Archive for 2016

TWO WASHINGTON POSTS IN ONE!

Shot: WashPo Attacks Christian Leaders as ‘Enemies of Equality.’

— Thomas D. Williams, Big Journalism, today.

Chaser: I rejected my parents’ WASP values. Now I see we need them more than ever. They represented a different, dying vision of the GOP.

— Pamela Constable, the Washington Post, Friday.

And note this:

In March 2013, Dad passed away at 96; my mother followed him at 97. I was relieved that they had not lived to see their party’s new standard-bearer hurling vulgar taunts and whipping up xenophobic crowds, or to witness the rout of the rational, civilized conservative norms that had defined their lives and guided public policy for a century.

Constable has worked for years for a newspaper whose employees wore buttons that said “Yeah, I’m With the Media. Screw You” to the 1992 Republican Convention and the following year described evangelical Christians as “largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command,” before declaring (via its then sister publication) “We Are All Socialists Now” at the dawn of the Obama era — and then wonders how someone like Trump emerged from the media culture the Post spent decades setting on fire.

Sorry, you can’t serve as a spear carrier in the war to fundamentally transform American culture and then get to say, “What happened?! Why aren’t there any mild-mannered patrician Republicans left?”

THIS ISN’T THE 21st CENTURY I WAS PROMISED: Silicon Valley startup proudly starves its employees:

Employees at Nootrobox, a smart drug company which produces cognitive enhancers called nootropics, don’t eat from Monday night until Wednesday morning.

“We’re actually super-productive on Tuesdays,” co-founder and CEO Geoffrey Woo told The Mercury News. “It’s hard at first, but we literally adopted it as part of the company culture.”

Some of Woo’s colleagues are way more hardcore. “Some people don’t eat for even longer. They fast on Sunday night, then breakfast on Wednesday morning,” he told Inverse.

Many Silicon Valley workers are trying to “hack” their brains as they strive to gain an edge in the city’s ever-competitive market.

When a great idea can earn you millions of dollars — apps like Uber, Snapchat and Tinder once started as tiny ideas — there’s an extra incentive to have your brain always working at full capacity.

“It kind of sucks, in the beginning, to not eat for 36 hours,” Woo said. “But it’s fun to get breakfast together on Wednesday. We realized that a lot of people in our community want to do that as well, so we started a biohacker breakfast.

“We have 300 people in a Slack channel, nerding about fasting and different fasting protocols. Every Wednesday at 8 a.m. in San Francisco, we have a biohacker breakfast.”

I’m old enough to remember when Silicon Valley was run on junk food. You could stop by the San Jose Fry’s Electronics and buy circuits, diodes, and other electronic parts, a case of Coke, a bag of Doritos, a box of Twinkees or Ho-Hos, a copy of Penthouse Forum, and start hacking a project together. Plus, it’s just surreal that in a city like San Francisco crawling with armies of feral starving homeless people, a cult-like business wants its employees to deliberately starve. And good luck enforcing those rules after hours, fellas. (Perhaps it’s a “rolling fast” a la Cindy Sheehan and Sean Penn, circa 2006.)

HILLARY IS UNEXCITING AT BEST, ALIENATING TO MOST: More Sanders voters say they will choose ‘other,’ or not vote, than back Clinton.

Supporters of rebel Democrat Sen. Bernie Sanders are not following his lead in backing Hillary Rodham Clinton, detouring away from the establishment Democrat to other candidates including Donald Trump.

A new Economist/YouGov poll showed that the email scandal, and FBI Director James Comey’s charge that Clinton’s behavior was “extremely careless,” has led Sanders backers to abandon the former secretary of State.

Since Comey’s House testimony, support for Clinton has dropped 12 points, to 41 percent. For the first time, Sanders supporters now prefer either someone else or they won’t vote.

It is the latest evidence that Clinton suffers from a trust and honesty deficit.

And some 14 percent support Trump, a number that has increased in the last month as the Sanders campaign died.

Related: Hillary and the Democrats’ Trust Problem.

SCOTT ADAMS: Gingrich, Pence, and Monitoring Mosques. “People are outraged because Newt Gingrich suggested that the U.S. government should start monitoring mosques to thwart terrorism. Outrage is a perfectly reasonable response to Gingrich’s proposal if you’re dumb enough to think the government isn’t already monitoring mosques in the U.S.”

Well, I think it used to. Not so sure now.