Buzzfeed circles the drain. 

Kyle Smith watches it spinning:

Founded in 2006, BuzzFeed is, as of this year, a teenager, and as is true of many teens it has an unrealistic view of its own likely future. BuzzFeed dreams of landing the Disney prince of profitability by dolling itself up in two ways. One is to cut costs. Unload most of the journalists producing the kinds of pieces that could in theory appear in an actual newspaper because this stuff loses money. Dozens of people have been laid off already, with more to come. Yet BuzzFeed is at the same time advertising for “editorial fellows” (journalistic lingo for “low-paid employees”) to apply for jobs. Clear out all those 28-year-olds whose salaries have soared worryingly into the mid-five figures and replace them with 23-year-olds willing to work for Starbucks wages. Hey, being a journalista beats being a barista, right? And as hinted above, it’s not like BuzzFeed has any hangups about the quality of its content. If you can make a latte, you can probably make a listicle.

I knew Buzzfeed, at least as far as “journalism” goes, was going to be a joke when I first heard about it. Know how I knew? Because of the company it kept here in the Twin Cities.

The second part of the BuzzFeed makeover, coming soon, is to grow. BuzzFeed has hinted that it intends to hoover up many other similar sites, all those fourth-rate imitators of a third-rate product that also seek to provide micro-dopamine infusions to cupcake-scarfing arrested-development cubicle prisoners as they daydream of shopping at Forever 21 and wonder if Jafar is kind of hot. If 17 bajillion dollops of extreme-low-quality content delivering 150 gajillion eyeballs doesn’t work, double down! If gigantic scale doesn’t work, activate ludicrous scale!

If Buzzfeed spirals in, one hopes the American people would get smarter.

These days, it’s more likeliy it’d get replaced by something worse…

What better way to commemorate “the worst movie ever made” than with one of the worst written movie reviews ever excreted?

Four Houston cops were shot (and another sustained a non-gunshot injury) serving a warrant against a couple of drug dealers.

That’s bad enough.

Worse?

Houston Police Officers’ Union President Joe Gamaldi was upset:

“We are sick and tired of dirt bags trying to take our lives when all we’re trying to do is protect this community and our families,” he said. “Enough is enough.”

I get that. It’s downright understandable.

This next part – where he apparently declares war on anti-police thoughtcrime? A little more troublesome:

“If you’re the ones that are out there spreading the rhetoric that police officers are the enemy, just know we’ve all got your number now, we’re going to be keeping track of all of y’all, and we’re going to make sure that we hold you accountable every time you stir the pot on our police officers.We’ve had enough, folks. We’re out there doing our jobs every day, putting our lives on the line for our families.”

I’m curious what level of criticism

If this law passes, you will be able to march down to the County Recorder and pay $46 to have them record your Affidavit of Virtue.
Well, that’s not the exact title.  It’s called “Discharge of Restrictive Covenant Affecting Protected Classes.”  It has no legal effect.  Restrictive covenants which discriminate against protected classes already are unenforceable, but by recording this form you can proclaim to the world that unenforceable restrictive covenants on your land are now double-plus-ungood.  You and your virtuous neighbors might want to put up lawn signs, get t-shirts printed, have block parties.  You could invite city council members and legislators to attend and congratulate you on your virtue.
In addition, I suspect the newspapers will publish names of people who have signaled their virtue by recording these forms, and also the names of racist, hateful curmudgeons like me who won’t spring $46 to record a document that does absolutely nothing.  So you’ll have that going for you.
I can hardly wait.
Joe Doakes

Sort of a like a PC loyalty oath.

I’ve never been a yuge Pink Floyd fan.

But if you had to pick a guitar player whose style is probably most like mine, it’s probably David Gilmour.

And Gilmour is selling off most of his guitar collection for charity, including some seriously iconic pieces:

The instruments that will be on the auction block at Christie’s New York headquarters this June include many of his signature instruments. He’ll be selling the Black Strat — a guitar he played on “Money,” “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” and “Comfortably Numb” and enough other songs that it has amassed a legacy worthy of its own book — as well as his Stratocaster with the serial number 0001, the 12-string he wrote “Wish You Were Here” on and the Ovation six-string he’s played “Comfortably Numb” on at almost every live performance he’s done.

“These guitars have been very good to me,” he tells Rolling Stone on a phone call from his home in England. “They’re my friends. They have given me lots of music. I just think it’s time that they went off and served someone else. I have had my time with them. And of course the money that they will raise will do an enormous amount of good in the world, and that is my intention.”

I liked this particular pullquote:

It’s very hard to talk about the writing process and how I record and use little snippets. Sometimes I’m hearing a piece of music as it’s playing on the radio or on television, and I record 10 seconds of it, just for a little particular thing and rhythm or something attracts me. I will go back to that little moment to say, “What was it about this that attracted me and what can I … not steal, but pay homage to or extract a feeling from it.” Most of [the ideas] are things strummed on acoustic guitar or plunked on a piano. Ninety percent of them, I will not understand why on earth I jotted them down and recorded them, but I have several hundred of them. I’ll find something good in there.

So – time to find that winning lottery ticket…

Rep. Dan Crenshaw gives a better speech in Spanish than most Congresscritters give in English

Alternate title: “Ryan Winkler tries to make the trains run on time”.

The DFL majority in the House has moved all the House’s committees under the Ways and Means committee – meaning that Ways and Means chair Lyndon Carlson can can move bills around, and forward to votes, without a whole lot of scrutiny:

According to the DFLers who now make up the majority in the House, the newish method of managing the flow of budget-related bills is more efficient: a way for legislation to spend less time on the House floor and more time in committees, where the heavy lifting of legislating is really done.

But for House Republicans — both the 55-member Republican Caucus and the four-member “New Republican” caucus — those same rules constitute an anti-transparency move that puts democracy at risk. The newbie GOP even borrowed the motto of the Washington Post — “Democracy Dies in Darkness” — when discussing the rules, and one person testifying against them even drew a comparison to the casus belli of the Revolutionary War.
So is the move anti-democratic or a way of making things more efficient? Both? And does anyone outside the halls of the state Capitol much care?

Given that we now have situations with pages of bills moving through “divisions” – not even “committees”, anymore – with a single terse memo of commentary, I’d say “anti-democratic”.

Indeed, given that Ryan Winkler is behind it, I’d say “prima facie anti-democratic“.  

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Minneapolis and St. Paul public schools are closed today.  I’m getting old, my memory isn’t what it was.  I remember looking forward to snow days, but did we get cold days off school?  My sister claims there were a couple of occasions when the country kids didn’t have to come in, only the town kids, but I wonder if that was due to bad roads for the school busses more than low temperatures?
I’m having trouble squaring school closures for cold, record setting cold in Chicago, freezing temperatures for  75% of the nation, with The New Hotness’ claim global warming will destroy the world in 12 years.  
Although if it does, I suppose women and minorities will be hardest hit, so I’ve got that going for me.

It’s science, because shut up.

To: Andrew Zimmern, Celebrity Chef
From: Mitch Berg, irascible peasant
Re: Appreciation!

Chef,

I caught this on Twitter over the past weekend:

Although the government shutdown is ending, at @lucky_cricket_west_end we are planning to continue to serve all those with a Fed Gov ID throughout next week, Monday-Friday, 2-5pm. We realize that furloughed workers will continue to need food since they h… https://t.co/h6qga7mPUP pic.twitter.com/67fbA92RaC

— Andrew Zimmern (@andrewzimmern) January 27, 2019

Glad to see you’ll be giving “Free” food to people who missed two checks…

…well, no. Wait. They had two checks delayed before getting it all paid back, amid a national welter of corporate virtue signaling of financial support – extremely low-interest loans, offers to skip payments, and, well, free food.

I and a few million private sector workers would have loved some of that ‘compassion” when we were struggling.

Know what I heard from one bill collector when I was out of work back in 2003? “Get a job”.

Hold that thought, Chef.

That is all.

…calls for a repeal of the First Amendent:

We cannot allow the financing of misinformation campaigns to shape our democracy.

We can disagree on policy, but climate change is real. Period.

Proud to have joined @chelliepingree on this letter asking for greater responsibility to our democracy and planet. https://t.co/5hLsg1FmgT

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 28, 2019

There’s really no other way to put it.

Ilhan Omar – perhaps the most powerful person in Minnesota today in terms of foreign policy – twote:

A US backed coup in Venezuela is not a solution to the dire issues they face. Trump’s efforts to install a far right opposition will only incite violence and further destabilize the region. We must support Mexico, Uruguay & the Vatican’s efforts to facilitate a peaceful dialogue.

— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) January 25, 2019

She was basically parroting the Maduro regime line – that the Trump administration was imposing a “far right” government on the “democratically elected” government of Venezuela.

A congressman who isn’t actually an active disgrace to his state, Carlos Curbelo, responded:

.@jguaido is actually from a center left party. He supports human rights & the fair treatment of all people. He was also legitimately & democratically elected. You’d think a progressive would be a little more supportive. But no, the sick obsession w @realDonaldTrump is blinding https://t.co/Eh96qanAE4

— Carlos Curbelo (@carloslcurbelo) January 25, 2019

In her own way, Omar may be a dumber, more toxic sign of the times than Tide Pod Evita.

…another hypocrite.

Back in the nineties, there was a hilarious list circulating around this “internet” thing I’d just encountered – a list of rabidly anti-gun New York pols and celebrities who had New York City carry permits.  They included a slew of actors, politicians, and – most ironically at the time – the frothingly anti-gun publisher of the New York Times, Punch Sulzberger, who was known to have his Beretta 92 badly concealed under his suit coat as he’s rail against plebeians’ right to own firearms. 

Former mayor and soon to be perennial Presidential candidate Mike “Where Have You Gone Rudy Giuliani” Bloomberg, who has spent  most of his past 20 years surrounded by armed security and cops, donates millions to groups that want to disarm law-abiding citizens and crime victims.  It could be fairly said that he may not have bought the DFL the 2nd Congressional District in Minnesota, per se, but he certainly chipped in more than most of the Lefty Plutocrat Panel.  

His message:  Guns for plebeians, bad.  Muggles don’t need any more protection from crime than the cops, whenever they can fit you in.  

But if you go to his alma mater?  

Then, your life deserves armed protection.   

Bloomberg pimps for an armed police force for Johns Hopkins – because it’s in Baltimore. 

Despite his acknowledgement that firearms would be useful to protect the elites at Johns Hopkins, Bloomberg hasn’t let up on curbing everyone else’s access to the means of self-defense. In fact, the Sun reported that as he was in Annapolis advocating for the armed private police force, the anti-gun financier was also pressing lawmakers to advance his gun control agenda.
The average residents of Baltimore can’t afford to hire their own private police force, and thanks to gun control advocates like Bloomberg, they can’t provide for their own self-defense outside their homes either. Maryland is one of the eight remaining states that has a severely restrictive may-issue concealed carry permitting regime. 
Moreover, it’s not as if the law-abiding residents of Baltimore don’t have “good and substantial reason to wear, carry, or transport a handgun… as a reasonable precaution against apprehended danger.” In 2018, Baltimore saw 300 homicides for the fourth year in a row. In 2017, FBI data showed that Baltimore had the highest murder rateof an U.S. city with more than 500,000 residents and the second highest violent crime rate.

But certainly he never went full-blown hypocrite, rolling around in the special security he, personally, got, rubbing it all over himself like Scrooge McDuck in his cash vault?

Did he?

In 2011, the billionaire referred to the NYPD as “my own army.” Following his terms, Bloomberg hired some of the same officers from his security detail to work for him privately.

Oh.

Never mind.

…over the recent layoffs in the hipster millennial junk news industry…

…but in this case, it’s Iowahawk doing the Schadenfreud.

Another @iowahawkblog work of art pic.twitter.com/BDhiXxUKRo

— SixStringTweets (@SixStringTweets) January 25, 2019

I can’t tell if sound more like a Nebraska outtake or a Jay Farrar demo.

So the police roll up to a house, and the woman meets them out at the curb with two black eyes and a face puffed up from having been punched a couple times. 

The guy comes to the door in a, er wife beater (don’t look at me, I don’t invent these terms) without a scratch on him except for scraped knuckles with smears of blood up and down his fingers. 

Asked what happened, the guy responds “Sheprovoked the whoooole thing!”

How do you think that’s gonna play with the cops, the prosecutors, and a jury? 

Not well, most likely. Whatever the “provocation” may have been, it’d be pretty absurd to presume it warranted beating someone purple. It’s kind of a no-brainer. 

This past week, I’ve heard some people I otherwise have reason to believe are serviceably intelligent – who, in reference to the Covington flap, say “the MAGA cap is, itself, a provocation!” that warrants all manner of mayhem against people who wear them. 

I’m not big into wearing paraphernalia for political campaigns, even those I completely support. But this claim is one of the most toxic things I’ve heard lately. 

First of all – the MAGA cap is “racist” almost entirely because, for the past two years, Trump’s opponents have been *saying* it was. It has little or nothing to do with the actual behavior of actual individuals who supported or voted for Trump. It’s called “othering”, and it’s one of the most noxious tactics in modern politics. 

Second – the idea that there’s some license to try to destroy peoples’ lives (or worse), not just because of the (utterly legal) beliefs they have, not even because of the (utterly legal) symbols they may wear, but because of the meaning that (people have told) you the symbols have? 

Could there be a more toxic idea? 

In this society, the remedy for (for sake of argument) “bad speech” has always been “more better speech”, at least among those who deserve to be taken seriously. Unfortunately, a fair chunk of our society [1] believes “our ends justify our means”. 

I mean, don’t get me wrong – if the notion of the intellectual “Purge Night” takes off, the thought of taking a can of Pam to the next smug little fop wearing a “Che Guevara” t-shirt would work for me…

…but for the fact that *no free society can survive* that sort of thing, any more than the marriage in that first example is going to survive. 

But just like the “She provoked me!” at the top of the post, “wearing your symbol justifies any evil I want to commit against you” is the refuge of the entitled narcissist and the abuser. 

[1] And in the interest of diplomacy, I’ll say “both sides do it”, although my heart’s really not in it. Mike Pence’s kids aren’t throwing smoke bombs and punching 17 year old girls at their opposition’s rallies, but Tim Kane’s kid sure as hell did. Still, the point is “your (interpretation of) someone’s symbol doesn’t justify a response faaaaar out of proportion to the symbol itself”. Ever.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Article 2, Section 3 of the Constitution provides:  “He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”  The State of the Union originally was a letter the Present sent to Congress.  Later, the President went in person to speak to Congress, which turned into a silly partisan event where half the chamber leaps to applaud every time he takes a breath. 
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi won’t let President Trump deliver the State of the Union address to Congress while the government is shut down so it’s postponed, or maybe not, now that we’re open for three weeks.  Nobody knows. 
Actually, nobody cares.  It’s grandstanding.  It’s silly.  Instead of delivering a speech or mailing a letter, Trump ought to break new ground: give the State of the Union by Twitter.  Hey, it’s his signature medium.  Why not? 
 “The Constitution requires me to advise Congress on the State of the Union.  Democrats won’t let me speak to Congress in person so I’m tweeting it to you, the American people.  Pass along this message to your elected representative, will you?”
 “The union is in a sorry state.  We owe more than we can repay.  Deep state saboteurs within our own government are undermining the principles of representative democracy.  The nation is flooded with illegal immigrants who suck up welfare, commit crimes and vote in elections for policies that further weaken the nation.”
 “We can’t stem the violence in our own cities but we’re wasting lives and tax dollars protecting Europe from Russia and most of North Africa from themselves.  We’ve barely recovered from a decade-long economic slump but influential people are already demanding we saddle the economy with higher taxes and more regulations.”
 “I call on Congress to end deficit spending, cut government spending, lower taxes, reduce regulations, cease subsidizing other nations, defend our own borders, and then step out of the way.  Give us half a chance and ordinary Americans will make America great again.”
 “If Congress remains deadlocked, all is not lost.  Elections have consequences.  I have a pen and I’ve got a phone.  I can use that pen to sign executive orders and administrative actions that will move the ball forward.” 
 “Good night, and may God bless America.”
That ought to set the cat among the pigeons. 
Joe Doakes

It’s got my vote.

To: Most Of You In Big Media
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: Perspective

All,

I remember back in 2003, during the post-9/11 recession, when my field was in its “last hired, first fired” phase, and I – a single parent with two kids – got laid off from a contracting job after my old startup closed.

How it took me three months to get an interview. Five to earn *any* money. And 10.5 months to actually get a job – which led to 6-12 months catching up back bills, and years rebuilding credit. How we scrimped, stretched unemployment checks and a tax refund and about five weeks of contract work to cover six months.

And you know what I remember the most? How the media constantly did stories talking about all the trouble we unemployed and underemployed private sector workers were having, and how dire our situations were – even after *two missed paychecks*, and nobody saying “when you finally land a job (whenever that is), we’re going to give you all the “back pay” you would have had coming”.

That helped so much.

UPDATE: Wait – that never happened. Nobody gave a crap. To the media, private sector unemployment when there’s a GOP president is a feature, not a bug.

As far as those Fed workers go – I get the dislocation that happens when your income gets diverted (see above), and that lots of federal workers aren’t the stereotype of Big Bureaucracy fatcats with the six figure salaries and the golden pensions (although a lot more are than they like to let on) and that invincible sense of entitlement to your income.

But when this kerfuffle over the budget and wall ends, THEY GET BACK PAY. EVERY PENNY.

As a private sector worker who’ll be working until he’s 75 to pay the pensions of all these federal and state and local workers so they can retire at 55, can I just say “please stop with the &^%$# waterworks”?

That is all.

NYTimes  reporter tweets:

I'm a New York Times reporter writing about #exposechristianschools. Are you in your 20s or younger who went to a Christian school? I'd like to hear about your experience and its impact on your life. Please DM me.

— Dan Levin (@globaldan) January 24, 2019

Gosh – what do you suppose his angle is going to be?

Caitlin Flanagan at that noted conservative tool The Atlantic notes that h Big Media botched everthing that could be botched about the Covington flap – and gave us the pullquote of the week:

The full video reveals that these kids had wandered into a Tom Wolfe novel and had no idea how to get out of it.

But read the whole thing anyway.

The serious answer – so the good guy doesn’t run out of bullets before the bad guy runs out of attack.

Homeowner in Houston repels a violent, armed home invasion…

…by five men with “big guns”:

One man was left dead in front of the house, at least one wounded man took off on foot and the others left in an SUV, police said.
The car crashed into a pole nearby at Harrisburg Boulevard, where a man was found dead inside, according to police. Police say another person in the car fled, collapsed down the street on Capitol Street and later died. 
The fourth and fifth suspects were also injured and taken to a hospital, police said.
Outside the house, homicide investigators are combing through the crime scene where it appears there was a shootout; several dozen shell casings have been found. 

No word yet on charges for the defender. Fingers crossed.

Tom Knighton at Bearing Arms notes:

No, five bad guys coming to your house may not be a common thing, but we can’t pretend it hasn’t happened. Not now.
Now, let’s imagine how someone in a situation like this would fair under a 10-round magazine limit. Oh, they could change magazines in theory, but with that much lead flying around? More rounds in the weapon at the start is always a better place to be.
Of course, if a 10-round limit is bad, imagine what they’d go through if they were stuck with Oregon’s proposed 5-round limit. This man would’ve never had enough ammo on his person to have survived this one.

Hey, just surrender and hope that your attackers don’t cut you into long thin strips…

Academic writing on foodie site:  “Foodie authenticity-snobbery is racist“.   The concept was good for a masters’ thesis, apparently, which is further evidence of the free fall of the modern academy.

Which occurs to me –  I’d like the writer and so-called “academic” – Sara Kay, which may be the most Brooklyn-hipster nom ever put to plume – to meet Twin Cities author and so-called “journalist” Sara Vogel, author of perhaps the most vapid-yet-vicious bits of autheticity-signaling I’ve ever read ,to get together and hash this out.

They can’t both be right, unless you’re a “progressive”.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails a movie review:

I saw “Mary Poppins Returns.”  Sold out show.  Herewith, my movie review.  Don’t go.  Wait for Netflix.  SPOILER ALERT: Mary Poppins wins in the end.  Sorry if I ruined it for you.

First off, let’s be clear.  The original Mary Poppins movie is one of my childhood favorites.  After 50 years of listening to the songs on my mother’s phonograph and watching the reruns on television, I know it by heart.  The movie is better than the book, by the way.  The theater was full of old people my age – it’s clearly a nostalgia movie, not targeted at kids like all the modern Disney princesses.

Mary Poppins Returns clearly was intended as an homage to the original.  They rebuilt Cherry Tree Lane perfectly.  It’s a musical: the singing and dancing is spectacular.  It’s a Disney movie: the human-animated scenes are incredible.  Emily Blunt as Poppins is excellent: not a Julie Andrews mimic, but believable.  Stern and smart-alecky, but playful and softhearted, too.  She slides up the banister, her parrot umbrella talks, her carpet-bag-of-holding is still bottomless, same shoes, same quips about Michael being stubborn, Jane inclined to giggle, Mary being practically perfect, same mirror trick, music from the first movie plays in the background at opportune moments.  All scenes to bring a touch of the old into the new because the audience knows the inside jokes and expects to see them.  In that, the movie does not disappoint.

Having said all that, this version isn’t as good as the original.  Not just because sequels never are, but because the film makers misunderstood the first movie.  They saw the elements and thought they could repeat the success by using the same elements.  They forgot that the original story made fun of the parents for their human foibles (a classic Comedy).  This story is a Comedy only in the sense that the Good Guys win in the end.  The story itself is no fun.

In the original, Mr. and Mrs. Banks are so preoccupied with adult concerns, they have no time for the kids. The bankers are such a stiff bunch they can’t understand a simple joke. The whole theme of that movie is “lighten up, be more childlike.”  Splurge on feeding the birds.  Go fly a kite. Mary Poppins leaves the Banks family when the parents are focused on the family again, as they should be.

This movie is darker.  Jane and Michael have grown up. Jane is modern feminist: unmarried, activist for labor unions.  Michael is a pajama boy:  works a meaningless day job to support his real life’s work as an artist whose pictures won’t sell.  He lives in the family house with his three kids but no wife – she recently died – and he’s losing the house to foreclosure.

The bankers in the first movie were starched shirt, upright, careful investors but they weren’t wicked, evil, cheats.  They didn’t try to steal Michael’s tuppence, they wanted him to prudently invest the tuppence in railways to India instead of wasting his money feeding the birds.   The banker in this movie is a crook who intentionally tries to cheat Michael’s family to steal their house.

The big difference between the films is the first was a Comedy but this is a modern Liberal movie.  Crooked banker. Exploited workers.  Dead Mom.  Heartless lawyers.  And, of course, the obligatory 18% Black characters and one Admiral in a wheelchair, historical accuracy be damned.  Yes, Mary Poppins and the Banks family win in the end but even that is annoying [HERE’S THE SPOILER, SKIP TO THE NEXT PARAGRAPH]: the tuppence the banker got from Michael in the first movie was indeed prudently invested which, with interest, is now worth enough to pay off the mortgage in the second movie.  The bankers were right – adult prudence over childish frivolity – which destroys the theme of the first movie.  Did the film makers even realize they were stabbing the first movie in the back?

The film makers dutifully included all the elements from the first film:  animation, penguins, Dick Van Dyke, singing, strange words, dancing, a cannon, bankers, a country fair, a horse race, one of Mary’s weird relatives, flying a kite, even a shaggy dog.  But the movie is a jumble as if it was made by cargo cultists who saw the images but didn’t understood what they stood for.  The songs have nothing to do with the action.  Crooked bankers and a dead Mom don’t make a lighthearted, uplifting story.  The characters themselves don’t grow in wisdom, Mary Poppins swoops in to save the day. She’s not a nanny, she’s a superhero.

Mary Poppins Returns made me want to cry.  No, not for the exploited workers or dead Mom Banks, couldn’t care less.  I wanted to cry for what’s been lost.  Disney didn’t understand why the first movie was beloved so their remake is a swing-and-a-miss.  Not Jar Jar Binks bad, but certainly Ewoks bad.

A friend argues that the first movie was just as political as the second, but the first movie reinforced my political beliefs so I liked it.  Feminists are air heads.  Prudence is boring.  Kids are the most important people in the family.  This was the dogma of the 1950’s so it’s no wonder I liked the first movie but not the second. I’m a relic.  Times have changed.  Move On!

I wanted to cry because I miss London. Not the actual city but the London I know in my mind from Ebeneezer Scrooge, Constable Grant, Sherlock Holmes and especially, from Mary Poppins.  I miss the London of my imagination.  It’s dead and Liberals killed it.  That, most of all, is their unforgivable sin.

Joe Doakes

At least they didn’t make Mary a lesbian.

Er – they didn’t, did they?

Not that there’s anything wrong with that…

Your opinion of what happened at the March for Life last weekend largely depends on your point of view on the Trump administration. You either…:

• Watched the full two hours of video (or take the counsel of those who did) and have come to believe that that CNN edited the video maliciously, with full intent to defame a bunch of MAGA hats ahd the kids they were sitting on, or
• believe that in abeyance of all the actual evidence, MAGA cap + white + Catholic private school = smug racist, evidence be damned

That’s Robby Soave’s conclusion over at Reason – the Covington Kids are a Rohrschach Blob that says more about the viewers and their opinions than they do about themselves.

But the most frustrating and worrying reactions have come from those who have convinced themselves that the extended video footage confirms their initial impressions. Of all the myriad examples of this, perhaps none is more contemptible than the effort by Deadspin‘s Laura Wagner, who writes, “Don’t Doubt What You Saw With Your Own Eyes.” Wagner accuses the Covington kids’ defenders—me among them—of “siding with some shithead MAGA teens and saying that 2+2=5 in the face of every bit of evidence there is to be had.”
But I know what I saw, and I think I know what Wagner saw, too. She saw a group of white teens wearing MAGA hats who had just engaged in partisan political activity on behalf of a cause she opposes (this last detail is more than sufficient on its own to convict the teens, according to several prominent progressive feminists). And that was enough.

Of course, this country – and by “This country” I mean “mobs of entitled bobbleheads spurred on by the agenda-driven parts of our idiot media” – have a dismal record of seeking truth:

In writing and speaking about this, I have drawn parallels to the Rolling Stone/University of Virginia gang rape hoax of 2014, which provides a powerful example of mainstream media getting a story very wrong in ways that permanently damaged the magazine’s reputation.
But in the less insane media world of 2014, at least the Rolling Stone debunking was accepted by pretty much everyone. When friends of “Jackie,” the alleged rape victim, came forward to help clarify that her alleged attacker did not exist, and was in fact a persona she had invented in order to catfish them, I don’t remember many major pundits sticking their fingers in their ears and pretending not to hear this.
The ongoing effort to pretend that videos of boys doing pep rally type cheers in opposition to a hate group is in fact evidence of deep-seated racism makes me wonder whether Rolling Stone truther-ism would have been much more common had the story come out in 2019.

Things are getting much, much worse out there.

The SCOTUS will be taking on serious Second Amendment issues for the first time in almost a decade:

The court granted a right-to-carry case out of New York that that pits the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association against the City of New York. New York bans transporting permitted handguns outside city lines, even if the gun is not loaded and is locked in a container. The guns currently can only be taken to the handful of shooting ranges within city limits.
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The case could have wide ramifications for gun rights and gun restrictions across the country, depending on how broadly the court rules.
Conservative justices have been champing at the bit to take up gun rights cases. Justice Clarence Thomas in 2014, for example, criticized the court for not taking up more gun cases, calling it a “disfavored” right.
“The right to keep and bear arms is apparently this Court’s constitutional orphan,” Thomas wrote.
With a newfound majority after the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, conservatives may have their chance to make a broad ruling, holding, for example, that the right to own a gun means the right to carry one, or it could rule more narrowly, saying New York’s law is overly restrictive or something in between.

And if the conservative majority issues a broad opinion – and Real Americans hope they do – the reaction is going to make the Kavanaugh hearings look like a Taylor Swift concert.

Smoke ’em if you got ’em.

Woman defies the odds in robbery attempt in Chicago.

Not by driving off a robber…:

A man in Hyde Park was in for a surprise when the woman he was trying to rob pulled out a gun and fired.

Just before 6:30 p.m. Saturday near 56th and Dorchester, Chicago police say the woman took out the gun and shot at the man.

Police say she has a valid concealed carry license.

The suspect drove off in a dark-colored SUV.

…although I love a happy ending.

But no, she beat the odds by getting her permit in Chicago in the first place.

David Brooks wrote this piece – “The Cruelty of Call-Out Culture” – almost a solid week before the Covington kerfuffle, in which a dishonest media led a pack of bovine keyboard commandos to a high-tech lynching of a MAGA hat and the kids standing around it.  But the episode brought it back to mind for me.  

Brooks details a fascinating – and by “fascinating”, I mean “terrifying” – episode involving a chain of online “denunciations” that seem reminiscent of the sort of thing that got millions killed under Mao and Stalin.   And the chain led back to one, er, man:

The guy who called out Emily is named Herbert. He told [NPR podcast] “Invisibilia” that calling her out gave him a rush of pleasure, like an orgasm. He was asked if he cared about the pain Emily endured. “No, I don’t care,” he replied. “I don’t care because it’s obviously something you deserve, and it’s something that’s been coming. … I literally do not care about what happens to you after the situation. I don’t care if she’s dead, alive, whatever.”
When the interviewer, Hanna Rosin, showed skepticism, he revealed that he, too, was a victim. His father beat him throughout his childhood.
In this small story, we see something of the maladies that shape our brutal cultural moment. You see how zealotry is often fueled by people working out their psychological wounds. You see that when denunciation is done through social media, you can destroy people without even knowing them. There’s no personal connection that allows apology and forgiveness.

My theory? The Covington social lynching, like the paroxysm of gleeful hate around the Kavanaugh hearings, are the result of an awful lot of people who’ve never learned to see political differences as anything but “hate” being told to “punch a Nazi” – and they can’t find any actual Nazis, because there are bowling leagues in Cincinnati with more people and political clout than the Nazi party in the USA today – but then again, to them pretty much everyone they disagree with is a Nazi…

…and they can’t punch, anyway. So they use the only weapons they have; the social media mob.