REMEMBERING THE JOYS OF 1999. I was already an adult by that time, but things did seem to be on a glorious upswing that, from the vantage point of 20 years, didn’t really happen as we’d hoped.

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Ashe Schow On Fox News: ‘I Really Can’t Feel Sorry’ For Joe Biden After He Championed Norms That Led To His Accusations.

“Joe Biden’s been on this since the beginning,” Schow said. “I mean, it was the Obama Administration that had their Department of Education put out new rules saying, you know, students on college campuses don’t really have due process rights. They supported the affirmative consent movement that’s basically, if you want to touch anyone, really for any reason, you have to ask their permission first.”

Schow continued: “So, this is all coming around for Joe Biden and I really can’t feel sorry for him on this. I mean, the ‘It’s On Us’ campaign. Believe women. Affirmative consent. These were all things that came up under the Obama Administration and Joe Biden was the one that was there at the Oscars, that’s there at every awards ceremony saying, ‘we need to take this issue seriously. I take this issue seriously.’ Meanwhile, we had all these photos and videos of him clearly not taking the issue seriously or at least he didn’t think it applied to him.”

Saul Alinsky smiles.

I’M SURPRISED SHE DIDN’T CLAIM HE WAS WEARING A MAGA HAT: Mom Charged With Falsely Accusing a Man of Trying to Kidnap Her 5-Year-Old at the Mall.

Perhaps you’re wondering why someone would make up such a preposterous story. I have an idea.

For the last few years, there has been a string of moms going on Facebook, breathlessly claiming that they were out at the mall (or Ikea, or Target), when suddenly they realized that they were being stalked by a kidnapper clearly planning to snatch their kids and sex-traffic them.

The evidence is usually something like, “I saw a guy staring at my baby.” Or, “I saw the couple in one aisle and then I went down a different aisle and there they were again,” or, “I looked outside and there was a van with its door open!”

Inevitably, the mom congratulates herself on having had the wherewithal to figure out what was going on just in time, and bravely thwart the heinous crime by, uh, staring the guys down. Then the mom usually says something like, “if it happened to me it could happen to you,” without reminding readers that in fact, nothing happened. No one grabbed a kid. No one was sex-trafficked. (The head of the Crimes Against Children Research Center, David Finkelhor, says he knows of zero cases of a child kidnapped from a parent in public and sex trafficked.) It’s all in the moms’ heads.

Yet they get thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of approving shares and comments on social media.

Here’s one story. Here’s another, and another, and another. Here’s one that went mega-viral a few years back. You get the idea. It’s a panic, with a twist: adulation.

The mom ends up the hero of the non-event, basking in comments like thank you for sharing this, and so glad you are safe and, you are such a strong, conscientious mama.

Mass hysteria, social media, and false accusations. Who could have imagined?

A DEEP DIVE INTO Millennials’ Prospects.

CHANGE: Trump Administration to Designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a Terrorist Organization. As Rick Moran asks, “What took the US government so long?” Yes, however did that happen?

NO. GO AWAY. Mysterious drug-resistant fungus is quietly sweeping the globe.

EX-DEM STAFFER PLEADS GUILTY TO DOXXING MCCONNELL, OTHERS IN GOP DURING KAVANAUGH HEARINGS.

Somebody’s angling to get a sweet gig at CNN.

CHANGE: The Permian Basin Is Now The World’s Top Oil Producer. The US government spent decades and a fortune trying to break our dependence on Middle Eastern oil, and the private sector just up and did it. And it’s amazing how little attention it gets now that it’s happened.

CLARENCE THOMAS UNDERSCORES THAT HE HAS NO PLANS TO RETIRE.

EVERYONE IS CONSERVATIVE ABOUT WHAT HE KNOWS BEST*, EVEN ELITE SAN FRANCISCANS: Elite San Franciscans start GoFundMe drive to stop homeless shelter.

* Robert Conquest’s first law of politics.

A CHALLENGER FOR DOUG JONES: “U. S. Senator Doug Jones, a Democrat from Alabama, has another Republican willing to challenge him for the seat in 2020. Saturday former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville announced his candidacy for the Senate and is running as a Republican. Sean Spicer, former White House Press Secretary for President Trump is onboard Team Tuberville.”

NOW OUT FROM CHARLES LANE: Freedom’s Detective: The Secret Service, the Ku Klux Klan and the Man Who Masterminded America’s First War on Terror. An interview with Charles Lane is here.

EVERYONE IS CONSERVATIVE ABOUT WHAT HE KNOWS BEST, EVEN MICK JAGGER. “We keep hearing about long delays and antiquated care in the National Health Service, and here Jagger is able to get cutting-edge surgery in a matter of days! Oops, never mind. Jagger flew to New York for the operation, a fact that his press representatives don’t seem eager to emphasize.”

A COOL AND LOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE BICYCLE MENACE. As P.J. O’Rourke warned in the mid-1980s in his essay of the same name:

Our nation is afflicted with a plague of bicycles. Everywhere the public right-of-way is glutted with whirring, unbalanced contraptions of rubber, wire, and cheap steel pipe. Riders of these flimsy appliances pay no heed to stop signs or red lights. They dart from between parked cars, dash along double yellow lines, and whiz through crosswalks right over the toes of law-abiding citizens like me.

In the cities, every lamppost, tree, and street sign is disfigured by a bicycle slathered in chains and locks. And elevators must be shared with the cycling faddist so attached to his “moron’s bath-chair” that he has to take it with him everywhere he goes.

In the country, one cannot drive around a curve or over the crest of a hill without encountering a gaggle of huffing bicyclers spread across the road in suicidal phalanx.

Even the wilderness is not safe from infestation, as there is now such a thing as an off-road bicycle and a horrible sport called “bicycle-cross.”

The ungainly geometry and primitive mechanicals of the bicycle are an offense to the eye. The grimy and perspiring riders of the bicycle are an offense to the nose. And the very existence of the bicycle is an offense to reason and wisdom.

The cyclists’ latest offense to reason is their sudden offense at the word “cyclist,” David Thompson writes today:

Should we stop using the word ‘cyclist’?

So asks Laura Laker in the pages of the Guardian, thereby adding to our collection of classic sentences from said newspaper. This is promptly followed by another contender:

As the repair man rummaged around in my gas oven, I tried to explain something to him about cyclists.

Which perhaps conveys a flavour of what follows.

Stopping using the term “cyclist” has been up for debate since an Australian study last week found 31% of respondents viewed cyclists as less than human.

Specifically, a minority of motorists have been known to indulge in “humorous references to violence against cyclists,” which is entirely unwarranted, apparently, and must not be allowed to continue.

It is easy to dehumanise people who cycle… because they often dress differently and move in a mechanical way, and drivers cannot see their faces… Public references to violence against cyclists are not uncommon, and rarely given the same condemnation as, for example, violence towards women or bullying.

It occurs to me that cyclists are more likely to be the subject of unkind humour if their behaviour, not their chosen outfit, is causing a problem, or is perceived as such. And note the bold conflation of actual violence with merely joking about it.

There is another answer. “John works hard, which means that he can afford a car. That means he gets home to his family, safely, every night. Work harder. Get a car.”

(Via Small Dead Animals.)

NEW SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” CONTINUES TO PAY DIVIDENDS: Ocasio-Cortez Melts Down Over Criticism Of Fake Black Accent.

KILLED THE CZAR AND HIS MINISTERS; ANASTASIA SCREAMED IN VAIN: Lenin’s Back on Jagger and Healthcare.

IF THIS SORT OF RHETORIC DOESN’T GIVE YOU CHILLS, YOU DIDN’T PAY ATTENTION IN YOUR “MODERN WORLD HISTORY” CLASS (OR YOU HAD A COMMIE TEACHER):

WEIRD: Donald Trump’s rhetoric is breathtakingly authoritarian, but so far he’s done less than his predecessors to expand executive power.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE:

Thirty years ago, having tapped out of a Ph.D. program, I moved to Los Angeles (long story) and got hired at the top boys’ school in the city, which would soon become co-educational. For the first four years, I taught English. Best job I’ve ever had. For the next three, I was a college counselor. Worst job I’ve ever had.

* * * * * * * *

I just about got an ulcer sitting in that office listening to rich people complaining bitterly about an “unfair” or a “rigged” system. Sometimes they would say things so outlandish that I would just stare at them, trying to beam into their mind the question, Can you hear yourself? That so many of them were (literal) limousine liberals lent the meetings an element of radical chic. They were down for the revolution, but there was no way their kid was going to settle for Lehigh.

—“They Had It Coming: The parents indicted in the college-admissions scandal were responding to a changing America, with rage at being robbed of what they believed was rightfully theirs,” Caitlin Flanagan in the Atlantic.

Found via Rod Dreher, who headlines his post linking to Flanagan’s article, “The Joy Of Schadenfreude.”

As Ed Morrissey discovered when he guested for Hugh Hewitt a few weeks ago when the college admissions scandal first broke, “and for three hours, this was the story listeners wanted to discuss,” and now with the Atlantic actually attacking wealthy Democrats, it’s bipartisan schadenfreude.

ESTABLISHMENT FOOTSOLDIERS MOBILIZE TO PROTECT THEIR PLACE AT THE TROUGH: Governor Lee met by protestors in Knoxville. “Governor Bill Lee was met by more than 150 protestors in Knoxville today. Protestors from the Tennessee Education Association stood outside the Rothchild’s Banquet Center protesting Governor Lee’s voucher program that would allow qualified students in failing schools go to a private school with taxpayer dollars.”

Public schools stink. Their chief role today is as vote farms for the Democrats. Naturally they’re going to resist any reform.

UPDATE: And apparently “any reform” means any reform: Both Teachers’ Unions Oppose Bill That Would Make Sex with Students a Crime.

WELL, SHE’S A SOCIALIST, SO . . . Investor rips Ocasio-Cortez as ‘financially illiterate’ at Sharpton conference.

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