January 29, 2019: Ohio Ruins Valentine's Day

My old boss recently canceled the only email account I’ve had for six years. At first I worried about all the old emails I failed to back up.

After five days I am convinced I am a pilgrim of a new lifestyle that will sweep Millennial Kingdom. The next step is to eliminate phone calls.

Friends can contact me through South Korea’s hottest social media app, KakaoTalk. If they can’t contact me through KakaoTalk, they ain’t my friend.

---

The Hallmark Card Industrial Complex created Valentine’s Day out of thin air. I can’t remember the “holiday” without sweetheart candy.

It’s been a staple of Valentine’s Day since elementary school when it was a classroom custom to give romantic, crayon-written cards and candy to girls who would grow into to other men’s husbands.

The sweetheart candy gravy train derailed this year. Valentine’s Day 2019 will be the first time the iconic candy won’t be available for purchase in over a century.

From Jennifer Merritt of wosu.org:

Fortune reports how the Byron, Oh.-based Spangler Candy Co. - which bought up the rights to Necco brands after the company went out of business last year - apparently didn't have enough time after the acquisition to make the quantities necessary to supply stores this year. 

Spangler did say Sweethearts, which have been around since 1902, will return in 2020. 

Valentine’s Day would be canceled in a just world. Unfortunately we live in Hellworld, which means the fake holiday will continue with or without the iconic candy.

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost is the one statewide Republican politician that I respect because he types his own tweets.

Typing your own tweets is a dangerous game, though. No matter what station in life you obtain, Twitter reduces you to your most primitive thoughts.

Yost unleashed one yesterday when he condemned childless Americans to an unrewarding life.

Having children is not intrinsically bad or good, despite our state’s top cop being proud of fucking. You can’t take your children with you when you die, either.

Centrists make me laugh because they revile folks with passionate political beliefs. Their brain disease leads them into thinking they are the moral glue holding America together, which leads them to believe inviting Nazis into a high school classroom is an effective tool for improving our nation’s discourse.

From Julie Carr Smith of apnews.com:

[Worthington social studies teacher Judi] Galasso and co-teacher Jonathan Duffy invite members of America’s most extreme political groups —including the National Socialist Movement, the Weather Underground and the Revolutionary Communists — into their classroom each semester. They teach students to engage respectfully with those of differing beliefs and to ask questions.

The Covington Catholic incident has seemed to further divide the nation. Parents, alumni and others have rallied to the white teenagers’ defense and, in a tweet, President Donald Trump called the students “symbols of Fake News and how evil it can be.” Others largely supported the Native American activist, describing him as a victim of racism and white entitlement.

In Galasso and Duffy’s class, no one shies away from such political discomfort.

“In 2019, our teachers generally are like, ’You know what? Let’s redirect to a different topic, because that one sounds like it’s loaded with land mines,” said Pete Scully, principal of Thomas Worthington High School, where Galasso teaches. “The idea of poli-rad is, you know what, let’s explore all those land mines and talk about them.”

Nobody who claims to be a Nazi or Revolutionary Communist in 2019 deserves a platform in high school. How is this a thing? I would burn down my kid’s school if his teacher thought hearing a pitch from Nazism would improve their education.

John Kasich loves to present himself as a thoughtful centrist when in actuality he’s a raging dickhead (not that I would know what that looks like or anything).

His true form came to bare recently when Kasich forgot the first rule of air flight: Never disrespect a B-List comedian with a podcast.

Julie Klausner tweeted about Kasich stealing her seat on a recent flight, which we talked about last week. She detailed the experience on her podcast yesterday.

From Seth A. Richardson of cleveland.com:

Eventually, Klausner said she decided to take a later flight to avoid the confrontation. Klausner, a liberal, said when she found out exactly who Kasich was and his politics, she decided to post on Twitter.

“The funny thing about it is when I tweeted about it, I realized people on both sides hate him,” Klausner said. “Because I guess Republicans hate him because he’s like, you know, not fascist enough, and then obviously people on our side hate him because he’s just a bad person. Just having interacted with him or interacted near him, I never met anyone so douchey and obnoxious and just dripping with disdain for people who in his mind aren’t as important as he is. I hope he – I don’t know. I hope he goes away forever. He sucks.”

When the basics of the story first came to light, Chris Schrimpf, a spokesman for Kasich, attributed the whole ordeal to confusion, though didn’t elaborate on specifics.

“There was confusion about seating, the airline had given a pilot the Governor’s seat and then chaos ensued,” Schrimpf said. “He’s sorry someone lost a seat.”

Sounds like Kasich is still a guy with his hand on the pulse of centrist America.

Here’s how cool the media industry is in 2019: You can work for a profitable company like Buzzfeed and lose your job to the nerdiest scab in America.

From fluxblog.com:

You might be wondering – wait, why would they lay you off? You were doing the quizzes, and that brings in a lot of money! Well, that is true. But another thing that is true is that a LOT of the site’s overall traffic comes from quizzes and a VERY large portion of that traffic comes from a constant flow of amateur quizzes made by community users. In the recent past, the second highest traffic driver worldwide has been a community user in Michigan who is a teenager in college who, for some reason, makes dozens of quizzes every week. It’s kinda amazing how much revenue-generating traffic the site gets from unpaid community volunteers. So, in a ruthless capitalist way, it makes sense for the company to pivot to having community users create almost all of the quizzes going forward. I understand math. I get it.

Hopefully that’s the most depressing thing I read this year. And hopefully that #teen either gets paid by Buzzfeed or finds literally anything else in the world to do.

Folks have asked me who I support for president in 2020. I’m waiting to see the whole field before making the plunge.

Wall Street is one voting bloc I won’t consider while making the choice. Who will think of them in 2020? Apparently not Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.

From Ben White of politico.com:

Bankers’ biggest fear: The nomination goes to an anti-Wall Street crusader like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) or Sanders. “It can’t be Warren and it can’t be Sanders,” said the CEO of another giant bank. “It has to be someone centrist and someone who can win.”

Robert Wolf, an investment banker, founder of 32 Advisors and former adviser and fundraiser for Obama, echoed that sentiment but suggested it was too soon to declare anyone unelectable.

“We just haven’t seen this many candidates running in our party. The Republicans went through that, but we haven’t,” he said. “There is a lot of excitement about where the party is going, and we will all have friends running, and it’s hard to decide who to support. Our party likes the aspirational, exciting candidate, but we also have to find someone who can do well in the swing states.”

Sometimes it’s easier to judge a politician by their enemies rather than their supporters. In other news, Sanders and Warren are my front-runners for the nomination.

THOSE WMDs. iPhone FaceTime bug lets you eavesdrop on other people… The plot to assassinate George Washington… Democrats must reject Howard Schultz’s radical centrism… Your TV is a computer now, but not in a good way… Meet the man behind a third of Wikipedia… A trash-talking furry became e-sports’ most dominant player… The long, violent fall of tanning mogul Todd Beckman.