culture:
Indie rock legend Craig Finn (frontman for The Hold Steady and Lifter Puller), Americana icon producer T-Bone Burnett (music for the movies O Brother Where Art Thou, Cold Mountain, Walk the Line and Crazy Heart) have teamed up for an 8 episode musical dramedy for AMC called National Anthem. Musical TV outings (High School Musical, Glee, Zooey’s Extraordinary Playlist) tend to skew toward teen girls and not brooding, boots-and-Levi’s Americana fans such as myself. Curious to see where this goes. Also, The Hold Steady released a new album today.
90’s video game (and 90’s bad movie spinoffs) franchise Mortal Kombat returns after after 24 years to HBO Max with James Wan (Aquaman) as the creative lead with a new trailer that was released yesterday. Yeah, you may not care, but 97% of this email was probably interesting…so let me have my moment?!
Amazon Prime’s new mystery/thriller show Tell Me Your Secrets, which debuts today, is earning favorable comparisons to the HBO hit Big Little Lies. If that sparks your interest, let me know if you watch this weekend.
Disney debuted the first trailer for Cruella, a prequel explaining the origin story of the 101 Dalmatians to mixed results. I love that it’s starring Oscar Winners Emma Stone (La La Land, Zombieland) and Emma Thompson (Harry Potter, Love Actually). I love 70’s British punk culture, which this is set in the middle of…but I also love my dog so it seems difficult to root for a dog killer/skinner. This one is set to open in theaters (only) this summer, which means Disney is betting on the multiplex opening back up (and people showing up). Also, the movie is already getting flack for allegedly taking too much creatively from the DC comics movies Joker and Harley Quinn, which seems valid.
WolfWalkers on Apple TV+ is one of the best (and only) animated movies I’ve seen in the last few years. It’s a folk tale set in Ireland about werewolves, or something. Highly recommended, as is the soundtrack if movies scores help you focus at work (as they do for me). People who know such things are calling it the animated film to beat in 2021.
Quick music recommendations: viral sensation Rebecca Black released an update of her painfully bad single “Friday” on the song’s 10th anniversary. It’s even more painful than the original, but a notable moment in pop culture, I suppose. I found my way back into the Christian metal sub-genre and have been keeping the new Demon Hunter on repeat at the gym (note: this is the band Seal Team 6 listened to on the way to the Osama Bin Laden Raid… they also wore the band’s logo on their uniforms…strange but true—see below). Rapper NF dropped the excellent new single “Clouds,” as did TobyMac. Post-punkers Anberlin released a live album, as did Switchfoot’s Jon Foreman (which I’m loving at first listen). Finally, a newcomer Americana pick, The Barlow’s (and yes, that’s they use the apostrophe) are worth checking out if you’re into that genre.
Until the next one,
-sth