What word is missing from this PJ Media headline?

"Parents Shocked at Drag Queen 'Pre-Show' Ahead of 'Star Wars' at Alamo Cinemas."

How good is your bullshit detector?

I went there from Instapundit. PJ Media is not a place I go on my own, and here's a great example of why I find it so off-putting.

Why does PJ Media hate that Starbucks racial training video so much?

Here's the video, which I think is good:



PJ Media's Jim Treacher surrounds it with snark that assumes you think just like him:

Do you want to see a preview of the training video? You're curious, aren't you? It's gotta be exactly what you're expecting it to be, right?

Right.

[VIDEO]

We'll now take a quick break so you can get all that cringing out of your system.

[15-20 MINUTES LATER]

Done? Whew. Yeah, all the money in the world can't buy common sense, but it can buy a guest appearance by rapper and activist Common.

I am cringing at something. I'm cringing at that style of internet writing. It's like somebody figured out how to look — in text alone — like a super-casual asshole and now it's just standard internet writing. So tiresome! I feel as though I'm constantly being poked in the ribs and expected to laugh at all kinds of mundane things, like an earnest expression of the desire to make all customers in a coffeeshop feel welcome.

Whining about "whining."

I am so tired of Pajama Media stuff like this.

One of the nice things about being a writer in 2018 is that SJWs will continue to find new and absurd ways to get their feelings hurt. Even if nothing else is happening, I can always count on a group of SJWs providing me with something to write about. This time, a horde of them provided me a gift by taking to Twitter to express their dismay at a photo of chopsticks accompanying a New York Times story about a new Japanese restaurant....

The NYT deserved the ribbing it got in tweets that were not "whining" but well-aimed gibes like:

was that chopsticks placement also 'inspired by asia' 👀 pic.twitter.com/xG4ixOsOd3

— Wilfred Chan (@wilfredchan) December 27, 2017

The phrase "inspired by Asia" — which really is ridiculous — was in the NYT restaurant review. Asia's a big place. And the photograph is ludicrous, and to mock it is not to be an SJW or an absurdly easily hurt snowflake.

Where is the diner supposed to sit, and how do you eat that steak without a fork and a big knife? It reminds me of the May 6, 1990 entry in David Sedaris's diary:

A man at the IHOP tonight lifted his entire steak with his fork and held it before his mouth, chewing off hunks of it.

Something must have happened to Pajamas Media sometime.

This grabbed me by the eyeballs and I opened up the app called Grab and made this capture for you:



That's the "Editor's Choice" in the sidebar when I clicked on "Meryl Streep Admits She Reads Drudge, Watches Fox News."*

Let's talk about the psychology of Pajamas Media or, more accurately, the psychology Pajamas Media imagines in its readers. Somebody there believes that putting those 3 things together will work on you to click one. And they can see which one readers choose. Which way does your anxiety lead you? You can always calm yourself with the "overrated male musicians" if the idea of sexualized boys and adult wussies is too disturbing.

You might take refuge in "overrated male musicians" because it's the one that's not overtly sexual, and you know you'll see familiar faces — warning: you have to click through multiple pages — and you can dreamily lose yourself in contemplating how highly these men are rated and then whether they should really be rated lower. Hey! If you do that, maybe you're experiencing "modern life" and getting transformed into a wussy. What manly man gives a fuck whether musicians are overrated? By the way, the listicle is written by a woman and she begins by talking about Woody Allen and his 40-year-old riff from "Manhattan" about which writers are overrated.

I skimmed "How Modern Life Transforms Men into Wussies," including clicking through 4 pages. Apparently, men these days watch action movies and play video games instead of doing manly outdoor things. Well, if you're reading that article, you're probably not flexing your muscles out in the elements. And be careful. You're a modern man on the precipice of the wussy-making machine. You may be moved to comment over there, participating by whimpering something like: "So you just finished pointing out just how crappy the situation is for men, and then chide us for not participating in it?" Poor man. He should have opened door #3 where he could have calmly nodded over the notion that Stevie Wonder is overrated.

Need I open door #2, "New York Times Celebrates Sexualization of 10-Year-Old Boy"? It must attract PJ Media clicks, since it's an article that's already almost a month old. Of course, the NYT article doesn't talk about the "sexualization" of the boy, and it certainly doesn't "celebrate sexualization" of a child. It merely enthuses about a boy wearing what would be a depressing shitload of makeup on a grown woman. The PJ Media article chides the NYT: "Apparently, there are... many cosmetics companies and fashion magazines willing to whore out young boys for the sake of sales and clicks." But PJ Media is also using that madeup boy to get clicks, and it's putting "sexualization" in the article title and pimping it — weeks after its original publication — in the sidebar under a headline written to scare men about the world turning them into "wussies."

________________________

* Don't get too excited about that nonnews. Meryl Streep is talking about news media, because she's in a new Steven Spielberg movie about the Pentagon Papers. She plays the role "of Washington Post reporter Katharine Graham," as PJ Media puts it. Katharine Graham wasn't a "reporter." She owned the newspaper and was its publisher. Anyway, Streep was answering questions about what media she consumes, she listed a lot of things, and on mentioning Fox, added that she looks at it "to see the manipulation." All the media manipulate, so I only wonder if she tries to see manipulation when she looks at media that lean the way she likes, but I'm not a reporter, I'm not interviewing Meryl Streep. I'm just a humble blogger prying my way into Pajamas Media at 5 in the morning.

The Russian government-affiliated troll farm was "sophisticated" enough to Facebook-target Ferguson and Baltimore with a "Black Lives Matter" ad.

CNN reports.

"This is consistent with the overall goal of creating discord inside the body politic here in the United States, and really across the West," Steve Hall, the former CIA officer and CNN National Security Analyst, said. "It shows they the [sic] level of sophistication of their targeting. They are able to sow discord in a very granular nature, target certain communities and link them up with certain issues."...

[Facebook's chief security officer, Alex Stamos] said, "the ads and accounts appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum -- touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights."

Sowing racial discord — that's what we do for ourselves. How dare the Russians get in on the action! But if they did, were they trying to defeat Hillary and elect Trump or just screwing with us more generically?

In the end, we might think that Hillary lost because not enough black people in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin felt like coming out and voting, so maybe there was some effect, but why would just a little more racial discord make a difference?

I'd like to see these ads, but if somehow the Russians figured out how to make a devastating race-based ad, I think there would have been Americans copying that message and running it on their own and we'd have been seeing it going viral on YouTube. If it were so powerful, it would not have remained targeted to Ferguson and Baltimore. It would have broken loose and gone national, and we'd all have been talking about it.

I found that article after encountering the Pajamas Media presentation of the issue, which was linked by Ed Driscoll at Instapundit. Pajamas Media says — inaccurately, I think — "Narrative Fail: Russia Facebook Ads Showed Support for Black Lives Matter, Clinton." Here's a screenshot that sums up why I can't stand to read Pajamas Media:

It was Hall, who's not a Senator, who talked about "the level of sophistication of [the] targeting." The only quoted Senator is Burr, a Republican. So who was absurd? I don't know, but it seems that there was some sophistication — enough to know that you can screw with Americans by stirring us up about race and perhaps to see the potential to stoke cynicism about voting among black people.  I guess it is absurd to infer that Russians couldn't reach that modest level of sophistication on their own and another huge leap to get to the idea that Trump must have helped them. But what Democratic Senator suggested that?

The most interesting part of this to me is: If it really is so horrible to stir up racial discord and cynicism about voting, why is it done by so many Americans — Americans who present themselves as virtuous? You can't say those Russians are outrageous if they're just spreading the same message that you yourself have been spreading.

And now, I can see that I'm caught up in a paradox. I seem to be saying that the Democrats have been spreading a message that is damaging to their cause. But the paradox is avoided if you see that the left isn't monolithic. There are people the Democrats would like to think they own, but they don't. If the Russians helped deactivate these would-be Hillary voters, they colluded with Bernie Sanders, not Trump.

IN THE COMMENTS: Amadeus 48 informs me that the greenish text does not relate to the article where it appears. It's a teaser hotlinked to another article! That is, it's not a highlight meant to draw me into the text where it is embedded, but the sort of thing that I'm used to seeing over in a sidebar. Ridiculous! What a stupid squandering of the reader's time and good will.

Okay, here's the other article, which has the title you see in the greenish writing in my screen grab. The Democratic Senator is Richard Blumenthal:

"This micro-targeting required sophistication, knowledge, and a great deal of data and research," Blumenthal told CNN's Wolf Blitzer. "And the real question, as you've just asked it, is how did they know how to micro-target?.... There is speculation, to be absolutely blunt, that they received that help from the Trump campaign, which had a great deal of digital information to enable its own targeting," Blumenthal said. "So the question is, was there collusion between this Russian internet agency, a St. Petersburg firm of trolls, and the Trump campaign?"

That is pretty pathetic. I love the way "speculation" simply exists, as if it were an entity, living and breathing and able to concoct conspiracy theories without any human... collusion. And I love the jackassery of claiming to be "absolutely blunt" while avoiding saying who is doing the speculating. Is it him, right there, on Wolf's show?

Why would you need a "great deal of digital information" to find black people in Ferguson and Baltimore? Even if it weren't a matter of common knowledge, isn't Facebook designed to do the targeting for anyone who ponies up the cash to advertise?

Who would spray paint "Tear It Down" on a statue of Joan of Arc in New Orleans?

I'm reading this story at PJ Media  — which misquotes the graffiti in the headline and makes it sound as though the graffiti was on the statue when it's actually on the base. So let's switch to The Times-Picayune (which is linked at PJ Media):

The phrase "Tear it Down" was hastily sprayed in black paint across the base of the golden Joan of Arc statue on Decatur Street in the French Quarter sometime earlier this week. It has since been removed, with only the vaguest traces of the paint remaining.

The "Tear it Down" tag would seem to relate to the debate surrounding the city's ongoing removal of four Confederate monuments. But the statue of Joan of Arc, a 15th-century military leader, martyr and Catholic saint, hasn't been mentioned in the controversy to this point.

Now, wait a minute! This article is from last May, and the PJ Media article went up yesterday and doesn't mention that the defacing of the Joan of Arc monument predated the current uproar over the removal of Civil War monuments. But there was a "Take Em Down NOLA" movement at the time that — as the Times-Picayune tells us — aimed at the local Confederate monuments (and this group denies targeting the Joan).

Anyway, who would spray paint "Tear It Down" on a Joan of Arc monument? Do you leap to assume that some idiot believes that Joan of Arc has to do with the Confederacy? Maybe that's how you have fun. At PJ Media, the author (Tom Knighton) does not assume it was ignorance about Joan of Arc. At the end of his piece he says:

It's also possible that this was the result of someone being intentionally ridiculous. After all, while removing statues of Confederate leaders is the big thing, there are also movements to remove a Thomas Jefferson monument from outside of Columbia University and a Teddy Roosevelt from outside of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. So maybe someone is just trolling these lunatics.

Yes, that theory fits the facts better than the theory that some idiot thought it was a pro-Confederacy statue.

But it could also be anti-Catholic. Speaking of ignorance of American history, it's ignorant not to know that the KKK and other nationalists have been virulently anti-Catholic. Here's a Wikipedia article, "Anti-Catholicism in the United States."

Here's some KKK artwork from 1925:

You see the tear-it-down enthusiasm.

There are people who would want to take down a statue of a Catholic saint. Quite aside from the KKK, what about people who want the strict separation of religion and government? Why is there a religious monument in the public square?

"If people make the difference in a locale, that’s also true in Madison — unfortunately. In my dozens of trips to Wisconsin’s capital city..."

"... I found a pleasant area surrounded by many pristine lakes ruined by its residents. Collegians from around the country, their professors and local progressives team up to form Berkeley of the Midwest, where generally one ideological mindset is tolerated. Most of downtown is swallowed by the enormous university. Once you peel through the masses, the capitol building is constantly obscured by either renovations or violent protests, thus you rarely get photos outside or inside the building."

So says Ari J. Kaufman at Pajamas Media, putting Madison at #2 on his list of "10 Most Overrated Destinations in the Midwest." I guess his dozens of trips were back in 2011, during the big uprising against Scott Walker, and even then his observations are none too astute, since the protests, while clamorous, were never violent. Groups that got as large as 100,000, full of people who were really upset and trying to crank up the emotion, did not become violent. That was actually pretty amazing, and the Capitol building, one of the most beautiful state capitol buildings, isn't obscured by anything.

Kaufman seems to be pandering to the PJ Media readership, which is apparently supposed to be a lot of liberal-haters. If you're reading my blog, you've seen plenty of what's great about Madison. I've lived here for 30 years, and Meade has lived here 5 years now. I asked him what he thought of Madison, and he said:

I like it. I like the residents. I find it a very peaceful place to live. I know it's very lefty, but I think most of the real lefties are old, complacent, kind of fat, drunk, and lazy. So it's a nice time to be in Madison, because there's some re-energizing in the politics, and a lot of that is due to Scott Walker Republicans....

ADDED: Kaufman's powers of observation are also deficient when it comes to assessing lakes. They are not pristine.  Here's a picture I took from the Union Terrace on the shore of Lake Mendota a few days ago:



So it's certainly not "pristine." But don't worry, the sign isn't always there, and I haven't seen it recently. And we have Wingra, Monona, Kegonsa, and Waubesa as well as Mendota.

AND: Lake Wingra:

Instapundit opens up comments in a "grand experiment."

He writes:

I’ve opened ‘em up before — and, for that matter, Ann Althouse did it once when I was away, to much excitement — but this new system should be much better. 

The system is part of "the new rollout of tech at PJ Media will allow one sign-in to work across the whole site," so you've got to join their system to be able to comment. And they will be able to manage you in ways that I was not able to manage my commenters (some of whom really were trying to destroy my blog and waste all our time).

Someone at Instapundit named Stoutcat says:

Where Althouse closes a door, Reynolds opens a window! This is an excellent idea, and I'm anticipating much enjoyment and eddification from reading your commenters, who are, no doubt, as far above Althouse's commenters, as hers were above the general horde.

Instapundit responds:

Yeah, Althouse's apparent joy at being comment-free gives me pause. But there' s no connection -- this has been in the works for months as part of PJ's single sign-on thing.

As for "Althouse's apparent joy at being comment-free," if that's what he's seeing, that is in fact only appearance. The loss has been very painful, because I believed the comments gave the place a lot of energy. But some unknown proportion of the commenters were people with ill will, who wanted destruction, and deleting even the ones we knew about had become literally a full-time job. But I wasn't in some big old system with lots of tech people. I've kept independent, with the simplicity of the people's platform, Blogger, which won't let me exclude people. I could only delete, which was a technique that my most aggressive antagonists used against me (and against all the other commenters who'd contributed so much over the years).

That really hurt, but I'm an optimist, and — like a blog — I live in the present and move forward, so I find the good in whatever the situation is, continually making choices about how to keep things as good as possible, and the day came when the balance of good and bad in the comments experience tipped so severely that I couldn't maintain the sunny denial needed to put up with everything. Since then, I've felt the loss, and part of the loss is seeing exiled commenters talking about me elsewhere on the web, forgetting/ignoring the problem that made me close the comments — as if I would shut off the comments because people attacked my writings! — and saying such nasty things about me that I could get depressed brooding about the real proportion of good faith to bad faith commenters.

But I've got to resist traipsing down that detour as I continue on the road of blogging, where I've found so much joy in the past and hope to find more, doing things in this newly simplified style. Meanwhile, Instapundit gets fancier, as PJ Media makes its play to become a social media enterprise. That's the road I've diverged from. I can't be your social media website.

I've redefined my task as something I can do alone, not that I'm alone. I've got Meade — the commenter I married — walking with me every step of the way. I've got all the joy I can handle, and maybe it is joy at being comment-free. I'm a less is more kind of person. My own version of that slogan is: Better than nothing is a high standard. I do notice and take joy in the negatives that I'm free of. That's called freedom, and comment-free is a kind of freedom.

ADDED: I said it back in 2004:

Why do you blog? > To live freely in writing.

PJ Media's stupid effort to attack Obama through Derrick Bell's book "Afrolantica Legacies."

Did anyone over there realize how dumb this is?

As a 28-year-old student at Harvard Law Barack Obama supported the activism of Professor Derrick Bell and urged his peers to open their hearts and minds to the words of Critical Race Theory's founder.

I've already blogged about the stupidity of attributing significance to the student who gave a nice introduction to a venerable professor. I won't repeat that. This is about PJ Media's failure to see that Bell is attacking liberals. It's stupid to tear down Bell as a way to attack Democrats. Bell is attacking Democrats!

PJ Media is reading one of the lesser Bell works, "Afrolantica Legacies." It's not available in Kindle, or I'd buy a copy right now, but I see that it's like about the 7 millionth best-selling book over at Amazon right now. The book is a collection of essays, and PJM displays photos of some pages in the book, including a collection of "rules of racial preservation," which is the first thing the PJM article decides to trash. But let's look at Bell's first rule:

No matter how justified by racial injustices they are intended to remedy, civil rights policies, including affirmative action, are implemented only when they further the interests of whites.

Hello? Who implements these race-based policies like affirmative action? Liberals! Derrick Bell is saying that white people do this when and only when it works for their advantage! The critical race thinking you're invited to do here is to understand how, when white people purport to advance black people, they are really exploiting black people for their own advantage. This is an attack on the work of the Democratic Party and other liberals. Conservatives are on the sidelines of this battle.

I am reminded of the dissenting opinion that Clarence Thomas wrote in Grutter v. Bollinger, the case that upheld the affirmative action admissions at the University of Michigan Law School:

The Most Inappropriate Nausea of the Day.

A writer over at Pajamas Media whose name appears in an unreadable font — Jebuda? Jehuda? — assumes we readers will all want to puke when we see that Shepard Fairey — the artist behind the famous Obama "Hope" poster — is working on a new movie version of George Orwell’s 1984.

That’s right: we may soon see in screens big and small a movie that could very well be advertised as “From the Dishonest Propagandist Who Brought You the Obama ‘Hope’ Poster.”

There’s something very fitting about a dishonest propagandist pushing for a whole new 1984 movie, but coming from Obama booster Ron Howard and Shepard Fairey, this project might amount to – if it’s ever produced – a version of 1984 that would make George Orwell spin in his grave.

First, I think what would make Orwell "spin in his grave" is your use of the phrase "spin in his grave." Good lord, you purport to care about Orwell, yet you blithely violate one of the most memorable rules in his famous essay "Politics and the English Language": "Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print."

"Apparently lost upon the mostly college-aged protesters: for their false flag operation to work..."

"... they must blend in to the group, and then display signs that cast the tea party group at large as bigoted or racist."

Why is Pajamas Media assuming the people in the photographs are attempting to pass as protesters? They are making their counter-protest transparent and charmingly funny. Calling them stupid is... stupid.

"The video you have selected requires you to be a member of Pajamas TV."

To see a complete list of free videos click here.

For information on the full range of Pajamas TV offerings click here.

Sign in

I was going to check out Glenn Reynolds's video —

SO I COVERED THE KNOXVILLE TEA PARTY LIVE, with an experimental (I kludged it together myself!) wireless broadband camera rig consisting of a JVC pro DV camera firewired into my Macbook Pro, then connecting to PJTV studios over iChat using a Verizon broadband card. It worked pretty well — but, mostly, I was just relieved that it worked.

— and I encountered that screen full of crap.

How can anyone possibly think it will work to combine amateur-style video with a pay-to-view scheme? Even if some of the material is free, how can they think we'll fiddle with figuring anything out to get to it? If a blog says "go here" to see video, in this day of YouTube, the click better go straight to a simple, easy-to-play video.

Doing the math on Pajamas Media.

"Roger Simon’s claim that the ad network lost money from day one is the result of extremely poor business decisions, and that all they had to do to make it work was tell their bloggers the truth and simply renegotiate CPM rates."

***

"The fact of the matter is, these righty bloggers were kept financially afloat by PJM in an attempt to institutionalize the wingnut blogosphere as an alternative to the perceived liberal MSM. Given the American people's distaste for conservatism as practiced by George W. Bush (which can be argued was a perversion of it) and desire for change, the money wasn't there because no one cared about what these bloggers had to say or was willing to pay them to say it in this climate."

***

And here, Roy has fun surveying the rightosphere reaction.

Looks like Dennis has weighed in.

In answer to your first question: So did I. And I never slurped.

The Pajamas Media blogging enterprise has collapsed.

Jeff G. (at Protein Wisdom) has the letter from Roger L. Simon, which buries the bad news in a statement about how Pajamas is turning its attention to its web TV efforts. I wonder how many people watch Pajamas TV. In the comments over there, Showy writes:

Those guys certainly know more about web advertising than I do, but it seems like a strange business decision to me. My first thought on reading this was, “I can’t imagine having less interest in anything than I have in watching ‘Ask Dr. Helen’ or ‘Hugh News’ on my computer”. Not to pick on those two, per se, but it’s true. So I checked the web stats on Alexa, and appeared to me that Protein Wisdom alone had more views over the past 6 months than pjtv.com, the portal for all of their shows (probably a reasonable facsimile for views of all their shows combined). Yet they’re going to dump PW (and presumably others) in order to focus on PJTV? When you factor in that probably a solid half of the readers of these sites are stealth-reading them from work, and that it’s rather harder to stealth-watch a 20 minute video clip, I have a hard time seeing how this is going to work out for them.

Jeff G. retorts:

Maybe I’ll start a free version PJTV. I’m sure I can play all those characters.

I must say, I can barely stand to watch any political talking heads TV shows, even on network TV and cable TV. I just have no patience waiting for people to say something that I could read in 1/10 the time. I've clicked over to PJTV a few times, but after less than a minute, I always leave. Why am I looking at these folks? Put it in writing! Yes, I know I do Bloggingheads, but that's an active conversation for me. Do you watch Bloggingheads? At least with Bloggingheads, I can make whatever little embeddable clips I want to use to set up a discussion in writing.



I'm reading more comments chez Protein Wisdom, and SGT Ted mirrors my thinking:

Well, crapo. The reason I use the intertoobs is because I don’t LIKE the talking heads “we’ll tell you what we think is important and you won’t have any way to respond” Bullshit of TV. If I want TV like programs, I’ll turn on the goddam TV. I like the people doing the PJMTV when they are blogging, but I don’t want to watch them go blah blah.

Instapundit says:

YEAH, the PJM ad-network model isn’t working. I don’t have much to do with the PJM business side, but online ads just aren’t producing revenue like they were a few years ago, and the blog-network thing was apparently a tough sell. Hence the emphasis on PJTV. How will that work out? Stay tuned.

Well, we will, of course, stay tuned to Instapundit for further updates on this and everything else. But do you want to watch him on web TV? I mean, surely you must want to watch him when he's talking to me... or do you? (Hey, that's one of the few times Bloggingheads put me on the left.)

Ace, another PJM blogger who's about to lose his income stream, says:

Damn. I was finally starting to make an amount of money I wasn't utterly embarrassed by, too....

[T]he model for payment was pretty transparent and intuitive -- paid per impression. One could figure out one's quarterly payment just by eyeballing one's Sitemeter. BlogAds paid okay, but there are always those patches where no one really wants to buy ads, making income kind of unpredictable.

This is one of those patches. I usually have 2 or 3 ads running via BlogAds, but haven't even had 1 ad in the last couple of weeks. You can see why BlogAds is a less risky business. It doesn't pay you because you have traffic. It pays you because they sold an ad to run on your blog. How much does it pay? When I sell an ad, it pays me a percentage of the price I set myself (and can adjust up or down as I see fit). (Feel free to buy an ad!)

Some of you long-time readers may remember that I rejected my offer from Pajamas Meda back when it started:

Did you get your offer from Pajamas Media yet? Are you going to put on the pajamas -- take a flat fee to commit the top four spots on your sidebar for a whole year? I thought Pajamas implied a bloggy freedom, different from a corporate, mainstream mentality. Are we supposed to marry Pajamas and give up on Henry Copeland's delightful BlogAds, which has been beautifully designed with a feeling for the spirit of blogging? Ah, I don't like pajamas anyway. I want to blog naked. With Henry.

Will Henry take them back?

I did some pretty harsh anti-Pajamas blogging back in the day. (Including stuff aimed at Jeff G. Remember when I wrote what my old commenter Icepick said was "that the grossest thing Ann has written on this blog"?) It was a huge ideological issue for me at the time: the freedom and independence of bloggers. Looking back on those old posts, I can see I've lost some of my lively romanticism about blogging. I had a very intense feeling about how subversive this all was. That somehow went hand in hand with the anticipation of waves of money flowing in — and who would channel more of it to me, Henry or Roger?

But these are hard times for everyone. Any business could fail in this environment. So, what does it say about how good that business model was in the first place? My concern was always, which business model is better for us writers, and I thought it was Henry.

ADDED: The Anchoress — a PJM blogger — weighs in... and, as one of several reasons why she doesn't want to do web TV, reveals that "the Lord’s overgenerous endowment in my chestal area makes any notion of camera work unthinkable, particularly in HD where the girls might terrify some." How large do breasts need to be before they make it impossible to appear on television? And can't you just adjust the camera frame? On Bloggingheads, we're all just heads — and maybe a bit of shoulders — unless, of course, you're Arianna Huffington:



UPDATE: I'm still waiting for Dennis the Peasant — PJM's biggest antagonist — to join the conversation, so let's read that other relentless Pajamas antagonist, Steve from Hog on Ice:

This is probably what’s going on: PJM always lost money, so it was paying people out of venture capital. As the capital dissipated, people had to be fired.

PJM’s new hope is PJTV, a pay video site. Where you can pay to watch Glenn and Helen Reynolds. This is not unlike asking people to pay to be punched in the face. It will fail. I can’t understand why anyone would think it could succeed....

I used to see the PJ fiasco as the result of greed, treachery, foolishness, and dishonesty. These days I see it more as the evidence of a curse.

Go to the link for his curse theory. It includes Obama and the GOP and the G-O-D. He ends with Biblical verse:

Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child, and thy princes eat in the morning!

I keep telling myself to go cook breakfast, and I'm taking this as a sign.

"By making a 15-minute-of-fame political media celebrity its point man in Israel, PJTV took a risk and they've now been bitten by it."

"Joe is now the face of PJTV. His saying that reporters should not be with front line soldiers undercuts any effort by PJTV to put reporters on the front lines of a war."

J.D. Johannes is — rightly — taking this personally.

Via Instapundit – and I appreciate seeing the Pajamas Media bloggers deviate from promoting the project.

"Ann has her reasons, discernible in a parsing of her own comments following her post..."

I'm not sure if I like that or not. On the one hand, Sissy Willis, not bothering with my reasons, rolls along, lavishing praise on the project she has already bound herself to. ("Roger L. Simon is a genius.") On the other hand, it does encourage her readers to click over to this blog.

And those reasons of mine have to do with not wanting to be put in the position of needing to defend and promote a group project that I can't control.

Incidentally, the University of Wisconsin Law School is the greatest law school in the land!

Pajamas Media taps Joe the Plumber to serve as a war correspondent in Israel.

Many are the times when I've felt good about rejecting offers to work for Pajamas Media. This is one of them.

The New York Times comes to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and finds that the radical professors are on their way out.

The radicals are old Boomers nearing retirement and being replaced by a younger generation:

[A] Wisconsin professor, Erik Olin Wright, a 61-year-old sociologist and a Marxist theorist, described it this way: “There has been some shift away from grand frameworks to more focused empirical questions.”

As for his own approach, Mr. Wright said, “in the late ’60s and ’70s, the Marxist impulse was central for those interested in social justice.” Now it resides at the margins.

“I was part of a new wave of hires,” Sara Goldrick-Rab said, peering over the top of her laptop at her favorite off-campus work site, the Espresso Royale cafe. She came to the University of Wisconsin in 2004....

Hey, weird! I'm sitting here reading this on my laptop at the Espresso Royale café.

“My generation is not so ideologically driven,” she said....

“Senior people evaluate us for tenure and the standards they use and what we think is important are different,” she said. They want to question values and norms; “we are more driven by data.”...

As for partisan politics, when she wrote an article in May for Pajamasmedia.com about welfare reform cutting off poor people’s access to higher education, some friends and co-workers were surprised by its appearance on that conservative blog. She said she didn’t know; she had not paid attention to its political bent.

Oh, New York Times? Pajamasmedia.com is not a blog.

When Ms. Goldrick-Rab speaks of added pressures on her generation, she talks about being pregnant or taking care of her 17-month-old while trying to earn tenure. The lack of paid leave for mothers is high on her list of complaints about university life.

If you have paid leave for mothers (beyond a few weeks to recover from childbirth), you have to have paid leave for fathers or it is unconstitutional sex discrimination. Nevada v. Hibbs.

Anyway, bottom line: It's great that the younger generation is more interested in data and science and less interested in political action and ideology. I welcome their contribution — to the University of Wisconsin and to the world.

Did you watch that Democratic debate, you know, the rich-folks-only debate?

Eric Scheie agrees to cover a debate for Pajamas Media only to discover that it's not going to be so easy to watch it:

Thinking I must be crazy or just stupid (for the Democrats would never hold a debate on a channel that wasn’t generally available to the public, would they?) I spent quite a bit of time fiddling with the controls looking for [HDNet]....

As it turns out, the only way to get this channel is to upgrade my monthly service to “HD TV,” (plus pay an extra charge for “special” channels like HDNet), but that even then my existing equipment (which I paid for and had installed) would not work. To actually receive the new signal, I would have to buy a new receiver, and on top of that I’d have to buy a new satellite dish, have old one yanked off the wall and the new one installed!

Ha ha. You know I have an HD TV, and I pay for cable plus extra for HD service, but I still don't get HDNet, because it's extra extra. So I was 2 steps closer than Eric to being able to watch it, but I still couldn't watch it.

So, the Democratic Party — the party of the working class — is broadcasting tonight’s debate from an elitist network run by billionaire Mark Cuban that requires expensive equipment and high monthly charges to access.

What’s up with that? Is this a signal that despite the egalitarian rhetoric, that they’re actually the party of the rich and famous? Imagine the outcry if the GOP broadcast its debate from fancy network that ordinary people couldn’t access. There’d be cries that the Republicans were in a “gated community.”

And, amusingly enough, it's where you have to go to watch Dan Rather.

Eric decides to "blind-blog" the debate:

I couldn’t watch it, and so I can’t tell you what the questions or the answers were. But here’s what I think probably happened.

Hillary won, hands down....