MATH IS HARD! Math classes cause “intellectual trauma” to minorities: STUDY.
I wrote a piece a while ago: Why Affirmative Action May Be Doing More Harm Than Good for Black Americans. The gist is that if you and everyone around you believes you can’t learn something, you won’t learn something. This, and other arguments like this, just reinforce that “fixed mindset”.
EXPERTS: EVERYTHING IS AWFUL. A Salon Hair Wash Can Be a Serious Health Threat, Expert Says.
NO PASARAN! The Smug Liars’ “Screw-You” Party.
DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF THE PARTY OF YOUTH AND ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Nancy Pelosi’s daughter goes scorched earth on Jill ‘Lady McBiden’ in the bitter feud between Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi daughter Alexandra has some choice words for First Lady Jill Biden as the family stews over her mother’s role in ousting President Joe Biden from his reelection campaign.
Pelosi’s daughter described the First Lady as ‘Lady McBiden,’ comparing her to Lady MacBeth, the evil wife controlling her husband’s kingdom from behind the scenes in the legendary Shakespeare play.
‘If I was Lady McBiden, I’d put on my big girl pants, play the long game and think about my husband’s legacy,’ Alexandra Pelosi told Politico.
‘We were friends for 50 years,’ said the first lady when asked about Pelosi by the Washington Post. ‘It was disappointing.’
Pelosi was a vocal proponent of Biden stepping out of the race, even going on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and raising doubts about whether he could continue even after he reasserted that he would stay in the race.
Pelosi’s daughter indicated that the Bidens should be grateful that her mother was still praising the president for his legacy.
‘There aren’t that many people left in America who have something nice to say about Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi is one of them,’ she said.
This new comedy satire of Downfall has been surprisingly fun to watch, as the clock ticks down on the Biden (p)residency: Watch: Biden Moving Out of White House — People Love It and Ask One Big Question. “Is someone at the White House inventorying what’s going out the door? Given prior history with Democrats, particularly when the Clintons walked out with thousands of dollars worth of things they weren’t supposed to take, that might be a good idea. Whose chair is that, that the movers are carrying out there? Yes, and maybe do a thorough check that there isn’t anything funny left behind, since cocaine seems to have found its way into the Biden White House before without anyone ever figuring out how that happened. And is anyone checking if any classified documents are going out the door with Joe?”
AXIOS: Biden planning book with his narrative on presidency, election exit.
President Biden plans to write a book after leaving office, the White House confirmed to Axios, giving him an opportunity to try and shape the narrative around his presidency and the tumultuous weeks leading to his historic withdrawal from the 2024 race.
Why it matters: There’s a glut of reporting coming out on Biden’s fateful decision to run again in 2024 and ultimately step aside after his disastrous debate with President-elect Trump — most of it unflattering to the 82-year-old president.
Biden’s own version of those events has hardly registered, beyond his contentious claims that he could have beaten Trump.
If the book project comes to fruition, it will be a chance for Biden to lay out, in full, his views on what he accomplished and why he handled the 2024 cycle the way he did.
NBC News first reported that Biden was planning a book. A White House spokesperson confirmed the plans but did not provide additional details.
Jill could really bring things full circle by hiring the perfect ghostwriter: Neil Kinnock, an admitted Biden supporter, is tanned, rested, and ready!
ANYTHING THAT PRODUCES A NUMBER GETS MORE RESPECT THAN IT SHOULD: The problem with pulse oximeters. I was at the doctor’s and my pulse ox reading seemed kinda low to me — I think it was like 95 or something — and when I said something the nurse shrugged, wiped off the little sensor with an alcohol wipe, and put it back on my finger, where it then read 99.
TIME TO EXPAND THE HATCH ACT TO COVER CONTRIBUTIONS? Ever since FDR was in the White House, the Hatch Act has barred federal workers from partisan activities while on duty.
Now that there are so many of them, making an average $101,000+ annually, they provide millions of dollars to Democrats and Republicans who protect their jobs and programs. And nearly half of the managers in the nation’s capital openly declare in a recent survey they will actively oppose President Donald Trump’s policies and programs.
All of which raises a logical question that I cover in my latest PJMedia column: Should feds also be barred from contributing to partisan political campaigns?
FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Nearly two thirds of convicted rapists in Sweden are migrants or second generation immigrants.
(Via SDA.)
READER FAVORITE: Apple AirPods Pro 2 Wireless Earbuds, Active Noise Cancellation, Hearing Aid Feature. #CommissionEarned
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
AOC on the verge of tears: "This is the eve of an authoritarian, 21st century fascism" pic.twitter.com/grLnsdDPcF
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 19, 2025
We know the withered and sclerotic Biden has no idea about much of what was issued under his name. Does AOC, age 35, remember how many things her Green Nude Eel were going to ban in 2019?
Although to be fair, her earlier efforts to fight global warming are now paying spectacular dividends! Coldest Inauguration Day in 40 years expected as polar vortex invades America.
HOW MUCH RANGE DO E.V.s LOSE IN THE COLD? “As EV research and data group Recurrent explained in a data analysis report this week, the level of range degradation in cold weather depends on the vehicle and its factory equipment. After analyzing data from 18,000 electric vehicles across 20 models, the research group found that, on average, EVs with a heat pump are 83% of their normal range in winter conditions. Without a heat pump, the average drops to 75%. Across all EVs analyzed, the average is 80% range.”
SALES: Tesla Begins Discounting Cybertuck for 2025.
My local dealer seems to have a lot of them on the lot lately.
READER FAVORITE: Instant Pot Duo Plus 9-in-1 Electric Pressure Cooker, Slow Cooker, Rice Cooker. #CommissionEarned
OUT ON A LIMB: You don’t have ADHD – you’re just annoying.
ADHD is the disorder du jour. It’s the most coveted diagnosis of our time. The middle classes in particular crave the ADHD label, because who wants to go to a dinner party these days without having some vogue ailment to boast about? There is now concern – finally! – that ADHD is being overdiagnosed. The Times reports that 278,000 people in England are on ‘central nervous system stimulants’ – yikes – to treat their ADHD. There was an 18 per cent hike in prescriptions for ADHD drugs between April 2023 and March 2024, and now nearly five in every thousand people in England are being treated for the condition. Man that’s a lot of annoying people.
The Economist is worried, too. Last year it got the fashionably disordered middle classes choking on their pills when it said ‘ADHD should not be treated as a disorder’. Its reasoning was solid: much of the stuff we bundle up as ‘ADHD’ is just ‘ordinary human traits’, it said. It’s so true. Who among us has not at some point felt impulsive, disorganised, agitated? We’re not sick, we’re having a bad week. No one benefits from the pathologisation of life’s ups and downs. Aside from Big Pharma, that is. As a writer for Scientific American said back in 2016, ADHD feels like a ‘manufactured epidemic’. Drug companies have ‘massive financial incentives’, he said, to convince people they’re unhinged and need drugs. One wonders if Scientific American would publish a piece like that today.
The ADHD epidemic, like all faux disorders, started in the US. They’ve been drugging kids there for years. Seven million American kids – that’s 11.4 per cent of them – are said to have ADHD. Many are being pumped with Ritalin and other calming drugs. The sedation of a generation – it’s crazy. As one sceptical psychiatrist wrote in the New York Times a few years back, this ‘drugging of children’ is the really scary ‘epidemic’. We are using stimulants to ‘[suppress] all spontaneous behavior in normal children’, he said. Aldous Huxley called – he wants his storyline back.
How striking that this explosion in the drugging of children coincided with the crisis of discipline in family and school life. It seems to me that medication was brought in to do what adults were increasingly reluctant to do: make kids sit still and shut up. And now these ill-disciplined brats have become ill-disciplined adults. As someone from Gen X (the last sane generation), I remember fidgeting and overtalking being severely reprimanded. At school, at the dinner table, at Mass, you twitched and chatted at your peril. Even random old men on the bus would tell us to shut the fuck up. No doubt millennials and Gen Z think this sounds tyrannical, but at least we don’t need drugs to get through a 20-minute work meeting. The West’s millions of ‘ADHD adults’ don’t need medication – they need a time machine so they can go back and beg their bourgeois parents to discipline them better.
Just make sure that time machine has got a digital, not analog clock: Schools are removing analogue clocks from exam halls as teenagers ‘cannot tell the time.’
THE JOY OF LOSING: Review: Kamala: Her Historic, Joyful, and Auspicious Sprint to the White House:
Some books are destined to be bestsellers. Others are destined to end up on a cargo plane to Africa next to pallets of T-shirts celebrating would-be Super Bowl champions and Hillary Clinton’s “herstoric” victory. Indeed, sometimes it all comes down to which candidate wins the big election. Consider the recently published book of photographs commemorating Kamala Harris and her relentlessly “joyful” campaign for president. Kamala: Her Historic, Joyful, and Auspicious Sprint to the White House was churned out in just six weeks (after extending the original deadline of four) by journalist Kevin Merida and photo historian Deborah Willis of New York University. It was never going to be a bestseller for a single reason: Harris was never going to win.
It was worth a shot. The word “auspicious” seems like an unfortunate choice in retrospect. The authors and their publisher, Simon & Schuster, presumably needed a title that would work in the highly unlikely (but theoretically possible) event that Harris was elected president. The brief introduction is sufficiently vague, applauding Harris for proving “the unthinkable could happen” and “with scant time to prepare for such an epic challenge, breath[ing] hope into a deeply divided America, and turning a moribund race for the presidency into a contest stocked with optimism and possibility.” She was “poised to win.”
The photos are fine to look at. For the obnoxious liberal, this book would make a serviceable addition to any coffee table or toilet tank. But it’s Merida’s formidable prose, though relatively scant, that shines through in this extraordinary (and at times utterly bonkers) work of political hagiography, and allows normal Americans to glimpse into a bizarre alternate reality that bears little resemblance to our own. “Over a lightning-swift 107 days, Kamala Harris completely rewrote the American political playbook,” Merida writes with unrelenting passion. “She took her perpetually underestimated self and sprinted across the 2024 presidential campaign landscape, giving voice to aspiration and ambition, bringing confidence to little girls, championing small businesses as part of her economic vision. … She even ordered a slice of chocolate caramel cake—caramel’s her favorite—at Dottie’s Market in Savannah along the way.”
Merida, the former executive editor of the Los Angeles Times*, commends Harris on her successful quest to “popularize joy: A simple, sweet, infectious noun that became a kind of campaign anthem to rally around. The antidote to fear and hopelessness, and just maybe the inception of a saner kind of politics. The politics of decency.”
Strength through joy! Speaking of which, the book makes an excellent double-feature with this (also real) relic of the 2020 campaign and the vigorous youthful muscular administration it foretold:
* The owner of the L.A. Times clearly has his work cut out for him if he wishes to clean out the El Segundo Augean Stables: Los Angeles Times Owner Now Deeply Regrets Paper’s Endorsement of Bass for Mayor.
“EMPATHY” — YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG: Adrien Brody hopes The Brutalist ‘reawakens empathy for immigrants.’
Adrien Brody said he hopes his new film The Brutalist can “reawaken” empathy for immigrants.
The Oscar-tipped drama focusses on Brody’s Hungarian-Jewish architect László Tóth, a Holocaust survivor who emigrates to the United States.
Brody, 51, said he took inspiration for the role from his mother, the photographer Sylvia Plachy, whose family emigrated to the United States from Budapest in 1958 after the Hungarian Revolution.
“I witnessed my own mother’s journey, how she and her parents fled terrible circumstances only to enter a harsh new reality of being foreigners,” he told the Sunday Times.
“They had the obstacles of assimilation. But most of us in the US have come from such a past – second generation, third generation. So it is incongruous that there can be apathy towards people’s yearning to come over and be a contributing part of my nation.
“I hope this reawakens empathy for immigrants.”
Judging by the reviews of the three hour, 35 minute film, it doesn’t sound like its screenwriters carry around much empathy for America itself in their hearts: The Brutalist: The Raw Concrete of America.
The story follows the fortunes of the Hungarian architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) after he flees the aftermath of the Holocaust in Europe to seek his freedom in the United States…Tóth settles with his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), a furniture-maker in Philadelphia, who is enslaved by his desire to assimilate: He marries a shiksa, he becomes Catholic, he even changes his Hungarian surname to Miller. Tóth regards him with contempt. Soon, he encounters the wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), an ersatz Charles Foster Kane, who is of course enslaved to his own money, but also to a driving desire to be thought of as a serious, intellectual man. Van Buren, in turn, enslaves Tóth, all but forcing him to design and build a large, self-consciously modern community center in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. And of course, Tóth enslaves himself, first to drugs to numb his despair, and then to despair itself, as he comes to see his American experience as little more than an extension of his detainment in the concentration camps.
In case anyone in the audience isn’t tracking with the brutality of it all, Corbet helpfully includes a scene where Van Buren rapes a drunken Tóth while making antisemitic observations about the causes of the Holocaust. (Yes, yes, we get it—America has raped the world….) And in case that brainy symbol isn’t clear enough, shortly after, he restates the film’s thesis in the mouth of Erzsébet, who declares to her dejected husband, “You were right, this place is rotten. The landscape, the food we eat—this whole country is rotten.” And so it goes until the very end, when Corbet unveils his final exhibit: At the first Venice Biennale, Tóth’s niece reveals in a speech that his forced labor for Van Buren was really just an extension of his Holocaust experience, that what his patron has intended as a monument to a modern, forward-looking America was in fact a re-envisioning of the death houses at Buchenwald.
As Charlie Kirk was quoted as saying, “America is the only country where even those who hate it refuse to leave. That’s how you know you live in a great country.”
ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN: The Six Key People Who Covered Up Biden’s Senility Have Been Unmasked.
“Six key people protected the president,” the New York Times revealed. “Jill Biden, the first lady, and Hunter Biden, his surviving son, fervently believed in his ability to win. Mr. Donilon and Steve Ricchetti, the counselor to Mr. Biden, knew when and how to deliver information, along with Annie Tomasini, the deputy chief of staff. She and Anthony Bernal, the first lady’s most senior aide, took tight control over the president’s public schedule.”
All of them are deeply devoted to Mr. Biden. All are adept at navigating his quick temper. All enjoy proximity to the most powerful office in American politics.
And all were convinced that he was the only one who could beat Mr. Trump.
Then there was Mr. Biden himself, whose pursuit of the White House had been the family’s project for nearly 40 years. Finally elected on his third try, Mr. Biden suggested that he would be a transition president. But his pride, plus a string of legislative accomplishments and a strong showing in the 2022 midterms, drove him to seek re-election and set out on a quixotic mission to prove his vitality.
Mr. Biden told USA Today that he could have defeated Mr. Trump if he had stayed in the race. But when he departs the White House on Monday, history will remember him as the man who beat Mr. Trump, then paved the way for his return.
Though the actual number is much bigger than six. From Larry Sabato on the left, to GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson on the right, to the virtually the entirety of the “cheap fake” DNC-MSM, a lot of people were apparently sufficiently scared of the Bad Orange Man to maintain their omerta and thus prop up Biden as a nominal figurehead for as long as possible.
ZOMBIE EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT: Now that Biden thinks he has made the ERA part of the Constitution, here’s another zombie for you. I wrote this essay in 2007 (published in 2008) after Ted Kennedy and Barbara Boxer announced a renewed effort to adopt the ERA, so it’s a little dated. But its main point still comes through: The last thing progressives should want is the ERA. It will make preferential treatment for women and woman-owned businesses illegal. “Feminist” organizations knocked themselves out to oppose Proposition 209 in 1996 and support the effort to repeal it (Proposition 16) in 2020. If they wanted ban discrimination by sex, they should have supported 209.
By the way, the insane tv ad they did against Proposition 209 (described in the essay) still annoys me.
REGULATORS ON THE JOB: FAA grounds SpaceX Starship launches after breakup in Texas. SpaceX had the failure analysis in hand the first night. And I don’t think the FAA has the expertise, honestly, to evaluate what’s going on.
TIKTOK HAS CUT A DEAL WITH TRUMP AND IS RESTORING SERVICE.
Lmao I opened TikTok to find the message that it’s unavailable is gone and this starts playing.
Trump Rally and Inauguration is gonna be 🔥 pic.twitter.com/cu9pQTycfy
— AliceInCommieLand (@NovaRockwell23) January 19, 2025
SUGGESTION: While we have presidents deciding on their own what is and is not in the Constitution, may I suggest DJT think hard about whether the 16th Amendment is *really* part of the Constitution?
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