Read it.

Well, duh. We have fluoride in our toothpaste, fluoride rinses, and just try to get through a visit with your dentist without him (or her) pushing a fluoride treatment ( that YOU have to pay for) on you.

Rollo Tomassi: “If there is no bogeyman, nobody gets paid.”

Babylon Bee.

Satire — read it before it comes true.

OffGuardian.

This title is intentionally a play on the pro-gun faction’s slogan “Guns Don’t Kill People, People Kill People.” At a certain time before my social awakening, I was appalled by all of the gun violence in the US and elsewhere and therefore believed restricting gun sales and use (through more stringent registration regulations) might be a good idea.

However, I never thought that particular NRA slogan was nonsense as so many of my liberal friends did. It actually rings quite true. Yes, you can still argue (as the leftists do) that if there were not as many guns lying about, people wouldn’t use them to kill other people. To me, that is a rather weak argument.

I have known many gun owners, and I must say as a group they are the most responsible people amongst my friends. The people who use guns to kill others indiscriminately are typically mentally deranged and in need of psychological intervention. So, we either reach out and come up with ways to help these people, or we remove access to guns—for everyone. Which way do you think the agenda believes we should go?

That seems to me equivalent to removing all cars so drunk people don’t have access to them to kill other people with. I know, I know…those who would wish to argue with me would say “Cars have a useful value, guns do not.” It isn’t so much taking away the guns as material objects, it is taking away the right to have them.

Priorities, man, priorities….

American Dreaming.

How sure are we about a future population crash, and would a decline in the population necessarily be a disaster for humanity? On both scores, there is ample reason to be skeptical.

“Just because no one understands you doesn’t mean you’re an artists.”

Read it.

The essential complaint of populists is that democracy is a noble ideal from which we have strayed. To be precise, it has been killed off by a hyper-progressive, self-serving, out-of-touch establishment—a betrayal that has occurred most of all at the expense of Europe’s native working-classes. In the 21st century, any conservative-minded counter-elite worth its salt must either act in the interests of these people or resign themselves to the only plausible alternative: indefinite left-wing political domination.

Bear in mind, too, that the Left of this century will be nothing like the Left of the last. The genuine heirs to Keir Hardie and Clement Atlee, well-represented by ‘Blue Labour’ figures like Lord Glasman in Britain and paleo-leftist parties like Sahra Wagenknecht in Germany, do not have demographic momentum on their side. The 21st century Left will consist of activists more inclined to condemn Winston Churchill as a racist, genocidal maniac than to smile at the thought of having served in his war cabinet, as Atlee himself did.

At least since Tony Blair, Britain’s former party of the proletariat has been consciously dependent on minority voting blocs, having ditched solidarity with the working man for the politics of racial, ethnic, and religious grievance. Andrew Neather, a former speechwriter for Blair, once had an unwise moment of candour in the Evening Standard, admitting that under New Labour mass immigration was partly “intended … to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.”

Wall Street Journal.

An academic paper in 2010 popularized $75,000 as the salary threshold beyond which earning more money didn’t make people any happier. More recent research indicates that there is no such plateau.

Indeed there is not. There is no such thing as having too much money, unless maybe you’re Barack Obama (and I don’t see him giving any of it back, or sending it on to the IRS).

Anybody who says (or thinks) money doesn’t buy happiness is a pea-brain.

Babylon Bee.

Satire — read quickly before it comes true.

Stop worrying about what other people think of you.

If you really got to know them, you’d realize that their opinions suck.

Babylon Bee.

Satire — read quickly before it comes true.

Babylon Bee.

Satire — read quickly before it comes true.

Read it.

The underwater caves of the Yucatán Peninsula are a window to the distant past. Through two million years and over multiple glaciation cycles, these caves have been transformed. When the sea level was high, the caves flooded, and their reach expanded.

During the ice ages, the caves dried out as the sea level dropped, and the seeping water from the surface decorated the caverns with deposits such as stalagmites and stalactites, collectively known as speleothems. Then, with the next cycle came higher sea levels again, flooding the caves and preserving in time the speleothems and everything else with them.

I have been diving the unique submerged landscapes of Mexican cenotes, or sinkholes, for almost ten years, exploring their dark, flooded tunnels and capturing their secrets. The last time the shallow caves on the Yucatán Peninsula flooded was around 8,000 years ago, which means that every diver in these caves travels back in time to a prehistoric age. The paleontological and archaeological remains preserved within them would disintegrate at the surface, which makes these caves a perfect time capsule.

Read it.

Peter Vlaming, a longtime high school French teacher in Virginia, was fired in 2018 for refusing to use a student’s preferred pronouns. On Monday, after years of litigation and a win for Vlaming at the Virginia Supreme Court, the school board finally capitulated and agreed to settle the case for $575,000.

But the West Point School Board’s refusal for five years to protect Vlaming’s free speech and religious freedom rights came with an exorbitant price tag.

In 2018, one of Vlaming’s female students at West Point High School began identifying as a transgender male. Although Vlaming consistently used the student’s preferred name, the French teacher carefully avoided using third-person pronouns so as not to violate his own religious beliefs.

None of this would be possible without the guarantees embodied in the U.S. Constitution. See what’s happening in Europe and the U.K. if you don’t believe me.

Babylon Bee.

Satire — read it quickly before it comes true.

Babylon Bee.

Satire — read it quickly before it comes true.

Read it.

The other day I saw a meme that went something like this:

Isn’t it crappy how basic human activities like singing, dancing, and making art have been turned into skills instead of being recognized as behaviors? The point of doing these things has become to get good at them. But they should be recognized as things humans do innately, like how birds sing or bees make hives.

I thought about that for a minute, then decided: making websites should be the same!

The original vision for the web, according to Tim Berners-Lee, was to make it a collaborate medium where everyone could read and write.

Social media sort of achieved this, but the incentives are off. And it’s not just about ownership of the content you produce and who can monetize it, but the context in which you produce it.

Everyone ought to have a personal website. That way they can make public anything that they think ought to be made public, and other people have the ability to consume it or not, as they choose. As an added bonus, the type of people who require attention/validation to feel good about themselves increase their chances of becoming so despondent and lonely that they self-delete, thus improving the gene pool for the rest of us.

I’m all about improving the gene pool for the rest of us. Just sayin’.

Curtis Yarvin:

Leftism is always and everywhere an aristocratic force. Perhaps this is most clearly seen in the Labor Party UK, which from its roots in the Ruskinites and Fabians has always been the political vehicle of the university Left. Across the last century, this vehicle has switched its fuel from the disappearing British worker to the burgeoning British immigrant—without any substantive change in the nature of its leadership! This is an absolutely wild way to use the word “democracy.”

Read it.

With still no resolution in the months-long diplomatic row between Brussels and Budapest over the latter’s alleged violation of European Union asylum rules, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán doubled down on his government’s previous rhetoric, saying he would begin bussing illegal migrants straight to the EU capital if the Commission insists on collecting hundreds of millions of euros in accumulated fines—despite Budapest’s willingness to implement the reforms being demanded.

And, indeed, it would serve them right.

Read it.

My Grann’s edition of The Grady County Extension Homemaker Council’s cookbook Down Home Cookin’ is missing its front and back cover. Once made of thin, flimsy pieces of plastic decorated with an old barn and windmill, the cover has long since fallen off and some of the pages are loose. The book is held together by three red rubber bands. My Grann explains that the plastic binder got brittle and began to fall apart—the rubber bands are her solution. The pages of the cookbook are yellowed from years of use. At least three generations of women in my family, including myself, have flipped through these pages, leaving them stained with the oils from their fingers and the drippings of in-progress recipes. Most importantly to me, they scribbled in the margins. My family’s edition of Down Home Cookin’ has reached a critical mass of notes in the marginalia such that it no longer counts as a simple copy of a cookbook: it is my Grann’s cookbook, our family cookbook. Holding it in my hands in my apartment in California (my Grann kindly agreed to mail it to me) feels off. It feels so delicate here, out of the context of her home, her kitchen, in the little cupboard where she has kept all of her cookbooks since I was a child. Now, it is more like a museum piece, something precious and precarious, meant to be handled with care, preserved, analyzed.

My mother had an old composition book in which she kept all of the recipes she had accumulated throughout her life, starting off with taking Home Ec from the nuns in high school and extending through over six decades of being a homemaker. I wish I had thought to make a copy of it before she passed on and everything got lost. I especially miss the Connie’s Fudge recipe.

Babylon Bee.

Satire — read it quickly before it comes true.

Read it.

Well, you pick one up and you put it in your pocket. Nothing to it.

The real problem is finding the pawpaw patch.

Read it.

In 2009 Paul Graham wrote a thoughtful essay titled “Cities and Ambition.” There he proposes that a great city is defined by the sort of ambitions it kindles—or perhaps more accurately, the sort of ambitious it gathers.

…

When I discussed this essay on Twitter many of my followers took issue with Graham’s premise. Millions of human beings call a city like New York, San Francisco, or London home. The dreams of these millions cannot be shrunk down to one prestige occupation. Folks in Los Angeles were particularly resistant: the Angeleno who works in law or shipping resents when his city is reduced to its most vapid industry.

These objections are obviously true yet somewhat irrelevant to Graham’s larger point: Every city has its own aspirational ideal, and this ideal influences who a city holds in high honor. Packed as they are with so many millions, large cities contain almost every kind of ambition—but not every city will esteem each ambition equally. “Professors in New York and the Bay area are second class citizens,” Graham comments, “till they start hedge funds or startups respectively.”2 Likewise, in Cambridge the financier and the founder will be held in high esteem—but less esteem than the scientist or the scholar.

Read it.

Tom Thumb in Plano, Texas. Star Market in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Pavilions in Newport Beach, California. Jewel-Osco in Glenview, Illinois. What do these regional grocery chains have in common? They’re all owned by Albertsons, the Boise, Idaho-based company with more than 2,200 locations under about two dozen banners.

Over the past three decades, the traditional supermarket industry shrunk as a handful of big-name grocers acquired their smaller local and regional rivals. Now Walmart, Kroger, Aldi (Süd) and Albertsons own a third of all U.S. grocery stores locations, according to a Washington Post analysis of OpenStreetMap location data.

But the marquee companies could further concentrate their dominance: A federal judge in Portland, Ore., is deciding whether Kroger and Albertsons can proceed with a merger in what would be the biggest supermarket union in U.S. history.

The hand-wringers of the Washington Poop appear to think this is an impending crisis. Pish and tush. Within a five-minute drive of my house, at least four of the ‘giant chains’ are represented, and others are only an internet click away in this pick-up-and-delivery world. I routinely get grocery deliveries from Costco, Amazon Fresh, Whole Foods, Tom Thumb, Sams, and Walmart; I don’t think I’ve been ‘grocery shopping’ in person in months, and then only when it was on my way and my need was urgent. (Not to forget Braum’s, which has the freshest produce and the most cook-for-two-people-friendly packaging I’ve ever encountered.)

Know the feeling.

Read it.

Although the end of October is a long way away, the first Halloween items have crept into retail stores here in Southern California. Of course, what most Europeans see in Halloween is yet another American importation—and one of ghoulish or even Satanic orientation at that. One could hardly blame such a reaction, especially as this observance is preceded by a long list of other such, including (but not confined to) Black Friday, Santa Claus, KFC, McDonald’s, and on and on. Not being aware of either the slightly-terror-tinged-but-wholesome thing that Halloween was in my childhood, or of its Christian and Celtic roots, one can easily forgive the devout European for this conclusion. But the whole thing is rather more complex. It is not merely a question of Halloween, but of the whole body of weird lore that underlies Europe’s cultures—and in a sense may be a bulwark of tradition in the fight for her future. There is also the question of whether that lore is strictly fictional, or if it contains some unpleasant realities that are ignored only at one’s peril—even if one wields political power.

Read it.

People who are raised in cultures not based on Judeo-Christian values are treasured resources to criminal enterprises.

OffGuardian.

And so, I had my cup of coffee and the cat was fed and the morning looked grimly cloudy but at least not cold and it was a Monday and Mondays are always full of optimism which gradually dissipates into abject misery by Friday, as we know, but we only truly know by Wednesday afternoon when we start sobbing over the number of emails to respond to and there isn’t enough coffee in the day to keep us awake.
So I did the crossword and the Wordle thing and turned on the news sites. I tried very hard to start in the optimistic narrative where the economy is lovely and the wars are so far away as to almost be incidental and the price of gas went down and pineapples are on sale and politicians truly care about the little people and a new high-end restaurant just opened. And that was delightful.
And utterly ridiculous for anyone who actually lives in this world.
But I suppose it makes the newscasters happy and politicians even happier and who are we to take that away from these silly people anyway? They are unfortunately lost in a narrative and can’t find Waldo for the life of them.
They are not happy people and we must be compassionate. Somewhat.
In any event, in my desperate effort to find truth in a world of propaganda from both sides, I reluctantly went off and researched the other side again. And apparently the economy is imploding, wars are coming to our home territory, the price of gas will go up astronomically, pineapples are outrageously expensive again and politicians don’t even remember who the people are who elected them let alone understand them and slews of restaurants have had to close up shop this month because nobody can afford them anymore.
Yeah. That’s unfortunately more likely. We know this because we actually live in the world of reality. Sometimes at least.
So I decided to do the only sane thing and concluded it was time to Death Clean.

Read it.

If you collect Kennedy assassination conspiracy stories, as I do, this will be a real treasure.

And how does a woman, with her husband slumped on top of her, manage to turn around, in a pencil skirt, and climb onto the back of a car that’s moving so fast, a running man, in good shape, almost can’t reach it? She has white gloves on, too. Wouldn’t she be slipping and sliding all over that shiny limo? And if Hill shoves her back down into her seat to protect her, why would she not fall backward instead of going back into a seated position on the way to the hospital? She didn’t turn around and crawl back, as I recall. And why do you see a single white rose (or is it an ominous lily)? Where are the <em>red </em>roses Jackie had received, which should be all over the place with all the jostling going on? And, finally, where is Mrs. Connally? Did she get replaced by a plant? https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/2117088/zapruder-captured-jfks-assassination-chilling-detail

Read it.

Ross Perot’s theme song for his 1992 independent presidential run was the classic country weeper “Crazy,” written by Willie Nelson and made famous by Patsy Cline. It certainly seemed appropriate for a quixotic bid that ultimately failed to win the White House, as has every independent or third-party effort since Abraham Lincoln.

But victory at the polls is only one way to measure the success of independent and third-party presidential efforts. For in many ways, Perot’s two futile candidacies – he ran again in 1996 –provided a preview of today’s political scene.

Political author Michael Barone has said that “no third-party candidate could succeed in America unless he had a billion dollars and a household name.” Ross Perot, of course had both. As the founder of Electronic Data Systems, he became a tech billionaire at a time when most Texas fortunes were still based on oil and cattle. By the 1980s, when he began dabbling in politics, Perot was already one of the richest men in Texas. And the tale of his 1979 rescue of two EDS employees held hostage in Iran made him the subject of both a best-selling novel and a made-for-TV movie starring Charlton Heston.

I’m not ashamed to say that I voted for Ross Perot and never regretted it.

Zman is epic today.

A feature of this age is that we are regularly presented with unusual events and then presented with an official explanation that is stranger than the event itself or given no explanation at all for what happened. In fact, you could describe the Trump era as a series of unexplained phenomena that either come with no official explanation or one so ridiculous no one accepts it. Trump is like a modern-day wizard in that his mere existence creates unexplainable happenings.

Read it.

France’s new Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau, of Les Républicains, is considering ending the controversial AME (Aide Médicale d’Etat), which provides free medical assistance to migrants—including illegal ones. The Left sees this stance as a clear sign of the new team’s benevolence towards the ‘far Right,’ and some ministers have openly expressed their discontent.

Invited to appear on the TF1 television news on Monday, September 23rd, Retailleau asserted that he wanted to “take all possible means to reduce immigration in France.” Among these is the reform, or even abolition, of State Medical Aid (AME). This scheme, which entitles foreigners who have been present on French soil for at least three months to free medical care, is costing the state several billion every year.

When European government-provided health care systems were set up in the wake of WWII, little thought was given to the prospect of immigrants from the Middle East and Africa flooding in and swamping the system. Looks as if people are starting to wake up to the fact that Unintended Consequences can be a bitch.

ZMan points the way.

Yesterday the state of Missouri executed convicted murderer Marcellus Williams after a quarter century of legal wrangling. The case gained some attention because the defense managed to muddy the waters on the DNA evidence and therefore drag out the process long enough to get some of the principles to change their opinions on whether Williams did the crime. Of course, the real reason it gained attention was that the killer was black, and his victim was white.

The subtext to crime in current year America is that on the one hand, blacks commit crime due to living in a white supremacist society. On the other hand, when blacks commit crimes against whites, the whites must deserve it for perpetuating the white supremacist society that causes black crime. This is what makes up the social vengeance subculture at the heart of the social justice movement. In the end, it is all about getting revenge on white people.

The result of this or maybe the cause, it is not easy to know at this point, is that whites often appear to worship black people or at least want the world to think they hold blacks up as gods among men. The three dumbest members of the Supreme Court made sure the media knew they were opposed to the execution. As part of what we call the left in America, they need to let the rest of the hive know where they stand on every issue that involves race, especially when a black is involved.

Virtue Signaling is our national religion.

Babylon Bee.

Satire–read it quickly before it becomes true.

Another example would be AlGore.

Read it.

Silicon Valley has the reputation of being the birthplace of our hyper-connected Internet age, the hub of companies such as Apple, Google and Facebook. However, a pioneering company here in central Ohio is responsible for developing and popularizing many of the technologies we take for granted today.

A listener submitted a question to WOSU’s Curious Cbus series wanting to know more about the legacy of CompuServe and what it meant to go online before the Internet.

That legacy was recently commemorated by the Ohio History Connection when they installed a historical marker in Upper Arlington — near the corner of Arlington Center and Henderson roads — where the company located its computer center and corporate building in 1973.

On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog–not that there’s anything wrong with that….

John C. Wright: “The path to paradise is paved with skulls.”