MARK JUDGE: The Hollywood Stasi and their botched anti-Kavanaugh film.

A new surprise documentary recently played at the Sundance Film Festival. Justice looks into the sexual misconduct allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. The film is being sold by filmmaker Doug Liman, who kept its existence a secret for years before premiering it to a sold-out theater surrounded by armed guards.

The verdict is that Justice is a nothing burger, with no new evidence and even the Hollywood Reporter calling it “a nonevent.”

I haven’t seen the film, but I was approached about it by Liman late last year. I played a role in the Kavanaugh confirmation battle when a woman named Christine Blasey Ford claimed that I was in the room when she was assaulted by a teenage Brett Kavanaugh in 1982. Ford famously could not remember the time or place of the alleged incident, and her claim was rebuked by a close friend of Ford’s who Ford said had also been at the party.

I wrote a book about my experience in The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi. My thesis is that the media, opposition researchers, and Hollywood form a new American Stasi, similar to the old East German secret police. They use extortion, intimidation, and threats to destroy the lives of others, ignoring any facts or evidence that point away from their narrative.

Justice is a great example. My suspicion is that Liman and his crew were working on a heavily propagandistic film for years and were not expecting my book to drop.

Read the whole thing.

THIS IS THE WAY: After DeSantis pushback, College Board drops Critical Race Theory from AP course.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: Chip Roy Gets Maxine Waters to Denounce Maxine Waters in Amazing Exchange.

Before he addressed Waters, though, Roy stated that “I was intrigued by an op-ed that I saw not too long ago by a Democrat from Cuba commenting on one of our colleagues, an avowed socialist [AOC], and essentially pointing out the extent to which ‘democratic socialism is a lot like the system my family fled except its proponents promised to be nicer when seizing your business.’”

“That’s the truth,” Roy remarked. “We can talk about these terms as if they don’t matter, but they do. They do matter. They’re actually at the core of who we are.”

“I’ve got one question for the ranking member,” Roy continued, looking at Waters and then his notes. “Ranking member Waters, in a 2008 hearing you said quote, ‘and guess what, this liberal will be all about? This liberal will be all about socializing, would be about basically taking over the government and the government running all of your companies,’ end quote” Roy said. “Simple question: Do you stand by that statement?”

Waters responded by first claiming that socialism was “basically a non-issue” and saying that the federal programs she was trying to protect were the same ones Roy wanted to protect.

Roy didn’t take the bait and insisted on Waters addressing the 2008 remarks he referenced where she appeared to advocate for a government takeover of the oil industry. Waters denied twice during their back and forth that she was a socialist. She later claimed she was a “capitalist” in what hilariously came across as Maxine Waters denouncing Maxine Waters when all was said and done.

Now get her to denounce her numerous calls for violence:

● Rep. Maxine Waters Jokes About Threatening Trump Supporters ‘All The Time.’

● Maxine Waters: ‘Americans should be out in the streets screaming’ for Trump’s head.

● Democrat Maxine Waters Makes Public Call For Harassment & Violence Against Members of Trump Administration.

GENTLEMEN, YOU CAN’T HYPERSEXUALIZE ME, I’VE BEEN A SEX-BOMB MY ENTIRE CAREER! ‘I’m capable of anything:’ Pamela Anderson, 55, talks defying people’s expectations of her after years of being hypersexualized in new interview with WSJ Magazine.

IT’S COME TO THIS: The NPCs are mad at Mr. Beast for curing 1,000 people of blindness because the woke mob is eternally angry.

Or as America’s Newspaper of Record quips: Sad: YouTuber MrBeast Spends Millions Curing Blind People When He Could’ve Sent Another Tank To Ukraine.

21st CENTURY QUESTIONS: Can Chat GPT3 Make Pennsylvania a Red State?

Microsoft has already pledged $10 billion to optimize Chat GPT3 toward profitability. Tens of billions more dollars are coming.

The last time policymakers were presented with displacement on this scale was the globalization that decimated the American working class. The solution for Pennsylvania policymakers was to pivot the state’s economy to “Eds and Meds,” which now constitute 44% of total employment.

Those industries were chosen because spending is generated predominantly by the government, which is historically stable. To quote Ronald Reagan, “Government programs, once launched, never disappear.” Pennsylvania policymakers knew that they were making safe bets as those markets would almost always exist.

The pivot worked, with Pennsylvania stabilizing its population decline. Communities able to make the pivot, particularly in the suburbs, saw prosperity.

Once reliably Republican, the suburban voters employed by “Eds and Meds” now constitute the Democratic Party’s base. The rise of conservative populism, which pointed the finger at college-educated elites for the decline of the working class, accelerated the trend.

The reticence of suburban elites to choose Republican candidates is understandable, considering some in the GOP’s working-class base label them the enemy. For many in the working class, the contempt is personal, as they perceive the college-educated as having enriched themselves at their expense, via globalization.

But generative artificial intelligence is poised to inflict the same level of economic devastation on suburban elites as suffered by the working class through globalization. Some elites will undoubtedly find sure footing in the pending economy created by generative artificial intelligence. But many others will not.

As Glenn wrote at his Substack, “Famous writers and artists may be brands, unique enough not to be replaced by machine intelligence. But most writers and artists aren’t famous, and aren’t brands, and are hired simply to do a good enough job, cheaply enough, to meet client needs. When machines can do the job as well or better for less money, they’ll be out of work. Well, this is all good news for plumbers and auto mechanics. Their jobs are safe unless and until they can be replaced by actual robots, something that’s much further away. It’s just a lot more difficult to manipulate atoms than bits.”

THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: 4chan users embrace AI voice clone tool to generate celebrity hatespeech.

Such AI voice deepfakes have improved rapidly over the past few years, but ElevenLabs’ software, which seems to have opened up general access over the weekend, offers a potent combination of speed, quality, and availability — as well as a complete lack of safeguards.

Abuse of ElevenLabs’ software was first reported by Motherboard, which found posters on 4chan sharing AI generated voice clips that sound like famous individuals including Emma Watson and Joe Rogan. As Motherboard’s Joseph Cox reports:

HEATHER MAC DONALD: Tyre Nichols and the new black-cop white supremacy.

Had the officers been white, their race would have led every report on the incident. But since all were black, such reticence bought time until a new racism reporting protocol could be developed.

CNN commentator and Obama White House veteran Van Jones initiated that new protocol. Connoisseurs of academic identity politics are familiar with the nostrum that only whites can be racist, since, according to black studies ideology, racism equals power plus privilege (and blacks allegedly lack both).

But that “blacks can’t be racist” line has changed. Now we learn from Van Jones that blacks can be racist, too — at least as regards other blacks.

“It’s time to move to a more nuanced discussion of the way police violence endangers black lives,” Jones wrote on the CNN website last Friday. “It is the race of the victim who is brutalized, not the race of the violent cop — that is most relevant in determining whether racial bias is a factor in police violence.”

In other words: anything bad that happens to blacks is a function of racism, determined solely by the race of the victim, not by the intentions or identity of the perpetrator.

Only cops are subject to this new “the victim alone determines the reality of racism” rule, however. Those black teenagers who shoot at their gang rivals on a near daily basis and who regularly take out young black children as collateral damage are not deemed “anti-black” by the mainstream media and its academic sources.

The rest of the race industry quickly coalesced around Jones’s lopsided definition of racism, from which whiteness has been provisionally suspended (to be restored the next time a white cop is caught on videotape using force against a black suspect).

Meanwhile, Whoopi Goldberg bellowed on The View, “‘Seems things don’t seem to make sense to people unless it’s somebody they can feel or they can recognize. But how many times do we have to – do you we need to see white people also get beaten before anybody will do anything?’ Goldberg wondered during her opening screed. She followed up by claiming she wasn’t suggesting what she was clearly suggesting. ‘I’m not suggesting that. So, don’t write us and tell me what a racist I am,’ she whined.”

REPORT: Former ABC News producer who went ‘missing’ in 2022 arrested for transportation of child pornography.

SAINTS, BRONCOS AGREE TO TRADE TO MAKE SEAN PAYTON DENVER’S HEAD COACH.

UPDATE: DeMeco Ryans Ignores Stephen A. Smith’s Advice, Becomes Third Straight Black Head Coach For ‘Racist’ Houston Texans.

(Updated and bumped.)

JOHN PODHORETZ: Biden’s base: Why he won’t end the COVID ‘emergency’ for months.

Here’s the New York Times press release — sorry, “news report”: “Ending the emergency will prompt complex changes in the cost of Covid tests and treatments that Americans are accustomed to getting for free. Any charges they face will vary depending on whether they have private insurance, Medicare coverage, Medicaid coverage or no health insurance. What state they live in could also be a factor.”

Here’s the thing: People don’t need COVID tests and treatments in the way they did before. Know why? Because there’s way less COVID, and what does persist is vastly less dangerous.

This is all disingenuous hogwash anyway. What the Biden people are doing here is trying to provide a soft landing for their government-worker constituents, so many of them toiling from home, who have been the true beneficiaries of the changes in workplace rules since 2020 — not the people for whom they work, namely us.

Or maybe they’re all just trying to figure out what the hell the boss is actually trying to say, since Biden announced out of nowhere Tuesday, “The COVID emergency will end when the Supreme Court ends it.”

I’m not sure whether that statement fills out your “Biden is an idiot” or your “Biden is senile” square on your “There’s Something Wrong With Biden” bingo card, but you can certainly make an argument for either — or both!

Embrace the healing power of Trunalimunumaprzure “and.”

COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW: The press versus the president, part one.

By July, Trump was poised to become the GOP nominee at the party’s convention in Cleveland. On July 18, the first day of the gathering, Josh Rogin, an opinion columnist for the Washington Post, wrote a piece about the party’s platform position on Ukraine under the headline “Trump campaign guts GOP’s anti-Russian stance on Ukraine.” The story would turn out to be an overreach. Subsequent investigations found that the original draft of the platform was actually strengthened by adding language on tightening sanctions on Russia for Ukraine-related actions, if warranted, and calling for “additional assistance” for Ukraine. What was rejected was a proposal to supply arms to Ukraine, something the Obama administration hadn’t done.

Rogin’s piece nevertheless caught the attention of other journalists. Within a few days, Paul Krugman, in his Times column, called Trump the “Siberian candidate,” citing the “watering down” of the platform. Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, labeled Trump a “de facto agent” of Putin. He cited the Rogin report and a recent interview Trump gave to the Times where he emphasized the importance of NATO members paying their bills and didn’t answer a question on whether nations in arrears could count on American support if Russia attacked them.

But other journalists saw the Rogin piece differently, introducing a level of skepticism that most of the press would ignore. Masha Gessen, a Russian-American journalist and harsh Putin critic, writing in the New York Review of Books that month, said labeling Trump a Putin agent was “deeply flawed.” Gessen, in articles then and a few months later, said the accounts of the platform revisions were “slightly misleading” because sanctions, something the “Russians had hoped to see gone,” remained, while the proposal for lethal aid to Ukraine was, at the time, a step too far for most experts and the Obama administration.

Matt Taibbi, who spent time as a journalist in Russia, also grew uneasy about the Trump-Russia coverage. Eventually, he would compare the media’s performance to its failures during the run-up to the Iraq War. “It was a career-changing moment for me,” he said in an interview. The “more neutral approach” to reporting “went completely out the window once Trump got elected. Saying anything publicly about the story that did not align with the narrative—the repercussions were huge for any of us that did not go there. That is crazy.”

Taibbi, as well as Glenn Greenwald, then at The Intercept, and Aaron Mate, then at The Nation, left their publications and continue to be widely followed, though they are now independent journalists. All were publicly critical of the press’s Trump-Russia narrative. (Taibbi, over the last month, surged back into the spotlight after Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, gave him access to the tech platform’s files.)

At the end of July, the DNC held its nominating convention in Philadelphia. In attendance were legions of journalists, as well as Simpson and Fritsch. On the eve of the events, the hacked emails from the DNC were dumped, angering supporters of Bernie Sanders, who saw confirmation in the messages of their fears that the committee had favored Hillary.

The disclosures, while not helpful to Clinton, energized the promotion of the Russia narrative to the media by her aides and Fusion investigators. On July 24, Robby Mook, Hillary’s campaign manager, told CNN and ABC that Trump himself had “changed the platform” to become “more pro-Russian” and that the hack and dump “was done by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump,” according to unnamed “experts.”

Yes, it’s your regularly scheduled DNC-MSM “we really screwed up coverage of the last Republican president, and we promise never to do it again” article. (Pay no attention to the 2024 battlefield prep we’re already doing: The Washington Post Botches the Florida Classroom-Library Controversy.)

TYLER O’NEIL: Missouri Schools Took Kids to a Drag Show Without Informing Parents. AG Bailey Is Working to Prevent It Happening Again.

“I want Missouri to be the safest state in the nation for children, which includes preventing school officials from taking schoolchildren to drag shows,” Andrew Bailey, the state’s attorney general, said in a statement on the letter, first provided to The Daily Signal. “That’s why I am asking the Missouri School Board Association to call on their members to adopt a resolution pledging to uphold Missouri law on what can be taught regarding human sexuality in schools.”

“My office will use every tool at our disposal to ensure Missouri children are educated, not indoctrinated, and that parents have a say in the process,” Bailey, a Republican, added.

Bailey’s letter points to Missouri state law on human sexuality instruction and states that “adherence to the law is particularly important in the wake of recent events in which Columbia Public Schools took a group of middle school students to an event that featured a drag show performance.”

“Drag shows are inherently sexualized performances,” Bailey argues. “they are an outward expression of a desired sexuality and sexual identity. They are intended to draw attention to human sexuality in a manner that appeals to prurient interests. Drag shows have no educational value and no place in our public schools.”

Much more like this, please.

NO, HE FAILED IN MANY, MANY DIFFERENT WAYS: Internal watchdog warns Fauci’s agency failed in one huge way.

It seems we get new evidence of the malpractice going on at Dr. Fauci’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) every week at this point. And all of that evidence continues to point to illegal and dangerous gain-of-function research gone awry in the Wuhan lab—research the American people were unknowingly paying for.

The Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) just released a new bombshell report that specifically examined three grants the NIH made to the notorious nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance that they were using as a pass-through organization to cover their tracks. EcoHealth was given $8 million between 2014 and 2021, some of which went to the Wuhan lab.

Flashback: Unredacted Documents Reveal Fauci Tried to Shift the Narrative On the Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory.

FREDDIE DEBOER: Do You Want Cancel Culture to Exist?

What I find more interesting is that this argument requires the very thing that it laments. That is, in order to make this argument, you need to have figures like Louis CK who escape/survive the consequences of public shaming, but simultaneously to assert that this is a bad thing. The immediate question for someone who expresses this point of view should be, “so you would prefer cancel culture exist, yes?” Because if it did, by their own contention, then Louis CK would not be playing Madison Square Garden, nor would other publicly-shamed individuals escape the consequences. (An implied consequence of this tweet, and arguments like it, is that public shaming should be permanently career-ending, which many people would take as a decent gloss on cancel culture.) And once you’ve established that the argument suggests that cancel culture would be a good thing, we’re free to debate it as a preferred state of affairs if not a current reality – at which point the whole “cancel culture doesn’t exist” complaint becomes moot. By wishing for it you’re making it arguable.

I do think that things like Louis CK getting back some of his career are indicative of a loosening of the strict social culture that flourished in the past half-decade or so.

But as Jim Treacher pointed out yesterday, Louis CK is only able to “get back some of his career” because he can afford to self-fund his relaunch: “When he wins an award because his work is still excellent, everybody gets embarrassed and quickly moves on. The entertainment industry has turned their backs on him, and it’s nobody’s fault but his own. But he can still stand on a stage and say words. All he needs is a microphone, a room, an audience, and someone to record it all. So he just did it himself.3 His comeback4 has been completely self-financed. He pays out of his own pocket to produce all the comedy specials he’s made since his cancellation, and he distributes them himself. He’s the one taking all the risk. And if he starts being bad at comedy, he’s the one who takes a loss.”

MARK JUDGE: All About the Narrative.

Of course, [former Washington Post executive editor Len Downie] spends a lot of time on Watergate, which turned the Post staff into movie stars and the Post from a small local paper to a rich international one. The reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein drove Richard Nixon from office, an event that made journalism seem like a sexy and dangerous profession and that filled newsrooms with generations of elite liberals and hard-core leftists.

However, the person who comes off the worst in All About the Story is not Nixon, but Hillary Clinton. Downie’s dislike for Clinton is palpable. When in 1994 the paper began “pursuing significant questions about the relationship the Clintons had with the failed Madison Guarantee Savings and Loan Association in Little Rock, Arkansas, when Bill was governor,” Downie and the first lady had a tense meeting at the White House. Clinton was irritated that the Post was reporting on the federal investigation into the Clintons and their deals in Little Rock, yet she refused to turn over any documents related to the case. Downie would not back down. Clinton then switched the subject to the various women who were claiming to have had affairs with her husband—a kind of preemptive strike against their credibility. (She would also dispatch George Stephanopoulos to have lunch with Downie and try to kill the stories.) After the meeting, Clinton began to spread rumors that Downie was out to get them and that he was jealous of Ben Bradlee. Despite being criticized by other journalists and liberal activists, Downie defends his coverage: “I strongly believe that we did what we should have done in holding the Clintons accountable for their behavior. Even as I write this, I believe that there remain significant unresolved questions about the veracity of both Clintons.”

Well, not everything; its sister magazine Newsweek, then owned by the Post, couldn’t be bothered to break the story on Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. Or as Mark Steyn wrote in 2018: “It was twenty years ago today/Slick Willie taught the intern to play!”

The drama of January 1998 put certain words and phrases in the public discourse for the next two years, including “impeachment”, “vast right-wing conspiracy”, “the meaning of ‘is’”, and “completion”, which President Clinton was said by Monica in the Starr Report not to reach.

Yes, it was twenty years ago today/Slick Willie taught the intern to play! In a sense, the Clintons have never reached completion — which is why, two decades on, the news is full of Uranium One, Hillary-commissioned dirty dossiers and Huma’s emails — not to mention the exposure of Harvey Weinstein and other Clinton buddies for availing themselves of the same interns-with-benefits approach to the workplace. We may run some old pieces from the Dawning of the Age of Incompletion in the weeks ahead. But, if you’re wondering what we were talking about before Monica, the answer is Paula – who became near totally eclipsed by Miss Lewinsky.

The Age of Incompletion also kicked off the age of new media, beginning with a young man with a DIY Website named Matt Drudge, who published the Lewinsky story that then-Washington Post-owned Newsweek had spiked, because – say it with me:

The bill came due eventually, though — the Post sold Newsweek for a dollar in 2010, only for the Graham family to see its newspaper acquired three years later by Jeff Bezos, reportedly for about the same amount of money he paid for the first three seasons of his Grand Tour car TV series on Amazon Prime.

(As to what’s happened in the last few years to Matt Drudge, that’s an entirely different story, one that appears not to have a satisfactory answer. A year ago, Steve linked to an article headlined, “Matt Drudge confirms he still runs Drudge Report.” As he wrote in response, “Could Have Fooled Me.”

UPDATE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARIES ACCORDINGLY: From ‘defund the police’ to ‘reimagining’ policing.

Lacking a race card to play in the police beating death of Tyre Nichols, left-wing Democrats and their media allies have turned their attention not to the local government of Memphis, Tennessee, under a Democratic mayor and Democratic police commissioner, but toward the supposed entire system itself.

They now claim that policing, per se, is a racist institution that must be defunded and abolished. This time around, however, they are not stating this outright. They tried the “defund the police” argument two years ago and found it deeply unpopular. In turn, a new slogan, “reimagining policing,” has replaced the “defund” movement’s particular vernacular of choice. This reflects a pattern on the Left. When an idea is unpopular, it just changes the language and terminology around said idea (see “gender-affirming care,” for example). But the impact is the same.

Flashback: White Progressives Shocked to Learn Black and Latino Voters Don’t Share Their Radical ‘defund the Police’ Views.

GOVERNOR ABBOTT APPOINTS A RETIRED BORDER PATROL AGENT AS TEXAS BORDER CZAR:

The activists who advocate for no restrictions on immigration often refer to what Governor Abbott is doing as “stunts.” The White House does it, too. However, Abbott is doing what he can to make the southern border more secure. Texas bears the biggest burden during the Biden border crisis. Governor Abbott has written five letters to Biden with suggestions on how to better secure the border, yet Biden ignores the crisis he created. During their most recent interaction, Abbott handed a letter to Biden on the tarmac at the El Paso airport. It was later reported that Biden didn’t bother to read it. If he had, he would have seen several steps the governor recommends that DHS and the Biden administration do, in simple bullet point form. Abbott said he deliberately made the text concise and simple to read and understand. Still, Biden couldn’t be bothered.

Why would Biden want to change course?

● Jared Bernstein, member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors: “One thing we learned in the 1990s was that a surefire way to reconnect the fortunes of working people at all skill levels, immigrant and native-born alike, to the growing economy is to let the job market tighten up. A tight job market pressures employers to boost wage offers to get and keep the workers they need. One equally surefire way to sort-circuit this useful dynamic is to turn on the immigrant spigot every time some group’s wages go up.”

● Former Trump administration senior adviser Stephen Miller: Biden’s Immigration Plan Would “Erase America’s Nationhood.”

● “Labour wanted mass immigration to make UK more multicultural, says former adviser. Labour threw open Britain’s borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a ‘truly multicultural’ country, a former Government adviser has revealed.”

OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH GEORGIA: Democrats Do an About-Face on Georgia.

For much of 2021, every major Democrat, including President Biden, denounced the state of Georgia as a racist disgrace when its Republican-controlled state government enacted an election-reform law that they insisted was was a voter-suppression effort and “Jim Crow 2.0.” But 2022 brought record turnout in both the primaries and midterm elections, and the state’s African Americans reported great satisfaction with and trust in their voting experience. Now, Joe Biden wants Georgia to vote early in the presidential-primary process, and just about every major southern Democrat wants Atlanta to host the party’s next national convention. Somehow, in a very short period of time, Georgia went from too racist to host the 2021 Major League Baseball All-Star game to deserving to host the 2024 Democratic National Convention.

Since at least 1941, the left has always been able to do a complete 180 at will, since they know the media won’t point out their hypocrisy du jour.

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? China’s Baidu to launch ChatGPT-style bot in March.

Chinese internet search major Baidu Inc is planning to launch an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot service similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT in March, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The technology firm plans to launch the service as a standalone application and gradually merge it into its search engine, said the person, who declined to be identified as the information is confidential.

ChatGPT’s technology works by learning from vast amounts of data how to answer prompts by users in a human-like manner, offering information like a search engine or even prose like an aspiring novelist.

Chatbots in China currently focus on social interaction whereas ChatGPT performs better at more professional tasks, such as programming and essay writing.

Chat CCP’s responses to questions about Communist China’s dark history would be fascinating to read. But, ala 1984’s two-way telescreens, I wonder if Chat CCP is programmed to report doubleplus ungood crimethink for reeducation purposes?

UPDATE: China Boasts of ‘Mind-reading’ Artificial Intelligence that Supports ‘AI-tocracy.’ “An artificial intelligence (AI) institute in Hefei, in China’s Anhui province, says it has developed software that can gauge the loyalty of Communist Party members – something that, if true, would be considered a breakthrough, but has sparked public outcry. Analysts said China has improved its AI-powered surveillance, using big data, machine learning, facial recognition and AI to ‘get into the brains and minds of its people,’ building what many call a draconian digital dictatorship.”

(Updated and bumped.)

LET’S NOT RUSH INTO ANYTHING HERE: Biden tells Congress he’ll end COVID-19 emergencies on May 11.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Jerry Garcia’s Grateful Dead cannabis brand is leaving California.

Jerry Garcia is one of the most iconic pot smokers in California history. Born in San Francisco, Garcia led the Grateful Dead for 30 years as the city became an international beacon of counterculture, and he did it all while casually and openly smoking weed. His pot pipe is considered an artifact of California cannabis history.

But even the iconic Jerry Garcia name couldn’t survive California’s turbulent legal pot market.

RIP, GERARD VANDERLEUN: Neo on When death comes for bloggers.

WATCH: Hilarious Video of Vegans Vowing to Stop Livestock Truck, Learning a Hard Lesson.

GOODER AND HARDER, SAN FRAN: Where Have All the Chairs Gone? This Is Why Many Downtown SF Starbucks Locations Are Seatless.

Where have all the chairs gone? That was the question posed by a Standard staffer during a recent morning editorial meeting. She was referring to the Starbucks at the corner of Stockton and Sutter streets, just off of Union Square.

Populated by a lonely hightop table and a slim bar without stools, the place appeared to be offering grab-and-go service only—even though the cafe’s floor was clearly large enough to accommodate tables and chairs.

She wasn’t the only one in our newsroom to have encountered a seatless Starbucks in the city. A few months ago, I came across a very similar scene at 1390 Market St., where I popped in for a hot chocolate one day to find nary a place a place to sit and sip it.

Being that we journalists can be quite cynical, we wondered if removing chairs from these locations was a corporate strategy for deterring unhoused people from hanging out in the cafes. Or perhaps it was a monetary decision aimed at moving more caffeine addicts and their dollars through stores at a faster clip.

The “unhoused people” line employed by the reporter at the San Francisco Standard is a classic — as Thomas Sowell wrote almost 20 years ago, “Politically Correct Terms Replace Honest Words.” (Also available here under a different headline if the article is paywalled):

Another word that the left has virtually banished from the language is “bum.” Centuries of experience with idlers who refused to work and who hung around on the streets making a nuisance — and sometimes a menace — of themselves were erased from our memories as the left verbally transformed those same people into a sacred icon, “the homeless.”

As with swamps, what was once messy and smelly was now turned into something we had to protect. It was our duty to support people who refused to support themselves.

And now apparently the euphemism for “bum” is considered a hot (vegan) potato.