Welcome to the latest edition of our version of the lightning round, where there is not often much lightning but at least a bit of enlightenment.
We’ll start with something that trades off a fun development Thursday that you can read about elsewhere on the site (yes, I’m doing double duty today), which is Ilhan Omar getting the hook from the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Omar’s fellow leftist nutters flipped their wigs over the horror of her not getting a committee assignment she wanted. Most of the rest of America is still wondering why she hasn’t been deported. Anyway…
There’s a certain class of people who are so insecure about their ability to meet basic societal standards, the kinds of things that every successful civilization has been able to agree on, that they’ve decided all of those standards are oppressive and based in bigotry.
And said people don’t ever stop to consider that they’re butchering the entire spirit of the term. Or at minimum, they’re conflating the traditional negative connotation of “bigotry,” which is based on more or less immutable things like ethnicity, with something else.
For example, this crowd will say that people objecting to the use of public facilities and resources to put on a drag show are bigots, and that drag shows are an important expression of “LGBTQ” culture.
Opposing that isn’t bigotry. It’s the preservation of mainstream American and Western culture. Nobody is saying you can’t put on a drag show, you just can’t do it in a public facility on the public dime and you can’t use it to groom and sexualize kids. If some gay bar or strip club wants to do drag shows, mainstream culture couldn’t care less. Particularly if mainstream culture isn’t required to pretend it enjoys the idea of mentally unstable men making a mockery of the feminine form and reducing the fairer sex to bad burlesque images.
But the certain class of people in question hates mainstream culture because they don’t rate well in it. So it has to be polluted and made “diverse.”
Thing is, though, that “diversity” isn’t real, because once they set their hooks, then THEY become the mainstream and the “bigots” become the deviants. Which is what they wanted all along. Don’t forget Gertrude Himmelfarb’s famous quote:
What was once stigmatized as deviant behavior is now tolerated and even sanctioned; what was once regarded as abnormal has been normalized … As deviancy is normalized, so what was once normal becomes deviant.
And this is no accident. It’s been the plan all along. Go read your Herbert Marcuse, if you can stand it, and you’ll see it’s been there for three-quarters of a century.
But the big problem is that taking over the cultural institutions doesn’t mean the people affected by those institutions suddenly agree with you. Instead, it means you destroy the cultural institutions.
Look at Hollywood, which lost TWO HUNDRED FIFTY BILLION DOLLARS in 2022. Meanwhile, Angel Studios is revolutionizing the entire funding model for film and TV by crowdfunding projects that enforce and promote traditional standards.
It’s only a matter of time before the public schools get defunded. The libraries, too. If they’re going to be repositories for the depraved and the rebels against traditional standards, the non-depraved simply won’t vote for the tax renewal. Or we’ll move out of the places where our resources are confiscated for those purposes.
You can do whatever you want, but you can’t force me to support it. To try that is to violate my rights. And there is no making that OK.
I’m doing research for the book I’m writing about Barack Obama, and I am absolutely amazed at the similarities between the Communist Party USA, which Obama’s intellectual father, Frank Marshall Davis, was a prominent figure in, and how it operated, and the Democrat Party of today.
The willingness to do a 180-degree narrative turn, the vitriolic, reflexive anti-Americanism, the shameless lies, the embrace of political violence, the blind eye if not outright support for criminality, and most of all the nonstop, vicious use of race as a wedge against civil society.
The modern Democrat Party is almost literally identical to CPUSA in the 1940s and 1950s before the House Un-American Activities Committee stepped in and broke it up. Do the research and you will be blown away.
And toward that end, I would suggest two excellent books: The Communist: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor, by our own Paul Kengor, which focuses on Davis’ life, writings, and activism, and Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism, by Stanley Kurtz. Both books have been around a while, but if you want to really understand how the Democrats have gone so completely off the deep end and how they’ve managed to remain a viable political party nonetheless, the picture they present will certainly help you to understand that all of this is a long time coming.
It’ll also go a long way toward curing you of using the word “liberal” to describe the Left in America. These are not liberals. There is no liberty in their philosophy at all.
If you haven’t seen this piece at the Federalist by Tristan Justice, it’s worth a read…
A new study out of England published Tuesday links ultra-processed foods with heightened risk for developing and dying from cancer.
Researchers at London’s Imperial School of Public Health collected diet data for nearly 200,000 middle-aged adults and monitored their health over roughly 10 years, specifically their risk of developing 34 types of cancer. The medical researchers found that every 10 percentage point increase in the consumption of “ultra-processed” food — defined as items heavily processed during production such as ready-to-eat meals and a majority of breakfast cereals — was associated with a 2 percent rise in cancer incidence and a 6 percent increase in overall cancer mortality. Specifically, a 10-point increase in processed food consumption was associated with a 19 percent increase in ovarian cancer and a whopping 30 percent rise in ovarian cancer deaths.
“This study adds to the growing evidence that ultra-processed foods are likely to negatively impact our health including our risk for cancer,” lead author Dr. Eszter Vamos said in a press release. “Although our study cannot prove causation, other available evidence shows that reducing ultra-processed foods in our diet could provide important health benefits.”
While the study examined U.K. residents, the U.S. and Britain share similar levels of overweight people hooked on processed diets. Processed foods are generally cheaper and more convenient than healthier alternatives and come with high sugar content that makes the packaged products addictive. Prior research from the same team shows that the consumption of processed foods is higher in the U.K. than all the rest of Europe, and it linked processed products with obesity and type 2 diabetes.
Here’s the thing: conservatives have always hated plaintiff lawyers, or at least as far back as I go, we always have. But the world has flipped over on its axis to an extent and it’s probably time to make a play for those guys.
We’re going to need them, after all. Corporate America, which we’ve spent an awful lot of time defending, is woke, Chinese-influenced (and a lot of these corporations actually like China better than us nowadays), grotesquely wrapped up in fascistic ideas like ESG and DEI, and increasingly literally killing us.
The whole country is fatter than Chris Farley and we all know it’s the food we’re eating that’s doing this to us. And we’re starting to realize how corrupt the medical and pharmaceutical professions are, with an eye toward making us unfit and unhealthy because that’s how they can get our money.
All of a sudden, those plaintiff lawyers start looking pretty useful.
This goes back to the basics, but there are two ways to regulate markets. One is through the bureaucracy, and the other is through the court system. We actually use both, but the better way to go is to have lots of lawyers and lawsuits because then you have regulation through the market with insurance companies providing the grease to the wheels. And for all the complaints we have about trial lawyers, that adversarial system in which they practice is a lot harder to corrupt than the bureaucracy is.
So maybe we ought to take a second look at some legal Ragnarok to set Big Med, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Food, and corporate America straight. We know damn well the federal and state governments aren’t up to that job.
Did you know that there were black slaveowners in the United States?
This would seem to be very problematic for these clowns in California and elsewhere who insist on the ridiculous pandering that is this idea of reparations. Do they know or care that they’re going to be awarding reparations checks to the descendants of slaveholders?
Everything about this is idiotic. The fun part happens when Hispanic and Asian Americans start to weigh in on this stuff. Reparations don’t really poll too well with them.
We’ll set this last one up to be interactive, as you’re welcome to tell your own stories in the comments. But I have two of them that I can offer because a couple of times a week I grab takeout food at the bar down the street that isn’t exactly a hookup joint but has at least a little bit of action, and while having a beverage waiting on dinner, I’ll observe the happenings.
I’m not much of a participant, so you’ll know, so these aren’t mine. I absolutely can’t stand the entire process of picking people up in bars, and I hated it even when I was at the age when it was a thing. Everything about that is awful. Nonetheless, there is humor in the suffering of others in this regard.
So the latest one went like this: this guy walks in, plops down next to this girl, and cocks his head a little as he looks at her. She looks at him and says something like, “Can I help you?”
So then he smiles at her and his eyes get big and he goes, “I knew it! You’re attracted to me, aren’t you?”
She falls out laughing at him, and I’m thinking he has flamed out, crashed and burned. But he holds his gaze at her and doesn’t change his expression.
And then she turned a little sheepish, and she told him to give her his phone. She put her number in it.
I saw another one a couple of weeks ago at the same place. It went like this…
HER: Excuse me, are you staring at me?
HIM: No … I don’t think so.
HER: Yes, you were. You were staring at me.
HIM: OK, yeah. I was, a little.
HER: It’s a little creepy.
HIM: I’m sorry. I haven’t earned the right to look at you that way.
HER: Oh, I like that. So are you gonna earn it?
HIM: Sure. My name’s Chris.
I wouldn’t have believed either one of these would ever have worked, but they did. Hope does spring eternal, I guess. Feel free to post your best examples of horrendous pickup lines that actually worked in the comments.
READ MORE:
Congress Just Threw Ilhan Omar Off the Foreign Affairs Committee, and the Squad Went Bonkers
To the Left: You Suck, and Your Things Do Not Work: Part One
