Kurt Schlichter is dead right about credentialed experts. A badge or a diploma does not make anyone omniscient or invariably trustworthy. In fact, these days, membership in the community of fashion elite pretty much guarantees intellectual conformity and the absence of critical intelligence.

The great progressive dream is to dispense with rule by us mere citizens in favor of a government staffed by technocratic, disinterested experts who selflessly apply the principles of science (social science and real science) to create a better, more efficient, effective, and impactful society. Of course, the progressive advocates of expertocracy assume that those experts will share their coastal, urban and blue perspectives, mores, and values – funny how that works. And it has been working, for them at least. We normals are now expected to defer and submit to the commands of unelected functionaries bossing us around for our own good, though this is only good for those said experts and their fellow travelers in the ruling class. Over about 250 years, America has gone from its leaders being selected on the basis of the divine right of kings to its leaders being selected by on the basis of the divine right of nerds with advanced degrees from Yale.

The sordid reality of our glorious expert caste is exemplified by that nimrod gnome Fauci taking a break from generating conflicting stories about how he helped fund a Chi Com bioweapons lab to giggle in his emails about how Brad Pitt played him on SNL, a TV show that was last funny … well, ask your dad when that was – he might remember. See, today even alleged the experts in comedy are falling short.

It might be one thing if the experts demonstrated some expertise. If these doofuses could actually make the trains run on time, at least our trains would be on time. But our experts today are such that they think it’s a great idea to spend billions on high-speed trains running between Bakersfield and Fresno – the one choo-choo journey on earth where you desperately want to be late.

Have you noticed that all the experts…stink?

The experts on war haven’t won one in twenty years.

The experts on diet told us for decades we needed to eat processed carbs and eschew the meat our ancestors thrived on.

The experts in finance gave us 2008; the experts in healthcare gave us Obamacare.

This is not new. Long ago, the experts gave us eugenics and the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, perhaps the best proof one might offer to support the notion of systemic racism since, of course, the experts are a key component of the System.

Now, experts are not always wrong. In fairness to Dr. Fauci he was right about COVID, at least for a moment. Of course, this is only because, over the last 18 months, that ubiquitous shrimp has literally taken every possible position on the pandemic, so he was bound to have been right at least once simply because of the sheer number of different and often contradictory poses he struck. Remember the Great Mask Circle of Jerking Us Around? His just-FOIA’d emails reiterate that idiocy. First, masks were bad, then good, then we needed two masks. One of those has to be correct, right?

And then there are the Wuhan lab lies. “Oh well I never! The thought that commies might have let a bug out of their lab is preposterous, unscientific and – worst of all – racist!” Yeah, it was a real stretch for those nuts on the internet to think the source of a bat coronavirus outbreak might not be the pangolin buffet just around the corner from one of the only labs in the world doing US-funded Frankensteinian experiments on bat coronaviruses. So nutty, in fact, that the smart people at Facebook – experts in fact-checking, according to themselves – suppressed those nuts while the smart people in the media called it a “conspiracy theory.” And guess who was right? The nuts.

But hey, you should totally believe the experts when they tell you that, no Schiff, no foolin’, this time the world really is going to burn to a crisp in 10 years if you peasants don’t give up your trucks, cheeseburgers, and freedom.

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LithHub excerpts Grant Faulkner’s new book repining the technocrafication of San Francisco that prices out creative Bohos like himself.

Our sense of place is as important as the other senses because it provides the sense of belonging, and without knowing it, I belonged in San Francisco in the early ’90s, no matter that I wasn’t quite as hip as the other hipsters (I thought about but eventually balked at getting a tattoo of barbed wire around my bicep), no matter that my leftist politics placed me nearer Jerry Brown than Che Guevara. Whether I was doing yoga in the attic of an old Victorian on Dolores Street (yoga studios were still rare and exotic in the early ’90s) or going on my weekly pilgrimage to Fort Mason on the 49 bus to page through the slim binders of jobs at Media Alliance, desperately trying to find a job that better suited my college education than my gig as a waiter, or walking with hordes of people through Golden Gate Park for a free concert, I belonged to San Francisco, and my Midwestern self was fading away.

And yet, the place I belonged to was just about to depart. To be usurped, really. As the dot-coms rolled in, finally providing those jobs that were better suited to my college education, some of my poor writer friends became digital marketers and content providers and would soon climb the ladder to earn more money, and then more again, because it took more and more to live here. Others left for places like Portland, LA, and Austin, places they hoped would provide an easier and more creative life. The rest were pushed out. Rudely pushed out by escalating rents. We thought the Mission, the city, was ours, and didn’t understand how such a thing could be for sale. We were futurists looking in the wrong direction.

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Butter Pat cast iron skillets.

Alex Lauer, at Inside Hook, tells us about a new company bringing old-time quality products back to life.

Founder Dennis Powell spent six figures trying to make a cast-iron skillet that was just like the ones they made 100 years ago; he originally did it just for fun and had no interest in starting a business; now that he is in business, he has no interest in growing, and as he told me on a phone call, he has no problem roasting his customers who mistreat their pans. I can already hear Mark Cuban saying, “I’m out!”

By all modern standards of business, Powell has done everything wrong. But since 2013 when he founded the company, his skillets have become a favorite of chefs when cooking at home, received the highest marks of any cast iron that’s undergone the rigorous testing at Consumer Reports, and regularly rack up significant waiting lists despite being some of the most expensive on the market.

So what’s going on here? It all started with his grandmother’s pan.

“The precipitating moment was: I was at home cooking, I dropped my grandmother’s pan, which was the only pan that I usually cooked with, I broke it — a great big crack in it,” Powell tells InsideHook of his favorite cast-iron skillet. “And since I’d always assumed that was going to be something I was going to give to my two kids, and I realized I wasn’t going to be able to do that, I decided that I was going to just replicate that pan, almost the way a sculptor goes about saying that they’re going to cast a bronze edition of a sculpture.”

What happened next was the slow boil of an obsession. He spent time researching in the Library of Congress, he pored over all the records from the Griswold foundry which he got from a friend who was president of the Wagner and Griswold Society, and he eventually visited 20-odd foundries in the U.S. to try and find one that could make a pan to his specifications. The walls of the skillet had to be thinner than modern iterations (3/32 of an inch thick), the cooking surface had to be smoother (a roughness average of 90) and it had to be made in the States.

“Every one of those foundries would say, ‘You can’t make cast iron to these specifications,’” he remembers. But at these meetings, along with his design brief, he also carried a century-old skillet from Favorite Stove & Range Company that had inspired his own design. “Then I would pull the pan out and say, ‘Well where did this pan come from?’”

After a good long while — which included some test castings at an Amish foundry in Pennsylvania that specializes in replacement parts for steam engines — what Powell discovered is that people don’t make them like they used to because modern technology has made it untenable; automatic molding machines are the norm, not hand-casting done one at a time.

“It wasn’t until 2015 when my wife said, you know you realize you have $100,000 tied up in your research — without exaggeration — and you ought to try to monetize this,” he says. But he was at a fork in the road. On one hand, he could do things like other modern cast-iron companies — brands like Finex, Field Company and Smithey — by creating a rough cast and then mechanically smoothing the pans, or he could develop a brand-new process from scratch that replicates cast iron of the late 1800s in the 21st century.

He chose the latter, and he succeeded.

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The problem is their 12-inch “Joan” skillet costs $295, and you can buy a 100+-year-old equivalent Griswold made in Erie, Pennsylvania for less.

Griswold Manufacturing Wikipedia article

Griswold history and guidebooks

Another Griswold guide

Why? The old Griswold cast iron pans are much, much lighter, and their cooking surface is smoother which means they cook better with less sticking.

Dr. Aruna Khilanani

Bari Weiss astonished mentally-normal people yesterday by sharing excerpts from a talk given last April at the Yale School of Medicine Child Study Center by Dr. Aruna Khilanani, a NY-based psychiatrist graduate of Cornell and Columbia, titled “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind.”

Dr. Khilanani’s practice web-page is flashy and professionally-designed and manifests her keen determination to equate her own Hindu background with African-American ‘hood culture by employing as many Ebonic expressions as possible: “Yo!… Whatup… Are you down?.. My Steez.”

She proceeds to inform potential patients that she specializes in treating the psychological maladies of outsiders and marginalized groups, and she specifically includes conservatives and Trump supporters in her outsiders list.

However, in her April Yale talk, as Bari Weiss notes, she was decidedly the opposite of tolerant and inclusive.

A few weeks ago, someone sent me a recording of a talk called “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind.” It was delivered at the Yale School of Medicine’s Child Study Center by a New York-based psychiatrist as part of Grand Rounds, an ongoing program in which clinicians and others in the field lecture students and faculty.

When I listened to the talk I considered the fact that it might be some sort of elaborate prank. But looking at the doctor’s social media, it seems completely genuine.

Here are some of the quotes from the lecture:

This is the cost of talking to white people at all. The cost of your own life, as they suck you dry. There are no good apples out there. White people make my blood boil. (Time stamp: 6:45)

I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Like I did the world a fucking favor. (Time stamp: 7:17)

White people are out of their minds and they have been for a long time. (Time stamp: 17:06)

We are now in a psychological predicament, because white people feel that we are bullying them when we bring up race. They feel that we should be thanking them for all that they have done for us. They are confused, and so are we. We keep forgetting that directly talking about race is a waste of our breath. We are asking a demented, violent predator who thinks that they are a saint or a superhero, to accept responsibility. It ain’t gonna happen. They have five holes in their brain. It’s like banging your head against a brick wall. It’s just like sort of not a good idea. (Time stamp 17:13)

We need to remember that directly talking about race to white people is useless, because they are at the wrong level of conversation. Addressing racism assumes that white people can see and process what we are talking about. They can’t. That’s why they sound demented. They don’t even know they have a mask on. White people think it’s their actual face. We need to get to know the mask. (Time stamp 17:54)

Here’s the poster from the event. Among the “learning objectives” listed is: “understand how white people are psychologically dependent on black rage.”

My observations:

This talk was one of the ways doctors could fulfill their continuing education requirements imposed by an activist busybody state legislature.

Obviously, it is absurd for a person who has benefited from the generosity of a majority-white country granting in recent years entry and access to citizenship even to exotic aliens from different races and remote countries with no ties whatsoever to America by culture or by blood, and who has additionally received an education at two Ivy League universities, to have cultivated such a huge and obsessive sense of racial victimization.

In this country in our current time, calling someone a racist is a very grave accusation, an insult, and an attempt to apply an intrinsically stigmatizing and discrediting label. It should be looked upon as a serious matter for a professional person to throw these kinds of accusations around, and an even more serious matter for one of the professional schools of a very elite university to endorse this kind of perspective.

There is a genuinely serious problem with Racism in Europe and America today and it really consists of a pattern of pathology in which elite institutions try virtue-signaling by endorsing, validating, and facilitating the communication of African American racial chauvinism, irrational grievances, and unlimited baseless accusations.

Yale, along with a host of our other colleges and universities, and elite institutions like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and the New Yorker, makes a habit of supplying platforms to, and groveling in agreement with malicious agitators, crackpots, shakedown artists, and peddlers of division like Al Sharpton, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah Jones, &c.

All Aruna Khilanani has to do is keep up delivering these kinds of feverish rants filled with racial paranoia and hatred of the white majority and she’ll probably be in line for a McArthur Genius Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

There is a grave pathological racism abroad in the land these days, but it has nothing to do with ordinary people or the police. This racism is confined to large sections of the African-American community and to the elite establishment.

Bari Weiss finds that a number of doctors are speaking out about the problem.

I’ve heard from doctors who’ve been reported to their departments for criticizing residents for being late. (It was seen by their trainees as an act of racism.) I’ve heard from doctors who’ve stopped giving trainees honest feedback for fear of retaliation. I’ve spoken to those who have seen clinicians and residents refuse to treat patients based on their race or their perceived conservative politics.

Some of these doctors say that there is a “purge” underway in the world of American medicine: question the current orthodoxy and you will be pushed out. They are so worried about the dangers of speaking out about their concerns that they will not let me identify them except by the region of the country where they work.

“People are afraid to speak honestly,” said a doctor who immigrated to the U.S. from the Soviet Union. “It’s like back to the USSR, where you could only speak to the ones you trust.” If the authorities found out, you could lose your job, your status, you could go to jail or worse. The fear here is not dissimilar.

When doctors do speak out, shared another, “the reaction is savage. And you better be tenured and you better have very thick skin.”

“We’re afraid of what’s happening to other people happening to us,” a doctor on the West Coast told me. “We are seeing people being fired. We are seeing people’s reputations being sullied. There are members of our group who say, ‘I will be asked to leave a board. I will endanger the work of the nonprofit that I lead if this comes out.’ People are at risk of being totally marginalized and having to leave their institutions.”

While the hyper focus on identity is seen by many proponents of social justice ideology as a necessary corrective to America’s past sins, some people working in medicine are deeply concerned by what “justice” and “equity” actually look like in practice.

“The intellectual foundation for this movement is the Marxist view of the world, but stripped of economics and replaced with race determinism,” one psychologist explained. “Because you have a huge group of people, mostly people of color, who have been underserved, it was inevitable that this model was going to be applied to the world of medicine. And it has been.”

“Wokeness feels like an existential threat,” a doctor from the Northwest said. “In health care, innovation depends on open, objective inquiry into complex problems, but that’s now undermined by this simplistic and racialized worldview where racism is seen as the cause of all disparities, despite robust data showing it’s not that simple.”

“Whole research areas are off-limits,” he said, adding that some of what is being published in the nation’s top journals is “shoddy as hell.”

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And here’s an example of what she’s talking about:

The editor-in-chief of the prestigious medical journal JAMA will step down June 30 following backlash after an editor at the publication made controversial comments about racism in medicine, the Chicago-based American Medical Association (AMA) announced Tuesday.

Dr. Howard Bauchner has been editor-in-chief of JAMA and JAMA Network since 2011, but he’s been on administrative leave since March when comments about structural racism made by another editor on the publication’s podcast, and a tweet promoting the podcast, sparked outrage.

“I remain profoundly disappointed in myself for the lapses that led to the publishing of the tweet and podcast,” Dr. Bauchner said in the announcement. “Although I did not write or even see the tweet, or create the podcast, as editor-in-chief, I am ultimately responsible for them.”

Dr. Edward Livingston, a deputy editor at JAMA — who is white — said structural racism no longer existed in the U.S. during a Feb. 24 podcast, The New York Times reported.

“Structural racism is an unfortunate term,” Dr. Livingston, said during the podcast, according to The Times. “Personally, I think taking racism out of the conversation will help. Many people like myself are offended by the implication that we are somehow racist.”

In a now-deleted tweet promoting the podcast, The New York Times said the journal wrote, “No physician is racist, so how can there be structural racism in health care?”

Livingston later resigned, the Times reported.

Over 9,000 individuals have signed a change.org petition following the podcast and accompanying tweet calling for a review of Bauchner’s leadership as well as changes in the editorial process to ensure a more inclusive publication.

“The podcast and associated promotional message are extremely problematic for minoritized members of our medical community,” the petition, created by the Institute for Antiracism in Medicine, says. “Racism was created with intention and must therefore be undone with intention. Structural racism has deeply permeated the field of medicine and must be actively dissolved through proper antiracist education and purposeful equitable policy creation.”

In place of the now-deleted podcast is an apology from Bauchner.

“Comments made in the podcast were inaccurate, offensive, hurtful, and inconsistent with the standards of JAMA,” Bauchner said in the minute-long audio clip. “Racism and structural racism exist in the U.S. and in health care.”

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Babylon Bee:

Here are a few classics that every woke parent should read to their kids at bedtime.

1. Communist Manifesto (Illustrated Kids Edition): This beloved classic by Karl Marx has been rewritten for young audiences! Follow your friend Karl as he teaches your child everything from seizing the means of production to throwing your enemies in the gulag!

2. The Very Gay Caterpillar: Follow the beloved central character as he goes through 7 same-sex partners in 7 days! This is normal and should be celebrated.

3. Are You My Birthing Person?: The classic-yet-problematic Are You My Mother? has been updated with more inclusive language. About time!

4. All 371 of Barack Obama’s memoirs: Open one of Obama’s many memoirs and let your child bask in the warm glow of the light-bringer himself. Read it, and hide his words in your heart. …

7. Harry Potter but just say “Trump” instead of Voldemort: To drive the point home, make sure and scream at the sky every time you say his name.

8. The Little Engine That Was Held Back By Systemic Oppression So She Shouldn’t Even Try: An essential life lesson for every woke child.

9. ‘Men Can Have Periods’ pop-up book: If your child throws up while you read it to them, remind them that they are a bigot.

10. Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad USA: Another children’s classic rewritten for modern audiences. It teaches one of life’s most important lessons: America is bad.

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All of my grandparents’ sons and one daughter, now all departed, served.

Joseph Zincavage (1907-1998) Navy
(No wartime photograph available, but he’s sitting on a Henderson Motorcycle in this one.)

William Zincavage (1914-1997) Marine Corps

Edward Zincavage (1917-2002) Marine Corps

Eleanor Zincavage Cichetti (1922-2003) Marine Corps.

My father (on the left, wearing jacket & tie, holding the large envelope), aged 26, was the oldest in this group of Marine Corps volunteers from Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania, September 1942, so he was put in charge.

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William G. Zincavage, Fall 1942, after graduating Marine Corps Boot Camp

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Military Police, North Carolina, Fall 1942
He was only 5′ 6″, but he was so tough that they made him an MP.

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Third Marine Division

I Marine Amphibious Corps

First Amphibious Corps, Third Marine Division, Special Troops:
Solomon Islands Consolidation (Guadalcanal), Winter-Spring 1943
New Georgia Group Operation (Vella LaVella, Rendova), Summer 1943
“The Special Troops drew the first blood.” — Third Divisional History.

“We never saw them but they were running away.” — William G. Zincavage

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III Marine Amphibious Corps

Third Amphibious Corps, Third Marine Division, Special Troops:
Marianas Operation (Guam), Summer 1944

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V Marine Amphibious Corps

Fifth Amphibious Corps, Third Marine Division, Special Troops:
Iwo Jima Operation, February-March 1945

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Navy Unit Commendation (Iwo Jima)
Good Conduct Medal
North American Campaign Medal
Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal with Four Bronze Stars

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While recovering from malaria after the Battle of Iwo Jima, he looked 70 years old.

But he was back to normal in December of 1945, when this photo was taken shortly before he received his discharge.

John Moses Browning

Commie LGBTQ LithHub this week actually published a nice long excerpt from Nathan Gorenstein’s new bio: The Guns of John Moses Browning.

Browning is undoubtedly the greatest firearm designer of all time. The list of his sporting arms, lever action Winchester, pump and semiauto shotguns is long, and the useful careers of some of his military arms is even longer. The Browning .50 caliber M2 machine gun (the “Ma Deuce”), designed late during WWI, is still in use by the US Military today. His Model 1911 pistol remained our military’s primary issue sidearm right up until the 1980s, and has since gone on to whole new wave of massive enthusiasm for both target-shooting and personal defense. A hundred years after its design, the old 1911 is still pretty much America’s default handgun.

The 1865 Browning home in Ogden, Utah, was adobe brick, situated a few steps away from untrammeled land filled with grouse, a small wildfowl that made tolerable eating once it was plucked, butchered, and cooked, preferably with bacon fat to moisten the dry flesh. Utah’s five varieties of grouse could fly, but mostly the birds shuffled about on the earth. The male “greater” grouse reached seven pounds, making a decent meal and an easy target, as yellow feathers surrounded each eye and a burst of white marked the breast. A skilled hunter could sneak up on a covey picking at leaves and grasses and with one blast of birdshot get two or three for the frying pan.

Such frugality was necessary. The closest railroad stop was nearly one thousand miles east, and the largest nearby town was Salt Lake City, 35 miles to the south and home to only ten thousand people. Ogden’s settlers ate what they grew, raised, or hunted. Water for drinking and crops depended on the streams and rivers that flowed west out of the mountains into the Great Salt Lake, and irrigated wheat, corn, turnips, cabbage, and potatoes. Each settler was obliged to contribute labor or money to construct the hand-dug ditches and canals. They made their own bricks, cured hides for leather, and made molasses out of a thin, yellowish juice squeezed from sugar beets with heavy iron rollers and then boiled down to a thick, dark bittersweet liquid.

The rollers were made by John’s father, Jonathan, himself a talented gunsmith who also doubled as a blacksmith. Jonathan’s shop was his son’s playground, and John’s toys were broken gun parts thrown into the corner. At age six, John was taught by his “pappy” to pick out metal bits for forging and hammering into new gun parts. Soon the boy was wielding tools under his father’s direction.

To build that first crude gun John chose a day when his father was away on an errand. From the pile of discards John retrieved the old musket barrel and dug out a few feet of wire and a length of scrap wood. He clamped the barrel into a vice and with a fine-toothed saw cut off the damaged muzzle. He set Matt to work with a file and orders to scrape a strip along the barrel’s top down to clean metal. With a hatchet John hacked out a crude stock. The boys worked intently. On the frontier a task didn’t have to be polished, but it had to be right. Basic materials were in short supply, and to make his gun parts and agricultural tools Pappy Browning scavenged iron and steel abandoned by exhausted and overloaded immigrants passing through on their way west. Once, he purchased a load of metal fittings collected from the burned-out remains of an army wagon train, and as payment he signed over a parcel of land that, years later, became the site of Ogden’s first hotel.

John used a length of wire to fasten the gun barrel to the stock, then bonded them with drops of molten solder. There was no trigger. Near the barrel’s flash hole John screwed on a tin cone. When it came time to fire, gunpowder and lead birdshot would be loaded down the muzzle and finely ground primer powder would be sprinkled into the cone. The brothers would work together as a team: John would aim, Matt would lean in and ignite the primer with the tip of a smoldering stick, and the cobbled-together shotgun would, presumably, fire.

This wasn’t without risk. There was no telling if the soldered wire was strong enough to contain the recoil, or if the barrel itself would burst. Then there was the matter of ammunition. Gunpowder and shot were expensive imports delivered by ox-drawn wagon train. And the Browning brothers’ makeshift weapon might prove ineffective, or John could miss, and anger their father by using up valuable gunpowder with no result. Despite the risks, John pilfered enough powder and lead shot (from Jonathan’s poorly hidden supply) for one shot.

In ten minutes the brothers were in open country. Ogden’s eastern side nestled against the sheer ramparts of the Wasatch Mountains, and to the west lay the waters of the Great Salt Lake. To the north the Bear and Weber rivers flowed out of the Wasatch to sustain the largest waterfowl breeding ground west of the Mississippi River. Early white explorers were staggered by seemingly endless flocks of geese and ducks. In the 1840s pioneers described the “astonishing spectacle of waterfowl multitudes” taking to the air with a sound like “distant thunder.” Mountains rose up in all four directions, with one range or another flashing reflected sunlight. It was a striking geographic combination, magnified by the bright, clear sunlight of Ogden’s near-mile-high elevation. A settler’s life was lived on a stage of uncommon spectacle.

John carried the shotgun while Matt toted a stick and a small metal can holding a few clumps of glowing coal. The idea was to take two or three birds with a single shot, thereby allaying parental anger with a show of skilled marksmanship. Barefoot, the brothers crept from place to place until they spotted a cluster of birds pecking at the ground. Two were almost touching wings and a third was inches away. John knelt and aimed. Matt pulled the glowing stick out of the embers, almost jabbed John in the ear, and then touched the stick to the tin cone to fire the shot. The recoil knocked John backward—but in front of him lay a dead bird. Two other wounded fowl flapped nearby. Matt scampered ahead and “stood, a bird in each hand, whooping and trying to wring both necks at once.”

The next morning, as Jonathan breakfasted on grouse breast and biscuits, John listened to sympathetic advice from his mother and chose that moment to tell Pappy the story of his gun, his hunt—and the pilfered powder. Jonathan sat quietly and when John was finished made no mention of the theft. He did ask to see the weapon and was unimpressed. “John Moses, you’re going on eleven; can’t you make a better gun than that?”

Matt snickered. John choked down his remaining breakfast. “Pappy has drawn first blood, no doubt about that. He hadn’t scolded about the powder and shot, and the sin of stealing. But he’d hit my pride right on the funny bone,” John told his family decades later. A moment later he followed his father into the shop. He unrolled the wire from the barrel, “whistling soft and low to show how unconcerned I was,” and then stamped on the stock, snapped it in two, and tossed the pieces into a pile of kindling. “I remember thinking, rebelliously, that for all Pappy might say, the gun had gotten three fine birds for breakfast. Then I set to work. Neither of us mentioned it again.”

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Tomorrow’s Wokefest devoted to guilting White America for a race riot (that blacks lost) in Tulsa a hundred years ago will not be happening after all, the Daily Mail reports.

The flagship commemoration event to mark the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre was scrapped after three survivors demanded $1 million each to appear.

Monday’s Remember & Rise event – which was also set to feature John Legend and Stacey Abrams – was called off on Friday after survivors Viola Fletcher, 107, her brother Hughes Van Ellis, 100 and Lessie Benningfield Randle, 106, upped their appearance fee from $100,000 each to $1 million each.

Lawyers representing the trio also demanded seed money for a reparations fund be boosted from the agreed $2 million to $10 million, with Oklahoma State Senator Kevin Matthews saying organizers were unable to meet their revised demands.

The event was due to take place on Monday – the 100th anniversary of the notorious massacre that saw whites in the Oklahoma City given permission to attack the prosperous black Greenwood district and its residents.

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It’s all about the shakedown.

My take on that 1921 riot:

Kindred-spirit blogger Gerard van der Leun has a regular nostalgic feature of posting “Boomer Anthems,” i.e. old Rock & Roll classics. This week, it was a real winner, with the Stones, circa 1964 and looking like high school kids, covering the Buddy Holly favorite on American TV. Brian Jones joking about Mick Jagger’s “ambivalence” is priceless and you marvel that the joke was actually broadcast back in that so much more innocent era.

Followed by the middle-aged and already pretty wrinkly Stones’ circa 1994-1995 Voodoo Lounge version.

And finally, topped off with the Austin City Limits 2014 cover by a host of famous names, including Jeff Bridges no less.

I was nine years old and in 4th Grade when the Buddy Holly original came out. This one seems a pretty appropriate protest choice as Gerard’s generation and mine finds itself well along in the process of fading away.