Jonathan V. Last's Blog, page 19

“Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” Was a Lie

Don’t take my word for it–that’s the conclusion Jonathan Capehart reaches in a somewhat courageous essay on the Justice Department Ferguson report. There may be a temptation to dismiss this as Menchu-ism, but I don’t think Capehart is peddling “fake, but accurate.” He’s taking the time to point out a totally under-reported aspect of the DoJ file to what will be a hostile audience on his own side in order to correct the record. That’s an honorable thing.

As I’ve said from the beginning, it should not be difficult to understand that the Ferguson case was problematic on all sides–Brown was a bad actor; Wilson was, at best, not a great cop; the locals behaved criminally by rioting; the police behaved worse in their response; and outside agitators poured gasoline on the fire–but that the criminal justice system, especially the police and their unions, are in dire need of reform.

This is not an either/or proposition.

The Greatest Thing Ever

Courtesy of Santino, here’s a Max Landis production on the greatness of pro wrestling.

Now that description alone should be enough to melt your eyeballs. But it’s like he’s made this thing just for me. Because it’s not just an appreciation of wrestling–it’s an appreciation of Triple H. And it’s not just an appreciation of Triple H–it’s an appreciation of Triple H featuring:

* Awesome callbacks to The Death and Sleep of Superman.

* The single best explanation of Ric Flair, ever.

* The funniest t-shirt send-up of John Cena, ever. (I want “Spoiler: I Win” and I want it now.)

* Probably two dozen insanely hot girls dressed in really clever send-ups of various WWE stars.

* An absolutely money Paul Bearer impression.

* The best middle-brow defense I’ve ever seen of wrestling as story-telling artform.

Insane amounts of awesome. Go now. Commit the full 24 minutes. You won’t regret it.

About the Eagles

Had a funny conversation with Galley Friend T.V. the other day. She asked me if I was worried about the crazy moves the Eagles had made. I told her that the Shady McCoy thing might look bad, but could turn out to be a Belichickian masterstroke, because slot-backs seem to be easy to find these days and not worth committing big financial resources for. Then she said: “Haven’t you heard? They traded Foles.”

And my head basically exploded.

I asked T.V. whether or not there was unrest on the Philadelphia street. Her reply:

After the press conference Kelly ran yesterday the majority of the WIP team, and the callers, think Kelly is an arrogant boob. He is either a pure genius with a brass set of cajones, or a total moron. He picked up good players IF they come on the team healthy. Bradford has missed the majority of the last two seasons with torn ACLs. All you needed this year to have a competitive team was a lineman, a safety and two corners. Still waiting on those to magically appear!

My hubby, ever the conspiracy theorist, thinks the Cowboys are paying Chip to tank our team. I am not quite ready to walk down that road. Yesterday, because of all the Oregon players that have been picked up, Steve was joking and saying that Huey, Dewey, and Louie are going to be our receivers and that Donald Duck is our running back. He referred to Lurie as Scrooge McDuck and said that Chip’s new nickname ought to be Daffy.

It’s always a good sign when the gallows humor sets in during the free-agent period after a 10-win season.

In other news, Galley Brother B.J. informs me “For who? For what?” doesn’t exist in the ether of the internet. There’s no video or audio surviving. I suspect it must be buried in the Channel 7 Action News tape archive somewhere. They ought to put an intern on that, for posterity’s sake.

Mary Katherine Ham on the IRS and the Tax Code

As this kids say: This.

I don’t know if I’m offended or amused by the Washington Post writer who thinks that filing your taxes is easy because Internet! It takes me a full working weekend every year–that’s just about 2 percent of yearly weekend time–to taxes every year and that’s with the help of the wise souls at Intuit. I think it’s literally true that if I didn’t have software help, I would be incapable of filing my taxes on my own.

Now, I’m willing to believe that my taxes are more complicated the median filer because I’m a writer. But not that much more complicated. And we do seem to hear a lot about how in the future more and more workers will be freelancers of one sort or another.

What’s so punishing about the complexity of the tax system is that it extracts not just money, but time. I’d consider it a major quality-of-life improvement if I could give the IRS the same amount of money every year (or even a little more!), but do so in an hour.

The Actual Definition of a Shill

If there was any justice in #ThisTown, nobody would ever take David Brock the least bit seriously ever again. Have a look at this Washington Post story about Democrats freaking out over Hillary Clinton’s private email scheme:

Last week, supporters in Congress and others were willing to go on cable television to defend Clinton on the e-mails but were puzzled when her aides did not provide talking points or other information that might help them, according to Clinton allies. “A lot of people were flying blind,” said one Democratic ally who spoke on the condition of anonymity to comment candidly. Requests for information “were met with dead silence” from Clinton’s team, this person said. “This shows they have a long way to go until their organization is ready for prime time.”

Some of Clinton’s longtime allies in the Senate and House leadership did receive guidance from the Clinton camp, although their aides were frustrated that they had to proactively reach out to Clinton aides to get it.

And here’s the money graph on Brock:

But Correct the Record — an outside political group set up specifically to defend Clinton in the media — received only a brief set of talking points from Clinton’s office instructing them to dismiss the story as silly and to compare Clinton’s use of a private e-mail account to former secretary of state Colin Powell’s use of an AOL account. The group was given no additional information for days, leaving Correct the Record founder David Brock and other surrogates to craft their own, sometimes incongruous, defenses.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with being partisan. All you have to do to keep your honor is be transparent, independent, and candid enough to call things like you actually see them.

But here’s Brock’s group complaining that they didn’t get any marching orders, so that they had to think up what they thought on their own. It’s unbelievable.

And yet, come January the Post and other media outlets will dutifully quote Brock and Correct the Record as if they’re just another partisan outlet worth paying attention to. But they’re not. There’s a difference between being a partisan and being an actual shill.

Site News

So the reason blogging has been close to non-existent for the last couple months is that I’ve been tied up working on a sequel to The Seven Deadly Virtues. And now it’s done. Or, almost done. Behold: The Dadly Virtues.

It’s due out by mid-May, which means this entire thing will have gone from “Hey, how about thinking of a sequel” to books-on-shelves in seven months, which has been a Herculean task on the part of the Templeton folks, because the speed-boost came almost entirely on the production side.

Anyway, I can’t even tell you how much I love this thing. It’s a book about fatherhood and it’s really, really funny and occasionally profound, too. It’s mostly the same cast from 7DeadV, but with a few additions: Joseph Epstein, Matt Continetti, Toby Young, Steve Hayes, and Tucker Carlson. The conceit is that the book walks you through the entire lifecycle of fatherhood, from pregnancy to becoming a grandfather, with each chapter dealing with some important stage along the way. Matt Labash, for example, does the chapter on giving the sex talk.

I’ll have lots more about it once the whole thing is totally and completely locked-down; we’re just a few days away from shipping it off to the printer, I think. But for now, I’ll just say this: I love this project as much as anything I’ve ever been associated with. And I’m really excited to get to share it.

Everything’s a Problem

Santino has started a really funny new website, Everything’s a Problem. It’s a Stuff White People Like for the Privilege Age. Sample awesome:

In my previous post, I noted that Tina Fey’s new series, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, is problematic. But we should also note that the Daily Beast story highlighting the problematic nature of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is itself extremely problematic.

Look at that byline. “Gabe Bergado.” Wow, GABE. Mansplain much?

Perhaps he needs to check his privilege for a moment and consider the struggles faced by women in the entertainment community. This is, after all, an industry in which men outnumber women more than three to one in the writer’s room. It strikes me as extremely problematic that this man—who, I’m guessing, is far less experienced when it comes to creating TV shows—feels comfortable sitting there and lecturing this silly woman about how to do her job in a better fashion.

Problematic. But not surprising.

I give the transgression of a man telling a woman show runner how to run her show two problematics.

To keep track of today’s Pyramid of Grievances, you need a scorecard. This is it.

Obligatory Apple Watch Post

It’s not totally clear to me whether the Apple Watch will be a the Newton, the iPad, or something in between. But it does seem to be a superfluous-enough toy that it will be considered more fashion than tech in the hierarchy of consumer impulses.

Think of it this way: Technology consumers now have a list of devices and peripherals they need/want. In order of importance they are (1) Smartphone; (2) Laptop/desktop computer; (3) Tablet. The Apple Watch is going to sit in the 4-hole for just about everyone, which means that the potential audience for it is already just a smaller-slice of the general computing public: It’s only an option for people who want (and can afford) a fourth device and already use an iPhone.

That creates all sorts of ripple effects. For instance, how intensive will app development be if the number of Apple Watches out in the wild is relatively small? (Witness how app development for the iPad has stalled out as the tablet market hit the wall.)

And what will this mean for the product refresh cycle? Apple seems to have been surprised by the fact that people don’t generally rush out to replace their iPads every two years, even though they keep iterating the device on a yearly basis. Will Apple push out new Watches every twelve months or so? Or will they let it sit in the market? (My guess is that they’ll do what they did with Apple TV: Treat this launch model as a beta and introduce a tweaked version that fixes its shortcomings in 18 months or so. And then let that sit for a good long while.)

And by the by, those shortcomings are already obvious even before anyone has the watch in the field. 18 hour-battery life? For lots of people, that means it won’t even make it from wake-up to bed-time.

Also: I had a discussion with some friends over whether or not the watch would be water-proof. I argued that it almost certainly wouldn’t be, because if it was, Apple would have been crowing about it. This is a company that tried using the idea of a “unibody” laptop housing as a selling point. Sure enough: The Apple Watch is only “water resistant.”

Hillary and Jihadi John

Two non-related items:

(1) It seems that the Washington Post has identified the London-accented ISIS executioner. They claim that he is “a Briton from a well-to-do family who grew up in West London and graduated from college with a degree in computer programming.”

But that seems rather far-fetched. Don’t we all know that ISIS militants are motivated by a lack of job opportunities?

That said, the Post story does lay the foundation for a radicalized-by-stop-and-frisk explanation. That would be awesome because it would prove, once and for all, that Islamophobia is the (other?) root cause for religiously-motivated beheadings.

(2) Andrew Stiles deserves a Pulitzer for stuff like this. Sample funny:

Hillary Clinton is running for president, but due to her advanced age, inability to think on her feet, and unquenchable lust for money, she would like to avoid having to actually campaign for as long as possible.

Anyway, after seeing the idea floated that Clinton would like to finish the nominating contest without participating in any candidate debates, it got me thinking: What if Clinton was able to make it through the primary season without giving any unpaid speeches!

Might not be as crazy as it sounds. I mean, these don’t have to be Goldman-Sachs-style paid speeches. But what if she turned every campaign event into a closed-door fundraiser where Democratic voters had to pony up, say a $25 cover to get in the door? (18 to party, 21 to drink!) No more “Come to the IHOP and meet the candidate garbage.” You want the good stuff with the next POTUS, you pay like everyone else.

Japan’s Robot Babies

Me over at TWS: There are some perfectly good reasons why Japan would be disinclined to fix its demographic problems with immigration.