The Dog Days of the News
GuvTina goes transcontinental; Portland discovers (finally) that it's summer; PSU looks silly again; and perfumes for every sexual preference.
About That Old Boy…and the Other Old Boys
By now we’ve heard from just about anyone who can put pen to paper about that old guy. Who used to be the big guy.
You would think that our local newsies would be interested in GuvTina getting on a plane and jetting all the way to DC to meet with other Democratic party guvs to discuss what to do with the old relic.
Wouldn’t you?
But if there was anything more than a cursory, “She flew…” story, there’s been no follow-up.
Nope; no one seems interested in what got discussed out there in DC; in what a political lightweight from a securely blue state might add to the conversation; or, for that matter, what GuvTina thinks about the old gentleman’s syntax. Or survivability.
Throw in our two senators—remember them?—and you’d have a trifecta. Both are being schtum, as they say on the other side of the pond.
What the hell: the old guy could be a mummy and he’d get this state’s electoral votes. But still, you’d think that Tina would get on the blower to kanoodle with her chief water-carrier, Noelle Crombie of the Oregonian and dish some inside stuff. After all Crombie put together the cover story that greased the way for Tina to purge the state’s creepy Liquor and Cannabis Control “old boys’” network. It was a pure patronage ploy disguised behind the scandal that rare, hyper-expensive whiskey was going to insiders instead of Mr. and Mrs. Oregon—the shame!
By the way, that rare whiskey got distributed (in laughably small quantities) in a big lottery. It was the payoff to the Oregonian, validating Crombie’s little “bourbongate” scandalette. I filled out the entry for a few pricey bottles, but the call didn’t come from my local liquor store.
And not a word in the dinosaur media about who got the good stuff.
We’re All Going to Fry! Whenever!
It’s a wonder that media hyperventilation over a few toasty days didn’t manage to bring the temperature down. Having grown up in the American midwest, allow me to assure my fellow occupants of the temperate Northwest (where “summer” occurs somewhere around the 4th of July) that a few 100-degree days won’t do much more than cook editors’ brains. It’s called “summer.” Combine that with “slow news days” and you wind up with panic on the front pages, such as this admonition from the Oregonian…
…which, given the city’s escalating homicide rate, ought to be kept permanently in type. TV, meanwhile, adapted its mantra, “If it bleeds, it ledes,” to “If it sweats…” and came up with the predictable…
…although, as usual, the actual truth was deeply buried under bureaucratese…
“Investigators say confirmation will not be complete for several weeks to months,” officials said. “Further tests and investigation will determine whether the deaths are officially hot-weather-related. In some cases, the deaths may be found to have had other causes.”
Short version: who knows? It’s a slow news day.
Our award for the most desperate tag-along weather story goes to this in WillyWeek…
McKibbon came all the way to Portland from temperate New England to pitch the climate armageddon…and his many books on the coming catastrophe (or is it a cataclysm—who knows?), such as…
…which has been predicting the end of the world since 2014, with an update last year. This is keeping with the penchant for climate doomsdayers to miss their end-of-the-world predictions, as documented by the Perplexity AI search engine…
Dire famines by 1975
Ice ages by 2000
Water and food rationing in the US by 1980
Disappearance of nations due to rising seas by 2000
New York City's West Side Highway being underwater by 2019
Children not knowing what snow is by the 2000s
Ice-free Arctic by 2013, 2014, and 2015
…Apocalypses that have failed more often than a snake-handling preacher’s predictions of the Rapture.
McKibbon was sponsored at the boiling church by the folks at Extinction Rebellion, although WillyWeek didn’t credit that organization, since other chapters, mostly in Europe, like to throw tomato soup on art in museums and glue themselves to roads.
McKibbon also didn’t talk about one of his own predictions—that the koala would be "functionally extinct" in Australia because of climate-related wildfires.
The koalas are doing fine.
Why Does Ann Cudd Still Have a Job?
Dinosaur media, proving it has the memory of its extinct forebears, has tippy-toed around the disgrace of the trashing of the PSU Library—the heart of any halfway respectable campus—by rioters who thought Hamas is a bunch of wonderful folks. And who trashed the library to prove it.
Cudd, the school’s president, dilly-dallied, tried to cut deals with the kids (who were under the tutelage of professional “protesters”), and finally called in Portland cops to tromp around in the top floors of the library to enable the whack-jobs to flee with their gas masks and garbage-can shields.
Embattled DA Mike Schmidt made a big deal of telling the press that he might charge some of the mopes who managed to get caught with burglary. Have you read any follow-ups on whether he actually did that?
President Cudd, meanwhile, has been issuing estimates of how much damage the kiddies managed to wreak—it just got upped from $750K to over $1-million. KGW and other TV stations got mildly interested…
…and managed to note, in passing, that her original estimates were a little off the mark because of the rioters’ damage to electronic systems and computers. Which are merely the most important part of the library, since books on paper are now considered passé by literati.
But the Big News! was a nasty little lawsuit by a couple of the kiddies having fun in a follow-up “demonstration,” covered by Oregon Public Broadcasting with typical indirection…
Reporter Camhi did her own tippy-toe around the reason the litigants encountered the cops…
That protest over the war in Gaza started out as a peaceful student-led demonstration at PSU’s Urban Plaza. The demonstration then moved to an administration building where two students locked themselves to the building’s doors with chains. PSU’s campus police and the Portland Police Bureau responded.
Portland State students Makayla Topaz Arnold, 25, and David Mosqueira, 28, were in the crowd of demonstrators that attempted to shield the chained students from law enforcement.
…which managed to get the facts of the case wrong—if the Oregonian’s coverage, under an even more tippy-toe headline…
…was correct, or even a good guess…
Two Portland State University students filed a pair of $445,000 lawsuits Monday against the university, claiming it retaliated against them for speaking out about alleged rough treatment by police at a May protest over the war in Gaza that came weeks after the library takeover.
Both news outlets agreed that the students were peeved that, following the mini-riot and their threats to sue, the university invited the two to a meeting to discuss whether or not brawling with the cops might be, well…a “possible violation of the university’s code of student conduct…” which is what got Cudd and the University in the pickle in the first place.
Said the Oregonian, with a straight face…
In the lawsuits filed Monday, both students claim the university’s response impacted their education and distracted them from studying. Arnold is studying biology at PSU.
There will probably be the usual “settlement,” and taxpayers will be on the hook, although PrezCudd explained to a KGW reporter that the university has insurance (which we’d guess will have a whopping premium increase) and, after all, PSU is a public institution, which means... well, you know.
No one bothered to pose the only question worth asking: are these two still enrolled at PSU?
If so, why?
Speaking of Tag-Along Stories…
Just making it under the wire for WillyWeek’s wall-to-wall coverage of Pride Month, was this…
…with plugs for local tag-along businesses, and this curious lesson in why dudes wear the smell-juice…
…some guys use rose and cupcake accords to subversively enhance their masculinity, like pearl necklaces.
Daddy, why’s a man wearing a necklace?
Your argument that 'someone predicted catastrophe X by date Y and it didn't happen exactly as they predicted by then' (paraphrased) is a deceptive tactic used by anti-environmentalists for decades. It ignores the relatively slow buildup of human overload on nature, and claims the impact must be like one lethal rifle shot or there's no problem and we can skip along in endless denial. It's like saying a superficially healthy smoker at age 50 will never have lethal lung effects over time; a full lifetime diagnosis done in one snapshot (absurd).
That tactic was famously used against Paul Ehrlich, framing the only real proof of human overpopulation as 'not being able to feed humanity.' Ehrlich did fail to predict that the (oil-dependent) agricultural Green Revolution could feed more people via denser plantings and intense (oil-based) fertilizers, which will run into major issues when oil peaks. He never failed in his observations that human population growth continues to wipe out wilderness, forcing species into endangerment or extinction and causing more pollution. The problem of too many people demanding too many resources from a finite planet didn't vanish because some of his predictions were overstated in the narrow realm of human hunger.
You use that same ruse with global warming, setting up straw man arguments as specific years being all-or-nothing deadlines for proof of lethal warming, using absurd parameters like "We’re All Going to Fry!" or "ice free Arctic by year X," ignoring ongoing major losses of ice as trivial, since it's not "all" gone. To examine global warming honestly, you need to monitor growing droughts, fires, floods, melting glaciers, melting permafrost and shrinking polar ice caps as the sum of warming effects, not nitpick random dates to "debunk" a gradual process. But tipping points (like methane release) could make it non-gradual, so you have to wish those out of existence.
Instead of constantly politicizing the topic and never learning the science, you'd start at the beginning by studying how CO2 traps heat (triatomic vibrations re-emit absorbed infrared) and then try to convince scientists that more trapped heat would NOT mean more melting and plant desiccation. That makes no sense. Climate contrarians never do the detailed work (outside of manipulated graphs) because they're operating inside ideology, not science. Always framing the climate issue as Left vs. Right politics is no more honest than framing all cops as racist and ignoring POC crime (the CO2 of the streets, so to speak). The EPA is to climate-control what cops are to crime-control when one is stuck on ideological zealotry.
Toppie and Skeeter should lobby for a line of comic books featuring their origins, their thoughts, and their sort of capering jack-a-napes lives. Strike while the iron is hot though as I suspect the days of the free-range moron much less the litigious free-ranger of that ilk are drawing to a close.
I am finishing the last volume of J.G. Farrell’s Empire Trilogy. These books reconstruct the collapse of the British imperial way of life in different locales. The author has a fine sense of fun, but it is always in the service of horror.
The one I'm completing now, The Singapore Grip is a reference to disciplined pudenda, but among its other connotations it alludes to the hand that manages the UK's colonial marionettes out in that neck of the woods. Just now (in my reading) Jap is about to cross the Jahor Causeway. The European population is upset, mostly with the inconvenience of it all. As Gomer would say, “Surprise, surprise, surprise.”
The second book is titled Troubles and is set where you would expect. The societal collapse there is driven by inanition and the obdurate determination of the ruling clique not to see things as they are.
My favorite and the one that I have read most often is The Siege of Krishnapur. If you know little or nothing about the Sepoy Rebellion (aka The Great Mutiny) this is the briskest and most light-hearted introduction to Johnny Sepoy gone astray that you are likely to get. An example of the author and of history's wit is the degree to which The Crystal Palace Exhibiton's legacy is held to scrutiny
The novels bring to mind America and Portland at this very moment. In the affected communities all of the best people potter and totter around vaguely aware of the whirlwind churning apace just beyond the horizon. Now as then, the changes will arrive with an inexorable suddeness. A season of regret is nearing
“If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”