The Waffle House way. In times of disaster, it’s pretty rare for a Waffle House to close. The company is famous for its disaster response, keeping stores open on a limited menu to keep people dry, warm, fed, and happy. In Houston, two stores have closed, but the company’s disaster apparatus jumped into action, as NPR reports: “In the case of Harvey, Waffle House “jump teams,” restaurant managers from Ohio, Tennessee and Georgia, headed to Houston to keep the grills going — in some cases doing the shifts of storm-stranded local employees.” The key? Natural gas.
Fox leaves the UK. Fox News in the UK—just a rebroadcast—is no more. It lasted 15 years. The Guardian reports that it was only drawing 2,000 viewers a day there. Rupert Murdoch (former owner of TWS) is attempting to takeover British broadcasting behemoth Sky News. Also in Fox News news, the channel has announced that it has hired 25 year old pro-choice firebrand Tomi Lahren as a contributor.
Kill the fire ants. All of them. At the Free Beacon, Sonny Bunch has an explainer for his fellow non-southerners about the horror presented by floating fire ant colony taking over Houston. Naturally, Sonny’s conclusion (rightly) is to kill them all. “You see the problem here: if you can’t even drown these vicious little bastards, what are you supposed to do? I’m all ears. And if Trump won’t step up to the plate here, well, by God, I might just have to throw my own hat into the ring. It’s time we Make America Great And Also Ant-Free Again.”
Tres cheers for cultural appropriation! At the New York Times, Bari Weiss delivers a smart critique of the cultural appropriation police, or a “rap sheet from a single night in pop music” of the lowest-rated Video Music Awards in history. (Surprise?) It’s fantastic: “These days our mongrel culture is at risk of being erased by an increasingly strident left, which is careering us toward a wan existence in which we are all forced to remain in the ethnic and racial lanes assigned to us by accident of our birth. Hoop earrings are verboten, as are certain kinds of button-down shirts. Yoga is dangerous. So are burritos and eyeliner.” Culture, Weiss writes, is being treated by the left as something immutable. Just like Richard Spencer and his whiny band of white supremacists.
Media competition then and now. At St. Louis magazine, former Post-Dispatch reporter Nick Pistor discusses how, during the Civil War, competition among rival photographers created the media culture we have today. It’s an interesting look at how Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner’s competitive drive changed news. Here’s Pistor on their historic photographs shortly after Lincoln’s assassination: “I think it is the most important event in media: that one single day, July 7, 1865. It’s the first time a live, unfolding news event was photographed in sequence. Gardner had a multi-camera shoot, so he was actually able to get those shots in a sequence where, if you put them all out together, you can almost see the bodies [of assassination conspirators] drop in real time. That really is the first time anything like that has occurred, and that really is the bedrock of all the media that came after that. It was about 10 years later when real motion pictures were invented.”
But they’ll never condemn Antifa! One of the more depressing defenses of President Trump’s botched response to Charlottesville was the claim by some conservatives that violence perpetrated by radical leftists in Antifa would never, ever, be condemned by Democratic politicians. Doing the right thing or saying the right thing should never be contingent on others, it is its own intrinsic good. Alas, Nancy Pelosi must have disappointed Trump supporters when she released a statement condemning Antifa violence in Berkeley: “Our democracy has no room for inciting violence or endangering the public, no matter the ideology of those who commit such acts. The violent actions of people calling themselves antifa in Berkeley this weekend deserve unequivocal condemnation, and the perpetrators should be arrested and prosecuted.” Good for her.
Sign of the Apocalypse? With all the Harvey hoaxes out there, Snopes.com hilariously fact-checked the Christian parody website the Babylon Bee. The claim? That mega-church pastor Joel Osteen, criticized for not initially opening his 16,000 seat church to victims of Harvey, was driving around in a luxury yacht, handing out copies of his book. This is the 11th time they’ve “fact checked” the Babylon Bee. People will believe anything these days, it seems. The folks at Snopes have already fact checked The Onion 17 times.
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