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The Week’s Most Kinetic, Phyletic, and Peripatetic Headlines

L.A.’S DIVERSITY POTHOLE FILLERS
Only in Los Angeles would it come as a shock to journalists that a guy named “Jihad Muhammad” met a violent end. It’s hard to think of a more “violent end” name than that. Maybe “Ikeelyou AliAliAkbar” or “Die-Infidel Beheadaman.” Still, funny enough, Jihad Muhammad’s violent death had nothing to do with terrorism.

The 62-year-old black L.A. native was merely crossing a street on a rainy night in Crenshaw (one of the last remaining black areas in the city) when he was run over by a driver who sped off, leaving him to be run over by a second car, which also sped off, leaving him to be hit by a third car, which dragged him for a mile before the driver pulled over at a gas station to dislodge the body…before speeding off.

By the time it was over, Jihad Muhammad was not so much Imam as IHOP (as in, pancaked).

In the wake of Muhammad’s death, the L.A. Times decided to do some digging into the “epidemic of rising pedestrian deaths and traffic violence that is endangering us all but is having a disproportionate effect on people of color in low-income neighborhoods.”

Except it’s not actually “people of color” who keep getting Aunt Jemima’d on L.A.’s streets. As the Times pointed out, Hispanic pedestrians get tortilla’d at a rate that is “proportional to their share of the population.” White pedestrian deaths are also proportional, and (for whatever reason) Asians almost never get run over (perhaps they’re just more likely to be the drivers who run over others).

So really, it comes down to black Angelenos getting Wile E. Coyote’d way more than they should.

The Times mentions that in 2015 L.A. city leaders imported something from Sweden called “Vision Zero.” “Vision Zero” is described as “a strategy to eliminate all traffic fatalities and severe injuries, while increasing safe, healthy, equitable mobility for all.”

It’s not clear why a pedestrian safety program would be called “Vision Zero,” when limited vision on the part of drivers is actually what causes many of these accidents. Encouraging “zero vision” doesn’t seem like the best antidote.

But still, it worked in Sweden, so surely it would work in L.A.

Except, no. As the Times reluctantly admits, “pedestrian deaths are up 36% since Vision Zero became policy.”

Well, hurdy gurdy, looks like Sweden’s pedestrian safety program is as maddeningly inadequate as an IKEA instruction manual.

So the Times authors are left shaking their heads. Why these disproportionate black pedestrian deaths? Is there an answer? Or will it forever remain a riddle, a mystery for the ages, a Colossus of Roads, a Smudge Crater?

Times reporters may be flummoxed, but readers aren’t. The photo the newspaper chose to accompany the piece depicts an intersection in South L.A. near Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. “To help reduce fatal traffic crashes, the city of L.A. has added new crosswalks that extend further into the street, such as this one at 43rd and Broadway,” the caption reads.

And the photo shows an old black man on a motorized scooter crossing in the middle of the intersection, straight through traffic, outside the crosswalks, literally daring drivers to run him down.

Mystery solved!

YOU CAN WIN FOR LOSING!
In the good old days, when athletes competed, there’d be a winner and a loser (or, in soccer, a tie and an accompanying stadium mass-casualty event). Rarely—but it did happen—losers would be held accountable for their poor performance, like that time when Colombian footballer Andrés Saldarriaga was murdered by disgruntled fans after an own goal. It’s not really fair to bring that up, though, as Colombians kill each other daily over even more trivial matters. The Colombian version of The Price is Right, for example, has led to over a thousand Plinko-related murders.

But these days we live in a world in which women and nonwhites can’t lose, even if they do. U.S. athletics is no longer a contest of ability, but of rationalizations for why women and POC losers are actually winners.

When sushi soul-sista Naomi Osaka withdrew from competition because she had jittery nerves (“You GO, gurrrrrl! Why Don Knotts always gotta be a man?”), she was lauded as the bravest human to ever draw breath. And when Simone Biles pulled out of the Olympics due to the heebie-jeebies (“How can we ask her to compete when she’s still mourning the death of Emmett Till?”), she was feted as the next Harriet Flubman.

As every woke media sphincter on the ’net took great pains to point out, Osaka and Biles were the bravest women in human history for not competing, unlike miserable cowards like Jesse Owens, who just had to prove his toxic masculinity by humiliating the Nazis on the field with his superior athletic prowess instead of doing the brave thing and cowering in his hotel room, shivering and clutching a teddy bear for security.

And now comes the most courageous female athlete of all: Shelby Rogers. Rogers is a tennis pro who Don Knottsed her way out of the US Open last week, falling in straight sets to England’s Emma Raducanu. In olden days—back when the world didn’t turn on the axis of wokeness—athletes who crapped out at big tourneys would lick their wounds and practice harder for next time.

Again, how cowardly! Just like when Joe Louis embarrassed the nation by fighting and defeating Max Schmeling instead of doing the brave thing and hiding in his corner whimpering, “I’ze skee-skee-skeered to fights dat big spooky German!”

No, today’s athletes know the true meaning of courage. So following her humiliating loss, Shelby Rogers declared herself the most valiant woman on earth because she was in fear of her life due to the “9 million death threats” she was going to receive for performing poorly on the court.

Mind you, she didn’t actually get “9 million death threats.” She just feared she would, and her stoic resilience against imagined threats that exist only in her mind was far more important than her lousy showing in competition.

The media couldn’t have agreed more. “While that number (nine million) may be exaggerated, the impact even one death threat has is real,” Yahoo Sports declared, noting that even though Rogers hadn’t received even one death threat, that shouldn’t detract from her heroism, as it’s not about actual threats but rather the courage of a woman to stand strong in the face of invisible misogynists.

It’s good to know that from now on, U.S. female athletes will be competing not against real-world opponents, but imagined ones.

That’ll surely boost ratings and sell tickets!

MEAT THE BEETLES
It’s a popular rightist trope—global elites are using fear of “climate change” to persuade the “liddle peeple” to give up every convenience and live in squalor eating bugs.

The “eating bugs” thing isn’t exactly fiction. From Time to The Guardian to Vox, leftist elites have for years been telling the great unwashed that eating insects is the only way to “save the planet.” So trade those burgers, steaks, hot wings, and pork chops for fried cockroach.

Nursing-home escapee Joe Biden found himself in quite a pickle last week when faced with mass discontent over rapidly rising meat prices. On the one hand, Biden’s ideological masters are pleased that meat is being priced out of the mouth of the average Joe Beerswiller. On the other hand, Biden’s tanking in the polls, so telling Americans that inflation is good because it’ll help them transition to a kale and cricket diet isn’t exactly the ticket out of the public-opinion basement.

A frustrating dilemma for the president. Mind you, with his current mental capacity, deciding whether the bathroom faucet marked “H” is for hot or cold water is also a frustrating dilemma (“I think I’ve figured it out: ‘H’ stands for ‘Hurty’”).

So Biden sent National Economic Council chief Brian Deese to face reporters’ questions regarding skyrocketing meat prices. The initial plan was to blame inflation on mean ol’ meat-packers who cause artificial shortages because every time they find Carbone in the meat truck, he’s frozen so stiff it takes three days to thaw him out (“C’mon, man—just keep Carbone out of the meat truck and you won’t have to waste all that time”).

Unfortunately, an uncooperative reporter asked Deese why the higher prices aren’t being embraced because they “de-incentivize” meat-eating and therefore cripple “the leading greenhouse-gas-emitting areas of the economy.”

Deese, as out of his league as Teddy Pendergrass at a hacky sack tournament, stammered his way through an incomprehensible response that used the terms “consumer,” “sustainability,” and “transition” with all the coherence of a toddler reading randomly shuffled flash cards.

Literally, the dude just had to say, “We support the public’s right to eat meat.” But he wouldn’t.

Yet at the exact same time that White House officials couldn’t bring themselves to defend the right to eat hamburger, the Chinese presented the world with yet another demonstration of why, whether we like it or not, these inscrutable disease-spewing genocidal automatons are our inevitable future masters. At a gaseous-emissions summit in Glasgow sponsored by Greta Thunberg’s How Dare You Foundation (in association with Mexico’s refried bean industry), Chinese representatives told U.S. climate envoy John Kerry that they “won’t be bullied into going green,” and they will not reduce emissions if doing so harms their economy.

And there you have it. Soon enough, Americans will be reduced to chomping on lentils and ticks as the Chinese lounge around in front of outdoor grills fueled by Uighur body fat, roasting terriers and toasting the self-destructive nature of the empire they felled.

BASKET OF DYSPHORABLES
And speaking of the Chinese…

Every year Credit Suisse releases a report declaring that LGTBQYABBADABBADOO-friendly companies make more money than corporations that are “homophobic.”

“Credit Suisse says LGBTQ-inclusive stock basket has outperformed” (2021)

“LGBT-friendly companies outperform in the stock market, Credit Suisse says” (2020)

“Credit Suisse’s LGBT-inclusive index has outperformed the broader equity market 7 out of the last 11 years” (2018)

“LGBT-friendly stocks outperformed a broad index by three percentage points in the prior six years” (2016)

The problem is, where exactly are these “homophobic” companies? At least, where are they in the West? Where in the U.S., Canada, or the U.K. are major corporations that operate under the banner of “Damn them faggots! If you take it in the rear, our firm don’t want you near”?

The Westboro Baptist Church isn’t publicly traded. So the main issue with the yearly Credit Suisse reports is that they don’t contain the names of anti-LGBT corporations for comparison…because there aren’t any. At most, there are companies that have yet to find a way to work a tranny-friendly message into their advertising (“Ellsworth Pipe and Valve Manufacturers: Our fitting threads are neither male nor female; whatever they were assigned at birth, we allow them to choose their own identity”). But even Chick-fil-A ended up surrendering to the gay lobby.

So without any LGBTBLT-unfriendly companies as a control sample, the claim that going gay is the ticket to prosperity is somewhat unscientific.

But here’s the twist: While Credit Suisse’s yearly reports claim that “diverse perspectives deliver for our clients,” last week for some odd, totally inexplicable reason, Credit Suisse closed the account of internationally respected Chinese dissident and artist Ai Weiwei.

Turns out those vaunted “diverse perspectives” don’t apply to people who criticize China’s repressive, genocidal policies.

So if you bank with Credit Suisse, by all means don’t say anything like “Uighurs shouldn’t be killed.” But feel free to say, “Rectal fisting is the key to financial freedom.”

At least for now. As the BBC pointed out following the suspension of Weiwei’s account, China’s insistence on the suppression of ideas it finds distasteful will eventually pit the Asian dictatorship against Western “progressives.”

After all, the CCP just banned the portrayal of “sissies” in the media and forbade the “feminization” of men.

So how long before China gives Credit Suisse an ultimatum: “Lose the pansy-pandering or lose our business”?

It’ll be entertaining to see the Swiss try to stay neutral on that one.

IT’S REINING MEN (HALLELUJAH)
To end on some good news (for once), data released last week from the National Student Clearinghouse showed that women are enrolling in college at a far greater rate than men.

Female students accounted for 59.5 percent of all college enrollments in spring 2021, compared to just 40.5 percent that were men. The gap between the two sexes is widening, with male student enrollment declining more drastically than their female counterparts with 400,000 fewer male students enrolling in 2021 than 2020, versus 200,000 fewer female students between the two years.

Conservative news outlets tried to spin this as a bad thing, but that’s a questionable take. With most degrees being worthless these days, with most college graduates drowning is debt, maybe it’s not the worst thing in the world if more women are financially crippling themselves in pursuit of a BA in Genderqueer Araucanian-Yanomami Spoken-Word Macro-Chibchan Fourth Wave Feminist Foot Fetish Literature, while more men are learning to do things with real-world (and profit-making) applications.

The point being, those 59.5%/40.5% figures are meaningless without a breakdown of who’s majoring in what. If the majority of men are majoring in science, medicine, engineering, etc., and the majority of women are majoring in Polyamorous Interpretations of My Little Pony Through the Lens of Maasai Pansexual Furries, well…that’s really nothing to be alarmed about.

Every idiot who spends $50,000 on a useless degree is an idiot who has $50,000 less to donate to a political candidate or cause. And every idiot saddled with monthly student-loan payments because their degree didn’t translate to real-life employment is an idiot who can’t afford monthly contributions to BLM.

So while conservative media bemoans the decline in male college enrollment, the thoughtful ask, “Is it because men are no longer wanting to become educated and productive, or is it because most colleges have become indoctrination factories where dumbasses pay money they don’t have to receive a piece of paper worth about 60 percent less than a square of Charmin?”

Maybe men are just getting wise to the scam, and maybe they’re choosing their options more sagely, with an eye toward income. Maybe some are skipping college entirely to focus on the blue-collar skills that earn decent wages with no competition from Third World immigrants (India can provide plenty of coders and phone bankers. What it can’t provide is plumbers, considering that Indians have yet to figure out plumbing).

So don’t panic about those enrollment numbers. It might just be that the nation is profiting by having some of its least productive members kept busy for four years wearing pussy hats and reading The Price of Salt while those whose services are actually needed stay focused on the things that matter.