BURIED LEDE: VLADIMIR PUTIN INVENTS TIME TRAVEL!

JOHN OLIVER’S ATTEMPT TO SMEAR A CRITICAL RACE THEORY CRITIC BACKFIRES SPECTACULARLY:

Oliver complained that the concerns about critical race theory is nothing more than “noise,” before showing parents who have spoken up at school board meetings over the past year to demand that this curriculum be removed from classrooms.

A thread from Andrew Follett goes into even more detail. Oliver’s claims about Loudon County, Virg. schools are entirely wrong. He lashes out at parents who spoke up for this kids, forgetting entirely that this is the school district that covered up the rape of a girl in a bathroom, as well as where the school board made an “enemies list” of parents.

Was it over when Loudoun County bombed Pearl Harbor?

Rufo responds here: Christopher Rufo responds to John Oliver’s rant about the anti-critical race theory movement.

They’re the Dems’ palace guard, replacing actual humor with “clapter” for their trained seal-like hard left studio audiences.

RICH LOWRY: BLM’s disasters leave Democrats vulnerable. “If a right-wing purveyor of Internet misinformation wanted to discredit BLM and its allies, he couldn’t do much better than concoct a story in which a disturbed activist attempts to shoot and kill a local politician and immediately gets bailed out by his BLM brethren spouting clichéd attacks on the criminal-justice system. It’s what happened in Louisville, Ky., though. After 21-year-old Quintez Brown allegedly shot at — and missed — mayoral candidate Craig Greenberg, the city’s BLM chapter quickly posted his $100,000 bail. From attempted murder to walking free a couple of days later is quite the turnaround…Democrats wonder how they can blunt GOP attacks on culture issues and believe that if they explain their positions better, they’ll be fine. But the party is positioned so far left that it needs bold gestures. If it wanted to send an unmistakable signal of change, it would denounce the leadership of BLM, call for investigations into its finances, declare that the group’s priorities aren’t those of the Democratic Party and wear the ensuing furor from the left as a badge of honor. But Democrats won’t do that and can’t do that — which is why they are in such trouble.”

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! ‘Are You Guys Out Of Your F**king Mind?’: Joe Rogan Says Biden ‘Can’t Talk Right’ Anymore.

“He’s [Biden] not a good example, because he’s basically a shell, you know, cognitively,” Rogan shared. “And the fact that that took a long time for people to admit. That was one of the things that people were saying that I was a Trump supporter during the election because I said I would vote for Trump before I would vote for Biden.”

“But I didn’t vote for either,” he added. “The reason why I said that was like, ‘You don’t see this? Are you guys out of your fucking mind? You guys don’t see that this guy can’t, he can’t talk right anymore?’ Go watch videos of him from twenty years ago. He was a dummy, he said a lot of silly shit, he lied about a bunch of things, but at least he was articulate.”

Don’t worry, all the best people assured us in 2020; it’s just a stutter: Biden’s Ukraine Response After-Party Produces Some Horrific Optics. “Things got even weirder at the end of the roundtable, though. Biden gets asked an obvious question about Putin, and instead of answering it, the president starts smirking and picking at his teeth, while staring blankly for over 20 seconds. It was an incredibly odd scene.”

BIDEN: A UNITER, NOT A DIVIDER! Representatives Paul Gosar, Matt Gaetz, AOC and Cori Bush joined 39 other lawmakers in urging Biden to seek congressional approval before sending troops to Ukraine.

DROPPING THE MASK: NYT executive editor Dean Baquet sums up ‘the job of the New York Times’ — and accidentally gives away the MSM’s game.

* * * * * * * *

I feel very strongly—and I know this is not embraced by everybody—that nobody is objective. The system of “objectivity” (and I know that’s going to be a bad word) was designed to create a system—Wesley Lowery is right when he describes that—in which the organization’s job was to make sure that whatever your perspective was it didn’t get in the way of reporting the truth. I believe in that very strongly. That’s not the job of every institution. But the job of the New York Times should, in the end, be to come out with the best version of the truth, with your own political opinion held in check by editors and editing. Not everybody believes that, but I believe that. And I think that if you come to work for the New York Times—if you really want to work for the New York Times—you have to embrace that, because that’s what the New York Times is. Independence means being independent of everybody and of ideology—it just does.

Or not — as the paper’s original ombudsman admitted in 2004: “Is the New York Times a Liberal Newspaper? Of course it is.”

MUNICH: THE EDGE OF NONSENSE. Andrew Roberts, the author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny, reviews Netflix’s new film, Munich—The Edge of War, starring Jeremy Irons as Neville Chamberlain — strategic genius(!):

This movie which attempts to rehabilitate Chamberlain is historically illiterate, a farrago of nonsense. Yet in a sense, it performs a useful task because if—even with the bending of the facts and putting the best possible gloss on him—Chamberlain still emerges as a fool and a failure, which he does, it shows that the generally held view of him is the correct one. Although Chamberlain states in the movie, “If I’m to be made to look a fool, that’s the price I must pay,” he never said anything of the kind at the time, as he believed himself to be the greatest peacemaker since Disraeli.

Neville Chamberlain was such a poor wordsmith that this movie is reduced to quoting (without attribution) the words of Winston Churchill about people “falling below the level of events,” a phenomenon of which Chamberlain was the primary exemplar. Churchill is not even mentioned in this movie despite its several scenes of the House of Commons, which was where he made the greatest critique of the Munich Agreement.

“Do not suppose that this is the end,” Churchill prophetically said of Chamberlain’s sacrifice of Czechoslovakia. “This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.” Churchill was proved totally right within a matter of months, whereas for all this movie’s attempted advocacy, Chamberlain is still wrong eighty-four years later.

And speaking of Churchill, if you’re looking for an alternative, or if you suffered through Munich—The Edge of War as I did last week, Netflix also currently has a much more enjoyable alternative: Darkest Hour, starring Gary Oldman and his incredible — and deservedly Oscar-winning — makeup as Winston Churchill. As Victor Davis Hanson wrote when it played theaters (remember those?) in 2017: “Churchill assumed that if Britain and its overseas Empire could hold out, then a frustrated Hitler might turn elsewhere — and thereby gain new enemies (and new British allies). That is exactly what happened in 1941. A blundering and frustrated Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Later, he would declare war on the United States. By December 1941, Germany was at war against the world’s largest economy (American), largest navy (British), and largest army (Soviet) all at once. Germany and its allies could never win such a global war. Darkest Hour takes place almost exclusively indoors during Parliament sessions, private meetings, and scenes between Churchill and his equally brilliant wife, Clementine. But the dialogue is riveting, the acting superb.”

IT’S COME TO THIS: Canadian MP On Truck Caravan: Honk Honk=Heil Hitler (Video).

One member of Trudeau’s Liberal Party went absolutely frothing from the mouth crazy during the parliament’s discussion about extending the prime minister’s emergency powers.Her name is Ya’ara Saks. Per the Toronto Sun, In the middle of the parliamentary debate about extending Trudeau’s emergency powers, this crazy lady claimed the “horn honking during the Freedom Convoy protests in Ottawa was a call for Adolf Hitler.”

Why would a Jewish woman make an inappropriate comparison to the Holocaust, thus cheapening the memory of the actual horrors suffered by millions of people at the hands of Hitler? There’s only one explanation, the wiring in her cranial cavity shorted out.

Related: When boring people turn dangerous:

[Chrystia] Freeland arouses strong feelings among old Russia hands. Before the Yeltsin era collapsed, she had consistent, remarkable access to gangster-oligarchs like Boris Berezovsky, who appeared in her Financial Times articles described as aw-shucks humans just doing their best to make sure “big capital” maintained its “necessary role” in Russia’s political life. “Berezovsky was one of several financiers who came together in a last-ditch attempt to keep the Communists out of the Kremlin” was typical Freeland fare in, say, 1998.[”]

* * * * * * * *

Years later, she is somehow Canada’s Finance Minister, and what another friend from our Russia days laughingly describes as “the Nurse Ratched of the New World Order.” At the end of last week, Minister Freeland explained that in expanding its Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) program, her government was “directing Canadian financial institutions to review their relationships with anyone involved in the illegal blockades.”

The Emergencies Act contains language beyond the inventive powers of the best sci-fi writers. It defines a “designated person” — a person eligible for cutoff of financial services — as someone “directly or indirectly” participating in a “public assembly that may reasonably be expected to lead to a breach of the peace.” Directly or indirectly?

She went on to describe the invocation of Canada’s Emergencies Act in the dripping-fake tones of someone trying to put a smile on an insurance claim rejection, with even phrases packed with bad news steered upward in the form of cheery hypotheticals. As in, The names of both individuals and entities as well as crypto wallets? Have been shared? By the RCMP with financial institutions? And accounts have been frozen? As she confirmed this monstrous news about freezing bank accounts, Freeland burst into nervous laughter, looking like Tony Perkins sharing a cheery memory with “mother”.

With Freeland having locked up the Freedom Convoy’s bank accounts, Ottawa’s mayor also wants to sell off their confiscated trucks:

In the interview, Watson also said that the Freedom Convoy hurt small businesses in the nation’s capital and “disrupted the city.”

“That’s one of the reasons why, under the Emergencies Act, that I’ve asked our solicitor and our city manager, how can we keep the tow trucks, and the campers, and the vans and everything else we’ve confiscated, and sell those pieces of equipment to help recoup some of the costs that our taxpayers are absorbing? That’s one of the provisions of the Emergency Act and we have been a beneficiary of the Emergency Act,” Watson stated in the interview.

“I asked the Members of Parliament to consider, it’s [the Emergency Act] helped us a lot, things like confiscating vehicles,” he added. Watson continued, saying that lawmakers need a better plan going forward to “protect our residents” better than they have this past month.

Fortunately though, Oceania has never been in favor of totalitarianism: “Prime Minister Justin Trudeau responded to Russia’s actions during a late afternoon news conference in which he accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of having ordered an invasion of eastern Ukraine – and attacking democracy. ‘Russia’s flagrant disregard for the independence of a sovereign nation is a serious threat to security and stability in the region and around the world,’ he said. ‘Canada and our allies will defend democracy. We are taking these actions today in a stand against authoritarianism.’”

UPDATE: Democrat Congressman Suggests the Redistribution of Trucks.

21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Their Bionic Eyes Are Now Obsolete and Unsupported. Second Sight left users of its retinal implants in the dark.

Barbara Campbell was walking through a New York City subway station during rush hour when her world abruptly went dark. For four years, Campbell had been using a high-tech implant in her left eye that gave her a crude kind of bionic vision, partially compensating for the genetic disease that had rendered her completely blind in her 30s. “I remember exactly where I was: I was switching from the 6 train to the F train,” Campbell tells IEEE Spectrum. “I was about to go down the stairs, and all of a sudden I heard a little ‘beep, beep, beep’ sound.”

It wasn’t her phone battery running out. It was her Argus II retinal implant system powering down. The patches of light and dark that she’d been able to see with the implant’s help vanished.

Terry Byland is the only person to have received this kind of implant in both eyes. He got the first-generation Argus I implant, made by the company Second Sight Medical Products, in his right eye in 2004 and the subsequent Argus II implant in his left 11 years later. He helped the company test the technology, spoke to the press movingly about his experiences, and even met Stevie Wonder at a conference. “[I] went from being just a person that was doing the testing to being a spokesman,” he remembers.

Yet in 2020, Byland had to find out secondhand that the company had abandoned the technology and was on the verge of going bankrupt. While his two-implant system is still working, he doesn’t know how long that will be the case. “As long as nothing goes wrong, I’m fine,” he says. “But if something does go wrong with it, well, I’m screwed. Because there’s no way of getting it fixed.”

Ross Doerr, another Second Sight patient, doesn’t mince words: “It is fantastic technology and a lousy company,” he says. He received an implant in one eye in 2019 and remembers seeing the shining lights of Christmas trees that holiday season. He was thrilled to learn in early 2020 that he was eligible for software upgrades that could further improve his vision. Yet in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, he heard troubling rumors about the company and called his Second Sight vision-rehab therapist. “She said, ‘Well, funny you should call. We all just got laid off,’ ” he remembers. “She said, ‘By the way, you’re not getting your upgrades.’”

These three patients, and more than 350 other blind people around the world with Second Sight’s implants in their eyes, find themselves in a world in which the technology that transformed their lives is just another obsolete gadget. One technical hiccup, one broken wire, and they lose their artificial vision, possibly forever. To add injury to insult: A defunct Argus system in the eye could cause medical complications or interfere with procedures such as MRI scans, and it could be painful or expensive to remove.

Read the whole thing.

INSIDE EVERY LIBERAL IS A TOTALITARIAN SCREAMING TO GET OUT: Democrats overwhelmingly approve of Trudeau’s crackdown on freedom protestors, freezing of bank accounts: Poll. Looking at Democrat likely voters alone, 65 percent said they favored Trudeau’s crackdown on the protestors, and 17 percent said they disapproved.

Related: Canadian truckers protest organizer denied bail, judge cites ‘safety of the public.’

(Classical reference in headline.)

PUTIN’S PUPPET: Putin Invades Ukraine Just One Month After Biden Gave Him Permission to Mount a “Minor Incursion” Into That Country.

PUTIN CHUCKLES: Psaki says binge-watching The West Wing got her back into politics.

OLD AND BUSTED: Going “Green.”

The New Hotness? Spending Green! Climate activists spend millions for friendly Associated Press ‘news.’

When climate activists called for more coverage, the Associated Press went green.

No, it didn’t dive into environmental activism. The news agency had already done that. It dove into a pile of cash — more than $8 million.

AP just announced it sold its gold-standard journalism for 20 bright, shiny new reporters under the benign headline “Climate grant illustrates growth in philanthropy-funded news.” The announcement was adorned with a photo of a polar bear (of course) because journalists do love their cute, man-eating predators.

That $8 million over three years works out to about $133,000 per staffer — in case you’re interested in buying (or renting) a journalist or two.

Related:

Hey, a key member of the Obama administration casually mentioned that as well in 2009, and the AP didn’t bat an eye!

PUTIN ORDERS TROOPS INTO UKRAINE SEPARATIST REGIONS ON ‘PEACEKEEPING’ MISSION.

It’s especially brazen by Putin, knowing the cold, steely resolve in the White House that he’s up against:

JUST NBC THE EPIC FAILURE: NBC’s China Olympics were a ratings disaster.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Ukraine Invites Kyle Rittenhouse To Guard Their Border.

UNEXPECTEDLY: Canadian Parliament Votes to Extend Emergencies Act for 30 Days.

The Canadian House of Commons voted Monday night to approve a 30-day extension of the Emergencies Act, which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently invoked for the first time since its passage in 1988 to quash the trucker blockade in Ottawa protesting the cross-border vaccine mandate.

After hours of debate, the vote on the “motion for confirmation of the declaration of emergency” passed along partisan lines, with 185 members voting “yay” and 151 members voting “nay.” The vast majority of Liberal and New Democratic Leader party members voted to extend the law, and the vast majority of Conservatives and the Bloc Québécois voted to suspend it.

The law has been exercised to remove vehicles from the city center and to cut off the financial resources of demonstrators. That has included freezing the bank accounts of those directly and marginally involved in the protest including some citizens who’ve donated sums in the ballpark of $50, as well as monitoring financial transactions. Now that convoy leaders and other participants have been arrested, and the encampments largely dismantled, Conservative MPs have criticized the Emergencies Act as unnecessary and an abuse of authority, the National Post reported.

As of Monday, Trudeau suggested the vote on the law in the chamber was effectively a vote of confidence in his administration, meaning that if the parliament had revoked the measure, his government would resign and an election would be called to replace it.

Meanwhile: New York Times reporter stands by her account of gunpoint arrests in Ottawa.

Narwhal climate reporter Fatima Syed, who is also the Vice President of the Canadian Association of Journalists and host of the Canadaland podcast The Backbench, called the Times story “embarrassing and wrong.” Journalists from The Globe and Mail, Global News, and more also criticized the Times, some demanding a correction.

“Maybe leave the gossip to the “professionals”,” remarked society writer Shinan Govani.

Yet truckers were indeed arrested by police in Ottawa at gunpoint, says New York Times reporter Sarah Maslin Nir, who shares a byline on the contested piece with colleague Natalie Kitroeff.

“We saw these [arrests] transpire first hand,” Maslin Nir told Canadaland via Twitter DM, “and in addition have multiple interviews from people this happened to, including David Paisley, quoted in the article…what really is blowing my mind is the wave of JOURNALISTS saying we didn’t see what we saw.”

Maslin Nir referred Canadaland to a video of police officers with military assault rifles, one of them raised, entering the structure in which Paisley said he was arrested by an officer who aimed a rifle at his chest.

Just think of the Canada’s MSM as Trudeau’s operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.

JEFF DUNETZ: How Joe Biden Created The Ukraine Crisis.

Before Biden became President, the U.S. was energy independent and an exporter of energy. The lower American production and removing Trump’s restrictions on the Nordstream natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany. His policies made other countries more reliant on Russian gas. Giving Putin leverage on other countries such as Germany and doubling the price. All that extra money went straight into Russia’s pockets. Those new profits helped Russia raise the funds to continue Putin’s dream of the greater Russia of the USSR.

On top of the higher prices and the increased dependence on Russian energy, the mishandling of the Afghan withdrawal and removing some of the Iran sanctions showed Biden to be a weak President. Putin is no idiot. All of Biden’s flawed policies and feeble foreign policy made the Russian president understand that if he was ever going to get Ukraine back in Russia’s clutches, this was it.

Russia’s past performance is no, err pretty consistent, actually:

HOW IT STARTED:

How it’s going: Ukraine crisis: Putin orders Russian ‘peacekeepers’ into eastern Ukraine.

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Left-wing Green group that targeted Keystone pipeline plagued by accusations of ‘white supremacy culture.’

350.org, a left-wing green group focused on grassroots efforts to fight climate change, is being plagued by accusations of “white supremacy culture” within its own organization despite efforts it claims to have undertaken to increase diversity amongst its staff, as well as the climate change movement.

According to Politico, 350.org, which was largely responsible for the staunch opposition by climate change activists to the Keystone XL pipeline, “struggled to overcome its founding by a group of white people” when it followed efforts to hire more people of color with mass layoffs and increased workloads amid financial struggles.

The struggles for the group began in 2019 when executive director May Boeve announced an increase in the annual budget to an amount more than the organization had ever raised in a single year. Included in the new budget were plans to hire nearly 130 new employees.

The plans eventually broke apart with the organization failing to meet the required financial needs, which led to a fallout that included “mass layoffs, departures, exhaustion, distrust and a protracted labor battle.”

A restart of the pipeline, a public apology by Biden, and a return to $2.00-a-gallon gas is the only solution to this omnipresent racism.

THE BANALITY OF GENIUS: Notes on Peter Jackson’s Get Back.

When we meet Lennon in Get Back, he is in a fallow period, which has a dampening effect on his all-round confidence. Although, hang on a minute: can we really say a man is in a creative trough if, just a matter of months ago, he made Dear Prudence, Julia, Happiness Is a Warm Gun? When he is in the midst of creating Don’t Let Me Down? Perhaps it depends on who he’s sitting next to. In January 1969, Lennon seems like he’s drying up, and to an extent is drying up, because his primary creative partner is on a hot streak of epic proportion. McCartney apparently only has to sit at the piano, pick up a guitar or just allow his mind to wander, for songs to come surging through him. Months after Blackbird and Hey Jude, we now get Let It Be, Long and Winding Road, Get Back, Golden Slumbers, Two of Us, Oh! Darling, and more. Perhaps the question is not why Lennon is in a creative slump, but why McCartney isn’t.

Towards the end of the 1960s Bob Dylan and The Beach Boys were in states of disarray, creative outputs stuttering, minds and bodies giving out. Meanwhile, The Beatles increased their rate of production, making a double album in 1968 and two albums in 1969 (about three weeks after the end of these sessions they were back in the studio for what became Abbey Road). The engine of the band throughout this period was the relentlessly fecund McCartney. We ought to sympathise with Lennon. Yes, we can blame his drug-taking, but imagine being in his position: a tired genius whose closest collaborator is hurling down thunderbolt after thunderbolt from the top of a mountain, pausing only to ask, so what have you got?

McCartney’s creative collapse after the Beatles broke up is almost enough to make on believe the nutty “Paul is dead” conspirators of 1969-1970 — he never would again reach the sustained brilliance he was channeling from 1966 to 1969.

SUNLIGHT IS THE BEST DISINFECTANT: Minnesota college cancels no-whites-allowed luncheon after College Fix report.

OLD AND BUSTED AT THE WAPO: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

The New Hotness? “As mask mandates fall, more and more people will be forced to do their own balancing of risks and benefits.”

Whatever happened to “my body, my choice?”

20 MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE: Report: Israel Prepares For Biden’s ‘Spectacularly Bad’ Iran Deal Next Week. “Iran will not be required to destroy its advanced centrifuges under the revived agreement.”

Ben Rhodes smiles.

MATT LABASH: P.J. O’Rourke, 1947-2022.

It’s a sad fact of American letters that “humorists” – a word I’m almost positive P.J. detested – often get consigned to the children’s table.  As though laughing at life keeps one from extracting the marrow from it – a sentiment P.J.  regarded as ass-backwards.  After all, he was a God guy  – and God himself clearly has a bent sense of humor. As P.J. once wrote me: “We acknowledge the Bible as the word of God.  And — the one attribute that we absolutely share with our Creator — we have a sense of humor.  Right off the bat there’s Genesis 1:27: ‘God created man in his own image.’ And then I look in the mirror.”

But how good a writer was P.J. O’Rourke? Well that’s a hard thing to quantify if you’ve never read him. And I could sit here and play you his greatest hits reel, which would be a daunting challenge, since there are so many  hits to choose from. He was a one-man Bartlett’s, if Bartlett’s did funny. P.J. tended to leave at least one chocolate on the pillow in every paragraph. So in showing you how good he is– sorry, was (he’s still so alive to me, I keep forgetting) –  I have decided to simplify, and conduct an experiment. As I write this, I have five of his 20 or so books stacked near my keyboard. I am now going to open each one randomly, and relay to you whatever passage I see first.

From 1983’s Modern Manners: 

This brings us to a more drastic method of getting an audience: be one. Listen patiently while other people tell you about themselves. Maybe they’ll return the favor. This is risky, however. By the time they get done talking about themselves and are ready to reciprocate, you may be dead from old age. Another danger is that that if you listen long enough you may start attending to what’s being said. You may start thinking about other people, even sympathizing with them. You may develop a true empathy for others, and this will turn you into such a human oddity that you will become a social outcast.

From 1989’s Holidays in Hell:

There were some odd ducks in the audience. They were all milkmaid types with too much hair spray. The men were dark and greasy with Cadillac-fin lapels on their suits and tie knots as big as their ears. “What kind of people go to nightclubs in Poland?” I asked Zofia. “Whores and Arabs,” she said. “What do Poles really do for fun?” “Drink,” said Zofia.

From 1991’s Parliament of Whores:

We had a choice between Democrats who couldn’t learn from the past and Republicans who couldn’t stop living in it, between Democrats who wanted to tax us to death and Republicans who preferred to have us die in a foreign war. The Democrats planned to fiddle while Rome burned. The Republicans were going to burn Rome, then fiddle.

From 1994’s All the Trouble In the World:

Politicians are always searching for some grave alarm which will cause individuals to abandon their separate concerns and prerogatives and act in concert so that politicians can wield the baton. Calls to mortal combat are forever being sounded (though only metaphorically – politicians don’t like real wars, too much merit is involved). The idea is that people will drop everything for a WWIII. Remember the War on Poverty? And how Jimmy Carter asked Americans to respond to a mere rise in the price of crude oil with “the moral equivalent of war”? (What were we supposed to do, shame the gas station attendant to death?)

From 1995’s Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut:

We were on the Big Island, Hawaii proper, the place where migrating Polynesians originally landed more than 1,500 years ago and where Captain Cook died in 1779. Cook was the first haole (a Hawaiian word meaning “person whose luggage is still at the Los Angeles airport”) to visit Hawaii. His crew spread venereal disease through the islands, the Hawaiians beat Captain Cook to death with clubs, and the tourist trade has continued with only minor alterations to the present day.

Again, these aren’t necessarily the Greatest Hits. These are just roll-of-the-dice random passages. Yet I embarked on this experiment fully confident that my eyes wouldn’t land on some weakly-written or boring graf. For one simple reason:  P.J. was incapable of writing those. Try the same with any other writer, and see how quickly the experiment fails.

Read the whole thing.