People's glorious revolutionary potatoes!

Last Week in Weird

Game is you, komrade!

Childhood is a magical thing. With no preconceived notions bounding a child’s imagination, he is able to come up with all manner of games to play and stories to spin. Children are indeed highly adept at applying all manner of bizarre logic to nearly anything; if you’ve ever witnessed a child playing with blocks, or balls, or even rocks, you’ve noticed the way those seemingly mundane objects acquire characters and personalities.

So naturally it’s important to fill the children up with the right notions so they play the right games!

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Not plane, nor bird, nor even frog

Last Week in Weird

Batten down the hatches — there’s a whole new year of weird a’comin’!

Look! Up in the sky!

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s certainly not the U.S. government’s multi-billion-dollar, super-duper secret "Zuma" satellite. Because that’s at the bottom of the Indian Ocean.

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Danger! Danger!

It looks like Anthony Weiner — otherwise known as Carlos Danger, and otherwise otherwise known as Hillary Clinton scapegoat #347 — is actually going to do time for having cybersex with a fifteen-year-old girl [n.b.: link is saucy]. Granted, Weiner’s only looking at two years in prison whereas you or I would be locked up forever and a day, but that’s neither here nor there.

That’s not what I came to talk about today anyhow. What I want to talk about is this part here:

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In Soviet Union, orgasm has you!

Last Week in Weird

A more perfect union

Long ago, in the halcyon days of January — specifically, on the halcyon day of January second — I boldly predicted that an utterly madcap editorial run by Slate would be the worst opinion piece of the year. That article, if you recall, was advocating that the government encourage a sufficient level of traffic fatalities to maintain the supply of "free" donor organs. Surely nothing would top that!

Your humble narrator is nothing if not humble, and is thus forced to admit that the ever-faithful, true-redblue New York Times has certainly given it the old college try. The Times has been running a regular column called "Red Century" for a few months now, in which the luminaries of the modern left wax poetical about (so help me) the Soviet Union and how wonderful life was there. So that’s already pretty stupid, but I am compelled to point out that this week’s "Red Century" column has finally vaulted into the heady stratosphere of stupidity occupied by Slate’s explicitly pro-traffic-fatalities glurge. It’s a bit of historical ignorance about how positively liberated Soviet women were compared to the stupid rubes in the Free World, but… well, just you wait. You won’t believe this one.

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Father of Randy Savage

Last Week in Weird

Lights in the darkness

As we discussed a few days ago, April 6, 2017 was the day president Trump officially betrayed Trumpism, inserting the United States into yet another foolish regime change operation in the middle east, pushing the world yet closer to open war between the US and Russia, and dumping additional tens of millions of dollars down the defense contractor pit. Apparently, making America great again involves giving us Hillary Clinton’s policies dressed up with Sewer Urchin’s rhetorical style.

But you know about that already. In fact, if you’re a bit sharp, you most likely knew it was coming. Yes, the Trump reversal was whatever the opposite of "unexpected" is — a concept word scientists of the future will dub "expected." What was less expected, though — arguably much less expected — was the way many of Trump’s most stalwart supporters turned around on him just as ferociously. And I don’t just mean tiny, meaningless dudes with blogs and no audience.

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Russian hacker!

Last Week in Weird

The God That Failed

Ever noticed what a complete fraud democracy is? Let’s go right on ahead and notwithstand that even on its own terms, it’s rubbish; rather, I’d prefer to focus on the utterly phony way "democracy" is leveraged as a scare tactic; it seems as though, whatever happens, it’s a "threat to democracy" or it will "undermine democracy" or perhaps it will even be "the end of democracy." By my count, all the democracy everywhere should have ended about eleven times over since election day, yet it apparently struggles onward, facing new existential threats every day.

The latest threat to democracy, of course, is the dreaded Fake News. As any fule kno, but as only the kind of fule who works for a government school will breathlessly explain to you, the entire reason for the evil Donald Hitler’s victory over St. Hillary of Clinton is that the internet was so infested with fake news that everybody forgot how great Hillary is. I am compelled to agree with this thesis, since your humble narrator seems to have forgotten that quite thoroughly.

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You Might Want to Start Writing Your Angry E-mail Now

Because, since apparently nobody else is willing to do it, it falls to me to defend Milo Yiannopoulos. After years of gleefully dismantling the shibboleths of political correctness and getting away with it, Milo has finally gone too far; in a podcast appearance recently, he had the audacity to poke at the taboos surrounding pedophilia, which was, to be sure, a very poorly thought out decision. Milo, of course, is used to having the correct identity cards to say outrageous things and get away with it; in this case, he probably should have considered that the homosexuality card is a positive detriment, as homosexuality and pedophilia have been linked in the popular imagination for so long that a prominent homosexual playfully discussing pedophilia pushes all the wrong buttons with the conservative crowd. That is the politically correct line you do not want to cross.

Yet cross it he did, and the reaction was swift and fierce: his CPAC speech was canceled, his book deal was withdrawn, and he was resignated at Breitbart. Milo is sufficiently energetic and sufficiently entrepreneurial that I suspect he’ll survive it, but he’s lost a lot of cachet over this, to the point where even his friends seem to be distancing themselves from him. Since I’m already a pariah, though, I don’t fear the hornets’ nest; I’ll dive right in there!

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Dear Tom Woods: Pink Floyd still stinks

Last Week in Weird

Putting his money where his mouth is

How the man finds the time to do all these things is beyond me, but, prior to his rather eventful evening in Berkeley, right-wing troublemaker and official Donald Trump #1 Fan Milo Yiannopoulos (whose name I can finally spell under my own power) headed to the southern border with a crew of shirtless musclemen to get started building that wall we’ve heard so much about.

No, that’s true.

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If only

Last Week in Weird

Honest Journalism

You’ve probably heard by now, but the next president of the United States will be Hillary Rodham Clinton. We know this because a stalwart bastion of journalistic integrity said so — specifically Newsweek, which made the decision to go ahead and print its special commemorative "Madam President" issues well in advance of the election. Newsweek defended itself by pointing out that this is a common practice; production times being what they are, generally both commemorative issues do get printed, and only the correct one sees distribution. CNN even provided intellectual cover by referencing the true correct fact that MLB produced both Chicago Cubs and Cleveland Indians World Series championship memorabilia, but only sold the Cubs version (the Indians gear will be offloaded in the third world as discount apparel — no, that’s true). There’s just one problem with the story.

As CNN explains to its slower readers, "this is the media version of World Series keepsakes that were on sale in Cleveland and Chicago last week. Street vendors printed "Cubs win" and "Indians win" T-shirts, then trashed the Indians shirts after the Cubs won Game 7."

There is just one very notable difference: in the case of the World Series, there were two sets of shirts created. However, in the case of the infamous Newsweek special edition, the publishing company Topix, decided to print just one.

Guess which. [Emphasis original]

Whoops missus!

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Censorship and Morality

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Those are the exact words the irresponsible hippies who founded this country chose when they wrote the First Amendment. Those words are important; they were very carefully and very specifically chosen, and they reflect, as Judge Napolitano has forcefully explained, a very specific understanding of what it means to speak freely, and what the government doesn’t get to do about it:

The freedom of speech, as the framers envisioned it, is a preëxisting right; it came before the United States government, it was never abandoned to the United States government, and the United States government is obligated to respect it. The people are fundamentally and inherently free to speak as they please, completely irrespective of whether or not their overlords like it. This freedom is also understood to be a freedom not merely to speak as you please, but to put those words into writing — hence freedom of the press.

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