Of all the strange phenomena of our strange era, the most inexplicable to me is woke capitalism. We see it all around us: Major League Baseball moving the All-star Game out of Atlanta (does anyone remember why?), Delta Airlines aligning itself with the Democratic Party, the Bud Light fiasco.
Along with Budweiser, a number of other companies have driven off the “pride” cliff. This is only a partial list, but let’s start with Target. Target has been aggressively featuring its Pride collection, which includes women’s swimsuits with extra crotch room to make them comfortable for “women” who are men.
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Target holds ’emergency’ meeting over LGBTQ merchandise in some stores to avoid ‘Bud Light situation’ (Fox) Good luck with that. I, for one, will never cross the threshold of a Target again.
NYC Mayor Adams: Migrants should be sent to every city ‘throughout the entire country’ (Fox) No, just the ‘sanctuary cities’, to remind them not to be virtue-signaling hypocrites.
In Japan, social withdrawal among young men is now so severe that the Japanese have a very specific term for it: hikikomori.Hiki means “to withdraw,” and komori means “to remain inside.” At least 1.5 million Japanese people, many of whom are young men in their twenties and thirties, have completely withdrawn from society.
They don’t date; they don’t mate; they don’t work; and they don’t socialize. In short, they refrain from doing anything that requires them to leave their hyper-isolated chambers.
Many of these young males are hurting—financially, spiritually, and psychologically.
Up until very recently, hikikomori was considered a culture-bound syndrome, a problem unique to Japan. That is no longer the case. Hikikomori is now a global phenomenon, observed across the world regardless of culture—from Asia to Europe to the United States.
Huh. I didn’t know this was an option.
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Marymount University sits on a high hill over the Potomac River, in northern Virginia. Founded in 1950 by a religious order devoted to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the school’s undergraduate courses focus on the humanities—or they did until the president and the board of governors met to “restructure” earlier this year. This meant gutting nearly all the humanities, plus mathematics, science, and even theology and religious studies.
The sheer extent and suddenness of this transformation caught the public’s imagination. A small university’s restructuring is not typically the stuff of frontpage, international headlines. But these cuts perfectly illustrate how Christian education has squandered its moral, intellectual, and religious inheritance in a 100-year search for prestige—a search which has been inevitably followed by a retreat into rootless, commercial secularism and left-wing, political glad–handing. In this, the plight of Catholic universities offers a microcosm of the institutional capture that afflicts traditional institutions around the country. But it also offers instructive, object lessons in how to fight back.
Prior to, oh, say, Vatican II (early 1960s), this could not have happened. The entire reason for ‘Catholic schools’ was to provide education with a Catholic intellectual foundation explicitly separate from secular intellectual fads and fashions. But that was then; this is now.
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In The Past is a Future Country, Ed Dutton and J.O.A. Rayner-Hilles, argue that the West is about to be swamped by an unsustainable wave of stupid people. This is not the result of immigration, but rather the culmination of an evolutionary process that began in the Industrial Revolution. Darwinian selection weakened along with the increase in living standards. The result is a steady increase in narcissistic stupid people who undermine the fundamentals of Western society.
In this post, Ed Dutton makes the point that liberal female politicians are getting dumber, as a result of this process he outlined in his book. He relies on two examples, Sanna Marin of Finland and Angela Rayner of Britain, to make his point. Both women are on what we insist on calling the Left and both women are morons. Not only are they stupid, but they appear to have come from stupid parents. They are Nth generation morons who have risen to the top of politics.
It is an amusing and satisfying read for people who think of themselves on the Right, even if he is making sweeping claims from just two examples. For as long as anyone can recall, the people we call the Left have claimed that their opponents are unsophisticated morons who should be dismissed. Having this turned on its head with the use of the human sciences is good fun, but it may be missing the real cause for the great dumbing down of Western politics.
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In theory, the Durham Report and the testimony of FBI whistle blowers was to be about the internal conduct of the FBI.
It was that, to be sure. But without doubt the combination of the two was a decided fusillade that hit the once impenetrable fortress that was the credibility of the American mainstream media. And specifically the credibility of The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Pulitzer Prize.
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There is so much going on we don’t know about. Like I’ve said before, we definitely have reached that critical point of being a “closed system.” The mainstream media are all in on it, so they control the flow of information. No one knows what is happening unless they literally see it or experience it.
It is fascinating how if you don’t receive reliable information about what’s going on, you really don’t know at all . . . even in your own neighbourhood. Remember the Soviets would come and carry people away in an apartment building and no one there would know, MAYBE one person, the person living next door, but that’s it. They would just disappear. And only the people who KNEW them would even know that.
There could be people all around us dying, being persecuted for this or that, and no one would know it. And then stuff happening in the next city, or in Europe…no one knows ANYTHING reliable now unless they see it with their own eyes. Once a free press is gone, we are totally blind. Very few people seem to know this or accept it if they know it.
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Border Patrol agents in San Diego have come under fire twice in a week at the U.S.-Mexico border, including as they were aiding an injured, abandoned four-year-old boy who had been dropped over the border wall.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said in a statement that agents near the San Ysidro port of entry on Monday aided an injured 4-year-old who had been dropped over the primary border barrier by an illegal immigrant.
“Agents reported hearing both the impact and ricochet of gunshots off of the secondary border barrier just north of their location,” the CBP statement said.
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election are damning enough. The FBI allowed itself to become a conduit for disinformation instigated by a partisan political campaign and possibly influenced by the very foreign actor it was allegedly investigating.
But when you take a step back and put the Durham report into the broader context of the CIA’s involvement in suppressing Hunter Biden’s laptop and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s involvement in suppressing the investigation into the origins of COVID, a disturbing pattern emerges: The Democratic Party, the liberal media, and highest levels of the federal government are routinely conspiring to spread disinformation for plainly partisan ends.
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The latest example was served up on Monday, as two families brawled just beyond Disney World’s entrance gates, in a fight that reportedly arose from a family’s desire to take a photo at the iconic location.
The Orange County Sheriff’s Office responded to emergency calls at 2:30pm. Reportedly, one family asked another family to move so they could take a group photo at a spot that has the Magic Kingdom train station as a backdrop, along with Mickey Mouse topiary and, this year, a sign calling out the 100th anniversary of the Walt Disney Company.
Tempers flared, and violent impulses prevailed as a member of one family reportedly punched a member of another in the face. Things then quickly devolved into the kind of messy, co-ed slugfest seen with increasing regularity as American society steadily unravels — and companies like Disney set out to destroy the values that once bound it.
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Crime, on-line shopping, telecommuting and exorbitant rents are all contributing to the decline of downtowns, observes an article on CNN Business. But the real reason downtowns are declining, according to the article, is that people don’t live in dense enough neighborhoods.
“To reinvent downtown retail,” asserts the article without any room for debate or citation of evidence, cities need “denser neighborhoods with a broader mix of affordable housing, experiential retail, restaurants, entertainment, parks and other amenities.” Where have I heard that before?
How are denser neighborhoods going to solve crime and homeless problems? How are they going to fill office spaces when people are working at home? How will they get people to stop shopping on line? How will they make rents more affordable when higher densitis increase land values?
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The global liberal movement is trying to destroy modern, scientific agriculture. Liberals want organic farming–no intensive nitrogen fertilization–along with an end to animal husbandry and banning of pretty much all effective herbicides and pesticides. All great ideas, if you don’t care about billions of people dying. Just ask anyone in Sri Lanka or the Netherlands.
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A California city may lose out on a new restaurant from world-famous chef José Andrés because of its ban on natural gas.
The owner of the mall where Andrés was set to open his Mediterranean restaurant Zaytinya is threatening to sue Palo Alto over the ban, which starting this year prevents new buildings from having natural gas connections.
The restaurant relies on “traditional cooking methods that require gas appliances to achieve its signature, complex flavors,” said Anna Shimko, a lawyer representing the group that owns the Stanford Shopping Center where Andrés leased space for the restaurant. Palo Alto city council members discussed the letter behind closed doors on May 8 but took no public action.
Shimko said the building’s plans were approved by the city in 2019, years before the gas ban was imposed. She added that some of the appliances the restaurant staff needs “do not have electrically powered equivalents.”
“Without a gas connection and appliances, Zaytinya would be forced to alter its signature five-star reputation,” Shimko said, adding that if the ban is enforced, “Zaytinya will likely choose not to locate within the city.”
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According to a recent report in the New York Post, many members of Gen Z (Zoomers) are lousy employees. A majority (65 percent) of employers say that they’ve had to fire them more often; one out of eight Zoomers were fired from their jobs in the first week; and three out of four employers “say Gen Z is hardest to work with.” Most of the challenges of working with Zoomers are attributed to their general lack of professionalism, excessive sense of entitlement, and most of all, their addiction to smartphones. Apparently, the Zoomers struggle more than the millennials (my generation), who are usually the subject of such generational criticisms: “even Millennials and prior generations understood that you come to work and you do what your employer asks of you.”
Who would’ve guessed that a culture that abhors character development, celebrates mediocrity, and encourages screen addiction from an early age would produce a generation of incompetent young adults who can’t function in the workplace? Who could believe that indoctrinating them with identity politics would make them overly sensitive and impossible to work with? How is it possible that so many people who grew up in broken homes, never had a father, lost their innocence at an early age, had poor mental health, and never practiced religion could be so moody, flaky, and inconsistent?
With the recent irresponsible bank bailouts by the U.S. government and culture war over Bud Light, American capitalism seems to have gone off the rails. However, there’s a method to the madness. These shenanigans are symptoms of an underlying malady. It goes by various names—crony capitalism, ESG, woke capital—but its essence is simple: cool, calculating deals between elites to maximize wealth and power.
Standard economics provides the interpretive key. All we must do is take the toolkit economists use to analyze “private” choice, such as exchange in markets, and apply it to “public” choice, namely politics. Collective action is absolutely a forum for exchange. Representatives from Podunk and Decadentapolis logroll to get each other’s bills passed. Bureaucrats from the Department of Mission Creep and the Micromanagement Agency trade influence and favors to acquire larger budgets. It’s exchange all the way down. Crony-wokeism is no exception.
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At the Nation’s Gun Show in Chantilly, spirits seemed high. People wandered from booth to booth, and the scent of popcorn filled the air. It could have been mistaken for a state fair or weekend flea market were it not for the rows of weapons and accessories — gun parts, AR build kits and body armor — laid out on every surface. It was easy to overlook the one common emotion underlying the event: fear.
Here were weekend shoppers intently inspecting tools of death: moms testing the heft of handguns and fathers stocking up on ammo. When I asked attendees and sellers what gun ownership meant to them, most replied with the same word: “protection.”
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There is nothing wrong with admiring the bravery of Ukraine’s stand against Russia. In fact, I don’t think I’d felt that much ebullient pride, seeing the Ukrainians turn back the Russians from Kyiv, since the time I saw the once iconic but now forgotten ink-stained fingertips of Iraqi voters defying terrorist threats to go out and vote in 2005. In both cases, the West seemed to stand for the universal aspirations of all. In an age that oscillates between radical nihilism and a natural yearning for certainty and purpose, it was such a joy—and a relief—to see that Western values stood for something: something others wanted; something others would die for, when many of us can’t even muster the courage to speak up at the office watercooler to the woke ideologues who police pronouns and see ‘phobias’ more often than your average hypochondriac feels the onset of an illness.
Ukraine and the Ukranians, to some extent like the Iraqis of the millennial aughts, have unfortunately become the West’s—particularly America’s—panacea for our own civilizational fecklessness. Whether you call them ‘globalists’ or ‘neoliberals,’ or as in America the ‘uniparty’ of Democrats and Republicans, the West’s promoters of endless, contingency-free, lethal aid to Ukraine suffer a proximity infatuation of purposiveness—of trying to find one’s own meaning through somebody else’s existential struggle. At the same time, Ukraine’s struggle against Russian aggression serves what is arguably a much more delusional, if not dangerous, illusion for a certain kind of American and pro-Atlanticist conservative in Europe: the illusion that Ukraine’s patriots can fill the West’s spiritual and cultural void.
It goes without saying that there should, for reasons of social justice, be full representation of all demographic groups in all human endeavors: for example, in scientific fraud. There is, apparently, a lamentable underrepresentation of women in biomedical research papers subsequently retracted because they are fraudulent in some way, such as in the manufacture of data or in the falsification of pictures.
Having a semiprofessional, semi-prurient interest in fraud and forgery, I follow—admittedly in somewhat desultory fashion—an excellent website called Retraction Watch. It is there that I read a paper that analyzed the proportion of what was once called the fair sex among the authors of retracted papers. Overall, women were only slightly underrepresented in the biomedical sphere, but slight injustice is still injustice.
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Let me start with the positive. There is not a single day that has gone by that I have not felt truly honored to work with such an incredible group of people who spent every waking hour on behalf of victims. This opportunity has been a gift for which I have no words to explain the extent of my gratitude.
My partners, our Victim/Witness advocates, our Investigators, our support staff, the police officers and detectives, time after time I see each of you putting everything you have into helping people we encounter on the worst days of their lives. So often I see our personal lives, and indeed at times our own well-being, set aside just to do a little bit more on that last case for that last victim. It’s been nothing short of inspiring not as a lawyer, but as a person.
And yet, I’m leaving. Why could that be? The simple fact is that this State and County have set themselves on a course to disaster. And the worst part is that the agency for whom I work has backed literally every policy change that had the predictable, and predicted, outcome of more crime and more people getting hurt.
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In today’s developed world, average people can achieve a higher standard of living than has ever before been possible. In fact, the difference between an “elite” standard of living and that enjoyed by people of average, or a little more than average, means, has dwindled to near-insignificance. It is fair to say that today, an “elite” American has little more chance of living a satisfying and happy life than the average American.
Our “elites” consider this situation intolerable, a fact that explains much of our current political turmoil. Liberals are trying to drive down the standard of living for all Americans. True, their own standards will suffer slightly. But if you are a multi-millionaire, how much do you care if your electricity bill doubles? The salient fact is that a general decline in standards of living will increase the disparity between the “elite” and the rest of us. That, I think, is the goal of many liberal policies, and the main reason why most rich people are liberals.
Today, a person of ordinary means can toss some steaks on the grill on Memorial Day. That is a good thing, in most people’s opinion, but it galls “elite” leftists, who eat steak themselves but are annoyed that the rest of us can afford to do so, too. Hence the Left’s war on meat, the point of which is to drive up prices so that they can afford steak, pork chops, bacon, etc., but you can’t.
It might not matter whom Republicans run for president in 2024.
America’s propaganda press traffics in disinformation. Its Big Tech oligarchs censor news and information helpful to conservatives, while elevating biased news and information that helps the Left. And its election systems have been overrun by privately funded groups that run Democratic “get out the vote” campaigns to traffic ballots into ballot boxes. We catalogued this particularly complex problem in Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.
Instead of election day, we now have an “election season”—during which, over a period of months, we flood homes across the country with tens of millions of mail-in ballots, regardless of whether secretaries of state or local registrars have any idea if those ballots are being sent to the correct addresses. This in a country where 11% of residents move every year. We then wait for sophisticated partisan turnout operations funded by activist billionaires and run by ideological statisticians to round up those ballots in entirely selective ways.
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Why have alarming nuts been allowed to colonize New York’s mission-critical subway system? Why do we no longer have what we once did: adequate facilities in the countryside for agitated urbanites to decompress far from the madding crowd?
The massive deinstitutionalization of the 1960s–1980s is now widely considered a blunder, but why did it seem like a good idea at the time? We need to consider why progressive reformers in the English-speaking world turned as fervently against lunatic asylums in the 1970s as their forebears had become enthusiastic for them in the middle of the 19th century.
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I had a meeting arranged with one of my undergraduate students for 10am last Friday. At around 9.30 I received an email from her saying that since she was “struggling with [her] mental health” she wouldn’t be able to physically come to the building. It would be “too much”. So could we please have the meeting via Zoom instead?
This kind of thing has become completely normal. Vast swathes of students have diagnoses of ADHD or the ubiquitous ‘anxiety and depression’; the rest, who don’t, still feel no compunction in disclosing their ‘struggles’ at the drop of a hat. Working around these issues is now simply a fact of life for academics. We confront them literally on a daily basis.
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Clay Travis’ free beer experiment shows people ‘don’t want to be seen’ with Bud Light (Fox)
California, other states with strong ‘Defund the Police’ movements ranked best to be a cop, new study claims (Fox) Hey, you get paid and you don’t have to do anything dangerous like enforce the law. What’s not to like?
Have you ever come across the New York Destination fee? Or New York amenity fee? Or resort fee? No? Well, me neither. Until our recent NYC trip. Seems this kid has many names. And is common practice in quite a few US cities (Las Vegas being a really notorious one apparently). Until about two years ago, this wasn’t a big topic in New York. But things change. To save you the same nasty surprise we had checking in, let me tell all you need to know about the New York destination fee. What you get for it (or not), how much it is per night and if there is a way to avoid it.
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