Will County, Illinois

Source: Bigstock

The Week’s Most Ghoulish, Coolish, and April-Foolish Headlines

CONSERVATIVE DING-A-LINGS
Imagine a Ron DeSantis conference call with Florida conservatives…

DeSantis: “You know how I’m out there every day fighting to keep our schools free of transgender propaganda and pornographic, inappropriate reading material?”

Florida conservatives: “And we love you for it!”

DeSantis: “So can you do me a favor? Can you, like, not do anything stupid? Like, something unbelievably idiotic that discredits my efforts?”

Florida conservatives: “Oh, Ron, bless your heart. We’re conservatives! Asking us to avoid unforced errors is like trying to stop a canary from singing or a dog from farting.”

Last week, Florida religious conservatives literally reenacted a classic Simpsons episode. In “Itchy & Scratchy & Marge,” Marge successfully lobbies against violence in children’s programming. But Springfield’s prudes sully her victory by also demanding that Michelangelo’s David be banned for frontal nudity. Springfield becomes a laughingstock.

Tallahassee Classical is a conservative charter school affiliated with Hillsdale College. The school requires that sixth graders study Renaissance art. But three parents complained that the lesson plan “exposed” their kids to David’s wingding, so the principal was fired and Florida’s now a laughingstock.

A real-life Simpsons episode, brought to you by people who can’t tell the difference between tranny child fellatio manuals and one of the great works of the Renaissance.

Meanwhile, in Waukesha, Wis., conservatives forced the removal of an innocuous Dolly Parton/Miley Cyrus duet from an elementary school concert due to fears it was too “controversial.” The song, “Rainbowland,” is harmless pap about people living together in peace, “every color, every hue.”

Discernment is to religious conservatives what garlic is to Dracula.

As Marge says at the end of the episode, “I guess one person can make a difference, but most of the time, they probably shouldn’t.”

THE (REALLY) NUTTY PROFESSOR
“If we be conquered, let men conquer us, and not these bastard Bretons, whom our fathers have in their own land beaten, bobb’d, and thump’d.”

So exclaims Richard III.

Rightists should adopt a similar cry: “If we be murdered, let men murder us, and not some nebbishy schlemiel whom our fathers have in their own locker room wedgied, swirlied, and pantsed.”

Steven Shaviro is a professor at Wayne State (not to be confused with Bruce Wayne State, which only offers one course: Secret Caves, Male Wards, Discreet Butlers). Shaviro teaches “Affect and Subjectivity,” which is not nearly as interesting as his former class, “Affectation and Subjectivity” (the entire course was him speaking in a snooty accent while wearing an ascot, then asking his students, “How does that make you feel?” And since Wayne State’s in Detroit, 90 percent of the students still managed to fail).

Last week, Shaviro declared on Facebook, “I think it is far more admirable to kill a racist, homophobic, or transphobic speaker than it is to shout them down.”

That was too much, even for a school where the yearbook has categories like “most photogenic mug shot” and “most likely to murder over fries.” Shaviro was suspended without pay.

News reports describe Shaviro as an author, but none mention the topic of his books. Shaviro is pathologically obsessed with Jerry Lewis. One of Shaviro’s essays “addresses Lewis’s relationship to space and time by way of a reading which takes the comedic theory of philosopher Henri Bergson as a counterpoint.”

Behold the winner of 2023’s “essay not a single human wants to read” award.

“Jerry Lewis is a figure who has haunted me—or, who has played a major role in my Imaginary—for most of my life,” Shaviro wrote in 2017. Yes, the guy who wants to murder rightists based his entire life on a spaz who screams “Oygenflaaaaaygen!”

Rightists needn’t fear. Shaviro’s the kind of doofus who’d try to blow up a VDARE conference and end up blasting himself into a tree where he’d be found hanging by his shorts, face blackened with soot, crying, “Oy, too good I don’t feel so much.”

As Shaviro’s death threats resulted in his own termination, he can now mimic his idol: Steven Shaviro starring in The King of Karmady.

WHAT IN TARDNATION?
Finally, a news story about Americans that doesn’t feature blacks in the accompanying photos.

An article about banking will feature a boardroom full of Daquans. A story about science will show a black woman in a lab coat staring intently at a beaker (“This potion will make even the coldest fries white-hot in milliseconds”). But in last week’s barrage of stories about a new study claiming that American youngsters are losing IQ points, the accompanying photos were of white kids, looking terribly sad because they’re terribly stupid.

Frankly, the woman in this Mailchimp ad touting “the new face of small business” would’ve made a better accompanying photo for the IQ story.

CNN, which bafflingly used a photo of an elderly white man taking a standardized test for an article about young people’s IQs (the photo might be intended to illustrate how long it takes the average American white to finally be accepted to college in the age of “minorities first”), argued that the IQ drop is not due to genetics but “environment,” which isn’t the win CNN likely thinks it is, because CNN’s gone all-in for the current educational environment of jettisoning math, science, and reading for slavery, trannies, and lockdowns.

If the IQ drop is indeed environmental, seems like woke education ain’t working.

Or maybe it’s working too well. Maybe those pics of white kids aren’t inappropriate after all, if the point is to bring the most promising kids down to the level of the “gentle giants” who still have to be given safety scissors in high school.

The study doesn’t break down by race, but one suspects Asian kids are doing just fine.

Which leads us to our next story…

TERM PAPER TIGER
When it comes to academia, maybe Asians aren’t all that and a bag of mah-jongg chips after all.

Last week the Financial Times detailed the growing menace of Chinese research paper “mills” that churn out fraudulent academic studies to trick the world into seeing China as a center of intellectual advancement.

The article highlights John Cheseboro, who works at a biomedical publishing company called Spandidos (Cheseboro Spandidos is Frito Lay’s top-selling product). Cheseboro’s uncovered numerous examples of Chinese academics using “digital manipulation” of slides of cell cultures to produce fraudulent results.

According to the creatively named Institute for Scientific Information (what, they couldn’t go with Flavoritos or Sciencheetos?), “China produced 3.7mn papers in 2021.” If Cheseboro’s correct that 10 percent of that Chinese output is comprised of fakes, that’s a big deal.

Not all fake Chinese papers are difficult to spot. Among the more obvious: “Science Proves Inscrutability Is Most Attractive Physical Feature,” “We No Drive Worse Than Roundeye,” “Uyghurs: They Like Being in Camps,” “The Dalai Lama: 80 Years of Being a Big Stupid Jerk,” “The True Master Race Has No Need for Dimorphism,” and “Three Inches: Nature’s Perfect Number.”

China surpasses the U.S. in papers cited in science journals but ranks dead last in the “research-to-innovation pipeline,” because fake studies don’t lead to new breakthroughs.

Fake it till you can’t make it.

Other experts quoted by the Times include New Zealand professor David Bimler (who shares a surname with the notorious Nazi who ran a death camp for actresses), British researcher Steven Inchcoombe (who was interviewed while measuring marigolds), intellectual property expert Carsten Fink, and Danish CEO Mads Krogsgaard.

The Chinese can cheat all they want, but they’ll never out-innovate the West. You can’t top a people capable of creating that many stupid names.

THE CONFESSIONS OF WRONG TURNER
It’s a Jordan Peele movie in real life: the true story of a young black man caught in a strange town filled with whites with bizarre intentions.

Call it Never Get Out.

Chicago career criminal Jordan Henry had grown used to skating from one felony to another in a city where, if you’re black, there are zero consequences for committing crimes. Henry, accused of car theft, aggravated battery, two cases of aggravated kidnapping with intent to inflict harm, four counts of aggravated sexual assault, and two counts of aggravated robbery with a gun, had just bonded out of a Cook County courthouse for…$1,000.

Yep—all those charges, and for one grand, he was free.

And what was the first thing he did upon leaving the courthouse? He stuck a gun in the face of his 69-year-old Uber driver and took the car.

State police gave chase, and here’s the part of the story that would chill Jordan Peele to the bone.

Heading south on I-55, Henry went off-roading and got a flat. Escaping into a marshland, he was pursued by a police dog named Hades. Henry punched the dog in the mouth and kept running. Once officers caught up to him, Henry surrendered and smiled.

“I’ll be out by Sunday,” he gloated.

Except Henry wasn’t in Cook County anymore. He was in conservative Will County, a place where Soros fears to tread. Without realizing it, he’d made a wrong turn off I-55. And now he was in a land where $1,000 bonds for multiple felonies don’t exist.

Last week, Henry was sentenced to 22 years for 13 crimes, including striking a police animal. At a press conference, Will County State’s Attorney Jim Glasgow told Chicagoans that this will be their fate if they bring their rot into his county.

And yes, Hades the German shepherd was at the presser, healed and ready for the next wrong-turner.

Sometimes it’s good to end The Week on a story that’s not so much funny as satisfying.