Masterpiece

Last Week in Weird

Divide et impera

Hollywood leftists have had a rough year. First, they had to deal with the fact that their newly-annointed Ultimate Supreme Executive Chairman wasn’t the one they wanted, which I guess is a real blow to the ego if one is bizarre. Then there was that bit about how they had all threatened to leave the country if that happened, which bluff was very thoroughly called. Then there was the fiasco at the celebration of left-wing political grandstanding that used to be the Academy Awards.

Still and all, if there’s any Hollywood celebrity who’s having an even worse year than the average Hollywood celebrity, it could only be alleged famous person Shia LaBeouf, whose "art installation" consisting of a camera was repeatedly trolled by people more interested in pointing out that he’s a clownshoes than in announcing that "he will not divide us," whatever that means. After he got out of jail for losing his mind and physically assaulting said trolls, LaBoeuf relocated his "art installation" to that world-class center of metropolitan art and culture, Albuquerque, New Mexico, where it lasted less than a week before being taken down again. For his third trick, LaBoeuf changed the format of the exhibition: instead of an invitation for other clueless rubes to protest being divided, the camera merely pointed up at a "he will not divide us" flag silhouetted against a featureless sky. Clearly this exhibition is troll-proof!

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President William Denali

Presidential Rankings #26: William McKinley

The mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation.

The War to Prevent Southern Independence was a horrible, senseless waste of capital and human life. There were, in fact, only two unequivocally good things to come out of the war. The first, and most obvious, was the abolition of slavery — while it was certainly not the purpose of the war, and while no war was necessary to achieve it, the end of slavery was nonetheless a consequence of the war, and was of course an unalloyed good in and of itself. The other beneficial consequence of the war is that it took the United States off the path of empire it had been treading for fifteen years; the people were so busy with the attempt to rebuild a devastated and depopulated nation, and the would-be tyrants so busy attempting to establish and support the military junta assigned to rule over the conquered Confederate States, that scarcely a thought was given to foreign conquest, and, in the postbellum years, America no longer went abroad in search of monsters to destroy. All of this changed on 15 February 1898, when the USS Maine sank into Havana Harbor.

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