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Wikipedia article

HT: Steve Bodio

T.A. Frank, in Vanity Fair, totally demolishes the third member of the Clinton Dynasty.

Like tribesmen laying out a sacrifice to placate King Kong, news outlets continue to make offerings to the Clinton gods. In The New York Times alone, Chelsea has starred in multiple features over the past few months: for her tweeting (it’s become “feisty”), for her upcoming book (to be titled She Persisted), and her reading habits (she says she has an “embarrassingly large” collection of books on her Kindle). With Chelsea’s 2015 book, It’s Your World, now out in paperback, the puff pieces in other outlets—Elle, People, etc.—are too numerous to count.

One wishes to calm these publications: You can stop this now. Haven’t you heard that the great Kong is no more? Nevertheless, they’ve persisted. At great cost: increased Chelsea exposure is tied closely to political despair and, in especially intense cases, the bulk purchasing of MAGA hats. So let’s review: How did Chelsea become such a threat?

Perhaps the best way to start is by revisiting some of Chelsea’s major post-2008 forays into the public eye. Starting in 2012, she began to allow glossy magazines to profile her, and she picked up speed in the years that followed. The results were all friendly in aim, and yet the picture that kept emerging from the growing pile of Chelsea quotations was that of a person accustomed to courtiers nodding their heads raptly. Here are Chelsea’s thoughts on returning to red meat in her diet: “I’m a big believer in listening to my body’s cravings.” On her time in the “fiercely meritocratic” workplace of Wall Street: “I was curious if I could care about [money] on some fundamental level, and I couldn’t.” On her precocity: “They told me that my father had learned to read when he was three. So, of course, I thought I had to too. The first thing I learned to read was the newspaper.” Take that, Click, Clack, Moo.

Chelsea, people were quietly starting to observe, had a tendency to talk a lot, and at length, not least about Chelsea. But you couldn’t interrupt, not even if you’re on TV at NBC, where she was earning $600,000 a year at the time. “When you are with Chelsea, you really need to allow her to finish,” Jay Kernis, one of Clinton’s segment producers at NBC, told Vogue. “She’s not used to being interrupted that way.”

Sounds perfect for a dating profile: I speak at length, and you really need to let me finish. I’m not used to interruptions.

What comes across with Chelsea, for lack of a gentler word, is self-regard of an unusual intensity. And the effect is stronger on paper. Unkind as it is to say, reading anything by Chelsea Clinton—tweets, interviews, books—is best compared to taking in spoonfuls of plain oatmeal that, periodically, conceal a toenail clipping.

RTWT

Laidlaw’s tweet inspired others:

And still others:

More here.

Via The Passive Voice.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

You’re really ready for trouble when you have holstered an attack dog!

A certain Irish hunt held its annual Hunt Ball last weekend. Yesterday on FB occurred the following exchange:

Female member 1: “We have 2 coats from the hunt ball…if anyone is missing a Zara women’s jacket size M and a black fur shrug please pm me and we can arrange for them to be collected.”

Male member: “And the knickers?”

Clearly a good time was had by all.

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

Via Vanderleun.

BBC:

Alexander Laznenko of the Smolensk Region Border Agency tells Tass news agency that the smugglers used heavy earth-moving equipment at night to “widen and raise the gravel track, and put in more turning and passing points” — right under the noses of the local authorities.

Earlier this month, customs officers ambushed a convoy of nine lorries there laden with 175 tonnes of Greek and Polish fruit worth 13m roubles (£154,000; $200,000), but are none the wiser about who upgraded the road through the tiny Russian village of Klimenki.

Local administration chief Sergei Listopadov said villagers have come forward to say they saw crews working on the road earlier this year. He joked to RIA Novosti news agency that he’d like to write their mysterious benefactor a “letter of thanks” for improving a road that only a horse and cart could negotiate before.

But Mr Laznenko doesn’t see the funny side. He says customs officers have put the 4.5km (2.7 mile) track under constant surveillance but, as they do not have the authority to barricade or dig it up, they will have to rely on catching the smugglers out.

Russia announced a ban on food imports from the European Union last year, in retaliation for an EU trade embargo over Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. Since then, the number of lorries crossing legally from Belarus has increased dramatically in the last year to 73,000, all of which Russian customs have to inspect for banned foodstuffs, Mr Laznenko says.

Social media users tend to agree with Mr Listopadov, though. “At least someone is maintaining our roads,” one person writes, a sentiment echoed in many other comments on RIA Novosti’s site. Some even suggest the smugglers should form a party to stand in next month’s parliamentary elections on a “Let our lorry through, and we’ll fix your potholes” platform.