Nefarious Landslides

Us: Today at DRNORMALVISION we welcome Mr. Willard Bunckhorne, of the NRA.

WB: Thank you.

Us: Your exact title is Assistant Executive Director of Media Relations and you are based in Louisville, Kentucky; is that right?

WB: Correct.

Us: What brings you to the New York area?

WB: The NRA decided to hold an emergency meeting to address the events at the Covenant School in Nashville.

Us: The shootings.

WB: Er, correct.

Us: Is it usual for the NRA to hold an emergency meeting after mass shootings? Did the NRA hold one in 2015 after the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church murders?

WB: No. Them’s Blacks.

Us: How about in 2018 after the shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh?

WB: No. Them’s Jews.

Us: The Pulse nightclub in Orlando?

WB: Them’s gays.

Us: The Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas?

WB: Them’s Latins.

Us: The Star Ballroom Dance Studio in Monterey Park, California?

WB: Them’s Chinese.

Us: So, if you didn’t feel the need to hold a special meeting over any of those previous shootings, why now? What is the difference?

WB: The Covenant School—them’s Christians. Something had to be done.

Us: So what did the meeting do?

WB: We reiterated our belief that guns don’t kill people. And we will mobilize to inform the country of what really is to blame for people getting killed.

Us: Like what?

WB: Doors—school side doors. That was pointed out by former FBI agent Nicole Parker on Fox News. “That seems to be a common pattern in many of these shootings, a side door,” she said. 

Us: Anything else?

WB: Yes. Solar panels.

Us: Solar panels are to blame for mass murders?

WB: In a way, yes. Sen. Mike Rounds said that money allocated to installing solar panels in schools could be diverted for security. So, security is compromised by using the money for solar panels.

Us: But still, guns kill people.

WB: Listen. On the same day that six people were killed at the Covenant School, a landslide in Ecuador killed at least 14 people with 67 still missing. That’s 81 people—13 and 1/2 times the number killed in Nashville. At our emergency meeting we drew up model legislation (which we are hoping that Marjorie Taylor Greene will introduce in Congress) that would ban landslides in the United States. Landslides kill people!

Us: And that’s your last word?

WB: No. Looking at my cell phone, I just came across this headline:

Nikki Haley wants to ban TikTok, not guns

That’s my last word.

Us: Before you leave, what do the initials NRA stand for?

WB: “No Reality Assessment.”

Dear Parent

 Ottermarsh County Florida 

                                                                                          Official Seal

Board of Education

 March  27, 2023

Dear Parents of an Ottermarsh Student:

As Superintendent of Schools of Ottermarsh County, it grieves me to have to report to you that there has been great recent controversy about the curriculum offerings in our schools. Several parents have brought to me their complaints about what their children are being taught in their classrooms. We here in Superintendent’s Office have always been watchful over the wellbeing of our students and have, therefore, taken the complaints of the parents seriously. 

While we in the Office feel that our schools have not been neglectful of the need of the students to have access to a noncontroversial education, we realize that we must amend our curricula to avoid the impression that we are lax in our duty. 

Thus, since the parent of each student knows absolutely what is right for his/her child, the Superintendent’s Office is instituting a new program that will allow each parent to control the content of his/her child’s education. In order to institute such program, the Office needs to learn the desires of each parent. We have, therefore, devised a questionnaire to ascertain such information.

The questionnaire will allow you, the parent, to decide what your child will be taught. For example, in science class you may wish your child to learn about gravity, but not about the heliocentric solar system; in mathematics class you may wish your child to learn arithmetic, but not geometry. You may also wish to exclude from your child’s curriculum any reference to biology. All of these—and your other—desires will be noted and implemented as early as May 1, 2023.

As a final note, let me hope that the calm that this new program will bring to the District will reverse the downward trend in the results of student performance caused by the raucous controversy of recent times. Last year, for example, the number of Ottermarsh High School graduates who were accepted into college fell from 4 to 2 (both were accepted at Blue Mountain Holler Bible College in Tennessee, which school we thank most heartily).

Most sincerely yours for a true Floridian education,

J. Estes Jefferson Davis, III

Superintendent of Schools

(Enclosed with this letter you will find said questionnaire and a stamped return envelope.) 

                                                                                            

Please Read This

Please is at a strange crossroads between its once and future meaning—but it would please me to see it go.

Walker Mimms *

*

Mr. Mimms is being particularly cutesy here, since early on in his article he claims, “I almost never use the word please”—despite his upbringing in a mannerly household.

What seems to be the burr under Mimms’ saddle is that 

[t]he word can brilliantly convey anger, irony, passive aggression, condescension, formality, or desperation—all without a hint of true politeness.

He offers the example of a boss asking an underling, 

“Can you have this report on my desk by Monday please?”

That’s not politeness; that’s an order, son!

Mimms says that his sole exception these days in the use of please is when he accepts “something already offered—as in ‘Yes, please.’” I, myself, find that I often respond to queries such as “Do you want a receipt?” with the single word please. 

I don’t know how I have become so much more polite these days; perhaps old age has loosened my tongue, making it easier to say “Thank you very much” in all sorts of situations. I’ve become a veritable walking Emily Post etiquette book. And as such, please is very much a part of my politesse repertoire.

*

Mimms is not wrong to point out that usage of please can range from politeness to anger. But so can other ordinarily polite terms. After staring at the tablecloth for seemingly ages, one mutters a sarcastic thank you to the laggardly waitperson. Should one drop that phrase because it can be used to convey the opposite of politeness? Of course not. What one needs to do—with all words—is to consider the range of possible meanings that can be conveyed with the word via intonation, facial expression, hand gestures, and body positioning. 

*

Let me end here with a bow toward Mimms’ recognition of the power of an angry please. Here is the finale of episode one of “Fawlty Towers”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_68f7fN8EuI

***

* https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2023/03/polite-words-is-please-rude/673397/

Crystal Ball For Sale

Just eight days ago the 2023 motion picture Oscars were awarded. (That I have no idea who won what is irrelevant here.) Apparently, the Dodo was not the judge of the awards, as not everyone received a prize. (Actually, everything written so far is irrelevant to the point that I hope to make shortly.)

What did spur me into writing this was an article in the Guardian on the Wednesday after the Sunday awards ceremony, the headline of which was:

Oscars 2024: who might be in the running for next year’s awards?(1)

Was I wrong in thinking that with over 360 days to go a prognostication about next year’s Oscar race was just a wee bit premature?

* 

Then again, it just might have been that I was worn down by the aftereffects of the run-up to the National Hockey League’s trade deadline, which was Friday, Mar 3, 2023 3:00 PM ET. For weeks—nay, months—before the deadline, sports sites specializing in hockey news were filled with hints, rumors, and speculations about which teams would trade which players to whichever other teams. I’m sorry now that I didn’t catalogue some of the actual ruminations, but many went like this:

Which 12 teams should look to acquire player X?

6 players that team Y might acquire.

I was eagerly waiting for a headline that read:

WHICH 31 TEAMS MIGHT TRADE FOR PLAYER Z?(2)

The speculations about individual players were interesting—and almost totally wrong. Jakob Chychrun of the Arizona Coyotes was, everybody knew (as the team made clear), going somewhere. Prognosticators at one point had him just inches away from becoming a member of the Los Angeles Kings. When that fever broke, thoughts turned to his joining the Edmonton Oilers (if the Oilers couldn’t pry Erik Karlsson loose from the San Jose Sharks and his big contract). 

And how did things end up? The Oilers traded for Mattias Ekholm of the Nashville Predators, and Chychrun amazingly landed in Ottawa. (Karlsson remained in California.)

I could go on and on about what the hockey experts got wrong or didn’t see coming (Vladimir Tarasenko to the Rangers, anyone? James van Riemsdyk not getting traded by Philadelphia, leading to the general manager's getting fired?).

But the real nuttiness in the fruitcake baked by the experts was how—after it all played out—the speculators wrote columns or aired podcasts on why things didn’t happen. They strutted around as mavens of after-the-fact facts. 

*

Op-ed columnists and TV’s talking heads build followings by making bold, confident predictions about politics and the economy. But rarely are their predictions analyzed for accuracy.

Now, five Hamilton College seniors led by public policy professor P. Gary Wyckoff have analyzed the predictions of 26 prognosticators between September 2007 and December 2008. Their findings? Anyone can make as accurate a prediction as most of them if just by flipping a coin.(3)

Actually, I have seen other studies that have come to the same conclusion: Experts are really dumbasses who should have the decency to shut up. 

Just this afternoon I read in the Atlantic the following:

Back in the 2008 presidential campaign, when the GOP nominee, John McCain, forgot how many houses he owned, the pundit Mark Halperin became infamous for a prediction: “My hunch is this is going to end up being one of the worst moments in the entire campaign for one of the candidates, but it’s Barack Obama.”(4)

Writer David A. Graham goes on:

That became a notoriously bad take, but Halperin is unchastened. “You are about to increase the odds that Donald Trump will win another four years in the White House,” he wrote in italics on his Substack [about Trump’s impending indictment]. “You could in fact be increasing his chances of winning dramatically, maybe even decisively.”

To sum up the smarts of the experts, there was the quick take on the present economic scene offered in a recent New York Times newsletter:

Economists expected inflation and rates to stay low for years. They were wrong.

*

Okay—time to confess. How good am I as a prognosticator? Years ago, slate.com had a readers’ forum (they called it an “affray”) on “The Sopranos.” I was an active participant (before a friend advised me to stop, as I was getting too worked up about the wrongheadedness of others). But before leaving, I posted a list of ten crazy off-the-wall predictions about the characters. And lo and behold, one of them actually came true: Paulie Walnuts would find out he’s adopted (Season 6, Episode 4).

So, there it is—on the record. I am a 10% believable prognosticator. Take the other 90% of what I say with a grain of salt.  

***

(1)  https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/mar/15/the-oscars-2024-predictions

(2)  The NHL has 32 teams.

(3)  https://www.hamilton.edu/news/story/pundits-as-accurate-as-coin-toss-according-to-study

(4)  https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/not-great-news-donald-trump/673442/

"Munich" 2023

This has been a blue-ribbon week in exposing the hypocrisy mill known formally as Fox News. E-mails released prior to the soon-to-be-tried Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News Networks and its parent company, Fox Corp, reveal that in private Fox on-air personalities disparaged the false voting fraud claims that they pushed on their shows. Perhaps the most outrageous dichotomy between private and public proclamations about the election was evidenced by the network’s biggest star, Tucker Carlson. As the New York Times pointed out, 

Mr. Carlson — who ridiculed claims about a plot to steal the election as “shockingly reckless” and “absurd” in his November 2020 text messages — also continued to give credence to lies about widespread voter fraud this week.(1)

In fact, Carlson in an e-mail has stated, “I hate [Trump] passionately.”

But that was in private. In public, the following picture seems to be more in character.

Why did Fox News, despite acknowledging behind the scenes the falsity of its claims, pivot to support of Trump’s stolen election fantasies on its shows? As News Corp owner Rupert Murdoch said about allowing Mike Lindell, an avid conspiracy theorist, to run MyPillow ads on the network, it was purely a purely financial decision. “It is not red or blue, it is green.”(2) 

After the network correctly called Joe Biden the victor in the voting in the state of Arizona, thereby putting up enough electoral votes for the Democrat’s victory, hordes of rabid MAGAs defected to (fake) news outlets even crazier than Fox, leaving the latter to worry about falling profits.

Sean Hannity, in an exchange with fellow hosts Carlson and Laura Ingraham, fretted about the “incalculable” damage the Arizona projection did to the Fox News brand and worried about a competitor emerging: “Serious $$ with serious distribution could be a real problem.”(3)

Thus the decision to appease the MAGA faithful—to promote false narratives that would keep the pointy-headed rabble tuned to Fox and their $$ on the company’s balance sheet.

*

Trump, himself, the other day paused long enough from crying into his Diet Coke about the “stolen election” to claim that he could end the Russian-Ukraine war by practically snapping his fingers. According to the UK’s Daily Telegraph, “Donald Trump indicated that he may have ‘made a deal’” with Vladimir Putin “if he were president at the time of the invasion.”(4)

The great master of “The Art of the Deal” claimed, admittedly in his usual inarticulate manner:

I could have negotiated. At worst, I could have made a deal to take over something, you know, there are certain areas that are Russian speaking areas, right, like, but you could have worked a deal.”

Now that “deal” sounds just like Trump, a man who gives nothing of his own to charity; he asserts the right to steal from others (the Ukrainians, who obviously would have no voice in this) and hand their land over to a beady-eyed tyrant. 

Does this remind you of anything? Hint: I used the verb form above. That’s right: Appeasement —The Munich Agreement, (September 30, 1938), the settlement reached by Germany, Great Britain, France, and Italy that permitted German annexation of the Sudetenland, in western Czechoslovakia.(5)

Of course, we all know how that deal worked out. 

***

(1)  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/07/business/media/fox-dominion-2020-election.html?searchResultPosition=4

(2)  https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/feb/28/rupert-murdoch-deposition-fox-news-dominion-voting-systems

(3)  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/17/opinion/fox-news-dominion.html?searchResultPosition=1

(4)  https://news.yahoo.com/donald-trump-d-let-putin-194231988.html

(5)  https://www.britannica.com/event/Munich-Agreement

  

Is Everybody Happy?

`The race is over!' and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, `But who has won?'

This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it sat for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead (the position in which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him), while the rest waited in silence. At last the Dodo said, `Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.’

Alice In Wonderland

*

I recently wandered into a new supermarket in my area. Along the wall over the dairy section was a sign that asserted that the store had an award-winning assortment. Although the store was nice enough and the prices were generally fair, I questioned the variety on display. But who was I to argue with the granting of an award? 

Since that day I have became aware of award-bragging by all sorts of companies about their products and services. Why just an hour or so ago I learned of the “Most Awarded” Natural Smoked Salmon Nova on Amazon—only $107 for 0.5 Pound (Pack of 3). 

In a very short time, I have also found cell phone, airline business class, and on-line casino award-winners. Here are some other claims:

“Watches with award-winning designs and handpicked materials”;

“award-winning independent journalism.”

Oh, and here’s an academic braggart:

“I have also written 2 award winning books.”

My greatest wonderment when faced with all this award-winning is trying to figure out who exactly is giving out the awards and what the criteria are. I mean, who goes around sniffing lox to see if a particular slice is hall-of-fame-ish or proletarian riff-raff?

But let me not carp that something might be fishy about all those claims of awards. Let me don the Dodo’s feathers and grant everyone a prize. 

To quote the old-time bandleader Ted Lewis:

“Is everybody happy?”