SNOWFLAKE NATION: Facebook Hiding ‘Like’ Counts so Wusses Don’t Get Their Feelings Hurt.

CANCEL CULTURE, THEN AND NOW: At Quillette, in an article titled, “‘Cancel Culture,’ Roaring Twenties-Style,” Kevin Mims looks in detail at legendary prizefighter Jack Dempsey, and silent movie superstar Fatty Arbuckle, whose careers were derailed by moral outrages – Dempsey for rumors of draft-dodging, Arbuckle for, well, as they say in Hollywood, rumors of violating his moral turpitude clause rather badly:

The 1920s—and the cases of Dempsey and Arbuckle in particular—offer warnings in these overheated and confusing times about the dangers of trial by media and a rush to judgment. Reputations and careers, once tainted by accusation may never recover, even if those accusations turn out to be based on nothing but hearsay and lies or motivated by nothing more noble than score-settling. There are those who may argue that people like Dempsey and Arbuckle are acceptable collateral damage in the fight over values. But it is more important still to ensure that we establish the truth of the matter at hand, and that the punishment fit the crime…should one turn out to have been committed at all.

But today’s cancel culture has been working at a much faster rate of attrition, simply because of how easy it is to gin up the mob – and aim it at people with far less social standing than today’s equivalents of Dempsey and Arbuckle, often simply for kicks and grins.

Consider these recent stories:

1. Local Indiana TV reporter walks into an Walkerton (population  2,248) pizza parlor and asks the owner a hypothetical question about catering a gay wedding. When the interviewee’s traditional morals are viewed as doubleplus ungood crimethink by the local TV reporter and her bosses, her segment serves as the Bat-Signal, and then ”The Internet has unleashed its wrath.” as BuzzFeed passively described it at the time. As Scott Ott wrote, “All of those eyeballs benefit the TV station, which sells advertising on its website. It also helps several young, minor-market reporters who hustled and stumbled their way into the national spotlight. But don’t blame them. Blame the editor.” Meanwhile, “Over on Facebook, the restaurant’s 5-star average rating rapidly plunged to one star, as non-customers slammed away at Crystal’s little business.”

2. Woman tweets poorly written joke based around white privilege before boarding a plane to Africa. “‘We are about to watch this @JusticeSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time. Before she even KNOWS she’s getting fired,’ one Twitter user wrote. Sacco lost her job and endured months of harassment online and offline.”

3. Man creates a silly animated gif with a CNN logo placed atop a wrestler getting body-slammed. Silly gif is retweeted by President Trump. CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski (formerly of BuzzFeed, where he led the Twitter mob against the aforementioned Sacco) doxxes man into submission on the Fourth of July of 2017 by keeping his name private because “he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again. In addition, he said his statement could serve as an example to others not to do the same. CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.” To paraphrase Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi, no anti-CNN gifs for you – forever!

4. And just this week, Iowa’s Carson King loses a sponsorship from Anheuser-Busch because a former BuzzFeed writer employed by the Des Moines Register digs into tweets he wrote when he was 16, which they later Orwellianly described as a “routine background check.” Naturally, the editor sacks the former BuzzFeed writer and refuses to acknowledge her own role in not striking out that passage from the article, and possibly giving Anheuser-Busch an advanced screening of the piece.

And by pillering King, her paper brags that they’ve done a great public service:

As H.L. Mencken famously wrote, “Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”  But now, with just a click of a button on social media, Internet puritans can make that person’s life a living hell. And as Allahpundit noted last week, after Saturday Night Live creator-producer Lorne Michaels caved to the mob and fired comedian Shane Gillis, “Pity [Gillis], though, for having endured one of the special cruelties of cancel culture, having your dirty laundry aired *right after* you’ve achieved your professional dream. It’s like Kyler Murray getting zapped for offensive tweets he sent in his younger teenaged years days after he won the Heisman. No one cares about policing wokeness in people until the very moment they become hugely successful and potential cultural influencers. And so inevitably one of the best days of their lives becomes one of the worst.”

YES. To Hell with the Elites. “It’s time for the president to build a big, beautiful door in the wall of propaganda that papers over the actions of America’s ruling class. And make the Democrats pay for it.”

YOU KNOW THAT’S GOING TO BE A SELLING POINT: BMW Has Posted, And Then Deleted, an Ad Hinting at Sex in Self-Driving Cars.

THAT’S DIFFERENT BECAUSE SHUT UP: Senate Democrats Face Questions After Letter Resurfaces of Them Asking Ukraine to Investigate Trump in 2018.

TELECONTRACEPTION: Buying birth control online safe, secret shopper study shows. Too bad the Democrats keep blocking GOP efforts to make the pills over the counter.

UGH: Active-Duty Suicide Rate Rises for Fifth Consecutive Year.

WINSTON SMITH SMILES: Canada’s Green Party used Photoshop to add reusable cup and metal straw to photo of Elizabeth May.

AT AMAZON, deals in Men’s Shaving.

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY: That’s Not the Camel’s Nose.

A Milton, FL couple, Gloria Lancaster, 68, and Edmond Lancaster, 73, were visiting the Tiger Truck Stop in Louisiana when their dog slipped his leash. The dog got into the truck stop’s camel enclosure — is this a Louisiana thing? — so Gloria, ignoring the warning signs, crawled under the barbed-wire fence to fetch her dog.

That’s when things got weird.

I really can’t give away anything more than that.

YOUNGEST CHILDREN IN CLASS more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD.

QUESTION ASKED AND (POSSIBLY) ANSWERED: Who is responsible for the impeachment circus?

NATO: Russia is About to Get A Close Look at the F-35 Stealth Fighter.

Italian F-35As belonging to the Italian air force’s 13° Gruppo, 32° Stormo are on track to take over the air-policing mission in Iceland, David Cenciotti reported at The Aviationist on Sept. 25, 2019.

“The Italian aircraft, that have already deployed to Keflavik International Airport, from their homebase at Amendola air base in southeastern Italy, will start flying familiarisation sorties in the next few days,” Cenciotti wrote. “After achieving the NATO certification they will start quick-reaction alert duties.”

“The F-35s, were accompanied by a KC-767A tanker, a C-130J and a P-72A maritime patrol aircraft,” Cenciotti added, citing data from flight-tracking websites.

F-35s surely will become regular fixtures in NATO deployments.

Well, those stealth jets are going to get close, but I’m not sure how much of a look Moscow will get.

OMEGA 3 AS adjunct therapy for depressions.

HMM: How The House Plans To Use Its ‘Inquiry’ To Instigate Impeachment.

Congress’s authority to request documents is dependent on whether it has a legitimate legislative purpose for the documents. The purpose of the House invoking the phrase “impeachment inquiry” is to create a pretext to argue in court that it has a right to the documents.

The White House brushed off many of Nadler’s requests in this May 15, 2019 letter denying the requests because Nadler had “not articulated any proper legislative purpose” for pursuing matters already investigated by Robert Mueller, for example. Because impeachment is one of the enumerated functions of the House, document requests relevant to an “impeachment inquiry” might be able to overcome this objection.

The strategy of declaring an “impeachment inquiry” actually has little or nothing to do with a serious effort to put a case in front of the Senate based upon existing wrongdoing. Rather, it calls to mind the technique used to snare so many victims of the get Trump movement: the process crime. Democrats want to force the president into defying a court order upholding a House document request in order to meet the Khanna test for a full-blown impeachment proceeding.

Impeachment was a scam from the start.

ON THIS DAY 80 YEARS AGO: Warsaw fell to German forces following a brief but awful siege.

POLITICO PUBLISHES ARTICLE TITLED, ‘JUST ANOTHER DAY IN F***NUTSVILLE’ BEFORE QUICKLY CHANGING.

On Friday morning, Politico Magazine published an opinion piece from author and founding editor of Politico John Harris titled, “Just Another Day In F***nutsville.”

The outlet quickly updated the headline to read: “Trump Killed the Seriousness of Impeachment.” For a brief time, the URL of the article still included the original title.

Steve Guest, the rapid response director for the Republican National Committee, flagged the error and included a screenshot of the original headline.

They should have stuck to their guns – it’s a perfect description of Washington, and the Democratic Party operatives with bylines such as the Politico, that keep F***nutsville churning along.

BIDEN SAYS A LOT OF STUFF: Biden Accuses Trump of Trying to ‘Hijack an Election’ in Ukraine Call.

YEAH, BUT TRUMP SAID SOMETHING MEAN ABOUT SOMEBODY: World Yawns as U.S. Accuses Syria of Another Chemical Attack on Civilians.

PHOTO ESSAY: Protesters rally outside Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam’s town hall meeting.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Microaggressions and “micro assaults.” Meh. A micro-problem.

NEW ORLEANS RADIO HOST THREATENING TO SUE OVER ANTI-GAY TWEET THE STATION CLAIMS HE SENT HIMSELF:

A radio host in New Orleans said he received an anti-gay slur, sent to him from the radio station’s Twitter account. On Wednesday, WWL host Seth Dunlap, who is openly gay, said he planned to sue the station’s parent company after working for years in a homophobic and hostile workplace. In a strange turn of events Thursday, the New Orleans Police Department said the homophobic tweet sent to Dunlap came from none other than Dunlap’s phone.

Read the whole thing. Curiously, the words “Jussie Smollett” do not appear in the CBS News article itself, but they are in the article’s metatitle: “Seth Dunlap Louisiana: WWL Radio host threatening to sue over anti-gay tweet sent the tweet himself, station claims, similar to Jussie Smollett case – CBS News.”