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For no other reason than historical, the entire European Parliament migrates from Brussels to Strasbourg for one week each month. To orchestrate the move, the parliament charters entire trains. This practice has drawn criticism and ridicule at the best of times. Earlier this week, due to a switching error, dozens of Members of European Parliament heading for Strasbourg found themselves at Disneyland instead. The symbolism of the error invites numerous jokes, such as POLITICO recalling that the EP is regularly seen as a Mickey Mouse Parliament – though I would say that Mr. Mouse probably runs a tighter ship than Europe.

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Whenever I leave my Berlin apartment, the first thing I see is a sign saying CHICKEN HAUS BURGER; the second is a café blackboard announcing: « You can’t buy happiness but you can buy CROIFFLE and that’s kind of the same thing. » A billboard advertises an upcoming film as « ein STATEMENT für GIRLPOWER »; one shop promises a wide range of Funsocken. Rather more disturbing — particularly here in Neukölln, a neighbourhood copiously populated by leftie Americans and families from the Middle East — is the Arabic-German barber shop called WHITE BOSS. And when I go downtown to the bookstore where I occasionally host readings, the only good coffee nearby is served by a place unbelievably named PURE ORIGINS.

Being an English native speaker in Berlin means wading daily through a sea of linguistic nonsense. « Be Coffee My Monkey » orders one café; another says « Make Coffee Love Magic ». At one of those cafés you might overhear Germans saying things like « das ist ein Gamechanger! » and « Hast du’s geliket? » and « Oh my God was für ein Fuck-My-Life-Moment ». On bad days, I worry that English has turned primarily into a status symbol — a tool of pure Habitus, a means for young elites to signify their cosmopolitanism and savviness. On days like that, it’s also hard to avoid the feeling that English — the language I inhabit, the tool I use to pay the rent and tell my wife I love her — is like too little butter spread out across too many bits of toast. In the battle of the languages this absolute anglophone triumph might be as Pyhrric a victory as a victory can be. Ease of access means seeing the worst of yourself plastered everywhere; it’s a privilege, sure, but a source of embarrassment and solitude as well. If das Grindset is what winning looks like, then count me tired of winning.

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Next year’s presidential election here in America could turn out to be the most absurd in the nation’s history.

On the one hand, Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, much like Navalny in Russia, would be under indictment by the justice machine led by his own opponent, the sitting president. On the other hand, Joe Biden, the sitting president himself, could be under impeachment by a Congress led by his opponent’s own party.

There is a fair chance that when we get to about this time next year, neither Trump nor Biden will be on the ballot. However, this is already gearing up to be such an unprecedented presidential campaign that previous experience is of limited use in predicting its outcome. For one, the left still has not been able to establish that their indictments against Trump also make him ineligible to run for president. This opens many absurd scenarios, including one where Trump is found guilty of whatever charge they have thrown at him, goes to jail, wins the presidential election, takes the oath of office, and pardons himself.

But wait, it gets better.

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“One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputation.” – Thomas Sowell

Sowell’s truth has been demonstrated amply over the years, but during the current administration, it seems to be underlined, italicized, and emphasized. It does not seem to matter what an intellectual does. Even when it blows up in their faces, they walk away with their reputation unharmed and generally a promotion.

It is like watching a real-life version of a Roadrunner cartoon. Wile E. Coyote (a metaphorical intellectual) has the boulder he intended for the roadrunner land on him. He is flattened, but soon staggers away and by the next scene is intact, plotting another asinine scheme to get the roadrunner. So, too with our intellectual. No matter how staggering the setback, in the next scene our intellectual is back at it, sometimes at another job, but with no loss of prestige.

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How can you not love America? It is possibly the only country where someone can find a bag of cocaine inside the president’s office, where the world’s most technologically skilled police services can find no way to trace the perpetrator who left it there, and where the country’s political leadership does not get ridiculed by the media over this.

Let us not even begin with all the questions about White House security (anthrax anyone?) and simply note that nobody has been blamed, nobody has resigned, and nobody is forced to answer any questions about the incident.

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The recent controversy surrounding Ben & Jerry’s and its calls to reclaim “stolen Indigenous land” is heating up.

An Indigenous tribe, descended from the Native American nation, originally controlled the Vermont territory where the ice cream giant’s headquarters is located, and its chief wants it back, Newsweek reported Friday.

According to the report, Don Stevens, chief of the Nulhegan Band of the Coosuk Abenaki Nation — one of four descended from the Abenaki that are recognized in Vermont — said his tribe was “always interested in reclaiming the stewardship of our lands.”

Ben & Jerry’s has yet to reach out.

Proglodytes have absolutely no capacity for thinking things through. And these guys are supposed to be the smart ones? I think not.

Quilette.

Kathleen Stock tweeted recently that ‘Many philosophers have existed only in their own minds, but I think I may well be the first to exist only in other people’s.’ She was responding to the latest outbreak of leftist moral panic about gender-critical feminism, in this case a series of actions taken by student activists at the University of Oxford in protest against her being invited to participate in a debate hosted by the Oxford Union—which describes itself as ‘the world’s most prestigious debating society’. In commenting that she exists only in other people’s minds, Stock meant that the version of herself and her views being objected to by the student activists was unrecognizable to her.

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We are always told by today’s woke Stasi that “language matters.” They’re quite correct: that’s why their own attempts to police our words have to be so assiduously resisted by conservatives. When the language being policed is scientific in nature, the need for resistance is even greater. To redefine the discourse of science along political lines is to redefine the very parameters of reality itself.

The latest attempt to do so comes in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Language Project (EEBLP), launched in February 2023 by a network of clearly left-leaning scientists from universities across the U.S. and Canada. Predictably, the EEBLP commissars seek to decolonize their subject, whose very origins are supposedly steeped in the Western civilizational filth of white supremacy and cis-heteronormative oppression alike.

In their online “Team Statement of Positionality” (‘positionality’ here being a fancy euphemism for ‘sexual, racial, and political bias,’ but in a good way), EEBLP proselytizers are encouraged to “critically assess their subfield’s terminology,” asking whether it helps “celebrate dominant narratives or oppressive norms”—norms such as the sole existence of the two traditional binary human sexes of ‘male’ and ‘female,’ and not any recently invented new made-up ones like those of the popular entertainer Sam Smith, who self-identifies both as ‘non-binary’ and as a professional singer.

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

Time was when a politician like Patrick Henry (“Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace–but there is no peace!”) or Abraham Lincoln (“A house divided against itself cannot stand”) could quote from the Bible and assume that pretty much everyone in his audience got the reference. Those days are gone, of course. But most Americans still have at least a nodding acquaintance with the Book. Not, however, those who write and edit articles for the New York Times.

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Canvassers for a far-left Philadelphia mayoral candidate who has pledged to crackdown on gun violence in the city pulled guns on each other and one of them died, according to the police.

A 22-year-old man, who was canvassing Philadelphia’s East Germantown neighborhood on behalf of the progressive group OnePA, fatally shot a 46-year-old fellow canvasser on Monday, police said. Both men were knocking on doors in support of soft-on-crime Democratic mayoral candidate Helen Gym, among other left-wing candidates.

The victim and the killer “knew each other and began arguing after they ‘happened upon each other'” in the neighborhood, deputy police commissioner Frank Vanore told the Philadelphia Inquirer. Inspector Ernest Ransom said the argument led both men to draw guns on each other, with the younger canvasser shooting and killing the older man.

The shooter “said he was acting in self-defense,” Ransom told the Inquirer.

Reed it.

“You seem to find this whole thing rather amusing,” snapped a short angry man with a Not My King sign, about half an hour into the Republic protest against the coronation of King Charles III. I must admit I did. Kettled into a small enclave just off Trafalgar Square, an angry swell of old school socialists, Twitter anarchists, Lib Dem mums, eccentric vicars, boomer hippies, blue haired students and Covid conspiracists had somehow foundthemselves part of the coronation spectacle. Before the bells of St Martin in the Fields, the full shouty brunt of British republicanism was aimed at a bewildered stream of Chinese tourists and young families out for a day in London.

The survival of the British monarchy is one of the great wonders of modern history. Spending the morning of the coronation with Republic, it began to seem less mysterious. Despite everything in recent years, the Monarchy is still liked more than most of our institutions and probably every one of our elected politicians. No one gathered there could really explain why. The arguments were articulated in between the shouty chanting: things about “modern Democracy” and a “family of Lizards”, none of which quite landed the blow as the day unfolded around us.

Ptolomy I was Greek, one of Alexander the Great’s generals.

In accord with pharoanic tradition, his descendants in the Egyptian royal family depended on brother-sister marriages to ‘keep the bloodline pure’.

Cleopatra was Greek, wholly Greek, and nothing but Greek. Black? No chance.

Apparently black people are comfortable believing six impossible things before breakfast, so long as it’s Good For Blacks.

Steve Sailer.

Thank goodness those heroic gay men saved us so heroically from some obscure disease called Mpox that they didn’t even let become common enough that you or I had ever heard of it.

Oh, wait, Mpox is what they now call Monkeypox because Monkeypox was too memorable and the Authorities were worried that you’d remember it. And if I remember correctly, although who can remember back that far, gay men didn’t save us from monkeypox. Instead, they inflicted it on each other.

The New Republic.

You’ll never guess because the author pulled it out of his ass.

The inflation crisis is over, and you can thank the poorest among us for delivering what (so far at least) is a soft landing. That isn’t the mainstream view yet, but eventually I think it will be.

No, it won’t, because the poor have nothing to do with inflation. Inflation is done by the people with power over the money supply: The government. (Biden and his handlers.)

Timothy Robert Noah (born 1958), an American journalist and author, is a staff writer at The New Republic. Previously he was labor policy editor for Politico, a contributing writer at MSNBC.com, a senior editor of The New Republic assigned to write the biweekly “TRB From Washington” column, and a senior writer at Slate, where for a decade he wrote the “Chatterbox” column. In April 2012, Noah published a book, The Great Divergence, about income inequality in the United States.

No training or expertise in economics, then, but plenty of experience pushing the Narrative.

New York Post.

A growing handful of New York City restaurants are determined not to handle cash despite the Big Apple’s ban on refusing hard currency – and they are turning to a new twist on old technology.

Slutty Vegan, an Atlanta-based vegan comfort food chain with outposts in Harlem and Brooklyn, is among restaurants that are installing “reverse ATM machines” that spit out prepaid cards to get around the “Cash-22” dilemma, Side Dish has learned.

One service provider – called ReverseATM, appropriately enough – rents out ATM-style machines that accept cash bills in exchange for an “open loop” debit card whose balance can be used anywhere that Visa and MasterCard are accepted.

An executive at the ReverseATM – whose clients range from fast-food eateries to large sporting venues like Madison Square Garden – told Side Dish that customers are never charged a fee for the debit cards.

Of course not–they get their piece from the business that accepts the card, as is normal.

Steven Hayward at Power Line.

It is fun to take in the Chronicle of Higher Education every day, because it is like reading a trade journal for an industry that knows it is in decline, along the lines of daily newspapers or buggy whip makers. Every day the Chron operates from a cringe mode about the problems of declining enrollment, financial pressures, the poor morale among DEI staff and the rising backlash against it, and above all paranoia about Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Yesterday the Chron had an especially revealing article about labor shortages in higher education. This will certainly come as bizarre news for the armies of un- and under-employed Ph.ds and adjunct instructors everywhere. But it turns out faculty hiring isn’t the main problem. Colleges are having a difficult time hiring—wait for it—administrators.

Babylon Bee.

Long a staple drink of people who hate actual beer, Bud Light felt putting Dylan Mulvaney’s face on a can would also attract people who hate actual women. “As a man acting out the most horrendously offensive stereotypes of women, Mulvaney taps into the soul of people who despise real women,” said Mr. Whitworth. “As a company dedicated to serving those who detest real beer, the partnership made perfect sense. The new beer can just shouts, ‘Come, enjoy this atrocious substitute for the real thing’.”

Read it.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

Tech Crunch.

Your romantic love story with Iris (get it, like IRS?) continues similarly throughout the game — while getting to know you, she asks you further questions, like what your address is and whether you have dependents (TH3K only works for single people without dependents, because Iris doesn’t want to get involved in a complicated situation and/or MSCHF did not make the game that complex… also, it doesn’t do state tax.) She even gets nosy enough to ask you for your annual income, tax withholdings and even your social security number, but you’re so enamored by Iris that you’re willing to look past her invasive questions — and the fact that she seems to love talking about taxes. A lot.

I am not making this up.

Washington Post.

To get our politics working again, we need a system that delivers energy (the ability for the government to get things done), republican safety (protection of our basic rights), popular sovereignty (adaptive responsiveness to the will of the people) and inclusion (all voices should be synthesized in the national voice of our House of Representatives). Real proximity of representatives to their constituents is necessary for delivering on all those design principles. For that, we need a bigger, and continuously growing, House of Representatives. We need smaller districts and fairer representation between more- and less-populous places.

But how big should the House be? That is also to ask how small should a district be. And based on what math? And on what principle of growth?

Scholars and advocates have been working on this question for decades. There are seven basic options, all compiled in a report on enlarging the House by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences commission on the state of our democracy, which I co-chaired. Those options would increase the size of Congress from 435 to between 572 to 9,400.

CBS News Pittsburgh.

Every day, we make environmental decisions. Recycling has become almost a reflex.

But did you ever think you are making an environmental or climate decision when you buy toilet paper?

Last week’s World Forest Day went pretty much unnoticed, except for one group which chose the day to release its Issue with Tissue report.

The report takes toilet paper makers to task for wiping out a lot of forest land.

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Germany and other European NATO members that agreed to send Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine are running into logistical problems. Germany finally relented and allowed NATO nations that had purchased Leopard 2 tanks from Germany to send them to Ukraine whereupon the real problems started. Most contributors found that their Leopard 2s needed remedial work because they never expected another recurrence of European military tension, let alone another war, and failed to complete, or never started, planned or recommend upgrades.

Delaying these upgrades seemed reasonable because the Americans were still an active NATO member and their M1 tanks were known to be up-to-date. There are still about 2,000 Leopard 2s in service with European nations. Unlike the Americans, the Europeans saw no need to complete needed upgrades to their tanks or even keep most of them operational. So the Ukrainians will have to wait until the Europeans get enough of their Leopard 2s operational or the Americans change their minds on how quickly they will deliver M-1s. There are already over 200 operational M-1s in Europe with American armored brigades. The Ukrainians don’t need American soldiers but they could use their M-1 tanks.

No, they couldn’t. Like the F-16s that everyone is talking about, it would take Ukranians about a year to get enough expertise with the M-1 to survive, much less prosper, in actual combat.

Washington Post.

You don’t have an anxiety toolkit? Well, you’d better get with the program.

Read it.

For eight years, the Scottish National Party (SNP) was synonymous with Nicola Sturgeon’s name. However, her legacy will always be a divisive one, marked by (among other things) a continuous fight for a second independence referendum in the wake of Brexit, as well as controversial progressive policies such as transformative green initiatives or the infamous Gender Bill, which may have contributed to her eventual resignation.

Now, the SNP appears to be moving in an even more leftist direction under the future leadership of Humza Yousaf. The health minister was the first to announce his intention to enter the leadership contest and chances are he will win it comfortably after most other prominent members of the SNP turned down the opportunity. Instead, they have chosen to back Yousaf, believing that the party needs a “fresh perspective.” At the moment, the biggest challenger to Yousaf’s bid is Kate Forbes, the SNP’s young, more socially conservative finance secretary, albeit with considerably weaker prospects.

Yeah, I can’t think of a more obvious Scottish Nationalist than ‘Hamza Yousaf’.

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A silicon-based Guide for the Perplexed.

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It’s this kind of shit that gives lawyers a bad name.

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Tech companies with names from the world of Lord of the Rings.

Zeldin dumps campaign treasurer he shared with Santos (Politico)

Journalist finds something unusual in George Santos’ campaign expenses (CNN)

Meet the Auschwitz survivor saluted by George Santos in Congress (The Forward)

Susan Quinn: Get Rid of George Santos

Santos’ unusual $199.99 campaign expenses are putting scrutiny on his longtime treasurer (CNN)

Santos expected to face House ethics committee probe (CNN) But no probe of Maxine Waters for funneling funds to her daughter’s business.

McCarthy: House Ethics Committee Investigating GOP Rep. George Santos

Santos is accused of harassing prospective staffer in his D.C. office (Washington Post)

About Those 2,500 Dogs That George Santos Claims He Saved (N.Y. Times)

George Santos, who claimed mom survived 9/11, invites ground zero volunteer to SOTU (ABC)

Ex-staffer claims George Santos sexually harassed him, violated pay rules (N.Y. Post)  Joining the witch-hunt for fun and profit.

George Santos Is Accused of Sexual Harassment in His Capitol Office (N.Y. Times)

The most important secret George Santos is keeping (CNN)

The One Lie That Could Get George Santos in the End (Daily Beast)

George Santos may owe thousands for traffic violations in two states (CBS)

George Santos: ‘I’ve kept 100 percent of my campaign promises’

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Welcome to the Whitest City in America.

Just 22 cups will be available from Proud Mary Coffee Roasters, which has locations in Portland and Austin, Texas.

Of course.

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A man suspected of breaking into a Seattle home has refused to come clean about his intentions, even though police found him fully clothed in a bathtub filled with water.

A woman returned to her home Friday night to find a window smashed and an unknown man inside the house, according to the Seattle Police Department.

She remained outside the home and called police. Upon their arrival, officers instructed anyone inside to come out. When they got no reply, they went in to search the home — and found a suspect in a bathroom.

“The man was clothed but very wet, and the bathtub was full of water,” police said in a statement.

Full of hopes and full of fears
Full of laughter full of tears
Full of dreams to last the years in Seattle

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A UK man was crushed to death by a hydraulic ‘telescopic’ Urinal designed to pop out of the ground for use.

The man, who has not been named, was performing maintenance on the pop-up urinal at Cambridge Circus outside the Palace Theatre, when the hydraulic unit trapped him below street level.

Think of it as evolution in action.

These types of pop-up urinals appeared in London around 20 years ago to discourage urination in the street.

Uh-huh. San Francisco, take note.

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A Florida woman was pulled from a storm drain for the third time in two years last week.

The Delray Beach Police Department said officers and firefighters responded to a report of a woman possibly in distress while swimming in a canal near the 500 block of Lindell Boulevard around noon on Wednesday. The department said officers located the woman, identified as Lyndsey Jane Kennedy, and asked if she needed help.

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Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees….

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

We wrote here about a task force of the State of California that is developing a proposal to pay reparations to the state’s black residents, to the tune of perhaps $800,000 apiece. But that is chump change compared with what is being demanded in San Francisco.

The City of San Francisco appointed an African American Reparations Advisory Committee which delivered its draft Plan in December. The Plan is embedded below, so you can peruse it at your leisure. It acknowledges, as it must, that neither the State of California nor the City of San Francisco ever countenanced slavery, but nevertheless claims that San Francisco has systemically discriminated against blacks from the beginning. And, of course, the “legacy” of such discrimination is still felt today, reflected in every “disparity” that is to the disadvantage of blacks.

On the whole, the document comes across as whinier than Prince Harry’s memoir. But for now, let’s focus on the proposed remedy. News accounts have reported that the Plan provides that San Francisco blacks should get $5 million apiece. Currently, San Francisco’s population is 895,000, of whom around 5% are classified as African-American. Assuming those numbers, around 44,750 people would get $5 million apiece, for a total of $223,750,000,000. Each San Franciscan who is not a recipient of reparations would be on the hook for approximately $263,000, or a little over $1 million for a family of four. (I know, there aren’t many families of four in San Francisco, but you get the idea.)

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

Leftists, perhaps thinking their war on reliable energy is well in hand, are now making war on scientific agriculture. The war has two main elements: opposition to fertilizers, without which billions of people could not be fed, and hostility toward animal husbandry. Leftists don’t want you to eat meat.

When you tell people that liberals’ end game is for them to eat bugs, they sometimes think you can’t be serious. Those are the people who aren’t paying attention. This article in an ostensible scientific site, is typical: “Making the case for using insects as food for both humans and livestock.”

Steve Sailer.

My impression has long been that the White House during Democratic administrations, bureaucrats, NGOs, academics, and the media routinely conspire together to promote The Latest Thing.

…

Occasionally, though, The Establishment screws up and gets the pieces in the wrong order, so the conspiracy is more evident. We can see this with the Gas Stove Fiasco of 2023.

Steve Sailer.

Dear ChatGPT: Write me a Washington Post book review of a novel by a whiny Asian-American guy obsessed with an Asian-American player in a black-dominated sport who once got a hot hand for seven games in a row. Blame everything on white people.

TIME magazine wanders out into Left field.

How did U.S. exercise trends go from reinforcing white supremacy to celebrating Richard Simmons? That evolution is explored in a new book by a historian of exercise, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, author of the book Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession, out Jan. 2023.

Because, you know, black people just can’t do shit when it comes to exercise.

Read it.

Perhaps you’ve seen the story on the Wall Street Journal editorial page today (or in some other outlet where it is booming this morning) about Stanford University’s “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative,” which reads like a parody of our idiotic woke university culture today. But no—Stanford employed a task force that worked for months to advocate that no one on campus use the word “American” because “This term often refers to people from the United States only, thereby insinuating that the US is the most important country in the Americas. . .”

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For much of its running time, Avatar: The Way of Water resembles nothing so much as one of those screensavers from the early 2000s that turned your computer monitor into a simulated aquarium. Remember? Fish floated by, there were some bubbles, it was very colorful and completely unrealistic. Soothing, though.

For a solid hour of The Way of Water—it’s the movie’s second in a complete running time of 3 hours and 10 minutes—we are treated to tall blue and green cartoon characters swimming and diving and riding on the backs of alien seahorses and having sign-language conversations with whale-like creatures. It’s like a nature documentary, only there’s no actual nature, just the world’s most unimaginably expensive computer-generated imagery blended with live-action performances the computer then draws over. (Kate Winslet is in this movie. You’d never know. It could have been me.)

Check it out.

Move over David Deeble, J.P. Sears, and Ammo Grrrll: we have a new comic to induct into the Official Power Line Comedy Club: Tyler Fischer.

Here he neatly skewers NPR and practically every other major woke news media sensibility in just sixty seconds.

Read it.

I’m sure we are all tired of hearing about David French.  But this is ridiculous.  This isn’t a legal issue (as French knows full well).  It isn’t just about Twitter either; Facebook also suppressed the story.  Nor was the government totally uninvolved; Congressional Democrats applied pressure behind the scenes.  But this idea that there is something wrong about making a political issue out of an entire sector of industry conspiring to secretly manipulate an election.  That is obscene.  French should be ashamed of himself.

But he’s not. Which is the problem with David French.

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But it was the very serious journalists at the Bezos Post who delivered the death blow, gravely noting that Musk’s affinity for Diet Coke puts him in league with the beverage’s other “unsavory acolytes, including former president Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein.”

I’m sure Hitler would have drunk Diet Coke if it had been available to him. After all he was a vegetarian, and you know what fascist assholes vegetarians all are.

Victor Davis Hanson.

For various loose definitions of the term ‘morality’.

Sam Bankman-Fried is the ultimate dangerous and ridiculous expression of the most toxic and creepy culture in America. If he did not exist, he would have to be invented.

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

Meghan Markle (the Duchess of Sussex) has a podcast on which, earlier today, she hosted Paris Hilton as a guest. The topic of their discussion was “bimbos.” (They said it, I didn’t.)

All actors/actresses are narcissists. Narcissists are crazy. Crazy people are dangerous. Avoid if at all possible.