READER FAVORITE: Occer 12×25 Compact Binoculars for Adults and Kids. #CommissionEarned
Archive for 2023
November 8, 2023
THIS IS FINE AND ALSO NEVER HAPPENS: Pennsylvania Voting Machines Changing Votes Sparks Outrage.
ARAB ISRAELIS BACK ISRAEL AGAINST HAMAS: You won’t read this in the New York Times or the Washington Post, which is why Right media organizations like the Washington Free Beacon exist. Andrew Tobin has the story on the 2 million Arab citizens of Israel and their support of the war against Hamas.
MILE MARKERS ON THE ROAD TO DETROIT: San Francisco’s Post-Apocalyptic Hellscape Is on Full Display in This Viral TikTok Video. “Police lights flashing, litter in the streets, and homeless encampments in doorways with sketchy individuals loitering everywhere are on full display in the video. The scene is something one would expect to see in a warzone like Gaza, not in a bastion of liberal America in the heart of one of the wealthiest regions of California.”
BECAUSE BEEF IS DELICIOUS AND HEALTHY AND NO ONE WANTS TO EAT YOUR F***ING BUGS: Why cutting back on cow consumption is so hard. Eating less beef, cheese, and ice cream would slash emissions. If only it were that easy.
GALILEO’S REPLACEMENT SPEAKER: What cancel culture does to trust and expertise.
Imagine an anachronistically modern university in 1633 Italy. Your school is hosting a debate about whether the Earth goes around the Sun or vice versa. Galileo is supposed to speak on a panel defending heliocentrism, but a different scholar enters the room instead…
THE GEORGE SOROS PARTNER WHO DISRUPTED RIGHT-WING PUBLISHING: All Seasons Press, founded by billionaire investor Scott Bessent, has a funny habit of signing big-name MAGA authors to book contracts, then suing them.
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR WEEKLY INSANITY WRAP [VIP]: Amateur Pr0n Star Goes Down in Virginia Election.“Onetime amateur pr0n star and first-time Democrat candidate Susanna Gibson underperformed for once last night, losing her swing district to Republican David Owen in an otherwise strong night for Democrats. That’s the lead crazy on today’s Insanity Wrap, an entire week’s worth of the best bad news.”
Plus:
- Come see the oppression inherent in the Ivy League.
- Hamas supporters deface Middle East history book sold on Amazon.
- TikTok goes to the make-believe dogs.
So much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
WOULD EXIT EXAMS FIX COLLEGE RANKINGS? It probably can’t hurt, but how do you get people from fancy colleges to take them?
SOME OF THEM MAY EVEN RUN: Russia Still Has Three Years of Tanks in Storage Based on Satellite Imagery.
WHAT OTHER CHOICE DOES ISRAEL HAVE? Netanyahu Says Israel Will Control Gaza Security Indefinitely. “Senior Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said Israel will likely keep military control of Gaza, and it has no intention of creating an interim government to run civilian life. The plan, which was suggested for the first time since the start of the Oct. 7 war, raised concerns from the Biden administration.”
It’s a safe bet what they think of those “concerns” in Jerusalem.
MEGAN FOX: YouTube Sent Me to Reeducation Camp and I Didn’t Even Get a Lousy TeeShirt.
I did a bad, bad thing. What that bad thing is, I have no idea though. But I was informed by YouTube that a video I made almost three years ago contained double-plus-ungood content and that content was so threatening to the approved narrative that it had to be removed from the platform without ceremony.
It was removed so efficiently that I wasn’t allowed to see what the offensive content was. I was allowed to appeal the decision but without knowing what the content was, the appeal was useless. All they would tell me is that it was “medical misinformation.”
That’s code for “You said you don’t like vaccines” or something. The strange part was it was a family court video.
Read the whole thing.
READER FAVORITE: Gravity Electric Salt and Pepper Grinder Set. #CommissionEarned
THE 21ST CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT HOW I’D HOPED: CDC sounds alarm on newborn syphilis ‘epidemic.’
XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT: Yet another CEO goes AWOL in China. “Chen’s unexplained absence comes as China continues an anti-corruption crackdown that has ensnared top executives, particularly in the finance and tech sectors.”
Since the beginning of his tenure, Comrade Xi has used “anti-corruption” as a cover for taking out rivals and potential rivals.
A SMALL-TOWN KIND OF GUY: House Speaker Mike Johnson is from Benton, a small suburban town in Northern Louisiana, and now the most well-known member of the Cypress Baptist Church congregation. Darlene McCormick Sanchez of The Epoch Times went to Benton, talked to locals, and superbly captured the “feel” of Johnson’s roots.
RAYMOND IBRAHIM: How a Few Billionaires Manipulated the World. “From a macro-historic perspective, the West is slowly regressing, and the ultra-rich are becoming ‘the globalist version of feudal lords, as the new Western slave class emerges beneath them.'”
WHY, INDEED? Why does the ‘party of abortion’ keep winning?
Pro-life Republicans will lick their wounds, blame each other, and point to uniquely unhelpful factors in each race. But the pattern is now so obvious as to be irrefutable. Since Dobbs, in elections where abortion is on the ballot, the party of abortion keeps winning.
The pro-abortion electoral tide could be stemmed in next year’s presidential elections, when turn-out will be much higher and the highly mobilized “reproductive choice” lobby will have less sway. But for the Democrats, who are losing on the economy, on immigration and so much else, the tactic is clear. We can expect the party of abortion to add ballot “reproductive rights” measures in every state in November next year to drive up their support. And Joe Biden, a practicing Catholic whose Church teaches that abortion is an excommunicable sin, will make it a major campaign issue — assuming his re-election campaign isn’t itself terminated in the coming months.
Donald Trump saw this coming.
WELL, SO HAS ACADEME: “Judges Have Long Deferred to Academe. That’s Changing.” “Activist politicization is not the entire problem. In other recent high-profile decisions, courts have demonstrated that they do not understand the purposes of academic freedom or the norms of academic governance. All these developments threaten the relative latitude courts have long granted colleges and universities to manage their own affairs.”
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: The South Park Rules: How to do Taboo Comedy Without Getting Cancelled.
South Park offers a giant, yet rather inscrutable, example of how to succeed with dangerous comedy.
I’m mostly groping in the dark too, but gather round, you ambitious youngsters. As far as I can tell, here are South Park’s rules for cancel culture immunity:
- Be really funny
- Make fun of everything
- Make industry gatekeepers wealthy
- Get famous before 2013
Sorry up-and-comers, #4 is going to be tough for you to achieve. And what’s so special about 2013 you ask?
That’s about the time The Maddening began.
Teen anxiety and depression shot up. Race relations, which had been chugging along quite well for years, suddenly got much worse. Innovations like “liking” and “retweeting” turned social from a mostly harmless novelty into a tool that allowed online mobs to burn witches and torch dissenters.
More on The Maddening here, and its dramatic impact on young people: How smartphones are dooming a generation.
[Jonathan Haidt] argues that the tools of social media are just too sharp for young minds. On digital platforms teens parade themselves, often to an audience of strangers, and this is leading to addiction, paranoia and despair. For girls, the effect is especially acute. “What we’re seeing is a very sharp, sudden change in girls’ mental health all around the Anglosphere and the Nordic countries,” he says. A big change was evident from 2013, when physical friendship groups started to be supplanted by smartphones and online chat. “But you cannot grow up in networks. You have to grow up in communities.”
It is striking that boys who have religion in their lives seem to be less susceptible. “If you’re a kid who’s a religious conservative, on average, your mental health is not really much worse than it was ten years ago. But if you’re a secular liberal girl, you’re probably more than twice as likely to have a mental health problem.” He cites a University of Michigan survey into “self-derogation” — i.e., how likely teenagers are to say they are “no good” or “can’t do anything right.” Figures had been stable for years but started rising sharply ten years ago — except for among boys who identified as conservative and said that religion was important to them.
Faith, it seems, does not help girls as much. Why not? One theory is that girls simply use social media more. But Professor Haidt also thinks they are more likely to buy into what he calls the “three great untruths” of social media. The first is that they are fragile and can be harmed by speech and words. Next, that their emotions, and especially their anxieties, are reliable guides to reality. And finally, that society is one big battle between victims and oppressors. All this, he says, is the subtext to social media discourse.
Exit quote: “It’s what I’ve been calling the phone-based child,’ he says. ‘For all human history, millions of years, all mammals play. Anyone who has had a puppy knows it’s all about play. So we had play dates in childhood, up until around 2010.’”