UM, NO: Woman who sleeps in $500 EMF-blocking sack wants area-wide Wi-Fi limits. “Seems like a good time to remember that EMF sensitivities are not real.”
Archive for 2019
October 1, 2019
GRAY LADY PROFILES RACHEL MADDOW. It’s a glowing profile of Maddow herself of course, but these are quite the tangents:
Recently, I went to dinner at the home of Rebecca Kee, a preschool principal in San Francisco who turned to Maddow in her depression and confusion over the 2016 election. I brought a bottle of rosé, and she poured it into glasses decorated with charms that featured Russia-investigation figures on one side and characters from “Star Trek: The Next Generation” on the other. I sipped from the Hope Hicks/Beverly Crusher glass, and we watched Maddow’s show over veggie enchiladas. “I think of her as a news doula: You know the news is going to be painful no matter what, so we might as well have someone who helps us survive it,” Kee told me. Last year, Kee had a Maddow-themed birthday party, at which her friends and her two young sons put on big black glasses and slicked their hair to the side. Also in attendance was a life-size cardboard cutout of Maddow, which is now in storage so as not to startle guests.
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After Rebecca Kee bought her Maddow cardboard cutout, she got a Robert Mueller one, too. For a time she would sit him in her front window, posing him near speech bubbles that she wrote herself. But after the real Mueller filed his report and failed to step into the role she had imagined for him, she tucked him away in the closet with Maddow. Now her car is decorated with Elizabeth Warren bumper stickers.
If this is what “real life” looks like in America’s blue regions, the Babylon Bee is really going to have to up its satire game to compete.
AS DAVE BARRY WOULD SAY, I SWEAR I’M NOT MAKING THIS UP: How Far Will the WaPo Go to Generate Clicks? Meet the Trump Georgia Butt Peach Story.
FASTER, PLEASE: Gene-based therapy shows promise for advanced prostate cancer.
A DAY THAT SHOULD LIVE IN INFAMY: Hong Kong protesters hit the streets as China marks 70 years of Communist rule.
Related: Why the 70th Anniversary of the Establishment of the People’s Republic of China Should be a Day of Mourning. “The PRC committed the biggest mass murder in the history of the world, and numerous other atrocities and human rights violations, some of which go on at this very moment.”
RESILIENCE IN THE FACE OF TRAUMA: THE ANNIVERSARY OF ROUTE 91 SHOOTING.
TOO LATE FOR ME, I BOUGHT THE IPHONE 11 PRO: 7 Ways to Make Your Old Phone Run Like New.
HMM: Bernie Sanders Is in Trouble. “Up close and personal with a candidate in decline — and seemingly stuck in his ways.”
With just four months until the first-in-the-nation caucuses, Sanders is in trouble. As he delivered his populist gospel to large crowds of camouflage-clad high schoolers, liberal arts college students, and trade union members across Iowa last week, a problematic narrative was hardening around him: His campaign is in disarray and Elizabeth Warren has eclipsed him as the progressive standard-bearer of the primary. He’s sunk to third place nationally, behind Warren and Joe Biden, and some polls of early nomination states show him barely clinging to double digits. He’s shaken up his staffs in Iowa and New Hampshire. He’s lost the endorsement of the Working Families Party, a left-wing group that backed him in 2016, to Warren.
Dismissed out of the gate in 2016 as a nonfactor against Hillary Clinton — only to single-handedly shift the Democratic Party’s ideological center of gravity — Sanders is quite familiar with being left for dead. His top brass’ official line is that pundits and political elites are writing him off because they have no clue what’s happening at kitchen tables and picket lines across America. Sanders and his team have argued some polls that are bad for him are out of whack and several polls that are good for him are ignored by the media.
Meanwhile, his aides say, Sanders remains a fundraising and organizing juggernaut.
Well, he is all about other people’s money.
But more seriously, at four months out and in this wide a field, fundraising might be a better indicator than some of these polls.
20 MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE: James Lileks on California’s Smoothie Consistency Act of 2020. While Los Angeles faces a crushing homeless problem, their city council passes the time being upset with plastic straws and smoothies:
Exit quote: “There seem to be two kinds of stories out of California cities these days: filth and forbiddance.”
ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why Your Dog Likes Sticking Its Head Out the Car Window.
REPUBLICANS POUNCE! Trump cranks up grievance machine. “Trump’s campaign has turned impeachment into an organizing tool for supporters primed to back a president they see as under siege.”
I can’t tell if the Left is outraged, astounded, or just flummoxed that Trump isn’t sitting there and taking it like a Bush or a Romney.
Or is this a time to embrace the healing power of “and?”
PROJECTION COMING IN, FAST AND FURIOUSLY: Eric Holder on 2020 Election: ‘Republicans Are Going to Cheat.’
GRANDMA STILL THINKS THE ELECTION WAS STOLEN: Hillary Condemns Backlash Against Greta Thunberg by Those Living in a ‘Fact-Free World.’
THE SCIENCE IS UNSETTLED — BUT DELICIOUS: Eat Less Red Meat, Scientists Said. Now Some Believe That Was Bad Advice.
IN THE MAIL: From Dr. Insensitive Jerk, Gaia’s Wasp.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: When attention gets monetized, it’s up to consumers to make reasonable limits on the supply. “One needn’t look far to see that today’s social media seems to keep people angrier, more reactive and less thoughtful than we used to be. (And it’s not as if people were paragons of reflective virtue beforehand.)”
HOW CAN WE MISS HIM IF HE WON’T GO AWAY? Jeff Flake Pens Op-Ed to Remind Everyone Why He Was Run out of Office.
PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, LET THIS BE A PARODY: “Woke Math in Seattle.”
HMM: McConnell says he’d have ‘no choice’ but to take up impeachment articles if House approves them. “How long you’re on it is a whole different matter, but I would have no choice but to take it up based on [the] Senate rule on impeachment.”
Sounds like McConnell is signaling that he’ll treat anything coming out of the House with as little seriousness as the House is treating it.
BUT DON’T QUESTION THEIR PATRIOTISM: POLL: 8% of Democratic college students, 74% of Republican college students very proud to be American.
AN UNFORTUNATE CHOICE OF HEADLINES: Why Nancy Pelosi Is Screwed.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Leader of Yale Law ‘animal rights’ program: ‘Past beliefs about human exceptionalism’ no longer legally relevant.