I’m not sure what the real scandal is here: That we have a state-college full professor dumb enough to believe that the CIA “gave” Hugo Chavez cancer, or that Penn State – Abington considered “Women’s Agency In Hysteria and Its Treatment” and “Defending the Self In a Total Institution: Staff Prompting and Patient Burlesque” to be actual academic credentials.

Either way, you cannot miss this interview with Penn State Professor Karen Halnon. Sample awesome:

Can you comment on your arrest and on the videos of you on the plane that are circulating?
I do have a comment. I know that I expressed an act of civil disobedience. But that act was necessary.

Why so?
I’m very knowledgable about that part of the world. I teach about U.S. imperialism in Latin America. And the U.S. has declared war against Venezuela. That means military aggression. They tried to take out Hugo with a coup, and then they took him out with cancer. . . .

What is the revolution revolting against?

The problem is U.S. military global domination. And they want the oil. And they want the water. And so I found that this act was a necessary Thoreau-like act of civil disobedience. I had to speak out now. The situation is dire and urgent, and any sacrifice I make for my own self, if it saves lives — there have been far too many lives lost due to U.S. global military domination. . . .

But what of the cigarette? One reporter who covered your actions said that lighting a cigarette on a plane is just a little better than yelling “BOMB!”

Why did I have a lighter if there is such great national security? It was right in the top of my book bag.

Listen, the point is, I am a sociologist, and I live in an intellectual world. A sociologist always thinks in terms of symbols. And every revolutionary I know smokes. It was identifying with the revolutionary cause. And then, beyond that, it is a symbol that the United States is a smoking gun. The action was necessary. They are going to kill many more people.

She’s like Ward Churchill minus 30 IQ points.

Exit question: Isn’t it problematic that Halnon is accusing our first black president of declaring war on Venezuela?

#1: Books written by white men, and possibly white women. No really, this is a thing:

The internet has been abuzz recently with debates over reading lists and reading habits. Writer K. Tempest Bradford caused a bit of a stir when she challenged readers to stop reading straight white cisgendered male authors for a year. Sunili Govinnage generated her share of outrage when she reported on her year spent deliberately not reading white authors. And in late 2014, the phenomenally successful #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign took Tumblr and Twitter by storm, sparking a conversation about which books get published and read, and which don’t, and what these choices are doing to children’s literature.

Many of the responses generated by these articles and initiatives have been supportive — even from those white male authors ‘targeted’ for exclusion. Neil Gaiman, whose novel American Gods appears crossed out in red at the top of Bradford’s piece, told “anyone hoping for outrage”that he thought Bradford’s suggestion was “great” . . .

Don’t take my word for it–that’s the conclusion Jonathan Capehart reaches in a somewhat courageous essay on the Justice Department Ferguson report. There may be a temptation to dismiss this as Menchu-ism, but I don’t think Capehart is peddling “fake, but accurate.” He’s taking the time to point out a totally under-reported aspect of the DoJ file to what will be a hostile audience on his own side in order to correct the record. That’s an honorable thing.

As I’ve said from the beginning, it should not be difficult to understand that the Ferguson case was problematic on all sides–Brown was a bad actor; Wilson was, at best, not a great cop; the locals behaved criminally by rioting; the police behaved worse in their response; and outside agitators poured gasoline on the fire–but that the criminal justice system, especially the police and their unions, are in dire need of reform.

This is not an either/or proposition.

Courtesy of Santino, here’s a Max Landis production on the greatness of pro wrestling.

Now that description alone should be enough to melt your eyeballs. But it’s like he’s made this thing just for me. Because it’s not just an appreciation of wrestling–it’s an appreciation of Triple H. And it’s not just an appreciation of Triple H–it’s an appreciation of Triple H featuring:

* Awesome callbacks to The Death and Sleep of Superman.

* The single best explanation of Ric Flair, ever.

* The funniest t-shirt send-up of John Cena, ever. (I want “Spoiler: I Win” and I want it now.)

* Probably two dozen insanely hot girls dressed in really clever send-ups of various WWE stars.

* An absolutely money Paul Bearer impression.

* The best middle-brow defense I’ve ever seen of wrestling as story-telling artform.

Insane amounts of awesome. Go now. Commit the full 24 minutes. You won’t regret it.

Had a funny conversation with Galley Friend T.V. the other day. She asked me if I was worried about the crazy moves the Eagles had made. I told her that the Shady McCoy thing might look bad, but could turn out to be a Belichickian masterstroke, because slot-backs seem to be easy to find these days and not worth committing big financial resources for. Then she said: “Haven’t you heard? They traded Foles.”

And my head basically exploded.

I asked T.V. whether or not there was unrest on the Philadelphia street. Her reply:

After the press conference Kelly ran yesterday the majority of the WIP team, and the callers, think Kelly is an arrogant boob. He is either a pure genius with a brass set of cajones, or a total moron. He picked up good players IF they come on the team healthy. Bradford has missed the majority of the last two seasons with torn ACLs. All you needed this year to have a competitive team was a lineman, a safety and two corners. Still waiting on those to magically appear!

My hubby, ever the conspiracy theorist, thinks the Cowboys are paying Chip to tank our team. I am not quite ready to walk down that road. Yesterday, because of all the Oregon players that have been picked up, Steve was joking and saying that Huey, Dewey, and Louie are going to be our receivers and that Donald Duck is our running back. He referred to Lurie as Scrooge McDuck and said that Chip’s new nickname ought to be Daffy.

It’s always a good sign when the gallows humor sets in during the free-agent period after a 10-win season.

In other news, Galley Brother B.J. informs me “For who? For what?” doesn’t exist in the ether of the internet. There’s no video or audio surviving. I suspect it must be buried in the Channel 7 Action News tape archive somewhere. They ought to put an intern on that, for posterity’s sake.

As this kids say: This.

I don’t know if I’m offended or amused by the Washington Post writer who thinks that filing your taxes is easy because Internet! It takes me a full working weekend every year–that’s just about 2 percent of yearly weekend time–to taxes every year and that’s with the help of the wise souls at Intuit. I think it’s literally true that if I didn’t have software help, I would be incapable of filing my taxes on my own.

Now, I’m willing to believe that my taxes are more complicated the median filer because I’m a writer. But not that much more complicated. And we do seem to hear a lot about how in the future more and more workers will be freelancers of one sort or another.

What’s so punishing about the complexity of the tax system is that it extracts not just money, but time. I’d consider it a major quality-of-life improvement if I could give the IRS the same amount of money every year (or even a little more!), but do so in an hour.

If there was any justice in #ThisTown, nobody would ever take David Brock the least bit seriously ever again. Have a look at this Washington Post story about Democrats freaking out over Hillary Clinton’s private email scheme:

Last week, supporters in Congress and others were willing to go on cable television to defend Clinton on the e-mails but were puzzled when her aides did not provide talking points or other information that might help them, according to Clinton allies. “A lot of people were flying blind,” said one Democratic ally who spoke on the condition of anonymity to comment candidly. Requests for information “were met with dead silence” from Clinton’s team, this person said. “This shows they have a long way to go until their organization is ready for prime time.”

Some of Clinton’s longtime allies in the Senate and House leadership did receive guidance from the Clinton camp, although their aides were frustrated that they had to proactively reach out to Clinton aides to get it.

And here’s the money graph on Brock:

But Correct the Record — an outside political group set up specifically to defend Clinton in the media — received only a brief set of talking points from Clinton’s office instructing them to dismiss the story as silly and to compare Clinton’s use of a private e-mail account to former secretary of state Colin Powell’s use of an AOL account. The group was given no additional information for days, leaving Correct the Record founder David Brock and other surrogates to craft their own, sometimes incongruous, defenses.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with being partisan. All you have to do to keep your honor is be transparent, independent, and candid enough to call things like you actually see them.

But here’s Brock’s group complaining that they didn’t get any marching orders, so that they had to think up what they thought on their own. It’s unbelievable.

And yet, come January the Post and other media outlets will dutifully quote Brock and Correct the Record as if they’re just another partisan outlet worth paying attention to. But they’re not. There’s a difference between being a partisan and being an actual shill.

So the reason blogging has been close to non-existent for the last couple months is that I’ve been tied up working on a sequel to The Seven Deadly Virtues. And now it’s done. Or, almost done. Behold: The Dadly Virtues.

It’s due out by mid-May, which means this entire thing will have gone from “Hey, how about thinking of a sequel” to books-on-shelves in seven months, which has been a Herculean task on the part of the Templeton folks, because the speed-boost came almost entirely on the production side.

Anyway, I can’t even tell you how much I love this thing. It’s a book about fatherhood and it’s really, really funny and occasionally profound, too. It’s mostly the same cast from 7DeadV, but with a few additions: Joseph Epstein, Matt Continetti, Toby Young, Steve Hayes, and Tucker Carlson. The conceit is that the book walks you through the entire lifecycle of fatherhood, from pregnancy to becoming a grandfather, with each chapter dealing with some important stage along the way. Matt Labash, for example, does the chapter on giving the sex talk.

I’ll have lots more about it once the whole thing is totally and completely locked-down; we’re just a few days away from shipping it off to the printer, I think. But for now, I’ll just say this: I love this project as much as anything I’ve ever been associated with. And I’m really excited to get to share it.