This is just another example, one of so many it makes my head hurt.  

A teen was apparently sexually assaulted by an immigrant to the North of Ireland, in the town of Ballymena.  Because of ongoing tensions among the local population and immigrants -- who are often not white or Christian -- this incident has created a firestorm, with days of rioting.

What kills me about this is that really it's the same old story.  Women get defended from other men the same way the men would be attacked if they'd poisoned a well, or raided a field before harvest, right?  It's about property, not about the young woman being assaulted.

Had that girl been attacked by a white Irishman, she'd be called a liar and told to shut up, the same old-fashioned way.  It's always political.  There's no sense of protecting women from sexual violence simply because we're human beings and men can be asked to behave, no.  It's always about the agendas of men, with women and children like a dog toy that can be ripped apart in the middle.

I'm planning to move to the EU, or possibly the North of Ireland, in the next few years.  I'm almost certain I'm eligible for an Italian passport through my grandmother.  And because I'm part of three different European diasporas -- through my mother, my father, and my mother's husband who raised me -- I have stayed up on those three cultures, including my Bosnian "heritage."

I put that in quotes, because the people of Europe have made themselves very, very clear:  Americans have no right to claim any European heritage whatsoever.  We should take [European country] right out of our mouths.  That shit is fully gatekept, and we don't belong, fuck off, you're store-brand American and nothing more, because that's totally a thing.

It's amazing to me that the less desirable a European country is, the quicker they are to pull that shit, specifically Serbia -- of all the garbage countries to be tied to, as if I'd ever want to admit any connection to having my nose directly lodged between Putin's butt cheeks.  And my family isn't even Serbian, they're Bosnian.  But I digress. 

There's something incredibly twatlike about believing yourself the arbiter of other people's sense of personal identity or cultural heritage.  It would never occur to me to have such vehement opinions about how things work in a country I've never visited.  I can't imagine redirecting people who live in said country on how they should feel about their roles in it, or how that pertains to their own family histories.  It really just seems like a huge power trip.  It's people who are too privileged to have ever considered that ethnicity and nationality are actually two separate things.  They want me to beg to sit at their lunch table, basically.  It makes them feel important when they get to exclude somebody else.

I stopped self-identifying as an Irish-American decades ago, after my aunties had a meeting, voted me off the island, and sent my godfather over to have me forcibly removed from the family.  

I saw an interview with Paul Mescal where he quipped that Americans, if asked to find Ireland on a map, would point to Mexico!  Isn't that hilarious?  Yeah, it never gets old.   It never starts to seem like insecure people trying to feel better about themselves at your expense.

I've heard so many Irish people say that Irish-Americans aren't Irish at all, and we have no right to use the word "Ireland," that I'm totally on board with rejecting about half of my blood quantum.  Done and dusted, let's all go our separate ways then, and I won't lower your cultural property values with my stupidity and unworthiness.  I'll leave you with Longford's legion of fully vetted, definitely Irish pikey fighters. 

I wonder if they're all people who think Conor McGregor is awesome?  Because McGregor also freely un-Irishes people in public, like he did with Paul Hughes.  And I'm pretty sure Conor McGregor is universally regarded as the coolest guy in Ireland amirite?  Isn't that why so many people like to run that same move on Irish-Americans, so they can be neato like their hero Conor McGregor, and knock the Irish off of other people?

No, seriously, you know you've arrived when you've been put out of the Irish, and the Serbians are too good for you.

But back to the above video.  I get that this guy is joking, the whole video is meant to be a lark.  But he's actually spreading divisive, misinformation at my expense, in that especially smug, arrogant way that Europeans just love shitting on their diasporas, in a way that makes me no longer identify as a member of their diaspora.  Just kiss my ass, bro.  Don't come to my lunch table.  Stick your fake news up your ass.

The above video is linked to the part that I find so objectionable that I stopped watching.  He mentions that "400 Serbians" fought for the Confederates in the Civil War.  WOW!  That would be really something if it were true!

I took 90 seconds to hit Chat GPT with it:

"The claim that 400 Serbians fought for the Confederacy in the U.S. Civil War is not well-supported by mainstream historical evidence. Here's what we know:

1. Ethnic Serbs in the U.S. during the Civil War

• Immigration from the Balkans (including Serbia) to the U.S. was very limited before the 1880s. The major wave of Serbian immigration occurred between 1880 and 1920.
  
• While a small number of Serbs may have been present in the U.S. before the Civil War, they were not numerous enough to constitute a group of 400 Confederate soldiers.
  

2. Origins of the Claim

• The idea of “400 Serbs in the Confederacy” appears to stem from nationalist narratives or modern reinterpretations of history, often repeated without documentation.
  
• It is sometimes tied to modern-day Serbian pride or diaspora storytelling, but it lacks primary source validation (e.g., muster rolls, pension records, or immigration data from the time).
  

3. What Might Be True

• Some individuals of Balkan or Austro-Hungarian origin (possibly including a few ethnic Serbs) may have fought on either side during the war.
  
• A handful of men with Balkan surnames appear in Civil War records, but these are isolated cases, and it's very difficult to confirm ethnic identity from names alone, especially given 19th-century recordkeeping.
  

Bottom Line:
There is no credible historical evidence that 400 Serbs fought for the Confederacy. This is almost certainly a myth or exaggeration. At most, a very small number of individuals with Serbian roots may have participated in the war, but they did not form a significant or organized group."
Now, I totally get that Serbia in general is on the wrong side of everything.  I have no desire to go there.  Whenever I see "Serbians" in the headlines, it's going to be racist athletes being jerks, or they're honking for Putin, or some other shameful garbage.  And also?  When I google my grandmother's ancestral village in Bosnia, I get a ton of information from the UN about all the war crimes against "my" community during my lifetime -- which I can accept that I have no legitimate ties to, because my grandma fled during WWI.  By European logic, Bosnia has nothing to do with me -- although according to this video, people who move to countries other than America are still Serbian.  MAKE IT MAKE SENSE.  It's cool.  I'm fine with not being included in their insular, elitist shitshow. 

No seriously, fuck Europeans, they suck.  Clock the whole attitude of the linked "humor" video.  If you move from one European country to another, you retain your European ethnicity no problem.  Come from somewhere else to Europe?  You'll never be one of us!  Move from Europe to elsewhere?  We don't know you, don't you dare mention our country!  You belong to some group that is cohesive in our imagination!

But yeah, those alleged 400 Serbians that fought for the Confederates?  Yeah.  Dude makes it sound like Serbians invaded the whole continent.  That was the English-Americans -- who somehow never, ever, ever self-identify as such, I WONDER THE FUCK WHY, HMMMMM?   Because they're the people who check "American" on the census.  That's what it means to be "JUST AMERICAN," that you're an Anglo-Saxon Protestant from the slaveholding South.

Actually there were five entire tribes of Native Americans fighting alongside the Confederates, which makes the Balkan contribution look as trivial as it potentially was.  Fuck everyone who fought with the Confederates but the Five Tribes, who were so coerced, manipulated, and overwhelmed that they could not possibly make logical or rational decisions in their own self-interest.  There was no way for them to understand the decisions they were being forced to make under such duress.  Nikola Tesla is pretty much the only good Serbian thing, other than Milunka Savic and the food. 

America's double genocide was perpetrated by the English in real life.  Whoever fought alongside the Confederates and survived wasn't made to march to Oklahoma like the Five Tribes.  But they still weren't the English.  Serbians aren't shit in America and they never were.  This is and always has been an English plantation, not a Serbian one, not an Italian one, not an Irish one.

I doubt if Broseph ever mentions that Chicago was considered the second largest city in Serbia when I was born, because that's not inflammatory, and so not worth mentioning.  I'm sure he stopped at just making it look as if Serbian-Americans were somehow behind Wounded Knee, instead of the WASPs who actually drove the whole thing top to bottom.  It's just such an incredibly random fact to pull out of your ass about Serbian-America.

And that's my real issue with this:  people in Europe are actually pitting their diaspora against people of color in the United States with their uninformed narratives, for fun and profit. 

It's not clear to me if they know or care that they're doing so.  The guy in the linked video is just having a laugh.  But he's now got a whole bunch of people basically blaming Serbian-Americans for the Native American genocide and the atrocities of the English.  And as an Irish-Serbian American who regularly attends pow wows, frankly I owe him a punch in the fucking face for monetizing that bullshit.  It's a gross distortion at best. And there's no reason to think he's in good faith.  I wish a motherfucker would lay this on me in person.

Europeans who hate their diasporas, and are so loud about it, are some of the biggest cunts of all.  I'm not sure what they don't understand about the hyphenated Americans -- oh wait, yes I do.  It's their own racism and extreme privilege operating in low emotional IQ and pure moral decay.

What they don't understand is multiple things all at once.
Snotty Europeans don't get/care that:

• When their countrymen were forced to flee Ireland/Italy/Bosnia/Wherever to America, America was already wall-to-wall with different ethnic communities, just like Europe.  So you can't make us "just American," that's not a thing.  It was all full up when we got there.  "Just American" means "I'm the default white person in America, aka former slaveholder descendant, not planning to own that reality."  Fuck the fuck out of you for reassigning me to their ethnic community after I got shoved out of yours.  No, seriously.
• The "drop your hyphens" crowd doesn't make that demand of people of color, only the European Americans.  They think all the white people form one big, unified ethnic community called "Murican."  By that same logic, they all need to stop saying they're German, French, whatever because they're all European, because of the EU, right?  That will be my counterargument next time they come with this shit.  You don't get to have an individual identity because I'm not comfortable with it and there's a larger, flatter label that could be applied for my convenience.  Good for the goose, good for the gander.
• Native Americans and African-Americans were colonized by the English, and to a limited extent the French.  Neither of those two groups have a diaspora that self-identifies to any noticeable degree, except in Canada/French Canadians, which I'm not talking about.  Right?  So when you insist we remove our hyphens, you're relabeling us English because that's more comfortable for yourselves.  This is especially shitty when the IRISH do it.  Pogue mo thoin.
• Okay, so by the logic of every Irish person who blasts Irish Americans as not Irish:  when an Irishman moves to England, he becomes English.  BOOM!  Bye, fucko, congratulations on having a king.  Since Irish Americans are only American and have no right to claim an Irish identity, by that logic, when an Irishman moves to England, his children and grandchildren automagically become English forevermore and should not use the word Irish regarding themselves, right?  Isn't that exactly how it works?  Right Irish people?  Right?  LOL  Go fuck yourselves.
• Further on that same logic, when someone moves from Ghana, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Syria, or wherever to Ireland, they are IRISH, RIGHT FUCKERS?  RIGHT?  SAME WAY I'M AMERICAN ONLY?  RIGHT YOU CUNTS?  THEIR CHILDREN ARE EVERY BIT AS IRISH AS YOU, AND SHOULD NEVER AGAIN USE THE WORD GHANA/VIETNAM/BANGLADESH/SYRIA, BECAUSE THAT BEARS NO REFLECTION WHATSOEVER TO THEIR LIVES, JUST LIKE IRELAND HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ME HERE IN AMERICA, RIGHT? RIGHT YOU HIGHLY CONSISTENT, NOT RACIST AT ALL, NOT BAG OF ASSHOLES?  ISN'T THIS THE WHOLE CONVERSATION WE'RE HAVING IN DUBLIN RIGHT NOW? 
  
• Speaking of which, riding up on a high horse and telling people from a country you've never even been to that whatever they imagine their ethnic identity to be is incorrect, and they need to just get over it, because you recognize them as this other label, and toodle pip?  That's the ultimate colonizer power move for real.  The whole conversation is nothing but how to wreck India, North America, Gaza, or everywhere, only coming from some keyboard warrior with no army.  Again, this is especially shitty when the IRISH do it.  Pogue mo thoin.
• Do they really think that me, the Navajo, descendants of slaves, Chinese Americans, the Amish, the Cajuns, Vietnamese Americans, Puerto Ricans, and descendants of the original colonizers all belong under the same generic "American" label?  We're all in the same ethnic community?  Do they tell all of those people to drop their hyphens and forego their sense of connection to their heritage, too?  Fucking of course not.

Of course not.  They haven't put any thought into that part of it.  It's just insecure, brittle, highly privileged Europeans who fear dilution of their own identities.  They want to be cultural gatekeepers.  They fear change.  And frankly, they're often just losers, pandering to others like themselves, rage baiting, clout chasing, or whatever other garbage people do nowadays.  That's all. 

I'm happy to just be a culture of one, belonging to no ethnic community at all and loyal only to myself.  The Irish disowned me personally, and they very loudly let us know how stupid and not Irish at all we Americans are all the time.  Not enough potatoes for you?  Okay, you're English!  Now get lost.

The thing is, whenever I self-identify as an Italian-American, and someone responds with, "Oh, do you speak Italian?"  It's never a friendly conversation or a genuine interest in me.  It's always a smug asshole gatekeeping.  The goal is for me to reply, "No," so they can insta-invalidate my identity, because "speaking the language" is their cunty little gatekeeper criteria.  Because it's general knowledge that the very first assimilation demand on our dago community was "English only," and we were getting lynched for being Italian when my family arrived.  There are only two different kinds of people who constantly seek to invalidate me this way:  Snotty Europeans and African-Americans.  That is 100% consistent.

So it doesn't strike me as entirely accidental when some rando in Europe misinforms Europeans to suggest that actually Serbian Americans are just as guilty of Native American genocide as all the other white people.  European Americans are expected to flatten ourselves out into the "colonizer" whiteberg, pay the tab that the English are absolutely never going to pick up, and don't gripe about it.  And if you're not okay with that definition of your identity, snooty Europeans and the identity politics portion of America agree that it's because you're a delulu right-wing jerk. 

This attitude was recently on display when someone named Hasan Piker discussed meeting the band Kneecap at Coachella.  He went on and on about how great they were.  He described them as indigenous, colonized people.  He went on to explain in the next breath that, "Yeah, but Irish-Americans are just conservative white people."  Love that!  Because Hasan Piker is -- what, a black man?  LOL  Wait, is Hasan Piker suggesting that he's so of-color that he can't catch a cab in America -- which he doesn't even need to, because he has one of those nifty E-vehicles?  Is this highly privileged boy with the huge platform he got from that incredibly misogynistic platform suggesting that he's had a bumpier ride in this country than me?  He's reduced me to a colonizer?  Hilarious.

Wait, what ethnic community is Hasan Piker from?  Oh, wow, he's Turkish, the people who colonized my father's Bosnians almost forever.  But luckily male privilege has never been a thing anywhere, especially not America!  And he just waved his magical dick on the giant platform he has compared to me, and reduced me to a privileged, conservative white person -- unlike himself.  Must be a day ending in Y.

Just for fun, let me spend another few seconds fact-checking Chat GPT about whether Irish America is more conservative than everybody else:

"Let’s set the record straight:📊 FACT: Irish Americans have been a solid Democratic voting bloc for generations.

• Since the 19th century, Irish immigrants in cities like Boston, New York, and Chicago built and sustained the Democratic Party—especially in urban, labor, and union movements.
  
• The New Deal coalition? Propped up by Irish-American voters.
  
• In every major civil rights-era shift, Irish-Americans remained deeply entrenched in the Democratic political machine, even as others peeled off.
  

🗳️ Voting data today still shows strong Irish-American support for Democrats:

• In places where Irish-American identity is strongest—Massachusetts, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania—Democrats dominate.
  
• The idea that Irish Americans are “the most conservative” is either bad-faith garbage or a total misunderstanding of the "Reagan Democrat" blip of the 1980s—mostly working-class voters reacting to economic shifts and crime fear, not ethnic identity.
  

So why does this myth persist?

1. Selective memory + bad internet history:
   People latch onto outliers (like “cops vote Republican!”) and pretend that reflects the entire culture. Never mind that most Irish-American families include teachers, nurses, union workers, and lifelong Democrats.
   
2. Blame the visible diaspora:
   Irish-Americans are culturally loud, institutionally entrenched, and easily targeted. Blaming them for America's sins is like blaming Italians for the mob—it’s lazy and reductionist.
   
3. Projection from abroad:
   Some of the people pushing this stereotype are not even American. They see a Boston cop with a shamrock tattoo and suddenly we’re all Trump voters? Please.
   

Here’s the real insult:They’re not just wrong about politics—they’re erasing the radical history of Irish Americans:

• Labor leaders.
  
• Abolitionists.
  
• Anti-draft protestors.
  
• Anti-fascist soldiers and organizers.
  
• People who died building the foundation for civil rights and social welfare in this country."
  

Now, this Hasan Piker thing could really piss me off, if I think about my personal experiences in Belfast in the 1980s, long before Hasan Piker was born.  But I'll defer to the deep insights that come from being of-color like he obviously is, and all the oppression he must have suffered to get to where he is today.  I'll just STFU and let the brilliant radical talk.  I'll just let him continue to wave Kneecap around like the Labubu starter pack for courageous, self-aware heroes like Hasan Piker, who add so much value to the community.

Back to this other Balkan goof.  It's fascinating to me how quick Europeans are to shove their own diasporas under the bus on behalf of the English.  I am pretty sure some of them have noticed how fashionable it is these days in America to be rude to white people on the basis of nothing but their color, older white women in particular.   A lot of the Eurotrash bros love the Karen meme.  (I find it interesting that Europe, being the literal factory that builds "Karens," does not have a Karen problem, while America, full of people of all demographics, experiences constant Karen outbursts from people of every demographic, go figure.)

In my experience Native Americans do the opposite.  They often ask my actual ethnicity.  And Native Americans are routinely respectful to elderly people even when white.  This is in stark contrast to the current trend in America, where popping off on "Karen" as hard as possible is seen as a virtue.  It's like a way of counting coup these days, even if that old lady is really minding her own business.  Karen has become the face of the English, who will never, ever, ever own their shit.  This has always been a white male supremacy.  Now that we have decided to address the white supremacy part, Karen is the only one left to give the bill for damages.

Since 2019 I have been speaking only when spoken to in public, especially with people under 40, and in particular when they are of color.  I've had too many incidents where people lose their minds on me over the slightest thing, sometimes when I don't even say or do anything.  A lot of people seem eager to have a "Karen" story.  For example, I've learned that if I get on a bus with my walker, and the people in the wheelchair seats don't get up, not to ask them for the seat.  If they don't offer the seat based on my obvious disability, the answer is no, sometimes with a "reverse Karen."  So I just stand and ride while teenagers sit in the wheelchair seats with their bikes or scooters, men spreading their legs out or whatever.

Of course when I was in Ireland, I was treated like a goddess.  Possibly because I wasn't that American idiot who went around drowning in shamrocks like, "My great grandpa was a baker from County Louth, are we related?" 

I was walking in a tiny village upstairs back during the Troubles.  An elderly woman stopped me on the road, because they don't really get strangers there.  She asked who I was.  I told her I was visiting from America.  She brought her hands up to her face, I think to avoid crying.  "I can see Ireland in your eyes," she said. 

When I went to the pub in that village, I sat at one table in the back and only spoke to the people I'd gone with.  When I got up to leave, the barman said, "What about this?"  He pointed at a long row of half-pints that people had bought for me all night.  I'd have to stay in that village for a year to drink that much Guinness.

But the people who have a stick up their asses about hating their diasporas are legion.  And they are such a piece of shit that I have no desire to be included in any of my three heritage communities. I already escaped the families who had no use for me but a punching bag.

I will claim my Italian citizenship, and if people still want to hassle me about my Italian-American identity -- which I have no doubt they will -- they can lick the ink off my passport.  Maybe then Rome will scrape my name off the list they've been keeping since before the Bible.

It's nice that Wendy Williams is coming forward with these receipts.

I totally believe her that all of this happened.

It's interesting to me that during Harvey Weinstein's downfall, she didn't believe that Harvey had a network that did all the same things to people. 

I distinctly remember watching Wendy's show one time when she was going to discuss something about #MeToo back in 2019.  I recall being so disgusted I couldn't watch the whole piece.

Her take on it was that she thought #MeToo was bullshit, because she's a hot woman, and in all her years in show business, nobody had ever pressured her to do anything.  So Wendy called bullshit on the predominantly white actresses who came forward during the onrush after Harvey Weinstein got busted.  That was Wendy's logic:  she's been in showbiz a long time, and nobody ever demanded her piping hot snooch, so meh.  Her whole audience cheered. Yes!  #MeToo is fake!  I clicked away.

So on the one hand, I absolutely believe all of the above about the dick pig behaviors described.  I'm glad she kept records.  And I'm scrubbing my cat box with her salty, racist, rape-trolling tears. 

The depth and breadth of her cowardice, the lack of her shame, the complete absence of integrity or self-awareness on the part of Wendy Williams, none of that surprises me.  The sort of POS you need to be to come forward and precisely describe a Weinstein-like coercion mechanism aimed at sexual abuse survivors in show business, after having pissed all over that idea six years ago on your show?  LOL!  Oh, Wendy. 

I guess her brain started turning to oatmeal long ago, bless her heart.  Good thing she kept receipts.

Okay, here is the fashion opinion nobody would ever come to this blog for.

So I've never earned any money to speak of, despite working my butt off since I was 17.  I've never spent one second even thinking about owning a Birkin before.  But I am aware that it's a whole thing, and some people are outraged that you can't just walk into an Hermes store and buy one.  

At 2:06 in the above-linked video, there's a young lady who has found a knockoff Birkin at a brick and mortar Walmart.  They were available for a few days for under $100, until everyone lost their minds and bought them like locusts.  At this point you can't even order one on the Walmart app anymore, which all of the handbag bloggers had been sharing how to do.  Hermes has put its foot down.  You can still buy pre-owned Hermes bags on the Walmart app for many thousands, if you're insane.  Those will almost certainly be fakes, and you won't be able to tell.

And I have to say, Hermes didn't put its foot down when every Tom, Dick, and Harry came out with a bag that looks almost exactly like the Birkin.  Because they all did.  It really is a great bag.  But that's why there are so many other places you can get one that looks almost exactly like that, at very high quality and much lower price point.  So I wish everyone would just stop being silly.  Buy a really nice leather bag from them for a few hundred instead.

I have very mixed feelings about this.  I would feel differently about it had it been any other design house.

But as I understand it, Hermes has no marketing department.  They don't advertise.  They aren't looking for you as a customer, lady with crazy colored hair and caterpillar eyelashes, standing in a Walmart.  Not trying to be mean or to judge. 

But Hermes is a very old business, a saddle maker, who bench-makes bespoke bags for people who can routinely afford such things without asking the price.  That's their narrative, where they're coming from.  Start out with French horse owners, and go from there.  They're not trying to have ladies at Walmart twist themselves into financial pretzels to get a Birkin.  They really aren't reaching out to expand their customer base all the way to you.  The prosthetic/orthotic place in my town has that same relationship with me:  not trying to have me as a customer, and I'm not mad about it.  Right?  Same with Bass Pro Shop.  You can just be okay.  Not every store is for everybody.

Back in the early 1970s, my mom met a woman, let's call her Honey.  They both played the piano.  And my mom glommed onto rich people every chance she got.

Honey's husband, Hal, was a stockbroker.  He would go everywhere in a chauffeur driven limousine.  He would show up sometimes at my school and pick me up in his limo.  And because it was the '70s, they would allow that.  The nuns would be like, sure, no problem, she can get into that random limousine instead of walking home and being unsupervised like usual.  Hal would take me out to a steak house where everybody knew him.

When they bought an apartment in Water Tower Place, they actually bought two apartments and combined them.   And I remember them discussing in passing that  it was upstairs from her favorite store: Hermes.  I believe she was showing my mother the scarf he had bought there for her that day, because her husband was super adorable like that.

When I said (age 11 or 12), "Oh, Hermes?" and pronounced it to rhyme with "herpes," because I had only ridden past there on the bus and of course wouldn't dream of trying to walk inside there, Honey was super nice about not laughing out loud.  She actually kicked Hal so he wouldn't riff on me too hard.  Because he was the biggest goofball of all.

So when I hear people being butthurt about how they can't get an appointment to try and buy this Birkin, it just seems kind of weird to me.  Like chasing after a guy who will never be interested in you.  The more you chase, the less he wants you.

Because I promise you Hal could've bought anything in the store.  He didn't need an appointment. He may have had to wait for certain things sometimes, because that's the kind of merchandise they produce at Hermes.  It's truly not a crap factory -- like a lot of the "luxury" houses really are nowadays.  Hermes does have more to sell than they admit.  But they don't just keep having more and more and more produced to meet the demand, unlike the other ones.

Hal was their customer, the exact person they were in business for.  Every time he walked in there, I promise you they knew exactly how he took his coffee, and they fixed him one and had it ready.  They loved him.  Because his wife loved that place.  And so he'd pass by there whenever he had a chance.  And he didn't have to ask the price of anything.  He DGAF.  It was all a big lark to him. 

Hal was their customer, the exact sort of person they were in business for.  His wife was exactly who they wanted to see their scarves on, stepping out of that limo in that camel cashmere trenchcoat.  They don't want to see their bag being worn with those nails at Walmart.  Just my guess, from having gone past Hermes a million times and looked in their tiny little display window each time.  They had a giant marble wall in the most expensive retail space in Chicago, with exactly one square foot of display window.  The lady in the linked video doesn't have the Hermes vibe that I remember from their Chicago store.

So for me, I feel like these Walmart Birkin people should really continue to just buy fake Louis Vuitton and Chanel from Canal Street or the internet, really.  Those people often have equal of better quality, in terms of craftsmanship, than the real deal when you're talking about basic design houses.  I was looking at bags from some of the biggest names, from their official websites, recently.  And some of the things I saw convinced me to never buy anything from them -- as if I could.  But the quality of the beading and embroidery and particular was deal-breaking.  You can get exact knockoffs that will look very close to the real deal, last a long time, for only a few hundred bucks.

If I had a few thousand dollars to spend on a bag, instead of an ultraluxury whatever, I'd get this, maybe. 

But why be silly and buy a plastic Birkin from Walmart?  If you love that bag, why not buy this?  Or this one, which almost looks exactly like a Birkin? Just save up and buy any one of a number of lovely, structured, well-made, leather bags that are very similar and will last a long time.  Don't buy fake plastic crap.  Spend like $500 and buy a high quality Birkin dupe or replica.  Polene will hook you up with something lovely.

Don't be mad at Hermes.  They have been in business for a really long time.  They have always had a very small, very spendy clientele.  They're not the ones out here trying to bankrupt the brokes.  They didn't ask for this.  There are some very fugazi designers out there who totally deserve to get Walmarted.  It isn't Hermes.

Two different Oklahoma City officers were arrested, about six months apart, for very similar charges.

Both were domestic violence incidents. 

Officer Kitchens is said to have physically and sexually assaulted and threatened a woman with a gun in a car.

Officer Stark is said to have done all kinds of crazy things to another woman above and beyond allegedly raping and threatening her with a gun, including running over her foot with a patrol car, strangling her, and spitting gum in her hair.

I wish everyone a good day in court.

Both of these cases got me thinking about how stupid the whole "Believe Women" meme is.  It's all just so wrong-headed and doomed to fail.  Because it's another way of saying, "Women Aren't Liars."  And it isn't so much that they think we're lying.  It's that we have definitions of what's okay, what they're entitled to.  The whole gray area is like 80% of the world or more.

And even then it's just stupid.  It shouldn't be "Believe Women," because then men have all the choices, of whether to hold themselves accountable for their sexual violence or not.  Of course they're going to choose no.  Instead of "Believe Women," it should be "Men Are Liars"  Because that's why "Believe Women" fails:  Assume the woman is lying is a default setting.  Saying "Believe women" is asking people to work uphill in a passive way.  You're dealing with the fact that one of them is a liar, while leaving that fact unspoken.

Let's call it like it is.  Who lies about sex, men or women?  Men do.  Especially when they've raped somebody.  It's common sense.   And the more entitled they feel to the behavior, the more convincing their denials will be.

The person who doesn't want to face criminal charges always says, "I din do nuffin" at least ten times.  Watch every bodycam video.

Apparently the thing that gets police officers like Daniel Holtzclaw -- and now Liam King -- in trouble is their sheer sense of entitlement to sexual violence.  They're comfortable talking about their behavior when asked, as if they aren't trained in criminal investigation.  Right?  It suggests they either (a) don't believe it's a problem in the first place, or (b) assume that the other cops don't believe it's a problem.  Both Holtzclaw and King seem to fully expect their ridiculous stories to get an, "Okey doke!" from the lady IA detective.

KRQE.com has more coverage.

In the above-linked video, Officer Liam King explains how he stopped a citizen, "Because I'm bored, it's a hot day."  This caused her to volunteer to open up her bra, according to him, even before he lied and told her he had cause to arrest her.  He says he later noticed his body cam wasn't on. -- whoopsie. 

This IA detective didn't give him the full Kim Davis.  She didn't let him keep on talking and talking.  She mentioned after only a few minutes that you can't just stop someone who hasn't committed a crime, turn off your body cam, put your fingers down the back of their pants, and have them lift their bra up.  Mr. King then terminated the interview.

Mr. King is currently on administrative leave and facing charges.