"Several large shareholders have urged BuzzFeed founder and CEO Jonah Peretti to shut down the entire news operation...."

"BuzzFeed News... has about 100 employees and loses roughly $10 million a year.... The digital media company went public via a special purpose acquisition vehicle in December. The shares immediately fell nearly 40% in their first week of trading and haven’t recovered.... Rather than shut down BuzzFeed News, Peretti is attempting to make the division profitable. He has a ready-made template: He made the decision to lay off 70 HuffPost staffers last year after acquiring the company from Verizon Media...."

CNBC reports.

BuzzFeed — I haven't blogged about Buzzfeed since Ben Smith ran the place and Jake Tapper criticized him for being "‘Irresponsible’ For Publishing Trump Dossier." That was bloggable because Tapper wrote (in private email) "Collegiality wise it was you stepping on my dick."

Does HuffPo really think Donald Trump doesn't understand that Larry David is not a Trump supporter?

So Trump tweets this a clip from Episode 1 of the new season of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," showing Larry David putting on a "Make America Great" hat to appease a motorcycle guy who's angry at him:

TOUGH GUYS FOR TRUMP! pic.twitter.com/DbjZjGzLWU

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 11, 2020

Larry, the character in the show, got the MAGA hat for the purpose of repelling other people, so he can be left alone. The twist in this little vignette is that the hat that makes the kind of people in his social group loathe him also — with another kind of people — works to undo loathing.

Trump knows TV. Trump knows humor. There's zero chance that Trump is mistaking Larry David for a Trump supporter. He may not have time to be watching "Curb" episodes, but he surely grasps that there's some back story to Larry's having the hat and can see that Larry is afraid of the "tough guy" and using the hat to mollify him.

But here's HuffPo: "Trump Just Tweeted A Clip From A TV Show That Was Totally Making Fun Of Him/The clip came from Larry David’s MAGA-centric episode of 'Curb Your Enthusiasm.'" I guess that will get many clicks from people who are hungry for news that Trump is an idiot.

The HuffPo article does nothing but explain the episode, to get the readers up to speed, so they can understand that Larry was "totally making fun of" Trump. Duh. There's no consideration of why Trump would tweet that clip if he knew that, which is what I assume.

How does it benefit Trump to propagate that clip even if Larry was making fun of him? Forgive me for spelling out something so obvious, but I can see there are some obtuse people who think Trump is a dummy who made a mistake.

The clip shows Larry as an oblivious, terrible driver who seriously endangers a motorcyclist and then is terrified at the coming confrontation. Larry is not the "tough guy" and he deserves the tough guy's anger. The tough guy is very expressive (with bad language and a threat of violence). Larry puts on the hat as a fake representation of camaraderie and saves himself.

When Trump offers this clip with "TOUGH GUYS FOR TRUMP," he's implying that you should want to be the tough guy. He's a good guy. He's a motorcycle guy, and he follows the rules of the road, but he gets rightfully angry when affluent, oblivious, insulated jerks violate the rules. You don't want to be like Larry, do you? He's not tough. He's not a good driver. He's a faker. And he's desperate to escape accountability.

Quite aside from how to read the clip, it's to Trump's advantage just to get people seeing that pop culture is using the Trump brand in an unusual and fun way. More Trump. More MAGA hats. Pure familiarity. And if it gets the Trump haters like HuffPo indulging in their own Trump-is-an-idiot fantasies, and they really do seem crazy, as Trump loves to say they are.

"Dan Rather did a 60 Minutes segment on wellness in 1979... 'Wellness,' he said, 'that’s not a word you hear every day.'"

From "The Wellness Epidemic/Why are so many privileged people feeling so sick? Luckily, there’s no shortage of cures" (in New York Magazine).

Speaking of words you don't hear every day, I just learned the word "spoonies." Do you know about "Spoon Theory"?

Also, I didn't know that Arianna Huffington is involved in something called Thrive which sells products like a bed for your iPhone — a little wooden bed with satin sheets...

“You know, there is something so satisfying …,” Huffington explains one day in her crowded Soho office as she tucks her phone in beneath a satin sheet.

I think the answer to the question in the article title is: There are products to sell. (Here's that iPhone bed. It's $100.)

Was that Uber board member's sexist remark just an attempt to make a subtle dig at fellow board member Arianna Huffington?

I'm trying to understand this story in the NYT:

David Bonderman, an Uber board member and partner at private equity firm TPG, resigned from the board of the ride-hailing company after he made a disparaging remark about women at an Uber meeting on Tuesday.

Earlier in the day at an Uber staff meeting to discuss the company’s culture, Arianna Huffington, another board member, talked about how one woman on a board often leads to more women joining a board.

“Actually, what it shows is that it’s much more likely to be more talking,” Mr. Bonderman responded.

So Arianna Huffington talked about the value of women, maybe — I'm thinking about her specifically — she held forth annoyingly. And the guy makes a wisecrack that's funny because what it really says is that Arianna Huffington has been talking too much.

It's still a sexist remark. He dragged in other women to take a shot at one woman, and the humor depends on stereotyping if the meaning is: If you're any indication of what women on the board are going to be like, there's going to be too much talking. Ha ha. Women! They talk too much. That's the standard stereotype about women that I remember growing up with, back in the 1960s.

How old is Bonderman? 74. I'm reading his Wikipedia page. The guy went to Harvard Law School. He's a billionaire. He likes to celebrate his birthdays:

In 2002, for his 60th birthday, Bonderman had The Rolling Stones and John Mellencamp play at his birthday party at The Joint at Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. John Mellencamp played for an hour, The Rolling Stones played for an hour and a half, and comedian Robin Williams entertained guests between acts. The party cost $7 million....

In 2012, for his 70th birthday party, Bonderman held a private concert by former Beatle Paul McCartney at Wynn Las Vegas for 1020 guests. Robin Williams also performed a comedy routine.

Sorry. No pity for this guy. I tried a sympathetic reading of his remark. No. He's simply awful, even assuming Arianna Huffington is mind-blowingly irritating at a board meeting. And by the way, the meeting was about dealing with the sexist culture at Uber. The company got Eric Holder to produce a 13-page report on the subject, and they're supposed to do something about it, not go back to their old ways.

Bonderman's got his 3-quarters-of-a-century birthday coming up. What if — as with Donald Trump and the presidential inauguration parties — the big stars won't show up now?

The "meternity" leave.

It's maternity leave without having a baby — me... -ternity.

Women are bad at putting ourselves first. But when you have a child, you learn how to self-advocate to put the needs of your family first. A well-crafted “meternity” can give you the same skills — and taking one shouldn’t disqualify you from taking maternity leave later.

As for me, I did eventually give notice at my job and take a “meternity” of my own.... Ultimately, what I learned from my own “meternity” leave is that any pressure I felt to stay late at the office wasn’t coming from the parents on staff. It was coming from myself. Coming back to a new position, I realized I didn’t need an “excuse” to leave on time....

That's from Anna Davies, who has a book. Meanwhile, Arianna Huffington, who also has a book, is making herself about sleeping. 

“I want to rekindle our romance with sleep,” said Ms. Huffington, 65, in a lullaby voice as soothing as her floral perfume. “It’s a central part of life and a gateway to our dreams.”

"Who Is This Objectively Badass Attorney Running The Freddie Gray Investigation?"

Headline at a Huffpo article that's teased on the Huffpro front page with "BALTIMORE BADASS":



If the question is the abuse of government power in the form of the police, the answer is not mindless cheerleading for another form of government power, a prosecutor.

Objectively Badass...

Yeah, let's be objective. Let's be level-headed and demand that all government power — police, prosecutors, the lot — operate within the bounds of the law.

My criticism is of the headline and the front-page teaser. The article doesn't contain the word "badass" or present Marilyn Mosby as anything that warrants the use of the word "badass." She herself is saying appropriate things like "I uphold the law" and "At the end of the day I’m here to do my job. It’s about applying justice fairly and equally to those with and without a badge. Did I treat this case any different in the pursuit of justice? No, I didn’t."

I wonder what pushed Huffpo to use that word "badass." I doubt if the word would have been chosen if Mosby were a white male.

"Charles Barkley Says Paying NCAA Athletes Is A Turrible Idea, And Americans Still Agree."

Can someone explain to me why the Huffington Post used that "turrible" spelling? Is it mocking Barkley's speech? It it mocking the idea?

The idea sounds right to me, by the way:

"There’s only a couple of players on the college team that actually can really play in every sport, so sometimes you have to look at the big picture... All of those kids are getting a free education. But let’s say we do it your way … we have to pay the diving team, the swimming team. That’s crazy. Less than 1 percent [of college basketball players] are going to play in the NBA... What about the other 99 percent that are getting a free education? Think about it."

I'm looking at the comments now and see that the top-rated comment is:

The spelling of terrible in the article title ("Turrible") diminishes both the point of Mr. Barley's opinion and his education. Further, given how some in his country have worked to to portray African American men, it can also be interpreted as racist.

That gets the response "but that's how he says the word" — which is something I wondered about, but didn't know — and the original commenter comes back with "And in how many instances have journalists used regional accents when writing on a commentary's opinion?" — which is exactly how I would have responded to the assertion that Barkley happens to pronounce "terrible" like that. I mean, he'd have to be awfully famous for that word, pronounced that way before it wouldn't seem disrespectful and a cheap way of discounting what is a damned good argument. He's not famous enough for saying "turrible" that I knew it. Are there any other cases of famous people so famous for a way they pronounce a word that the respelled word would be used like that in a headline? The only thing I can think of is a bunch of dumb old headlines about Ed Sullivan and his "really big shew."

"Woman Slaps Period Pads All Over Her Town For A Very Important Reason."

A HuffPostWomen headline.

1. I'm telling you — and I've told you before — the job of cranking out one "feminist" post after another is not easy. And isn't it just what you'd expect in a phallocracy? — that they'd relegate this job to women. How I pity the slaving female scribes of HuffPostWomen.

2. Great name, by the way: Elonë Kastratia.

3. Is "period pads" really an expression? Never heard it, perhaps because I've sojourned scantily in Europe.

4. Here's a better story about sanitary napkins: "How do you cut the school dropout rate for girls in a remote pocket of Uganda? And how do you create jobs for village women? The answer to both questions: sanitary pads. The story begins in 2009, when 26-year-old Sophia Klumpp and her husband-to-be Paul Grinvalds – she's from the U.S., he's from Canada — began working for a nonprofit group in a rural village in Uganda. Klumpp saw that many of the teenagers in school used threadbare rags or tufts of mattress stuffing as sanitary pads. The embarrassment and the fear of an accident kept many of them away from school for the four or five days of their period each month...."

5. Great name, Klumpp. Good work. Much better than protest-littering in Europe.

"Wednesday Addams would have killed these men. It would have been a horrible, comical double murder. But murder nonetheless."

"She wouldn't waste that much time talking. She'd burn their house down."/"And end their suffering so soon? Doesn't sound like the Wednesday I know."/"Classic Addams are more about slow torture than quick killing."

Comments at a HuffPo/Women piece titled "How Wednesday Addams Would React To Catcalling."

How grim it must be to have the assignment to crank out one pop-culture feminist item after another. The mind turns to dark places.

ADDED: I should say that I did not watch the video, which could possibly be funny in a way that doesn't require us to laugh at torture and murder.  Metafilter has some background about the actress in the video and the Metafilter folk seem quite enthused about her grown-up Wednesday routine.

UPDATE: I've watched it, and I don't think it was particularly good or funny.

"Huffington's daughter, Christina, is a recovering cocaine addict who received treatment through a 12-step program..."

"... and several sources said Huffington objected to the portrayal of 12-step programs in the piece."

"Supremes Saving Worst Decision For Last?" is the big banner headline at HuffPo right now.

Tomorrow is the Court's last day of the term, and the "worst decision" HuffPo is stirring its readers up about right now is Hobby Lobby, the case about whether a for-profit corporation is entitled to relief from the "substantial burden" on religion arguably imposed by the Obamacare regulations about contraceptives.

HuffPo doesn't bother to mention that the case is based on a federal statute — the Religious Freedom Restoration Act — which Congress could amend and to which Congress could have put an exception in the Affordable Care Act.  Except that Congress couldn't do any of those things, and the contraceptive mandate wasn't even something Congress put in the ACA, because Congress only just barely passed the ACA, and an exception from the need to provide religious exemptions would have made the ACA less politically viable, not more.

Which is why — however you feel about birth control, religious objections to it, and for-profit corporations that find a way to be religious — it's not bad for Hobby Lobby to win.

But if it does, the "worst decision" will instantly plunge us into war-on-women, election-year politics.   

Why can't I just plunge into my 4th-of-July swimming pool?, you might ask.

No. The internet will never allow you to go back to your summer holiday week as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.

"My wife and I have always made our whole lives a part of the discourse in the family."

"So if something one of my boyfriends once told me makes me laugh, I'll say that -- 'Oh god that reminds me of something my boyfriend once said.' Or if wife says, 'Oh my god that woman looks like my ex-girlfriend' -- we just don't edit ourselves. And I don't think any bisexual, gay person, lesbian person -- they should not edit themselves in front of their children. Because if you edit yourself your children will grow up to edit themselves and the problem perpetuates."

From a HuffPo article about a married couple discussing "the ways they navigate the ins an outs of an open relationship and information-sharing with their children."

So no editing, that's the goal? I wonder what will happen when these children who have grown up learning not to edit the discourse become teenagers and speak without repression. It's delusional to imagine that teenagers will not get sick of hearing their parents gush about their other sexual partners and — I hope — hearing "Oh God" or "Oh my God" at the beginning of each gush.

Couldn't you at least edit out the part where you gratuitously and inanely take the Lord's name in vain?

And HuffPo, couldn't you edit a capital "G" on "God"? Maybe it's a way not to take the Lord's name in vain, to write "God" as "god," to it look as though these people are continually evoking some minor deity nobody even believes in....

"Well, fine, Joe Squirtgun. If your rapist is a bird."

A line I pulled out of Sarah Palin's speech to the National Rifle Association's "Stand And Fight" rally to balance the line I saw pulled out in a bunch of places like Huffington Post, "Waterboarding Is How We'd Baptize Terrorists."

"Clubhouse chemistry is important," said Nate Silver, displaying a chart that shows that only 6 of the 19 members of his editorial staff are female.

Emily Bell at The Guardian says:

It is as if Arianna Huffington never happened. Or as if diversity of leadership and ownership did not really matter, as long as the data-driven, responsively designed new news becomes a radical and successful enough departure from the drab anecdote laden guff put out by those other men....

A clubhouse. Do we really still have to have one of those? And does the importance of clubhouse chemistry really override the need for a more thorough look at the statistical make-up of its membership?

Nate Silver, ironically, is the big statistician. I'd use these numbers against them if they use numbers like this against anybody else. But I'd say a startup should be tight and efficient, not padded with extra people who are there for appearance's sake. They've got 6 females in the clubhouse. I don't see a reason to charge discrimination. Now, give us some great journalism.

"With no notice, the man stepped forward, grabbed the headband off of Dexter's head and threw it to the bottom of our shopping cart."

"He then cuffed Dexter around the side of his head (not hard, but that is not the point) and said with a big laugh, 'You'll thank me later, little man!'"

At the same time as I stepped forward, Dexter grabbed his head where the man had smacked him and threw his other hand forward, stomping his foot and shouting, "NO!" I got between my son and this man and said very firmly, "If you touch my son again, I will cut your damn hands off."

The guy snarled at me, looked at Dexter with disgust and said, "Your son is a f*cking fa***t." He then started sauntering out, but not before he threw over his shoulder, "He'll get shot for it one day."

That spiraled out of control quickly!

The things that happen to HuffPo mombloggers when they happen to go to WalMart with their 2-year-old sons wearing mommy's pink lace flower headband.

Here's the blogger Katie Vyktoriah's description of the horrible homophobe who was, I take it, monitoring WalMart shoppers for insufficiently instilling gender norms in toddlers:

The man was overly large with a bushy beard and a camouflage shirt with the arms cut off. He had tattered shorts and lace-up work boots with no laces. I could smell the fug of cigarette smoke surrounding him, and there was a definite pong of beer on him.

Smoking and shorts. And overly large. When are men overly large? Don't they know when they are taking up too much space? A camouflage shirt with the arms cut off... talk about the right to "bare" arms. And the "pong of beer"... Pong?



Pong, meaning "A strong smell, usually unpleasant; a stink" is a Britishism. OED examples:

1925 E. Fraser & J. Gibbons Soldier & Sailor Words 226 Pong, a stink.
1936 F. Clune Roaming round Darling xxiv. 257 Avoid the smell of camel. They were complete with permanent, pyramid, and perfume, commonly called pong....
1991 D. Coupland Generation X i. i. 4 Smelling the cinnamon nighttime pong of snapdragons and efficient whiffs of swimming pool chlorine.

There's a blast from the past. Not the old Atari game (whoever forgot that?) but "Generation X." Remember when everyone was reading "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture"? I'd buy that right now and blog it for its poignant, pungent, pong-ent, obsolescences, but it's not available in Kindle? Not in Kindle! Oh! How the times pass! How the cutting edge dulls!

But, what say you? There's a lumbering, overly large man in shorts, a jack-booted thug with no shoelaces, and he's come to snatch the pink headband off your little boy. Threaten him with hand amputation, that might bridge the culture gap. Or, since he's a stinking smoker, a beer drinker, it might incite him to splutter out some warning about future bullying that will be so badly worded that in print it's good enough to make the HuffPo crowd gasp: Oh, noooooo! Homophobia rages... at WalMart. That's why I NEVER go there. That guy is always there, in his over-largeness, blocking the aisles, shuffling around, graceless... and laceless.

Mika Brzezinski on Obama's Kamala Harris remark: "It just divides people up to separate them by looks."

Longer quote as transcribed at HuffPo:

I'm sure he meant to pay her a compliment... but quite frankly, it just divides women and it just divides people up to separate them by looks and probably was a little hand-fisted. I just think the whole thing, the whole dynamic about women and their looks puts women under a lot of stress that they don't need. and they should be sort of talked about by their qualities at work, especially when he is introducing someone because she is the attorney general. I actually think, you know, he meant to do -- say something nice. I think he made a mistake.

Did she really say "hand-fisted"? The colloquialism is "ham-fisted." I tried to check, listening to the video at the link, but it went on and on, beginning with a commercial, which I put up with, proceeding through some David Letterman jokes about North Korea, on to introductions of a number of internet-focused male journalists, and then to a presentation of what Obama said about Harris, and I'm still waiting to hear the Mika quote that I can already read, but I actually still care about whether she said "hand-fisted" or "ham-fisted," and then Morning Joe turns to the insipid internet men and asks:

"What did you see on line yesterday?"

I'm all: What did you see on line yesterday? What did you see on line yesterday? What did you see on line yesterday? What the hell am I doing slogging through a video with some guys summarizing what was on line yesterday? Is TV like this now? They don't have commentators opining about what they think. They have little men who pick through Twitter and, essentially, retweet for... who is this for? People who can't find Twitter on their own and need Twitter summarized?! People who think the news is the way the news looked to the people who tweeted about the news the other day" And the only news underlying all of that news is that the President said a pretty lady is pretty?

But like a pretty lady's face, the President's remark has got our attention. (What are we not paying attention to?) And it's something we can all chat about. (What are we not talking about?) And if we don't have anyone to talk to, we can lull ourselves into utter oblivion by listening to Morning Joe's little men repeat the texts of tweets they saw on line yesterday.

That's what I have to say, and you are so far ahead of the Morning Joe-level folks, because you are seeing it on line today.

"I feel like I just won the Academy Award. If an artist can offend so many people that he has to go to prison..."

"... to protect society, that's really saying something. Most shock artists dream of this kind of attention, without the prison part."

Ira Isaacs, sentenced last month by a federal judge — this is in the United States— for 4 years, for violating obscenity law. The Huffington Post — considered a liberal website, and, again, this is in the United States — began its article about the sentencing with a joke: "Looks like someone's career went down the toilet." (The movies included the simulated consumption of feces.)

There is no shame anymore. And yet there still are obscenity trials. Absurd.

I'm finding this story now because I happened across an account to the trial in an article published last March at Reason.com: "Porn So Icky That It Can't Be Obscene" (by Jacob Sullum), describing the argument made at trial, which describes the argument made by Isaacs's lawyer:

"My intent is to be a shock artist in the movies I made," [Isaacs] testified, "to challenge the viewer in thinking about art differently... to think about things they'd never thought about before." Similarly, [his lawyer Roger] Diamond argued that the films have political value as a protest against the government's arbitrary limits on expression, illustrating the "reality that we may not have the total freedom the rest of the world thinks we have."

Sullum wrote:

I will be impressed if Isaacs, who faces a possible penalty of 20 years in prison, can pull off this feat of legal jujitsu, transforming the very qualities that make his movies objectionable into their redeeming value — especially since at least some of the jurors... found the evidence against him literally unwatchable. But if the jurors want to blame someone for making them sit through this assault on their sensibilities, they should not blame Isaacs. They should blame the Justice Department, which initiated the case during the Bush administration, and the Supreme Court, which established the absurdly subjective test they are now supposed to apply. Will they take seriously Isaacs' references to Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, Kiki Smith, and Piero Manzoni, or will they dismiss his artistic name dropping as a desperate attempt to give his masturbation aids a high-minded purpose?

But here's some up-to-date news from 2 days ago: Minutes before Isaacs was to turn himself in to the  federal Bureau of Prisons, Isaacs go a call from his lawyer saying "don't go." The judge had approved his motion for bail pending appeal.

Isaacs told XBIZ that today's events were so surreal he had felt like he was in an episode of the "Twilight Zone" or a Quentin Tarantino movie....

"Last night, I was thinking it would be my last night of freedom," he said. "I really thought that this would be it; that I would be sleeping in prison the following night... and that would continue for a very long time."

We'll see what happens in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and — if we're lucky — the Supreme Court.

15,000 journalists cover 5,000 delegates in what Dana Milbank calls a "media lovefest."

Yikes.

I’ve had my deltoids massaged in candlelight by a licensed therapist; had a foaming pore cleanser and mask applied to my face by an aesthetician; been instructed in the Warrior, Half-Sun Salute and Dancer poses by a yoga instructor; and crawled into a hanging cocoon for a “meditative snooze.” I worked up quite an appetite doing all this, so I ordered vegan corn chowder and gluten-free chicken chile verde washed down with Fiji water — all courtesy of the Huffington Post.

And yet we know the hotels you have to sleep in are horrible and bedbug-infested, not that I'd envy this time-wasting nonsense if I didn't know that. Personally, I'm glad to be in Madison, Wisconsin, blogging the convention by watching it on C-SPAN.

Unpaid bloggers lose their lawsuit against Huffington Post.

"The principles of equity and good conscience do not justify giving the plaintiffs a piece of the purchase price when they never expected to be paid, repeatedly agreed to the same bargain, and went into the arrangement with eyes wide open."

"This is the electronic equivalent of someone writing a letter to the editor," John Coffee, a professor at Columbia Law School, said in an interview. "You are rewarded by publication, not by payment."

You want to get paid for your writing? Bargain for it. And quit whining. No one wants to read things written by whiners, so you're only digging yourselves a deeper hole.

"Why Men Opting-Out Should Make You Angry"/"Puppies You Need More Than A Man."

HuffPo headlines, more or less inconsistent.

The first link is via Instapundit, who adds, sarcastically, "Apparently, women should always be angry." Now, now, with puppies, that need not be so.