Knowing yet not knowing: Matt Damon positions himself vis a vis Harvey Weinstein.

"You had to spend about five minutes with him to know that he was a bully, he was intimidating — that was his legend... When people say everybody knew, yeah I knew he was an asshole. He was proud of that.... I knew he was a womanizer. I wouldn't want to be married to the guy, but it's not my business... But this level of criminal sexual predation is not something that I ever thought was going on" (Hollywood Reporter).

He just didn't know the level.

The clues were there and seen, but he claims not to have made any of the inferences that will put him in a bad light now.

At the same link, George Clooney is similar but different in 2 key ways:

"Harvey would talk to me about women that he'd had affairs with... I didn't necessarily believe him quite honestly, because to believe him would be to believe the worst of some actresses who were friends of mine.... The idea that this predator — this assaulter — was out there silencing women like that ... it's beyond infuriating.... There has to be a comeuppance for all of this. All of the people who were part of that chain. And then, we have to make it safe for people to feel that they can talk about it."

1. Clooney seems as though he had a simpatico relationship with Harvey. He had confidential conversations with him, and he's using the word "affairs" to refer to what Harvey did — even as he says that if the stories were true what the women were doing would be the worst.

2. And— unlike Damon — Clooney doesn't seem to have experienced Harvey as an "asshole." Clooney disapproves of the behavior that has come out recently, but he doesn't say that the man he knew first hand was "a bully... intimidating... an asshole."

#MeToo overload.

"A woman claims that esteemed scholar, philanthropist and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel molested her as a teenager, squeezing her 'ass' at a charity event in New York three decades ago. In a 'Me Too' post on Medium last week, Jennifer Listman, a former doctoral student at New York University and researcher at Yale University, recounts that the late Wiesel forced himself between her and her boyfriend during a photo shoot at the 1989 memorial event and molested her. As the photographer focused, Wiesel allegedly moved his hand from Listman's right shoulder to her shoulder blade, then down her back where he groped her as the photo was taken...."

Newsweek reports.

ADDED: The man is deceased. It was 3 decades ago. The allegation is only that in a photo shoot, he put his hand on her ass. This kind of #MeTooism is diluting the category that we have been taking very seriously in the light of the Harvey Weinstein revelations.

I'm not approving of ass-grabbing. I have a problem with making an allegation this late against a dead man. And I have a problem with lumping things together the wrong way.



IN THE COMMENTS: Bob Boyd said:

Maybe we should pick Harvey Weinstein up, brush him off, put him back where we found him and forget the whole thing.

If too much is thrown into the category we've been activated to take seriously, many of us will deactivate. Those who want to keep the recent activation working should want to help keep up the distinctions. If the problem seems vague and expanding, the need to protect the unfairly accused will outweigh the interest in smoking out people like Weinstein, and — ironically — it will give them cover.

"Let’s all give each other a pass, shall we?"

The awful politics around what Donald Trump said to the widow made me want to find a quote I know is in the archive. (I've blogged it twice.)

From "Half Empty" by David Rakoff (who was facing the cancer treatment of amputation of his left arm and shoulder):

A friend asks if I’ve “picked out” my prosthetic yet, as though I’d have my choice of titanium-plated cyborgiana at my disposal, like some amputee Second Life World of Warcraft character. Another friend, upon hearing my news, utters an unedited, “Oh my God, that’s so depressing!” Over supper, I am asked by another, “So if it goes to the lungs, is it all over?”...

But here’s the point I want to make about the stuff people say. Unless someone looks you in the eye and hisses, “You fucking asshole, I can’t wait until you die of this,” people are really trying their best. Just like being happy and sad, you will find yourself on both sides of the equation many times over your lifetime, either saying or hearing the wrong thing. Let’s all give each other a pass, shall we?

In a somewhat similar vein, in the NYT: "Trump’s Not Alone. A Lincoln Condolence Letter Stirred Controversy, Too."

If we make it too hard to talk to a person in dire circumstances, a lot of people will play it safe and not speak at all.

Indeed, John Kelly advised Trump against calling the widows of fallen soldiers. But that's not the kind of person Trump is. He goes ahead and speaks, even though it's often imperfect, and he knows he's got antagonists ready to jump on anything he says. I've regarded him as a free-speech inspiration ever since I had a dream about him — long before the election — in which I hugged him and thanked him for showing that free speech — with mistakes, straight from the human head — is much better than inhibition, self-censorship, and holding back until you've somehow arrived at the ability to get it exactly right.

Here's something Scott Adams wrote (in the WSJ) about Trump's imperfect speech:

When Mr. Trump smack-tweets a notable public critic... it violates our expectations of his office. That's what makes it both entertaining and memorable. He often injects into his tweets what memory expert Carmen Simon calls a "little bit of wrongness" to make it hard to look away. If the wrongness alarms you, consider that for years he has adroitly operated within a narrow range of useful wrongness on Twitter without going too far. That suggests technique. In the Twitter environment, strategic wrongness is jet fuel.

That's not about giving people a pass and tolerating wrongness. In this analysis, a little bit of wrongness is a good thing.

The Carmen Simon idea is: Impossible to Ignore. A different value of a little bit of wrongness is: Proof of Humanity. If you say things that aren't entirely correct, it shows you're not tightly scripted, that you are speaking the thoughts that are alive in your head right now. Perhaps when the President awkwardly connects volunteering for the military, understanding the risks, and the meaning of courage and, literally, it seems to say that the man signed up to die, the response should be something more like, Thank you for letting me see your imperfection, your humanity.

"She always looks like a high priced call girl in her tightclothes and stiletto heels with that icy cold smile that never reaches her eyes."

That's the second-highest-rated comment at "Photos of Melania Trump donating her inaugural ball gown to the Smithsonia" (WaPo).

The highest-rated comment is: "Remember when Michelle Obama going sleeveless was a scandal? Republicans have ridiculous double standards." To answer that question: No. But if it happened, I'll bet it was in a different situation, like inside a church, and not at a ball.

Here, I found this from March 2009: "Obama's Choice to Bare Arms Causes Uproar." There was some criticism of Michelle Obama for going sleeveless in her first official photograph as First Lady and at Obama's first congressional address, which took place in wintertime.

"Most of the complaints centered on the dress conveying a sense of informality on a serious occasion," [Chicago Tribune style reporter Wendy] Donahue said. "She's kind of faced some criticism for that in the past where people have said maybe [her clothing is] distracting from the central point, from what is going on."...

"When she was at the non-State of the Union address and had the sleeveless dress on, that was a bit of a surprise and I got some e-mails from some folks who were, you know, they work on the Hill and they were like, 'Wow she's sleeveless,'" [Politico White House reporter Malika] Henderson said. "'Nobody else is sleeveless here and it is the winter.'"

I don't think anyone criticizes a ball gown as informal when it bares the arms (and shoulders and much of the back and chest). Those are standard design attributes that make it seem formal.  The bareness is standard even in winter, and I don't think Michelle Obama was criticized for baring her arms at the inaugural balls.

But if you want to talk about double standards, I don't remember anyone saying that Michelle Obama looked like a "call girl in her tightclothes and stiletto heels with that icy cold smile."

Was Obama criticized for wearing her clothes too tight? Yes! In the New York Times, quoting an unnamed fashion designer: "Her clothes are too tight."

Was her smile criticized? Yes, according to "To the First Lady, With Love Four thank-you notes to Michelle Obama, who has spent the past eight years quietly and confidently changing the course of American history," in the NYT just before last fall's election:

Because she said what she thought, and because she smiled only when she felt like smiling, and not constantly and vacuously, America’s cheapest caricature was cast on her: the Angry Black Woman. Women, in general, are not permitted anger — but from black American women, there is an added expectation of interminable gratitude, the closer to groveling the better, as though their citizenship is a phenomenon that they cannot take for granted.

“I love this country,” she said to applause. She needed to say it — her salve to the hostility of people who claimed she was unpatriotic because she had dared to suggest that, as an adult, she had not always been proud of her country. Of course she loved her country....

At the Maple Café...

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Have you listened to the "Dirty John" podcast?

I listened to the entire 6-part series over the weekend (and listened to parts of it twice). It's very good, not as good as "S-Town," but definitely worthwhile, especially if you want to expose yourself to the thought processes of a woman — a successful businesswoman — who becomes inexplicably stupid while in love (and a second woman whose religion takes her to a mindboggling level of forgiveness).

Subscribe to the podcast in the normal way or start here at the L.A. Times where you can play the audio (highly recommended) or have a reading experience (with photographs).

In "'Dirty John': Journalism as Noir Entertainment" (New Yorker)("mild spoilers"), Sarah Larson questions the mixing of journalism with entertainment — the "pulp-like tone":

John is shown to be thoroughly evil—a descriptor used by several interviewees—and the story freely presents him as a monster. It does this journalistically, through legal documentation, jail records, first-person accounts, archival recordings, text messages, restraining orders, and so on. But it also does so narratively, with the kind of language we might hear in [the old radio melodrama] “Leiningen Versus the Ants.” [Veteran newspaper journalist Christopher] Goffard seems to encourage an almost mythical impression of his subject’s evil. At one point, Goffard tells a lawyer that the lawyer’s description of John sounds “almost like the opposite of a religious experience, you know, where you meet someone holy and it changes your life? This is sort of the inverse of that. Like you looked into a void.” “That is so true,” the lawyer says, with emotion. “Because we all—we don’t want to believe the really bad things about people. We just don’t. We want to think that people are good. And when you meet somebody like this, and you realize, ‘I am sitting here in the presence of evil incarnate,’ you know that people like him really do exist.”...

At Vulture,  Nicholas Quah is more critical "Dirty John Is a Stunning Story, But Why Is It a Podcast?"

The podcast is a crude construction, and its choices often come to the detriment of the actual narrative it’s trying to unfurl and ideas it’s itching to explore. Which is a damn shame, because the Dirty John story, as reported by Los Angeles Times reporter Christopher Goffard in a six-part written feature, is a stunner. If you were to give up on the podcast midway through its first episode and switch over to the feature, you’d find a deep, complex tale of domestic abuse and psychological violence that’s rigorously reported, deftly written, and smartly laid out....

I got a lot out of hearing the voices of the characters, but I wanted more psychological depth. A man was evil — some people are just evil, we're told, and there's no explanation. You might as well say his skull was full of "green worms" (somebody says, near the end). As for the woman who took him in and took him back repeatedly, she's treated with such respect as The Victim that there's no exploration of the part of the story that would make some sense of her awful choices: profound sexual desire and satisfaction.

"What's Killing U.S. Business Schools?... [T]he University of Wisconsin is in the process of reviewing its graduate business degree programs..."

"... a process that may result in the discontinuation of its two-year full-time MBA program.... The Midwestern school’s program may become the latest casualty in a string of closures of MBA programs around the country. The University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business announced in August that it would end its full-time MBA program. In recent years, Wake Forest University, Thunderbird School of Global Management, Virginia Tech, and Simmons College (the country’s only all-female business school) have shuttered their traditional two-year programs."

Fortune offers 4 reasons explaining what's happening:

1. Non-MBA graduate business degrees are proliferating....

2. Fewer international students are opting for American schools....

3. Undergraduate student debt is ballooning....

4. Top business schools are pulling away from the pack....

"A male feminist writer has been fired by the prestigious GQ Magazine after a woman accused him of sexually assaulting her outside a bar."

"The writer, Rubert [sic] Myers, apologized to his accuser after she outed him on Twitter. Journalist Kate Leaver took to Twitter on Thursday to open up about her alleged experience with Myers. 'Ok, here goes. I haven’t told this story because I listened to the voice that told me it ‘wasn’t that bad’ or ‘worth talking about,' Leaver wrote. 'When I moved to London, I wanted to make friends. I met @RupertMyers on Twitter and agreed to go for what I thought was a friendly drink... I was very clear about not being romantically or sexually interested in him, once the subject was raised. I suggested we be mates … He said "I’ve got enough mates, I’d rather f--k you" and forced himself on me outside a pub in Fitzrovia.'"

Fox News reports.

"Male feminist" wasn't Myers's label for himself. In fact, no one at GQ ever uses the term "male feminist"...



... if I can trust the search function at the website.

Which I can't....



But I think conservative media came up with that descriptor to revel in the hypocrisy of a liberal.

Daily Caller reporter Ian Miles Cheong had harsh words for Myers, tweeting, “Male feminists who claim the moral high ground, who turn their noses up at the ‘misogynists’ below, are the very demons they claim to fight.”

Yes, of course, that's fun to do — and liberals often deserve it — but Myers seems to have written mainly about British politics, not gender. There is at least one Myers article in the gender category: "Men’s Rights Activists are cave dwelling idiots."

MRAs routinely deny the existence of what many feminists call "rape culture" by suggesting that failures to prosecute sexual violence are the result of endemic false rape allegations, rather than societal attitudes towards consent. When the founder of MRA site "A Voice For Men" Paul Elam wrote a piece entitled "Bill Cosby's victims? Or just a bunch of drug whoring star fuckers?" he was displaying an overt hostility towards women that characterises the movement. Over 50 women have accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault. Yet Elam goes to bat for Cosby.

But who will go to bat for Myers? Any Men's Rights cavemen want to step up for this guy? He's all alone now. Sad!

What are the rules for going out for drinks with a co-worker? If they say they just want to be your mate, when is it okay to quip "I’ve got enough mates, I’d rather fuck you"?

Yesterday, in the context of discussing allegations against the film director James Toback, I put up this image from what seemed to me to be his most significant film:



That inspired the commenter tim in vermont to write:

Robert Downy doesn't need techniques to pick up women, a simple "wanna fuck" would probably work at least half the time for him. In Wedding Crashers, the PUA was Will Ferrel, that was more believable.

If you look like like Robert Downey Jr. in 1987, go ahead and quip "I’ve got enough mates, I’d rather fuck you," and I suspect the worst you'd get is a laugh and a no from a woman who feels flattered and still hopes to be friends. But here's Rupert Myers:



He does not have the looks privilege to say things like "I’ve got enough mates, I’d rather fuck you." Now, I think the woman could have briskly gotten the upper hand with the comeback "Rupert, you are not cute enough to work a line like that" and laughed at him. Maybe if she had, they could have been mates. I wish more guys had girl friends who can laugh and keep up with the jokes, including dirty jokes, if they're out having a drink after work.

I'm afraid too many women will recoil at sexual expression and hide too much away and nurture the notion that they are "broken" and "violated" (to use the words of one of Toback's accusers). Let's not fling ourselves headlong into a new era of sexual repression.  There's a big difference between the unsuccessful pick-up line "I’ve got enough mates, I’d rather fuck you" and taking a physical action.

I don't know the details that made Kate Leaver write "He... forced himself on me outside a pub in Fitzrovia." This was on a public street, so I'm picturing something like an awkward, resisted hug. Without knowing more, I can't think of what else to say except that conservatives who've been crying out about the lack of due process for men accused of sexual assault should not be gleefully enjoying this man's loss of a job. That would be hypocritical, and your glee is based on the notion that Myers is a hypocrite. That's double hypocrisy!

"I heard him stumbling on trying to remember my husband's name, and that’s what hurt me the most because if my husband is out here fighting for our country and he risked his life for our country why can’t you remember his name?"

Myeshia Johnson sits for an interview with George Stephanopoulos this morning:



Trump's response this morning is: "I had a very respectful conversation with the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson, and spoke his name from beginning, without hesitation!"

Stephanopoulos began the interview with "I hope you're feeling the thoughts and prayers of everyone." Meade, who was listening and not watching, said: "He sounds like he's speaking to a child."

I said: "Well, he's modeling the kind of empathy that he wants us to understand that Trump failed to express. But he sounds smarmy and patronizing which shows how hard it actually is to do it right."

Johnson seemed most concerned with the facts about her husband's death and the treatment of his dead body: "They won’t show me a finger, a hand; I know my husband’s body from head-to-toe and they won’t let me see anything." She sounds troubled by doubt: "I need to see him so I will know that that is my husband."

I'm thinking that alternative response open to Trump is to do something to relieve Johnson of these doubts, but that might not be possible, and Johnson seems clear that she wants nothing to do with Trump. Prompted "Is there anything you'd like to say to the President now?," she says, "Nah, I don't have nothing to say to him."

So maybe it is best for Trump to leave Johnson alone. The anti-Trumpers are not leaving her alone.

At the end of the interview, the other "Good Morning America" host — her name doesn't appear on screen or in the linked article — says in a showbiz-sincere way: "Ugh! It's so powerful! And to have to go through all this while she's grieving her husband! Truly unthinkable, but she's a powerful woman." Well, who's putting her through this? Why does she have to go through it? Who's imposing this on her?

And I'm listening again to that line "I hope you are feeling the thoughts and prayers of everyone." You know, you can trash just about anything anybody says if you want.

I could say it's obviously disingenuous to express that hope, because there is no ability to feel the thoughts and prayers of everyone. It seems to express a belief — which I doubt Stephanopoulos holds — that prayer opens up channels of communication that flow to God and then out to the people who are prayed for. And it's absurd to say that "everyone" is praying for Johnson. It's even offensive, because many people do not believe in prayer.

"Mr. O’Reilly spoke on the record to my colleagues Emily Steel and Michael S. Schmidt..."

"... addressing the latest reporting on a $32 million settlement he reached with a longtime network analyst."

This morning's podcast from Michael Barbaro (NYT).

Steel and Schmidt wrote the article that went up on Saturday, "O’Reilly Settled New Harassment Claim, Then Fox Renewed His Contract In January, the Fox News host was said to have agreed to a $32 million settlement with a former network analyst, the largest of his known payouts."

What's in the podcast that's not in the article?  1. The sound of Bill O'Reilly's voice pleading victimhood, 2. The gay pornography O'Reilly allegedly sent to Lis Wiehl, the Fox News legal analyst who got $32 million, was gay male pornography, 3. O'Reilly's assertion that he'd do anything to protect his children and that he has knowledge that Eric Bolling's son is dead because of the news story that drove Eric Bolling off Fox News, 4. O'Reilly frames his victimhood in terms of harm to his children, and Steel and Schmidt observe that the Harvey Weinstein story has undercut O'Reilly's ability to characterize his problem as a liberal vendetta.

At the Yellow Tree Café...

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"What woes do not befall Chicago! That city has a debt of $6,000,000 which is increasing at the rate of a cool million each year."

"One Chicago newspaper gives a double-leaded opinion that the city has a 'prognathous City Council,' whose members accept bribes so quickly that Boss Tweed turns over in his grave," wrote the NYT on November 23, 1895.



By the way, $10,000 overcoat in 1895 corresponds to a $292,452 overcoat today.

Now, why am I reading this? It's not that I'm looking into Chicago's debt problems. Nor is it an interest in the word "prognathous." It means "Having projecting or forward-pointing jaws, teeth, mandibles, etc.; having a facial angle of less than 90°; having a gnathic index of 103 or more. Of jaws or a lower jaw: prominent, protruding." OED. I think the suggestion is that the Chicago City Council members are thugs. My Google image search on the word kind of freaked me out:



I was reading that 1895 article because I wanted to get a sense of when people started using the phrase "cool million" after trying to read this National Review article by Andrew C. McCarthy, "The Obama Administration’s Uranium One Scandal." It begins:

Let’s put the Uranium One scandal in perspective: The cool half-million bucks the Putin regime funneled to Bill Clinton was five times the amount it spent on those Facebook ads — the ones the media-Democrat complex ludicrously suggests swung the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump.

I thought it was funny to say a "cool half-million." $500,000 is not an awesome amount of money in this context, even if it's 5 times $100,000. Was "cool half-million" supposed to be funny or supposed to impress us with why Uranium One needs more attention? I found it distracting. You can see I'm not paying attention.

I'd rather talk about whether "the worst is worse than wienerworst" was once an idiomatic expression. You see it there in the second-to-last paragraph of the 1895 NYT article, where the issue of legalizing the sale of horse meat comes up. Attempting to google my way to an answer, I found this mindbending sentence:

For it must be remembered that at the time I knew quite nothing, naturally, concerning Milo Payne, the mysterious Cockney-talking Englishman with the checkered long-beaked Sherlockholmsian cap; nor of the latter's 'Barr-Bag' which was as like my own bag as one Milwaukee wienerwurst is like another; nor of Legga, the Human Spider, with her four legs and her six arms; nor of Ichabod Chang, ex-convict, and son of Dong Chang; nor of the elusive poetess, Abigail Sprigge; nor of the Great Simon, with his 2,163 pearl buttons; nor of – in short, I then knew quite nothing about anything or anybody involved in the affair of which I had now become a part, unless perchance it were my Nemesis, Sophie Kratzenschneiderwümpel – or Suing Sophie!

I love the "in short."

AND: What are "boodlers"? Chicago is "cursed by the reign of boodlers" and "the Man in the Moon turns up his nose as he sails over during a heavy wind." The OED defines "boodler" as "one who practises boodleism," and "boodleism" as "bribery and corruption, embezzlement of public funds." "Boodle" can mean counterfeit money or money acquired improperly, but it can also be a contemptuous way to refer to a group of people, as in this 1861 example (from the OED):

I motioned we shove the hul kit an boodle of the gamblers ashore on logs. 'Twas kerried.

We're more likely to say "caboodle" or "kit and caboodle," but "caboodle" is a corruption of the phrase "kit and boodle" — where "kit" is a kind of open tub used to hold water for washing or to carry something like milk or butter.

IN THE COMMENTS: Gabriel find this wonderful passage in "Great Expectations," by Charles Dickens (1860):

"Well, old chap," said Joe, "it do appear that she had settled the most of it, which I meantersay tied it up, on Miss Estella. But she had wrote out a little coddleshell in her own hand a day or two afore the accident, leaving a cool four thousand to Mr. Matthew Pocket. And why, do you suppose, above all things, Pip, she left that cool four thousand unto him? 'Because of Pip's account of him the said Matthew.' I am told by Biddy, that air the writing," said Joe, repeating the legal turn as if it did him infinite good, 'account of him the said Matthew.' And a cool four thousand, Pip!"

I never discovered from whom Joe derived the conventional temperature of the four thousand pounds, but it appeared to make the sum of money more to him, and he had a manifest relish in insisting on its being cool.

That pushed me to check the history of "cool" as a way to stress the size of an amount of money (which might have to do with the idea of the counting the money with an attitude of calmness). The OED traces this usage back to the 18th century. It comes up in "Tom Jones" by Henry Fielding, from 1749, when you only needed 3 digits to get to cool: "He had lost a cool hundred, and would play no longer." So the expression had been around a while before Dickens made comedy out of taking it literally and talking about temperature.

"Nothing more beautiful than everyone putting their differences aside to help humanity in the face of catastrophe."

Nothing more beautiful than everyone putting their differences aside to help humanity in the face of catastrophe. #OneAmericaAppeal pic.twitter.com/2TPdPonvWv

— xoxo, Gaga (@ladygaga) October 22, 2017

"The Pick-Up Artist has finally met his match."

I knew the name James Toback, but I couldn't name a single one of his movies, after I read out loud the Daily Mail headline "More than 30 women accuse Hollywood director James Toback of sexual assault in disturbing accounts of him 'coercing them to his hotel rooms, dry-humping their legs, and masturbating in front of them'" and Meade said "Who's he?"

Maybe I'd just always remembered his name because back in the 1970s, I knew somebody else with that unusual last name. I'd thought Toback was kind of important, so I was surprised that he'd only directed 12 films (in a 40-year period). I looked for the most famous one to impress Meade that this was indeed a well-known director. I came up with "The Pick-Up Artist" and showed Meade the image and said, "That was back when Robert Downey Jr. look like this. 1987."

According to a report by the Los Angeles Times, on several occasions Toback would invite women, usually in their 20s, to his hotel room where he would dry-hump them or masturbate in front of them, ejaculating into his pants or onto their bodies and then walk away.

Starr Rinaldi, who was an aspiring actress, told the Times that she was approached by Toback 15 years ago in Central Park. 'He always wanted me to read for him in a hotel or come back to his apartment, like, "How serious are you about your craft?" And the horrible thing is, whichever road you choose, whether you sleep with him or walk away, you're still broken... You have been violated."

Why are you "broken" and "violated" if you walk away from bad pick-up lines like that? This kind of post-Weinstein pile-on is going to dilute the righteous fury and end up boring us. There are so many people with so many stories, so many would-be actresses who never got to live out their dreams that nothing's going to stop the chatter. It's a good time to hurt and embarrass every unattractive guy who got a pretty woman to give him some time by portraying himself as a useful contact.

How could he even think he could have her if he didn't give some major career advancement in exchange!

"The deadly wildfires that ravaged communities and wineries in Northern California also severely damaged numerous marijuana farms..."

"... just before the state is expected to fully legalize the drug, in a disaster that could have far-reaching implications for a nascent industry. At least 34 marijuana farms suffered extensive damage as the wildfires tore across wine country and some of California’s prime marijuana-growing areas. The fires could present challenges to the scheduled Jan. 1 rollout of legal marijuana sales at the start of an industry that is expected to generate billions of dollars in revenue."

WaPo reports.

Supply and demand... in the interesting setting where you can't import from out of state. Jack up the price.

In many cases, owners have spent tens of thousands of dollars to become compliant with state law to sell the product. But because the federal government considers marijuana cultivation and sales a criminal enterprise, it remains extremely difficult, if not impossible, for most of the marijuana businesses affected by the fire to access insurance, mortgages and loans to rebuild. Even a charitable fund set up to help marijuana farmers was frozen because a payment processor will not handle cannabis transactions.

I boldfaced the word "considers" because, being an erstwhile lawyer, I think it's funny to be characterizing the government as considering something to be criminal. The government has written law that makes it criminal. It's not an opinion about whether marijuana cultivation and sale should be regarded as criminal. It simply is criminal, because of the statutes. There's no mind that is the federal government contemplating the matter and developing a conception. In fact, since these businesses are operating openly and the human beings working within the federal government aren't swooping in and prosecuting, it would make more sense to say that the federal government doesn't consider marijuana cultivation and sales a criminal enterprise. But I can see why businesses and other organizations not focused on marijuana — banks, insurance companies, payment processors — don't want to risk violating the law on the books.

"Have you seen the dumb ads with Trump-like handwriting scrawled on them?"

"'Mister police, you could have saved her. I gave you all the clues.' By the way, there are no fucking clues. This movie makes no sense and you’d drive yourself insane trying to figure out what it’s about. Did you know Michael Fassbender plays a detective named Harry Hole? Did you know that some Hollywood executive didn’t change that name because they’re somehow unaware of the juvenile laughing it elicits? Did you know Val Kilmer is in this movie?! And he’s somehow more insane in it than when he’s being pervy about Cate Blanchett on Twitter?"

From "'The Snowman' Is the Most Unintentionally Hilarious Movie of the Year/Michael Fassbender as a detective named 'Harry Hole.' A serial killer who puts snowman heads on their victims. How the hell did this get made?" by Ira Madison III (in The Daily Beast).

I have a more general question: Why is so much Hollywood talent and money thrown into glamorizing and entertaining people with sadistic, graphic violence against women?

I'm trying to understand the sentence "Did you know that some Hollywood executive didn’t change that name because they’re somehow unaware of the juvenile laughing it elicits?" There are so many negatives that I don't know what the reviewer is asking. I just feel prompted to say that I think Hollywood executives are juvenile men who get off using their power to get away with rude intrusions on the feelings of females.

Having said that, I'll now try to undo the excessive negativity and complexity of "Did you know that some Hollywood executive didn’t change that name because they’re somehow unaware of the juvenile laughing it elicits?"

A Hollywood executive accepted the use of the name Harry Hole because he did not see what's funny about it.

Is that what Ira Madison III is saying?

I don't believe it. I think the executive thought it was funny and operates gleefully within a culture where guys like him do things like that.

I went to IMDB to find out which executives were actually involved in this movie, and I happened to see this:

Harry's last name is consistently mispronounced throughout the film. As per the books, the correct pronunciation resembles the English word "holy."