DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

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As recently as 2011, Tim Walz claimed in official biographies for his campaign and congressional office that he was on the verge of completing a doctorate in education, a decade after he enrolled in a Ph.D. program at St. Mary’s University of Minnesota in the small town of Winona.

The university, however, told the Washington Free Beacon that its last records indicating Walz was an active student are dated to 2004.

“We can confirm that Governor Walz attended Saint Mary’s from 2001-2004 in our doctorate level Ed.D. program,” the school’s communications director, Ashly Bissen, told the Free Beacon. “He did not complete the degree program.”

How sad is it when you can’t even complete a ‘degree’ in education?

The Foundry.

Americans are obligated to lenders and creditors for overspending, the government has made a habit of spending more than it takes in.

You could say that Congress was doing “girl math” long before it was cool.

Popularized on social media, “girl math” refers to an unwritten playbook women sometimes use to justify purchases. A jacket anticipated to cost $150 is on sale for $75, so now you can spend the other $75 on a pair of shoes because you save 50% of the jacket. That’s girl math. Or you forgot you had $20 in your Venmo account; so, paying your friend back for dinner was actually “free.” That, too, is “girl math.”

While “girl math” is usually a funny joke between friends, it can go too far to justify irresponsible spending, and no one is better at justifying lavish and wasteful spending than the federal government.

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Two and a half years after Bloomberg Opinion published advice for those earning under $300k on how to weather the Biden-Harris inflation storm—suggesting, among other things, swapping beef for “tasty meat substitutes” like lentils—we revisit whether labor economist Teresa Ghilarducci’s tips have truly shielded consumers from the fallout of failed Bidenomics.

The short answer is no.

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In yet another headline you won’t see from corporate media, 75% of those arrested in Midtown Manhattan in recent months for crimes like assault, robbery, and domestic violence are migrants.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

In Queens, it’s around 60%, the NY Post reports, citing police sources.

…

According to the report, the sanctuary city laws make it ‘almost impossible’ for authorities to handle the problem.

Time to leave.

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Harvard University has refused to cooperate with the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office’s investigation into the assault of an Israeli business school student that occurred during a protest in October 2023. That decision has delayed the ongoing criminal case against two of the students caught on camera accosting their Jewish classmate, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

Assistant District Attorney Ursula Knight, who leads the office’s Civil Rights and High-Risk Victims Unit and is prosecuting two of the students who participated in the assault, during a Wednesday hearing admonished the university.

“Harvard police essentially refused to investigate,” she said, according to an attendee, adding that the school’s behavior “has been a shock to the Commonwealth.”

Read it.

Joe Biden has gone from a vacation at a billionaire’s estate in California to a postponed appearance at the DNC convention in Chicago, and then once more to a vacation in Delaware.

The man who formally serves as president of the country barely has anything resembling a public schedule. And his private one appears to be equally empty. Biden is satisfied with occasionally showing up at a few events a week, mumbling something and then moving on.

Meanwhile his VP is on the campaign trail and appears equally out of reach, only now finally agreeing to a single CNN interview with Gov. Tim Walz, her running mate, there to back her up. If Kamala Harris can’t handle a press conference, can she handle running a country?

And if neither POTUS nor the VP are running the country, who or what actually is in charge?

Alma Boykin.

My car was getting worked on, and another person in the waiting area was listening to a podcast about the End Times and how they were Nigh. They also needed to have their hearing checked, because if I can hear your ear-buds from ten feet away, you need to turn the sound down. Anyway, I mostly tuned the discussion out because 1) I’ve heard most of it before and 2) it wasn’t loud-loud.

Many cultures and belief systems have an idea of an earlier time, when things were much better than they are today. A Golden Age, the time of the Legendary Emperors, the world before the Fall, before the coming of private property when all were Noble Savages, the Dream Time when the gods walked among men and animals spoke, when the living was easy, or easier. When all people were equal (“When Adam delved and Eva span, then there was no noble man”), and a just ruler oversaw a time of peace (Numa Pompillius, Quetzalcoatl, what have you).

Some, not all, also have an end time idea. This may vary, and sometimes shows up in faiths that don’t usually focus on eschatology, like Buddhists or American Indians, or the modern Environmental movement’s more radical offshoots. Judaism has had end times movements, and Christianity is well known for people who think that the End is Nigh and can be predicted. Some people even want to bring about that end time, thus calls of “Don’t immenatize my eschaton.” The government of Iran is the best known at the moment, although I’ve heard that there are Jewish and Christian groups who seek to bring about the Second Coming or just the arrival of the Messiah by— Several things. Extinction Rebellion and some even more radical environmentalists want to trigger the return of wilderness* to the world and restore Nature to its pre-lapsarian state. Which lapse varies from group to group, and which state is often left vague, although “pristine Nature without the corruption of mankind/the free market/the patriarchy/Western Civilization/pick three” seems to be common.

Alma Boykin has many very readable fiction books on Amazon. Highly recommended.

The New Yorker.

There is no such thing as a ‘magazine for mercenaries’, any more than there is a ‘magazine for drug cartels’ or a ‘magazine for car repos’–and if there were, you wouldn’t know about it.

In the early nineteen-eighties, Susan Katz Keating was living in California, working as a freelance journalist with a side gig waiting tables. On a newsstand, she came across Soldier of Fortune, a monthly magazine infamous for its gonzo war reporting and its gun-for-hire classified ads. “I wanted to write about mercenaries,” she recalled recently. So she placed an advertisement in the publication. “You paid by the word, and I was quite young and didn’t have any money. The ad said, ‘Are you a mercenary? Contact S. Katz.’ And then I gave my home address.”

Keating was flooded with letters. A handful of seemingly professional warrior types arrived at her door unannounced. “I also got some government agents showing up, because they thought that I was trying to raise a mercenary army,” Keating said.

In 1986, Keating began contributing to Soldier of Fortune, the rare woman to do so. Two years ago, she achieved a longtime dream by purchasing the magazine from its founder, the retired lieutenant colonel Robert K. Brown, for an undisclosed sum. She now operates as its publisher and editor-in-chief.

Another Narrative Media down-the-alimentary-canal-with-gun-and-camera look at ‘flyover country’; popular zoology for the Coastal Crust. Read it for the entertainment, but don’t take it too seriously.

The Register.

(Sorry, I’m just tired of poor grammer in headlines. Or anywhere, really….)

Tech companies are forever acquiring each other, but future buys will likely face more scrutiny after four US federal regulators decided to share data that they hope will help antitrust investigators assess whether an acquisition impacts labor markets – not just the market for tech.

Let no business be un-over-regulated. (After all, It’s For The Children.)

Read it.

Well, she could always go back to Arkansas.

Read it.

Time to leave.

Read it.

Good luck with that.

Time to leave.

Read it.

Time to leave.

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Welcome to our world. Be careful not to step in the diversity.

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The mapping of 50,000 mysterious “knots” in the human genome may someday lead to the development of new cancer drugs, researchers say.

ds

ZMan pulls no punches.

In this age, we see this master and slave relationship between the people we call the left and the people we call the right. The former looks at the rules as a means to an end and that end is always getting what they want. Even the rules of physical reality are subject to interpretation if they prove difficult. In the hands of the people we call the left, the rules that supposedly regulate every aspect of life are merely the whip in the hands of the masters, who apply it to ensure obedience.

The people we call the right see the rules as every slave sees the rules, which is as a source of shelter from the uncertainty of their masters wrath. They invest their time in polishing their principles in the same way the house slave makes sure to always be seen busy tidying up the master’s house. This is a sign of subservience. David French is at the New York Times for the same reason the field slave rises to become the master’s manservant. He is the most resolute loser.

Read it.

The daylight shooting of San Francisco 49ers rookie receiver Ricky Pearsall in an upscale shopping district has once again put the city’s safety in the national spotlight weeks before voters choose a new mayor.

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In yet another knife attack involving a foreigner, a Somali man stabbed a 46-year-old man in the neck outside a supermarket in the small town of Waltershausen. Thirty police officers arrived on scene and took him into custody.

At 5:30 p.m., the incident started with the 27-year-old Somali man purposefully coughing on customers at random inside the “Netto” discount supermarket. He then began threatening them and randomly entering into arguments with various customers.

When a 46-year-old man asked the Somali man to stop, the Somali man allegedly threatened to kill him. The victim then told the Somali to calm down, at which point the Somali stabbed him in the neck, according to the Welt newspaper.

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The president’s desk bears a remarkable pedigree. Its story ties together several disparate historical threads, including a ghost ship, polar exploration, and relations between the United States and the UK. The tale begins with a certain British Admiral, Sir Edward Belch.

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Jimmy McCain, the youngest son of the late Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, slammed Donald Trump’s recent appearance at Arlington National Cemetery as a campaign backdrop, even though his father did just that in a 1999 campaign ad.

Tyler Cowen.

The wealthy and influential networks in society use moral-sounding concepts such as environmental protection and invoking famine-era evictions to establish legal frameworks that protect existing capital by preventing growth. They also use the civil service as a massive programme of sinecures for the less ambitious within the upper middle classes. To take a random example: Ireland still claims to have ‘free’ university (though there is a significant registration fee). But the cost of renting is so high that effectively only the wealthy can send their kids away to college. Superficially left wing, but de facto oligarchy. This is everywhere: health service (half the population have private), public transport (unusable if you actually need to be somewhere), and there are shakedowns at every financial touchpoint — bank duopoly, huge insurance fees, dysfunctional legal system

I once asked my mother’s mother (a Brennan from Mayo) whether she would like to go back to Ireland someday. She blew up. “No! There’s nothing there but losers and the descendants of losers. Anybody with an ounce of gumption left a hundred years ago!”

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When Vanessa Sivadge, a registered nurse at Texas Children’s Hospital, wrote an anonymous op-ed about the hospital’s secret transgender medicine program, two FBI agents showed up at her home shortly thereafter to interrogate her. Last month, the hospital fired her. Dr. Eithan Haim, a general surgeon who worked at the same hospital, received a similar visit from federal agents after he leaked information about the existence of the transgender program to conservative activist Christopher Rufo. The United States government is not kind to conservative whistleblowers.

“We exposed the fact that Texas Children’s Hospital—the largest children’s hospital in the world—was lying to the public about the existence of their transgender program,” Haim wrote. “In part due to the story’s release, the very next day, the Texas Legislature voted, with bipartisan support, to ban transgender medical interventions on minors. The conduct we exposed became illegal in the State of Texas within 24 hours of our story.” Despite that, Haim was investigated and is now being prosecuted on allegations that he mishandled medical records. If convicted, he could face ten years in federal prison and a maximum possible fine of $250,000.

The Register.

NASA has successfully extended into orbit an 80 m2 (860 square foot) sail that is designed to catch emissions from the Sun and convert them into propulsion for space exploration.

The Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (ACS3) was launched on April 23 from New Zealand aboard Rocket Lab’s Electron hardware and – after months of careful checking – was successfully unfurled at 1333 EDT (1033 PDT) on Thursday, August 29. Such is the compact nature of the spacecraft that the whole thing fit inside a 23x23x34 centimeter (9x9x13 inch) CubeSat before being deployed.

“The sail will appear as a square about half the size of a tennis court,” NASA Ames reported.

“Now, with the sail fully extended, the Solar Sail System may be visible to some keen skywatchers on Earth who look up at the right time. Stay tuned to NASA.gov and @NASAAmes on social media for updates on how to catch the spacecraft passing over your area.”

Read it.

Thank you, Joe Biden.

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A devout Christian teacher at a Church of Ireland boarding school unwilling to accept “the hellish ideology of transgenderism” was jailed for the third time Monday for violating a court order.

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Yale’s Divinity School coerced students to read from a “spell” written by a “witch” as part of its Before the Fall Orientation.

The three-day orientation between Aug. 21 to 23 saw a series of talks and activities preparing incoming students for the year ahead, interspersed with small group discussions.

One of these small group periods was the first activity of orientation. Participating as an incoming student in one of these circles, I saw how the discussion opened with a set of “Restorative Circle Rules.” These rules boiled down to a warning to be open minded: all viewpoints were expected to be heard, that you only have to take what you want from the circle and participate as wanted – at least nominally.

Trump’s Wildly Unhinged New Ramblings on Fox News Reveal the True MAGA (The New Republic) MAGA is the New Nigger.

Trump claims he had ‘every right’ to interfere with election (CNN)

Trump Says He Had ‘Every Right’ to Interfere With Presidential Election (Newsweek)

Trump says he had ‘every right’ to interfere in 2020 election (Reuters)

Gee, there’s an echo in here….

You can fill in the rest for yourself. It’s not as if they’re hard to find.

Global Health Crisis: Over Half the World Lacks Essential Micronutrients, Harvard Study Reveals (SciTechDaily) Whatever would we do without Harvard Studies?

Billions worldwide consume inadequate levels of micronutrients critical to human health (Harvard School of Public Health) Billions and billions and ….

Four Key Nutrients Lacking in Diet of Two-Thirds of Adults: ‘Alarming’ (Newsweek) Aren’t you alarmed? I’m sure alarmed.

Billions worldwide consume inadequate levels of micronutrients critical to human health, new study finds (MedicalXPress)

That’s really all it is. There’s nothing complicated about it.

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Dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters demonstrated outside and blocked one of Columbia University’s entrances on the first day of classes Tuesday, some beating drums, while a long line of students and staff made their way through a security checkpoint.

And they’ll keep doing this shit as long as they keep getting away with it.

Read it.

We have previously discussed the anti-free speech views of Clinton’s former Labor Secretary, Robert Reich, who has tried to sell citizens on the perfectly Orwellian view that more freedom means tyranny when it comes to the freedom of expression. He also demanded that former president Donald Trump be banned from ballots as a “traitor” — all in the name of protecting democracy from itself. Last week, Reich wrote a column declaring Elon Musk “out of control” in his refusal to censor citizens and appeared to call for his arrest.

ZMan pulls the curtain back.

One of the features of this age is the proliferation of lying to the point where it is reasonable to assume everything is a lie. The West is a liar’s culture now, where only the naivest trust anyone or anything. This liar’s culture is led by the people at the top, who seem to take great pleasure in lying for its own sake. They often lie when the truth would serve them best. As a result of the endless downpour of lies from the top of society, the culture itself is drenched in lying.

At the top, the culture of lying is obvious. We just went through a month where the media and the so-called experts told us that a day-drinking simpleton went from the butt of jokes to heroic strong diverse female character. Of course, the fact that the concept of the strong diverse female character exists is a testament to the promiscuous lying that now defines the entertainment industry. Every ad on television now contains a naked lie, placed there like some sort of cultural totem.

Read it.

As they do.

A report from Sweden’s Crime Prevention Council (BRÅ), commissioned by the government to study the increase in gun violence, completely fails to consider mass migration or the ethnicity or culture of shooters in its analysis.

Henrik Angerbrandt, one of the authors behind the study, told news outlet Samnytt that the study did not include the background of perpetrators as it was not considered interesting for the report: “We have not looked at the individual level. We have not looked at foreign backgrounds, and we have generally not examined socioeconomic factors.”

Last year, Sweden registered 363 shooting incidents (including 53 fatalities and 109 injured)—the highest numbers in Europe, in a country that once had the lowest firearm crime rate per capita. In contrast, the other three Nordic countries—which have all had significantly more restrictive migration policies—registered only six fatal shootings combined in 2023.

While Swedish authorities have shied away from identifying poorly controlled migration as a cause of increased violent crime, their Danish counterparts are upfront about it:

“Sweden is a frightening example of what happens when too little attention is given to immigration and law enforcement policies,” Danish MP Preben Bang Henriksen told daily paper Aftonbladet. “Neither the conservative nor the Social Democratic governments have addressed the problem.”

Read it.

The deadline for EU member states to put forward their picks for the next European Commission passed on Sunday with all 27 capitals successfully naming their candidates. The ball is now in President-elect Ursula von der Leyen’s court to divide the portfolios between them as she sees fit before the incoming commissioners stand before the European Parliament for the approval of MEPs.

But von der Leyen has a problem: only nine candidates are women (excluding herself) and 17 are men, something she sees as unacceptable in the current age. In order to reach gender parity, she even asked countries to put forth two names this year—a man’s and a woman’s—for her to mix and match for the best results. However, as commissioner nominations are an exclusive member state competence, all but one country (Bulgaria) ignored this ridiculous (and frankly, undemocratic) request.

When your priority is quotas rather than competence, you’re going to lose.

Read it.

An Idaho Army National Guard officer is under fire for expressing his religious beliefs on social media, leading to his removal from command and a heated debate over First Amendment rights within the military.

Read it.

Nearly one-third of K-12 students across the country are behind their grade level as of the end of the 2023-24 school year, according to a new survey released by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).

Gee, those government schools work great, don’t they? Must be the teachers’ unions, yeah,  that’s the ticket.

Read it.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has sparked debate by awarding billions of dollars in extra paid leave to DHS employees, leading to questions about the impact on the department’s budget and mission, a new report says.

As Jerry Pournelle was fond of saying, the purpose of government is to hire and pay government workers.

The New Neo.

The first of a multi-part elucidation of the recent activities by the Religion of Peace.

Read it. And watch the video.

Eric Weinstein told Chris Williamson on the “Modern Wisdom” podcast that Donald Trump’s presidency has disrupted the old “rules-based international order,” which many view as an attempt to control global stability and wondered if the Republican nominee will “be allowed” to reenter the White House if elected in 2024. Weinstein argued that Trump’s unorthodox approach challenged the status quo, exposing flaws in the system and revealing that the impact of populist leaders on democracy and international agreements is more complex and significant than previously understood.

Chris Williamson’s MODERN WISDOM podcast on YouScrewed is well worth watching.

Read it.

An illegal immigrant from Mexico, who has been deported four times from the U.S., including after a murder conviction in Alabama, was arrested last week in Houston.

Thank you, Joe Biden.

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The authors at UCSF have found that the C19 spike protein, while its primary purpose is to penetrate cell walls, has a secondary effect in binding to a protein called fibrinogen, which is an essential precursor to… blood clots. There’s an affinity between parts of the spike protein and sites along the amino acid chain in fibrinogen – an accidental bonding that’s apparently triggering the clot formation cascade just as bodily damage will do normally. The authors provide evidence for this, as well as secondary effects on inflammation and lung and brain damage. They also perform an experiment in mice using a monoclonal antibody that ameliorates these effects. This seems to be a substantial advance by a credible team, and is likely to trigger plenty of attempts to verify and advance the work.

A natural question arises: Can COVID-19 vaccines trigger the same cascade? The paper has this to say…

…we do not believe that this mechanism is related to the rare clotting complications observed with adenovirus based COVID vaccines because the production of anti-PF4 autoantibodies and ensuing drop in platelet counts are triggered by the vector rather than spike36. In general, COVID-19 RNA vaccines lead to small amounts of spike protein accumulating locally and within draining lymph nodes where the immune response is initiated and the protein is eliminated37. Consistent with the safety of the spike mRNA vaccines, mRNA vaccines prevent post-COVID-19 thromboembolic complications38 and a cohort study in 99?million COVID-vaccinated individuals showed no safety signals for haematological conditions…

The distinction being made is between dead-virus vaccines (the first case) and those using mRNA as a means to get the body to synthesize virus spike protein without any actual virus present. The latter seems reasonable, as the binding to fibrinogen will have the effect of consuming spike protein. An active C19 infection will keep producing more, but as the mRNA is consumed during the formation of spike, there’s a limited amount that can be generated. Again, I expect follow-up studies to confirm this, assuming the observed mechanism is verified by others.

And that’s why I refused to take any of the mRNA vaccines: THE SPIKE PROTEIN ITSELF IS PATHOGENIC and will damage your body. So injecting spike-protein-creating stuff into your body is like shooting yourself in the foot to avoid getting mugged. It reminds me of the scene in Blazing Saddles when Our Hero, surrounded by Hostile White People, pulls out his gun, holds it to his own head, and mutters “Nobody move or the nigger gets it!” The people of Rock Ridge were the audience for the COVID hysteria, successfully so.

UPDATE: The eternal lockdown of the soul

UPDATE: How Many People Have Been Harmed by mRNA-Based So-Called Vaccines?

Tom Kratman.

In the first place, there are two things we mean by “the election was stolen.” They’re mutually reinforcing, yes, but they’re not the same. The first of these is via the influence of media and social media. It was not illegal for them to have been Biden’s campaign, but they _were_ Biden’s campaign. What that means, in practice, is that they used their privileges under the first amendment to violate the intent of the first amendment. I say “privileges,” by the way, rather than “rights” because by their conduct they have undermined the first amendment to the point we can calmly consider killing it, as regards the media, as so many lefties want it to be killed for the common citizenry. It no longer serves its purpose.

The second factor is our belief that actual spurious ballots were introduced into the system by both mailing in and other means. And the numbers were not even that large; Trump “lost” by about twelve thousand in Georgia, eighty thousand in Pennsylvania, and under twenty-one thousand in Wisconsin. Let’s not pretend that those were particularly difficult numbers to have illegally come up with.

…

In short, election fraud is so completely a part of the Democratic Party and the left, more generally, and has been for so long, that it would only be remarkable if there were a close election where there wasn’t any. We expect it. If we can’t easily see it, we expect it to be only because it’s a little better hidden than usual.

The Democratic Party is and always has been a party of corruption, heavy on power, short of or bereft of principle. The only difference between it and any given sub-Saharan African kleptocracy is in the shade of skin.

Does anybody seriously think that Biden got more votes than Obama did in 2004 and 2008?

Read it–if you dare.

A few years back, for a laugh, I read every single Dickens novel. All 15 of them. One after another. And then I read his five Christmas Books, followed by the collection of his early short fiction and non-fiction known as Sketches by Boz. I read well over 4 million words of Dickens which, to put it into absurd solipsistic context, is like reading this article 1,700 times, in quantity if not quality. It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.

Because I’m me, I didn’t just read these books. I also made notes about locations. Specifically, I jotted down every single time a London location was mentioned, across all 21 books. If anyone wants to see it, I have a 714-row spreadsheet listing out every named place, and the books in which each one appears.

Spreadsheets are crap for editorial purposes, though, so a map HAD to be made. I started off plotting all the points on a Google Map. This worked to some extent, but was a bit glitchy, and not particularly easy on the eye. So, that’s where this article comes in. I’ve started from scratch with the data and redrawn Dickens’s geo-literary output — his geobibliome, as I’m pompously calling it — as a proper map.

How does a ‘proper map’ differ from a ‘just plain map’? Got me

Read it.

The European Commission has threatened to take away European Union funds from Hungary if it does not pay the €200 million fine imposed by the European Court of Justice over the country’s asylum system.

“There is no wiggle room here. We have to follow the applicable procedures,” a Commission spokesman said on Monday, September 2nd.

The issue revolves around the Hungarian conservative government’s tough stance on migration. Hungary has made it difficult for illegal migrants to enter the country, which is also the external border of the European Union—a border Hungary is obliged to protect.

Since 2016, Hungary has been enabling its police to deport foreigners lacking valid documentation directly to Serbia. Illegal migrants travelling through the Western Balkan route can only submit requests for asylum outside Hungary’s borders.

The European Commission, which has been pursuing an open-border, pro-migration policy, has deemed these practices a breach of EU law, saying asylum seekers should be allowed into a member state to seek protection and to stay there until their claim is handled.

“We won’t give you this money until you pay this other money.” To which the appropriate response would appear to be “Stick them both up your ass.” But that’s just me. Why Hungary remains a part of the European Union escapes me.

Tyler Cowen.

I don’t agree with this theory as stated, but it can be worth spelling such things out, if only to see their weaknesses, or perhaps some strengths at some of the more unusual or less likely margins. Here goes:

People, especially “thinkers,” like to believe they serve all sorts of noble purposes in the intellectual infrastructure. But in reality their main effects are either to raise or lower the status of the elites in their society.

Noam Chomsky, for instance, has lowered the status of American elites. That is his net long-run effect, not that he drummed up sympathy for the Khmer Rouge. A lot more people, for better or worse, are more skeptical of a bunch of things because of Chomsky.

The New York Times, in contrast, works hard to raise the status of elites. It tries especially hard to raise the status of Democratic elites, but still it is raising the status of elites for the most part.

Most ‘thinkers’ are in love with thinking, and spend little time thinking about whether what they’re thinking has any connection to reality. Usually they think of ‘connection to reality’ as a bug, not a feature

It is hard to lower the status of elites without lowering your own status as well.  It is not just that the elites will not like you, or may treat you and your PR harshly.  You also have to come across as quite negative, and furthermore some of the negativity you create for your targets will rub off on you, at least in the eyes of much of your audience.  Plus being too relentlessly critical, rather than constructive, tends to make people stupider.

I can live with it. Most people will grow stupider over time all by themselves; I am happy to help that process along pro bono publico. Think of it as evolution in action.

UnHerd.

Human beings are conflicted animals. We are capable of great devotion to the people and things we cherish, and will strive tirelessly on their behalf. Yet we long to be done with worry and struggle, to close the open wounds of existence and be relieved, once and for all, of anxiety and toil. At times of cultural exhaustion, this longing can afflict a whole people. We see this today in the United States.

Americans have suffered bruising blows for four years now: the Covid shutdown, urban riots and crime, ballooning inflation and debt, open borders, civil strife, the gloating of our enemies and the collapse of the international order. The electorate is weary and dispirited, and seems ready, like a boxer on his last legs, to take a sweet nap on the canvas.

Kamala Harris’s handlers understand this perfectly well. Having accurately discerned the national mood, they have made her the woman of the hour. She seems to float above all weighty issues. In her campaign poster “Forward”, a knockoff of the iconic Obama “Hope” image, her uplifted gaze radiates joy and “upliftment”. Her invocation of “What can be, unburdened by what has been” is happy and hopeful.

If all that sounds attractive, consider that Harris’s candidacy involves a deep memory-wipe. Politically speaking, she has sprung into being as a fully formed adult with no discernible past or historical recall. Her plan to control food prices repeats a common, famine-inducing error of communist regimes. Her tough-on-crime and border-securing persona rests not just on amnesia, but on media-driven amnesty. And yet, propelled forward by the cheerful drone of the “KHive ” and the good vibrations of “Brat summer”, Harris may surf all the way to the Oval Office.

In the immortal words of the Clinton Campaign Song: Don’t stop thinkin’ about tomorrow/Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone….