MY USA TODAY COLUMN: What Fuels Trump Derangement Syndrome? Gentry Liberals’ Status Anxiety.
Archive for 2017
January 5, 2017
A FALSE SENSE OF ABUNDANCE: “What is confusing is the words people are using all denote a fear of a shortage of good men. But if you look at the attitude that accompanies these missives, you will see that the overwhelming sentiment is one of abundance, of being in a position to nitpick, and select the very cream of the crop.”
Well. If you want one of the top 5% of men, you should probably be one of the top 5% of women. The odds that you in fact are one of those women are 1 in 20. If, as a woman, you have high expectations for men, ask yourself: What do I bring to the table that would attract such a man? And the reverse is true for men, too, of course, but I think men engage in less self-delusion here.
Related: Men aren’t irrelevant @glamourmag. Who drove the delivery trucks? Those are low-status men, unsuitable as marriage partners and hence beneath notice.
MAKE AMERICA MATE AGAIN: “Shortly before Christmas, the U.S. Census Bureau put some coal in the nation’s holiday stocking. It released data highlighting a worrisome trend: The population grew a subdued 0.7 percent, the lowest rate of growth since the Great Depression years of 1936 and 1937.” Birthrates always fall under socialism. They’ll rise again over the next few years, if things go as expected.
SEXISM AT DISNEY: Why does Disney hate boys so much? All their male characters are losers. “I have only boys. We watch the Disney Channel. But they have noticed that there is no commercial for them. There is no encouragement for boys to have big goals. Boys are completely left out of the equation. There isn’t even a picture of a boy in any of their videos or ads. In a world that is pushing gender inclusivity, this seems like a big oversight.”
Oh, it’s not an oversight.
Plus: “Even the new Star Wars movies offer strong women and very few strong men.”
QUALITATIVE IMPROVEMENT IN NORTH KOREAN MISSILES: This is from Reuters. The source is the U.S. State Department. For a change the State Dept. and moi agree on something. In missile testing failure is progress. Except when The New York Times reports on U.S. anti-ballistic missile tests. Then failure is failure is failure (I apologize to roses) and the failure is attributed to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush…Hold the presses…and attributed to Donald Trump!
The United States said on Thursday North Korea had demonstrated a “qualitative” improvement in its nuclear and missile capabilities after an unprecedented level of tests last year, showing the needed to sustain pressure on Pyongyang to bring it back to disarmament negotiations.
U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken told a joint news conference after a meeting with his Japanese and South Korean counterparts that North Korea had conducted 24 missile tests in the past year, as well as two nuclear tests, and learned from each one.
“Even a so-called failure is progress because … they apply what they have learned to their technology and to the next test. And in our assessment, we have a qualitative improvement in their capabilities in the past year as a result of this unprecedented level of activity,” he said.
“With every passing day the threat does get more acute,” Blinken said, and referred to comments by North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, on Sunday that his country was close to test-launching an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) of a kind that could someday hit the United States.
Wynken, Blynken and Nod…excuse me, his name is Blinken.
VERY MUCH RELATED: My latest Creators Syndicate column.
AT AMAZON, New Year, New You!
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Why I Married Myself: Self-marriage is a small but growing movement around the world.
TROLL LEVEL: GALACTIC OVERLORD. Milo Yiannopoulos named LGBTQ Nation’s 2016 ‘Person of the Year’ by readers. With about 70% of the vote. . . .
UPDATE: From the comments: “Jill Stein is calling for donations to her recount effort. The Russians obviously hacked it.”
NEVER GONNA DRINK YOU UP: 80’s pop singer Rick Astley coming out with his own craft beer.
“I enjoy a beer with friends and I’m hoping to sell my own brand soon,” Astley said.
“I’ve been working with the Mikkeller brewery in Copenhagen, which was founded ten years ago by a teacher who made his own beer at home. Mikkeller beer is quite experimental and they’ve been sending me various bottles to sample.”
The singer explained that the brewery has a variety with ales with some being “quite fruity – one was a pear beer they make for a restaurant.” His own beer is reportedly a fruity tasting pilsner.
If I’m reading this right, Astley isn’t coming up with his own brew, but sampling Mikkeller’s to find one he likes well enough to put his name on.
So no different from most celebrity-branded perfumes then.
JOHN HINDERAKER: Vicious Hate Crime In Chicago Whitewashed By Press.
A FITNESS DOWNSIDE TO STATIN DRUGS?
Taking cholesterol-lowering statin drugs seemed to make exercise more difficult and less beneficial, a new study in mice suggests. Mice are not humans, obviously, but the study does raise interesting questions about whether and how statins might affect physical fitness in all of us.
In the experiment, statins were very effective in lowering cholesterol levels. But animals moved less if they were taking statins than if they were not taking the drugs. And when they did move, mice on statins developed fewer advantageous physical changes within their muscles than animals that were not given the drugs.
Statins are already one of the most widely prescribed drugs on earth, and their use is likely to grow still more in coming years. Last November, in an article published in JAMA, a group of scientists proposed that any adult past the age of 40 with even a single risk factor for cardiovascular disease start taking a statin in order to lessen his or her risk of eventually developing heart disease.
If implemented widely, that recommendation would vastly increase the number of people using the drugs.
But statins are not without risks. They have been found to increase the risk for Type 2 diabetes. They also can result in muscle aches and fatigue. In some studies of people taking statins, as many as 20 percent report significant muscle pain, with the incidence rising even higher among people who exercise while taking statins.
I wonder how much of that is offset by taking CoQ10?
AT AMAZON, Every Man’s Favorite Dress Shirt.
I’VE GOT A LITTLE LIST, THEY NEVER WOULD BE MISSED: 9 People We’re Hoping Will Just Shut Up and Go Away in 2017.
The group being released will be drawn from those held at Guantanamo – who include an accused senior al Qaeda bomb-maker, the terror group’s top financial manager, and two intended 9/11 hijackers, who have all been held in the Cuba-based U.S. detention facility for more than a decade.
According to a military source briefed on the process, 22 detainees are being prepared for transfer out of the camp, also known as Gitmo, before January 20.
Although the White House has not specified which inmates will be transferred out – or which foreign countries have agreed to accept them – it has indicated that this will be a priority for Obama in his final days in office.
Attention, Dana Milbank: This is “the farewell message Obama wishes he could give” — and he just might.
CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS:
Shot:
“It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion*, just as effectively as by bombs.”
—Kenneth Clark, script for [1969 BBC TV series] Civilisation.
—“Almanac: Kenneth Clark on how civilizations commit suicide,” Terry Teachout, today.
Chaser:
Judge Edwin Torres of the New York State Supreme Court, Twelfth Judicial District described how…“A society that loses its sense of outrage is doomed to extinction.” There is no expectation that this will change, nor any efficacious public insistence that it do so. The crime level has been normalized.
Consider the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. In 1929 in Chicago during Prohibition, four gangsters killed seven gangsters on February 14. The nation was shocked. The event became legend. It merits not one but two entries in the World Book Encyclopedia. I leave it to others to judge, but it would appear that the society in the 1920s was simply not willing to put up with this degree of deviancy. In the end, the Constitution was amended, and Prohibition, which lay behind so much gangster violence, ended.
In recent years, again in the context of illegal traffic controlled substances, this form of murder has returned. But it has done so at a level that induces denial. James Q. Wilson comments that Los Angeles has the equivalent of a St. Valentine’s Day Massacre every weekend. Even the most ghastly re-enactments of such human slaughter produce only moderate responses.**
—Patrick Moynihan, “Defining Deviancy Down,” the American Scholar, Winter 1993.
Hangover: CNN’s Don Lemon: Anti-Trump Violence Against Disabled Man ‘Not Evil.’
—Tyler O’Neil, PJ Media.com, today.
* A look at England in the decades after Clark’s epochal series ran is in its own way proof of that statement as much as Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago.
** Chicago hit the 500+ murder milestone for 2016 in September. It would hit almost 800 before the year was out.
Related: Lemon is far from the only member of the DNC-MSM loathe to examine this story. The Washington Post’s Callum Borchers does a whole lotta throat-clearing (and anti-Trump, anti-GOP virtue signalling) in the lede before laying out the actual details:
Just think of them as Democrat operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
I’D RATHER HAVE JAMES HUDNALL IN CHARGE THAN DISNEY, BUT OKAY: Toyota Concept-i looks weird, will be fun to drive, and comes with a Disneyfied AI.
LESS SHRINKAGE: This is your aging brain on the Mediterranean diet.
In a group of 562 Scots in their 70s, those whose consumption patterns more closely followed the Mediterranean diet experienced, on average, half the brain shrinkage that was normal for the group as a whole over a three-year period.
To glean how diet might influence brain aging, researchers tapped into a large group of Scottish people who were all born in 1936 and had many measures of health status and lifestyle tracked from an early age.
Around the time they reached age 70, 843 members of the “Lothian Birth Cohort” filled out a dietary frequency form that gave researchers a broad look at what foods they ate, which they avoided, and how often they consumed them. At about age 73 and again around age 76, their brains were scanned to gauge the volume of the overall organ and a few of its key components.
The researchers used the food-frequency surveys to divide the group into two — those who at least approximated a Mediterranean-style diet and those who came nowhere close. Even though many in the Med-diet group were far from perfect in their adherence, the average brain-volume loss differed significantly between the two groups.
There may be something to this. I used to be acquainted with a gentleman of Italian descent who credited his good health and longevity to a nightly tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil — and his only other habits were women and booze.
HOW CAN WE MISS HER IF SHE WON’T GO AWAY? Clinton Mulling NYC Mayoral Run.
Hank Sheinkopf, a New York Democratic consultant, told Newsmax, “She is wildly popular among New Yorkers — so much so that were she to file, [Mayor Bill] de Blasio would have to file his retirement papers on the same day.”
“She’s talking about it,” a former elected city official told Newsmax.
De Blasio dragged his feet endorsing Clinton during the election. It took him six months to endorse, and when he finally did on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” in October 2015, Clinton’s campaign emailed reporters saying it was “a sign of the campaign’s continued momentum.”
Haven’t New Yorkers suffered enough self-inflicted wounds?
UPDATE: Former Bush operative Matthew Dowd mulls challenging Cruz for Senate.
Cruz is showing some weakness, but it seems doubtful that Dowd is the man to connect with Texas voters.
BREAKING: Megyn Kelly Being Replaced by Tucker Carlson at Fox.
He’s earned it. And think of how happy this will make Stephen Kruiser.
THESE DAYS DOESN’T EVERYTHING? BBC’s ‘Real Housewives of ISIS’ Skit Causes Liberal Heads to Explode.
Video at the link.
SCOTT ADAMS ON CREATING ECONOMIC ASSETS OUT OF NOTHING.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: What Fuels Trump Derangement Syndrome? Gentry Liberals’ Status Anxiety.