“DO THE LETTERS F.O. MEAN ANYTHING TO YOU?” Is Your Neighbor a Covid-Information Terrorist? Are You? DHS Wants to Know.
Archive for 2022
February 12, 2022
DON’T TRUST CHINA, CHINA IS ASSHOLE. FDA panel rejects drug tested only in China for lung cancer.
THIS WILL ATTRACT MEN BETTER THAN CHANEL NO. 5: “The IPC said the fragrance, Frites by Idaho, is made from distilled Idaho potatoes and essential oils and is designed to smell like a fresh plate of French fries.”
21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Selfridges tempts shoppers with sex therapy and ‘psychedelic trips.’
Selfridges is to offer sex therapy and drug-free “psychedelic trips” in the luxury department store’s latest gambit to tempt shoppers back into stores.
From 28 February, the retailer, which has outlets in Manchester, Birmingham and London, will offer the headline-grabbing services as part of its Superself event, which it claims “takes visitors on a journey of uplifting self-discovery and nurturing self-care”.
The therapy sessions are being provided in partnership with The Stack World, a women-focused online media outlet that was spun out of the Beautystack beauty marketplace founded by the former stylist Sharmadean Reid.
The 45-minute £150 “sex life reboot” is being led by Dr Karen Gurney, a clinical psychologist and psycho-sexologist who promises “to evaluate and reset a couple’s or an individual’s sex life through a Sex Life MOT”. Other options include a £50 confidence coaching session or £99 “creative breakthrough” meeting with a hypnotherapist.
On the one hand, this is pretty much the 21st century I was promised as a kid, but on the other, I’m pretty sure Blade Runner and Logan’s Run were meant to be warnings, not how-to guides.
GOD AND MAN AT YALE LAW: Anthony Kronman grew up in an atheist household. Now he’s determined to convince American elites of the existence of ‘divinity.’
Was it divinely ordained that a boy raised by aggressively atheist parents would one day, in his eighth decade, make a passionate public case for God? This mischievous thought crosses my mind as I speak to Anthony Kronman, whose book “After Disbelief: On Disenchantment, Disappointment, Eternity and Joy,” forthcoming in March, aims to persuade America’s “relentlessly rational” elites to acknowledge the existence of “divinity.”
Those elites include his colleagues at Yale Law School, where Mr. Kronman, 76, is a professor and former dean. “In the academic circles in which I live and work,” Mr. Kronman writes, “the only respectable view of God is that he doesn’t exist.” He elaborates in an interview, saying that they regard his public professions of spirituality with “skeptical bemusement.” To the extent religion figures in their conversations at all, “it often does so as a synonym for prejudice and superstition—the attitude [Barack] Obama expressed, in an unguarded moment, when he made his regrettable comments about ‘guns and religion’ ” while seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008.
Mr. Kronman’s ambition is to repair “the schism between those for whom religion continues to matter and those who view it with amusement or contempt.” The political implications of this split are especially profound in America, which Mr. Kronman says is unlike any other country in both its “commitment to secular values” and the “seriousness with which it takes religious beliefs.” The combination of the two has frequently been a source of national strength, but in recent decades it has given rise to hostility and bitterness.
“After Disbelief” approaches the problem by giving each side its philosophical due. Mr. Kronman argues that the scientific conviction that everything in the world is “knowable and explicable” collides with the practical reality that we can never know everything—that the questions are “inexhaustible” because new ones arise from every answer.
I wish him luck.
JIM TREACHER: Weiner Wants to Get into Your Ear. Let me explain:
The radio show is called The Left vs. The Right. I guess Sliwa is “the right”? Well, it’s about time Weiner got to co-host a show. I always thought he and Eliot Spitzer should team up. C’mon, wouldn’t you tune in for Weiner/Spitzer?
Weiner is as focused and rational as ever:
“I am not going back into public life, I am doing a radio show with a friend of mine,” he exclusively tells Page Six. He added, “It’s not a conscious decision,” before joking to us, “I have a face for radio, but I don’t know if I have a place in radio as a career. Sometimes it is what it is.”
I gotta admit, I’m Weiner-curious. I’ll be listening to WABC online tomorrow to hear what he has to say. Everybody deserves a 22nd chance!
It’s a mark of how badly Bill de Blasio ran Manhattan into the ground, that it’s possible to make a pretty good case that Carlos Danger, aligned as he was with the (comparatively) moderate Clinton wing of the Democrat party, would have been a far better (read: less destructive) mayor, had not, err, things came to a head in 2013.
OUT: COLLUSION. IN: OUTRIGHT GROVELING. Syracuse U. dean apologizes for email calling Tibet a country separate from China.
Remember when funding for higher education was justified on the ground that it would further independent thought?
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: San Diego County School Retracts ‘Wheel of Privilege’ Teaching Tool.
BYLINES OF BRUTALITY: CNN Analyst Lit up by Internet After She Advocates Physical Destruction Against Freedom Convoy.
CNN analyst and Harvard professor Juliette Kayyem tweeted about a Wall Street Journal report of how the truckers have a blockade at the Ambassador Bridge on the border between Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario. She had some suggestions for how to get rid of the Freedom Convoy.
“The convoy protest, applauded by right-wing media as a ‘freedom protest,’ is an economic and security issue now. The Ambassador Bridge link constitutes 28% of annual trade movement between US and Canada. Slash the tires, empty gas tanks, arrest the drivers, and move the trucks,” Kayyem wrote. It should be noted that Kayyem worked for the Obama DHS as well.
Now let’s just say, that Harvard/CNN aren’t sending their best here. If you slash the tires and empty the gas tanks, how are you going to move the trucks? She doesn’t understand the setup there, or that the tow trucks have already refused a request from the city of Ottawa because they work with the truckers and they support them too.
Kayyem doubled down on the consequences she wanted protesters to suffer.
Not since 2009 have the left have discovered a protest they absolutely, absolutely hate:
(Classical reference in headline.)
DIVERSITY PROBLEM: 2022 Midterms: PA university employees are donating overwhelmingly to Democrats. That’s true at my university. I didn’t do a count, but just scrolling through the FEC listings shows it’s a political near-monoculture.
SO IS SHE BEING SET UP AS THE FALL GUY FOR A COMING UKRAINE DEBACLE? Kamala Harris dispatched to Munich conference to talk Ukraine later this month.
Also, is Munich a felicitous location for talks on a threatened invasion in Eastern Europe?
THE NORMAL-AMERICAN COMMUNITY HAS A DIFFERENT VIEW OF RACIAL PREFERENCES THAN DOES THE GENTRY CLASS: Backfire: Just 36% say Biden’s pledge to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court was a good idea.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Nothing Says Corruption and Chaos Like a Teacher Giving a Kid A’s When She Left Months Ago for Private School.
Great news. A sixth-grader received glowing grades in P.E. and Social Studies from her teachers at a middle school in year three of San Francisco Unified School District’s COVID-19 annus horribilis. School records show that the unidentified girl received two As as a student at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School.
Bad news. She hadn’t gone to the school the entire year.
Worse news. The school district had been counting her as a student, thus getting federal funds for the entire year also.
How many others are out there?
Read the whole thing.
SALENA ZITO: The covenant between the Main Street consumer and big corporations is collapsing.
There is only one business here on Penn Avenue that is a franchise establishment. It is called Penzeys Spices. On this Wednesday afternoon, there is a sign on the front door reading it is closed despite it being early afternoon. A call to the store the next day reveals it hasn’t had in-customer service “in forever,” and when it does, it is inconsistent, but the store would be happy to take a phone order or direct me to its website.
The word that traveled so fast around here was about Penzeys — on several fronts.
First, customers were tired of not being able to go into the store. When you want to buy a spice, aroma is a big part of that experience and decision. You could see workers in the store, but you could not physically go inside. This was a starkly different experience than customers had at every mom and pop store, not just on either side of Penzeys, but up and down the street.. . .
There was a second reason word was spreading about Penzeys, though.
Usually, when we buy our food to make a meal, whether it is at a grocery store or a local farm or farmers market, we don’t expect to be lectured about politics. We are all adults, and we all have a level of expectation that store owners’ politics may be different than ours. What we don’t expect is to be scolded for holding different beliefs.
And we certainly don’t expect to be called racists.
Yet that is exactly what Bill Penzey Jr. did in emails to his customers twice over the past month, and it wasn’t even subliminal. Penzey sent out a corporate email and posted on his webpage the ” Republicans are Racists” weekend special the store held for Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
That was followed just days later by another “All Republicans are Racists” special that begged whatever remaining loyal customers it had — he admitted in his Facebook post that the store had lost 40,000 of them — to buy gift cards.
There are several things at play here that deserve deeper exploration. These things really show a lot about the dwindling relationship that consumers have with the men and women who run many of the institutions, corporations, and media and entertainment outlets in this country.
It is a covenant that has broken because people like Penzey don’t have a cultural connection to their customers. This is not a Democratic or Republican thing. It’s an inside-outside thing. Here in Western Pennsylvania, you don’t have to be a Republican to have been really turned off by his missive.
That’s because he was being a dick. But in our monocultured Gentry Class, people say things like this and don’t even understand how they play with the normal-American community.
OLD AND BUSTED: Banning Joe Rogan.
The New Hotness? Banning Rap Music! NYC Mayor Eric Adams Calls On Tech Companies To Police “Alarming” Drill Music.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams is calling on social media companies to help police gun violence linked to “alarming” drill music. “We pulled Trump off Twitter, because of what he was spewing. Yet we’re allowing music, displaying of guns, violence. We’re allowing it to stay on these sites,” Adams said in a press conference today, adding that he wants to hold a meeting with high profile rappers in the Brooklyn drill scene.
Adams’ statement comes after the recent deaths of two young Brooklyn drill rappers. Last Tuesday, ABC News reports, 22-year-old Tahjay Dobson, aka Tdott Woo, was shot and killed in front of his home in Brooklyn hours after signing a record deal. And Jayquan McKenley, an 18-year-old rapper from the Bronx known as CHII WVTTZ, was shot and killed while leaving a recording studio in Brooklyn on Sunday.
“There are thousands of Jayquans in our city right now. Thousands of children experiencing homelessness and poverty, who need educational support, who are at high risk,” Adams said in a speech on Thursday. “We cannot let thousands of children lose their lives to violence and neglect … Like many young men, Jayquan was an aspiring rapper. ‘Aspiring’ is a word that means hope, but his music was anything but hopeful.”
The PMRC could not be reached for comment and warning stickers.
DISPATCHES FROM THE BRANDON ERA: Afghan evacuation non-profit preps for potential rescue operation in Ukraine.
TO BE FAIR, THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT HE DID: Trudeau Ally Accuses Him of Politicizing Pandemic and Dividing Nation.
BE PREPARED: Augason Farms 30-Day 1-Person Emergency Food Supply. #CommissionEarned
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Toxic Virginia Democrats are protecting the enablers of the Loudoun County school rapist.
I WOULD HAVE EXPECTED BILL TREANOR TO BE A GOOD DEAN, BUT I WOULD HAVE BEEN WRONG: Newsweek: Georgetown Law Self-Cancels Its Elite Status.
Georgetown University Law Center had long been at the bottom of the law school world’s elite “Top-14” rankings. It maintained its worst-of-the-best status largely by the draw of its physical location in Washington, D.C. It finally slipped below UCLA this year, just when Georgetown Law distinguished itself above and beyond even top-ranked Yale Law in a category not ranked by US News and World Report: leadership. To wit: Georgetown Law Dean William Treanor has proven himself, almost beyond a reasonable doubt, to be the single weakest leader in American higher education.
An examination of Treanor’s leadership by a jury of his peers should convict him of this weighty charge. Last March, someone leaked a video of professor Sandra Sellers lamenting that black students tended to score poorly on her examinations. Treanor publicly condemned her without speaking to her. Georgetown then violated its own policy and American Association of University Professors’ guidelines and fired Sellers without any due process.
I asked Treanor: Why condemn Sellers before speaking with her? Was there an empirical basis for her lamentation? If there was, then why would he find lamenting an empirical truth to be “abhorrent?” I also asked him to comment on what a Georgetown Law student told me: “[B]ecause of [Treanor’s] action, [students] are now terrified of providing any personal opinion or even putting forward ideas ‘for the sake of argument’ in [Georgetown Law] classes for fear that someone might clip their speech and post a video on social media to destroy their reputation and career.”
Treanor provided no comment. He did, however, publicly vow to consider requiring all students to study Critical Race Theory (CRT), to make professor tenure contingent on CRT-inspired “diversity, equity and inclusion” criteria, and insisted that he was “dedicated to the important work that lies ahead.” . . .
The self-righteous self-infantilization of Georgetown Law students is a strange and profound sociological phenomenon. But the response from Treanor and Georgetown was more telling still. We can’t ascribe too much personal agency to weak-willed leaders. Their actions, after all, are over-determined by “structural” and “systemic” considerations prescribed by “institutional” forces.
Consider the contrast between how Georgetown handled Shapiro’s tweets, and how it handled professor Carole Fair’s tweets during the contentious Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination hearings of 2018. She tweeted, at the time: “Look at this chorus of entitled white men justifying a serial rapist’s arrogated entitlement. All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps. Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes.”
Georgetown’s institutional response to Fair was perfunctory. This allegedly Jesuit institution was far more existentially triggered by Shapiro’s banal poke at the sacred cow of race than it was by rhetoric about castration and throwing testicles before swine. You don’t have to be a highly skilled Freudian psychoanalyst to understand the pathological institutional illness on display here.
Nope.
Plus: “Georgetown Law certainly deserves to be led by William Treanor. Treanor is the very model of the modern university administrator: Fearful of all, respected by none. Under his short tenure, Georgetown Law has already officially slipped into second-tier status. Georgetown’s infantilized law students no doubt sense that his weakness can be further exploited by whatever further pretext they prefer to manufacture. It seems all but certain that Georgetown Law’s status will plummet far further before he steps down.” Ouch.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
● Shot: New York Times senior editor resigns amid backlash over controversial op-ed. James Bennet’s resignation comes after backlash on a comment piece written by a GOP senator called for using military force on protesters.
—The Grauniad, June 7th, 2020.
● Chaser: Have your Trader Joe’s and eat it too: Nikole Hannah Jones criticizes Rev. Al for admitting shoplifting is out of hand. “Jones lashed out at Sharpton and accused him of legitimizing ‘the carceral state.’”
—John Sexton, Hot Air, Thursday.
● Hangover:
GETTING DOWN TO IT NOW: Instapunditeer Lee Dise takes up “Hume, Kant, and the Limits of Knowledge.” Wait, limits? You mean we can’t know everything? It’s part six of Lee’s seven part Lessons From History series on HillFaith. The “Reformed Trombonist” seems to have hit the right chord because readership has grown steadily through the week.