Workin’ for the Weekend #50: Kmele Confronts Cooper; Spitting Fire on a Crowded Panel

Also: Second Sunday comin’ up; prolly later this evening

As per the ancient traditions, this Sunday being the second of the current calendar month means, nay, requires that the tribes of paying subscribers be gathered under one Zoom-roof for the ecstatic pagan ritual of yakking and listening and questioning and chat-smacktalking and playing-guitar-licks-while-muting and so forth. The betting money is on the chautauqua to be convened around the 9 p.m. ET coordinate; stay tuned to this space and your email in-box for the usual last-minute notification….

* As mentioned on Members Only #172, Kmele showed up and asked a question at a public event starring birder/author/TV star Christian Cooper, a man who became famous after a high-profile dispute in May 2020 with a woman named Amy Cooper over dog leashing (and cop-calling) in the Central Park ramble. The incident, about which only Kmele demonstrated skeptical journalistic curiosity, ruined Amy’s career while supercharging Christian’s. (You can listen to past Fifth Column discussions about it on Episode #187, #308, #321, #324, Special Dispatch #78, #325 & M.O. #165.) Alert listener Kevin found the whole YouTube video of the event; alertist listener Busty Wimsatt then isolated the Kmele/Christian segment:

* Speaking of Busty, he also was kind enough to record and post some of my appearance this past Tuesday on CNN Tonight, where the assembled panel and I had a, shall we say, difference of opinion about the July 4^th injunction by Judge Terry Doughty in Biden v. Missouri banning the federal government (in most but not all cases) from pressuring social media companies to suppress user content, frequently these days in the name of alleged Covid-related misinformation. As Robby Soave (#332) and other Reason staffers have noted, there is a curious disconnect between elite journalists and the rest of us over the free-speech implications of this case, and in the general practice of governmental jawboning overall. The reaction to this segment has been among the most voluminous that I can ever remember:

* Speaking of discoursers misusing the old “shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater” saw, I did a tweet listing a half-dozen Reason pieces explaining its disutility, after which several people tipped me off to this classic 2006 speech from Christopher Hitchens (SD #36) that starts with the magnificent bastard shouting “Fire!”, careens to David Irving and anti-Austrian insults, and … just enjoy:

* This past Wednesday I went on House of Strauss, the semi-eponymous podcast of our sports-friend Ethan Strauss (#185, #333, #383, M.O. #151 & #408), ostensibly to talk about his big heave “What the Sports Culture War Is About: A big proxy battle waged over the big proxy battles,” but not after some long detours into 1990s Prague (he asked!), warblogging (he asked!), and whether I’m the Ernie Johnson or Paul McCartney of The Fifth Column (answer: neither, of course). I did try gamely to hype my 2005 Reason essay from another planet, “Locker-Room Liberty: Athletes who helped shape our times and the economic freedom that enabled them.”

* Old friend Coleman Hughes (#121, #144, #181, #188, #201, #379 & #412) this week joined American hero Walter Olson on The Reason Livestream with Nick Gillespie (SD 72, #379) and Zach Weissmueller, to talk about the Supreme Court’s recent affirmative action decision:

* Comment of the Week, purely for informational purposes, comes from John Bingham:

Is there a "little pharma"? Yes, there is. In fact, there is a fairly robust market of small pharmaceutical companies. Most of them work in one specialized area, trying to revolutionize that field with some major discovery. It's an area of high-risk investing; colleagues of mine do enjoy gambling on this pharma company or that pharma company. When it seems like they have a legit drug candidate, one of the "big pharma" companies usually buys them out and takes the drug through the ultra-expensive regulatory process to get it approved, and reaps the profits.

Hydromorphone (Dilaudid) is significantly more potent than morphine and tends to have less side effects. In the business, it's an inside joke when a patient is "allergic to morphine and oxycodone, but Dilaudid works just fine for me", the implication being that the patient is drug-seeking and wants the good stuff, but is smart enough to know that if they say they're allergic to everything else, we don't have a ton of choice given the liability implications if they actually are.

Outro music comes from the new album by The Baseball Project: