The Week’s Most Hopping, Bopping, and Champagne-Popping Headlines
AND ALL OF A SUDDEN, AUTOPSIES MATTER
In 2024, immigration would be the No. 1 winning issue for the GOP, so don’t count on Republicans to touch it with a ten-foot pole.
Still, if any GOPs do want to play their party’s winning hand, they need look no further than Vergilio Aguilar Mendez.
Mendez is the photo that accompanies the encyclopedia entry for “not sending their best.” The 18-year-old Guatemalan “immigrant” is, according to his own attorney, functionally retarded and nonfunctionally violent due to impulse-control issues.
And you’d think that would be bad enough.
Because that would be bad enough.
But remember—the motto of Guatemala, the nation that immediately follows Mexico to the south, is “You think you’ve seen bad enough? Welcome to worse.”
Mendez speaks a bizarre “indigenous” Guatemalan language called Mam (not to be confused with the indigenous language of American cowboys, “Howdy Mam,” or the indigenous language of Jews in blackface, “Mam-mee”). Retarded violent powder-keg Mendez caravanned to the U.S. knowing he speaks a language even Mexicans can’t understand (Guatemalans only exist to give Mexicans someone to look down on…they’re the fat bespectacled pimple-faced high school nerd who allows the thin bespectacled pimple-faced high school nerd to say, “Well, at least I’m not fat”), and what happens next? He trespasses on private property and attacks the cop who tried to question him.
Surely his indigenous cries of “ixtopoctle pterodactypoctle click-click-click quetzquaxtle” should’ve smoothed everything over.
And then, after wrestling with Rainforest Man as he resisted arrest, the cop—a 52-year-old with 26 years on the job—had a fatal heart attack.
And the medical examiner was like, “Ahhh, he had hypertension. He’d have died anyway!”
And the media’s cheering it.
Cut to Derek Chauvin in his isolation cell realizing that the country of his birth would’ve treated him a lot different had he been a foreign brown tard who spoke a dead language.
WEBSTER OF LIES
In keeping with annual tradition, last week Merriam-Webster’s announced its “word of the year.”
Bear in mind that Webster’s isn’t exactly culture-war neutral; this is the “dictionary” that switched the definition of “woman” from “biologically female human” to “whatever men say it is; now don’t worry your pretty little head about it princess and get back in the kitchen.”
So 2023’s “word of the year”?
Authentic.
Webster’s provided some relevant uses of the term from the year’s news:
The white man was forced to stop selling tacos because they’re not authentic unless cooked by a Hispanic.
The Chinese musician provided the most authentic version of Bach’s Cello Suites ever.
The Irish Prime Minister welcomed the newest planeload of Nigerians by saying, “It’s good to have authentic Irish back in their ancestral home.”
Bud Light was attacked by right-wingers for hiring an authentic woman to sell its delicious brew.
Djimon Hounsou was praised for his authentic performance as Frank Lloyd Wright in the Netflix biopic Darchitect.
Hamas activist Mahmoud es Fou-el condemned eyewitness descriptions of rape at the Nova music festival as not authentic. “They say the women screamed,” Fou-el told the AP. “That’s false; we covered their mouths.” Then he paused and said, “Oh, crap…”
“Webster’s definitions are not authentic,” said everyone in the world who cares about words.
The runner-up for word of the year was fryzee—“A frenzy brought on by fries served at subpar temperatures.” See also: brawl weavil—“The shed exofilament littering the floor following a fryzee.”
THE BIONIC MENSCH
Elon Musk has a robot rebellion on his hands. Last week in Austin, a robot that was programmed to “grab and move car parts” decided it preferred to grab and move human parts. The robot violently seized a human worker (who, ironically, was just about to activate software to disable the grab-bots, but he was running late because Travis County mandates a two-hour meth break before each shift), “pinned the man,” then “sank its metal claws into the worker’s back and arm.”
The worker lost a large chunk of flesh. And while pundits are making the easy-joke “rise of the machines” quips, it’s interesting to note that the amount of flesh the worker lost measured exactly one pound.
With his enthusiastic Twitter platforming and amplification of Jew-hatred and Holocaust denial, Elon may have pushed the Jews a little too far. Would it be a surprise if the people who crippled Iran’s entire nuclear industry with Stuxnet could create software that turns Musk’s robots into Shakespeare’s flesh-hungry Jew?
Behold, Shynet.
Coming in 2024: The Terminatorah.
“If you prick us, we do not bleed…YOU DO.”
The mass production of Jew-bots would certainly make life harder for street thugs; NYC hospitals would be flooded with black men with busted hands (“Man, dat Jew I sucka punched gots a jaw o’ steel!”).
So perhaps Musk’s best move, if he wants to mend fences after a year in which he repeatedly found himself at odds with organized Jewry, is to assembly-line Jewish cyborgs.
Sure, there’ll be ancillary problems; the “cybergs” will use their wealth and guile to steal all the blonde gentile sex robots, but hey, there are always gonna be trade-offs.
THE FRYNAL SOLUTION
Of course, it’s all fun and games to joke about Musk’s killer robots, but here’s an AI story that’s disturbingly true. McDonald’s was so badly plagued in 2023 by black violence over cold fries, the company is literally working on anti-cold-fry AI to stem the losses incurred via employee injuries.
According to The Verge, “McDonald’s is partnering with Google to deploy generative AI beginning in 2024” to ensure that “large orders of fries are delivered hot.”
“McDonald’s isn’t specific about how the AI will be used,” but “the system will help managers quickly spot and enact solutions to reduce business disruptions.”
Because surely it takes a robot to tell a black customer from a white one.
Meanwhile, the NY Post published a “hack” to ensure that your McDonald’s fries are scalding-hot every time: Just specify “no salt,” which means the workers have to make a batch especially for you. It’s a neat trick, but unlikely to help, because (a) blacks love salt like they love hypertension and diabetes, and it’s unlikely that potential brawlers will comprehend that they can add the salt themselves after receiving the order, and (b) thugs are unlikely to read the Post because they can’t read at all.
It’s impressive the extent to which, from Google to the Post, there’s an ongoing quest to stop cold-fry violence. Young blacks are America’s foodies, accent on the “dies.” On Christmas Day, a black vagrant with a lengthy rap sheet stabbed two South American tourists who were dining at a Grand Central Station eatery (Cavern on the Spleen, which offers a bird’s-eye view of commuters crushed and disemboweled after being pushed onto the tracks by schizos).
The vagrant, “Father Christmassacre,” asked to sit next to “the crackers,” only to declare that he wanted “all white people dead” as he stabbed the two young Paraguayan diners.
The tourists are expected to survive, and they’ll have wonderful tales to tell back home about how the fact that American blacks thought they were “crackers” confirmed everything they’d ever read about the genius of American blacks.
HOLIDAY ROADKILL
On Dec. 27, pro-Hamas protesters in the U.S. rolled out a nationwide airport blockade in which noble leftists fighting for the right of Muslims to rape and murder Jews linked arms and prevented entry to LAX, JFK, and O’Hare, keeping travelers from their flights.
The normally busy airports became so deserted, Sam Brinton had to obtain luggage by buying it at a store.
This capped a year in which “climate activists” in the U.K. and Europe (including Greta Thunberg, a.k.a. “the dwarf from Twin Peaks as a tranny”) made a cottage industry out of blockading highways, “slow-walking” traffic on busy streets, defacing buildings, and vandalizing museums.
So last week the AP decided to run a piece explaining how protests that involve violence and the use of force are actually the most important facets of a well-functioning democracy.
And the hack writer they chose to pen the piece?
Jill Lawless.
Because apparently Carl Chaos, Annie Anarchic, and Bob Barbarous were unavailable.
Lawless argues that even though, in the U.K., it’s great that anyone who misgenders a tranny gets tossed into prison, the people who must never be touched by law enforcement are “activists who have blocked roads and bridges, glued themselves to trains, splattered artworks with paint, sprayed buildings with fake blood, doused athletes in orange powder and more to draw attention to the threats posed by climate change.”
She describes these “activists” as “peaceful,” which would’ve been 2023’s largest and most pungent pile of verbal BS had Jonathan Majors not called himself “a great man.”
To be fair to the pro-Hamas protesters, they do represent a step up for violent activists, because whereas BLM “cops are genociding blacks” militants and Thunberg “the earth is on fire” radicals campaign for phony crises, at least Hamas protesters are correct that their buddies are being killed…it’s just that nobody cares and any chance that somebody might start to care is quickly extinguished when a gang of tablecloth-wearing lunatics makes you late for your flight back home.
And with that, The Week That Perished wishes you safe travels and a joyous New Year.
May your fries be hot and your Thunbergs cold,
May you age better than Biden as you grow old.
May your life be less chaotic than GOP leadership,
And longer in tenure.
Thank you for your readership.
See you in 2024!
In this season of giving, I’ll donate to the Doe Fund, a charity that helps drug abusers and ex-cons find purpose in life through work.
Doe’s approach doesn’t include many handouts. It’s mostly about encouraging people to work.
“Work works!” they say.
It does.
Most Doe Fund workers don’t go back to jail.
I’ll also donate to Student Sponsor Partners, a nonprofit that gives scholarships to kids from low-income families so they can escape bad public schools. SSP sends them to Catholic schools.
I’m not Catholic, but I donate because government-run schools are often so bad that Catholic schools do better at half the cost. Thanks to SSP, thousands of kids escape poverty.
Yet some on the left say giving time and money to charity is a mistake. Their trust in government leads them to think that government programs are much better at lifting people out of poverty.
“Charity can distract from permanent solutions,” claims an article in the Harvard Political Review. “Time, effort and funding that are funneled into charitable acts could be redirected to actual solutions spearheaded by the government, which has the resources to implement concrete change.”
Yikes!
Yes, government has “resources,” all of which are taken from taxpayers by force. “Concrete” is fitting because government’s “solutions” are rigid and immovable.
But as far as promoting change that’s actually useful, government has a terrible track record.
Before Lyndon Johnson launched his “War on Poverty,” Americans were lifting themselves out of poverty. Every year, the poverty rate dropped.
When welfare checks began, progress continued for about seven years. But then progress stopped! Progress stopped even as America spent $27 trillion on its “war.”
What happened?
Government handouts changed people’s thinking. They taught millions of Americans: You are entitled to a check.
No longer was it individuals’ responsibility to help families, neighbors and ourselves; now it was clearly government’s job.
The result is that people became dependent on handouts. Government rarely teaches people to be self-sufficient; handouts encourage you to be helpless.
Welfare created something never seen before in America: a near-permanent “underclass.”
Welfare told parents: don’t get married; you’ll lose benefits. Don’t work; your check will be reduced. Above all, make sure the father isn’t home when a welfare worker comes. If he is, your check may be reduced or eliminated.
This changed incentives that motivated parents for generations. The result has been ruinous for millions of children.
Charities aren’t perfect, but they are much more efficient and effective than clumsy government.
Charities have the freedom to be selective. They can help people who truly need aid, but also refuse charity to people who need “a kick in the butt.” Government’s one-size-fits-all rules prohibit that.
Charity is not guaranteed forever. People don’t know how long they can expect to receive assistance. They have an incentive to become self-sufficient.
In addition, while charities actually give most of their money to the needy, government doesn’t. America’s constantly growing welfare workforce today is so bloated that 70% of welfare money now goes to the bureaucrats!
As usual, big government is the problem rather than a solution.
Americans are generous. Most of us donate to charities, many of which will provide more permanent help to the needy than government ever will.
Ideally, America would shrink government and lower taxes so more of us would have money to spend how we want. For most, that means giving to those in need.
To help people, we need more rich people.
If only there was a system that made people richer …
Oh, right! There is — capitalism!
Over the past 30 years, more than a billion people climbed out of extreme poverty, thanks to free markets.
As capitalism makes us richer, we each have more opportunity to help others in need.
The desire for perfection in human relations is a powerful stimulant of conflict—and of a bureaucracy to adjudicate it. That all should be fair, open, aboveboard, that no one should ever experience discomfort because of what someone else says, that each should be shown equal signs or marks of respect, that no one should feel left out of anything, is an impossible pipe dream, as the most minimal reflection on experience should make evident.
What is possible, however, and what has eventuated, is a large and well-paid bureaucracy that has secured what it supposes to be its own eternity by the pursuit of such chimeras. Its work will never be done. The more cowed people are by regulations of their speech and conduct, the more microaggressions remain to be discovered and adjudicated. The task of securing diversity, equity, and inclusion is like the task of Sisyphus, with this difference: that in its very impossibility lies an assurance of a job, a pension, and a gratifying sense of doing the world’s work.
I suppose one should not rejoice at the discomfiture of a fellow human being, but this is a counsel of the same perfection attempt to achieve that is likely to lead to the same kind of dishonesty as that involved in the search for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Therefore, let me be frank: I have been rather enjoying the saga over the president of Harvard’s alleged plagiarism in her academic work. I doubt that I am the only one to feel this discreditable delight.
Medieval theologians are supposed to have argued over the number of angels who could dance on the head of a pin, and we laugh at them for their foolishness; but now we argue about what degree of failure of a writer to attribute to their authors the words he or she uses constitutes real plagiarism. How many words or lines are necessary before oversight becomes not only implausible but culpable? How much recidivism in this respect is forgivable? Should we say, “Let him who has never copied or failed to attribute cast the first stone”?
As I write this, Dr. Claudine Gay has survived calls for her to stand down as president of Harvard, and having no crystal ball I cannot say whether she will continue so to survive, or whether further revelations of non-attribution in her academic work (the titles of her publications do not fill me with much intellectual curiosity or excitement) will eventually cause a kind of administrative gestalt switch in her superiors who have so far sided with her.
I am not a betting man, but if I were, I would not put all my money either way. In such a situation, courage, truth, conviction, or personal loyalty do not count for very much by comparison with the bubble, reputation. There is no honor among snakes.
The trouble began for Dr. Gay when she was asked by a Congresswoman whether a hypothetical call for the genocide of Jews would be in violation of Harvard’s code of conduct. I am far from sure that the legislature is the forum in which questions of academic freedom should be aired or decided, since it implies a duty and a power of the legislature to adjudicate everything. The earth is the Congress’ and the fulness thereof; the world and they that dwell therein (a slight adaptation of Psalm 24 in the King James Version, which I mention only to avoid charges of not-attribution or even of plagiarism).
But the question was asked, and Dr. Gay answered it maladroitly: “It can be,” she said, “depending on context.” A follow-up question might have been whether a hypothetical call for the re-enslavement of black people in America would be a violation of Harvard’s code of conduct; if Dr Gay’s answer had been as equivocal, she would have been accused of apologetics for slavery and if it were not, the question would then have been asked whether enslavement were morally worse than genocide. In those circumstances, I would have felt some slight sympathy for Dr. Gay, as well as schadenfreude; for she would have been in the position of a man who is asked whether he has stopped beating his wife yet, yes or no.
I think the underlying problem is the very idea of a code of conduct in a university. At the very least, its existence, and the supposed necessity for such a code, goes to show how far mistrust has eaten into our society. Without such a code of conduct, would Harvard and other universities really become a hell of rapine, insult, menace, racial violence, and so forth? This suggests a very unpleasant population, and while I am no starry-eyed admirer of humanity as a whole, yet I have gone through my life without constant fear of the worst in my fellow beings. As Dr. Johnson put it, it is better sometimes to be deceived than never to trust. In my daily dealings, at any rate, I have found more trustworthiness than its opposite, though I am not unfamiliar with the worst that people can do.
It will be pointed out, no doubt, that before codes of conduct were instituted, people sometimes did behave very badly. No doubt they did: Before there were performance indicators, for example, some professors were like drones who never did a stroke of work once they were irremovable from their position. But I do not think that most were like this: I recall them as having frequently done much more than their duty rather than less. And it is a human trait that when one is harried and harassed, one is disinclined to do more than the strict minimum. If one is treated as a potential cheat, one begins to think and even sometimes to act like a cheat. One studies loopholes, seeks small advantages, studies strict contractual conditions, as never before. Goodwill is lost, but that is precisely what the apparatchik type wants. Goodwill and informal understanding are his greatest enemy; he wants everything to be laid down in codes of conduct, with enough ambiguity in them to require endless adjudication. He wants his staff fragile, insecure, inclined to paranoia: and for diversity read division. He dreams of a world in which the whole of life is but a procedure.
Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Ramses: A Memoir, published by New English Review.
Living as we are under the collective inferiority of the West, and humbled as we are when faced with the cultural achievements of tribal Africans, primitive Amazonian tribesmen, Saudi Arabian witch doctors, and savages in general, I was relieved to see that Hollywood is hard at work in maintaining the myth that everything that the West has achieved since the Greeks was due to the white man’s cruelty and ability to steal from the Dark Continent.
Now, please don’t get me wrong. I don’t watch the drivel that Tinseltown puts out nowadays, but a bad case of bronchitis had me in bed high up in the Alps, with a cough of a Volga boatman and a high temperature. There was nothing to do but watch TV, as I could not focus on the written word. And what I saw only made my temperature go up—actually, it made me so angry I got better. I will not mention the serial except that it’s been very successful. It takes place out west and the cowboys are all bad, bullies, criminals, sadists, and worst of all, white. The few black cowhands are wise, introspective, and very perceptive with their advice. The victims are the red Indians, sorry, Native tribesmen. One pretty Indian girl teaches history class, and her opening remarks to a new class are what a major criminal Christopher Columbus was. But the best part is the utter awfulness of the whites. They’re greedy, cowardly, murderous, bullying, dishonest, and I’m talking only of the men. The white women are drunks, sleep with everything that walks but the horses, and are very greedy and vengeful. My only thought was thank God I’m watching this in my own bed. In a movie house I’d probably be lynched once the lights went on. Mind you, I only watched less than a segment, and I’m told the characters improve later on.
Hollywood is at present doing the work UFA films did for Hitler in the ’30s. Back then, in film after film, the “International Jew” was portrayed as conspiring against Western interests, institutions, and Christian mores. By the time war broke out, there were few Germans who weren’t convinced that the Jews had conspired against them. Now our Jews in Hollywood are doing something along the same lines against the white man, white males having replaced on screen at least the “International Jew” as figures of hate.
Is America going the way of Weimar? Our Jews in Hollywood are not Hitlers, some of them are even nice guys. But they lack talent and courage, they love money, and the easiest way to get it is to follow the woke agenda, it’s as simple as that. Their grandfathers were Mittel-European Jews, uneducated and unsophisticated, but they learned quickly, could spot talent, used it well, and, when war broke out, turned Hollywood into a PR firm for Uncle Sam. These new Harvard guys are smart, well educated, but greedy, cowardly, and willing to debase themselves for woke ideology.
The verdict of history is always too late for those who correctly predict how it will turn out, hence the greatest Greek writer since Homer will abstain. One thing is for sure: Sub-Saharan Africa passed the one billion population mark in 2015, and it is going to more than double to 2.12 billion by 2050. By then it will be ten times what it was when I first visited Africa in the ’50s. The stance of some conservative politicians in Europe to counter an inevitable invasion from Africa is seen as fascist, and politicians who warn against unlimited African immigration as the embodiment of the Duce, if not the Führer. Woke is like the snowplow that opens the road after a heavy snowfall. Why should the whites have Europe to themselves? What have they done to deserve it except enslave people and profit from it? And what about America? The country is too big for a few rich slobs with large yachts and big private planes. Land and wealth need to be redistributed, and now.
The funny thing is, that show I watched while coughing my poor lungs out is all about this: one man with a large ranch, and many without large ranches who want to take it away from him because he did bad things in order to keep it from them in the past. Oy vey, as a Jewish granny would say. But here’s an idea for you Hollywood types. Why not make a movie about one of the bravest men alive, a man who saw action with the famous Rhodesian Light Infantry, acquired a law degree, wrote four well-received books including Men of War and on the Rhodesian SAS We Dared to Win, is a big-game hunter and conservationist, and survived a goring that ended with him operating on himself without anesthetic; a man who was mistaken by the doctors in Nairobi for Mel Gibson and, most important, a 14th-generation African—but white. He’s my dear friend Hannes Wessels, and the Hollywood bums should be filming his life. If they’re interested, he lives in the Cape of Africa and is known to everyone.
That’s a fitting title for a piece about Harvard’s plagiarizer-in-chief. Full disclosure: The title is, er, borrowed from the title of Kenneth O’Donnell’s 1973 book about President John F. Kennedy.
Claudine Gay, Harvard’s “new” president, is a disaster. She has given blacks a bad name. And the Harvard Corporation, by not dismissing her as soon as her villainy became apparent, has compounded the error.
Obviously there are blacks who are competent to be president of Harvard. But by holding on to Gay, the corporation has made it look as if she is the only one. They have also made it perfectly clear that Gay was selected solely because she was black. What a disservice to blacks!
A decade or two ago (maybe three), only a racist would refuse to go to a black doctor with a high-quality medical degree. Now a patient would be justified in having doubts. Even (especially?) if the black doctor had graduated from Harvard Medical School, how could the patient be sure she was really qualified—and not just an affirmative-action admittee and graduate?
Gay was chosen as Harvard president from, apparently, about 600 candidates, despite having only published eleven articles between 1998 and 2017, as well as co-editing one book. In one year (1987), former Harvard president Larry Summers published more articles than Gay has published in her entire career.
As this column reported last June, Gay worked to end the career of a black Harvard professor, Roland Fryer, probably because he reached conclusions she disagreed with.
In 2016, Fryer wrote an essay titled “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force,” in which he found that “on the most extreme use of force—officer-involved shootings—we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account.” Ooo! You can’t say that at Harvard.
A committee of Harvard’s highest-ranking administrators decided that Fryer should face two years of full suspension without pay, closure of his research lab, and an end to all his research projects.
Gay was on the committee, and according to a documentary maker who covered the incident, she actually asked the president to go even further, revoking Fryer’s tenure entirely. (The president refused.)
It looks as if Gay simply was unwilling to accept the conclusion that race was not a driving factor in police shootings.
In 2019, Harvard’s student newspaper published a piece on a different Harvard law professor, Ronald Sullivan, lampooning his willingness to represent Harvey Weinstein, the gross Hollywood mogul, in court. Under the Constitution, criminals are entitled to legal defense, but for Claudine Gay, defending due process is an “insufficient” response to students’ getting angry. Gay actually went out of her way to amplify the backlash against Sullivan, commissioning a survey to evaluate “how students felt” studying under a professor who would dare take on a client who appeared so guilty.
Why did Gay go after Sullivan? We don’t know, but we do know that Sullivan called Gay’s investigation into Roland Fryer “deeply flawed and deeply unfair” with “no semblance of due process or the presumption of innocence.”
All of that is now mostly forgotten, and what seems most likely to do her in, finally, is her plagiarism, not her extraordinary answers to questions about anti-Semitic students at Harvard.
According to the Free Beacon, in four papers between 1993 and 2017, Gay “paraphrased or quoted nearly 20 authors, including two of her colleagues in Harvard University’s department of government, without proper attribution.”
In ten cases, she borrowed entire sentences or paragraphs, changing only a few words.
An anonymous tenured Harvard professor is quoted as saying: “This looks really bad for her, and speaks to the fact that at worst she is a plagiarist, and at best, her worse-than-mediocre record as a scholar is highly derivative.”
And, of course, there is her congressional testimony that focused the spotlight on her (and two other college presidents): She equivocated when asked if advocating genocide against Jews violated Harvard’s code of conduct. Well, you know, maybe, but come on, it depends on, you know…etc., etc.
The mind reels…and asks, what is the Harvard corporation thinking? And to what lengths will they go to protect Harvard’s first black president? We don’t know. Yet. We will find out.
Especially since new charges of plagiarism have—drip, drip—just surfaced. Who will now bet—drip, drip—that there won’t be more?
If Gay had any decency, or concern for anyone other than herself—say a concern for Harvard—she would resign. Apparently, she hasn’t got that decency, and, one report says, she is even considering suing the Harvard corporation if they fire her!
How simply frightful. How humiliating.
How delightful!
In what might seem like a slight diversion, we should mention the extraordinary statement of Harvard professor Charles Fried (a solicitor general in the Reagan administration). He is quoted in The New York Times as saying (more or less), “It’s part of this extreme right-wing attack on elite institutions. The obvious point is to make it look as if there is this ‘woke’ double standard at elite institutions. If it came from some other quarter, I might be granting it some credence. But not from these people.”
So, professor, the facts don’t matter; all that matters is who presents them?
Harvard is worse off than we thought.
William F. Buckley Jr. said decades ago that he would rather be governed by the first two hundred names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard college.
Plus ça change…
But it’s a good bet that one chose will not be la même: Claudine Gay will be gone by spring, to spend more time with her family, or perhaps to family more time with her spend, or maybe to time more to with her with, or perhaps just to with more with to her to.
Then it will be bye, bye, Claudine. We hardly knew ye.
(Full disclosure: “How simply frightful. How humiliating. How delightful!” is borrowed from the script of My Fair Lady.)
Daniel Oliver, H’61, is Chairman of the Board of the Education and Research Institute and a Director of Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy in San Francisco. In addition to serving as Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission under President Reagan, he was Executive Editor and subsequently Chairman of the Board of William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review.
Email Daniel Oliver at Daniel.Oliver@TheCandidAmerican.com.
I usually take it easy on myself for my Christmas and New Year’s pieces by penning less labor-intensive columns. In part because I love the season too much to get bogged down by weighty matters, and in part because I assume that my readers are too busy with family and friends to want anything heavy.
So this column, and the next, will be capsules!
We all like capsules, right?
Right?
Here are a few items that didn’t merit a full column this year but are still worthy of mention.
Wait, Are We “Nazi Realists” or “Nazi Hystericals”?
A few months ago on Twitter I attracted the ire of the Fuentes Nazibois by pointing out what to me seemed like a rather glaring hypocrisy: Far-rightists are always going on about how not all Nazis were bad and it’s immoral to prosecute 98-year-olds who may have had some tangential association with the Holocaust.
“Just because somebody served on the Eastern Front against the Soviets doesn’t mean they were Jew-killers.”
And then in September Trudeau and the Canadian Parliament applauded a 98-year-old Ukrainian who fought alongside Germans against the Soviets on the Eastern Front, and all of a sudden, the prosecution and imprisonment of elderly “tangential Nazis” became the coolest thing ever to rightists.
“Git that decrepit ol’ bastard! Though accused of no war crimes, he might’ve peripherally been a part of ’em!”
These are the same bozos who DM me, “Dave, isn’t it a travesty that the 97-year-old concentration camp secretary is still being hounded by the courts?”
Look, I understand. You hate Ukraine and you love Putin because shirtless riding a bear or something. But I never cease to be amazed at the lack of coherence. Maybe that’s why a guy like me has a dedicated reader base—continuity of thought. Yes, I think it’s wrong to imprison a 97-year-old Nazi camp stenographer, and yes, I also think the situation with the 98-year-old Ukrainian lauded in Parliament is nuanced and I’m not in favor of tormenting an old man just to dunk on Trudeau—a vile human, but if he’s still in office despite all the domestic evil he’s done, I’m not sure destroying an elderly man’s last years on earth was worth giving Trudeau the minor dunking he easily weathered.
Plus, I see the hypocrisy more up-close than you. I have tards who write to me, “Hey Dave, how cum everybody talks about the Holocaust but nobody talks about the Holodomor?” and then these same idiots, when presented with an opportunity to talk about the Holodomor in order to explain the motivations of the 98-year-old Ukrainian guy, become Simon Wiesenthal: “ARREST HIM! WOIST OUTRAGE EVAH! NEVAH FORGET DAH HOLOCAUST!”
Dumbasses.
Foot Fetish
And speaking of Hitlers large and small, in August, Foot Locker announced that it wouldn’t be selling the “Yeezy” sneakers (the Kanye line) that Adidas was unloading on the market after severing ties with everyone’s favorite Hitler-suitor (in sociological terms, the love affair between a Nazi and a black man is referred to as “Mann-Boy Love”). Foot Locker’s decision led rightist website ZeroHedge to declare, “Instead of selling Yeezy shoes and sending sales surging, Foot Locker prefered [sic] to remain woke and watch its stock crater 35% in one day. Smart.”
ZeroHedge followers echoed the point:
“Foot locker went woke, and now their [sic] broke.”
@BadMomma0511
Wait, “woke”?
Okay, I’m confused here. Aren’t rightists the ones who claim that Hitler and the Nazis were “left-wing socialists”?
So how is refusing to sell sneakers created by a guy who said “I love Hitler” woke?
I’ll phrase it this way: If Foot Locker refused to sell shoes created by someone who proclaimed devotion to Che Guevara, would you call that a “woke” decision?
I’m pretty sure you’d call it “based.”
So if you really believe that Hitler was a leftist socialist, how is refusing to sell Hitler-sneakers “woke”?
I know, I know. Just like the “stop persecuting Nazi 98-year-olds/commence persecuting Nazi 98-year-olds” story, it’s not supposed to make sense.
But at least a few people in the ZeroHedge Twitter thread noticed the lack of coherence.
“Not selling shoes from a vocal antisemite is now ‘woke’??? Okay, sure!”
@StanphylCap
To which a ZeroHedge supporter replied:
“Not selling shoes at all for any political reason is what’s important.”
@Xerostomia1
Great; we’ve redefined “woke.” It now means “not selling something for any political reason.”
A roadside mom-and-pop store in Roberts County, Texas, the reddest point in the state.
A man with California plates pulls up and enters.
Man: “Hey, you guys sell any ‘Biden rocks, Trump sucks cocks’ T-shirts?”
Clerk: “You in the wrong county, boy.”
Man: “You woke bastard!”
Clerk: “Oh no, you’re right! I’m refusing to sell something for political reasons. I’m shamed!”
Yep, makes total sense.
Again…dumbasses.
Sieg Guile
After The Spectator’s Douglas Murray went viral via a devastating clip in which he contrasted Hamas to the Nazis, I penned a column affirming his stance (since then, Murray outdid himself by turning human pig Cenk Uygur into bacon bits). One of the points I made in my column was that not only are Palestinians in general (and Hamas specifically) more violently anti-Jewish than pre-Kristallnacht Nazis, but the Nazis actually downplayed their anti-Semitism before taking power, during the 1932 election, when they had to win a popular vote.
In response to that, hack “journalist” David Grossman tweeted:
The “before taking power” line plays into one of the oldest pieces of Holocaust denial: that the German people were simply tricked into supporting Hitler’s anti-Semitism. In reality, “Mein Kampf” was a best-seller, and Hitler’s worldview was very clearly understood by ’32.
A gross-man indeed. And a stupid one.
Mein Kampf was not about killing Jews. It’s a self-indulgent, lugubrious tome that was ignored until Hitler became chancellor, at which time it became a best-seller only because the party bought in bulk to give away free copies (a sales-boosting tradition that egotists like Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump continue to this day). Hitler himself felt embarrassed by the book. It’s a terrible work, and a “blueprint” for nothing more than his lack of skill as a writer.
Most of the German Jews who fled in 1933 returned the next year (see The Myth of Rescue for the data on that), because there was a general perception that they could ride the Hitler thing out. That feeling of “we can deal with this” only increased in ’36 when Hitler curtailed anti-Semitism for the Olympics. Hitler didn’t run on genocide, and even German Jews, in the immediate postelection years, didn’t think genocide was coming. There was nothing Hitler did to Jews in his early years in power that surpassed in cruelty Jim Crow laws in the U.S. People just lived with that stuff in those days.
Yes, Germans knew going in that Hitler didn’t like Jews, but at the same time, dozens of sitting U.S. senators and congressmen didn’t like blacks. These days, it’s an earthquake if a white politician even insinuates disdain for a nonwhite group. But 100 years ago it was normal. I know, hard to imagine, Zoomer. But it was so standard for white politicians in the U.S. and Europe to hold positions that some groups deserved less rights than “the white man,” it wasn’t shocking to anybody back then.
Even Kristallnacht, which did shock German Jews, was essentially just one night’s worth of the average Southern black’s experience with the Klan for decades. Obviously, European Jews knew their history of pogroms and expulsions, but until Kristallnacht, there was a sense that the Nazi thing could be endured. And by the time German Jews began getting their one-way tickets “East” in fall 1941, it was too late to leave.
The idea that Hitler told the Germans in 1932 that he’d kill the Jews, and the Germans voted for that, is pseudohistory at its worst.
Grab ’Em by the Pussy-Whipped
Thirty years ago Chris Rock was the most exciting young comic on the planet. His seminal “blacks vs. niggaz” routine gave voice to the most underserved and ignored demographic in the nation—civilized, intelligent blacks who are shamed by, and in fear of, their savage underclass. That comedy bit was like Sam Kinison’s 1980s riff about starving Africans. It’s what put Kinison on the map, because after years of being guilted and bullied by “artists and musicians” to give give give to starving UngaBungas, Kinison served as a release for all of us who were just tired of it.
Every year ’round this time Christmas music plays nonstop in my home, and to this day I can’t hear the line in “Do They Know It’s Christmas”—“Where nothing ever grows, no rain nor rivers flow”—without hearing Kinison screaming, “You live in a fucking desert! Nothing grows here! Nothing’s gonna grow here! C’mere…you see this? This is sand. You know what it’s gonna be a hundred years from now? It’s gonna be sand! We have deserts in America, we just don’t live in ’em, asshole!”
Rock’s “niggaz” routine was like that; an emotional release for people sick and tired of being told that they need to tolerate and “uplift” their inferiors.
A lesser-known bit from that same Rock concert dealt with the exact moment a woman knows she has her man by the balls. When she knows he’s fully whipped. If she insults her man’s mama, and he doesn’t strike her, that man is owned.
Last month, when Trump bragged about being endorsed by BLM, that was the same dynamic, even if not consciously played out. Fact is, though, if Trump had consciously wanted to test how mindless his followers are, the extent to which they’ll not only swallow but applaud anything he tells them, he couldn’t have chosen a better test case than to boast of a BLM endorsement.
MAGAs have spent the past three and a half years braying about how “BLM BURNED DOWN AMERICA! WHY WERE J6ERS IMPRISONED BUT BLM TERRORISTS GO FREE? COMMIE BLM MURDERERS!!! TO HELL WITH BLM!”
Then Trump says, “I’m honored by the endorsement of BLM,” and these same MAGAs go, “Whoooo-hoooo! Another victory for the god-king! Welcome, BLM! MAGA and BLM—besties forever!”
And now Trump knows that if he can get away with that, if he can be celebrated by his zombies for that, he owns them.
Because in the end, for all the vaunted bullshit about what a dealmaker Trump is, how his “understanding of business dynamics” would assist him in dealing with Congress, in fact the only power dynamic he understands is that of sycophant and boss. As president, he was buffaloed by Democrats, stymied by his own party, steamrolled by the D.C. bureaucracy, and intimidated by the courts. But he grew the most loyal kamikaze sycophant base since Hirohito.
And to him, that’s victory enough. He’s got you by the balls, bitch.
That satisfies him more than a second term.
Merry Christmas! Part II coming next week to ring in 2024.
Just in time to ruin another generation of toddlers’ enjoyment of Christmas, the Barbie Liberation Organization are back! But…who the hell are they? By now, you have probably long since forgotten these Grinch-like weirdos ever even existed.
The BLO (close twins of the PLO) first emerged in the early ’90s, aiming to save Barbie from the malign corporate patriarchy who supposedly then ran her manufacturers, Mattel. They have been hiding away deep underground ever since, but, as the new Barbie movie set box office records earlier this summer, the time finally came for the BLO to reemerge from their bunkers to undertake a fake PR campaign upon Mattel’s supposed behalf. According to a wholly false media operation, the toy-makers were about to abolish all use of plastic pollutants in their products forever, replacing Barbie’s traditional plastic essence with recyclable eco-polymers derived from lovely Green mushrooms and fungi instead.
Once the hoax was revealed, hardened BLO operatives released a terror-video warning that, if Mattel knew what was good for them, they had better turn fantasy into reality anyway. “This is a message to Mattel and every other company,” they warned: “Stop making plastic crap!” Sadly, this particular warning did not also apply to those companies currently doing great business making fake plastic breasts for men or strap-on polymer penises for women…
Barbie Army
The key founder of the BLO, Igor Vamos, is an artist and merry prankster who today teaches video and media arts at the Rensselaer Institute outside New York. Vamos is a proponent of the art of “culture-jamming,” the idea that, by inserting subversive little messages into wider normative society, you can plant the mental seeds that will later help pull it apart.
Vamos’ pranks are insignificant in themselves, and at first seem harmless or funny. As such, an amused mainstream media often help spread them more widely, like memes. These subversive seeds then take root within people’s minds, where, with fair cultural weather, they may later blossom.
Is this really a plausible way of transforming society wholesale? Maybe. All ideas must come from somewhere, and in 1993 Vamos was one of the figures who helped launch the early transgenderist movement onto an unsuspecting world. And the particular media weapon of mass destruction he chose to unleash this deadly social plague? The Barbie doll.
Barbie was already being obscenely subverted by some obscure demimonde activists. Yet most small children do not read the obscure far-left art periodicals or attend the radical fringe-theater shows where (as we shall see next week) Barbie herself was first being queered by weird Commie radicals. Therefore, Igor Vamos’ great innovation was to take such art activism out of the academy and into Toys “R” Us and the newsrooms of CNN and ABC.
Look Who’s Talking
In itself, the first and most famous act of toyland terrorism ever perpetrated by Vamos and his paramilitary operatives was generally considered fairly amusing, even by Mattel executives of the day. Exactly thirty years ago, in a mass act of “reverse-shoplifting,” the BLO entered California toy stores prior to Christmas 1993, bought various Mattel Teen Talk Barbies and Hasbro G.I. Joe figures, took them home, and swapped their electronic voice-boxes around. Then, BLO foot soldiers quietly replaced the doctored toys on shelves.
Now when kids pushed Joe’s buttons on Christmas Day, the apparently queer-converted soldier would say stereotypically girly things like “Let’s go shopping!” “Let’s plan our dream wedding!” “Will we ever have enough clothes?” “Do you have a crush on anyone?” or “Ken is such a dream!” Barbie, meanwhile, had gone butch, shouting, “Eat lead, Cobra!” “Dead men tell no lies!” or “Vengeance is mine!” Never had the phrase “military camp” enjoyed such wide resonance.
Also inserted inside the dolls’ boxes were special promotional leaflets claiming BLO responsibility and providing outraged parents with the phone numbers of mainstream media outlets to complain to. When they did so, TV news immediately recognized the entertainment potential of the story, creating a temporary sensation.
Some BLO hacktivists employed their own kids as underage terror operatives, too, one little boy telling cameras he didn’t want to swap his new G.I. Gay doll for a normal one as, by spouting soppy Valley Girl teenspeak, “He’s teaching me not to fight.” Igor Vamos had correctly identified one of late capitalism’s chief internal design flaws: that, even if any given product had the potential to destroy it, if it only turned a profit, fat cats would still line up to sell it anyway. “Capitalism contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction,” as Marx once predicted.
Hello Dolly!
Ostensibly, the BLO’s actions were prompted by the fact that one of Teen Talk Barbie’s many preprogrammed phrases was “Math class is tough!” which was widely seen as reinforcing backwards stereotypes about blonde female bimbos.
So, the BLO argued that Mattel’s prominent early-1990s attempts to market Doctor Barbies and Astronaut Barbies were all just an insincere commercial sham, aimed at screwing a few extra dollars out of young girls with lefty feminist parents. By swapping around Joe and Barbie’s voices, Vamos’ troops were just trying to ensure gender equality, nothing more…or so they said.
But was there more to it? A subsequent BLO video showing a Barbie doll with animated human lips mouthing their message specifically frames the voice-box swaps as being a form of “corrective surgery” and “sex-change operations.” Just a joke? Look at this BLO flyer in which Joe and Barbie, like newly released terror hostages, complain that:
“WE WERE FORCED TO SAY THINGS WE DIDN’T WANT TO. LUCKILY, WE CHECKED OURSELVES INTO A SPECIAL HOSPITAL AND HAD THE DAMAGE REVERSED. YOU CAN HELP US! GIVE US NEW VOICES! LIBERATE US!”
G.I. Jane
Perhaps the BLO would say it’s just coincidence, but you can hardly fail to notice that this is precisely the same kind of language now used by militant trans activists today. One contemporary approving online write-up of the 1993 prank swooningly calls these miniature human grenades “gender-bending Trojan Horses,” and it is hard to disagree.
Head to the official BLO website and you can view a “CLASSIFIED DOCUMENT” that it is advised you should “Eat after reading,” but presumably only if you’ve actually printed a copy out first. Here, the BLO speak of how their members share “a common commitment to challenging malign systems”—not only capitalism but also, one must presume, gender normativity. Via “subtle acts of subversion, the BLO endeavors to redefine cultural boundaries and empower [certain chosen] individuals”—i.e., trannies, presumably.
“The BLO’s mission was twofold: to challenge deeply ingrained gender stereotypes and expose the insidious influence of consumerism,” we are told. Therefore, they sourced “consenting GI Joe donors” and transplanted their maleness into female Barbie dolls and vice versa, at special “regional toy-surgery centers” in order “to confront the issue of enforced gender stereotypes and societal assumed norms.” Or, in my own rough translation: “We did it to queer your kids.”
Photos of BLO-liberated dolls being operated on strongly recall images of obscene old Nazi medical experiments. BLO Dr. Mengeles even provided detailed soldering instructions so wannabe Klaus Barbies could “carry out the surgery at home” with a screwdriver and putty: “If done carefully, Barbie need never know she’s been under the knife.” Just like Ellen Page.
Child’s Play
The ultimate level of success enjoyed by Vamos’ tactics is best shown by the fact that, where once Mattel viewed BLO gender-swapping antics as a mere joke, they are now engaging in similar stunts themselves. Disturbingly, Mattel now actually have their own specific line of Trans Barbies—sort of.
2019 saw Mattel launch their “Creatable World” line of gender-neutral dolls, which come with indeterminate hips, waists, and facial features, together with two wigs of short and long hair length, and several wardrobe options allowing them to pose as male or female, or a mixture of both, at the literal drop of a hat. Promotional photos show them split schizophrenically in half down the middle, one half male, the other half female, like Two-Face from Batman (or indeed the transvestite on the poster for Ed Wood’s 1950s high-
camp B pic Glen or Glenda?).
These dolls did not possess any political propaganda function, said Mattel. They were purely “relatable,” not “aspirational.” Kids were not meant to look at them and decide they wanted a sex change; instead, the causality was supposedly the other way around. Small children were increasingly becoming gender-neutral all by themselves, apparently, it was not the result of having any sinister ideology pushed upon them from above by activist adults. Mattel were simply responding to consumer demand and market forces, like capitalist companies are supposed to do: It was their financial duty to shareholders.
This was “all about play and not about politics,” said robotic, battery-operated Mattel spokesdolls, whilst simultaneously gushing that their new toys were being created “to celebrate the positive impact of inclusivity,” a nakedly political message in itself. When designing the Creatable World crew, Mattel had worked with “physicians and experts knowledgeable about gender identity”—and we all know precisely what kinds of “physicians and experts” they will have been.
No-Man’s Land
Doll-designers had also canvassed the opinions of infants themselves, concluding that “The kids didn’t want to be told that boys had to play with cars and girls had to play with dolls.” Indeed not. But it is a great leap from finding some little girls prefer Hot Wheels cars to Barbies, to claiming this means they therefore want to become hermaphrodites.
Purportedly, Mattel were creating a new doll line “free of labels,” but the term “gender-neutral” is in itself a label—the very idea of gender neutrality itself is not neutral, it is a key aspect of a new far-left ideology merely disguised as impartiality. By promoting it to kids through plastic playthings, you implant it in their tiny little minds, helping the cult spread ever further.
Clearly, culture-jamming can work. It is not as if Igor Vamos’ 1993 voice-swapping stunt caused the current trans-mania amongst teens all by itself, it is more a case of the BLO’s prank playing its small but useful part in the process of death by a thousand cuts.
So widely has the transgender spore-cloud now spread that even Mattel themselves have co-opted these ideas and begun spreading them too. As to precisely why: Who knows? It could be the presence of identitarian political proselytizers amongst its staff, or it may just be a cynical move to turn a further profit by irresponsibly selling new left-wing toy ranges to certain new target demographics of left-wing activist parents.
Whatever Mattel’s motive may be, the ultimate effect on children will be just the same. Combing their synthetic hair with tiny plastic hairbrush accessories, innocent little girls of the past used to groom their dolls. Now their dolls groom them instead.
Steven Tucker’s new book Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets is out now in hardback (Pen & Sword/Frontline Books). Buy it here (U.S.), here (U.K.), or here (direct from publisher).
The Week’s Most Dollying, Volleying, and Boughs-of-Hollying Headlines
ART-IS-ANAL CHRISTMAS
Sometimes conservatives come across like flat-earthers, in that they fail to see the curve. Last week’s outrage-du-jour involved a video posted by Her Lordship Dr. Jill Biden Ph.D. Ed.D. Esquire Esquivel. The video showed a breezy Nutcracker-themed tap routine performed by a New York dance troupe in the Christmas-decorated halls of the White House.
For some reason, conservatives declared it the greatest affront to Christmas since 1985’s Santa Claus: The Movie (never heard of it? Exactly). The fury appears to emanate from a belief on the part of rightists that the dancers’ costumes were Hunger Games–themed, when in fact they were based on Tchaikovsky Nutcracker characters.
It would be nice if the self-proclaimed “defenders of Western culture” actually knew Western culture (several of the more savvy conservatives, like Ann Coulter and “beloved” Takimag scribe Drunkowitz Dwarfenberg, took contrary positions, praising the video).
Grading on a curve, considering the extent to which Hollywood and other leftist institutions mangle beloved traditions, the fact that the video contained no twerking or same-sex snogging makes it based. At least based enough not to bitch about. Especially as the Christmas video suggested by Pete Buttigieg and Maxine Waters would’ve involved Lizzo shooting sugarplums out of her rectum as Sam Brinton dressed as Rudolph humps the leg of Rachel Levine playing Tranta Claus in a dildo workshop staffed by illegal Hondurans.
That said, far-leftists did get the Christmas video of their dreams…make that reams…as a legislative aide to Sen. Ben Cardin recorded an anal sex video in the Hart Senate Building (now known as the Hard Senate Building). The donner of gay apparel, Aidan Maese-Czeropski (ironically, AIDS and Maese-Czeropski is the clinical term for end-stage HIV), has been fired, not for violating the sanctity of the Senate but for not offering Cardin a reach-around.
Still, the news isn’t all bad for the Little Cummer Boy: He’s already landed a Netflix Christmas show. It involves the Island of Misfit Sex Toys, and the less said here, the better.
HA-MESS
Mr. Jill Biden was aroused from his cryo-chamber last week for a fundraiser in Beverly Hills. Due to threats by Palestinian beheaders-of-peace, the area surrounding the event was closed to traffic the entire weekend. Exactly what a Jewish neighborhood wants during Hanukkah.
The Biden shindig was supposed to be “star-studded,” but other than host Steven Spielberg, the only “celeb” who showed up was Lenny Kravitz. You know it’s a lousy celebrity event when the guy who played Mr. Belding would’ve gotten A-list seating.
Meanwhile, a pro-Gaza “comedy show” in Brooklyn hosted by “Muslim comedian” Ramy Youssef drew Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez, and Cara Delevingne (the scowling toff-nosed Brit of royal lineage best known for inventing “resting-bitch-of-Buchenwald face”).
And Youssef was on fire that night (literally; the Molotov cocktail he planned to throw at Jews went off in his hands).
His material was actually quite strong.
“October 7th proved the old stereotype that Jewish children are always a-head of their class.”
“Say this about the Nova music festival; in terms of female-targeted marketing, it had solid penetration!”
“Hostages are like Pringles; you can’t take just one. And nobody wants to give ’em back after they’ve been used.”
Finally, in London, Eric Clapton (who long ago abandoned “keep Britain white” for “to hell with Britain; I’m fightin’ for Arabs now”) held a pro-Hamas concert, in which he demanded that Israel stop the shelling.
Clapton’s desire to end the bombing is understandable; he has an unfortunate history with objects falling from the sky.
MEATHEAD-OF-STATE
Democrats are increasingly concerned about Biden’s age. Dude’s so old, his Secret Service codename is Methuselah (which is better than Hunter’s codename, Smoking-meth-uselah). Voters worry that a second Biden term might be compromised by the fact that America relies on China for its supply of Depends. So Team Biden’s hard at work crafting propaganda about how the elderly can do anything a young’un can.
And now the propaganda’s progressed to litigation.
Meathead Movers is a gimmicky California moving company, in operation for over 25 years, in which buff college athletes looking to earn a few extra bucks put on a “show” while moving furniture, fridges, and such. They flex, jerk, pose, and jog when not carrying an item.
For California gays, Meathead Movers is the perfect way to “pop the cork” in a new home on moving day.
The Biden administration is suing Meathead Movers for not employing the elderly as movers (not as clerks, but movers). To be clear, even California, a state where you can be sued for discrimination for not having a token black at your wedding or serving “bland-ass” potato salad, sees nothing improper with the gimmick of a moving company comprised of bodybuilders.
In legal filings, Biden’s EEOC claims that it’s “ageist” to suggest that an 81-year-old can’t single-handedly carry a couch on his back like a 20-year-old muscle-head.
This from a president what gets a hernia lifting an ice cream cone.
Of course, once you claim that men can get pregnant and menstruate, you gotta seek new heights of unreality.
Should Meathead Movers be forced to hire oldies, it’s likely that the customer experience will be diminished.
Mover: “Help! I’m trapped under this terrible apparatus!”
Customer: “It’s a toaster.”
Mover: “Call FDR! Call the WPA! My spleen’s crushed!”
Hopefully, Biden’s newest idiotic move will spark a Democrat-on-Democrat war, as West Hollywood gays mourn the loss of seeing large packages move their large packages.
PITCHING WU, CATCHING POO
Poor Michelle Wu. The Taiwanese-American mayor of Boston was doing so well. Scientist parents, high school valedictorian, perfect SAT and ACT scores, she even managed to get into Harvard without fellating an admissions administrator (these days, that’s the only way around Ivy League Asian quotas). As mayor, Wu effortlessly balanced motherhood with her political duties (she was not only the first mayor in the city’s history to give birth while in office, she gave birth during her State of the City address, without using a teleprompter).
Such a high achiever! A charmed life, a high-functioning high-IQ go-getter, never failing, always reaching her goals.
Then she put a sensitive task in the hands of a black woman.
Tiger mom, meet cold fry-ger mom.
Wu had a top-secret email to send to city council “members of color”: a clandestine holiday party invite, no whites allowed. Because certainly Wu has more in common with City Councilmember L’Dariuss “Stank-Ass” Odom, who not only failed the SAT and ACT, he didn’t even correctly spell the test names, than she has with some white dude who had to overcome the same quotas she did to get into college.
Wu assigned the task of sending out the sooper-secret email to her assistant, a black queen named Denise DosSantos (originally Denise DosEquis, but she changed it because “that beer be nasty”).
Literally, all this majestic person of color had to do was send the invite to the six “colored” council members, and not the seven white ones.
But that task involved math, so D’oh-Santos sent it to everyone.
To be fair, when she was hired she wasn’t told that her job would involve counting.
So of course now there’s a scandal, as Boston’s whites, who long ago traded effective governance for the ego boost of watching bad actors ape their idiotic accent, are wondering if it’s legal for government officials to exclude other officials based on race.
Holiday tears for Michelle Wu: The last time something yellow sank so quickly in Boston, the British were losing their crates of souchong to the briny depths.
MODS AND MODESTY
In a startling development, social media leftists have decided to respect the privacy of murdered Jews.
Because up till now, anytime leftists would see a propaganda opportunity when trying to paint rightists as Nazis, out came the photos of Holocaust victims—the naked, emaciated, dead, or dying human skeletons at camps like Bergen-Belsen.
Rightist: “I think maybe we should tighten amnesty laws.”
Leftist: “MONSTER! SEE the results of your Nazism. Look at these bare-assed full-frontal zombies plowed into mass graves. This is what your racism leads to, and we owe it to ourselves to forever fixate on and replay the footage of these people who never actually signed releases to become poster-corpses for political fetishes, but hey—I’m certain each one of them would be really happy to know that even in the year 2023, strangers are gawking at their shriveled nads just to dunk on Republicans.”
Weirdly, though, today, as Jews are being kidnapped, tortured, and killed in the present, Meta—parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Cyberdyne Killbots Inc., has decided that showing footage of Hamas savagery must be banned…to respect the dignity of the Jewish victims!
Ain’t that odd…as long as the perpetrators were white, there was never any concern about “dignity” while endlessly replaying footage of naked dying Jews. But now that the perps are Akbars, all of a sudden, one must never show their misdeeds, lest the Jews they’ve tortured or killed be seen in an undignified moment.
Surely the decision has nothing to do with shielding the savage actions of brown folks from public scrutiny.
Meta’s oversight board objected to the removal of Hamas atrocity footage. Fortunately, the Killbots took care of that problem (R.I.P. oversight board). The new board members have promised to be less uppity, though they did suggest a compromise—allow the footage, but use AI to make every Hamas thug look like 1970s Jon Voight.
And every victim like Joy Behar, to make the deaths less disturbing.
Repeat after me, class: Growth does NOT cause inflation. Write it on the blackboard 100 times.
For decades, the economics profession has been trying to tell us all just the opposite. They keep shoveling out the dumbest economic concept of all time: the Phillips Curve. This was the lame-brained “theory” by neo-Keynesian economists of the 1960s and 1970s that to slow inflation, the Federal Reserve needs to raise unemployment and slow down economic growth.
The whole concept of an inverse relationship between unemployment and inflation blew up when it was put into practice in the mid-1970s and the result was rising inflation AND rising unemployment. Then in the 1980s and ’90s, with free-market supply-side policies in place, we had low inflation and low unemployment.
Over the past 40 years or so, if there is a relationship between unemployment and inflation, they tend to run together more often than in an inverse relationship. As my colleague at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, David Simon, puts it: “The historical evidence shows the opposite of the Phillips Curve theory: increasing inflation in a particular year increases the unemployment rate in the following year — and that reducing inflation in a particular year reduces the unemployment rate in the following year.”
This concrete evidence should be the end of the myth of the Phillips Curve. Except that we’ve learned in recent years that when the Left’s theories are contradicted by the real world, they stick with the theory. If the laboratory mice aren’t behaving as predicted, the problem isn’t the theory; it’s the mice.
Which brings us to the high priests in the temple of the Federal Reserve Board — who gave us 9.2% inflation last year. Now what are they doing? Still singing out of the discredited Phillips Curve hymnal. Just listen to Jerome Powell explaining the Fed strategy back in August: “Getting inflation sustainably back down to 2% is expected to require a period of below-trend economic growth as well as some softening in labor market conditions” — i.e., fewer people working.
Then there was this from Fed Governor Christopher Waller explaining the latest Fed decision: “While I am encouraged by the early signs of moderating economic activity in the fourth quarter, inflation is still too high.” Then he added: “I am increasingly confident that policy is currently well positioned to slow the economy and get inflation back to 2%.” — Christopher Waller, Nov. 28, 2023 (emphasis added).
This is dangerous nonsense. As economist Louis Woodhill has explained it: “It is as if the Fed is trying to stop a careening car headed over a cliff by turning on the windshield wipers.”
We aren’t anywhere close to real full employment in this country. We still have 5 to 6 million working-age men out of the workforce — the vast majority of whom could and should be working. The economy’s average growth post-COVID over the last two years has averaged less than 2% when the historical average is in the 3% to 3.5% range. So the Fed is delivering that below-trend GDP they’ve been hoping for.
Some of the problem is the mandate for the Fed as dictated by Congress to deliver an American economy that achieves “stable prices and full employment.” But this is redundant. One of the surest ways of achieving full employment is precisely to stabilize prices. Instead, the more than 300 Ph.D. economists at the Fed and the Board of Governors are under this weird spell that full employment actually creates inflation.
The Fed should have long ago tossed out the Phillips Curve sophistry. They’ve completely misdiagnosed the inflation problem. Bidenflation wasn’t caused by too many people working or any sudden spurt of economic production since 2021. It was fueled by runaway government spending, debt and a vastly expanded Fed balance sheet, which pipelined excess dollars into the economy. And so the Fed seemed to be squelching private-sector growth at the same time we need more of it.
As Arthur Laffer has put it: “If the economy produces more apples, the price of apples goes down, it doesn’t go up.” The reason that the pro-growth movement is called “supply-side economics” is that the goal of any well-run economy should be to increase the production and “supply” of goods and services.
This Fed is for private-sector austerity, but they are fine with government growth. Half of the new jobs in the economy this year have been in government or health care. Unlike Fed chairmen of the past, including Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan, who routinely criticized Congress for its addiction to debt-financed spending, Jerome Powell rarely jawbones Biden or Congress to spend less money. This would be far more effective than raising interest rates and slowing down the economy, which only makes the cost of the federal government’s borrowing even more expensive.
What Americans want right now is prosperity. Neither Congress nor the Fed are taking us there. Then they wonder why 70% of voters are unhappy.
One of the great pleasures of retirement is that one can lie abed in the morning and read Agatha Christie without any feeling of guilt—guilt about being late for work, for example. It doesn’t matter in the least if one gets up at eleven: One hasn’t anything else important, or pseudo-important, to do. (Most importance is of the pseudo kind.)
Therefore, I was content one morning last week to lie in bed reading They Do It With Mirrors (my wife having brought me coffee). But human, or at any rate my, nature being what it is, prolonged unperturbed contentment is not of this world. Soon there were two flies in the ointment of my satisfaction.
Notwithstanding that I had nothing else pressing to do, I soon began to feel a slight and inchoate unease. At least seven-eighths of my life is now over: Should I not be spending the final eighth allotted to me in cultivating my soul (at long last) rather than idling my time away reading Agatha Christie? I remembered the line Richard speaks in Richard II:
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me…
But one of the things life teaches us is how to rationalize well. Just as Miss Marple said that there is a lot of wickedness in an English village, so there is a lot of spiritual sustenance in Agatha Christie. I do not mean by this the sustenance to be found in her convoluted plots, but rather in her shrewd observations of life, which might even be called philosophical.
In fact, a publisher once asked me to write a book about Mrs. Christie’s philosophical, social, and psychological ideas. The prospect tempted me because I could lie abed all day reading her and imagine that I was working. I also had a grand theory to propound, namely that Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple were actually themselves serial killers. Wherever they went, murder was soon to follow (in fact, there are three murders in They Do It With Mirrors alone). Almost all of these murders take place in circumstances in which you would least expect them to occur, so that the most parsimonious explanation for this extraordinary epidemic of homicide is that the two detectives themselves—the only characters, after all, present at all of them—are the killers.
This raises an interesting philosophical question: Why is the most parsimonious explanation of any phenomenon the one that we prefer? Is it because it must be true? Assuredly not, for a very elegant theory may nevertheless be false. Even less is it the case that by definition the most parsimonious theory is best. There remain two possibilities: that we prefer the most parsimonious theory for aesthetic reasons. It is more elegant than its competitors, and the achievement of beauty is one of the great aims of human existence. The other possibility is that, in practice, the most parsimonious theory will be found to be the most useful.
Be that as it may, I am rather attached to the theory that Poirot and Miss Marple were serial killers. Alas, I have not the time, patience, ingenuity, or scholarship to prove it.
In They Do It With Mirrors, Mrs. Christie makes a devastating (and profound) criticism of psychoanalysis, and indeed of all unitary theories of human psychology. It is not that such theories fail to explain anything, it is that they explain too much, too easily. The figure of the psychiatrist in the book, Dr. Maverick, is lampooned for his assumption that he understands everyone’s behavior. It brings to mind the anecdote told by the philosopher Karl Popper, who, back in Vienna just after the First World War, was initially impressed by the theories of Alfred Adler, the dissident Freudian. “How can you be sure,” Popper once asked him about a patient whom he claimed to understand thanks to his own theory, “that your explanation is the true one?” “Because,” replied Adler, “of my thousand-fold experience.” Popper replied (or said he replied): “I suppose your theory is now a thousand-and-one-fold.”
Mrs. Christie illustrated the dangers of procrusteanism (to which we are all liable) in a very light and amusing way.
In fact, I think I could write a short book on They Do It With Mirrors alone, never mind on the whole of Mrs. Christie’s oeuvre. It would include, for example, the question of arsenic poisoning raised therein. I once proposed to write a history of arsenic in the 19th century, when arsenic suffused the social world as cigarette smoke did in the 1940s and ’50s, when three-quarters of men, and half of women, smoked. The world must then have smelt like a giant ashtray. In the 19th century arsenic was everywhere, in the wallpaper, in medicines, in cosmetics; in America, it was in the banknotes so that bank tellers suffered from poisoning by it; it got into beer and chocolates. It was used to kill flies, weeds, insects, and rats—and, of course, humans, especially by wives, but also by a few doctors. It was a drug of abuse. It was mined—in Cornwall there was an English Arsenic Company that refined arsenic and left so much of it in the ground that to this day nothing grows around its workings. An interesting subject, I think.
A publisher agreed, and my first step was to buy books about arsenic. I have a very large arsenical library, including a book published in America in the 1880s, consisting of arsenic wallpapers. I had assumed that arsenic wallpapers must all have been green, but there were pink and blue ones, too.
Unfortunately, I left it too long to write the book, and another author beat me too it, writing a book that was, from my point of view, lamentably good.
I must just briefly mention the second fly in the ointment of my contentment as I lay in bed reading Agatha Christie, namely a peculiarly persistent fly, the only one in the room, that kept buzzing around me and landing on my hands and face. He was too fly for me: I kept slapping myself, but he was like a thought-reader; he seemed to know my actions in advance. One he had the temerity to land on the tip of my nose. After a while, I began to feel him landing all over me, even when he hadn’t. I began to hallucinate the tickle of his tiny feet. In a way, I admired him, for his qualities of character and intelligence; but wasn’t he supposed to be hibernating?
After a time, it was no joke. O! for a fly paper of the Victorian kind that Mrs. Maybrick soaked, allegedly to poison her husband with arsenic! Arsenic isn’t everywhere anymore, except in my mind.
Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Ramses: A Memoir, published by New English Review.
