Lileks.

To be honest, I was actually upbeat when the coffee machine broke. I looked at the brand-new machine, its lights blinking but unable to excrete a single jot of wonderful java, and I thought: If nothing else, I can get a column out of this.

…

So I was intent on cashing in on this opportunity. First step: a call to Customer Support, which is lazy columnist gold. We all hate making those calls, right? Those menus: ridiculous. “To hear these instructions in South Ossian, press 0.” Then you’re on hold for the rest of the afternoon.

In the old days, our parents took a defective coffeemaker right back to Harold’s Appliances on Main Street, walked up to a counter and said, “It broke, Harold.” And he just handed them another one. But his store closed when Wal-Mart came in, and Harold set himself on fire on Main Street, shouting, “Are you happy now? Is this what you wanted?” And people just walked past, ashamed, because they’d bought a Mr. Coffee at the Wal-Mart and felt responsible, somehow. On the other hand, Harold’s old shop is now a bakery and they have fantastic Cronuts.

Read it.

Most people are not actually ideological. That’s not how they think of things. They just look at what goes on in government and think what are these people talking about? What are they wasting their time on? Why doesn’t anything get done? Why is it the same sort of people seem to be in charge whoever we vote for? Why is it always good for them, but my life seems to just get tougher?

Guide for the perplexed:

1. Government doing something I don’t like (Hell, anybody doing something i don’t like) = Fascism
2. Government doing something the benefits me = Populism

Keep these points in mind and you’ll understand the news. Miss them and the news will look as if the world has gone mad.

ZMan is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

The criticism of the Pope on economic grounds says more about the bottomless ignorance of modern conservatism than it does the Pope or the Church. For the Church, any church for that matter, economics are downstream from theology. In fact, economic positions should only matter in so far as how they advance the particular theological points of the faith. Catholicism long attachment to the sovereign authority of the people, naturally leads it to embrace national economics over global economics.

That bit is sure to get some spergy responses from Catholics and Christians, but we’ll deal with that in the comments. The point to take away is that it is perfectly plausible for the Pope to be within Catholic doctrine and oppose the current fads in global economics and not be a communist. The fact that secular defenders of globalism are more hive minded than the clerical critics, suggests globalism has become more of an all-consuming religion than Catholicism. It is international fascism.

…

It’s not just a question about the Pope being Catholic, or at least prioritizing Catholic theology over his personal theology. The question is whether the Catholic Church is still Catholic. It used to be that the Church was at the forefront of social issues like abortion and homosexual marriage. Today, it is rare to hear anything from the Church on social issues. Instead, in the US at least, the Church is more concerned with maintaining their refugee rackets and defending Gaia from your lawnmower.

Read it.

Just in case you had nothing better to do today.

The New York Times has some advice. What do they know that you don’t?

“The most important thing is to build underground,” says Cédric Vuilleumier, an engineer for the Federal Office for Civil Protection in Switzerland, where all citizens are legally guaranteed a spot in a bomb shelter. Packed earth insulates against radiation and blast waves, but don’t go deeper than 10 feet; if your exits (make two) become blocked in the blast, you may need to dig yourself out.

Zman lays it out.

There are two issues at work here. One is the self-awareness, or the lack of self-awareness, we see with Progressives. We’re all used to seeing Progs preach against something they are doing to excess. Google “the opposite rule of liberalism” and see what comes up. The other issue is about agency. These tactics we see them employ to corrupt public institutions suggests a level of plotting and scheming that strains credulity. On the other hand, the pattern suggests agency. They plan their work and work their plan.

The first part is probably the easiest one. People in a cult are not sitting around saying to one another, “This is a great cult. I’m really enjoying my time as a cult member.” Similarly, no one sits down one day and says, “I think I want to join a cult.” People in a cult think the beliefs and rules of their cult are perfectly logical and rational. They provide an explanation and framework for understanding the world. People on the outside, however, see the rules and beliefs of a cult as weirdly irrational and maybe even dangerous.

The other thing about people in cults is they join from self-loathing. They hate themselves and seek to swap their hated individual identity with that of the group. It’s why they will savagely defend their group like a mother defending their young. It’s self-defense. The group is them and they are the group. Therefore, any criticism of the group, or the beliefs of the group, is the same as an attack on the member. It is why they consider criticism the same as violence. From their point of view, it is violence, violence against their identity.

Here’s visual proof:

Read it.

Just so you know.

With thanks to Debby Witt, a kindred soul.

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Read it.

If, that is, you limit yourself to national brands.

Fortunately, you don’t have to do that.

On the other hand, these are the places to put your IRA money for a comfortable retirement.

Read it.

That’s because (a) Obama was a stone-cold hypocrite, and (b) a lot of them have Gotten the Word and are staying home.

Either way, it’s a win for us nativists.

(No, we are not a ‘nation of immigrants’. We are a nation of the grandchildren of immigrants. The difference is crucial.)

Read it.

JUST AFTER DAWN in the Salinas Valley south of San Francisco, a raucous robot rolls through a field spitting clouds of vapor. It’s cutting lettuce heads with water knives—super-high-pressure beams—and gobbling up the produce. The heads roll up its mouth and onto a conveyor belt, where workers in hoodies and aprons grab the lettuce and tear off the loose leaves.

Right across the road, workers are harvesting lettuce the agonizing old-fashioned way—bent over with knife in hand. “If you’re a beginner, it kills you because your back really hurts,” says Isabel Garcia, a harvester who works atop the robot. “It takes somebody really strong to be doing that kind of work.”

Message: Automation is in the process of killing unskilled manual labor. Increasing the minimum wage will only speed up this process.

Because if humanity expects to feed its booming population off a static amount of land, it’s going to need help.

Typical modern pseudo-journalism. (a) Population isn’t ‘booming’; the rate of increase is rapidly slowing, and many First World countries are actually declining in population. (b) The amount of land devoted to agriculture isn’t static; right now we use less land than we ever have, and if we need more, we can put idle land back into production. One of the most distasteful features of popular web sites like Wired is that it hires a lot of proglodyte millennials who take their cultural-Marxist myths as gospel and write as if everybody has the same prejudices that they do. Coming across that in an otherwise interesting/useful piece of writing is like biting down on a bit of eggshell at breakfast.

For sure, the robots will definitely support the dwindling farming workforce. Fewer immigrant workers are coming to the fields, and their demographics are shifting.

Thank you, Donald Trump. Just sayin’.

“Just with a changing population here in California, we’ve got an aging workforce,” says Mark Borman, president of Taylor Farms California, which operates the robot. “So people who are coming out to do agricultural, we’re not getting that younger population into the job.”

Apparently there are jobs that Mexicans are no longer willing to do. Progress, I guess.

That means not only using robots to help fill those jobs, but modifying the product they grow to make things easier for the machine. Taylor Farms has selected a kind of romaine that grows more like a light bulb, which leaves a longer base for the water knife to more efficiently slice. So while workers are adapting to work with the robot, the farm is adapting the produce to work with the machine. This is what the future of agriculture looks like: Humans modifying food to fit robots as much as they modify their own behavior to suit the machines.

This is the same process that gave us our current plethora of tasteless but easily produced produce. No one writing about food thinks this is ‘progress’. Don’t get Michael Pollan started.

“We’re not looking to replace a workforce,” Donohue says. “We’re looking to maintain an industry and the food supply for North America.”

Although, if that means replacing a workforce, well, can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. I am reminded of the Dilbert cartoon where the pointy-haired boss chides Alice for not working at 110%. “That’s like stealing from the company.” When Alice points out that she’s not getting paid for her overtime, which is like the company stealing from her, he responds “That’s not stealing, that’s being competitive.”

But Donahue has an existential argument on his side that, say, car factory operators don’t: Humanity is in danger of not being able to feed itself.

No, it’s not. That’s (again) just proglodyte mythology, with no Real Science behind it.

By 2050, the world population could boom to almost 10 billion people.

Note the weasel-word ‘could’. It could all die off in a new Black Death, but it probably won’t, and it probably won’t reach 10 billion, either, given the current trends.

Farmers will have to feed those humans—not to mention their livestock—with the same amount of land. Hell, even less land, as ocean levels continue to rise.

‘Continue to rise’? Are they rising now? Really? Any proof of that? No, just another proglodyte assumption. (More eggshell in the scrambled.)

California may be out of its brutal drought, but there’s no telling how climate change will shape the coming decades.

But, even though ‘there’s no telling’, you Social Justice Warriors will be happy to tell us anyway.

Steve Sailer looks at The Gap.

What if Charles Murray is right? What if some of the various racial gaps in cognitive performance are due to genetics? Would that be the end of the world?

It is considered appropriate to hyperventilate as if you believe so.

On the other hand, what if Murray is wrong and his best critic, James Flynn, is right? Would that validate traditional liberal approaches to bridging The Gap?

Food may be healthy when it is in the ground or on the animal, but, once removed, it is not healthy; it is dead.

Food (when chosen wisely) may be nutritious, but that’s a different thing.

People (when they eat wisely) are healthy, and that’s the goal. Take whatever action you deem appropriate.

Read it.

Its ability to produce high academic results in children who do not start formal schooling until the age of seven, have short school days, long holidays, relatively little homework and no exams, has long fascinated education experts around the world.

Finland is doing some very interesting things these days.

“Traditionally, learning has been defined as a list of subject matters and facts you need to acquire – such as arithmetic and grammar – with some decoration, like citizenship, built in around it,” Ms Lonka says.

“But when it comes to real life, our brain is not sliced into disciplines in that way; we are thinking in a very holistic way. And when you think about the problems in the world – global crises, migration, the economy, the post-truth era – we really haven’t given our children the tools to deal with this inter-cultural world.

Read it.

Albrecht Speer could not be reached for comment.

Jim Goad takes on The Burrito Kerfuffle.

I’m not a fan of Mexican food, for reasons which should be obvious. Although I hold Mexicans in the highest esteem as a proud and noble (if exceedingly short) people, they tend to score poorly on standardized tests and have never invented much of note beyond nachos. I can’t think of a single Mexican comedian, musician, writer, or filmmaker who’s inspired me. To put it bluntly, I’ve never appropriated anything from them because I’ve never wanted to.

I never eat food from a place where more people are moving here from there than are moving there from here. I figure they know something I don’t, and the food is the chief suspect.

Portland, OR is one of the best American cities to enjoy from a distance. After all, it hosted what is easily one of my Top Three Favorite Hate-Crime Hoaxes of all time in the person of one Azalea Cooley, an allegedly cancer-stricken, wheelchair-bound black lesbian who wound up being the person who, when all was said and done, turned out to be the Mystery Klansman who was burning crosses in her own backyard.

Plus the rain. Don’t forget the rain.

Kevin Williamson points out some inconvenient truth.

Tim McVeigh was God’s gift to the Left, and the Left will forever keep his memory alive, tending it like a kind of sacred flame.

Al-Qaeda attacks the United States on September 11, 2001? Yes, but don’t forget about McVeigh. Omar Mateen lets loose an “Allahu akbar!” before massacring 49 people at a gay bar in Orlando? Yes, but remember McVeigh. Salman Abedi and his pack of “lone” wolves get a jump on Ramadan by nail-bombing a bunch of little girls and their grandmothers at a concert in Manchester? Terrible, of course, but let us not forget about the real threat: right-wing terrorism on the McVeigh model.

…

We were, impossible as it sounds to say it, in one sense lucky to have al-Qaeda as our main terrorist threat in the years immediately following September 11, 2001. Al-Qaeda was, as an ideological matter, focused on spectacular attacks when it came to the West, desiring each to be more dramatic than the last. Osama bin Laden et al. found 9/11 difficult to follow up on, especially with U.S. forces hunting them down in their safe havens. The Islamic State has no such ideological limitation, and it is happy to bomb a concert here and behead a hostage there. The mullahs in Iran may dream of a nuclear Armageddon, but the Islamic State would be perfectly satisfied with a permanent intifada being fought in every Western city of any consequence.

Read it.

But of course the ‘consensus’ on Global Warming is incontrovertible.

Read it.

The amount of censorship on the Internet seems to be increasing. Most of it is not implemented overtly by Western governments — with Germany being a notable exception — but by supposedly private outfits. Facebook and Twitter hold near-monopolies in their specific markets, so that when they decide to censor, their actions are as effective as a government clampdown. And in Germany, of course, the government actually requires them to censor. Geert Wilder’s account was recently blocked in Germany, presumably in obedience to Angela Merkel’s orders.

But Twitter is quite willing to institute censorship on its own initiative, as in the recent case when the account for WorldNet Daily was suspended. If your opinions veer too far from the Narrative, and you become prominent enough that your tweets and posts are often “trending”, then in all likelihood you will eventually be squashed.

Check Scott Adams’ blog where he talks about getting shadowbanned on Twitter.

Read it.

I’ll start with a question: What is good writing?

It depends on what country you’re from. We all know what’s considered “good writing” in our own country. We grow up immersed in the cadences and sentence structure of the language we were born into, so we think, “That’s probably what every country considers good writing; they just use different words.” If only! I once asked a student from Cairo, “What kind of language is Arabic?” I was trying to put myself into her mental process of switching from Arabic to English. She said, “It’s all adjectives.”

Well, of course it’s not all adjectives, but I knew what she meant: it’s decorative, it’s ornate, it’s intentionally pleasing. Another Egyptian student, when I asked him about Arabic, said, “It’s all proverbs. We talk in proverbs. People say things like ‘What you are seeking is also seeking you.’” He also told me that Arabic is full of courtesy and deference, some of which is rooted in fear of the government. “You never know who’s listening,” he said, so it doesn’t hurt to be polite. That’s when I realized that when foreign students come to me with a linguistic problem it may also be a cultural or a political problem.

William Zinsser has forgotten more about good writing than you will ever know.

First, a little history. The English language is derived from two main sources. One is Latin, the florid language of ancient Rome. The other is Anglo-Saxon, the plain languages of England and northern Europe. The words derived from Latin are the enemy—they will strangle and suffocate everything you write. The Anglo-Saxon words will set you free.

How do those Latin words do their strangling and suffocating? In general they are long, pompous nouns that end in –ion—like implementation and maximization and communication (five syllables long!)—or that end in –ent—like development and fulfillment. Those nouns express a vague concept or an abstract idea, not a specific action that we can picture—somebody doing something. Here’s a typical sentence: “Prior to the implementation of the financial enhancement.” That means “Before we fixed our money problems.”

Believe it or not, this is the language that people in authority in America routinely use—officials in government and business and education and social work and health care. They think those long Latin words make them sound important. It no longer rains in America; your TV weatherman will tell that you we’re experiencing a precipitation probability situation.

And that’s a lot of the problem with America today. Churchill said it best: ‘Short words are best; and old words, when short, are best of all’. (Of course, he always did.)

Read it.

No one knows exactly how many bodies remain on Mount Everest today, but there are certainly more than 200. Climbers and Sherpas lie tucked into crevasses, buried under avalanche snow and exposed on catchment basin slopes – their limbs sun-bleached and distorted. Most are concealed from view, but some are familiar fixtures on the route to Everest’s summit.

Perhaps most well-known of all are the remains of Tsewang Paljor, a young Indian climber who lost his life in the infamous 1996 blizzard. For nearly 20 years, Paljor’s body – popularly known as Green Boots, for the neon footwear he was wearing when he died – has rested near the summit of Everest’s north side. When snow cover is light, climbers have had to step over Paljor’s extended legs on their way to and from the peak.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

Teaching children according to their individual “learning style” does not achieve better results and should be ditched by schools in favour of evidence-based practice, according to leading scientists.

Thirty eminent academics from the worlds of neuroscience, education and psychology have signed a letter to the Guardian voicing their concern about the popularity of the learning style approach among some teachers.

Demonstrating how short a life a ‘scientific consensus’ has as a reflection of reality.

The group opposes the theory that learning is more effective if pupils are taught using an individual approach identified as their personal “learning style”. Some pupils, for example, are identified as having a “listening” style and could therefore be taught with storytelling and discussion rather than written exercises.

The letter describes that approach as “one of a number of common neuromyths that do nothing to enhance education”. It is signed by Steven Pinker, Johnstone family professor of psychology at Harvard University; Dorothy Bishop, professor of developmental neuropsychology at the University of Oxford; and leading neuroscientist Prof Uta Frith of University College London among others.

Read it.

Enough about Trump, let’s look at something important.

Read it.

Hire Tony Soprano to have them whacked.

Well, that’s what I would do.

Lion of the Blogosphere sorts it out for you.

Gelato is just the Italian word for ice cream, and while there are customary differences between them, I don’t think that there exists an ice cream/gelato police that will put you in prison if you call standard American-style ice cream “gelato” to make it more appealing to SWPLs. You see, SWPLs love stuff that’s European and usually despise eating foods commonly eaten by Amercian proles unless it’s eaten ironically. Although there seems to be an exception for ice cream, a food that spans social classes and can be unironically enjoyed by SWPLs even though they have a preference for the fancier-sounding gelato.

I’ve always preferred sherbet to ice cream. It’s the Turk in me.

Read it.

They’ll have to oil him up first.

Victor Davis Hanson looks at Washington.

Far too many government officials never pay the price for their crimes and misdeeds: Clinton, Rice, Napolitano, Lerner … Comey is the exception.

President Trump’s firing of James Comey revealed strange timing, herky-jerky methods, and bad political optics.

Certainly, in the existential political war that Trump finds himself in, it would have been wiser, first, to have rallied his entire White House team and congressional leaders around the decision and established a shared narrative, to have been magnanimous to the departing James Comey, and to have had obtained private guarantees from a preselected successor that he or she would serve and be appointed within a day or two.

But otherwise the firing was overdue.

The head of the FBI (quite outside his purview as an investigatory official) announced in summer 2016 to the nation that he had decided not to seek an indictment of Hillary Clinton. Then, again in the role of a presumed federal attorney, he seemed to reverse that judgment by reopening his investigation. Then he appeared to re-reverse that decision — all at the height of a heated presidential campaign.

Read it.

Most people who have been exposed to defensive shooting techniques have heard the little slogan, “Two to the body, one to the head, is guaranteed to leave them dead.” Fewer shooters know this refers to a defensive shooting technique called the Mozambique Drill. But a large number of defensive students may be confused regarding the difference between the Mozambique and the Failure Drill. Well, as they say, here is the rest of the story.

I learned it as ‘Two to the body, one to the head, always leaves the target dead.’ But it’s core knowledge however construed.

Read it.

The event is taking place at Spøttrup Castle, a well-preserved 16th century fortress, and is part of the line-up for European Capital of Culture Aarhus 2017. The medieval combat will include one-on-one contests to large skirmishes, where teams of 16 people fight with swords, axes, clubs and warhammers.

Whilst the championships take place, the parkland around Spøttrup Castle will be converted into a Medieval market, selling everything from chain mail to mead. At the castle one can experience the entertainment up close while discovering some medieval gourmet as a real warrior, to the sounds of wild battle cries and metal on metal.

Everything old is new again.

Read it.

Theunis Botha, 51, from Johannesberg, was leading a hunt in Gwai, Zimbabwe, when they stumbled across a herd of elephants, which included pregnant cows.

Three elephants stampeded towards the hunters and Mr Botha opened fire with his rifle, prompting a fourth elephant to storm in from the side and lift him up with her trunk.

The Afrikaans news site Netwerk24 reported that another member of the group fired the fatal shot at the elephant and, as the animal collapsed dead, she fell on Mr Botha.

Usually karma isn’t that speedy.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

ZMan brings the future.

One of the things that ails us in the modern age is we have yet to adjust our thinking to the modern economy. The great political-economic thinkers lived in a time when money was either gold, backed by gold or a fiat currency. The result is our political and economic debates are based in the logic of a world that no longer exists. The modern global economy is not based on fiat money or hard money. It is based on credit money, which has a unique set of characteristics.

For instance, the US government is no longer able to print up greenbacks and sprinkle them on the economy. Instead, when they expand the money supply, they expand lending, both domestic and global. It’s not just any sort of lending either. The central bank can buy up long term notes in order to drive down long term lending rates, thus expanding lending for capital goods. Alternatively, they can buy up short term debt and increase the amount retail lending. The Federal Reserve holds close to 2 trillion in mortgages, for example.

P. J. O’Rourke tells us how he sees it.

“The politician creates a powerful, huge, heavy, and unstoppable Monster Truck of a government,” P.J. O’Rourke writes in his new book, How the Hell Did This Happen? (Atlantic Monthly Press). “Then supporters of that politician become shocked and weepy when another politician, whom they detest, gets behind the wheel, turns the truck around, and runs them over.”

Read it.

Far too many people operate according to a screwy and uncivilized code of ethics.  Butting in to strangers’ private affairs is applauded as altruistic if done through the agency of the state, while resisting and protesting against such officiousness is portrayed in the media and in the classrooms as evidence of greed or of cruelty or of ignorance (or of some combination of the three).

Making matters much worse are the all-too-typical modern economists.  They thrill to the not-very-challenging challenge of pointing out the many ways that real-world markets ‘deviate’ from textbook models – and in particular of all the many situations in which flesh-and-blood individuals acting in markets are less than fully informed.  These economists then leap, stuffed with confidence but devoid of anything at stake, to the conclusion that they – and the state officials who they imagine are eager to act on their scientific advice – somehow know, or can make known, all that the flesh-and-blood people are presumed not to know about the details of each of these individual’s specific situations.

Lion of the Blogosphere shares.

Trump’s trip to Saudi Arabia presents good possibilities for positive press. No doubt it causes cognitive dissonance for Democrats that the Arab countries like Saudi Arabia are very happy that Trump is President, because they hated Obama. They don’t care about Trump’s “Muslim ban,” because they don’t let Jews and Christians immigrate to their countries, why do they care if the United States does the same to their people, as long as they can all get along diplomatically? The Middle East simply does not understand the do-gooder liberal ethic at all. They think they’re a bunch of chumps. They love to take advantage of those chumps, but they have no respect for them.

I try to be cynical but it’s impossible to keep up.

Read it.

Let’s see, who is more likely to be peddling ‘junk science’, a distinguished academic who publishes the research on which his conclusion are based, or writers for a partisan web site who depend on ‘fairly wide consensus among behavioral scientists’?

As with any such issue, the proper response is SHOW YOUR WORK. We can see Murray’s — he put it in a book, which has been out (and subject to checking) for decades. ‘Consensus’ isn’t evidence, it’s just opinion. SHOW YOUR WORK. Give us the data on which you base your opinions. Point out exactly where Murray’s data are wrong. Don’t just wave your hands about how All Right-Thinking People Agree And So That Answers The Question. SHOW YOUR WORK. This is science, after all. (Or is it…?)

For the lazy, Steve Sailer fisks this hatchet-job here.

‘Remember this about America: Everybody is trying to get in, and nobody is trying to get out.’ — Roger Ailes

Read it.

I hope he got paid.

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A professor wants universities to “stop hiring white cis men,” according to her May blog post uncovered by Campus Reform Wednesday.

“If you are a cis white man (meaning you identify as male and you were assigned male at birth) you almost certainly should resign from your position of power,” wrote Piper Harron, a temporary assistant professor at University of Hawaii at Manoa.

“That’s right, please quit. Too difficult? Well, as a first step, at least get off your hiring committee, your curriculum committee, and make sure you’re replaced by a woman of color or trans person. Don’t have any in your department?  HOW SHOCKING.”

Racism from the Left, strait up. And yet Trump is the New Hitler.

Read it.

It’s a region that in many ways is the polar opposite of the San Francisco and San Jose metropolitan areas, which have dominated our ranking for the last few years. (They still place second and eighth this year, respectively, among the largest 70 metropolitan areas, though San Jose is down sharply from second place last year.)

Unlike the tech-driven Bay Area, Dallas’ economy has multiple points of strength, including aerospace and defense, insurance, financial services, life sciences, data processing and transportation. Employment in the metro area has expanded 20.3% over the past five years and 4.2% last year, with robust job creation in professional and business services, as well as in a host of lower-paid sectors like retail, wholesale trade and hospitality.

According to Southern Methodist University’s Klaus Desmet and Collin Clark, Dallas’s success stems in part from the fact that it isn’t looking to appeal to the elite “creative class,” but to middle-class workers and the companies and executives who employ them. Dallas attracts both foreign and domestic migrants, particularly from places like California, where housing is, on an income-adjusted basis, often three times as expensive. This has had much to do with the relocation to the area of such companies as Jacobs Engineering, Toyota, Liberty Mutual and State Farm.

Suck on it, Left Coast.

Joe Bob Briggs lays down the law.

And why is it called a smartphone? It’s not smart, it’s a computer. It’s dumb. It requires a smart person to operate it. It’s probably called a smartphone to disguise the fact that it’s likely to be operated by a dummy, thereby making it more marketable to consumers in need of remedial IQ points.

…

When Steve Jobs arrived at the gates of heaven, Gabriel was not there to greet him, there were no trumpets, and the gates remained closed all day, because the archangels were fiddling with their phones.