Now that we’ve mostly dealt with the Islamic problem, I thought it was time to talk about the new feminist grudges, manspreading and manslamming.

What’s “manspreading”?

The folks at Gothamist have bravely taken on the scourge of “manspreading,” the male practice of sitting on a crowded train with your legs spread wide apart. It’s a habit so nefarious the MTA even built a campaign targeted at scolding men who do it. Now Gothamist has taken a camera on the subway and confronted guilty manspreaders about their unthinkable behavior.

And what’s manslamming?

In early November of last year, 25-year-old labor organizer Beth Breslaw decided to confront male entitlement one sidewalk stranger at a time. She was inspired by a friend’s experience: Having heard that men were less likely than their female counterparts to make room on a crowded sidewalk, this friend wanted to test the theory herself while commuting to and from her job in the Financial District. From then on, she spent every day getting repeatedly body-checked.

When I explained the crisis to my wife, she said “huh?” I explained that I was manspreading as we spoke, holding my legs far enough apart to put my elbows on them, as all men do when they lean forward. She had heretofore been unaware of the sexual aggression it represented, especially since the real aggressor on our couch is Raebert, the deerhound who always wants his head on my or my wife’s lap.

So I thought maybe it was time to discuss both these sexual issues.

Manspreading first. Factually, not that many people are on an urban subway when you consider the whole population. But men do tend to sit with their legs apart and their elbows on their knees all the time, in bus stations, on couches, and even in the awful confines of airline seats. It’s not a display or an aggression, or even a microaggression. It’s just a desire to be able to spring from the seat into action if there’s a need. And a convenient resting place for our elbows.

Does it really take up extra space? It seems to me that women are reacting to the endless strictures to keep their legs together, lest men look up their skirts. Fine. Spread yourselves. Let us look up your skirts. And while you’re at it, jettison the giant handbags, backpacks, and other baggage you invariably carry with you when you travel by subway, train, and airliner. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been assaulted by female luggage — in the aisle, from overhead, and in a seat on public transportation. Also, given that most of the U.S. population is obese, does a few degrees of leg askewness really matter? People on public transit are fat, fat, fat, fat, fat. There are women who more than compensate for the worst cases of manspreading whose thighs are so thick I can’t even see up their skirts.

On to Manslamming. Which is even sillier. I have the advantage here of being a man. If the premise were true, these alpha male slammers should barge through everyone. They don’t. Walking sidewalks in big cities is a cooperative exercise. Sure, there are jerks. People who give way to no one. Most are not that. I rarely bump shoulders on big city sidewalks.

Two rules. Good for both sexes. First, don’t be walking sidewalks to make a testosterone statement. Walk to get where where you’re going as expeditiously as possible. The biggest obstacle is pairs of people who are so busy talking to one another they don’t see anybody else. The second biggest obstacle is people on cellphones, male or female. They don’t see nothing.

The second rule is to pick the right side to be on. Pedestrian traffic tends to divide itself into this way and that way. If you insist on going this way against a that way flow, you can count on shoulder bumping experiences, whether you’re a guy or a gal.

My own worst pedestrian experiences have to do with women in malls and airports. You know. The old broads who are ambling along three abreast talking at half the normal walking pace. They don’t know and don’t care that they’re holding other folks up. Because they’re the only ones in the whole goddam place.

Which brings us to Femsteering. This article says something true I haven’t heard in 30 years. [boldface added]

…Breitbart [London] has discovered an even more pernicious gender-specific public nuisance that is endangering anyone on the roads. The phenomenon is known as “femsteering,” and it describes the almost total inability of any woman to competently operate an automobile. Though whispered about on men’s rights forums, in working men’s clubs and on the pages of tabloid newspapers for decades, this is the first time the trend has been discussed in the open in a serious publication.

According to the activists drawing attention to this ugly expression of female privilege, femsteering affects all of us: men, women and children, and threatens the personal safety of anyone on the motorway or, especially, on busy streets outside schools. Its effects are dramatic and visually arresting, they report: crumpled bumpers, crippled cyclists and petrified passengers screaming: “Mommy, why are you driving us into the wall?!”

Yet some women insist the whole thing has been cooked up as yet another way of oppressing women. Asked yesterday to comment on the phenomenon, Guardian blogger Judy Truncheon said: “For too long men have expressed their cis privilege by alluding to a mystical driving manoeuvre no woman has ever successfully executed, referred to as ‘parallel parking.’ It’s time feminism took a stand against this patriarchal fairy story and said it out loud: women can drive just as well as men.

“So-called ‘health and safety’ restrictions placed on women, demanding that we stop applying lipstick at 80 miles an hour and texting at clogged-up intersections before lurching into oncoming traffic are folk tales put about to discourage women from expressing themselves and as a way of perpetuating inequality.” Short-lived cable TV documentaries with titles such as Are You Ready To See The World’s Worst Female Drivers? have contributed to “unhelpful stereotypes” about women, she added.

Truncheon’s comments will come as a surprise to husbands everywhere, who have for generations been left with inflated insurance premiums and hefty repair bills for the carnage inflicted on family vehicles by the fairer sex. Men point to the numerous examples from their own lives and the privately whispered meme among men about their better halves and motor vehicles.

This is intended as satire but it’s also true. Women generally have better insurance rates than men, as the insurance companies proudly tell us, but the facts hide the facts. Men drive fast, they drive drunk, and they drive a lot more. Women drive into things, not because they’re drunk or mad, but because their spatial consciousness isn’t quite up to men’s. Uncomfortable fact. Last year, they asked Richard Petty when Danica Patrick was going to win a NASCAR race. He laughed. “Never,” he said.

Never. The same timeframe in which feminists are going to win the superiority over men they insist they deserve.

I wouldn’t write this but for another fairly sleight reminiscence by National Review’s Jay Nordlinger.

Just now, I was reading, “Police have ordered all shops closed in a famed Jewish neighborhood in central Paris . . .” (Article here.) The neighborhood, of course, is the Marais, and in particular its Rue des Rosiers.

In the summer of 1982, I was between high school and college, and in Paris for a bit. Arab terrorists — same people as today, nothing ever changes — attacked a delicatessen in the Marais. On the Rue des Rosiers. It was called Goldenberg’s. Not sure whether it’s still there.

Anyway, there were six people killed, including two American tourists. More than 20 other people were injured. You know the drill. Same old scene.

In Jerusalem, the prime minister, Begin, said something like, “If the French state can’t protect these Jews, I will.” He meant in Paris itself. He was just blustering, of course, engaging in some bravado. But I was kind of impressed with it.

We had all been taught to hate Begin, needless to say. He was the Hitler of the Middle East. Never mind Saddam, Assad (père), or Khomeini. Menachem Begin was the bad guy, eating Palestinian children for breakfast.

August 1982 was just one step on my road to growing up. My lessons were hard, but there were those who had it harder — like the dead and their families.

Over the years, I’ve wondered, “Why the hell is there a single Jew in France? Why the hell is there a single Jew trying to do business on the Rue des Rosiers?” I wonder it again now.

No, I’m no expert either. But I was there in 1963, when Charles de Gaulle was the target of multiple Algerian assassination attempts. We had to stay home a couple of times because Paris was locked down after another incident of Gaullian gunfire. He would not let them go as a French colony. I saw him (almost) in a Bastille Day parade. My dad got me one of those cardboard towers with mirrors, and I was unable to make it work. But I heard the oceanic cheers when he rode by.

You can think, if you like, that at 11 and 10, my sister and I had no idea what was going on in the world while we were experiencing the pageantry of life in the vicinity of the Champs Elysee.

A woman spit on my father when he didn’t let her hijack a cab taking his wife and kids home. I’d never seen that before.

On the other hand, my mother got her hair done and never looked more beautiful. And my sister and I always felt rich in Paris because we had 35 centimes each for the Metro, so that if we ever got lost we could buy our way home.

My sister and I were not unaware of the world. We both remember the headline of the International Herald Tribune that announced the death of Jackie Kennedy’s baby Patrick. We went home to a November that resulted in the assassination of our president. Which changed everything forever.

In between we experienced near death in a hurricane at sea.

Funny thing. Our mother took us all over Paris. Place de la Concorde, the Louvre, Musee d’Orsee, and everywhere else too. The Catacombs. The Sewers. Place Vincennes. When my dad got time he took us down through the south of France. Many chateaus. My memory isn’t what it what it was but I remember Chenonceau.

So I think back to de Gaulle in France in that summer of 1963. I’m minded that you can move on or become the captive of your past. America tried heroically to move on. We tried to overcome the legacy of slavery. Maybe it can’t be done.

France didn’t try nearly as hard. And they are paying the price. Their guilt over imperialism has destroyed them. Their country is going to be terrorized to ruin. But America was the least imperialist of the great western powers. In European countries, there is no cultural contribution from their immigrants. They live in isolated ghettoes, “no go” zones, dead ends of society.

Different in America. Yeah, we haven’t had an Italian president yet, but we’ve had Irish and black presidents. It can be done.

The key is not to build the future on guilt over the past. The past will hunt you down, eat you alive, and ultimately kill you if you let it.

France does not have the equivalent of jazz, rhythm and blues, or even Oprah Winfrey. They take credit for crude burlesque acts like this:

And things, unlike that, I wish I’d done.

But I’m just a Jersey boy who was once in France.

Don’t even know which one to begin with. Male or female. How he started. A guest didn’t show, so he filled in, playing both parts. He’s done it ever since. The thing to notice is not whether the guest is male or female but the speed with which he switches from one voice to the other. People pay to see that. There are times when it seems he’s seems he’s overtalking, but that’s a mere illusion.

Here’s a male guest. Note the intrusion of an irate caller.

And here’s a female guest.

Every single night, there are irate callers. Think about that fact.

Jeb Bush is a generation out of date. Last night, the DC pundits were virtually unanimous in agreeing that Marco Rubio is done. He isn’t. For more than 50 years, leftists in the U.S. have been apologizing for and promoting Cuba. They’re all crazy — from Michael Moore to dozens of other Hollywood types who thought Cuban cigars offered by Fidel were more attractive than human and civil and economic rights for thousands of Cubans who starve and suffer and languish in prison and sometimes die for North Korean style government.

Wrote about it, oh, close to 30 years ago.

Cuber Today.

It would be funny if it weren’t so pitiful. Read, if you can, the internal irony of this screed from a moron professor at the University of Michigan.

A University of Michigan department chairwoman has published an article titled, “It’s Okay To Hate Republicans,” which will probably make all of her conservative students feel really comfortable and totally certain that they’re being graded fairly.

“I hate Republicans,” communications department chairwoman and professor Susan J. Douglas boldly declares in the opening of the piece. “I can’t stand the thought of having to spend the next two years watching Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Ted Cruz, Darrell Issa or any of the legions of other blowhards denying climate change, thwarting immigration reform or championing fetal ‘personhood.’”

She writes that although the fact that her “tendency is to blame the Republicans . . . may seem biased,” historical and psychological research back her up, and so it’s basically actually a fact that Republicans are bad!

Douglas said that in the 1970s she did work for a Republican, Rhode Island’s senate minority leader Fred Lippitt, but she hates them all now because Lippitt was a “brand of Republican” who no longer exists in that he was “fiscally conservative but progressive about women’s rights, racial justice and environmental preservation.”

Republicans now, she writes, are focused on the “determined vilification” of others, and have “crafted a political identity that rests on a complete repudiation of the idea that the opposing party and its followers have any legitimacy at all.”

[Apparently, the irony of this accusation given the content of her own article was lost on her.]

Douglas adds that Republicans are really good at being mean because studies have proven that they usually have psychological traits such as “dogmatism, rigidity and intolerance of ambiguity,” and that “two core dimensions of conservative thought are resistance to change and support for inequality.”

“These, in turn, are core elements of social intolerance . . . which could certainly lead to a desire to deride those not like you — whether people of color, LGBT people or Democrats.”

“So now we hate them back,” she explains. “And with good reason.”

U of M’s anti-discrimination policy forbids “creating an intimidating, hostile, offensive, or abusive environment for that individual’s employment, education, living environment, or participation in a University activity.”

It seems as though, for a student who votes Republican, knowing you had a teacher who assumed you were an intolerant bigot and blatantly advocated for hating you would likely create an “intimidating” educational environment…

Oh forget it. Hypocrisy and idiotic irony cubed.

It’s possible we’re looking at the Revolution of 2016. It will be 240 years even. Both major parties may fracture. Both parties have an establishment group who are reasserting the smoke-filled rooms of the 19th century. But it’s not the 19th century.

Why Jeb is an anachronism. He thinks he can ascend to a throne. Because Bush. If true, end of what he purports to believe in. If not true, a revitalization of what he purports to believe in. Withdraw, son. Prove yourself a statesman.

In a story they would normally prefix “Bombshell Study,” Hotair has now assured us that all dogs do go to heaven, even if the current gas station attendant Pope is now waffling on the subject.

There’s been a lot of Internet chatter about this nonexistent question. But no one to my knowledge has addressed the much more complicated question of whether or not all cats also go to heaven.

Admit it. Anyone who has ever seen a domestic feline torturing a mouse without getting around to just killing it has asked this question of himself. Or anyone who has read the results of a Brit study proving that house cats are responsible for something like 50 million deaths a year of birds, moles, chipmunks, squirrels, mice, rats, and –let’s face it — other cats.

So. Do these stone killers get the same pass dogs do? Even if they treat their human masters like servants? Even if they are mostly as conscious and intelligent as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator?

Yes. All cats go to heaven also.

Evidence? All the years of extra life enjoyed by old ladies because there is a loyal something purring on their lap.

QED.

Grand strategies work or they don’t. And there are always unintended consequences. A lesson liberals never learn.

Thus far, Raebert doesn’t know what to think of the Scottie. Neither does Elliott.

Oh. Yeah. You thought we were going to leap out of bed into a new day? No.

Except for the inexhaustible missus, all of us were fatigued, crashed in fact.

It takes me two cups of coffee to decide that I’m still alive every morning. It takes Raebert three (speaking metaphorically now). When I went downstairs to check on Eloise and Muffie, they were both snoring in their crates.

Elliott and Raebert filled up the couch till I decided I had to go down again and check. Muffie was curled up in a dog bed on the floor of the breezeway. As I dashed upstairs for my camera, the UPS came. Eloise barked and Muffie began her wandering routine. I just picked her up and carried her upstairs. Raebert was interested, followed her for a while and then returned to the couch and sleep.

Where was Raebert? Sorry. Forgot to show you. Here.

Boring? Sure. Wonderfully so. I picked Muffie up and held her. She allowed me to. She hasn’t been held much, I’m thinking. Then she wandered again. Resulting in the picture up top. Still outside. I started talking to her. Asked her to come closer. She did. (The Dog Whisperer btw is a control freak idiot.) She came all the way to my feet and I picked her up and held her again.

Raebert was right there and he said nothing while I explained that all her earlier life was no indication about this life. We would always be here for her. I told her I knew about terriers, and Scotties, and that she would always be free to be herself, that I would never spank her, that she would always be free to be independent and all I hoped for was that occasionally she’d want to be held.

She understood. I swear. In my 50 years of experience, Scottish dogs know English. People call them stupid. Stupid is the people who can’t perceive dogs smarter than they are. (The Scottie Rescue Directorate was arguing whether Scottie’s had five brain cells or one. Uh, then why bother?) If you think dogs who are supposed to be stupid really are, read Deerhound Diary. Enough said.

We conversed in this way for a full five minutes. Then she got down and followed my urging to go downstairs and into the breezeway. No leash involved. She was content to follow. But not into the garage and thence outdoors. It’s nasty outside. She gets it that I love her, but it’s much much more comfortable to pee and poop inside and let your human friends clean up after you.

As I said up top. Impasse. Scotties aren’t stupid.

Unintended consequences. We thought — er, I thought — we were getting a dog for Raebert. That was not quite right. He IS an only dog. He thought WE were dying when three died in a row. He doesn’t need to like the Scottie. He just needs to know that WE are not planning on dying anytime soon. Repopulating the pack is all he needs.

Welcome to deerhound life. Still a Scottish lord. He’s happier, but he has little to no interest in his new friend.

Fortunately, Muffie’s also Scottish. She had even less interest in him.

How has a tribe like this lasted for two thousand years?

Easy Answer: Sheer cussedness.

Right Answer: I’m the pack leader. They do what I say, as long as my wife agrees. So there.

Pretty funny Yale propaganda film. I also went to Cornell for grad school. So that part’s funny too. Shame they had to film in cheesy New Haven locations.

It’s no big deal but today is The Game. Harvard versus Yale. The only thing I like about Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League anymore. Football. It’s still a game, not a business. No athletic scholarships. No spring practice. Sure there are dumb jocks but they have to be able to do the classwork. There are no challenge flags. What the refs call is the law. Games move smartly along. Pun intended.

Overall, Yale’s way ahead in the series. They always had more dumb jocks. Recently, though, Harvard’s been kicking Yale’s ass. Some number of years worth in a row. If you know what I mean. (Okay, it’s not Alabama-Auburn. I don’t know exactly.) But I’m worried this year. Yale keeps beating everybody worse than Harvard does. That’s a sign, right? And sooner or later, Yale’s going to rise up and beat Harvard, because every dog has his day. Even if it’s a drooling, half-witted bulldog. Right?

Harvard rarely goes undefeated. (Only 19 times now that I’ve done the research.) They like to think it’s a noblesse oblige thing. Truthfully, it’s a not quite good enough at football thing. But right now Harvard is 9-0. About where they were in 1968. Yale was undefeated that year too. When they had Calvin Hill, who became a huge star with the Dallas Cowboys. Figures. Dallas Cowboys and Yale go together. Lots of stars, lots of sex scandals, not much in the way of solid accomplishments for a long long time if you know what I mean.

Not that Yale isn’t old. It is. Like Bill and Hillary are old.

Anyway. Back in 1968 there was a unique confrontation. Both Harvard and Yale were undefeated. (Not this year. Yale lost to Dartmouth early in the season.) That year, maybe for the last time, The Game meant something. Yale was ranked somewhere in the the top 25 nationally. Harvard was, well, Harvard. So with 42 seconds left on the clock, Harvard was losing 29-13. When a miracle happened. The next day, the headline of the Harvard Crimson read, “Harvard Beats Yale 29-29.” They even made a documentary about it. Because when a bunch of people go to Yale and Harvard and something unusual happens, you can bet a movie will be made about it eventually.

Not feeling good about this one. This year, The Game is at Harvard, but there’s no real home field advantage in this contest. It’s not like Lambeau, where everybody stops breathing when Aaron Rodgers has the ball. Everybody’s drunk and not paying attention. And the two schools are so close geographically that it’s pretty much 50-50 Harvard and Yale regardless of where they’re playing.

Worse, Marist grad and self-nominated Harvard man Bill O’Reilly is attending The Game. Yuk.

Nobody has to root one way or the other. We’re focused on The Game because we’re still getting over pet deaths. The deerhound Raebert runs away from Philadelphia Eagles games because my wife cheers too loudly. She’s much more restrained about Ivy League games. As am I.

Why? Because it’s just a game. Saving grace.

Amidst all the other crimes of the administration, this one has to rank high. An ongoing conspiracy to set American cities aflame in the name of racial justice.

The evidence is a matter of open record, however spun by mainstream media.

The newest news, buried in an article in the New York Times, gives us this, as reported by Gateway Pundit.

President Obama met with Ferguson protest leaders on November 5th, the day after the midterm elections. The meeting was not on his daily schedule. He was concerned that the protesters “stay on course.”

Gateway’s source is a sentence or two buried in the Times article titled In Ferguson, Tactics Set for Grand Jury Decision in Michael Brown Case, 21 paragraphs in.

Some of the national leaders met with President Obama on Nov. 5 for a gathering that included a conversation about Ferguson.

According to the Rev. Al Sharpton, who has appeared frequently in St. Louis with the Brown family and delivered a speech at Mr. Brown’s funeral, Mr. Obama “was concerned about Ferguson staying on course in terms of pursuing what it was that he knew we were advocating. He said he hopes that we’re doing all we can to keep peace.”

Peace? That’s been the objective? Really? Maybe if you add a Monty Python-style wink-wink. Consider the prelude. And remember, we are still awaiting a grand jury decision about the facts of the matter. But back in September, the president was already speaking prejudicially about Ferguson before international audiences:

President Obama, once tight-lipped about the volatile situation in Ferguson, Mo., has been speaking out a bit more in recent days, changing his approach to the conflict and unrest there nearly two months after the shooting of Michael Brown.

In a few different forums in recent days, Obama has mentioned the situation. He has done so even as there is clearly little political benefit to doing so — and more likely, a bigger downside.

First, he riled conservatives by citing Ferguson in his United Nations speech as an example of America’s imperfections. Then, this past weekend at the Congressional Black Caucus event, Obama sounded a somewhat different note from his earlier comments on Ferguson.

He said before that “sentencing may be different … how trials are conducted may be different,” when it comes to African Americans in the criminal justice system.

On Saturday, he was bolder and more unequivocal: “We know that, statistically, in everything from enforcing drug policy to applying the death penalty to pulling people over, there are significant racial disparities. That’s just the statistics.”

Meanwhile, he had already turned Eric Holder and the Department of Justice loose to conduct an investigation before there was any factual disposition in the case.

Attorney General Eric Holder travelled to Ferguson, Missouri, Wednesday to personally intervene in the investigation of the police shooting of Michael Brown, an unprecedented and highly questionable move…

The issue in Ferguson is possible police misconduct. Investigating such misconduct is the responsibility of the Criminal Section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. The primary mission of this Section is to prosecute individual police officers under 18 U.S.C. §§ 241 and 242. These criminal statutes prohibit officials who are acting under color of law from willfully depriving individuals “of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” In this case, the government must prove that Officer Darren Wilson used excessive force against Brown during the apparent confrontation that the two had. If Wilson is convicted, the punishment can be extremely severe, including life in prison or the death penalty.

The unrest in Ferguson has obviously been triggered by unproven – and increasingly unlikely, given the emerging evidence – allegations that Brown was targeted by Officer Darren Wilson because of his race. Brown is not only a suspect in the robbery of a convenience store, but Wilson was apparently severely injured in the struggle with Brown. The notion that Wilson deliberately targeted Brown, let alone used vastly excessive force in the interaction, seems a bit dubious at this point. Still, Holder has dispatched a team of lawyers from the Criminal Section to supervise over 40 FBI agents sent to Ferguson to investigate this tragic situation. The attorneys “deployed to lead this process,” says Holder, are the “Civil Rights Division’s most experienced prosecutors.”

What Holder did not say is that it is these “experienced prosecutors” in the Criminal Section who he is so “proud of,” along with lawyers in the U.S. Attorneys’ office in New Orleans, who were accused last year by a federal judge in Louisiana of “grotesque prosecutorial abuse.” In a shocking 129-page order in a civil rights prosecution of New Orleans police officers after Hurricane Katrina, the judge castigated the Justice Department, using terms like “skullduggery” and “perfidy” to describe the misbehavior of prosecutors. This included making anonymous postings on the website run by the New Orleans Times-Picayune that “mocked the defense, attacked the defendants, and their attorneys, were approbatory of the United States Department of Justice, declared the defendants obviously guilty, and discussed the jury’s deliberations.

Fair and objective? Two smoking guns on this question. First, Holder’s reaction to leaks from grand jury suggesting that Darren Wilson might have been acting in legitimate self defense.

Attorney General Eric Holder says that he is beyond exasperated — he is “mad,” in fact — at the leaks pouring out of the investigation into the police shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

Holder even went so far as to advise those responsible for leaking the information to “shut up” in a public interview at the Washington Ideas Forum on Wednesday.

“I think that somebody, these leakers, have made the determination that they’re trying to somehow shape public opinion about this case,” Holder told The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart.

“And that’s inconsistent with the way in which we conduct investigations, and especially grand jury investigations which are supposed to be secret.”

The leaks include claims that the grand jury weighing whether to press charges against Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson has been provided with evidence that the officer fired two shots inside of his car during a struggle with Brown and that blood was found on Wilson’s gun. That would seem to support Wilson’s claim that Brown attacked him.

Second, a letter from a responsible law enforcement official making a damning charge.

As the Senate prepares to hold confirmation hearings for new Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch and as outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder continues to allocate Department of Justice resources to the situation in Ferguson, former FBI Assistant Director and Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund President Ron Hosko has sent a scathing letter to President Obama detailing the damage done to the relationship between law enforcement and DOJ over the past six years.

“The hyper-politicization of justice issues has made it immeasurably more difficult for police officers to simply do their jobs. The growing divide between the police and the people – perhaps best characterized by protesters in Ferguson, Mo., who angrily chanted, “It’s not black or white. It’s blue!” – only benefits of members of a political class seeking to vilify law enforcement for other societal failures. This puts our communities at greater risk, especially the most vulnerable among us,” Hosko wrote in the letter exclusively obtained by Townhall. “Your attorney general, Eric Holder, is chief among the antagonists. During his tenure as the head of the Department of Justice, Mr. Holder claims to have investigated twice as many police and police departments as any of his predecessors. Of course, this includes his ill-timed decision to launch a full investigation into the Ferguson Police Department at the height of racial tensions in that community, throwing gasoline on a fire that was already burning. Many officers were disgusted by such a transparent political maneuver at a time when presidential and attorney general leadership could have calmed a truly chaotic situation.”

A bunch of political posturing? No. Real human lives and property are on the line, all over the country.

BOSTON — From Boston to Los Angeles, police departments are bracing for large demonstrations when a grand jury decides whether to indict a white police officer who killed an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri…

“It’s definitely on our radar,” said Lt. Michael McCarthy, police spokesman in Boston, where police leaders met privately Wednesday to discuss preparations. “Common sense tells you the timeline is getting close. We’re just trying to prepare in case something does step off, so we are ready to go with it.”

In Los Angeles, rocked by riots in 1992 after the acquittal of police officers in the videotaped beating of Rodney King, police officials say they’ve been in touch with their counterparts in Missouri, where Gov. Jay Nixon and St. Louis-area law enforcement held a news conference this week on their own preparations. Brown’s family is urging people to stay calm.

“Naturally, we always pay attention,” said Cmdr. Andrew Smith, a police spokesman. “We saw what happened when there were protests over there and how oftentimes protests spill from one part of the country to another.”

Preventing violence in Ferguson while awaiting grand jury
In Las Vegas, police joined pastors and other community leaders this week to call for restraint at a rally tentatively planned northwest of the casino strip when a decision comes.

And in Berkeley, Missouri, a town neighboring Ferguson, officials this week passed out fliers urging residents to be prepared for unrest just as they would a major storm – with plenty of food, water and medicine in case they’re unable to leave home for several days…

Imagine this whole thing explodes, as it well might, into rioting, looting and arson in cities across the country. Where would we look for the source of a nationwide detonation device? You know where.

Has this president and his administration ever done anything that wasn’t ultimately destructive of American good will and brotherhood?

No. Never. If America riots after the grand jury verdict, Obama and his minions should be arrested for incitement to riot.

Forget impeachment. Handcuff him and lead him away. Charge him in every death with conspiracy to murder. Tired of this malevolent paranoia and thirst for revenge for evils he never experienced.

Hip conservatives talk about South Park Republicans. People who have a sense of humor and an enormous tolerance for the potty mouths of Kyle and Cartman. It’s supposed to say something meaningful about who we are. I’m not so sure about that. It’s actually pretty easy to like South Park. The satirical targets aren’t subtle at all. Most of the laughter has to do with the obviousness of those targets. Rob Reiner is a hypocritical asshole. Hillary Clinton has a nuclear vagina. Ha ha.

The demographic that interests me is the AbFab Republicans. Do you know the show? Absolutely Fabulous. Brit sitcom. Any attempt at description is doomed to failure. Everything about the show screams satire, but the target is elusive. We have two women, both pampered and utterly worthless, one an ex-hippie narcissist and one an ex-groupie narcissist, both of them drunken freeloaders in the London fashion scene. They get a load on and take the Concorde to Paris to look at a doorknob for the rehab of the kitchen one of them burned down in the previous night’s binge. The only sane one is the hippie’s daughter, who is a humorless drab actively hated by the ex-groupie. At one point the two actually sell the daughter to white slavers in Marrakesh. But nothing they do ever actually works, so the bad penny returns and everything keeps going and going and going.

As descriptions go, the one above is pretty good. What it doesn’t do is convey just how falling down laughing funny the show is. Jennifer Saunders, the hippie (and chief writer) is so far beyond Lucille Ball in terms of timing and physical comedy that I blush even to make the comparison. Her sidekick, played by former model and world class beauty Joanna Lumley, is equally brilliant, amazingly able to top everyone in any given scene. Both of them are astoundingly willing to look just godawful bad in exchange for a laugh. Lumley, for example, is still a beautiful woman, but she seems delighted to portray a whorish, haggard, selfish bitch clinging to the remnants of her sixties youth.

One can grope for labels. AbFab is a post-modern nihilist grotesquerie that mocks the whole genre of situation comedies. Or not. It could be something altogether else. But what it does for certain is defeat the notion that a series must have at least one character you can really like and identify with. It doesn’t have any of those. Its point seems to be that if you’re really and truly funny, you don’t need anything else.

And funny it is.

Right now, it’s running as a marathon on the Logo Channel. Right. You know what that means. Gay guys love AbFab. So Republicans need not apply. Right?

Wrong. The deep satirical target the show consistently hits with annihilating precision is the absurdity of life lived without real human values. Fads and pseudo-libertarian Nietschean hubris don’t do anything but make you ridiculous. Every possible fad in ideology and self actualization pop psychology makes an appearance in Absolutely Fabulous. And nobody ever wins.

You can watch it and roll on the floor laughing without being gay. Trust me. And all these years later, Lumley is still — underneath the clown makeup — as hot as she was in The New Avengers.

How you can be sure you’re still a Republican.

We’re about to lose the second member of our pack in one week. He was always “my handsome boy.”

We’re going to have another death in the family. His name is Mickey. Thing is, you can’t control the aging thing. My wife got three feral cats all at once. They’re all 13 now, except for the beauty who died earlier. We got Molly, not expecting that she would outlive all our other greys. We plucked Eloise off the side of the road about eight years ago, when the vets told us she was three or four. Izzie the Bengal is at least nine. We’re looking at the end of our pet lives across the board.

I was always the Scottish pessimist, my wife the Irish optimist. Our last two young’uns are Elliott and Raebert. Both less than five years old. But Psmith was less than six and my wife and I are both tired of tears. She won’t look when I show her adoptable greyhounds after I visit the empty space where Molly used to live.

The one who isn’t giving up is Raebert. He refuses. Absolutely. He insists on ministering to Mickey. He licks and licks and licks and licks — and licks — until we banish him from the cat’s presence altogether.

I feel both ways about it. He fixed my glued together eye with a single tongue swipe and he’s convinced he can fix Mickey by laving the facial tumor with the magical Deerhound tongue, so obsessively that we’ve had to banish him to the bedroom. Do we sound crazy?

Let me stress this: Mickey is not dead. He is unquestionably the toughest cat who ever lived, nine lives mythology notwithstanding. He should have been dead a week ago. But he WILL NOT SURRENDER. I told my wife I need a jeweller’s loup to see him breathing. He has a tumor on his face. He cannot eat or drink. What does he do? He lives.

At this point I’m relying on old mythology. I wish it were more than mythology.

I’ve loved this cat as much as I love my heart dogs. He breaks my heart.

P.S. Mickey just died. Bravest single consciousness I ever knew. Love, love, love him.

So why was Raebert so obsessive? Here’s a pic you need to explain.

My wild sighthound Colleen is gone.

We’ve had Molly for ten years. A beauty and a force of nature. In all that time the only signs of aging were increasing gray on her face and the usual problems with greyhound teeth.

Until yesterday evening, she was as she has always been. Lively, eager, perpetually happy about dinnertime, still at near perfect racing weight, and suitably irreverent about his highness Raebert.

The change was sudden. After a dinner she ate with gusto she retired to her couch and then, oddly, had trouble standing up.

My wife knew the signs, as did I. We both dreaded the alarm this morning but we agreed to go down together. She was barely breathing. An hour later she was dead.

She was thirteen, which is very old for a greyhound, so we’ve known we were living on borrowed time. But the stunning quickness with which she left us was a shock. As if in her typically spontaneous style, she just decided, “I’m outa here.” No real chance to say goodbye.

I’m not going to wax sentimental here. Maybe later. We’re both still breathless at the, well, speed of greyhound departures. They don’t linger. They just go. The way they always go, with unbelievable acceleration and velocity.

But when they go for good it leaves a huge hole behind. Raebert is devastated. The cats are clingy and in need of comfort. But Molly’s life is marvelously free of tragedy. She was a rotten racer, who got out early, with only the obligatory ear tattoo to attest to her youthful servitude. The rest of her life was amazingly joyful. She loved her couch, her stuffed toys, her pug, her cats, and even her two Scottish deerhounds. Life on her own terms to an astonishing degree.

If you’ve a mind to, here are two links that kind of frame the day. The first describes the last trip to the vet Molly had with Raebert. Pure comedy.

Lord of the Jeep

The second describes the phenomenon of loving greyhounds and having to watch them go away. Just the price you pay for so much fun, laughter, and love.

Losing Greyhounds

But there will be no requiem here. Even on this “worst day since yesterday,” my memories are of insouciant vitality, never dimmed by all the vain attempts to restrain her exuberant nature. In fact, this seems like the perfect song for today.

Good golly. She was every bit of that. Perfectly black & white.

But I can’t resist this, either.

Yeah. It’s a psalm. Sorry. Love you, Molly.

P.S. The open question is just how hard the Scot will take it. He loved her like we did. He’s a conscious being. Hard to take, I know, but when he’s in your face, what are you supposed to do? Worse. He knew about Molly. Tried to tell us for two days. He’s not happy.

Or this.

P.P.S. If you can stand reality, here’s how greyhounds usually die. The ones who aren’t rescued. Don’t look if you have a weak stomach. But consider getting one. You won’t regret it.

Our friend Barbara who lives in Hawaii but was born in New Jersey is going through a tough time. I thought she was mad at me because I haven’t heard from her in quite a while. Because in my mind it’s always about me. It wasn’t. It was about her. Enough said. She’s down. So we need to lift her up.

I’ve tried to catch up. I’m not the only one who left New Jersey and had to come home. Mostly we all do. Here’s a rotogravure from someone better than I am on matters photographic.

There’s also this essay about New Jersey from the original Instapunk, back when I wasn’t as stupid as I am now. An excerpt:

Here’s the deal. New Jersey is the greatest state in the union. For so many reasons that it’s impossible to list them all. Okay, I’ll list a few, but there are many many more. New Jersey is:

The most topographically diverse of all 50 states, ranging from mountains to salt marshes and everything in between, including the best farmland in the world for growing vegetables, a beautiful and lightly populated bay shore that flows from one of the mightiest and most beautiful rivers in the country, one of the largest wilderness areas in the U.S. (the Pine Barrens), and horse country — and horses, by gar — on a par with anything you’ll find in Kentucky.

An architectural treasure and time capsule containing houses dating back to the 1600s and some of the best surviving specimens of colonial patterned brick houses, Victorian gingerbread, and Industrial Revolution commercial buildings.

The only state in the union that honored all its treaties with the Indians.

The site of the colonial town (Greenwich) Rockefeller tried to buy before he settled for Williamsburg, Virginia.

The site of the turning point in the American Revolution, the Battle of Trenton, and the only history changing duel in American History, the gunfight between Burr and Hamilton.

The home of a cattle brand older than any in the whole state of Texas.

Home of a greater university than any in New York or Pennsylvania — Princeton — and the only state university in the country — Rutgers — asked to join the Ivy League conference at its inception because of the school’s history and academic excellence. (Not to mention the fact that the first college football game ever played was between, you guessed it, Princeton and Rutgers.)

The birthplace of country music and, indeed, much of the recording industry. Jimmie Rodgers and numerous other artists cut their first albums at Victor Records in Camden.

The birthplace and/or home of numerous historical figures, writers, comedians, musicians, and actors, including Aaron Burr, Grover Cleveland, Molly Pitcher, Betsy Ross, Norman Schwartzkopf, Buzz Aldrin, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Dorothy Parker, Philip Roth, William Carlos Williams, Frank Sinatra, Count Basie, Bill Evans, Bruce Springsteen, Whitney Houston, Bette Midler, Bon Jovi, Queen Latifah, Ed Harris, Jerry Lewis, Ernie Kovacs, Eva Marie Saint, Meryl Streep, Ray Liotta, John Travolta, Bill Murray, Michael Douglas, Kevin Spacey, Kirsten Dunst, James Gandolfini, Joe Pesci, Dennis Rodman, Shaquille O’Neill, Derek Jeter, and Martha Stewart.

The only state in the union which eschews jingoism for humility. New Jersey people root for the Philadelphia Eagles, Phillies, Sixers, and Flyers and the New York Giants, Jets, Yankees, and Mets, and they represent in many cases the majority constituencies for these teams and don’t even demand acknowledgment of their cross-state support from people who uniformly laugh at the mention of their state’s name. They’re the same way when they travel; people who have never been to New Jersey at all laugh immediately and scornfully pronounce the clicheed “New Joisey” trope that makes rubes from Nebraska to Alaska feel more sophisticated than they have any right to. New Jerseyans laugh right along with them, soak up what they have to offer, and ultimately move back to the greatest state in the union, where there are thunderstorms but not tornadoes, droughts but not uncontrollable wildfires, tremors but not earthquakes, rainstorms but not hurricanes, overflowing streams and rivers but not floods, and snowstorms but not blizzards.

Born to run. All of us. Boats, cars, bikes, and everything else. It’s called balls. You New Yorkers could look it up.

We all come home, Barbara. It would be a privilege to meet you in person.

.
Come dancing. It’s only natural. Why Michelle wears Spanx, starves children, and flips the bird to the mid-term congressional elections. She needs a man.

This is from Instapunk.com in February 2008. It’s in the book.

Hillary’s stock has plunged like Victoria Falls since then, but note that nothing I cited ever became an issue in the campaign. There were plenty of murmurs, of course, but only in the righty blogs, who have always been part of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” the Clintons succeeded in pinning Bill’s, uh, troubles on in the past. None of it stopped the party establishment from regarding the controversial, carpetbagger wife of an impeached ex-president as the “inevitable” heir to the Democrat nomination for the presidency of the United States. Despite the continuous, unending reams of scandals, large and small, the political pundits saw Hillary as formidable and probably unstoppable. Certainly, they expressed no early interest in stopping her themselves.

Now, though, the Conventional Wisdom is that Hillary ran a bad campaign, that she was a bad candidate, that the fabled Clinton magic had, like the Fonz of Happy Days, somehow “jumped the shark” and lost its mystical feel for the heart of the American electorate. Poor Hillary is suddenly a sad female hammerhead whose latest jump was a bridge too far. Isn’t that the new narrative?

It’s bunk. All of it. Make no mistake. The Clintons, both of them, are master politicians, whatever the weaknesses of their ethics, ambitions, and policies. In a curiously American way, the nakedness of their Machiavellian maneuverings was always part of their allure. That’s why Bill was deemed the first black president. You could see the game he was playing every step of the way, but he was so damned good at it, and charming to boot, that you let him take you in. Because he also knew that you knew, and he counted on you understanding that he was half sincere and half self-serving rogue.Which is to say that he was a pure politician and purely American — in that he was never claiming to be better than you in absolute terms, but only at working the system on his AND your behalf. That’s how he skated through the Lewinsky scandal and kept his approval ratings higher than all those dully virtuous presidents who didn’t enter the Oval Office and see it as a stationary exoticar pussy-magnet.

The blanket, knowing forgiveness that gave Bill his two terms was also extended to his wife — whose personal travails we all understood without her ever coming clean about them. As a people, we accepted her marriage of convenience and saw it as the dues she had paid to become just as pure a politician as her rapscallion husband. Despite her seeming lack of humor, that was the joke the members of her party were willing to share with her without forcing the punchline to be uttered out loud.

So now it’s all over. A long, deeply committed relationship axed via text message, What can do that? Only an infatuation. All the durable lovers have deserted them — blacks, feminists, poor single mothers dying for another chance to be betrayed by yet another sweet-talking user, and even the unionists who have always known their cause depended absolutely on smiling corruption. Momentarily at least, they have all forgotten that American politics is about finding the best politicians who are willing to be on your side for a price you can both agree on without spoiling the pleasure between the sheets at least one of you is counting on. They’ve forgotten everything, including the basic nature of the transaction.

You see, Hillary was never a femme fatale. That’s the role Obama has stolen. He’s the mysterious, alluring, elusive siren, arousing, intoxicatingly seductive, remote but poetic, blade strong yet easily wounded and possessed of myriad vulnerablilities, all of which must be observed, placated, avoided, kow-towed to, and appeased. He is running for the position of national Greta Garbo.

A romance made in heaven, to be sure, the stuff of dreams. But what if, underneath it all, he too is a politician. What if he should turn out to be simply a different kind of manipulator than the Clintons — not the jolly whore of our egalitarian tradition but a greedy mistress with a grievance and a murderous grudge?

Down to earth. If the Clintons can’t make a dent in the campaign of a coolly ambitious, non-African-American, Ivy League Chicago machine politician, what will any of of us be able to do if he turns out to be inept, short-sighted, vengeful, corrupt, or actively seditious? If some clumsy American politician accidentally says something to offend his 300K-a-year Princetonian executive wife, for example, will we all have to apologize — or pay in some other coin? If he violates his vow to uphold the Constitution, will we have the recourse we would have with mere politicians? Or will every voice — in politics and the press — fall silent, because raising an objection of any kind is tantamount to a hate crime?

What stories will not be pursued by the already horrifyingly cowardly PC media? What legitimate policy objections will not be posed by senators and congressmen who are already living in daily fear that their most inadvertent verbal slip will bring down 400 years worth of resentment on their heads?

Think about it. If the “First Black President” has already been made to look a bigot for daring to promote his wife’s candidacy over Obama’s, what chance do the rest of us have in the next four or eight years if we start to see in Obama a Carter, a Ferrakhan, or Quisling? No matter what he does, he could never be impeached. It’s debatable whether he could ever be criticized. Let alone mauled and mocked and belittled day after day like a Bush or a, uh, Bush.

The first black President must be a politican, not a messiah. We’ve already seen what happens when teflon meets a halo. The halo wins. Without even being responsive. The truth is — and this is not racist, but statistically valid — that the first black president really can’t coast unexamined into office; he has an absolute moral obligation to demonstrate with full candor and understanding that he isn’t Marion Barry, Alcee Hastings, William Jefferson, Ray Nagin, or all the mayors of Newark, Detroit, and Philadelphia who have ridden the horse of jury nullification into sinecures of power only to abuse that power in systematic ways while branding all who objected to their corruption as bigots.

What we cannot afford at this time in our history is a sainted Jimmy Carter, a well educated Huey Long, or a closet Castro..

Inquire of yourselves — again and again — how did a neophyte take down the Clintons?

There was never a time when I didn’t know who O was. See the previous post for instructions.

Oh hell. Everybody needs a little fun. Fire up this youtube, then go watch O dance.

Better than watching him hack at a golf ball. Poor boy. No matter what he does, his wife thinks he’s acting white. Why there’s a Valerie Jarrett.

And so, by God, do we.

Can’t wait for the BRAND NEW glistening progressive view of the future.

Can you?

On the other hand…

…All of you. And the plywood rocking horse you rode in on. Just please, please, try not to do any more stupid shit. You know, stick to your own brilliant foreign policy. Because when it comes to progressives, WE are the foreigners. The few and the proud who still love this country. Who, by now, are the wasted and wounded left by the roadside.

Now scroll up and see if the Fool-in-Chief can dance to it. Thinking not. He’s never spent a night on a grate (and yeah, I have) needing the warmth. He’s been more coddled than most all of us privileged folk he so wants to punish.

Why I can so, so triumphantly, offer this response…

See if he dances to that. You know, scroll. Doris Day was like my mother. Ohio girl who loved dogs and did what she thought was right. First female picture in this post in that category. You do the math.

And, of course, send the Book.

Bizarro World. For the first time the monolithic Obama edifice of infallibility has begun to crack, with betrayals by two secretaries of defense, a former Secretary of State, a couple of White House advisers, and the guy who felt a “thrill down his leg” when Obama spoke. To top it off, we learned just how desperate the MSM has been to keep the myth intact. NBC actually wanted Jon Stewart to take over the helm of Meet the Press.

I’ve enlisted Mrs. IP to help me keep this post to a manageable size. Because I have four essays to offer, all of which should be read in their entirety, to demonstrate that the myth of liberals as liberal, tolerant, and open-minded is finally cracking apart like the coldly deceptive, authoritarian mask it is.

But what’s underneath that mask is astonishingly ugly. Ugly in matters of sex, religion, race, and fake religion. First up, a piece titled “It’s Time for Polite People to Ignore the Trolls.” (she also gets into climate change in a big way, but you have to read some to get there.)

It’s been a rough week. Jill Filipovic, noteworthy feminist and senior political writer for Cosmopolitan, has evicted me from my own sex. Check out her response to my most recent reflection on abortion…

But that’s how it works nowadays, right? If you’re Jill Filipovic, member of the Cosmo panetheon [sic], you can say or do whatever you want. We can’t expect Cosmo writers to be respectful of others’ gender identities. Nor can we expect Ruth Bader Ginsburg to be culturally sensitive about the poor. Nor can we demand that Lena Dunham to pay her workers a living wage (or any wage), just because she thinks all the rest of us should.

These Beautiful People can’t be expected to play by the laws they benevolently generate to edify the rest of us. It’s only we, the poor normal schlubs, who must toe the line and abide.

Next is an essay that explores the left’s extraordinary aversion to Christianity, even when it is demonstrably behaving heroically. It’s called “Why Do So Many Liberals Despise Christianity?” Apparently, liberals can admire what Christians do while hating why they do it.

[The] urge to eliminate Christianity’s influence on and legacy within our world can be its own form of irrational animus. The problem is not just the cavalier dismissal of people’s long-established beliefs and the ways of life and traditions based on them. The problem is also the dogmatic denial of the beauty and wisdom contained within those beliefs, ways of life, and traditions. (You know, the kind of thing that leads a doctor to risk his life and forego a comfortable stateside livelihood in favor of treating deadly illness in dangerous, impoverished African cities and villages, all out of a love for Jesus Christ.)

Contemporary liberals increasingly think and talk like a class of self-satisfied commissars enforcing a comprehensive, uniformly secular vision of the human good. The idea that someone, somewhere might devote her life to an alternative vision of the good — one that clashes in some respects with liberalism’s moral creed — is increasingly intolerable.

But we can all agree, can’t we, that liberals own all matters of race, racialism, and racism. Unless you’re John McWhorter, professor of linguistics at Columbia University, who was also inadvertently born black. His contribution, “Acting White is Still a Barrier to Black Education,” doesn’t seem to find reflexive liberal demagoguery helpful but pernicious and condescending.

Newspaper coverage of the phenomenon has been rich. John Ogbu wrote a whole book squarely documenting black kids being told that doing well in school was white. After I wrote Losing the Race in 2000, I was surprised by thousands of letters, including over a hundred from black people explicitly attesting that they were teased as “white” for liking school, as well as from concerned teachers wondering what to do about black kids coming to them and telling them about this happening. I could go on, and on, and on (and have, elsewhere). The evidence is of crushing weight.

But no, all of this is apparently mere “anecdotes,” refuted by the fact that if you ask black kids whether they respect school they say yes. Or, beyond that, people who want to wish the “acting white” problem away have a rather extraordinary collection of further feints.

The “acting white is a myth” crowd see quite the weapon in, for example, Tyson, Darity and Castellino’s finding that it’s mostly in integrated schools that the “acting white” charge flares up. Their implication seems to be that because it isn’t an issue among poor black kids, it basically isn’t an issue at all. But whence suddenly the idea that only poor black kids’ problems matter? Anyone can see that the reason poor black kids underachieve is lousy schools, not being called “white,” but surely we aren’t under the impression that there are so few middle class black students in 2014 that their problems qualify as mere static. That black kids suffer this in advantaged circumstances such as these is exactly why the “acting white” issue is a problem.

There’s religion, which liberals despise, and there’s an ideology of murder, persecution (and mutilation) of women, and implacable hatred of civilization that liberals defend tooth and claw. Here’s atheist Sam Harris describing his set to in the debate between Bill Maher/Sam Harris and Nicholas Kristof/Ben Affleck. Affleck, the chief aggressor, being the illustrious liberal and college dropout (no credits). Harris asks the critical question of the moment: “Can Liberalism Be Saved from Itself?”

After the show, Kristof, Affleck, Maher, and I continued our discussion. At one point, Kristof reiterated the claim that Maher and I had failed to acknowledge the existence of all the good Muslims who condemn ISIS, citing the popular hashtag #NotInOurName. In response, I said: “Yes, I agree that all condemnation of ISIS is good. But what do you think would happen if we had burned a copy of the Koran on tonight’s show? There would be riots in scores of countries. Embassies would fall. In response to our mistreating a book, millions of Muslims would take to the streets, and we would spend the rest of our lives fending off credible threats of murder. But when ISIS crucifies people, buries children alive, and rapes and tortures women by the thousands—all in the name of Islam—the response is a few small demonstrations in Europe and a hashtag.” I don’t think I’m being uncharitable when I say that neither Affleck nor Kristof had an intelligent response to this. Nor did they pretend to doubt the truth of what I said.

The answer is no.

If you don’t know how this applies, there is no hope for you.

When it comes to German Shepherds, the best of the best are the ones who are silver and black. I know I talk too much about Raebert, but he had a predecessor who was as difficult and intelligent as he is. Her name was Kristie.

She was a terrible puppy. Way worse than Psmith or Raebert. But Mrs. IP always says, go with the boys not the girls. The girls are awful. Kristie was. Her ears took forever to stand up. My dad despaired of them. Then they stood up and she got her gumption up at the same time. She completely destroyed a couch my mother had sewn the slipcover for. She was forgiven. My mother had just enough fabric left for a remake. Which Kristie destroyed within the week.

My dad, having watched my mother piece together the remnants of the first crime and then witnessed the aftermath of the second, threw her bodily out of the house. They went to bed. I let her back in. I thought she understood when I told her she couldn’t do that again.

You have to understand that the picture above is not Kristie. Her ears were taller. Her nose was sharper. She was the ultimate German Shepherd. Too beautiful to be believed. I could forgive her anything. So could we all. I remember, for example, Kristie accidentally catching a squirrel. That’s how quick she was. She let it go. She also caught a groundhog and killed it. It was a reflex. She nosed it afterwards. Sorry, I think.

You’ve heard stories about how many words a dog can learn. Kristie knew more than the average. A lot more. She became my dad’s constant companion, his shadow, his spirit.

She grew old in his service. As an ultra-shepherd, she became obvious prey to the hip displacement curse. At the end, he took her upstairs with a belt under her loins. Without that, you could hear her hip bones grinding. But she never complained.

She was gorgeous. She was brilliant. She was beatific. Hope I’ll see her again. Someday.

My own candidate would have been Tina’s ‘Simply the Best.’

Mrs. IP started this by announcing that the above was her theme song. I confessed I didn’t have one and solicited yours.

So far, two strong women have volunteered theirs.

Edna.

She’s always been a live wire. Emphasis on live.

And Rita.

Perfect. Don’t ever get in her way when she’s defending what she believes in, whether it’s a sports team or a child. Force of nature.

They know who they are and aren’t afraid to say it. People I admire.

But there’s hope for the rest of us too. Except maybe me. For example, this was my theme song yesterday.

Scotland forever! (Yeah, they’re officially Aussie, but they were born in Glasgow.) Congrats to the crazies for making the right decision.

Today it’s completely different.

I know. The Beatles. I know. But he made it a Sinatra song. And it’s one I want to hear a lot today. Feels right.

You don’t have to pick one song that represents your whole life. You can be callow and capricious. What’s your theme song today? Less pressure, more fun.

CHECKING IN. Tim has a theme song. Youtube doesn’t have his favorite version, but here’s one I like.

He also has a theme song for me. If only I could understand the lyrics. (Oh.)

Have to think about this. But keep your theme songs coming.

As I told you, Breitbart couldn’t be bothered to look at the record. Would have required work or competence or something. Fortunately we have the memory of Mollie Hemingway regarding the new token righty on ‘The View.’

…the woman who made me pay attention to the names of political operatives is Nicole Wallace. Her behavior of simultaneously serving as Sarah Palin’s aide while dishonestly sabotaging her to a gleeful liberal media was so disloyal, self-aggrandizing and despicable that I decided to write her name down so I would remember to be wary of anyone who ever hired her.

Nicole Wallace was recently hired by The View, a talk show that tends to feature three or four super-liberal hosts and then, supposedly, one conservative one. That’s always been a silly model, considering how unfair a fight it is and how it “others” conservative women despite the fact that we exist in the same percentages as liberal women.

But the notion that Nicole Wallace could serve in this role is laughable and speaks to how completely out of touch with reality the producers of The View are. Of course, they also brought back a host who believes that fire can’t melt steel, so they’re not known for their grasp of reality.

Let’s get the Nicole Wallace business out of the way. Basically there were two staffers on the John McCain for President campaign back in 2008 that leaked unhelpful information to pliant media like broken sieves. If various accounts are to be believed, these individuals were Steve Schmidt and Nicole Wallace. You can look at some of the evidence for those now-widely accepted claims here. Stuff like:

In a nutshell, the controversy centers on this sentence from the VF profile: “Some top aides worried about her mental state: was it possible that she was experiencing postpartum depression? (Palin’s youngest son was less than six months old.)”

Now, I’ve been around enough campaign operatives to know that at some point on flailing campaigns, many of them start worrying about whether they’ll be blamed for the results of the election. So they start positioning themselves as smarter, better, wiser, whatever, than everyone else, most importantly the candidates themselves. There is nothing new about this.

But the McCain-Palin campaign was known for taking this to astronomically ridiculous levels. Doing stuff like, oh, I don’t know, personally purchasing expensive clothing for the VP candidate and then claiming it was all the VP’s idea. Or suggesting that the candidate had post-partum depression. Or completely failing to prepare a candidate for interviews and then suggesting that the candidate was the problem. You know, that kind of positioning that goes light years beyond normal positioning. If the leakers had spent a fraction as much time doing decent jobs as they spent talking crap, well, John McCain still would have probably lost. But either way, what reprehensible behavior for campaign aides.

I’ll quote myself: “This little bitch is almost a war criminal.” I stand by that.

And Breitbart, please, please, do some actual journalism for a change.

My wife and I have been discussing the increasingly likely replacement of Roger Goodell as commissioner of the NFL. She was initially charmed by the possibility of Condoleeza Rice assuming that office. National Review threw convincing cold water on that outcome this morning.

…who is the only name that has been floated by the Left to take some heat off the league, to help quell an increasingly politicized outrage, to be a welcomed presence and a non-contentious figure? Just a little-known, inconspicuous former secretary of state that carries no baggage with her whatsoever.

The voices on the left now toying with the notion are the same ones that would eagerly take her down from her first opening kick-off. Rice can’t even set foot on a college campus without setting off an onslaught of sit-ins, protests, and boycotts; now, the same media figures who condone these demonstrations, if not personally hurl the “war criminal” invectives with Matthew Stafford–esque zip at Rice, are going to welcome her with open arms? Come on. You can already imagine the Salon thinkpieces linking the NFL’s handling of head trauma to Rice’s treatment of Abu Zubaydah.

We already have evidence of this eventual outcome. SB Nation’s Spencer Hall quickly brought up torture and Rice’s violations of “of human decency, the Geneva Convention, and every tenet of even the loosest definition of human rights” when she was added to the College Football Playoff selection committee last fall.

Listening to political pundits talk about sports over these past few months has been insufferable enough, and sportswriters taking self-righteous positions is equally tedious. The idea of a Rice commissionership tickles these commentators’ fancy because it gives them the opportunity to link the Rice/Peterson controversy to an area they actually know something about. Ultimately, they don’t want Rice as commissioner — they want to be able to talk about her as commissioner.

In other words, Condi Rice is not going to be the replacement. No way the old boy network is going to leap from the frying pan into the fire.

Mrs. IP favors the choice of some retired coach. I disagree. The media pressure will be for some outsider coming in to clear the air. All ex-coaches are going to be suspect to the extent that they participated in whatever cultural failings the NFL is presumed to have.

The NFL is already pandering to the hard left. The hiring of three women to consult on social policies in the league — the three Furies? — and the promotion of a former Obama functionary as their leader demonstrates that an all-out assault on football itself is underway, whether the clueless Goodell administration recognizes it or not. Is this important? Yes.

Again from National Review, Andrew McCarthy‘s piece on the infiltration of sports by the progressive left:

If conservatives want to know why we are losing the culture and the country, it is important to understand that while very few kids and young adults are watching Fox News (or news programs of any kind, for that matter), they inhale sports programming. It’s ubiquitous — television, radio, the Internet. And thus equally unavoidable is sports commentary, more and more of which has less and less to do with sports. Tendentious “sports journalists,” the majority of whom are decidedly left of center, are much less guarded about their hostility to conservatives than their fellow progressives on the political beat. It is a hostility that takes for granted the chummy agreement of its viewers and is designed to make Millennials want to be part of the fun…

My purpose here is less to wade into the Rice mess than to consider how radical ideas — like the Left’s war on boys — get mainstreamed…

On Friday, after highlights of the previous night’s game between the hometown Ravens and the Pittsburgh Steelers, ESPN’s Sports Center reported, incredulously, that many female Ravens fans proudly wore their No. 27 jerseys in homage to Rice. Although this week’s coverage made him Public Enemy No. 1, it turns out that Rice is still quite popular among fans in Baltimore. One woman, clad in her Rice jersey, explained that while she did not condone his behavior, Rice had said he was sorry and was deserving of a second chance, just like other people who have done abominable things. It was a mitigating factor, in her view, that Ms. Palmer (now Mrs. Rice) had started the fight, and that the muscular professional football player was simply retaliating…

In any event, I was surprised that ESPN gave airtime to the Rice supporters. The progressive soap-opera storyline of the Rice coverage is that our aggressive, competitive culture, which has made the NFL so popular, desensitizes men to the gravity of domestic violence; that women are uniformly outraged by this state of affairs; and that football and the men who play it must be tamed. ESPN is a prominent author of this particular narrative, so one wouldn’t expect coverage of women who dissent from it.

I should have figured, though, that the segment was just a set-up for what followed: a lengthy editorial interview with Kate Fagan. A former college basketball player, Ms. Fagan is now, yes, a sports journalist. Author of a memoir The Reappearing Act: Coming Out as Gay on a College Basketball Team Led by Born-Again Christians, she is a staple at ESPN-W. That’s where the network focuses on women in sports and, seamlessly, on political and social matters that the Left has successfully branded “women’s issues.”

For the politically aware, listening to Kate Fagan is a lot like listening to President Obama or any other deft community organizer. She first invoked tribal politics in refusing — or at least making a show of refusing — to rebut the female Ravens fans who sympathize with Rice. That, she said, would be “pitting women against women” — a no-no. She then skillfully lowered the boom: The problem is not Rice’s cheerleaders; it is our “culture.”…

By all means read the whole piece, which explains that the intent is to extort funds from the NFL to be distributed to community organizers who can begin the process of teaching boys to be more like girls.

…it was presented as incontestable fact that (a) there was a crisis involving violence, (b) the NFL and its violent sport must be responsible for it, (c) the NFL has deep pockets, and (d) the NFL should thus be coerced to fund bien pensant activists to perform progressive social-engineering on schoolboys.

Kids who tuned in to ESPN Friday morning to see the highlights of Thursday night’s game were treated to political indoctrination masquerading as sports commentary. Come to think of it, that’s exactly what football fans were treated to during the coverage of the game itself. And it happens pretty much every day.

Conservatives complain incessantly, and not without cause, about Republican fecklessness in confronting the Obama Left’s agenda, about the news media’s becoming an adjunct of the White House press office. But Washington’s political arena is just where the score is tallied. The game is being played, and lost, in the popular culture.

Yes. The leftist sports media are not just an annoyance or a distraction. They are a new front in the war on American values and traditions.

Before we proceed, one important fact. NFL football players are arrested at a rate 13 percent of that of the general population. Think about that.

The real objective here is not to clean up the NFL, which is already almost squeaky clean. The objective is to destroy football altogether and set about eliminating masculinity from American culture.

So who should be commissioner? Another bureaucratic drone like Goodell? No. A high profile progressive from outside the NFL, who will walk in the door dedicated to the new mission of destruction — turning the NFL into the NFFL, the National Flag Football League, whose champion will play the Super Bowl against an appropriately renamed Lingerie Football League (and lose)?

No.

To prevent that, we need our own Trojan Horse, our own Manchurian Candidate. Someone who just might pass muster in critical PC terms, and will yet save the day, the game, and the sports culture.

Her name is Tammy Bruce, pictured above. She is an avowed lesbian. She is pro-choice. She is a past president of NOW in California. She has led campaigns against sexualized violence, notably protests against the movie American Psycho.

Convinced yet? Well, maybe that’s because you don’t know that she’s a Reagan Republican, a hard line conservative on virtually every issue but abortion, an incredibly talented talk show host who occasionally substitutes for Laura Ingraham, an enemy of the feminist war on boys and men, and as she has admitted in interviews, “technically bisexual,” no particular fan of same sex marriage. Her self identification as lesbian was to make a point. As such she she belongs to the 25 percent of lesbians who are not obese and the 5 percent of lesbians who are actually beautiful.

What’s most relevant in this background? Two things. As a lesbian who has not held political office, she cannot be attacked for war crimes like Condi Rice would be. If attacks were made, the NFL could throw up its hands and say what do you want from us? How non-Old Boy Network can we get?

Second. She’s a died in the wool libertarian. One of Mrs. IP’s most persistent arguments has been that Roger Goodell brought this crisis on himself by presuming to be the disciplinarian-in-chief of the National Football League. And all appeals of his rulings are to him. Closed authoritarian loop.

Tammy Bruce has the media savvy, razor wit, eloquence, and conviction to transform the commissioner’s office into a bully pulpit rather than a star chamber. The responsibility for identifying thuggishness, punishing it appropriately, and preventing it in the first place lies with owners and coaching staffs of individual teams. The commissioner should not be a czar or pope handing down judgments on personal conduct.

She should be a talented interlocutor between and among teams, players, and sports media. She should have the insight and courage to call shenanigans on any or all of these when warranted.

The only argument of Mrs. IP I can’t counter is this: Won’t ever happen.

Why I could be so open about the reasons for nominating Tammy Bruce.

MY BAD. What’s wrong with me today? To mention the Lingerie Football League without providing necessary background? I call that shoddy research. The remedy.

The actual game begins at 21 minutes in if you want to skip Jenny McCarthy’s off color pre-game commentary.

The post-NFL name? I dunno. Maybe the LGBT Football League. Won’t be as much fun. But nothing else will be as much either when the progressives get their way, alas.

If you want your head messed with at a time when the world is doing everything possible not only to mess with it but bash it in, Dollhouse is your ticket. Ultimate binge watching, two seasons worth. (No nudity, no cringe-worthy simulated sex, no bad language. Not HBO. Pic above is just for how Echo will make you feel. Something about her acting.)

The oddest thing is that I tried to bail when I started to feel deeply uncomfortable with what the series was about and where it was leading. It was the missus who continued to be intrigued, and so we fell back from the point where I was uncomfortable and, having watched a few episodes at a time previously, binged on the rest.

I know what it’s about now, which is a revelation of the executive producer Joss Whedon, whom many of you know. He was the creator of Firefly and its movie climax Serenity (a couple of the stars of which appear here) whose final 15 minutes I have watched again and again, which I normally don’t do with movies anymore. Joss Whedon is, I’m thinking, a sick man. But he knows how to keep you turning the page.

I’d be tempted to say that Dollhouse is original except that its originality is not that of new sci fi ideas but of the way he has created a pastiche of The Matrix, Terminator, Stepford Wives, Manchurian Candidate, Constantine, Resident Evil, The Three Faces of Eve, and Barbarella.

Which is not to say that it fails to be consistently imaginative and creative. You may think I’m delaying getting to the point. I’m setting the latches for your understanding of the premise.

There is an institution in Los Angeles which takes in attractive but grievously damaged people and offers them a deal: give us five years you won’t remember and we’ll take away all your pain and release you to a life of economic freedom and escape from the guilty thoughts haunting you.

The key to the offer is a technology that wipes away their memories, which are stored on a shelf, and gives them new complete identities consistent with what high paying clients want. The “Actives,” as they are called, complete these engagements as utterly different people from what they originally were, are protected throughout their engagements by “handlers,” and then wiped again. In between engagements, the Actives exist in an infantile state. They shower together without experiencing sexual interest. They eat, they make crayon drawings, and they know each other only by their Active noms de guerre.

So we have a heroine whose nom de guerre is Echo. She is the most in demand. It takes a number of episodes to realize fully that most of her assignments are high priced, highly customized prostitution. The personality she is given makes her fall in love with the john. She is played by Eliza Dushku above. The name of the establishment is The Dollhouse.

There is also an FBI agent who is obsessed with proving the existence of the Dollhouse. For this he is shunned and ridiculed by his fellow agents. But he cannot be deterred.

We learn slowly how everything works. Before an assignment the Active lies back in a kind of high tech Eames chair and is quickly imbued with a new personality which provides the personal identity details, inclinations, emotions, and even the skills necessary. Early on, for example, Echo’s erotic assignments are downplayed. She has to be blind for one life saving assignment, an immodest but martially capable dancer for another, and in these first season episodes Eliza Dushku is a kind of Orphan Black, dazzling you with how many different people she can be. A terrific acting performance.

Slowly, slowly, slowly, everything shifts. Something more sinister about the Dollhouse than granting fantasies or righting wrongs. Something different about Echo. The post assignment wipes don’t quite work the same with her. The FBI guy gets closer. The Dollhouse turns her loose at least once as a Special Forces assassin and she very nearly kills the FBI guy, who is now obsessed with her in particular.

Hence the long arc of the show. Unlike the other Actives, Echo can access other identities she’s been given when she needs them, altogether unconscious of any transition. Typically an assignment ends when a handler says, “Do you want a treatment?” Obediently they say, “Yes,” and they are led back to the Dollhouse, the chair, and arise from it saying, “Did I fall asleep?”

Echo does this too until you realize she is no longer being wiped clean. She remembers, not her original identity, but some sum of the constructs that have been programmed into her. She assembles a human moral conscience from the kaleidoscope of her multi-brained mind. She becomes conscious. And incredibly dangerous. She’s a world class courtesan, martial arts master, weapons expert, electronics and demolitions maven, multi-lingual nurse, deeply altruistic and selfless leader, and fearless warrior. She also loves deeply and forever, as half a dozen of her imprints continue to do.

I was ready to bail when the FBI agent so obsessed with her entered the Dollhouse to become her handler, at which point he was effectively her pimp. Enough. She hadn’t completed her transmutation at that point, but I was feeling sick, manipulated.

What we are seeing in Dollhouse is Joss Whedon’s Ultimate Female Fantasy. She is the Everything we all think we want, and single-handedly she could fulfill all of every man’s fantasies.

Her mission is to take down the Dollhouse and the huge sponsoring organization behind it, whose ambitions grow throughout the second and final season. She dies, goes to hell, is resurrected, and keeps going. Won’t tell you the end. But she continues to regard herself as Echo, whose story we all know from the myth of Narcissus. Or most of us do.

The be all and end all of femmes fatales. That was Joss Whedon’s objective. Shocking how close he came to achieving it. But there is no such thing as Echo, except in the fevered dreams of men. She’s always a reflection of one more self-admiring Narcissus. I hope Dushku has round the clock armed guards.

Oh yeah. The trailer.

HINT: If you don’t show your wife this post, she might let you look at it. Women love Amazons. She’s that too. Absolutely unstoppable in combat, of which there is plenty. I told you. I was the one who tried to stop.

Both Peregrine John and I have had some contact with home-schooled kids. Our experiences differ. Hence this exchange, which began on other terms.

Peregrine John on September 4, 2014 at 4:08 pm.

The death of Christianity has been greatly exaggerated.

As has your ability to give up. The desire to, well, that is likely understated, contrary as that may sound to anyone of differing descent. (Clan MacThomas, yes.) Items 3 and 4 are the real kickers, and I see no way around them short of something more easily spread than ebola – smallpox, perhaps – causing an awakening, an actual Come To Jesus moment in America. The less hard-core idiots are realizing that Dear Leader isn’t quite all that and a well modulated bag of chips, but will happily make another idiotic decision if their masters tell them it’s different this time. Say, if it’s a genuinely Marxist woman instead of a conveniently Marxist half-black man.

There is an enjoyment in shouting into the darkness, and even more in “I told you so” when there’s evidence aplenty of having done so. I’m also German, and that lot coined “schadenfreude.” You might prefer the survival through suffering, I don’t know. For me it’s fairly balanced with enjoying my enemies – and they are declared enemies, no choice of mine – hanging themselves in droves.

In the mean time, I try to guide and prod a cadre of young people, of no particular earthly wealth but loaded with talent and intellect and beautiful spirits (homeschoolers, all), toward seeing things as they are without becoming nihilists. They are what keep my nature Jovian and not something grimmer. Though the Missus is surely a boon, I do recommend finding youngsters (a relative term, certainly) to inspire and who will, I assure you, inspire in return.

Reply:

Instapunk on September 5, 2014 at 1:04 am.
Not too much experience with the home schooled. The only ones I know spell like pidgin-speaking Maoris.

Youngsters have been notably not inspiring me. If they knew even half what they loudly assume they do, I’d be impressed. Am not.

Reply:

Peregrine John on September 8, 2014 at 4:10 pm:

Alas. You might need a different set of younguns. It is possible that I am simply very fortunate.

Reply:

Instapunk on September 9, 2014 at 1:08 am:

Maybe I’m asking harder questions than you are. In my experience old folks are foolishly eager to assume kids know what they don’t. Ask the basics. Don’t let them squirm away. They change the subject adeptly. What con artists do.

Reply:

Peregrine John on September 9, 2014 at 3:30 pm.

For some topics I do need to address the basics, it’s true. Social issues, for which they’ve been fed palaver and good intentions by those who should know better, need foundational questioning. The good news there is that they have less brainwashing to untangle than the lads asking me why their marriage is faltering after 5 years after doing all the right things. Those can be slippery if you don’t handle them carefully. Too tender.

Now, you may well be asking harder questions. I get asked pretty challenging items myself, from this group that reads Chesterton, Lewis, and Hofstadter. I am absurdly hopeful that they know or come to realize things others clearly never dreamed mattered. No secret there. It’s gratifying – and no bad thing for my own thought processes – to see them reasoned out in real time.

Reply:

Instapunk on September 9, 2014 at 3:53 pm.

PJ: WordPress is a bitch. Sorry.

About hard questions. My wife’s 40 year old daughter, who has an advanced science degree and a six year old daughter, had NO IDEA how many senators there are in the federal government. For asking the question and insisting on an answer I was treated as if I had farted in an elevator.

Reply:

Peregrine John (maybe) on September 9, 2014 at 9:31 pm.

Good lord ‘n’ butter. I know advanced degree holders hate being called out on ignorance of basic facts, but geez. First-round items from Are You Smarter Than A Fifth-Grader don’t really qualify for categorization as “hard questions.” She should be embarrassed, not incensed.

No, the last discussion around the fire pit involved whether deep characters simply have layers of junk built up on them or have some other kind of complexity, whether the answer to that applies in real life or mostly in fiction, how as a concept it relates to what is called “depth” in game theory and design, and the common confusion between complexity and complication. It went from there to how it all relates to why ENFP personality types are so drawn to INTJ’s and the role of cognitive function order in relationships. I can’t take credit for the topic, though, since it started with one of the authors asking me about creating layered fictional characters. Some times I find myself a tad out of my depth.

Reply:

Instapunk on September 9, 2014 at 11:16 pm.

I think you’re being silly. Throwing acronyms at ME is also a dodge. You want to talk about fiction with a real writer? Do so. What’s your question, PJ? (And are you quite sure you’re not Brizoni playing raccoon?)

Reply:

Peregrine John (really??) on September 11, 2014 at 4:56 pm.

They’re shorthand, not a dodge – and apparently a useful way to identify how to communicate with people. Be that as it may, the question I was posed, which I pass along to you since I really don’t have a reliable answer, is this:

If a character is said to be deep, does that usually mean it is filtered through layers of crap that has accumulated on their natural personality? Does it instead mean that they prefer to be less forthcoming about their yet-unspoken thoughts, whether from the aforementioned psychic sediment or an inability to convey them to perhaps simpler minds? Or is it that a complexity of thought means that more than the usual number of things must be discovered about them to get a clear picture (for reasons other than simple obscuring)? Or do people usually mean something entirely different by the term?

Obviously, that’s distilled from some short conversation, but it’s the whole of the thing in one. The follow-on, and the reason for it, was to wonder how often a given cause of “depth” is applied in works of fiction, and why.

Reply:

Instapunk on September 13, 2014 at 6:46 am.

Apparently NOT a useful way to communicate, since I don’t understand it. With every response, you get more faux intellectual. Funny.

Instapunk on September 12, 2014 at 8:42 pm.

Peregrine John.

I hate to offend you. Why I’ve been slow to respond.

You seem amazingly determined to miss the point. But it’s an important discussion. You are not inquiring into what your bright young things actually know.

Deep? For any writer, it’s an easy determination. Paragraphs and chapters you need to read out loud. Narratives, characters that stick with you through time. Structural elements that require you to reassess your own cultural base. I AM a writer. Sorry to take this off your big wide multiculti table.

Sunday School stuff, really. But asking questions, that’s hard. Old farts don’t want to ask questions of intelligent youngsters who can’t answer them. Do the kids have a continuum of dates that places them in relation to the Egyptians, the Romans, their European heirs, the Enlightenment, Napoleon, blah blah? Geography? World capitals? Great rivers by continent? Mountain ranges by continent? Masterpieces of art by era and nation? Dante? Picasso? Newton? Of course not. Old man having too good a time pretending he’s having an intelligent conversation. (Or young man just pretending for fun’s sake?)

More pedestrianly, do they know the state capitals, the rules of punctuation and grammar, Algebra, the Constitution, the presidential succession at least approximately, the Revolution, the Missouri Compromise, the Civil War, World War I and II?

My guess is, they don’t for the most part. I’m guessing they haven’t read Twain, Hemingway, or Fitzgerald. Or Shakespeare.

My granddaughter, niece of my wife’s daughter who didn’t know how many senators there are, worked her way back to the date of Pearl Harbor. She didn’t know it, mind. She figured it out. Hope for her. Not a lot. But she has a brain.

You can continue to fool yourself with how talented the Millennials are. But if they don’t know anything, they have no context for anything they believe. Which renders their opinions on the depth of any literature from any time moot.

If you’re keeping score, PJ is the smart one. Obviously. (“Does it instead mean that they prefer to be less forthcoming about their yet-unspoken thoughts, whether from the aforementioned psychic sediment or an inability to convey them to perhaps simpler minds?”). Jeez. No one could keep up with that. Me? I’m terrified.

P.S. Don’t know exactly when or how my conversation with PJ got hijacked. But it did. Some Internet trick, no doubt. Faux intellectual talk doesn’t work here. If you think you’re smart, confront me. Don’t waste my time with idiotic semantics.

SOS. What have you done with my friend Peregrine John?