In Mary Shelley’s 1818 original version of Frankenstein, the brilliant but unorthodox Dr. Victor Frankenstein created his nameless humanoid by using a formula he concocted in a lab. Obsessed with creating something beautiful, his experiment produced a hideous monster with yellow skin, watery eyes and exposed blood vessels who escaped the lab.
He was a 19th century gain-of-function research lab leak. ...
More than 200 years later, the real-life Dr. Anthony Fauci embodies both the “scientist” and the monster. He’s a slithering gorgon coddled by a Medusa of creatures in government, media, Big Pharma, Big Tech, the global billionaire class, China, and armies of compliant physicians enslaved to their careers.....
Fauci publicly advocated for using gain-of-function research to “juice up” bat viruses, which meant intentionally making the viruses worse, creating new strains, and making them so transmissible they could spread globally. Real-life Frankenstein stuff.
The goal? To make something beautiful – a vaccine that could save the world from a deadly pandemic when and if “nature” ever unleashed it. Oh, and money.
The Left suffers from social psychophysiology – the proclivity of people to get tangled up in ideologies that are like crippled religions. They operate on faith, disassociated from reality. And if they run up against reality, they dismiss reality and cling to their religion.
The Morning Brief from Yahoo Finance is written today by Andy Serwer, who asks the question:
Question: How many people does it take to run a tech company?
His focus is on what it takes to keep the lights on and servers running. In the case of Twitter, it's noticeable that the answer is much less than Twitter had when Elon Musk bought it.
But the proof isn't to Andy's liking. There's a hint that he's not a fan of Musk:
I’m not a huge fan of Elon’s management style — which seems in part to be about getting in touch with his inner 13-year-old boy
To give Andy credit, he questions the value of the employment bloat in general and even the vaunted engineers that create the features found in the big Internet organizations.
Many of these layoffs have likely been in marketing and staff functions, but I would argue that in some cases redundancy lies in line operations as well. It's an open secret that a fair amount of core technology work adds little or no value to customers, companies, or the economy....
I understand engineers and product managers need to experiment. It’s just that the process — an overly empowered tech culture where engineers are encouraged to “disrupt,” “pivot,” “move fast and break things,” and “fail fast” — has been taken too far.
Maybe this modus operandi makes sense for the smartest 1% of technical workers, but not for tens of thousands who have been given the keys.
But here's the problem, Andy's looking at these companies as if they were factories producing the necessary goods. He refers to firing half the workers at a dairy, leading to customer shortages. But that is an apple-to-oranges comparison. Twitter is not a dairy.
And then it gets personal.
To me Musk and his radical job cutting smacks of twice baked-over Randism. Every generation produces business leaders like Musk, those with incredible ideas who also cloak power plays in the guise of economic revolution.
But the problem with Twitter was never about the number of employees. It was about the product they delivered.
The problem with Twitter (and Facebook and Google) is that they don't deliver milk. They provide opinions, shape the culture and affect elections. Those thousands of employees hand megaphones to their partisan allies and send mobs to silence people who disagree. They inject partisan poison into the cultural bloodstream.
If those workers at Andy's dairy deliberately soured the milk, the number who work there is not the issue. They should all be fired and replaced with those who deliver good milk.
The problem with Twitter, Facebook, and Google is not the number of people who work there. It's the people themselves who are in charge of the Public Square. They have abused their power by stifling speech. They have deliberately censored the truth as well as dissent. They created a public forum and then turned it into a partisan meeting.
The question is not about the number of people it takes to run a tech company. The more important question is, what should be done when people in a company deliberately produce a toxic product?
It's telling that before Musk, Twitter censored President Trump but provided links to child porn. Twitter produced toxic waste. A lot of work is required to restore trust in Twitter. But with Musk and fewer employees, it's making the right changes.
The deposition of Anthony Fauci took place today in the lawsuit commenced by Louisiana and Missouri, alleging that numerous Biden administration officials colluded with and directed big tech and social media giants to censor dissenting scientific and medical voices with regard to Covid.
***
Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, who attended the deposition, tweeted that Fauci had a lack of memory.
...
One of my favorite quotes from Fauci’s deposition today: “I have a very busy day job running a six billion dollar institute. I don’t have time to worry about things like the Great Barrington Declaration.”
The Great Barrington Declaration was ultimately signed by thousands of doctors and scientists. It challenged the covid shutdown policies that were recommended by Fauci and implemented by governments at the federal and state levels
Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, 7 rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. (Col 2:6–7) https://t.co/WJqtoJY7x9
The Fake News Media spent the last few days smearing Tucker Carlson and @libsoftiktok, just to watch their BS narrative all come crashing down. https://t.co/SW2EmrLtAK
But the common denominator here is Judeo-Christianity, western civilization and America as founded as the existential threat and enemy that must be utterly annihilated. As more and more of a militant anti-American attitude becomes mainstreamed into government and the public discourse across all sectors of society, wrong-think will be punished. The concept of "you will be made to care" is well on its way to either being codified as law, or failing that adopted as a standing principle for employers and businesses. Bitterly ironic that someone like Jack Phillips has his life destroyed for the principle of refusing to serve someone because it goes against his beliefs while the very same principle will be used against you if you do not accept theirs. And yet, that is exactly what is happening.
The financial collapse of the crypto exchange FTX was brutal and swift. Almost overnight, its CEO Sam Bankman-Fried saw his $16 billion fortune wiped out.
SBF, as he’s popularly known, managed to fool almost the entire world—though not quite everyone.
In hindsight, it’s not hard to see the red flags at FTX. There was no board of directors. Bankman-Fried couldn’t answer simple questions about his funding. The executive leadership was shady and there was the whole “cabal of roommates” in the Bahamas.
One thing that hasn’t gotten enough attention, however, is SBF’s philosophy of “effective altruism,” a social movement that rejects self-interest and instead focuses on “how to benefit others as much as possible.”
Many people will no doubt applaud SBF for his philosophy. Putting others before oneself is considered by many to be not just a virtue but the virtue, and it could help explain Bankman-Fried’s meteoric rise and celebrity. Legacy media swooned over SBF’s apparent selflessness. Story after story after story gushed over the crypto altruist who wanted to give his wealth away—even as he lived in a $40 million penthouse.
Bankman-Fried clearly liked to talk about his altruism, which many see as a clear and obvious virtue. Or is it?
‘Do Not Confuse Altruism With Kindness’
Ayn Rand famously didn’t see altruism as a virtue; she saw it as a sinister force.
“Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others,” Rand wrote. “These are not primaries, but consequences, which, in fact, altruism makes impossible.”
Now, I’m not an Objectivist. I actually celebrate giving and see charity as part of my Christian calling. But I think Rand is on to something. While I don’t believe “selfishness is a virtue” or “that greed is good,” I do believe in rational self-interest, the idea that it’s both normal and prudent for humans to advance their own interests in their economic decisions.
The idea of rational self-interest is central to capitalism and was famously articulated by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations.
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest,” Smith wrote. “We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages."
Smith, like myself, didn’t see charity as a sin or mere foolishness. But he clearly understood that humans are naturally self-interested creatures and that this instinct is not actually detrimental to human flourishing, but a key to it. This is the miracle of a market economy, which leverages self-interest through trade and voluntary action to improve everyone’s standard of living.
Now, contrast this sentiment with Sam Bankman-Fried, who said he was bailing out digital assets not because he saw an opportunity but because he felt it was the right thing to do.
“It’s not fair to customers,” SBF said on CNBC’s Squawk Box.
Or consider what Bankman-Fried told an Institute of International Finance audience in August.
“It's okay to do a deal that is moderately bad, in bailing out a place,” SBF said.
Purchasing failing companies to protect their customers seems like a dubious business strategy to me, and it was one of the things that caught the attention of seasoned traders, who began to raise questions about FTX. Those traders turned out to be right. FTX, which recently had a valuation of $32 billion, was massively overleveraged, and when rival crypto exchange Binance announced it was offloading hundreds of millions of dollars of FTT (FTX’s token), a run on funds ensued.
But it’s worth focusing on Bankman-Fried’s rhetoric a little more, because it occurred to me it sounds a little like a character in Atlas Shrugged.
‘Material Greed Isn’t Everything’
James Taggart, president of Taggart Transcontinental, is the most prominent villain in Ayn Rand’s magnum opus. He talks endlessly about serving mankind and sneers at those who are concerned with crass profits.
“Material greed isn’t everything. There are non-material ideals to consider,” Taggart lectures his sister Dagny, the hero of the story.
Taggart’s smug thinking is what prompts him to take on his own bad deal, a massive expansion of Taggart Transcontinental into Mexico. He confesses to “a feeling of shame” that he owns a railroad, but “the Mexican people have nothing but one or two inadequate lines.”
“The Mexicans, it seems to me, are a very diligent people, crushed by their primitive economy. How can they become industrialized if nobody lends them a hand? When considering an investment, we should, in my opinion, take a chance on human beings, rather than on purely material factors.”
Taggart gets his way and—like FTX—his San Sebastian Line is a disaster. The lesson in both cases is clear: beware business deals based on altruism.
SBF, like James Taggart, spoke often about serving humanity. His concern with climate change, global pandemics, and progressive causes earned him laurels and fawning press. Even after the collapse of FTX, newspapers are discussing his noble efforts “to prevent another pandemic.” But there is also a notable difference between Rand’s petulant railroad baron and Bankman-Fried.
While James Taggart is a mean, surly, unscrupulous man, his altruism seems somewhat genuine; either he’s too stupid to see his good intentions will bear bad fruit or he lacks the self awareness to realize his “altruistic” ideas are not as pure as he believes. (It’s important to understand that even though Taggart spurns selfishness and greed, he is clearly a selfish and greedy person.)
With Sam Bankman-Fried, this appears less true.
In an exchange with Vox reporter Kelsey Piper, SBF’s altruistic philosophy came up. Piper noted he was “really good at talking about ethics” publicly. His response is telling.
“I had to be…it’s what reputations are made of, to some extent,” SBF answered. “I feel bad for those who get [expletive] by it…by this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say the right shiboleths [sic] and everyone likes us.”
From this response, it’s clear Bankman-Fried knew he was a poser. His advocacy was just part of the new game of stakeholder capitalism. (Interestingly, SBF actually refers to ESG as a perversion.)
Sam Bankman-Fried, unlike James Taggart, is not an idiot. He knew what he was doing. I don’t know if this makes SBF more of a villain than Taggart or not.
But it certainly makes Bankman-Fried’s downfall all the more tragic.
Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.
Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.
This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.
Republicans have focused on persuading voters. Democrats have focused on collecting ballots. It's why stroke victims who can't speak (Fetterman) and candidates who won't debate (Katie Hobbs) win elections. The winner is the one with more ballots, not the one bringing voters to the polls.
Why Republicans are not preparing for elections with this in mind shows - in no uncertain terms - that they have a serious problem. They are throwing money at consultants that don't care whether their candidates win or lose. The GOP’s Political Consultant Problem
As the political discussion centers on the 2022 wins and losses from the midterm election, one thing that stands out in similarity to the 2020 general election is the difference between ballots and votes. It appears in some states this is the ‘new normal.’
Where votes were the focus, the Biden administration suffered losses. Where ballots were the focus, the Biden administration won.
Perhaps the two states most reflective of ‘ballots’ being more important than ‘votes’ are Michigan and Pennsylvania. Despite negative polling and public opinion toward two specific candidates in those states, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Pennsylvania Senate candidate John Fetterman achieved victories.
Whitmer and Fetterman were not campaigning for votes, that is old school. Instead, the machinery behind both candidates focused on the modern path. The Democrat machines in both states focused on ballot collection and ignored the irrelevant votes as cast.
Since the advent of ballot centric focus through mail-in and collection drop-off processes, votes have become increasingly less valuable amid the organizers who wish to control election outcomes. As a direct and specific result, ballot collection has become the key to Democrat party success.
The effort to attain votes for candidates is less important than the strategy of collecting ballots.
It should be emphasized; these are two distinctly different election systems.
...
When ‘ballot organization’ becomes more important than ‘vote winning,’ you modify your electoral campaign approaches accordingly. It might sound simplistic, but inside the distinct difference between ballots and votes you will find why refusing debates is a successful strategy.
If you are trying to win votes you could never fathom campaign success by refusing to debate an opponent. However, if your focus is centered around ballot collection, the debate is essentially irrelevant.
Kurt Schlichter is writing a series of essays to make the case for and the case against both DeSantis and Trump. Here's the case for DeSantis ....(read the whole thing)
It’s going to be King Kong vs. Godzilla and, while a few pipsqueak Rodan's might be flapping around (Hi Mike Pence), this bout is the battle royale. The 2024 primary will be Donald Trump v. Ron DeSantis. Everyone else is barely relevant ....
Ron DeSantis is Trump’s number one competitor precisely because of his greatest strength – competence. Not just competence in running his dinosaur-ridden state but in turning it bright red and annihilating the competition. “Competence” is going to be the watchword in 2024, along with “normality.” People want to go back to “normal,” which some think of as American life before the drama that began when Donald Trump came down the escalator (note that these people do not necessarily see Trump as the cause of the abnormality; his rise is seen by many as a reaction to the abnormality). But many of us older folks see “normal” as the America we grew up in, before 9/11 and the 2000 election (an election that was A-OK to deny because of reasons and shut up you transphobe). We want a prosperous America and an America that is not constantly in turmoil and at war, facing alleged (and not-so-alleged) existential threats from outside and within. We want an America where weird perversions are not declared awesome and where those of us who oppose groomers waving their tu-tu-clad man-butts in the faces of kindergarteners are not declared dangerous terrorist bigots. We would prefer a country where mean tweets don’t happen because they are not necessary since the ruling caste is functioning and not in need of radical push-back.
Competence goes with normality. It is the ability to perform one’s job with a high level of skill, and Ron DeSantis has done that as governor. His state is secure and prosperous. His handling of Hurricane Ian was stellar. The storm response was planned and executed flawlessly, so flawlessly that once the wind died down you never heard about it again. And what you did not hear, if you did not live there, was how the power came back fast and how bridges got rebuilt in days. You would have heard all about it if those things didn’t happen. Now, especially if they live in a hellhole like California, people look at the construction jobs that clog the freeways for months or years and they know that it does not have to be this way.
House Majority Whip James Clyburn, D-S.C., blamed the right's "demonization of Nancy Pelosi" for the attack on Paul Pelosi in their San Francisco home, saying that this is what happens in a country that follows "Germany in the early '30s."
The man most responsible for putting Biden in the White House – the Democrat Kingmaker – called Republicans Nazis. Accusing Republican critics of Nancy Pelosi of inciting the attack on her husband.
We tend to think that attacks like this are so far out that nobody would believe them. We are wrong. When Biden says to a group of Black supporters: “They’re going to put you back in chains,” people on the Right use it as an example of rhetoric that’s so overheated that it is counterproductive. It’s not.
Normal people view this kind of rhetorical excesses through our Overton Window and don’t believe that others will not view them the same way. We’re wrong.
When Clyburn accuses us of being Nazis and Donald Trump of being Hitler, many people nod and agree. They see us the same way. They may be our neighbors and even nod as they pass us on the street, but they believe that if given power, we’ll bring back slavery, send our enemies to concentration camps and begin gassing Jews. If you think that’s an exaggeration that no one would believe, you’re wrong.
That’s the situation we find ourselves in. It’s partly our fault; we ignore these accusations at our peril because we know these are lies that anyone can see through. That’s wrong. It’s partly because, with very few exceptions, the mass media is on the other side, and acts are the megaphone to amplify and spread these smears. The press is an oligopoly controlled by the opposition.
It does not have to be this way. The first order of business is to create – or buy – our own press. Musk’s takeover of Twitter is a good start. But the press is financially precarious, and what Musk has done with Twitter can be done with local and regional organs, including local broadcast affiliates.
As the GOP prepares for post-mortems and mutual recriminations -- and some of that will be necessary -- it's also important to keep in mind that in any contest, the other team has strengths as well, and they get their time with the ball too. And that they're going to score.
We got a little self-deluded about abortion having all but vanished as a factor in the race. It didn't.
Abortion was a costly victory. That doesn't mean you don't take the victory; only a GOPe Grifter would say that you perpetually run on an issue and never actually try to win that issue on a policy level.
But winning the issue of abortion, finally, did provoke a powerful backlash from the 40% of the country that considers abortion to be an unholy sacrament.
Just as Obamacare was a costly victory that, from the Democrats' perspective, they absolutely needed to seize and accept the fallout as unavoidable consequences, so too does the GOP have to take the win on abortion, but with the unavoidable consequence of a riled-up leftwing progressive base.
And on that, even though abortion faded as an issue as we got close to election day, millions and millions of votes were cast weeks and even a month before election day. I checked the Pennsylvania mail-in voting rules; the website didn't give a firm date, but it said early voting usually takes place "4-6 weeks" before election day.
So people were casting votes for Fetterneck in the last week of September. When the July-August passions over Dobbs were still hot.
Another important factor is that the Democrat Party, being now the party of smug, comfortable affluent white professionals and civil servants who imagine themselves to be of the professional class, is now less of a political party than a Lifestyle Brand. By which I mean: they are affluent enough to not care as much about minor little things like gas costing six dollars a gallon and chicken breast costing almost $8 a pound (when you can even get it!). Or even that their 401K's have lost one third to 40% of their value.
They like advertising the fact -- or advertising the pretense -- that they're so wealthy that they don't care about the trivial worries of money that so concern the Lumpenproletariat:
Does anyone think this Bearded BBW is really unconcerned about the price of carbohydrates? Because I sure don't.
The Lifestyle Brand Liberals are fine with the price of gasoline, which they understand must Necessarily Skyrocket (TM) if we're to save the world from Carbon Dioxide (The Invisible Killer). They don't love paying more for gas, but they also don't love paying more in taxes. They accept doing so, however, as tithings they pay to the Universal Church of the God-State.
One sad lesson we learned in Iraq is that any tyranny has its fervent supporters -- there is no such thing as a tyranny that is hated by everyone. Such a tyranny would not last more than a day and an hour.
The Democrats' Covid Tyranny, of course, has millions of passionate Mask Baathists who voted not for Covid Amnesty but for Covid Vengeance, vengeance against those who have dared to unmask over the past year. The Democrats still very much count upon these jihadists as party loyalists.
Finally, the Lifestyle Brand that is the Democrat Party has little to pitch its smug, affluent white Karen core of extraordinarily mediocre careerists who think they're genius world-beaters except constant validation and slurs against the proles -- narcissistic mediocrities of the sort that make up the Democrat Party need to be constantly assured that there are huge swathes of people who are inferior to them.
The Democrat Party exists nearly exclusively to invent Nazi-like dehumanization campaigns against half the country so that the intellectually insecure sub-mediocrities of the civil-service and mid-management mid-wits can feel they're Superior to someone.
And the Democrat Party is creating these dehumanization campaigns effectively enough. The last campaign convinced the midwits that the people the Democrat Party is using government power to censor, surveil, and jail are The Real Fascists, and that the midwits should therefore feel Scorn towards them, and feel a swell of Unearned Superiority towards them.
And they reward the Democrat Party with their votes for this service.
No one will ever vote against someone who makes them feel like Somebody.
This is all primal and primally ugly stuff, but the Democrat Party has always been about this very base tribalism. They've been doing it for 100 years. They're good at it.
We maybe forgot that a bit.
That doesn't let us off the hook for having failed to counter this. That doesn't let us off the hook for having failed to beat them.
But we should keep it in perspective. Patton warned against soldiers imagining the Nazis to be ten-foot-tall giants who were unbeatable in battle.
But we should likewise resist imagining the Democrats as one-foot-tall Jonah Goldbergs unable to take three steps without stepping on the dick of the better-endowed studs servicing their wives. They are the nastiest race hustlers the modern world has created, in bed with Hollywood and Madison Avenue with access to all the expertise that professionals and artists in the fields of emotional manipulation and brainwashing can grant them, and they get to run their plays, too.
And they can run race- and class-baiting plays for Suburban White Karen against lower-class white men just the same as they used to run race-baiting plays for black and Hispanic voters against rich whites. They can run whatever racial/class play they need to. They are amoral and without conscience. Their only morality is Marxism.
Once the Left took the presidency, the House, and Senate, they tried a deadly experiment on the American people.
As the midterms approach, one way of looking at America’s current disaster is that we, the American people, were lab rats. And since 2021, the Left were the mad scientists, eager to try out their crackpot leftist experiments on us.
The result is that the housing market is tottering on the verge of collapse.
As interest rates soar, our $31 trillion national debt crowds out everything else in the budget.
Inflation roars at a rate of 8-9 percent per annum, higher than at any time in 40 years. Yet the prices of the stuff of life—food, fuel, shelter, energy—are far steeper still than the official rate.
No one is safe from thugs anymore—whether a commuter on a New York subway or the Pelosis in Pacific Heights.
The country reportedly has a 25-day supply of diesel fuel—the energy source that runs the nation. Meanwhile, we keep draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve of oil—a commodity we have in abundance but refuse to produce fully.
We never fixed the supply-chain crisis of last year, and so still face shortages of key consumer goods.
The labor participation rate is at an all-time low—given fat government COVID subsidies, the Siren-song appeal of staying home after the lockdowns, fear of COVID, and millions of workers with long COVID.
The post-Kabul Pentagon is quiet about the depletion of its critical stocks of weaponry. We have sent billions of dollars’ worth in howitzer shells, javelin missiles, and Hilmar rocket launchers to Ukraine without replenishing our own arsenals. The Army’s recruitment rate is off 50 percent this year....
The Democrats focus on abortion, defining it as the most
important freedom women have – the right to kill their babies – including
the right to kill it after it’s born – shows just how radical they are.
You didn’t realize that the right to kill your newborn was
part of the Democrat party’s platform?That’s because the corporate media hid this little gem by Ralph Northam,
former Governor of Virginia, in answer to a question about third-trimester
abortion. He took it a step further and discussed what should be done after the baby was delivered.
“``The infant would be kept comfortable . . . and then a discussion
would ensue.''
Translation: the right to
kill your just-born child is now yours.
Defenders of infanticide complain that Northam was referring
to children born with deformities.But
what’s a “deformity?”Democrats use euphemisms
for all sorts of things that most normal people know are barbaric.They are now busy defining removing young girls’
breasts and vaginas as “gender-affirming care.”For boys, “gender-affirming care” is cutting off penises and testicles and sewing
in a vagina as a replacement.They
recently elevated a woman to the Supreme Court who asserted under oath that she
did not know what a “woman” was. This is
Orwellian in the true sense of the word.
Stevie Wonder was born blind; Helen Keller was both blind and
deaf. Deformed? Downs syndrome children are “deformed,”
as are those born with Spina Bifida and cleft palates.One of
the most common defects is a heart defect. Deformities worth a death sentence are whatever they say they are.
Medical science can now detect abnormalities that were once
hidden until the newborn developed and the defect manifested itself.When you can lose your job for not getting a government-mandated shot or be defamed for knowing that men and women are different - and that
you can tell the difference at a glance - you can be sure that “deformity” will
soon mean anything that people who want to do away with their less-than-perfect
child want it to mean.
Please note: none of Northam's defenders support a law known as the "Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act." Why? They don’t want to protect the baby that survives a failed abortion.
Sunday, November 06, 2022
Paul Pelosi's behavior after he opened the door for police seems REALLY relevant.
I’m going to skip over the recent reports that the CDC, DHS and other federal agencies have been directing social media platforms on not just what but whom they would like to be censored. A clear first amendment violation....
Needless to say this obliterates the idea that these are simply private companies doing what they want. This is fascism, textbook.
In my view, we desperately need one major social media platform to embrace free speech and allow for open debate, this is the only pathway to make that a reality. While I don’t trust Elon Musk I am left with no choice but to pray his prior claim of being a “free speech absolutist” was sincere and he can somehow navigate this minefield to make my dream a reality. It may sound like hyperbole but I think the fate of humanity may rest on his shoulders; without open dialogue the chasm between our warring camps will widen and things will almost certainly turn violent. Let’s give peace one last shot. Words will never hurt you but civil wars most certainly can.
We look back on the primitive people of the past and sneer at their bizarre and monstrous atrocities – and rightly so. Even the civilized Romans recorded horrible acts by their elite – Emperor Elagabalus allegedly wanted to castrate himself and do some more cutting in order to become a Romanette, while Nero sliced the bologna off his boyfriend, a kid who was unlucky enough to resemble Nero’s dead wife. But here’s the thing – the Romans themselves wrote about this stuff recognizing that it was an atrocity. The Romans at least has a bit of moral clarity. But our savage elite celebrates the surgical disfigurement of disordered people, including kids. Our senile president sits with a male pretending to be a girl and cheers it on. Mutilation is a disgrace and it must stop.
Yeah, the word is “mutilation.” Chopping of penises and testicles, cutting off healthy breasts, trying to sculpt obscene parodies of male and female sex organs – these are mutilations. The Aztecs, no slouch in the atrocity department, would look at this in disgust.
“Top surgery,” “bottom surgery” – they know it is all an abomination because they try to hide double mastectomies and castration behind benign euphemisms like “gender affirming care.” It’s a lie wrapped up inside a deception. And our garbage ruling class think this is a good thing.
Oh, somewhere in their broken brains, they do understand that this is barbarity of the cruelest kind, so they always initially deny and obfuscate when confronted. “What? We don’t do gender-affirming surgery on minors! Why, just ignore our websites and videos where we brag about doing gender-affirming surgery on minors.”
But then, when exposed – after they call you a terrorist for letting people know about the horrors they are inflicting on sick and vulnerable people – they shift into, “It’s actually a good thing, this thing we were denying doing just a couple minutes ago.”...
Professor Lloyd Peck of the British Antarctic Survey is worried about – stop me if you've heard this one before – global warming. For this year's Royal Institution Christmas lecture, he'll be warning that the merest smidgeonette of an increase in temperature in the south polar seabed will lead to the loss of a zillion species. As the oceans warm, the ice shelves that extend from the polar depths into the sub-Antarctic light will shrink, and the thick mats of algae on their underside will vanish, and the billions of tiny krill that feed on them will perish, and pretty soon, up at the scenic end of the food chain, all those cute seals and penguins and whales will be gone.
And all this will happen if the temperature goes up two degrees, from butt-numbingly freezing to marginally less butt-numbingly freezing. "It is going to be really unpleasant," Prof Peck tells the Guardian. "We are going to lose things – we just don't know how much."
Each to his own. I like whales. I spend a lot of time on the north shore of the St Lawrence and around the Saguenay fjord in Quebec, and it would certainly be a duller place without the whales gaily plashing hither and yon. But what I find curious about this sort of thing is that Prof Peck is supposed to be a scientist and the newspaper reporting his views is famously rational. A month ago, for example, it was mocking the kind of folks who'd re-elected George W Bush – men of faith, not science, many of them from jurisdictions where the school boards are packed with creationists who look askance at Darwin, evolution and the like.
Evolution posits that species will come and go: some die out, some survive and evolve. I don't regard myself as anything terribly special but in a typical year I'm exposed to temperatures from around 98 degrees to 45 below freezing, in the lower part of which range I evolve into my long underwear.
Maybe if the Antarctic food chain is incapable of evolving to cope with a two-degree increase in temperature across many decades, it isn't meant to survive. Science tells us that extinction is a fact of life, and that nature is never still: long before the Industrial Revolution, long before the first lardbuttus Americanus got into his primitive four-miles-per-gallon SUV to head to the mall for the world's first cheeseburger, there were dramatic fluctuations in climate wiping out a ton of stuff. Yet scientists and their cheerleaders, the hyper-rationalists at the progressive newspapers, have signed on to the idea that evolution should cease and the world should be frozen – literally, in the case of Prof Peck and his beloved algae – in some unchanging Edenic state.
Well, good luck to him. If I see a chap with a "Save the algae" collecting box, I'm happy to chip in a fiver. But, at the same time as the Royal Institute and the Guardian and all other bien pensants are in a mass panic at the thought of the krill having to adjust his way of life, they're positively insouciant about massive changes to our own habitat. You like fox-hunting? You're not entirely cool with gay marriage? You prefer English common law to this new Euro-pudding legal code? Tough, shrugs the Guardian.
Stuff happens, things change, adapt or die. Perhaps he'll give us some hard numbers in his lecture but, insofar as I can tell, Prof Peck's doomsday scenario depends on a lot of "ifs". In the course of several decades, the temperature might indeed increase sufficiently, and that might reduce the algae, and that might diminish by several billion the number of krill, and that might impact the lifestyle of the Antarctic penguin by, oh, 2050, 2060.
But, on the other hand, somebody might have invented a thing the size of the Palm Pilot you staple to the seabed that automatically lowers the temperature by two degrees and we'll have wall-to-wall algae. Who can say?
What we do know for certain is that the krill's chances of survival are a lot greater than, say, those of the Italians, or the Germans, or the Japanese, Russians, Greeks and Spaniards, all of whom will be in steep population decline long before the Antarctic krill. By 2025, one in every three Japanese will be over 65, and that statistic depends on the two out of three who aren't over 65 sticking around to pay the tax bills required to support the biggest geriatric population in history.
Does the impending extinction of the Japanese and Russians not distress anyone? How about the Italians? They gave us the Sistine Chapel, the Mona Lisa, Gina Lollobrigida, linguine, tagliatelle, fusilli. If you're in your scuba suit down on the ice shelf dining with the krill and you say you'd like your algae al dente in a carbonara sauce, they'll give you a blank look. Billions of years on Earth and all they've got is the same set menu they started out with. But try and rouse the progressive mind to a "Save the Italians" campaign and you'll get nowhere. Luigi isn't as important as algae, even though he, too, is a victim of profound environmental changes: globally warmed by Euro-welfare, he no longer feels the need to breed.
And, if he doesn't care if he survives, why should the penguins and the krill feel any differently? Given the choice between the krill's hypothetically impending extinction and their own impending extinction already under way, Europeans would apparently rather fret about the denizens of the deep. Even Chesterton, who observed that once man has ceased to believe in God he'll believe in anything, might have marvelled at how swift the decay from post-Christian to post-evolutionary. Like the old song says: What's it all about – algae?
Sorry, Harvard, but 'visual diversity'—having a campus that looks like a Benetton ad—isn't a compelling state interest.
Years ago, in preparing to send their oldest son through the gauntlet of Manhattan private-school admissions (for which I had to write a recommendation letter for a four-year-old!), my Asian-American cousin and her white husband talked to an “admissions consultant.” The consultant told them that elite preschools value “diversity.” My cousin excitedly told the consultant that she’s from the Philippines, her husband’s from Australia, and their son at his tender age had already lived in multiple countries and been exposed to many different cultures and languages.
“I’m sorry,” the smiling consultant said to them about their white-looking son, “but that’s not what these schools are looking for. Your child does not offer visual diversity.”
Visual diversity. That sad, shallow, hollowed-out vision of “diversity” is exactly the kind of diversity that Harvard, UNC, and other educational institutions are obsessed with. That’s the kind of diversity these schools are seeking by giving pluses to applicants who “check the box.” Checking the “Black” box doesn’t guarantee a “Black” experience: the descendant of former slaves, the child of the Nigerian tycoon, and our son Harlan have had very different life experiences, and as a result, they probably hold very different worldviews too. But here’s the one thing that all three of them can reliably deliver, thanks to their darker skin: visual diversity.
So in the end, what Harvard and UNC are arguing is that visual diversity is a compelling state interest. Having classrooms and admissions brochures that look like Benetton ads can justify resorting to racial classifications that we have justifiably banned in pretty much every other area of American life. The idea would be laughable if it weren’t so wrong.3
CORUSCANT — Acknowledging past decisions that, while well intended, were destructive, and learning a ragtag team of rebels might win again, the Galactic Empire has proposed amnesty for anyone who may have gotten a little carried away and blown up several planets.
"This is supposed to be a happy galaxy. Let's not bicker and argue about who annihilated whose planet," wrote Grand Moff Ardus Kaine in a guest opinion piece published by The Atlantic after polls showed destroying Alderaan just to get a politician to squeal did not sit well with the galaxy's citizens. "Oopsies happen. Forgive and forget, I always say."
Kaine expounded on the need to forgive those who were forced to decide to erase entire systems from the galactic map while not having all of the information available at the time. He went on to advocate celebrating the moments in which only single reactors were used by Death Stars to vaporize millions of lives in mere ...
"To anyone who doesn't speak out against this politically-motivated attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband, I will say only this: your silence is deafening." Joe Scarborough of MSNBC addressed his viewer this morning in his first recent coverage of political violence amid several months of firebombed pregnancy centers and churches, an assassination attempt on a sitting Supreme Court Justice, and the running down of 18-year-old Cayler Ellingson in a truck for being a Republican.
Scarborough's call for all public figures to directly condemn political violence has been echoed across other popular left-leaning outlets, most of whom have not covered the widespread terroristic intimidation against conservatives from the last several months.
