Theodore Dalrymple peeks behind the curtain.

The son of a friend of mine applied for a place at medical school and was turned down on the grounds that his personal statement was inadequate. I don’t know what was wrong with it; perhaps he employed incorrect old clichés rather than the correct new ones. Having the means to do so, my friend sent his son to a tutor who specialized in personal statements (every bureaucratic requirement is an economic opportunity for an ex-bureaucrat wanting to strike out for himself). No doubt the tutor in personal statements advised him to put in more about his passion for social justice and equality. At any rate, it worked and he was accepted.

Read it.

California left-wingers who want to densify cities to make them affordable are getting some push-back from other left-wingers who think density will push low-income people out of neighborhoods. A proposed bill to eliminate zoning in transit-rich areas in order to allow developers to build high-density housing would, say opponents, displace low-income families from neighborhoods with high rental rates in favor of high-income whites who can afford to pay for high-rise housing.

The opponents aren’t wrong. On one hand, increasing housing supply would seem to make housing more affordable. But affordable for whom? With housing prices in some California cities averaging more than $1,000 per square foot, building high-density housing that costs $400 to $500 a square foot would allow people who can afford that to find a place to live. But hardly anyone can afford that.

Read it.

How many such tragedies will it take to bring about sensible immigrant-control laws?

ZMan is not afraid to ask the obvious questions.

Why is George Soros still alive?

For most of human history, a person who caused trouble for rulers found himself either on the run or on a pike. A earl or prince that made trouble for the king was dragged before the king, humiliated and then hanged. If he fought back, then the king sacked his lands, killed his family and made an even bigger spectacle of killing the the troublemaker. After all, the point of political power is to reward your allies and punish your enemies. Yet, George Soros, an international troublemaker, is free to make trouble wherever he likes.

The obvious reply to that is civilized nations no longer rely on political assassinations to handle their business. Political leaders have a self interest in discouraging the practice of killing heads of state. If ruler X has ruler Y killed, because it advantages him, the other rulers have no choice but to band together and kill ruler X. Otherwise, it is a lawless world of all against all. President Gerald Ford issued an executive order in 1976 prohibiting US intelligence services from conducting political assassinations for this reason.

That makes sense with legitimate political leaders, but George Soros is a rootless grifter, who has no allegiance to any government. Killing him would be no different than droning a terrorist. Some argue that international law prohibits targeted assassinations, but international law is mostly meaningless. The Israelis have been using targeted assassination against whoever they like for a long time, including the murder of Canadian engineer Gerald Bull. The US has droned more Arabs than we can count.

I’ve wondered about that myself. Offing people like George Soros is kind of what the CIA is all about.

Read it,

Even minorities own guns because of the minority. What do they know that she doesn’t.

Most black people who die from guns do so at the hands of other black people. But they never tell you that on the evening news.

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the obvious questions.

But let’s look at Mike Tirico instead as an example of how rare it is in modern non-Hispanic America for somebody who appears to be kind of black not to claim to be black. I won’t call him “the exception that proves the rule” because that always triggers a lot of people, such as a certain federal judge, who want to explain that, logically, an exception can’t prove a rule. So I will call Tirico an example of somebody whose famous exceptionalness to the general tendency offers support for the tendency.

The tendency is that people who are significantly black by ancestry seldom self-identify as white in recent decades (assuming they aren’t from some culture like Latin America where that is encouraged). This in contradiction to the popular theory of White Privilege.

Deirdre McClosky fisks Richard Thaler’s Nobel Prize in Economics.

Adam Smith spoke of “the man of system” who “seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board.” Thaler and his benevolent friends are men, and some few women, of system. They hate the Chicago School, have never heard of the Austrian School, dismiss spontaneous order, and favor bossing people around—for their own good, understand. Employing the third most unbelievable sentence in English (the other two are “The check is in the mail” and “Of course I’ll respect you in the morning”), they declare cheerily, “We’re from the government and we’re here to help.”

We humans face a choice of treating people as children or as adults. A liberal society, Smith’s “liberal plan of [social] equality, [economic] liberty, and [legal] justice,” treats adults as adults. The principle of an illiberal society, from Thaler’s to the much worse kind, is that you are to be corrected not through respectful dialog that treats you as an equal, but by compulsion or trickery, which treats you like a toddler about to walk into traffic.

What some on the alt-right call ‘Cloud People’ versus ‘Mud People’. In case you’re in doubt, you and I are Mud People.

Wikipedia lists fully 257 cognitive biases. In the category of decision-making biases alone there are anchoring, the availability heuristic, the bandwagon effect, the baseline fallacy, choice-supportive bias, confirmation bias, belief-revision conservatism, courtesy bias, and on and on. According to the psychologists, it’s a miracle you can get across the street.

For Thaler, every one of the biases is a reason not to trust people to make their own choices about money. It’s an old routine in economics.

And politics.

The Progressive economists believed they saw monopolies, spillovers, informational asymmetry, consumer ignorance, producer ignorance—in short, everyone’s folly and ignorance except the nudging government’s—to the number of over one hundred imperfections. They imagined a new one every year or so, and lately have been getting Nobels for discovering allegedly fresh market failures. Paul Krugman, for example, received the prize in 2008, supposedly for reinventing monopolistic competition for international trade. He deserved it eventually, though he got it embarrassingly prematurely (compare Obama’s for peace) because the social democratic Swedes wanted to buck up a left-of-center columnist. Krugman tweeted about Thaler: “Yes! Behavioral econ is the best thing to happen to the field in generations.” He would say that.

Lenin would have agreed, had he still been around.

The essence of civilization is Carriage and Storage.

Without Carriage and Storage, you got nothin’. You’re living from day to day, sometimes hour to hour, and your future is so uncertain that it might as well not exist.

If you gather more than you can eat right now, you need Storage, or you’re mostly wasting your time. Dork.

If you kill more than you can eat right now, you need Storage, or you’re mostly wasting resources. Shame on you.

If your Storage doesn’t readily convert into Carriage, then you are fixed in one place, and eventually something (or someone) will find you and kill you. And they will eat what you have stored, and you will feel like an idiot, or would if you were still around.

Think about it. What are buildings? Partly shelter, mostly storage. What are vehicles? Exclusively Carriage. What would we be without buildings and vehicles? Chimpanzees without the hair. Not a pleasant prospect.

There is a reason the women carry bags, and men have pockets.

Think about it.

Read it.

If you haven’t read any of the novels of Ian M. Banks, you probably ought to do so.

This article tells you why.

It also contains some useful discussion of culture, technology, history, and moral choice.

This is, I think, where Banks draws upon his most sociologically astute observation, again extrapolating from contemporary cultural trends. There are a variety of developments that are associated with modernity. One of them involves a move away from ascribed toward achieved sources of identity. The idea is rather simple: in traditional societies, people were defined largely by the circumstances that they were born into, or their ascribed characteristics – who your family was, what “station” in life you were born to, what gender you were, etc. There were a strict set of roles that prescribed how each person in each set of circumstances was to act, and life consisted largely of acting out the prescribed role. A modern society, by contrast, favours “choice” over “circumstances,” and indeed, considers it the height of injustice that people should be constrained or limited by their circumstances. Thus there is a move toward achieved sources of identity – what school you went to, what career you have chosen, who you decided to marry, and the lifestyle you adopt. “Getting to know someone,” in our society, involves asking them about the choices they have made in life, not the circumstances they were born into.

There are, of course, advantages and disadvantages to both arrangements. The advantages of choice, for people living in an achievement-oriented society, are too obvious to be worth enumerating. But there are disadvantages. Under the old system of ascribed statuses, people did not suffer from “identity crises,” and they did not need to spend the better part of their 20’s “finding themselves.” When everything is chosen, however, then the basis upon which one can make a choice becomes eroded. There are no more fixed points, from which different options can be evaluated. This generates the crisis of meaning that Taylor associates with the decline of strong evaluation.

Read it.

A story out of the United Kingdom details a University of Manchester research project to determine the carbon footprint of the humble sandwich. The upshot: a prepackaged and refrigerated breakfast sandwich with egg, bacon or sausage, produces as much carbon dioxide as a 12-mile car trip. No word on what kind of car the scientists assumed in this calculation — likely not a Tesla charged with coal-fired electricity.

At the other end of the scale was a ham and cheese sandwich made in one’s own kitchen. Presumably the fact that such a homemade meal didn’t require an employee who had to commute to work to make the sandwich, along with the packaging, shipping and refrigeration for hours afterward, played a large role in that sandwich’s superior carbon footprint rating.

Once you know what the ‘carbon footprint’ is (assuming your calculations are anywhere correct, which I dispute), so what? The assumption seems to be that a ‘carbon footprint’ is a bad thing. Is it? Almost everything in life seems to have a ‘carbon footprint’ of some kind — but saying that doesn’t really tell you anything useful.

The Unarticulated Assumption of this whole effort seems to be that a smaller ‘carbon footprint’ is better than a larger one, but without any sort of scale by which carbon footprints can be measured, and some sort of idea as to what constitutes an ‘acceptable’ carbon footprint, it tells us Absolutely Nothing Useful. Another Unarticulated Assumption is that somehow human being are responsible for all of the ThoughtCrime ‘carbon footprints’ existing in the world today — which is proglodyte religious dogma, and (again) not useful. (What is the ‘carbon footprint’ of a whitetail deer? Is that a good thing or a bad thing?)

Presuming that the Manchester scientists are correct in their data, so what? As a former California lawmaker, I know the practical effect of such a study is to inform policymakers to “Do something!” That something most likely being a tax on prepared foods with higher carbon footprints.

My question is: How does increasing taxes solve whatever problem is caused by ‘carbon footprints’? Then theory seems to be that if we slap a tax on something, then less of that something will be produced. The flaw in that reasoning is that history teaches us that whenever we slap a tax on something, people just bend their minds to evading the tax, not toward decreasing the ‘carbon footprint’. The major disqualifying counter-argument is that, if a large ‘carbon footprint’ is a bad thing, then the proper governmental action is to ban the activity, not just tax it. (Somehow that never seems to occur to legislators.)

The guilty flee where no man pursueth.

I’ll bet you’re wondering why the Democrats are so committed to importing foreigners into the U.S.

Well, I’ll tell you.

When you say ‘American’ to a Democrat, they think ‘redneck Republican’ — hence their hostility to the use of the word ‘American’, the flag, patriotism, etc. Their immediate reaction to this is ‘Not Our Kind’ — and they’re right. The ideal Democrat country consists of Their Kind of People and an appropriate servant population, with nothing resembling a middle class to cause trouble.

There are two reasons why Democrats want tons and tons of foreigners to come freely to the U.S.

1. They hope such people will vote Democrat (illegally if they can get away with it) in return for generous government benefits. (This is why Democrats also advocate ‘removing barriers to citizenship’, because it interferes with their process.) It was customary for Democrat city political machines (and may still be, for all I know) to provide ringers who would swear falsely that the immigrant had lived in the U.S. for the requisite period of time and was an upstanding candidate . My great-grandfather benefited from this system, being sworn in as a U.S. citizen the day he got off the boat from Ireland in exchange for a commitment to vote Democrat until (and, for all I know, after) he died. (My father was born a couple of weeks after my grandfather died, and my grandmother remarried a non-Irishman, which is probably what broke the chain.)
2. Such people are already accustomed to being governed by a narrow corrupt ruling class that is more white than they are. They think it’s How The World Works and, while they’re not happy about it, they don’t see any prospect of changing it (because it never changes in the place from which they came). If you doubt it, look at the sort of countries from which Democrats prefer their immigrants: Latin America, the Middle East, the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa – any place that could accurately be described by a non-Democrat as a ‘shithole country’. Nobody from democratic countries in Europe or East Asia need apply.

There.

That was easy. Ask me a hard one.

Read it.

I think this is an extended metaphor about politicians and journalists but I’m not sure which is which.

Read it.

Why not? It’s already turned a number of supposedly intelligent and well-education people into paranoid morons.

Read it.

Ben Thompson’s Stratechery is a must-read site for tech industry analysis. This review of the Amazon/Berkshire Hathaway/JPMorgan Chase announcement, and its implications for the future, is a well-reasoned look at what might be going on here.

Imagine Amazon doing to health care what it did to publishing. One of the chief defects in the American health care system is lack of transparency — people can’t price shop because they don’t know, and in many cases can’t get, the actual prices charged for their health care because people aren’t the customers, insurance companies and employers are the customers; people are just the patients. (Nobody bothers telling your cat how much the vet charges, because the cat is not paying the bill.)

Read it.

The open borders philosophy is wrong, because, like the failed ideologies of the past century, it doesn’t account for unpleasant facts about human nature and society. The truth Communism missed is that human beings prefer self-interest to compelled altruism. The truth open borders advocates miss is that human societies are tribal.

West Hunter continues his evaluation of Bryan Caplan’s new book.

For example, test scores convey useful information. They could help show that an applicant is smart even though he attended a mediocre school – the same role they play in college admissions. But employers seldom request test scores, and although applicants may provide them, few do. Caplan says ” The word on the street: putting high scores on your resume suggests you’re smart but socially inept. ” Who would understand that better than Bryan? So valuing conformity leads to totally arbitrary standards – they exist because they exist. Let me suggest another possibility: flaunting high scores risks irritating the drones in HR. HR tends be packed with underperformers and people that the corporation felt compelled to hire (AA). Few people in HR have high scores on standardized tests. Other employees routinely express contempt for HR/Personnel. In the immortal words of Lieutenant Callahan: ” Personnel? That’s for assholes. ”

In the long run, who you hire is truly important, so it seems odd that companies would routinely allot this task to feebs. Yet it happens. The same thing is true for college admissions – the people doing it are not that special.

(The headline is, of course, taken from the Tom Lehrer song, which was in turn taken from the title of the Yale alma mater Bright College Years, which Lehrer, a Harvard man, was intending to mock. We’re everywhere.)

Jim Goad comments on modern culture, as only he can.

After the glorious and undeniably hilarious election of my towheaded homeboy Donald J. Trump, a common lament among his eternally dyspeptic naysayers went something along the lines of, “I don’t want to live in a country where Muslims and Mexicans have to worry about being attacked by mobs of toothless racist rednecks.”

Well, good luck with that goal, hon, although I don’t think you need much luck. I don’t think that would have been a likely scenario, anyway, despite your wildest fantasies and most depraved yearnings. Those toothless racist rednecks don’t care about you, or even think about you, nearly as much as you would seem to like.

Here’s my dream: I don’t want to live in a country with a reigning moral code that extends blanket sympathy to Muslims and Mexicans but has nothing but scorn for “toothless racist rednecks.”

Joel Kotkin uses an incredibly mixed metaphor.

Ultimately all parties are coalitions of disparate groups and interests. Much attention has been on the divisions within the ruling GOP — libertarians, social conservatives and populist/nationalists. But with the Democrats poised to make a comeback this year, and perhaps gain control of all three branches by 2020, perhaps it’s time to analyze divisions that may determine the extent of their ascendancy.

Three different, and often somewhat hostile, tendencies now define the Democratic Party. These include the corporate oligarchs, causists obsessed with particular hot button issues, and (arguably the most critical to long-term ascendency) populists who bear much of the party’s social democratic message and legacy.

Read it.

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life

Read it.

The Great Depression brought the failure of thousands of banks in the United States, and none in Canada. Comparing Canada and the United States suggests that there was something deeply wrong with the American banking system. But what was it? The short answer is that American banks were heavily regulated, contrary to Canadian banks.

Few things strike fear in the ‘progressive’ soul than the term ‘unregulated’. Read the news: Whenever something new arises, the first reaction by the Usual Suspects is a call to ‘regulate’ (i.e. impose political controls via government) it. The ‘progressive’ mind reacts to the prospect of human activity outside of politics the way the Pope reacts to the prospect of Mortal Sin.

Mark Derian examines the aliens among us.

Joseph Campbell suggested as a matter of fact that Westerners do not consider the Chinese to be people. It’s why the Chinese have a portrait of Mao hanging from one “Gate of Heavenly Peace,” and we get our pictures taken in front of it like it’s the Parthenon. It’s why Mao’s regime is technically still in power yet we keep giving them the Olympics. It’s why the Pope doesn’t hold the Church in China to the same standard she holds the Church in Europe. It’s even why 87,000 Chinese died in an earthquake not ten years ago though it barely moved the needle on our cultural seismograph.

Campbell gave no explanation as to why this is, though the implication seems to be the Chinese look different than we do. This may be a factor in our “othering”—to borrow a millennial usage—but what distinguishes the Chinese more than their almond eyes is the fact that, on a fundamental level, they don’t think like we do.

Language is a tool of cognition. To understand how people think, first understand their language. The main distinction about the Chinese language is it’s symbolic as opposed to phonetic. It’s as different from English as the Koran is to the Bible. The dissimilarity runs so deep that we cannot compare them to each other, only with each other.

Throughout most of human history, the Chinese have been the most advanced civilization on earth. Why, then, do they not dominate world culture as Europeans do? Some single out the Chinese ideogrammatic writing system as to blame — it cannot serve as a tool for organizing, sorting, and retrieving information the way that phonetic languages can, nor is it convenient for encoding foreign languages with no effective native writing system. This is why no nation that lacks a native writing system is adopting ideograms (the Japanese and Koreans did so because there was no alternative, and it impedes their progress even today); almost all turn to some variant of the Latin or Cyrillic or Arabic alphabet.

Chinese has more than 50,000 pictures, each representing a concept. A picture of a flower means “flower,” a picture of a house means “house,” and a picture of a middle-aged man means “dad.” It’s the kind of language you would come up with if you were an uncreative third grader. It’s limited as a tool of cognition in that it doesn’t challenge the speaker to go beyond the perceptual level of awareness. The allure of symbolic language is that it substitutes memorization for understanding.

Not coincidentally, communism offers the same allure. It’s a concrete idea that solves every societal problem in one fell decree, so there’s no point in learning much else. When the Chinese do adopt free enterprise, they only do so because it makes sense perceptually—that is, it’s practical.

Mao was unable to make Communism work in China because it is essentially alien to the Chinese culture. Deng made it work by keeping the Communist facade and reinstating the traditional Chinese polity in a Clever Plastic Disguise. For some reason, nobody seems to remark on the fact of billionaires in a notionally equalitarian political system. We’re so used to it that nobody notices how anomalous it is.

Megan McArdle has learned some useful things.

You can no longer tell yourself that you might move to Lisbon, learn Portuguese, and take up the guitar. You cannot learn Portuguese at your age. You can’t remember new words anymore; you can’t even remember where you have left your keys.

So it seems a good opportunity to do two things. First, to wish Oprah Winfrey a happy belated birthday. And second, to address this “12 Rules for Life” meme that you young whippersnappers have got up to on the social medias. I am probably more than halfway through my life now; I ought to have some rules.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Most of you know the story of the boy and the starfish. For the few who don’t, it goes something like this:

Thousands of starfish washed up on a beach, and a young boy began throwing them back into the water, one-by-one. A man stopped him and pointed out that his effort made no difference since he couldn’t hope to save more than a few of the creatures. The boy looked at the starfish in his hand and replied, “Well, it matters to this one,” and he threw it into the sea.

The man in the parable is a collectivist who hates inequality. If you can’t help everyone, it’s unfair to help a few. The boy is an individualist who knows that individual life matters; we help those we can.

Read it.

How about that Global Warming, eh?

Read it.

I rather doubt that large gatherings of white people, especially in Minnesota, are as dangerous for black people as large gatherings of black people are to white people.

Read it.

I don’t expect you to have read Bryan Caplan’s new book, The Case Against Education, although it would be helpful if you had at least heard about it (which you will have done did you frequent the rightish side of the Force as I regularly do).

Caplan is one of the more eccentric members of George Mason University’s thoroughly libertarian Economics Department, and loves to take unexpected positions on various issues; his The Myth of the Rational Voter and Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids are well worth attention.

This article at West Hunter is an interesting review and response to Caplan’s  book.

He dismisses objections from educational psychologists who claim that studying a subject improves you in subtle ways even after you forget all of it. I too find that hard to believe. On the other hand, it looks to me as if poorly-digested fragments of information picked up in college have some effect on public policy later in life: it is no coincidence that most prominent people in public life (at a given moment) share a lot of the same ideas. People are vaguely remembering the same crap from the same sources, or related sources. It’s correlated crap, which has a much stronger effect than random crap.

That matches my experience.

These widespread new ideas are usually wrong. They come from somewhere – in part, from higher education. Along this line, Caplan thinks that college has only a weak ideological effect on students. I don’t believe he is correct. In part, this is because most people use a shifting standard: what’s liberal or conservative gets redefined over time. At any given time a population is roughly half left and half right – but the content of those labels changes a lot. There’s a shift.

I think it’s deeper than that. I have long maintained the there is no such thing as ‘conservatism’ or ‘liberalism’, because those terms describe aspects of personality, not concrete political views; what constitutes ‘conservatism’ especially changes depending on what point in human history is being dealt with. (The case of ‘liberalism’ is somewhat stronger, because in modern times that equates to ‘progressivism’, which does have a concrete political viewpoint that doesn’t change with time, but if  you wander outside post-1960s North America it reverts to being relative.)

I think the fraction of the population that believed in butt-kicking babes was lower in 1920: probably less than 1%, with most of those believers suffering from tertiary syphilis. What changed? At the root, most of the change must stem from professor-types. There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them. Many of those absurd ideas now have wide currency.

Can’t disagree with that. We all want to believe that Black Widow exists, but deep in our hearts we know that it’s as much of a fantasy as Thor.

Read it.

Illegal immigrants in Tel Aviv ‘invited’ to actress Sarah Silverman’s sister’s home as right-wing activists distribute ‘invitations’.

Hmmm. Wonder how Nancy Pelosi would like a couple hundred ‘Dreamers’ on her doorstep looking for a handout.

Joseph Epstein penned this classic in 1989.

Victims have never been in short supply in the world, but the rush to identify oneself as a victim is rather a new feature of modern life. Why this should be so isn’t very complicated: to position oneself as a victim is to position oneself for sympathy, special treatment, even victory. It’s not only individuals who benefit. In international politics, one sees the deliberate strategy of positioning for victimhood played out in the Middle East. Although Israel is a country of fewer than four million Jewish people surrounded by Arab nations numbering some 200 million people, very few of whom mean the Israelis well, the Arabs have somehow been able to make themselves – or at least the Palestinians as their representatives – seem the great victims in the Middle East. Every time a woman or a small child is injured in the organized riots known as the intifada – one might ask why small children are allowed anywhere near such danger – the victimhood of the Palestinians is reinforced and their cause, as victims, made all the stronger.

Gandhi was the great teacher of the art of victimhood, of setting one’s victimization on full public display. Part of the genius of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was to recognize the value of Gandhi’s lessons for the American civil rights movement, and most especially the lesson of nonviolent resistance, which not only highlights victimhood but gives it, in a good cause, a genuinely moral aura. Their moral and physical courage lent civil rights workers in the South an appeal that was irresistible to all but the most hard-hearted of segregationists. Americans, all of whose families began in this country as immigrants, have a built-in tradition of having known victimhood, at least historically, and hence a strong tendency toward sympathy for victims.

Makes more sense than any State of the Union speech I’ve ever heard.

Read it.

In 2012 the Chinese naval ships operating off Somalia were seen accompanied by what appeared to be a cruise ship. It was actually the first of two “barracks ships” that the Chinese Navy has built since 2011. Both are 30,000 ton ships that appear to be based on cruise ship designswith lots of topside cabins with windows and large open decks for recreation. These two ships are indeed “barracks ships” but were designed to be quite flexible.

They were first seen in operation off Somalia and described as an example the Chinese Navy learning how important morale at sea was. Until 2008 Chinese warships rarely spent more than a week away from port but since then China has been sending “Naval Escort Task Forces” to participate in the anti-piracy patrol off Somalia. There, for four months (plus a month to get to and from China) the two warships (accompanied by a supply ship) look for pirates and escort merchant ships. On those long voyages Chinese officers soon noted that many months at sea put more strain on sailors than the usual shorter training voyages.

Read it.

The nerve of that guy.

Where’s the fun in that?

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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The obvious question is: If this is such a ‘powerful political movement’, how is it so easily ‘neutered’?

I’d be more inclined to the thought that this is the perfect example when proglodyte delusion meets reality. Reality wins every time.

Case in point: Grammys 2018: Pink wears t-shirt and jeans for awards performance in solidarity with #TimesUp and #MeToo

Read it.

The 5:2 diet, based on intermittent fasting, involves eating pretty much whatever you like for five days a week, then for two nonconsecutive days restricting calories to 500 for women and 600 for men.

Orthodox Christians have been doing this for 2000 years. The fast days are Wednesday and Friday.

Read it.

Democrats are great at saying things that sound like English — but are just nonsense.

If you listen to the first video, it does sound like English that you can’t quite catch.

There is, of course, the famous scene in The Court Jester where Danny Kaye does the same thing with French, Italian, and German — and later on for Spanish. So it’s not just a one-way street.