Archive for 2017
January 10, 2017
MAYBE IT’S NOT TRUE, BUT WHY TAKE THE CHANCE? Naps might be saving your brain.
THE HORROR, THE HORROR! Western Feminists Discover New Tool of the Patriarchy: Salad!
AND BY DIVERSITY THEY MEAN… LIBERALS OF ALL COLORS! Hidden Figures Should Be a Diversity Wake-Up Call for Film
IT’S KIND OF NICE TO SEE THE LIBERALS ARE ALREADY WORKING TO ENSURE TRUMP’S 2020 VICTORY: Keep Up the Condescension, Snowflakes! [Fixing missing links now. Sorry. My computer was really odd last night.]
LESSONS FROM HISTORY: Climate Change or Coincidence? [Now with link. Sorry.]
YOU’RE AS LEGITIMATE AS YOU MAKE YOURSELF: What is “legitimate” in the 21st century publishing environment?
IT’S JUST A STICK TO BEAT US WITH: Implicit Bias: A Fool’s Errand.
I’VE ALWAYS SAID NOT WITH A WHIMPER, BUT WITH A BANG: Wither the EU. [Fixed link. Sometimes my browser “eats” the link, and computer glitches last night prevented me from seeing that.]
WHEN THE VICTIM WAS AS DELIBERATELY IMBECILIC AS PODESTA: When Is Victim Blaming Acceptable?
DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY OF THESE GUYS I ATE, DEEP FRIED? Just how smart is an octopus?
January 9, 2017
AT AMAZON, save on Surveillance Cameras.
TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY EDITION: Women’s March on Washington Opens Contentious Dialogues About Race.
Many thousands of women are expected to converge on the nation’s capital for the Women’s March on Washington the day after Donald J. Trump’s inauguration. Jennifer Willis no longer plans to be one of them.
Ms. Willis, a 50-year-old wedding minister from South Carolina, had looked forward to taking her daughters to the march. Then she read a post on the Facebook page for the march that made her feel unwelcome because she is white.
The post, written by a black activist from Brooklyn who is a march volunteer, advised “white allies” to listen more and talk less. It also chided those who, it said, were only now waking up to racism because of the election.
“You don’t just get to join because now you’re scared, too,” read the post. “I was born scared.”
Stung by the tone, Ms. Willis canceled her trip.
“This is a women’s march,” she said. “We’re supposed to be allies in equal pay, marriage, adoption. Why is it now about, ‘White women don’t understand black women’?”
Because people have been rewarded for this sort of drama all their lives, and nobody has enough self-discipline to set it aside now because they haven’t been rewarded for that.
Plus:
Ms. Rose said in an interview that the intention of the post was not to weed people out but rather to make them understand that they had a lot of learning to do.
“I needed them to understand that they don’t just get to join the march and not check their privilege constantly,” she said.
That phrase — check your privilege — exasperates Ms. Willis. She asked a reporter: “Can you please tell me what that means?”
It means decades of campus diversity training are going to make organizing an anti-Trump movement a lot harder.
IN OTHER NEWS, VIRUSES ORGANIZE AGAINST FLU SHOTS: Teachers unions mount campaign against Betsy DeVos, Trump’s education pick.
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Germany’s Green Party just suggested sex prescriptions for the disabled. It’s not the craziest idea they’ve ever had.
HOLLYWOOD HATE: What Did Football Players or Mixed Martial Artists Ever Do to Meryl Streep?
If your message is, “we have to remind each other of the privilege and the responsibility of the act of empathy,” fine. Empathy is a good thing. Except . . . no one’s going to feel obligated to be more empathetic if the call for empathy comes from the walking embodiment of Hollywood royalty, and it’s immediately followed by a declaration that the general public’s tastes are cruddy: “Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. If you kick ‘em all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.”
What did football players or mixed martial artists ever do to Meryl Streep? This isn’t just snide, it’s really inaccurate. Both UFC and Bellator have plenty of competitors born in other countries. The number of foreign-born NFL players is increasing as well. Such a gratuitous shot, and so counter to everything else Streep said.
Her very next sentence is, “An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us and let you feel what that feels like.” Could she enter the lives of football or MMA fans at that moment? How does she think those folks would feel?
Literally a minute later, Streep declares, “when the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.” Does she have enough empathy to understand why millions of Americans might feel like a multimillionaire superstar snickering about their entertainment choices might come across as a bully at that moment?
Self-awareness is not “multimillionaire superstars'” strong suit.
STRONG ENOUGH FOR A MAN BUT MADE FOR A WOMAN: Shower Beer Has Arrived, Because Why Not?
NEWS YOU CAN USE: The Hidden Dangers of Male Modeling. “Muscle-bound male models with perfect cheekbones and fat paychecks? They do not seem like obvious victims. But as I found during my short career as a male model, men and boys are increasingly at risk in the odd, unregulated workplace that is the fashion world. Being a man does not make you safe: Male models are often subject to sexual harassment but rarely report it. And, like their female counterparts, they are under intense pressure to have just the right kind of body. Recent menswear trends have polarized male catwalk modeling, encouraging either extreme muscularity or waifish androgyny. Want to look like that? It will likely make you sick.”
The fashion industry sounds seriously exploitative and dangerously unregulated. I hope the federal government will crack down. I’m sure the industry won’t object, since their politics are generally in favor of government regulation.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Of Class And Classes: If you want to help poor kids get ahead, then you need to support school choice. “The long knives have come out for Education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos. But her critics aren’t attacking her because they think she’ll do a bad job. They’re attacking her because they’re afraid she’ll do a good job. But I think that her success will be important, if you care about addressing inequality in America.”
SOME MEN JUST WANT TO WATCH THE WORLD BURN – AND OTHERS ENJOY THROWING THE MATCH ONTO THE BONFIRE: Obama leaves with the world in flames.
HEADLINES FROM 1987: The Edge Breaks Down U2’s Upcoming ‘Joshua Tree’ Tour.
U2 is one of those rare upside-down rock bands — I like their politics more than their music.
THEY CHOSE…POORLY: The National Laughingstock’s Margaret Sullivan: Now That Our Enemy the Right Is Using the Term “Fake News,” It’s Time to Retire It.
So our Wile E. Coyote super-genius DNC-MSM, which over the years has brought you such memes as Barry Goldwater, Crypto-Nazi; nearly 50 years of “we only have ten years to save the earth,” George Bush blowing up the WTC; RatherGate, Hurricane Katrina as Baghdad on the Bayou, accused the US military of deliberately targeting reporters for assassination, and read poetry on their broadcasts to advance Obamacare didn’t think they’d get blowback over “fake news?”
As with Meryl Streep, perhaps it’s time for old media to come clean about what they think about their customers and dust off those old Washington Post-approved “Yeah, I’m in the media, screw you” buttons once again. At least they’d points for honesty for a change.
DONALD TRUMP AND THE BATMAN EFFECT:
There’s an old joke about Batman. Suppose you’re a hypercompetent billionaire in a decaying city, and you want to do something about the crime problem. What’s your best option? Maybe you could to donate money to law-enforcement, or after-school programs for at-risk teens, or urban renewal. Or you could urge your company full of engineering geniuses to invent new police tactics and better security systems. Or you could use your influence as a beloved celebrity to petition the government to pass laws which improve efficiency of the justice system.
Bruce Wayne decided to dress up in a bat costume and personally punch criminals. And we love him for it.
I worry that Trump’s plan for his administration is to dress up in a President costume and personally punch people we don’t like, while leaving policy to rot. And I worry it’s going to work.
Well, something like that worked for FDR, after all. But I think it’s likely that Trump will have better economic policies than FDR did.