BOMB CANADA — THE CASE FOR WAR: Canadian kindergartners given masturbation homework assignment. “According to Libs of TikTok’s Substack, 4-year-olds at Alert Bay, British Columbia, were given a homework assignment discussing where and when to masturbate.The incident happened at the T’lisalagi’lakw School which is part of First Nation territory. School officials are said to be investigating the matter which was reportedly undertaken by one particular teacher and wasn’t indicative of the overall curriculum.”

(Classical reference in headline.)

VICTORIA TAFT: West Coast, Messed Coast™ Report – Lyin’ and Hidin’ Edition. “In this Friday the 13th edition, I lead off with the discovery of a mound of documents proving the existence of MK-Ultra-like experiments on Washington state prisoners some 50 years ago. But the question is why current COVID-19 dictator Jay Inslee suppressed them in 2021. Let’s see if you come up with the right answer.”

LOST HORIZON:

On a cold winter night in 1986, I met my father and the writer C.D.B Bryan at the Irish Connection, a bar in the basement of a building on DeSales Street in Washington, D.C. I was a student at Catholic University who had just published his first article as a professional, a piece on preventing animal cruelty for The Progressive. My father was the Senior Associate Editor of National Geographic magazine. C.D.B. Bryan was the popular author of Friendly Fire, a book about Vietnam. He had been hired by National Geographic to write the book National Geographic: 100 Years of Adventure and Discovery, which would be published in 1987.

My father had invited me to meet Bryan because he knew I had developed a fascination with Vietnam during a high school history class. He also knew that as a young journalist I would be enthralled to meet such an accomplished writer as Bryan who had written for the New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times Book Review. Over pints of Guinness, we three talked about various things—music, literature, sports, what it was like to write a massive history of National Geographic. Bryan expressed delight that I had just professionally published my first article, but added a quip: “The Progressive is a great place to start. I don’t know if you’d want your daughter dating a writer from there, but still.”

We discussed Friendly Fire, Bryan’s book that told the tragic story of Michael Mullen, an American soldier who had been killed by friendly fire in Vietnam. Friendly Fire revealed the lies the government had told about the nature of Mullen’s death. It explored in moving detail how Mullen’s parents, especially his mother Peg, went from staunch patriots to anti-war activists. “He was very proud of the fact that he exposed the friendly fire issue, and the fact that the government was lying to people who were as very patriotic as the Mullens were,” Mairi Bryan, C.D.B.’s wife, said after his death in 2009. “Of all of his works, Friendly Fire was the one of which he was most proud.”

It’s been more than thirty-five years since the night I had Guinness with my father and Bryan. Today, National Geographic reflects an obsession with race, gender, and “equity,” dedicating covers to slavery, feminism, transgender ideology, and Black Lives Matter. In 2017, the magazine ran a special issue on “The Gender Revolution,” parroting the catechism of the transgender faith, with all the logical inconsistencies that go along with it. It’s no surprise that the Western world has gone native into wokeism. Yet because it’s so personal, National Geographic‘s surrender is particularly painful.

As self-help author Mark Manson wrote in his 2019 book, Everything is F*cked, A Book About Hope (and Manson, like the rest of us, had no idea what was right around the corner):

Ideological religions are difficult to start, but they are far more common than spiritual religions. All you have to do is find some reasonable-sounding explanation for why everything is fucked and then extrapolate that across wide populations in a way that gives people some hope, and voilà! You have yourself an ideological religion. If you’ve been alive for more than twenty years, surely you’ve seen this happen a few times by now. In my lifetime alone there have been movements in favor of LGBTQ rights, stem cell research, and decriminalizing drug use. In fact, a lot of what everyone is losing their shit about today is the fact that traditionalist, nationalist, and populist ideologies are winning political power across much of the world, and these ideologies are seeking to dismantle much of the work accomplished by the neoliberal, globalist, feminist, and environmentalist ideologies of the late twentieth century.

Hence the moral panic within the leftist overculture of the last five years, which went into maximum overdrive in mid-2020, and as a result destroyed not only the readers’ trust of publications such as National Geographic that were once perceived as politically neutral, but trust in the public health profession as well:

“ULTRA-MAGA” TOOK SIX MONTHS? I’d do it in six minutes for half the price!

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: ‘Concerned’ students bringing more weapons to NYC schools, Chancellor Banks says. “Even in our schools that have not had — up until now — any significant issues, they’re expressing all kinds of anxiety because there are issues happening outside of the schools.”

OF COURSE SHE DOES: Biden’s Disinformation Czar Has a Diabolical Plan for Twitter.

SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE IS STUCK LIKE THAT: Florida, Texas students excelled while students in Democratic lock-down states lost academic ground.

A new study has found that although “high-poverty schools” suffered large losses in achievement by switching to remote learning during the coronavirus lockdowns, districts that remained largely in-person lost relatively little ground.

The report, titled “The consequences of remote and hybrid instruction during the pandemic,” was published by a team of researchers from the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research, and NWEA, a nonprofit research and educational services provider.

According to Harvard professor and education economist Thomas Kane, “Where schools remained in-person, gaps did not widen. Where schools shifted to remote learning, gaps widened sharply. Shifting to remote instruction was like turning a switch on a critical piece of our social infrastructure that we had taken for granted.”

In states like Florida and Texas, this is vindicating news after critics blasted the states’ Republican leadership for dismissing federal pandemic guidelines and returning to in-person learning much earlier than Democratic-led states.

Those that had the least lost the most while being awarded pittances in the form of “stimulus” checks.

Leftism in full bloom.

TURNING JAPANESE, I THINK I’M TURNING JAPANESE, I REALLY THINK SO: You can rent a ‘bunk bed pod’ in the Bay Area with 13 people for $800 a month.

The housing crisis in the San Francisco Bay Area has gotten so bad that one startup is now offering renters the chance to live in a “bunk bed pod” with 13 other people for just $800 a month.

Brownstone Shared Housing posted an ad for anyone looking to live in Palo Alto, the birthplace of Silicon Valley and the home of Stanford University.

Tenants are given the opportunity to shack up in a house with 13 other people. They sleep in a “bunk bed pod” while sharing two bathrooms.

The pods are “fully equipped” with electrical outlets, shelves for books, a rack from which one can hang clothes and laundry, hooks to hang plants and other decorations, and black curtains at the end of each pod for privacy.

Normally, the three-bedroom home would house a single family.

The startup is also advertising “co-living” spaces in another home — this one in Bakersfield. The home offers a pod for $500 a month alongside five other residents.

It’s not all that surprising to see the concept of the Japanese “capsule hotel” finally arrive in California. Look at these sweet Silicon Valley digs!

MUCH MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Netflix Fires Major Warning Shot At Its Woke Employees With New ‘Culture Memo.’

Variety reports that the change in Netflix’s company culture appears to be in large part due to the backlash the streaming service faced from woke employees last year over its Dave Chappelle special, which the employees claimed was transphobic.

The updated Netflix Culture memo includes a new section called “Artistic Expression” that states that it will not “censor specific artists or voices” even if employees consider the content “harmful.”

“If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you,” the memo states, later adding that employees may be required to work on projects that they “perceive to be harmful” and that if they have a hard time accepting their work assignment, they might want to consider working somewhere else.

“Entertaining the world is an amazing opportunity and also a challenge because viewers have very different tastes and points of view. So we offer a wide variety of TV shows and movies, some of which can be provocative,” the new section reads, later adding, “we support the artistic expression of the creators we choose to work with” and that “we let viewers decide what’s appropriate for them, versus having Netflix censor specific artists or voices.”

Netflix reportedly fired the leader of a trans organization within the company last October who allegedly organized a walkout to protest the company backing Chappelle over his special “The Closer.”

The Verge reported:

The employee was terminated on suspicion of leaking metrics to the press related to the Dave Chappelle special. Those metrics — about how much Netflix paid for The Closer and how many people it reached — subsequently ended up in a report on Bloomberg. While the employee had shared the metrics internally, they spoke out against the leaks to colleagues, worried they might hurt the walkout movement.

The leaking of internal data is highly unusual at Netflix. While the company prides itself on transparency, employees are told that the culture can only thrive when Netflix data remains internal.

Speaking of Netflix, Sonny Bunch writes: Traipsing Through the Vaster Wasteland. On Netflix, HBO Max, and thirst in the desert.

When you put a bunch of people in charge of making shows who don’t know how to make shows, you run into trouble. This is at least part of the reason why Netflix itself is in crisis, having lost three-quarters of its market cap and leaving creators unsure of its ability to do the only thing it was good for, namely shoveling money into the pockets of filmmakers in exchange for them churning out stuff they couldn’t get made elsewhere. Netflix’s biggest draw—its endless maw of “content”—is now its biggest liability. Sure, the food sucked, but the portions were sizable. Because no one ever said no.

Consider Anatomy of a Scandal, which I, unfortunately, spent last week watching. It’s the sort of program into which Netflix has poured untold millions, a mere portion of the $17 billion the service spent on programming in 2021 and a similar sum spent the year before. The six-episode miniseries was co-created by David E. Kelley of L.A. Law and Ally McBeal fame. It has stars in Sienna Miller (American Sniper, Layer Cake) and Michelle Dockery (Downton Abbey) whom the algorithm has undoubtedly pinpointed as audience favorites. It is based on a relatively popular book of the same name. It has “social relevance” in the sense that it is about #MeToo.

And it is utterly implausible and silly, each episode ending on a cliffhanger that’s so stupid the director of the episodes had to radically upend the style of the show we’d been watching—veering from vaguely realistic to surreal—in order to really hit home just how shocking it all is. As my wife and I joked when the first episode closed with James Whitehouse (Rupert Friend) literally being blown off his feet by an invisible force after he was told that what had heretofore been a mere infidelity scandal was mutating into a rape charge, it was like something out of The Matrix.

But The Matrix requires far fewer cognitive leaps, far less suspension of disbelief. Anatomy of a Scandal requires us to believe that a political official would not only be charged with rape as the result of a workplace dalliance but that the case against him would be randomly assigned to be prosecuted by a woman he assaulted decades prior who has since changed her name and also that neither the man charged nor his wife (Miller) would recognize this barrister despite having gone to college with her years before. And this is, believe it or not, the smallest leap of faith we’re asked to take.

* * * * * * * *

Obviously no network falls on the failures of a single show. But Anatomy of a Scandal isn’t a single failure and, as Richard Rushfield noted in the Ankler, even the Hollywood trades that have benefited from Netflix’s advertising spending are starting to stick the shivs in. A headline like “Mike Myers’ ‘The Pentaverate’ Is Just the Latest Example of Netflix’s Blank-Check Bloat: TV Review” in Variety would’ve been unthinkable just a few months ago. Now the narrative has shifted. Netflix makes a lot of shit, emphasis on both the lot and the shit, and people are finally starting to call them out on it.

All of a sudden, Netflix has turned from the awards-season darling and the great hope of the post-theatrical future to just another spigot pouring out dumb money into Hollywood. “Agents tell me that while of course their clients will take Netflix’s money, who wouldn’t, that the effect on their clients’ careers from Netflix projects is nil,” Rushfield writes. “‘There is no bump,’ one agent friend told me. Apple and then HBO have replaced Netflix as the place to take your project if you want the best chance of it being seen and noticed.”

Which, along with Netflix’ stock closing down a whopping 35 percent last month, helps to explain the above memo from its management to its crybully employees.

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Same Old, Same Old: Career Criminal, Low Bail, and Another Mass Shooting in Chicago.

HYPOCRISY, THY NAME IS PSAKI: All those protestors, bombers, shooters and bullies we thought were far-Left radicals were actually “Arlington Republicans,” according to the former White House press secretary.

DC SCHOOLS SPEND MORE PER PUPIL: At $31,843, the District of Columbia Public School (DCPS) system spends more tax dollars per student than any of the 50 states. And yet, as Hans Bader notes, student performance on standardized national tests trails all 50 of the states.

And we continue to allow these charlatans to run public schools across America why?

BLUE CITY BLUES: Majority of NYC workers STILL refuse to return to the office: Just 8% are going back full-time while 78% of workplaces have adopted hybrid models and 28% haven’t returned at all despite Mayor Eric Adams’ pleas for them to head back to the city.

The VodkaWife™’s employer wanted her back at the office starting this month. Her previous employer, that is.

RIP: Fred Ward, star of The Right Stuff, Tremors, and The Player, dead at 79.

MARY KATHARINE HAM: Democrats’ support for school closings comes back to bite.

Returning teachers and administrators certainly faced risks. They worried for their students, themselves and their own families. But as the school year progressed, the high costs of virtual school led some public-health officials to change their tune on the risk calculus, suggesting that in the time of vaccines and other mitigations, “teachers need to accept, as other essential workers have, that returning to school will entail some risk.”

Often, Democratic politicians, health and school officials, and teachers unions in some of America’s bluest cities and suburbs aligned perfectly in a mission to keep school doors closed for so long. In these places, in-person instruction was deemed nonessential by the very people who claim to fight for public-school education.

The high academic and social costs of remote learning and closed schools are now indisputable, but there was also a political cost. Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia capitalized on it by appealing to frustrated parents in 2021. He won an underdog race in this increasingly blue battleground state, the first statewide win for the GOP in more than a decade, on the strength of improved suburban performance combined with rural base turnout.

His opponent former Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s defining gaffe — “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” — solidified his party’s image as aligned with school boards and teachers unions, as did his decision to have American Federation of Teachers head Randi Weingarten stump for him at the close of the race.

After that loss, and a squeaker for Democrats in a New Jersey governor’s race animated by many of the same issues, the landscape changed. The American Academy of Pediatrics concluded that for the 2021-22 school year, the risks of closing schools outweighed opening them — even in the face of more contagious variants like Delta and Omicron. But the political damage remains for Democrats, who had become the face of school-closure policy.

In addition to the damage done to kids by losing in-class learning, the switchover to Zoom also allowed parents to finally see much more of what their kids were being taught. As did accounts such as Libs of TikTok, which curated the craziest of what leftist teachers were voluntarily uploading to the Internet, resulting in headlines such as this: Left-Wing Teachers Ditch Teaching To Indoctrinate Kids About Sex Against Parents’ Will.

Related: Add Homeschooling To List Of Things The Left Says Is Racist.

Right on cue, to deflect from the myriad woes of state-run education.

YA THINK? “If there’s an online discussion about race, using the term ‘white privilege’ can create a polarized situation, researchers report.”

I find that my own arguments do indeed go over less well when I start out by saying “First of all, you unavoidably suck because of who you are.”

HARRISON BERGERON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Rhode Island parents enraged at school board for removing honors classes in ‘equity obsession.’

KYLE SMITH: Goodbye, Jen Psaki — no one condescends quite like you.

Ordinarily, White House press secretaries try not to look like they’re getting so rattled by rude questions that they stoop to insulting the reporters, but Psaki said Fox News’ Peter Doocy sounds like a “stupid son of a bitch” in the course of throwing in an absurd and evidence-free suggestion that Doocy is a ventriloquist’s dummy for higher-ups.

“We must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue,” her boss famously intoned at his inauguration, but the Return to Civility (™) went out the window the minute Psaki discovered the existence of exactly one White House reporter asking questions more challenging than, “Why are you guys so awesome?”

White House flacks don’t usually keep working for the administration after they’ve accepted a job offer from a partisan news outlet, but Psaki did that.

Nor do they generally cheerlead for criminals, but even though Psaki is smart enough to know that intimidating judges by mobbing their houses is illegal, when asked whether her fellow Democrats should continue menacing the homes of Supreme Court justices, her answer was a green light: “There’s a lot of passion, there’s a lot of fear.”

The Democratic mob’s effort to influence the upcoming Dobbs decision that might overturn Roe v. Wade by swarming the homes of duly appointed Supreme Court justices is so revolting that even ultra-liberal Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin said it was “reprehensible.” Thanks to Psaki, voters now have excellent reason to disregard last year’s awful Jan. 6 riots as merely the analogue to what Democrats are doing to try to interfere with the business of the Supreme Court.

It’s hilarious that, as Psaki turns her back on the podium and tries her luck at being an MSNBC star, Clueless Joe’s approval ratings just hit a record low of 34%, according to a Civiqs poll this week, and she acts as though progressivism is winning big-time.

Perhaps in tribute to Psaki, the White House comms shop sent out quite a tweet last night: White House tweet about what wasn’t available when Biden took office quickly debunked using previous WH tweet; Updated:

CAN DOGECOIN FIX TWITTER’S BOT PROBLEM? Newly relevant since, as Stephen reports, Musk says his purchase is held up over Twitter’s claim that it’s less than 5% bots. I am enthusiastic about cryptocurrencies, but boy is the bot problem more easily solvable for 99% of people:

1. Make it so everyone can pay $1 a month via credit card with a name for a blue check verification (instead of it being some weird pseudo-endorsement granted by our unseen overlords).
2. Make it so users can choose to see only blue checks if they want, or blue checks and things they retweet. Or both, whatever.
3. Twitter gets millions in revenue, people are spared bots if they choose, and anonymous speech is still fine and available for folks who might want it (like Libs of TikTok) and who offer interesting material. Any blue checks lying about who they are are committing credit card fraud.

Or some variety of that, anyway. Practically every legitimate political problem with social media is solved if you let users choose their filters rather than leave it to companies to choose what you can I can see. The political problem this does not solve is silencing your opponents “disinformation,” which is why nobody seems to want to suggest this most obvious of solutions.

WELCOME BACK, CARTER! Democrats Wants to Give Biden Power to Impose Price Controls on Gas.

Such a move would surely bring shortages, as Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey notes.

Price controls do not eliminate “price gouging.” They artificially cap prices to a point where producers and retailers can’t profit off of their work. Production inevitably falls off, which then requires sharp rationing of shortage resources, as we also saw in the 1970s. I still recall the odd/even pump days based on your license plate and 5-gallon limits per visit, as well as the 2-hour waits to get to the pump at all, hopefully before the station ran out of gasoline.

Fortunately it’s pure grandstanding, as the legislation will be dead on arrival in the Senate.

Otherwise, I hope this ends better than the last time around:

RED ON RED: Georgia’s GOP Civil War Heats Up as Former VP Pence Endorses Governor Kemp.

DEAL OF THE DAY: Musment Charcoal Grill. #CommissionEarned

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: With Baby Formula Shortage, Pete Buttigieg Forced To Chestfeed.

EVERYTHING IS GOING… SWIMMINGLY: How Russian Forces Got Obliterated Trying To Cross A River.

The photos don’t seem to confirm the UA claim of 30-50 vehicles destroyed and up to 1,500 Russian dead, but the carnage on display is not insignificant.

BURN THE WITCH: Stephen King Goes Off the Reservation on Men Having Babies and I’m so Confused Right Now.