WSJ reports:

An employee petition at Simon & Schuster demanding that the company stop publishing authors associated with the Trump administration collected 216 internal signatures and several thousand outside supporters, including well-known Black writers.

The employees submitted the petition Monday to senior executives at the publishing house, according to the company and a person involved in the employee effort. The petition demands that the company refrain from publishing a memoir by former Vice President Mike Pence. The letter asks Simon & Schuster not to treat “the Trump administration as a ‘normal’ chapter in American history.”

Simon & Schuster Chief Executive Jonathan Karp sent an internal letter last week rejecting the employee demands, when the company was aware the petition was circulating.

It has now been formally submitted. A spokesman for Simon & Schuster on Monday declined to comment.

The 216 employees who signed the petition represent about 14% of Simon & Schuster’s workforce. Among the more than 3,500 outside supporters, according to a letter accompanying the petition, were writers of color including Jesmyn Ward, a two-time winner of the National Book Award for fiction. A representative for Ms. Ward confirmed that she had signed the petition.

The petition and letter were sent to Mr. Karp and Dana Canedy, publisher of Simon & Schuster’s flagship imprint.

The petition accused Mr. Pence of advocating for policies that were racist, sexist and discriminatory toward LGBT people, among other criticisms of his tenure as a public official. The petition also calls on Simon & Schuster to cut off a distribution relationship with Post Hill Press, a publisher of conservative books as well as business and pop culture titles.

A spokesman for Mr. Pence declined to comment. Post Hill Press publisher Anthony Ziccardi said, “We’re proud of our publishing program, that’s what we’re focused on.”

The employee pushback against Mr. Pence’s book underscores the challenges publishers face in releasing politically sensitive books that are commercially attractive. Major publishers generally want to give a platform to authors with a range of viewpoints, but don’t want to alienate portions of their workforce or customer base.

Simon & Schuster is one of the leading publishers of political books. In 2020, it published titles ranging from Fox News host Sean Hannity’s “Live Free or Die” to former national security adviser John Bolton’s “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.”

In rejecting the group’s demands, Mr. Karp last week said in his internal letter that Simon & Schuster’s core mission includes publishing “a diversity of voices and perspectives.”

RTWT

Simon & Schuster ought to fire every one of those little Nazis.

Last night, as soon as I pasted in the URL for this John Derbyshire post on the Derek Chauvin verdict and hit POST, instantly, up popped a “THIS VIOLATES FACEBOOK COMMUNITY STANDARDS AND CANNNOT BE POSTED” notice.

Well, I have a work around: the URL to my post quoting Derbyshire will upload.

The jury’s verdict itself was absurd. Derek Chauvin did nothing wrong. The best case here was made by retired lawyer Harold Cameron over at Revolver News a week before the verdict came out:

When Floyd continued resisting arrest after being placed in handcuffs, Chauvin didn’t beat him with a baton. He didn’t taze him. He didn’t put in him a chokehold. He put one knee on what the prosecution is now optimistically calling Floyd’s “neck area” and waited for the ambulance to come save Floyd’s life … The worst that could be said is that he didn’t simply let Floyd go because he was still complaining about being unable to breath, just as he had been since the beginning of the encounter. The state’s case so far boils down to a collection of experts equating that to murder.

[ Derek Chauvin Did Nothing Wrong, April 13, 2021]

Hamilton also reminds us of the size discrepancy between Chauvin, who weighs a slight 140 lbs., and Floyd, 230 lbs. and all pepped up on chemical stimulants. If you have ever been involved in a close-quarters struggle for physical mastery with another adult, you’re impressed that Chauvin managed to subdue Floyd.

In the famous kneeling video, Chauvin has a look of being somewhat pleased with himself. I would have been, too.

Aside from that look of muted pride, I thought from the beginning, and still think, that Chauvin did not at all have the appearance of someone who was aware he was doing something wrong.

Come on: If you are doing something grossly wrong, something that might end another person’s life, you know you are, and it will show.

Chauvin’s entire affect in that video was of someone who’s done an unpleasant job, and believes he’s done it rather well.

How does that square with the charges as presented? Following the verdict, Jared Taylor just referred readers to Judge Peter Cahill’s instructions to the jury before they deliberated [Read: Judge’s instructions to Derek Chauvin trial jurors, Washington Post, April 19, 2021]

He quoted several phrases taken from those instructions, which Judge Cahill in turn took from the statutes under which Chauvin was charged, and asked:

Did the prosecution really prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Chauvin “intentionally inflicted substantial bodily harm”? That he was “perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life”? That he “consciously [took] chances of causing death or great bodily harm”? Was this “[un]reasonable force in the line of duty in effecting a lawful arrest or preventing an escape from custody”?

Jared, ever the punctilious gentleman and scholar, added: “I wasn’t in the courtroom, so I can’t answer these questions …”

But he knows perfectly well, of course, that they answer themselves: No, absolutely not.

So, to quote from Lady Ann, another virgin has been tossed into the volcano to appease the hungry god.

RTWT

This Old West-style Shooting Competition prove otherwise.

Hugh Thomson, in the British Spectator, finds membership in a new Identity Group.

My brother recently decided to get a DNA test. He discovered that our family were all descended from a mix of the usual British suspects — a bit of Viking, Anglo-Saxon and Celt — and were predisposed to standard diseases and health risks. But there was one surprise. My siblings and I had double the normal amount of Neanderthal in our genes.

Reactions were mixed. My girlfriend declared she had suspected something of the sort for some time. My mother announced that it must come from my father’s side of the family. And it took us a while to digest. …

..then came help. I stumbled on an attractive scholarly thesis which proposed that the Neanderthal element within Homo sapiens was the part that added interest —that was, so to speak, the little spike of mustard in the mix. It can give a creative spark and has allowed us as a species to think outside the box. According to this thesis, the Neanderthal is the Mac component, with the design flair, while standard Homo sapiens is the boring old PC. Neanderthals were wilder, improvisational, free — and, the palaeontologists have shown, had bigger brains. The more Neanderthal you have within you, the more likely you are to break loose.

To say this came as a pleasurable hypothesis would be an understatement. Not only could I now frame myself as a proud Neanderthal, but as a middle-aged, middle-class white man living in the south of England, it could give me something I badly needed — identity politics.

Use Outline.com to beat the paywall.

Babylon Bee: Dungeons And Dragons Introduces New 100-Sided Die For Determining Your Character’s Gender.

HT: Karen L. Myers.

Sharks versus Jets in “West Side Story” (1961).

Charles C.W. Cooke, tongue firmly in cheek, has loads of fun joining Bree Newsome and Lebron James in sticking up for teenage knife fighting.

Since when do we need the cops to intervene in the recreational stabbings of our youth?

Just when I thought that America couldn’t possibly get any softer, people start suggesting that there’s a role for the police in preventing knife murders. The snowflake generation strikes once again.

Is there any tradition that the radicals won’t ruin? As the brilliant Bree Newsome pointed out on Twitter, “Teenagers have been having fights including fights involving knives for eons.” And now people are calling the cops on them? I ask: Is this a self-governing country or not? When Newsome says, “We do not need police to address these situations by showing up to the scene & using a weapon,” she may be expressing a view that is unfashionable these days. But she’s right.

Disappointingly, my colleague Phil Klein has felt compelled to join the critics. In a post published yesterday, Phil asked in a sarcastic tone whether the police should “somehow treat teenage knife fights as they would harmless roughhousing and simply ignore it.” My answer to this is: Yes, that’s exactly what they should do — yes, even if they are explicitly called to the scene. I don’t know where Phil grew up, but where I spent my childhood, Fridays were idyllic: We’d play some football, try a little Super Mario Bros, have a quick knife fight, and then fire up some frozen pizza before bed. And now law enforcement is getting involved? This is political correctness gone mad.

It’s hypocrisy, too. Who among us hasn’t come within a second or two of murdering someone else with a steak knife? My best friend in school, Bobby “The Blade” Simpson, used to throw shivs at the smaller kids in the music room. Did we need the authorities to step in when that happened? No, we did not. As MSNBC’s Joy Reid argued smartly on her show last night, pranks such as these were dealt with by our teachers — just as we all expected they would be. And if something went wrong? Well, that’s why we had substitutes.

In all honesty, I worry that this sort of helicopter policing is making us weak. Back in my day, the people who survived a good stabbing came out stronger for it.

RTWT

LithHub has a very interesting excerpt from Jonathan Meiburg’s new book on a striated caracara (Phalcoboenus australis), raptor from the Falkland Islands, off the southern tip of South America, that Meiburg contends is “the most intelligent bird in the world.”

Tina entered Geoff’s life by accident, when a talented young falconer named Ashley Smith offered her to him in trade for a goshawk. Goshawks are powerful hunters who excel at chasing prey through dense woods, but they’re rarely own for an audience because of their skittish, aggressive temperaments. Geoff, not without affection, calls them “psychotic,” and adds that there’s a saying among falconers that if you can train a goshawk to hunt for a season without becoming suicidal or getting a divorce, you’ve mastered the art.

This goshawk, however, played against type. It was utterly relaxed on public display, sitting blithely on its perch and fluffing its feathers even when it was surrounded by strangers. Ashley coveted it for his own collection, and Geoff, who wasn’t particularly attached to it, swapped it for Tina out of pure curiosity. He’d never come across a striated caracara in twenty years as a falconer, and had only recently heard of them; it was 1983, the year after the Falklands War, and soldiers were returning from the islands with stories of crow-like birds that peered into their foxholes and perched on the rotors of their helicopters.

Geoff also felt comfortable with the trade because he knew Tina’s life story. She was a little more than a year old, the offspring of a pair of captive striated caracaras who’d raised and edged Tina with minimal help from people. Geoff assumed that Tina would be an interesting but not maddening challenge—but he’ll tell you, with a touch of surprise in his voice, that it was Tina who trained him. In their first years together, he mostly left her alone, though he indulged her preference for running and walking in demonstrations, which earned chuckles from the audience instead of the gasps of wonder that greeted eagles and owls. After a job took him away for several years, Geoff expected he’d need to slowly rehabituate Tina to his presence, as he did with any captive bird he left for longer than a few months. Instead, Tina gave him the first of many surprises: she leaped onto his shoulder, calling and calling, as if to say, It’s you! It’s you! “She was all over me,” Geoff says. “Like a dog.”

Shortly after that, Tina let Geoff know she wanted more from their relationship. He dropped his keys one morning while cleaning her aviary, and before he could retrieve them she jumped down from her perch, grabbed the keys in her beak, and ran to the other side of the enclosure, where she turned and looked Geoff squarely in the eye. Geoff was stunned: no bird in his care had ever done anything like this. He took a step toward her, and she leaned forward, poised to run. This is a game, he thought. She wants to play. For the next few minutes, Tina ran around the perimeter of the aviary with the keys in her beak, deftly evading his grasp, until she finally traded them for food. From then on, this was how each morning began.

As they played together, Tina began to defy nearly all of falconry’s conventions. She didn’t ignore Geoff or try to mate with him: she simply wanted to interact with him, whether she was hungry or not. She loved inedible objects and would study, carry, and manipulate anything Geoff brought her, from plush toys to rubber balls and lengths of rope, and she called for him if he didn’t turn up on schedule. On quiet afternoons she sometimes fell asleep on his shoulder.

Months passed, and their daily games evolved: keep-away became fetch, then the shell game, then tasks that seemed to require abstract thought. Geoff built a device out of PVC pipes to test Tina’s ability to distinguish objects by color and to associate colors with spoken words— and she could. He also bought a set of rubber balls and blocks to see if she could distinguish between objects by shape—and she did. Then he modified Tina’s public performances to reflect her new skills, combining his passions for tinkering and falconry into something approaching behavioral science. Tina went from comic relief to the star of the show, and Geoff began calling her the most intelligent bird in the world.

RTWT

———————-

This interview with Meiburg has a video showing two striated caracaras exhibiting very impressive curiosity and enterprise.

Video 3 (Two young Striated Caracaras investigating unfamiliar objects) from Jonathan Meiburg on Vimeo.