TIM BLAIR: DRONES WRECK PLANS, MAKE ACADEMICS ‘STOP AND THINK.’

Global warming, potential plane crashes and bicycling is involved, so read the whole thing.

CHRISTINA’S AMERICAN TABLE RESTAURANT, Granbury, TX, last night:

(Shot with a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ200 in “Night Scenery” mode, on a tripod. Great restaurant, by the way.)

IT’S ALL IN WHAT YOU NAME IT: We know walls are for Nazis, racists and deplorables, right? So Wilhem DiBlasio, NYC’s Commissar decides a “privacy fence” is in order.

See, this is Trump’s biggest failing. He should never have used the word “wall.” He should have followed Cher’s lead and called it a “virtue ring.”

There, I fixed it.

SURE THEY DO: TO FEEL GOOD ABOUT THEMSELVES, SAME AS ALWAYS.

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BIG FRANK AS PREDECESSOR TO TRUMP:  Why Philadelphia’s Frank Rizzo was both detested and admired.

THIS IS PERCEPTIVE, AND GOES TO A LARGER POINT ABOUT TRUMP:

The political class has managed to set things up so that it’s impossible to both play by the rules and make fundamental changes to the post-WWII institutional setup. For a while, that protected the whole feedlot. But eventually, all that means is that the changes will be made by people who don’t play by the rules.

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY. Widows: Urban Blight and Hopeless Chicago.

Fans of British writer-director Steve McQueen’s long overdue follow-up to 12 Years a Slave have had half a decade to muse over the now acclaimed director’s short career beginning with the brutal and unsettling Hunger, followed by his second team-up with actor Michael Fassbinder in Shame. Given the high regard his previous trilogy has garnered, Widows is a rather conventional career pivot.

* * * * * * * *

The film’s finale, without spoilers, seems to suggest that this sense of nihilism and hopelessness is cowardly and must be destroyed and yet the system isn’t confronted by the end of the film. The best that can be done in the end is to honor the dead and try to build some semblance of friendship and justice beyond the horrors. The real bad guys get away in the end. The only real justice comes when you survive and your enemies don’t.

Maybe that’s honest in the sense that Chicago is a place where corruption, graft, and backroom deals reign supreme, but if the only way out of the quagmire is violence and the vain hope of some future after the turmoil, it goes a long way to show why the progressivism is so willing to push violent solutions in the aftermath of their losses.

When Hillary Clinton goes on live TV and says that there can be no civility when the policies she advocates are being denied by the party in power and when black bloc groups like Antifa are given unlimited reign to assault conservatives, we see this same progressive nihilism at work.

Chicago’s last Republican mayor left office in 1931.

A RADICAL PROPOSAL TO ADDRESS THE BABY BUST: Is the solution a “fertility dividend” that makes a portion of a person’s Social Security benefit dependent on each of their offspring’s earnings?

I wrote this piece, The Parent Trap, a while back on how society has raised the costs, and lowered the return, on parenting with predictable effect.

Related, and sad: The 40-year-old Reversion. “These women are the men their mothers divorced.”

CONFESSIONS OF A ‘SOULLESS TROGLODYTE’: How My Brooklyn Literary Friendships Fell Apart in the Age of Trump.

Over time, I seized on Jamie’s stories to help explain the chasm between the giant Jamie I idolized in Brooklyn and the shrunken Jamie who stood before me. There was a political undercurrent: The idea of Jamie as a victim of not just the circumstances of his own household, but also systemic racism more generally, seemed very much in keeping with America’s history of persecuting black boys and men.

“Forget them,” I said, referring to the members of Jamie’s unsupportive workshop. “Let’s start our own.” My futile MFA attempt behind me, I imagined the two of us engaging with the books we loved back in our childhood, in an environment free of social friction. Rather than nibble at the edges of style or craft, we could interrogate the moral choices made by enduring characters in history’s great novels: Why was it wrong to kill old women in Crime and Punishment? Who was this Gatz before he became Gatsby, and what was it that really motivated him? Together, we could trace the contours of the divine in Isaac Bashevis Singer and Flannery O’Connor, or the specter of war in John Cheever and Walker Percy; we could expose madness in Chekhov’s placid stories and Santiago’s courage in The Old Man and the Sea. A hopelessly old-fashioned reader, I wanted us to revisit Hamlet, the saddest moral clown of them all, as well as Chaucer’s lustful pranksters, no less juvenile than Jamie and I once had been on Brooklyn’s streets.

“Let’s start with Lolita,” I said.

But Jamie said that Lolita bored him after the first few sentences, so he stopped reading: “Maybe it was a bad translation.”

It brought me no joy to have to tell him that while Vladimir Nabokov was a Russian émigré who wrote his first nine novels in his native tongue, the later Nabokov of Lolita fame was one of the great prose stylists of the English language. What followed was a contentious exchange in which it became clear that Jamie has never read or finished many of the great books that I held dear. When I asked, in all sincerity, how he could teach writing to college students, he shot back by rejecting my beloved texts as artifacts of white, male European hegemony.

It wasn’t long before tirades against the Western canon—against my use of terms such as “Shakespearean” or “Dickensian” in reference to Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston—spilled over onto Facebook pages, where they turned personal, especially after I critiqued Ta-Nehisi Coates’ politics of nihilism and doom.

“I take offence to that as a man of colour,” Jamie wrote in response.

Identity politics are destroying the left’s ability to reason. Long but well worth a read.

(Via Maggie’s Farm.)

IF THERE’S A BUSTLE IN YOUR HEDGEROW, DON’T BE ALARMED NOW. Rational liberal response: Build ‘giant escalators’ to defeat the border wall.

(Classical reference in headline.)

FRENCH PROTESTS ENTER SECOND MONTH: Yellow Vest Protesters to March on Versailles.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Parkland Leader David Hogg Enrolling at Harvard Next Fall.

BUT HE’S GONE ABOVE AND BEYOND IN VIRTUE SIGNALING: David Hogg is heading to Harvard despite an SAT score of 1270. The bottom 25% at Harvard have an average SAT score of 1460.

THE #SCHUMERSHUTDOWN:

Well, to be fair it’s just because Democrats think they’ll do better in elections if they can import a new electorate.

I THINK COCAINE MITCH ALREADY KNOWS THIS: Four Reasons Getting Rid of the Filibuster for All Legislation Would Be a Disaster.

THAT’S BECAUSE “INTERSECTIONALITY” IS STUPID: Kirsten Gillibrand’s Invocation of ‘Intersectionality’ Backfires. “For people who encountered the tweet but were not familiar with the slogan about the female future—which began as the rallying cry of lesbian separatists in the 1970s (those were the days) and is now the kind of feel-good feminist slogan that’s printed on baby clothes and sold in posh boutiques in my Los Angeles neighborhood—it was an incendiary concept.”

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MICHAEL WALSH: “If Trump does nothing else but put an end to the endless wars bequeathed to us by the house of Bush, his will have been a consequential presidency.”

Related: CNN’s Don Lemon on President Trump, Post-Mattis: ‘I’m Actually Scared at This Point.’

But why? If, he truly believes, as Lemon blurted in October, “the biggest terror threat in this country is white men,” he should welcome an American pullback from Syria and Afghanistan.

ON THE DAY IN 1869, EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON WAS BORN IN LINCOLN COUNTY, MAINE: (That’s where my mom was born too and where half my gene pool comes from.) Robinson’s poem Miniver Cheevy is really swell:

Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reasons.

Miniver loved the days of old
When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold
Would set him dancing.

Miniver sighed for what was not,
And dreamed, and rested from his labors;
He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,
And Priam’s neighbors.

Miniver mourned the ripe renown
That made so many a name so fragrant;
He mourned Romance, now on the town,
And Art, a vagrant.

Miniver loved the Medici,
Albeit he had never seen one;
He would have sinned incessantly
Could he have been one.

Miniver cursed the commonplace
And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the mediæval grace
Of iron clothing.

Miniver scorned the gold he sought,
But sore annoyed was he without it;
Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
And thought about it.

Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking.

I love that poem. But it’s the only Robinson poem that I’ve read that is comic.

*Among Mainers of my mother’s age and older, “on the town” meant on welfare, since public relief was provided by townships and not by the county, state or federal government.

HOLIDAY RERUNS CAN GET AWFULLY DULL AFTER A WHILE: Government Shuts Down Over Border Wall Impasse — Despite urging from Trump, McConnell resists nuking 60-vote threshold to pass $5 billion sought by House GOPs.

TERRY BRENNAN: The Right Needs a Position on Gender and Family.

THE JANET COOKE OF HAMBURG. WAPO: A reporter’s dispatch from Trump country featured a ‘Mexicans Keep Out’ sign. But he made it all up.

What motivated [Claas] Relotius to lie? “It was the fear of failure,” he reportedly told editors at Der Spiegel, confessing that the pressure had grown as his career took off. After the 2016 election, his editors suggested that he write about Trump voters in rural America, and made plans for him to rent an apartment in Fergus Falls. But once he got there, the article failed to come together, Der Spiegel editor Ullrich Fichtner wrote:

When asked about the Fergus Falls story, he admitted that he knew perfectly well that the editors wouldn’t have reprimanded him if he had dropped the whole thing. “I think,” Relotius said last week, “a normal person would have said: ‘Listen, this just isn’t working. I’m stuck and we can’t do the story.’” But Relotius is evidently no normal person. “I tend to want to have control,” he said, “and I have this compulsion, this drive, to somehow make it happen. Of course, you don’t make it happen. You make a fabrication.” When he says “you” here, he can only mean himself and no one else.

According to Anderson, however, there was a story to be found in Fergus Falls. It just may not have been the one that Relotius was looking for. What he had overlooked, she wrote on Wednesday, were the community programs supporting local artists, the excellent coffee shop, and all of the residents who traveled to Washington for the Women’s March, planted Black Lives Matter signs in their yards and wept when they realized that Trump had been elected.

“This is just a hunch, but it seems to me that Relotius’ overseas readers might appreciate knowing that small American towns are more complex than they imagine — that die-hard liberals like me can still magically live alongside conservative Republicans — that sometimes we even find some common ground and share a meal together, and take the time to try to understand each other’s viewpoints,” she wrote.

You mean, we’re not all socialists now, as the Washington Post once pretended?

(Classical allusion in headline.)

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Remember James Lileks’ epic takedown of a foreign report from a Birmingham, Alabama Olive Garden shortly after 9/11? They’ve always got the story pre-written before they talk to anyone.

APOLLO 8: 50 YEARS AGO.