This seems important...
According to the Washington Post, most of the kids demonstrating at the March For Our Lives anti-gun rallies were not kids at all.
I know.
Shocking.
Contrary to what’s been reported in many media accounts, the D.C. March for Our Lives crowd was not primarily made up of teenagers. Only about 10 percent of the participants were under 18. The average age of the adults in the crowd was just under 49 years old, which is older than participants at the other marches I’ve surveyed but similar to the age of the average participant at the Million Moms March in 2000, which was also about gun control.
But wait... there's more!
Even more interesting, the new protesters were less motivated by the issue of gun control. In fact, only 12 percent of the people who were new to protesting reported that they were motivated to join the march because of the gun-control issue, compared with 60 percent of the participants with experience protesting.
Instead, new protesters reported being motivated by the issues of peace (56 percent) and Trump (42 percent), who has been a galvanizing force for many protests.
This was astroturf... in other words: fake grassroots.
Robert Tracinski at the Federalist nailed it yesterday:
There’s a lot more of this sort of thing in the report, but it’s all summed up in this amazing statement:
‘The kids did everything,’ said Jenn Hoadley, 36, who helped students organize a march in Anchorage. ‘All I did was say, ‘You want a stage? Cool. I’ll find one for you. You need a sound system? Cool. I’ll find one for you. You want to march in the park? I do paperwork to help you get that done.’ They planned it all, and they should be given credit for that.’
“The kids did everything” ends up meaning that they expressed their preferences and adults swarmed in to do all the actual work. Plus, in the words of another local student “organizer,” the adults “were paying for everything.” As we usually do.
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I don’t blame the kids for this, not primarily. They are responding to a perfect storm of two big trends among the older generation. The first trend is the rise of protest culture, in which your entire personal and political identity are supposed to be tied up in which protests you attend. Combine that with helicopter parenting, in which parents are so eager for their kids to enjoy success and a wide range of experiences that they hover over the kids and hold their hands the entire way. I guess we could call this helicopter protesting.
In an unrelated story, David Hogg is leading a boycott of Laura Ingraham's advertisers...
Because she tweeted this...
City of Asheville: Dine in darkness
Pack's Tavern in downtown Asheville has been told to turn off its patio lights because it's against the local light pollution ordinance.
From the Citizen Times:
The intent of the ordinance, most recently updated in 2012 and drafted with input from the Astronomy Club of Asheville and the public, is to lessen light pollution, mitigate safety hazards caused by glare, and eliminate "light trespassing," explained Bernard Arghiere, an Astronomy Club board member and past president of the group.
"It's far more than just protecting skies," he said. "It's creating lighting that's adequate for safety but not glaring."
Still, some area restaurant and brewery owners say enforcement has left customers and servers in the dark, creating another kind of safety issue.
The owner of the popular restaurant makes the obvious point: people don't go downtown to look at the stars.
Down the road at Wild Wings, people think it's closed...
Chase Roth, operations manager for Wild Wing, received a notice of lighting violation last summer for the downtown location's patio, last revamped and inspected in 2016.
She fought back, but learned in November she'd be back-charged $100 a day starting from the notice of violation if she didn't remove the lighting.
"I didn't have time to deal with it anymore, and just told the contractor to take them down," Roth said.
Patio customers since then have dined in the dark, reading menus via the light of their cell phones, Roth said. She's also received emails and phone calls asking if the newly darkened business is still open.
Just to point out again here... this all came from the Astronomy Club.
Teacher fed sick puppy to a turtle
A junior high teacher in a tiny town in Idaho reportedly fed a sick puppy to a snapping turtle - as a few students watched after school.
Animal rights activists and animal lovers around the world called for the teacher to be arrested on animal cruelty charges.
But the locals?
People in Preston, a community of 5,354, were also outraged — that everybody else was making such a big deal about the puppy.
As of Wednesday afternoon, more than 2,500 people had signed a petition to Preston's school board expressing their support for the teacher, Robert Crosland.
"Two of the three kids present were mine," wrote one parent, Farahlyn Hansen, in a Facebook post supporting Crosland that has been shared more than 200 times. She did not respond to messages seeking comment.
"NONE of the kids were upset or traumatized," Hansen wrote. "They do not need counseling. They saw the physical state of the very young puppy. It was sick, wouldn't accept food, and was dying. All of the three kids that were there felt Robert did the humane and right thing. My children work on farms, they understand life and death."
In a plot twist, the snapping turtle was euthanized because it's an invasive species. Apparently, the thing eats anything, and when it gets to be a bit larger, it no longer has any natural predators.
Should the science teacher face animal cruelty charges?