snake dat burger

The Korean script on the soda-vending machine simply says "drink-vending machine."

another perceptive commentary on "Minari"

Go to my blog's search window and type "minari."  You'll quickly discover that it's a plant I've mentioned several times, here, as an ingredient for stews like budae-jjigae.  The plant figures prominently as a metaphor in the movie "Minari," which is about a Korean family trying to make a living by moving from California to Arkansas.

Last night, I found what I thought was a very profound and perceptive review of the film by someone I assume is a either a gyopo (someone of Korean heritage living abroad) or a Korean with a high-level mastery of American English.  (If my Korean were anywhere near as good as his English, I'd be mighty proud of myself.)  His insights—as someone familiar with Western culture but even more familiar with Korean culture—proved valuable in helping me to straighten out some of the confusion in my own mind:  when I watched "Minari" last night, I came away with all sorts of conflicting thoughts and impressions, but watching this guy's video allowed me to de-confuse myself a bit, and to recognize the symbolic power of the plant that is thematically central to the story.  So please enjoy the video below, but be warned that it contains major spoilers about the movie's ending.

three via Bill

I've seen lots of comments about how huge the Bidens look compared to the Carters:

This is no different from mask restrictions in Korea that magically disappear the moment you sit down at the table of the restaurant you're visiting.  It's all so contradictory:

The meme below could be tweaked to apply to any number of Trump's policies:

improve this sentence!

I was reading a BBC article about the divorce of Bill and Melinda Gates when I came across this hilariously awful sentence about their charitable foundation:

The organisation has spent billions fighting causes such as infectious diseases and encouraging vaccinations in children.

While I love the idea that the Gates's foundation is actively fighting the vaccination of children, I can understand the writer's true intentions.

So!  How to improve this sentence?  Take a crack at it in the comments, and while you're there, ponder the desperate need for proofreaders in more places than just South Korea.

ADDENDUM:  Jeff Hodges has found an arguably funnier gaffe.

which side is jiggering elections, again?

Politics is basically the art of making hypocrisy look believable.

—Styx

My buddy Dr. Steve is a great guy, but politically, he's a head-up-his-ass left-Dem who has fully bought into the lies of the mainstream media.  In his latest post, he gloats about being right re:  GOP efforts to restore "election integrity."  These efforts are, of course, being spun by the left as—you guessed it!—racist attempts at disenfranchising the non-white crowd.  This is fucking laughable, and it's even more laughable to hear that the left has positioned itself against election integrity.  The left has historically shown that it has no notion of what true election integrity is:  in 2016, leftists collectively flew off the handle when Donald Trump suggested that he might question the election results if he lost.  The electoral process is inviolable! screamed the left.  Then Trump won, and the left immediately did a hypocritical 180:  The election was rigged by Russia with help from Trump!  We now know the Russiagate ructions were all bullshit after three or four federal-level investigations turned up fuck all—and most of those investigations had been led by Democrats.  

It's a pretty good guide to leftist thought and behavior to remember that the left always projects its own sins onto the right.  The right is racist?  The left will call you an Uncle Tom if you're a black conservative.  The right is sexist?  Look at the exploitation of women in leftie Hollywood.  It's all projection, all the time.  Styx deals with leftist electoral malfeasance in the above video, a video that I highly recommend.  Plenty of hypocrisy to explore in the form of rich leftists dumping billions of dollars into Democrat campaign coffers, as well as foreign influence-peddling by Swiss tycoons like Hansjörg Wyss.  There's never a reason to listen to or believe anything said by leftists.  As a recent Instapundit post contends, there's nothing to discuss when your interlocutor has passed beyond all reason:

We have to understand that you [cannot] reason with people like this,” [McWhorter] said. “It’s very rare that you teach somebody out of their religion[,] and this is a religion. And so to try to talk these people down doesn’t work. All they know is that you’re a racist[,] and that’s all you’re going to get. So the idea is not to try to have a dialogue with them about these sorts of issues…I think we simply need to start telling people like this no. 

—John McWhorter, quoted on Instapundit

That's one of the fundamental differences between lefties and righties:  righties take to heart Jesus' "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is God's" quote because they value the separation of church and state, and they understand that religion is religion while politics is politics.  The left, meanwhile, has taken the Islamic approach:  politics is religion, and religion is politics.  This explains why leftists scream, rant, drool, and thrash about like overcommitted zealots (or spoiled toddlers) when they don't get their way, or when they register even the slightest offense to their hair-trigger sensitivities.  They are hegemonic fundamentalists, and they can no longer be reasoned with.  Prepare accordingly.

reviews are on the way

I've watched Season 1 of the bloody, gory "Invincible," and tonight, I'll be watching "Minari," which finally became available for purchase on both iTunes and Amazon Prime Video (iTunes was cheaper).  I'll be reviewing both the cartoon and the movie over the coming days, so stay tuned.  In the meantime, Joe McPherson of ZenKimchi fame wrote a very good, very personal (he says it in the title) review of "Minari" not long ago.  Go give it a read.

models vs. reality

Found online:

my laptop and my new external drive

I ducked out of work and visited the computer-repair guy.  He gave me back my laptop, commenting on a broken piece of the structure that undergirds the plastic "command" key.  He said he didn't have the part in question, and that I'd have to visit a Mac service center to get the repair done—an action that would end up costing me a lot of money because the Mac team would end up repairing/replacing the entire keyboard, not just the one key.  What the hell?  Anyway, I shrugged and half-joked that I could make my own temporary repair for free by using tape to stabilize the errant key.  

The repair guy also presented me with my spanking-new external hard drive (whose capacity I no longer remember... I'll have to check what it is), which is housed in a sleek, black box.  Unlike my nifty 750GB external drive (thanks again, Hahna!), which simply plugs into my computer's USB port, this new drive is much larger and requires a power source to operate.  Not a big deal.  I'll get used to having another drive on my desk.

My plan is to unload all the data from that drive to my laptop, and from there, I'll load all the data onto my 750GB drive, whose huge capacity still remains mostly untested:  even after dumping a load of data into it over the past several years, I've barely reached a tenth of the drive's storage capacity.  750 gigabytes is most of the way to a single terabyte, and I can't imagine what I'd do with a full terabyte of storage.  At a guess, the people who store terabytes' worth of information are probably downloading (or making!) HD-quality movies—tens or hundreds of titles.  Not me:  almost all of my purchased movies are stored in the Cloud (with Amazon Prime, I have no choice; with iTunes, I have an option to download or to Cloud-store each film).  That way, I can save my storage space for other things.

I haven't plugged in and activated my new/old hard drive yet.  There are files on there—including a video of Mom before she died—that I want to see, to recover, and to store, somehow, in a safer, permanent manner.  Wading through all that old data (my Mac desktop died in 2014, so it's been a while) is going to be very distracting and, if I find more files like Mom's video, very emotional for me.  We'll see what happens.  I'll be setting up the hard drive right after I finish this post.  Wish me luck.

UPDATE:  Alas.  My computer can't read the data on the external hard drive.  This isn't surprising:  the hard drive comes from a 2009-era Mac, and the Mac OS has undergone many, many iterations since 2009.  My current OS is Mac OS Mojave (10.14.6), which was released in 2018.  In 2009, the OS was 10.6 Snow Leopard, back when Mac was naming its OSes after big cats.  That's a difference of eight iterations.  Back-compatibility can go only so far, and for Mojave to read data on a Snow Leopard OS, it's like going on an archeological expedition for items with inscriptions written in a language that few modern scholars would understand.  

All is not lost, of course:  when I do finally take my laptop to a Mac service center to get the "command" key fixed (and, possibly, the rest of the keyboard), I'll bring along my new/old hard drive and ask whether the data from it can be pulled out and placed on, say, a high-capacity thumb drive.  I'm kicking myself, though, for not having asked the repair guy whether he'd bothered to check the accessibility of my data after he'd converted the old 2009 hard drive to a new external drive.  Damn.

forgot about the holiday

Tomorrow, May 5, is Children's Day here in South Korea.  It's a national holiday, so technically, we're off.  I, however, will be going into work tomorrow for about two hours to finish Unit 1 of the next round of proofreading that I have to do.  I was a bit of a slow worker today, which is why I ended up somewhat behind.  Once I find my rhythm, I ought to proof this current batch faster than the previous one.  Ideally, I'll finish all the proofing before I head off to hike toward Andong Dam later this month.  This might mean working over the weekend to stay ahead (assuming my Korean coworker can print out, in a timely manner, the pages I need to proof), but a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.

I'd forgotten about tomorrow because, originally, I had hoped to have a five-day weekend this week, but given my workload, that wasn't possible. Instead, I postponed my Andong Dam walk to the week of May 19, which is the Buddha's birthday—another national holiday.  So now, fixated upon May 19, I'd completely forgotten that we'd all have tomorrow off.  D'oh.  I'm not exactly happy about having the day off because that's another day's delay in my proofreading.  Grrr.  I'll see what I can do to keep from falling behind.

Meanwhile, Happy Children's Day to those of you with kids, be they younger or older.

found online

Styx on Biden the statist warmonger

Joe Biden hates your privacy:

I'll be interested to see whether the dark implications below bear out:

Styx has been an uncanny predictor of things and events.  For years, he'd been saying that "we're past due for a pandemic," and sure enough—voilà.  He predicted Trump's initial win and was more cautious about Trump's winning of a second term, a caution that proved to be warranted (although Styx did, admittedly, lean somewhat toward the idea of Trump winning, a fact he himself sheepishly acknowledged).  So if Styx thinks Biden might get us into unnecessary military action (with enthusiastic backing by hypocritical Democrats who, under Trump, were passing themselves off as antiwar peaceniks), I'd bet there's something to this idea.  Something bellicose this way comes, thanks to the senile idiot chanting for war.

Happy Birthday, Mom

Mom would've been 78 today.  She didn't even make it to 67.  Glioblastoma doesn't care about numbers, though, and it sure as hell doesn't care about your feelings.

Happy Birthday, Mom.

laptop woes

Silly me. 

I tried popping off my Mac laptop's "command" key last night because it's been sticking lately. Instant regret: I successfully removed the key from the keyboard, but I couldn't figure out how to put it back on.

This morning, before work, I took my laptop to the repair shop down the street. The repair guy wasn't there, but the shopkeeper across the hall told me he'd keep my laptop and let the repair guy know what was up. I had also brought my old, dead Mac's hard drive to be converted into an external drive so I could get at its old data; I handed all my electronic equipment over to the old guy and left a note detailing what I wanted done.

Later in the afternoon, the repair guy, who had been out for much of the day, called and told me he wouldn't be able to fix the keyboard, but he would be able to convert my old internal hard drive to an external one. 

So tomorrow, I'll pick up both my laptop and my new external hard drive. I'll pay for the hard drive and figure out where the nearest Mac service center is, then get my damn keyboard repaired in what I hope will be a timely manner. 

Tonight, it's just me and my new phone, plus my GlocalMe WiFi-hotspot device. For your entertainment, here's a pic I took earlier this evening while walking home the long way:

I remember these little guys from 2017.

a quickie review of three self-published authors:Shawn Matthews, Island of FantasyMark J. Russell, Young-hee and the PullochoNB Armstrong, Korean Straight Lines

A lot of us expats are given to writing.  Some of us, like Michael Breen, write in a semi-scholarly, journalistic vein—serious nonfiction.  Others of us write to entertain, and even that style subdivides into literary fiction, poetry, and nonfiction:  fantastical adventures or humorous autobiographies.  Below are some long-overdue mini-reviews of two works by expats, plus a mini-review of an expat-created work that I only recently finished.

1.  Shawn Matthews, Island of Fantasy (2004)

I actually wrote a sort-of review of Shawn's book way back in 2004.  You can find my old review here.  Shawn's personal story is, ultimately, a sad one:  he broke up with his Korean girlfriend for unspecified reasons, hightailed it to China, got himself a Chinese girlfriend, and ended up committing suicide by jumping off the top of an apartment building.  In the aftermath of the suicide, Shawn's best friend told the world something that some had already suspected:  Shawn had been bipolar.  Shawn's blogs, Korea Life Blog and China Life Blog, were unfailingly—even manically—upbeat accounts of the awesomeness of living as an American expat in East Asia.  His blog was extremely popular for its photos and its unflagging humor—something that also suffuses Shawn's Island of Fantasy.  The events described in Shawn's book are fairly horrible, though, and they're a true reflection of a freshman expat's experience of life in Korea when he has no idea what he's getting himself into.  We've all been there:  in my first year of working in Korea, I ended up suing my boss, who was a true dick.  Like Shawn, I had no idea how crappy the hagweon experience was going to be.  If I could, I'd recommend that wannabe expats go straight into university teaching.  It's not perfect, but it's a damn sight better than hagweon work.

Shawn's prose could stand a good bit of editing (as you'll see, this will be a running theme through all of these mini-reviews), but if one looks past the occasionally clunky prose, there's an engaging narrative there about a young guy who plunges into the Korean hagweon experience after accepting an offer to teach on South Korea's Geoje Island (pronounce it "gaw-jeh").  The kids are unruly and misbehaving, and the couple running the hagweon prove to be an absolute nightmare.  People who know little about Korea might think Shawn's portrayal of this evil duo is an exaggeration, but such predators do exist, and in droves.  My first Korean boss was one of them.  Shawn somehow spins his narrative in a positive way, but he can't hide the truth that, to find happiness, he basically had to physically run away from the school to gain his freedom, with that evil Korean couple desperately running after him like wolves about to lose their prey.  Horrific, funny, and relatable.

2.  Mark Russell, Young-hee and the Pullocho (2015)

I read journalist Mark Russell's fantasy story a while back, and I haven't reread it since, so some of the details have gone fuzzy.  The story is about a little girl named Young-hee; she's spent some years in the States and has lost a bit of her Korean.  Now newly reestablished in Seoul, Young-hee is disappointed by the tall, forbidding apartment complexes that surround her.  Her adventure begins when she loses her little brother; her frantic search for him leads her down, down an apartment building's parking garage where she encounters a portal that takes her, in true CS Lewis fashion, into a sort of alternate universe where the creatures and characters of Korean legend live and interact.  Young-hee discovers her brother has been captured by a tokkaebi, a sort of goblin, and he refuses to relinquish the boy unless Young-hee goes on a quest for a powerful, ginger-like root called a pullocho.  While in this alternate world, Young-hee encounters dragons, tigers, a talking pair of jangseung (pole-shaped guardians, male and female, often found at trailheads; I've written about them many times), and many other magical, mystical beings.  She learns of a great war on the horizon—one that might devastate this world, which is called Strange Land (a biblical reference to Moses' self-identification as "a stranger in a strange land"?).

Russell's story is filled with colorful characters and Korean idioms, all perceptively rendered by an author who obviously loves Korea and its legends.  There's a keen awareness of Korean culture that no doubt comes from Russell's own experience in Korea; I did feel a twinge when I thought that the author may have beaten me to the punch in writing a story that involves characters much like the ones I'd like to include in my own fantasy-themed novel.  That said, Russell's book could stand some massive proofreading:  typos and other linguistic gaffes abound, and they sometimes detract and distract from the story.  Comb through the prose, straighten out the kinks, and you've got a fascinating adventure on your hands—readable by both kids and adults.  (I also really like the book's cover design.)

3.  NB Armstrong, Korean Straight Lines (2012)

My English friend N, who does freelance work for my company along with the several dozen other things he does to keep himself busy, recently recommended his Korean Straight Lines to me, so I bought the Kindle version.  Published in 2012, the book recounts N's early experiences in South Korea.  The narrative is presented in a pastiched, impressionistic manner; chapters are short, all unfailingly ending with little vocab lessons written in both hangeul and English words.

For the scatologically inclined, there's a brief story about N's encounters with an old man in Busan, whom N came to think of as something of a sage... until the day N found the old man leaning against a wall and taking a foul-smelling shit while gesturing vigorously for N to provide him with toilet paper.  Later in the book, and in much the same frank, toilet-related spirit, N finds himself on a bus, saddled with a raging need to take a piss.  He does so surreptitiously, into a bottle, and is literally caught with his pants down when another bus pulls alongside him, and a woman in that bus sees N in flagrante and fixes the Englishman with a glare of disapproval.  As the comedy of errors continues, N ends up dropping the urine-filled bottle, which rolls along the floor of the bus.

I don't want to give the impression that the book is entirely focused on bodily functions; it isn't.  Most of the book, in fact, combines insights on Korean culture with N's experiences as a newbie who eventually gains competency in the language and a deeper knowledge of the culture.  N isn't bipolar, so his perspective on South Korea isn't as relentlessly positive as that of the late Shawn Matthews:  N is more thoughtful and meditative, and he's not inclined to view Korea through rose-colored glasses.  He offers respect to the country when respect is due, but he's honest and critical when he sees the country's flaws.  A person can learn a lot, from this book, about private teaching in Korea, Korean food culture, piano lessons, Chinese lessons, and the interesting things that can happen in the company of strangers.

N's book, like the other self-published books reviewed before this one, can definitely use some proofreading.  N tells me he wrote the book in a rush; I can only hope that, one day, he goes back to his manuscript and buffs out some of the typos and other errors.  Also, the hangeul lessons at the end of each chapter are useless if you can't/don't/won't read hangeul, but N does provide a handy appendix in which, step by step, you can learn to sound out hangeul and learn some basic words.  I've lived in South Korea for sixteen years, and while I speak Korean at a high-intermediate level (I'm far from fluent), I was embarrassed to see, while reading N's book, how many basic vocab words I still didn't know.  I used my Kindle app's highlighter function to note all the words that were new to me; I'll be studying them all soon.

Do I recommend N's book?  Well, how can I not?  N is English, so he writes in the idiom of a speaker of the Queen's.  This is wildly different from Shawn Matthews's splashy, flashy, Amurrican prose, but I suspect that most Yanks find Brit-inflected English charming, not off-putting.  N's style is occasionally prone to humorously purple hyperbole, but the reader never loses a sense of proportion.

One thing I still haven't quite figured out, though, is the meaning of the book's title.  First, I'll note that the title, Korean Straight Lines, is slightly Konglish-y:  Straight Korean Lines would be more natural-sounding, just as it's more natural to say "traditional Korean clothing" rather than what Koreans always say, to wit:  "Korean traditional clothing."  That's not how we normally order our adjectives.  I don't mean this as a criticism of N's diction, although it may sound like one.  I'm actually wondering whether the title involved a deliberate choice to "go Konglish," so to speak.  

My guess, based on my own experience living in this country, is that the title is a friendly jab at the nonlinearity of Korean thought, society, and culture.  Things rarely proceed straight from A to B here, and it often seems, from the foreigner's perspective, as if life in Korea has been deliberately set up to prevent linear, Euclidean movement.  

Result:  the Korean version of a straight line looks like a drunken scribble.  You start your first day of vacation thinking you'll be heading to Busan and sitting out on the beach, but instead, you're accosted by a Korean stranger who insists you tag along and meet his friends up in the mountains (that, by the way, is an introvert's worst fucking nightmare—trust me).  

Or a more relevant example:  you want to sign up to a website so you can order kitchen products, but as you muddle your way through the registration process, you're suddenly told by the website that you need to register with this other website to make the payment procedure smoother.  Only after registering at Site B can you return to Site A and continue registering.  One step forward, three steps sideways, ten steps backward.  

That's life in Korea.  Things that ought to be simple and direct, like the frank expression of certain opinions, can't happen because you have to worry about everyone's over-delicate feelings thanks to notions of "face" and "honor" and "shame."  Of course, if you live here long enough, you do get used to things, and you do learn—at least somewhat—how to navigate society.  But the static and friction of everyday life will constantly annoy you, anyway, because the Korean version of a straight line is indeed a drunken scribble.

from an Instapundit comments section

Ave, Charles!

Charles supplies a recipe for peanut-butter-cup pie.  His photos look awesome.  I may have to make this pie—or the Oreo-crust version of it—soon.  Charles is at pains to tell the reader that he's front-loading his recipe as opposed to doing what so many cooking websites do, i.e., give the reader a long, tedious back story before offering the recipe.  I should note, though, that many such websites, these days, have "jump to recipe" buttons to help you avoid the tedium.  In Charles's case, though, there is nothing tedious about reading his pie's back story, which Charles offers after the recipe.  Enjoy.  You're welcome.

canceled (wussed out, really)

I had intended to do my yearly "crazy walk" this weekend—the 60K walk from my residence in Seoul to Yangpyeong City, just past Yangpyeong Station.  It would have started last night around 9:30 p.m. and lasted until around 2 p.m. today.  But rain was in the forecast, along with cooler temperatures than we've had in a while, so I chose the discretion is the better part of valor route and elected to postpone the walk until next week which, according to Weather.com, is looking rain-free for the moment.  In theory, I could have done the walk, anyway, but I wussed out.  Rain + cold = the most demoralizing conditions for walking.

So how am I occupying myself?  I've got material for making sandwiches—tuna and PB&J—so I'll be spending my Saturday munching on 'wiches and binge-watching "Invincible," an adult cartoon series about some messed-up superheroes—a topic that seems to be all the rage these days.  (I see that I still haven't done a proper review of the Amazon series "The Boys," despite having watched two seasons of it.)  All my favorite YouTube film critics have been talking about "Invincible," so I thought I'd go see what all the fanfare was about.  I'm halfway through Season 1 (currently the only season, but Seasons 2 and 3 have been given the green light, so there's more to come); I'll binge the final four episodes today and have a review of the season out sometime tomorrow.  Stay tuned.  And have a gute Wochenende.

buffalo police

Buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

to buffalo = to confuse or intimidate

The buffalo whom bison from Buffalo intimidate (also) intimidate bison from Buffalo.

The cycle of intimidation.

Police police police police police.

to police = to regulate, control, or surveil

The police whom other police surveil (also) surveil police.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

And now... A QUIZ!

Look at the following:

Choose the correct number(s)!  For the "Buffalo" sentence...

1.  Which word is the simple subject?

2.  Which word is the simple predicate?

3.  Which 3 words represent the adjective clause that describes the subject?

4.  Which 2 words are the noun phrase serving as the direct object of the main verb?

For the "Police" sentence...

1.  Which word is the simple subject?

2.  Which word is the simple predicate?

3.  Which 2 words form the adjective clause describing the subject?

4.  Which word is the direct object of the main verb?

NB:  I'm fully aware that the "Buffalo" sentence can be read in more than one way, but that's why I put the capital letters where I did.  With the capitals in place, only one reading is possible.  I think.

psychologizing is not journalism

Instapundit links to an American Thinker article titled "Kamala's Not Looking So Good Lately."  Here's an excerpt from the article's beginning:

Kamala Harris hasn't been looking well lately. She gave a maskless interview to CNN's Dana Bash a week ago, and she looked much more jowly and wrinkly than she did just three months ago, when she took the oath of office. She has a bit more junk in the trunk now, and gone are the purple, maroon, and ivory suits; it's black or navy all the time now, the better to hide the extra jiggly bits. A lot of her sentences now begin with "Well, I mean," signaling the intellectual vacuity she's settled for, as though she's completely given up on trying to sound smart.

Is the stress of not being able to do her job getting to her? Does she have Imposter Syndrome on steroids and the medication has stopped working? Or does she have some awful knowledge of a certain future event the rest of us don't know about and is coping with it the best way she can? On April 23, she gave a speech to the IBEW Local 490 in Concord, N.H., and she slurred and giggled her way through "I think it is important to look at folks like Haley and Kelly and also say we're gonna take note of the fact that during the pandemic 2 million people, 2 million women people (pause, nod, nod, giggle, giggle) became unemployed." (Is that funny? I don't get it.) Is she spending her days with Jose Cuervo now? Sipping Vodkawaiian Punch from the juice bottle? When her secretary accepts an engagement for her, does she whisper into the receiver, "Mrs. Harris would appreciate the offer of a teeny martooni upon arriving at the venue"?

Remember those early days, when she was maquillaged to perfection and could toss her deliberately casual hairdo back and forth without it losing its place, wearing bossy power suits with the shoulder pads out to here, patinaed with the insecurity of a Chihuahua always ready to fight but hoping everyone watching would think she was a Presa Canario? Yeah, good times.

I have little patience for this sort of "news."  The leftist media do this all the time, so it's a shame to see the same nonsense happening on the right side of the aisle.  As Dr. V impressed upon me long ago, psychologizing—the attempt to get inside another's head and guess at his thoughts—is a damn sloppy way to make a point.  It's an even worse sin in a journalistic context:  journalists are, ideally, hard-nosed empiricists reporting on facts.  Guesswork, conjecture, imagination, fanciful interpretation, agenda-driven implications meant to persuade—in principle, these have no role in a properly written article by a legitimate journalist.  Alas, these days, legitimate journalists are thin on the ground, and the rigorous pairing of logic and empiricism is almost nowhere to be seen.  

The above article has some empirical elements:  the writer thinks she's observing Kamala Harris becoming more slovenly (aesthetically) and sloppy (mentally).  That's a subjective take, though, and it shows no effort at objectivity.  I'd almost rather see a humorous pictorial meme about "Kamala:  Before and After" than read this sort of sensationalist "reporting."  It's garbage.  It feeds those on the right who are stupidly given to feeding frenzies.  Wake me when Kamala actually fucks up a meeting with a foreign head of state by doing something radically insulting or mortifying.  Until then, writers should quit trying to guess the state of her mind based on clues they think they see.

And this, friends, is an absolutely shit sentence:

She hasn't hurried to do any border czarring since then, but we know she's not going to visit said border and witness firsthand the mayhem and destruction happy slappies from every country on the planet are causing for everyone at, on, or around the southern border.

Kirstin Stein, the author of this garbage, should be fired and sent to kindergarten.

is this making a statement?

I see most "waves" of feminism (i.e., first wave, second wave, third wave, etc.) as little more than the expression of female insecurities and the attempt to appropriate maleness to compensate for weakness (via shoulder pads, loud and aggressive behavior, etc.).  Truly empowered women don't classify themselves as feminists; they don't need to.  (And if empowered women do label themselves as feminists, then they're probably my favorite kind:  Camille Paglia feminists!)  That said, is the video below a commentary on insecure feminists?  I don't know, but it cracked me up.  Enjoy.

(The character sure seems to fit the insecure, "every man is a predator" type.)

and in other news

My credit rating has gone up 30 points.  It's finally happening.

stolen from John Mac's blog

I saw this (from John Mac's blog here) and had a good laugh:

reprinting David Horowitz

Some people hate David Horowitz—a 60s-era indoctrinated leftie who later leaped across the aisle to the right—because he's a goddamn neocon.  I'm not partial to neocons myself (e.g., Dubya), but I don't want to commit the genetic fallacy when a neocon writes something I almost totally agree with.

A commenter at Instapundit reprinted and uploaded a recent Horowitz article.  I read the piece and found it good enough to repost it here at the Hairy Chasms.  Spoiler:  Horowitz doesn't say anything earth-shattering; as you read his piece, you'll nod mainly because you've heard most or all of these ideas before.  That said, the man puts the narrative together eloquently, which is why I find this article worth reading in spite of its length.

__________

DAVID HOROWITZ: WHERE WE ARE, AND WHAT WE FACE

11/20/2020

My first political demonstration was a May Day parade in 1948. I was nine years old. We chanted in support of President Truman’s “Fair Employment Practices Commission” and his successful effort to integrate the civil service. The May Day parade was organized by the Communist Party USA, a conspiratorial organization working in league with Communist Russia to overthrow the United States government and create a “Soviet America.” Both my parents were members of the Party.

These two causes in a way defined the next seventy-odd years of my life: on the one hand, the fight for individual rights and equality; on the other a lifelong struggle for – and then against – a treasonous movement that set out to change the world for the better but ended up making it worse – much worse.

As a young man, I was present at the creation of the New Left, editing its largest magazine, Ramparts. The New Left was a socialist movement that began as an attempt to rescue the “Old” Communist Left from the “mistakes” it had made in serving masters who murdered more than 100 million people. In peace time. “Mistakes” was our weasel term for the epic crimes our fellow Marxists committed against ordinary human beings who refused to go along with their utopian schemes. Our goal was to revive the quest they had begun and finally create a world of “social justice.”

I soon discovered that there was no new Left fundamentally different from its predecessor. The evil the left did flowed directly from the noble ideal itself. You cannot create a world of perfect equality because people are not equal, and the attempt to make them so requires taking away the freedom of most for the benefit of what turns out to be a few. You cannot create a government that is socially “just” because the people who will run it are the same people whose lies, bigotries, selfishness and greed created the unjust world you are attempting to leave behind. The new rulers, corrupt as ever, will have more power than ever. You can only make things worse. Much worse.

I learned these truths first in my work with the Black Panther Party, a murderous street gang whom we regarded as “the vanguard of the revolution.” We did so because the Panthers were the only leftists with guns who were willing to use them. The Panthers preyed mainly on vulnerable blacks but also murdered a friend of mine who was white.

My second awakening came with the success of the New Left’s “antiwar movement,” which forced America out of Vietnam. The New Left’s claims to be “anti-war” in behalf of the Vietnamese were actually two dangerous lies. When the movement succeeded in forcing America’s withdrawal from Indo-China, the Communists proceeded to slaughter two and a half million peasants in Cambodia and Vietnam. There wasn’t a single demonstration against the slaughter. Not one. I realized then that it was never an “anti-war” movement. It was an anti-American movement. The Left wanted the Communists to win and didn’t care how many innocent Asians were murdered in the process. I realized I was involved in a movement whose rhetoric was seductive and noble but whose deeds were evil. And I left.

The “social justice” radicals still have the best slogans. They call themselves progressives but are actually reactionaries. They call themselves liberals but are actually bigots. They say they’re for peace when they are organized for war. It is always the same war: to bring down the United States of America.

Thanks mainly to their growing influence, we live in extreme times, where things are not what they are made to seem, and monstrous accusations are leveled at individuals without restraint. As a result, we live in an atmosphere of intimidation, where people can lose their livelihoods, their careers and even their lives if they get on the wrong side of leftist crusaders. That is a terrible thing to have to say in this once free country, but it is something that has become too obvious to deny.

For 30 years before he descended the famous escalator in Trump Tower to declare his candidacy for the White House, Donald Trump was a well-known public figure. Everybody in America knew who he was. In all those 30 years, no one ever referred to him as “Donald Trump, host of ‘The Apprentice’ and white supremacist.” Nobody ever said “This is Donald Trump, New York builder and white nationalist.” That only happened when he ran against the Democrats.

In fact, all three of Trump’s predecessors as presidential candidates – Bush, McCain and even Romney were denounced as racists by the Democrats. Vice President Joe Biden told an audience that included many black Americans that if elected, Mitt Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan, “are gonna put y’all back in chains.”

Why do Democrats take such a low road as a matter of course? They do it because it is effective, and because the Democrat Party has a dirty secret to hide. Democrats control 100% of every major inner-city in America, and have for 50 to 100 years. Every killing field — Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore, St. Louis – is 100% in the hands of the Democrats. Every injustice in these inner cities – real or imagined – that policy can affect, Democrats are 100% responsible for. Every rotten school system, which year in and year out fails to provide mainly black and Hispanic kids with the basic tools they need to succeed is 100% controlled by the Democrat Party and its teacher unions who without exception put the interests of the adults in the system in front of the kids. Including keeping schools closed during the Covid-19 pandemic while demanding more money for themselves.

Trump represented a major threat to the Democrats’ corrupt inner-city empires and – worse – to their electoral power base. Consequently, when Trump asked inner city blacks “What do you have to lose by voting for me?” the Democrats lost no time in demonizing him. They did so in the most dehumanizing terms possible – launching an all-out war to destroy him as a white nationalist, white supremacist, Hitler. In this lethal atmosphere, which has lasted for four years, the first black President of the United States this week again called Trump – and by implication his seventy-three million supporters – racist.

Race is the Democrats’ nuclear weapon, deployed to destroy their critics and protect every corrupt urban Tammany Hall they have built and profited from over the last 100 years. This weapon was a gift from the radicals who successfully infiltrated the Democrat Party following their riot at the Convention in 1968. It is where the deep divisions that afflict us now began.

The absurd, racially poisonous term, “white skin privilege,” for example, was an invention of the hate America terrorists who called themselves “Weathermen,” and whose leaders, Bill Ayers and Eric Mann, advised Barack Obama (Ayers actually ghosted his autobiography) and mentored the insurrectionary founders of Black Lives Matter. The stated goal of the Weathermen terrorists was to join what they saw as a global race war against “white supremacy,” and to join it as a fifth column against white America.

Democrats embraced racial politics opportunistically at first, because it was an effective political weapon. As a result of the radical ascendancy within the Democrat party and in the nation’s schools, the race card now features the ludicrous charge that white America is a white supremacist nation, and “racism is in its DNA.” This is a charge that is deadly because it will justify the most radical anti-American measures. As a result of the Democrats’ blitzkrieg against this imaginary scourge, large sections of the American public are now in the grip of a hysteria that has detached them from any semblance of reality. In this atmosphere, a lifelong liberal like Trump can be miraculously transformed into a raving Nazi. On the other end of the equation, black America is cast as a race of noble savages who can do no wrongs that are not attributable to “systemic racism” and white oppression.

In this fantasy world, black Americans are routinely portrayed as though they are a “marginal” and “under-represented” people in our society. This has become a required perspective for racially sensitive Americans eager to position themselves “on the right side of history.” And it is forced on millions of whites who are demonized by a multi-million-dollar industry of racist diversity trainers who lecture captive audiences in our universities, corporations, and even military academies, in the anti-white racism of “critical race theory,” a creed concocted by the hate America left.

The notion that black Americans are marginal, and under-represented, and therefore oppressed is transparently ridiculous. On the contrary, to anyone with eyes to see, Black America and its wounds are closer to being the center of the nation’s attention, and also the focus of its charitable largesse. Otherwise, how explain the complacency of the nation and its civic authorities towards the epic lawlessness and destruction inspired by Black Lives Matter vigilantes in 600 American cities last summer without a single instigator being held accountable, and even the arrested perpetrators being immediately released from jail? How explain how such criminal violence could be justified as opposing “police brutality” in advance of a single trial or even investigation of an allegedly brutal police officer?

Far from being marginal, under-represented, and oppressed, Black America is a community continually front and center in the nation’s consciousness. They are a powerful and often dominant force in American culture. Black athletes are the heroes of America’s youth. Black comedians, entertainers, musicians and actors fill America’s TV, theater and Internet screens, bringing their stories – their lives, emotions, victories, losses – into America’s hearts. Far from being denied access to the American dream, most black Americans are now comfortably in the middle class and part of it.

Oprah Winfrey is a self-made billionaire, the richest woman in America, and she is joined by increasing numbers of other blacks who are also self-made, having amassed multi-million-dollar fortunes in a single lifetime. The reality is that far from oppressing black America, Americans have made blacks the recipients of a cornucopia of special privileges – of lavishly funded programs and benefits based on their skin color that are designed to give them a leg up in the world. And these privileges come at the expense of opportunities for white and Asian Americans who are denied places they have earned at elite universities, and in all walks of professional life, also because of their skin color. This is a systemic racism that Americans support because it benefits black Americans, and that self-anointed “anti-racists” will defend at all costs.

If the majority of black Americans are comfortably in the middle class, what accounts for the failure of other members of the black community to lift themselves out of poverty? This is a question that is now politically incorrect to ask. It is “blaming the victim.” It is an affront to the skin privilege of an oppressed people. It is racist. In fact, it is an obvious sham, but the vast majority of Americans go along with it. The rest of America doesn’t ask blacks who have fallen behind why that is so. For example, absent fathers, rampant drug use and off the charts crime rates – to mention three obvious factors. Instead of holding these individuals in any way accountable for their plight, their failure is blamed on invisible white people, who are allegedly responsible for an always un-evidenced “systemic racism” against blacks.

Systemic racism is illegal under the 1964 Civil Rights Act. If it were actually a problem in police departments and corporate institutions, as organizations like Black Lives Matter claim, there would be massive lawsuits by legions of black (and white) attorneys, prosecutors and attorneys general. There aren’t such lawsuits because the problem is invented. Aside from affirmative action programs, the only systemic racism is to be found in the disgraceful inner-city public schools, whose oppression of black youngsters is protected by the Democrat Party and its teacher unions. They will fight to the death to prevent poor minority kids from having the same choices in education as the children of Democrat teacher union members.

Taken together, the anti-white hysteria and the hysteria of black victimhood have had terrible consequences for Americans both black and white. In the summer of 2020, Black Lives Matter set in motion the largest, most violent, most destructive lynch mob in American history. Arsonists, looters and street criminals laid siege to 633 cities, caused billions of dollars in damage, and killed scores of people, as it happens mainly black. According to studies, ninety-five percent of the violent demonstrations were led by Black Lives Matter, and their fascist Antifa allies.

Like classic lynch mobs, the Black Lives Matter attacks were inspired by demands for verdicts in advance of trials or even investigations. “No Justice, No Peace!” Thus, George Floyd’s death was called a racial murder in advance of the autopsy report, which showed there was no strangulation and that he died of a self-inflicted Fentanyl overdose. One of the four officers indicted for Floyd’s “murder,” under pressure from the lynch mob, was an African American who had joined the police force to help institute reforms. How was this even a racial incident?

The same lies endlessly repeated describe the vast majority of Black Lives Matters’ claims about racial injustices committed by police. These lies obscure the fact that these incidents routinely involved black criminals resisting arrest by law enforcement officials whose chiefs – as in the Floyd case – were more often than not black themselves – and Democrats. “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” an infamous Black Lives Matter lie that led to arson, destruction and general mayhem in Ferguson, Missouri was the invention of a black criminal accomplice of Michael Brown. It was refuted before a grand jury by six black eyewitnesses who testified that Brown was actually charging the officer with his head down when he was shot.

Yet this lie is now part of the deadly folklore of the Black Lives Matter lynch mob and is featured in a new Netflix film based on the writings of the racist black author Ta-Nehisi Coates. Small wonder that the icon of the Black Lives Matter movement, Assata Shakur, is a cold-blooded cop killer. Shakur is also a fugitive taken in by the sadistic dictator Fidel Castro, a figure adored by Black Lives Matters’ Marxist founders.

Black Lives Matter leads a coalition of roughly fifty vigilante organizations claiming to be pursuing “social justice.” Vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris, who has raised bail funds for Black Lives Matter arsonists and street criminals, calls them “A Coalition of Conscience.” Hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested in its efforts by George Soros, the Ford Foundation and major U.S. corporations, helping to make it the most powerful political movement in America today.

The coalition has already presented its first legislative proposal, maliciously called “The Breathe Act” after two notorious Black Lives Matter lies claiming that Eric Garner and George Floyd were strangled by police. (The autopsy reports in both cases showed that neither man was strangled. Both were resisting arrest.) “The Breathe Act” is not about “choke holds” or other possible causes of strangulation. Its goals are to defund the police, abolish prisons, and eliminate border enforcement. In other words, to make America as vulnerable to domestic criminals and international enemies as possible.

Forty years ago, I left the left when I saw that it was a destructive force that would never change. Leftists do not tolerate dissenters in their ranks. They suppress politically incorrect ideas and cast out their perpetrators, demonizing them in the process. As a result, leftists never learn from their “mistakes” or take responsibility for their crimes. Thus, in every generation a new destructive crusade for “social justice” is launched, oblivious of the disasters previous radical campaigns left in their wakes.

The leaders of Black Lives Matter proclaim “We are trained Marxists,” as though that were a badge of honor rather than a confession of dangerous ignorance and a kiss of death. Every successful Marxist revolution without exception has established a ruthless police state, which more often than not conducts genocidal persecutions of ethnic minorities. In other words, social injustice on an epic scale. Yet that is the prospect we face in a reactionary left that has learned nothing from the past and is intent on destroying the most tolerant, inclusive, egalitarian society ever created. The good news is that a patriotic movement has risen, rededicated to the propositions that all men are created equal and endowed with God-given rights to life and liberty, and is prepared to defend them.

Leave your comments below.

Buddhawalkin'

I've moved the dates of my Andong Dam hike from the week of Children's Day to the week of the Buddha's birthday.  This year, Children's Day is on Wednesday, May 5, and the Buddha's birthday is exactly two weeks later on May 19, which is therefore also a Wednesday.  So I've put in my request to take Thursday the 20th and Friday the 21st off as well, and I'll use four of those five days (or maybe all five days—more on that in a sec) to do the walk.

I finally managed to plot a route from Sangju City to the Andong Dam.  As it stands now, it's a four-day hike along a bike path that loosely follows the Nakdong River.  If you followed my previous adventures along the Four Rivers path, then you may remember that Sangju City is the point where a hiker starting in Incheon leaves the Saejae portion of the trail and finally hits the Nakdong River; from that point on, the Nakdong portion of the path is what a person follows all the way down to Busan.  But for the Four Rivers walker, there's an entire stretch of the Nakdong that he never encounters, and that's the spur that leads east to the Andong Dam.  This is relevant to me because, having seen the signs for the dam since my first cross-country hike in 2017, I've had a years-long interest in walking the Nakdong River east toward Andong City, the capital of North Gyeongsang Province, which is famous—or infamous—for its conservative, traditional nature.  For four years, it's felt like a lost opportunity, never making it out to the dam.  Now, I'm finally going to visit it.

Walk-blog readers might also remember that Sangju City is where I had my unpleasant guest-house experience, so I'll be happy to bus out to the city Wednesday morning (May 19), walk 13.6 km to the Gyeongcheon-dae Motel, then continue onward the following morning—kicking the dust off my feet, so to speak, and leaving Sangju behind.

The route I've plotted is in four segments:

1.  Arrive Sangju City, walk to the Gyeongcheon-dae Motel:  13.6 km.
2.  Walk from Gyeongcheon-dae to the Gangnam Motel:  25.5 km.
3.  Walk from the Gangnam Motel to the Riverside Motel:  14 km.
4.  Walk from Riverside to the Andong Dam:  37.6 km.

So you see the problem:  after three fairly easy days, I suddenly have to walk 37.6 kilometers on the final day.  While I've walked longer than that—I've done 42-, 44-, and 60-kilometer hikes—that doesn't make 37.6 km an easy distance.  As a result, I'm thinking of breaking the fourth segment into two smaller, more reasonable segments of almost 20K each.  

I'll get back to you on what I decide to do.  37.6 km is far from impossible, and since it's also the final segment of the walk, I can simply flop down and rest after the long trek, basking in my victory, for the rest of the weekend.  There's a motel called the Business Motel about two kilometers from the dam, and Andong City's Yongsang Intercity Bus Terminal is within walking distance as well, so I can easily bus back to Seoul the following day.

More later as these plans crystallize.

don't write or say "er" if you're American

I've ranted about this before, but I'll do it again.

Americans, when pausing and thinking of what to say next, will banish the silence with the filler sound "uh."  In Bonnie England, this same sound is written "er" but still pronounced "uh" because the English don't like final "r"s and generally detest rhotic "r"s (e.g., the "r" in "car" when it's pronounced the American way, or the "r" in "real," which is pronounced rhotically on both sides of the pond, except by those with speech impediments).  Because Americans read English literature as part of their education, they've encountered "er" in written form.  The mistake many Yanks make, though, is in thinking that the English "er" is pronounced like the "ur" in the American pronunciation of "fur."  

It is not.

So Americans who say "er" the American way, i.e., with a rhotic "r," have completely misunderstood the utterance in its British form.  This also goes for Americans who, in an American context, write "er" as dialogue in a story set in the States.

Stop that shit.  Stop it now.

I am, of course, too late in giving this warning.  The rhotic "er" sound has been embraced by millions of clueless Americans who think saying "errrrr" instead of "uh" is properly American.  These people are all traitors to their country and should be fucking shot.

Now, if you're an American author writing a story that involves English characters and is set in England, then by all means, write the filler "er" to your shriveled little heart's content.  

Otherwise, NO. 

BAD DOG.

DC as the 51st state?

Chris Chappell lays out the issues surrounding DC statehood:

the Oscars smell like leprous scrote

I haven't watched the Oscars in years.  I no longer even bother making my silly predictions—based on no knowledge—of who will win which awards.  The whole thing has become a sad wokefest led by out-of-touch, overprivileged morons who think they have something important to say to the world. The Critical Drinker expresses these same sentiments in his own inimitable way:

Apparently, there were once again complaints of "Oscar So White" because Anthony Hopkins won best Actor ("The Father") and Frances McDormand won Best Actress ("Nomadland").  So white?  Really?  A Chinese woman won Best Director (Chloé Zhao, "Nomadland"), a black Brit won Best Supporting Actor (Daniel Kaluuya, "Judas and the Black Messiah"), and an unprepossessing Korean grandma won Best Supporting Actress (Youn Yuh-jung/윤여정, "Minari").  What the hell more do you want?  Will the complaints stop only once all the categories are swept by non-white folks?  You don't think it's at least a wee bit racist to focus so insanely on race?  Go make your own damn awards shows if you want; BET already does this.  Poor Korean Grandma can't even bask in her victory without being swamped by the woke-race crowd.*  This is the America I have no desire to come back to.  Let the big cities and their stupid wokeness burn to ash.  I won't miss 'em one bit.  Anyway, the Drinker is right when he says that stars have no business trying to influence how people vote.  Celebrities:  back the fuck off, check your privilege, shut up, and concentrate on entertaining the masses.  You're much more likable when you're not flaunting your stupidity.

__________

*She was apparently also asked by some interviewer how Brad Pitt smelled, and when Koreans here on the peninsula found out, they were outraged.  Youn responded to the Pitt-sniffing question by saying she wasn't a dog.  I haven't seen video of the exchange, so I don't know whether Youn was truly insulted by the question.  If she has the sense of humor of, say, Betty White, then I imagine she took the question in stride and responded "I'm not a dog!" with a cheerful crone's cackle.  If she got huffy because you just don't pose such questions to an older Korean woman, then I can imagine her being upset, with the Korean peninsula upset along with her.  It could be that the interviewer unintentionally overstepped her bounds thanks to cultural insensitivity; it could also be that the interviewer knew what she was doing, had a wicked sense of humor, and went for broke.  Personally, I don't get it:  Brad Pitt is old, now; if anything, he probably smells like fuckin' beef jerky.  Where's the sex appeal?  Sure, the older we guys get, the more we fool ourselves into thinking that young girls are into us.  Trust me, they're not—not unless we happen to be rich.

why East Asia needs proofreaders

This was belatedly making the rounds in my office the week before:

Is this real Engrish or fake Engrish?  No idea.  I do know that "There Lurks the Skid Demon" has become a tee-shirt design.  And, ladies?  Always remember to tootel your man with vigor.  He'll thank you later, possibly by vigorously tooteling you back... if he's a real man, that is.  Only pussies refuse to tootel their women by word of mouth.  Hi, Hi.

If we assume this is real Engrish, then you can see why East Asia has a serious problem and desperately needs proofreaders and editors.  I'll leave it up to you to hit my comments section and improve the English of the above instructions.  Good luck.  No, seriously:  good luck.

gas engines: don't count them out just yet

lettin' off some steam

sad news about my old French teacher

I got an email from the husband of my old high-school French teacher telling us that Madame is 82 and in hospice now with ALS.  Madame was always a character... but she's still with us, so I'm going to stop myself, right now, from writing an obituary.  For the moment, I'll just keep her and her husband in my thoughts.

some fun ones via Bill

Bill Keezer sent over a slew of memes.  Below are a few of my favorites.  Let's start off with a meme that I've slapped up here before:

The above is a good reminder of leftist projection.  The left loves to project:  accuse the right of racism while being racist.  Accuse the right of fascism while being fascist.  Accuse the right of trampling the Constitution while actually trampling the Constitution.  And as we see above:  accuse the right of perpetrating all the gun violence while actually using guns to murder people.

This next one is a good reminder of which culture is superior:

Yup:  I said it.  A culture whose women are strong, capable, unafraid of displaying beauty, and capable of shooting your fucking head right off your fucking neck is far superior to a culture that puts its women in garbage bags because the men are deadly afraid of woman and their sinful wiles.

And now, my favorite of the bunch:

More like the above, please.  The police are showing themselves to be useless.

And:

And once again, as we see below, capable confidence is sexy while feckless victimhood is not:

Below, a point that's been made by Styx for several years:

We should add Los Angeles and San Francisco to the above list!

Apparently, when global gun stats are tallied, the US is one of the few countries to include suicides in its count.  This inflates US statistics by a lot, and, as Styx says, when you also control for urban gang violence (which most gun violence is), you come to realize that, on the whole, the US is a far safer place to live than much of Europe.  Gun violence is generally confined to Democrat-run cities, as the above meme notes.

nice

Remember Kimberly Klacik?  She's got some choice words that might pertain to the recent shooting of 16-year-old Ma'Khia Bryant in Columbus, Ohio.  Bryant had assaulted two people with a knife when police shot her dead, as they were well within their rights to do, given that Bryant had been brandishing a deadly weapon.  Bryant was no cringing victim:  she was a violent, screaming murderess-to-be.  If you can't use lethal force when a deadly weapon is being wildly brandished, then when can you use deadly force?  Is the problem that Bryant was a woman?  I thought that, according to feminists, the whole man-woman dichotomy needed to be dispensed with.  Was it that she was black?  What does skin color have to do with attacking people with a knife?  Was Bryant poor or something?  She wasn't rich, but she also wasn't destitute.  Is it that the killing was done by a policeman?  Well, how's that whole defund-the-police campaign going?  No spikes in crime in areas abandoned by the police, right?

Anyway, Kim Klacik takes a different angle:

Klacik's going to get a lot of pushback against her tweet because Bryant was apparently in foster care at the time of her death.  Or maybe that's Klacik's point:  bad parenting is bad parenting, whether it's a function of unsatisfactory foster care or parental laziness and idiocy.  It could also be that Klacik is talking about a completely different situation from Bryant's; she mentions a "13-year-old" while Bryant was 16.  Whatever the case, Klacik's focus is on wild, knife-wielding teenaged girls.

Meanwhile, Styx talks about the death of Jaslyn Adams, a little girl whom you won't be hearing much about in the mainstream media because she was shot by Black Lives Matter members in Chicago.  The story has, in fact, made it to the MSM, but it probably won't have legs because it doesn't fit the preferred narrative that white supremacy is the fundamental problem in the States.  Remember:  it's narrative first, truth last:

your dose of Monday humor

from an Instapundit comment section

Sometimes, the Instapundit comment sections are great fodder for memes, snide remarks, and other pearls of wisdom and wit.  Here are some images I just came across:

Is the above accusation fair to all liberals and Democrats?  Probably not.  But it covers most of them.  The running narrative on the left side of the aisle, these days, is that white supremacy is, and has always been, a problem in American history, society, and culture.  We are a racist, bigoted nation—a beacon to no one.  That's why "X is racist" is such a popular thought these days.  Look what's happening, not just to Americans, but to Isaac Newton.

Then there are these beauties:

Sorry, snowflakes.  Sometimes, you just suck.  Get used to it.