Luxury is in a death spiral. After a decade of nearly unfettered growth, the sector is bombing across the globe. Analysts point to less-affluent buyers reining in their spending and slowing demand in China. I believe there’s another culprit: a growing realization that many luxury houses have broken the principles that made them so successful. These hoity-toity brands, which cheapened their essence and eviscerated their desirability with down-market celebrity partnerships, licensing deals and influencer advertising, have no one to blame but themselves.That she got away, in the pages of the house organ for "American greatness is a myth," with noting that at least some of the middle class is vanishing upward might be the more astonishing claim.
This started at the source of so many modern woes: social media. For those not glued to TikTok or “The Kardashians,” social media, helped along by reality TV, has instigated a frenetic game of one-upmanship in which top social-media content makers aim to project wealth while outdoing themselves and their competition. This means flaunting luxury goods in posts that are then spread widely by algorithms. Kyle Richards, a cast member of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” has become infamous for hitting the gym with a difficult-to-get Hermès Birkin bag — which costs anywhere from five figures to hundreds of thousands of dollars — dangling from her arm.
At the same time, the rich were getting richer — and more people were joining them. According to Swiss bank UBS, there were 7.64 million millionaires in the United States in 2000. By 2023, we saw that number nearly triple.
This dogma has infected all our institutions like a fungus. It won’t be easy to eradicate. Ever notice how quickly, after a full complement of treatments, athlete’s foot comes right back? One American election won’t do the trick. There are simply too many people with a vested interest in wokery, because ‘decolonising the curriculum’, say, is their job. Many a current museum director was hired expressly to ensure that an art collection doesn’t acquire work by white people. Numerous black female hires – who may tick two boxes in a kind of diversity ‘buy one, get one free’, but who are sometimes conspicuously under-qualified, such as ousted Harvard president Claudine Gay – owe their appointments to that fungal way of thinking, and they won’t all go quietly. America’s entire Democratic Party is steeped in this brain rot, and Kamala still came within 1.5 percentage points of winning the popular vote. On both sides of the Atlantic, universities, the judicial system, NGOs, the legal and medical professions, the news media, cultural institutions, theatre, publishing, film: they’ve all been putrefied by the zombie fungus.What it takes, though, is for sufficiently many people to notice that cultural vanguards, whether they're ruining literature or architecture, or making a hash of managing the government, are doing a bad job.
I’ve never doubted that our level-headed and unindoctrinated contingent – however beleaguered, persecuted and shockingly few in number – has always been destined to win, because lunacy eventually collapses from its own contradictions. It’s only ever been a question of how much longer we have to put up with this staggering bullshit.There's truth to that, and yet, dear reader, be careful.
As for the present juncture, I have a theory. Let’s remember the nature of the opposition. Wokesters are conformists. They didn’t invent their wretched ideas; they’re reading from a common hymn sheet. That’s why they all use the same words and subscribe to the exact same roster of convictions, no matter how preposterous: these people aren’t original thinkers. But they imagine they’re at the cutting edge. Being ‘progressive’ means they’re in the vanguard. See, they think woke makes them modern. They think woke makes them hip.
Whatever the more complex truth of the matter, it’s in our interest to promote the trope that woke is over. That woke has been vanquished. That woke is totally yesterday, hopelessly stale and played out. That the rest of us are all moving on to genuinely thorny questions that aren’t stupid. That we’ll no longer waste our time pushing back against petty amateur linguists who insist we call the portly ‘people living with obesity’. That, whatever our private reservations about the guy, Trump’s election marks a hard Before and After. That as Kamala would say, we’ve ‘turned the page’ and ‘we’re not going back’.
Because when you say something enough times (this is a gambit the wokesters themselves have mastered), you can make it true. Wokesters are highly suggestible. Furthermore, most of these folks don’t really care about social justice. They care about appearing to care about social justice. They care about other people’s esteem. They care about fitting in. They echo what everyone else around them says, because being a mindless copycat means other mindless copycats will like them and they’ll keep their friends and their jobs. And they care about social fashion.
So they won’t spout lingo like ‘cisgender’ if that might risk an eye-roll at parties. They won’t want to seem behind the times. If we convince them that woke is over, that their BLM lawn signs are passé, that maundering about ‘white privilege’ is boring and old hat, they’ll drop the whole patriarchy / neurodiversity / heteronormativity et al package in a New York minute. We just have to persuade them that woke is unhip. Which it always has been, but some people are slow.You're more likely to see the vanguardists banding together, avoiding the most trivial form of sectarianism, when they perceive themselves as out of fashion. The best thing to do with the purveyors of inclusive euphemism, for example, might be to shun them. That might be sufficient to get the preference cascade moving in a new direction.
Advent is the season of waiting, reflection and anticipation in the weeks leading up to Christmas. It’s a season during which Christians are encouraged to practice penance and reflection as they think about Christ’s arrival as celebrated in the traditional Christmas story. But it’s also a joyful, active season. Advent waiting is not like waiting at the doctor’s office for your name to be called. It doesn’t look like sitting passively and thumbing through magazines, staving off boredom.With some practical advice for carrying the good cheer into the upcoming year.
It’s more like the kind of waiting we embody when we’re eager for a friend to show up for dinner. We don’t know exactly what time they’ll arrive, but until then, there’s lots of bustling about, making the home lovely, cooking a meal, tidying up. In a similar vein, Advent waiting is full of actions that communicate hope. It’s why we decorate and plan special meals. It’s why we put up lights and buy gifts. It’s why we sing.
One could argue there could be no real Christmas if there wasn’t Advent first — if we didn’t have a chance to build up the anticipation.
The 2024 Atlantic hurricane season, which officially ends on Nov. 30, showcased above-average activity, with a record-breaking ramp up following a peak-season lull.Above average for named storms, hurricanes, and major hurricanes, but a major anomaly none-the-less. "2024 season came roaring back despite slowdown during typical peak period." Or, as we noted, "The opening three months of the 2024 hurricane season turned out to be extraordinary, in a boring sort of way."
The Atlantic basin saw 18 named storms in 2024 (winds of 39 mph or greater). Eleven of those were hurricanes (winds of 74 mph or greater) and five intensified to major hurricanes (winds of 111 mph or greater). Five hurricanes made landfall in the continental U.S., with two storms making landfall as major hurricanes. The Atlantic seasonal activity fell within the predicted ranges for named storms and hurricanes issued by NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center in the 2024 August Hurricane Season Outlook. An average season produces 14 named storms, seven hurricanes and three major hurricanes.
The past months had been busy for the 24th Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, Ga. A year earlier, the unit was regular infantry with jeeps and light trucks. Now the division worked feverishly exchanging light equipment for tanks and armored personnel carriers. Even the unit’s name was updated — 24th Mechanized Infantry Division.A few things have changed since the war, for instance Sarge didn't say "I want eight volunteers, you, you, and ..." Mr Ground was not subject to that call in any event.
The next step for the new mechanized division was a major training exercise. Fort Drum, N.Y., was selected for a January 1980 event. Located close to Lake Placid, the site for the upcoming Winter Olympics, Fort Drum would provide a different climate. There might be snow, something many of the soldiers had not experienced.
Joining Fort Stewart soldiers would be units from the 194th Armored Brigade (Separate), Fort Knox, Ky., as well as units from Fort Bragg, N.C.; Fort Huachuca, Ariz.; and Scott Air Force Base, Ill. The equipment move was a logistical challenge. All of the division’s heavy equipment would need to be transported nearly 1,100 miles from Fort Stewart to Fort Drum.
Rail transportation is often best for deploying a large, mechanized infantry or armored unit. Soldiers routinely train on all aspects of loading and unloading such rail movements. Experienced noncommissioned officers and railroad personnel provide supervision and hands-on training.
Routinely, in the early 1980s, a detachment of soldiers traveled along to provide security and logistical support. For the rail movement between Fort Stewart and Fort Drum, eight soldiers would serve as rail guards or “supernumeraries,” the military term for personnel accompanying shipments by rail or sea. Six served as guards, one would be the cook and a sergeant was in charge of the detail. A caboose was provided by the railroad, which had room to sleep four at a time — more or less comfortably — a simple kitchen setup, a toilet, and a coal-burning stove.In the same way that battle plans rarely survive their first encounter with the enemy, train movements, particularly of extra trains at Christmas, rarely survive their first hours with the dispatcher.
The supernumeraries boarded the train at Fort Stewart and stayed with it to Fort Drum. The rail movement was tentatively scheduled to begin a week before Christmas. Transit time was estimated at three or four days, putting the eight soldiers in Fort Drum a few days before Christmas and nearly two weeks before the rest of the unit was due to arrive via Air Force transports.
In the end, the first sergeant had no trouble getting volunteers. It was a chance at an adventure, operating as a small team on an important mission. It would mean being away from family over the holidays, but that was part of military service. Being a staff officer in the division logistics office, I did not volunteer, but monitored the train’s progress from Fort Stewart.
Lindsey Bales describes "blue state privilege" as the disparity where people living in Democrat-leaning states have greater access to certain resources, such as abortion, that should "just be the standard quality of life," compared to those living in Republican-leaning states.There's more along similar lines, should you wish to share her wallow.
In a recent TikTok, Lindsey (@officialnancydrew) talked about her experience moving to a blue state after only living in red states — Missouri, Nebraska, and Texas. In the video, which has over 600K views, she begins by talking about moving to Minnesota and how different it is, thus introducing the topic of "blue state privilege." "Y'all have it soooo much better here," she wrote in the caption.
Lindsey explains that she recently lived in the South, where she was terrified of getting pregnant again after having a high-risk pregnancy. She also alludes that her husband couldn't receive a vasectomy: "My husband couldn't get a snippy-snippy done because it wasn't on his insurance. Because they don't play that way."
The Artist was a genius, brimming with bold new ideas that the common people could never understand! The Artist defied the norms of bourgeois society! The Artist was part of some official collective with their own compound in a trendy part of the city! The compound produced manifestos explaining why their vision of Art was better than everyone else’s!Epistemically closed hothouses are always like that. The role of some self-despising rich guy making it all possible generally gets hidden away, and the history of starting from zero tends to develop amnesia where Thermidor and Brumaire are concerned. And so it will be when the culture-studies types turn on each other.
This romantic vision was so powerful that you could become a well-regarded artistic movement just by doing the collective, the compound, and the manifesto especially well. Whether or not you produced art was of secondary importance - the sort of question that a bourgeois who didn’t understand your true genius would ask.
At the same time, Europe’s intelligentsia was falling in love with socialism. There was an inevitable wave of new socialist art compounds, each writing a manifesto explaining why their new artistic movement was the one that truly threw off the shackles of capitalism and represented the proletariat.
Preeminent among these was Bauhaus, founded by Walter Gropius in Germany in 1919. Their big idea was “starting from zero” - since all previous art had been contaminated by capitalism, we needed a hard reset where people started by (eg) contemplating what color and shape really were, then gradually building a new socialist art from the ground up. This new art must eschew ornamentation, associated as it was with kings and nobles who had money to spare on gold trim or sculpted curlicues. Real socialist art would be brutally functional, the sort of thing a poor worker might build. If this sounds harsh, remember that this was right after World War I, the old order stood infinitely discredited, and starting from zero must have seemed pretty appealing.
Imagine for a moment the 2024 equivalent of Bauhaus. Someone has just started the woke artists’ collective, claiming to perfectly encapsulate all the principles of wokeism and be the wokest people around. What happens next? Obviously every other group of woke people accuse them of being racist, and they have bloody internecine feuds for the next twenty years, right?Look no further back in time than the Duke English department, circa the beginning of this century.
Right. No sooner had Bauhaus developed their new socialist architecture designed to utterly remove all traces of bourgeois influence from design forever, then all the other socialist artists said: “I dunno, seems kind of bourgeois”.
This week, in an announcement that stunned New Zealand’s research community, the country’s center-right coalition government said it would divert half of the NZ$75 million Marsden Fund, the nation’s sole funding source for fundamental science, to “research with economic benefits.” Moreover, the fund would no longer support any social sciences and humanities research, and the expert panels considering these proposals would be disbanded.That closing sentence is an invitation to rent seekers. That, though, is not what has set the boffins off.
Universities New Zealand, which represents the nation’s eight universities, called the planned disinvestment in social science and humanities “astonishing.” It was among several academic groups and many scientists calling for the government to reverse the unexpected decision.
In announcing the change, Minister of Science, Innovation and Technology Judith Collins said the fund should focus on “core science” that supports economic growth and “a science sector that drives high-tech, high-productivity, high-value businesses and jobs.”
Paul Spoonley, a sociologist at Massey University and the convener of the fund’s social sciences panel, says it’s a mistake to exclude social science. “The idea that somehow the economy doesn’t involve people seems to me a very strange one,” he says. Other researchers fear the cuts will disproportionately slash research by New Zealand’s Indigenous Māori scientists.If queer theory and radical chic and "indigenous ways of knowing" are but half as prevalent in New Zealand academe as they are in the States, it is as likely that Serious Thinkers are enabling extremism as they are in understanding (and perhaps hypothesizing methods of taming) it.
Spoonley says the decision also goes against New Zealand’s current science policy of encouraging interdisciplinary research to ensure the nation can anticipate societal impacts of technological developments. His own research themes cover New Zealand’s demographic challenges, including an aging population and declining fertility, and the rise of extremism. “All we need to do is go back to [the mosque shootings in] March 2019 to realize how significant understanding extremism is,” Spoonley says.
The cuts and priority changes suggest officials don’t realize commercially viable research is often underpinned by discoveries in fundamental science, says Nicola Gaston, co-director of the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology at the University of Auckland.Demography, and its laymens' companion, genealogy, at least deal with evidence, and, in principle, getting the facts right, and validating hypotheses. Whether that is true elsewhere in the humanities is debatable.
Heather Zwicker, a cultural studies researcher at the University of Queensland, says the blunt action also fails to recognize the importance of the humanities and social sciences to New Zealand’s economy and social cohesion. Zwicker is president of the Australasian Council of Deans of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, which represents 44 universities in New Zealand and Australia. It has called for an immediate reversal of the decision.
University of Waikato demographer Tahu Kukutai has a new Marsden grant to compile a database of 19th century iwi and hapū (tribal groups) and kāinga (homes) to better understand New Zealand’s population changes during colonization. She is particularly concerned about the loss of funding for Māori-led research such as hers. This year, Māori made up 13% of all Marsden-funded investigators. Take away the humanities and social sciences panels, and this drops to 5.5%. “This decision defunds Māori research and researchers by stealth,” she says.
Early in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I asked, "Might there still be a compromise in the Tom Clancy style available?" A year into the trench warfare, the Tom Clancy outcome still looked better than what the peaceniks were contemplating. "In Command Authority, the Russians gained Crimea and everything east of Mariupol, with relatively little loss of life. The territorial outcome Mr Gerson advocates is similar, only with the puppet oblasts of Lugansk and Donetsk picked over and destitute."That post concluded, "Whether the western, more Catholic bits of Ukraine west of the Dnieper will eventually become a separate state, part of the European Union, and potentially part of a future Atlantic Alliance remains to be seen."
The F-150 of [1977] was smaller than its current version, and the Suburban and assorted Jeep knock-offs were utilitarian, intended to be a cheaper version of the Land Rover for going bushwhacking. These days, whenever commentary about the size of those land yachts and the hazard they pose to pedestrians comes up, it quickly degenerates into slanging matches about whether the skippers of those land yachts or their critics have the lowest testosterone. And thus serious policy analysis goes by the board.Nothing changes.
A driver took to Reddit to vent about the size of modern trucks — especially the position of their headlights — and how they can create dangerous situations.We've known about the annoying placement of those headlights for years, and we called attention to the possibility that people in bigger pickups and sport-utes take long chances, thus making them dangerous even to pedestrians and motorists the operator can see.
In the r/mildlyinfuriating subreddit, the user showed themselves [c.q.] parked directly across from a newer truck model, with the headline "All these new truck headlights are eye level in my wagon."
"These new truck headlights are one of the most mildly infuriating things ever," they said, "Not only are they brighter than ever, they are fkn eye level to anyone not in a big ass truck. Dangerous."
Sure enough, a parked truck's headlights were directly in the middle of the poster's windshield, creating the potential for blinding the driver if they were on the road.
The continued growth of trucks has been a major issue in recent years. Rather than getting smaller and more efficient, pickup trucks have been swelling and getting heavier, making them far less efficient than their predecessors. But on top of the environmental impact, these massive trucks are just plain unsafe.
"It sucks so bad we've hitched all our transportation to autos and they're so poorly regulated we're in an arms race with other drivers," one commenter lamented after someone noted they'd been forced to get a bigger car just to be safe on the road.Dear reader, maybe "they're so poorly regulated" is a call for the government to go away.
With the car companies working to make even the big sport-utes and pickups fuel efficient (heck, the current Cold Spring Shops crossover gets almost as good mileage as our three previous Golfs and Rabbits), perhaps now is the time to abolish all the fuel economy standards and mandates, because a family sedan or station wagon that exceeds an automobile-specific fuel economy standard still, using contemporary construction techniques, be less guzzling than that crew-cab Ram or three-row Navigator with two pull-down video screens for the kiddos.Seriously. A few weeks ago I saw an advertisement for a three-row sport-ute that looked like an O Scale station wagon in an S scale world, and in the past few days people on the Trump transition team have been pointing out the foolishness of the electric car tax preferences and subsidies. The current bundle of subsidies, tax preferences, and fuel economy and safety standards might have done little or nothing to reduce vehicular pollution, congestion, and pedestrian deaths, although they surely have generated a lot of rents for the car companies, as evidenced by their lobbying in favor of the policies staying in effect.
California Governor Gavin Newsom has adopted a plan set forth by the California Air Resources Board to phase out all gas-powered and EV automobiles and replace them with Little Tikes Cozy Coupes no later than 2035.And we'll all be better persons for it.
"California now has a groundbreaking, world-leading plan to achieve 100 percent zero-energy vehicle sales," Newsom said in a statement. "By the year 2035, every new car sold in California will be a Little Tikes Cozy Coup."
While the Little Tikes Cozy Coup was already available for purchase in several exciting models, the line of vehicles was expected to be significantly expanded in the next decade. In addition to the standard model, drivers can expect to see new models joining already existing favorites like the Princess, Cozy Truck, and T-Rex. All options come with a standard vehicle warranty and the assurance that you are saving the environment.
Opponents of the executive order argued that this would cause California's economy to collapse due to the infeasibility of commuting and the inability to transport goods via freight.Everywhere, though, there are tradeoffs. "At publishing time, plastic manufacturing more than quadrupled to keep up with the demand for Little Tikes Cozy Coups, leading to severe adverse environmental impact." And the sort of environmentalist wacko who thinks of trucks as toxic has yet to weigh in.
"We are all going to die," California State Senator Scott Wilk said succinctly.
But Gavin Newsom said naysayers just hate the environment. "Think of all the good this will do," he said, elaborating on the plan during a press conference. "You have to push it along with your feet, so you're going to get in amazing shape. And say goodbye to fatal car accidents. You can't push these things more than four miles per hour, tops."
In its 27-year existence, the WNBA has languished in relative obscurity, with most basketball fans viewing it as inferior to the men’s game. A WNBA playoff game almost never drew as many as 1 million viewers before Caitlin Clark arrived, while a typical NBA playoff game had more than 10 million viewers. Salary caps for entire WNBA teams was $1.4 million—not much more than the $1.1 million minimum salary for a single player in the NBA.In the weird world of identity politics, though, political purity trumps any value proposition.
So you would think the league and its players would be overjoyed to have one of their own on the cover of Time.
But as was the case for most of her first season as a pro, nothing is simple when it comes to Caitlin Clark and the WNBA. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that there’s nothing simple when it comes to Caitlin Clark and the subject of race.
You see, Clark, 22, is not just the first women’s basketball player to grace the cover of Time, she’s the first white women’s basketball player to make the cover. And despite everything her presence has meant to the league—the increased TV ratings, the standing room–only crowds at every arena the Indiana Fever played, the infusion of excitement around the league—there has always been an undercurrent of resentment among many of the league’s black players. (A little more than 63 percent of the league is black.)
A’ja Wilson of the Las Vegas Aces, and the league’s MVP, said it straight out to Time—Clark’s race was a “huge” reason for her popularity. “It doesn’t matter what we all do as black women, we’re still going to be swept underneath the rug,” Wilson said. “That’s why it boils my blood when people say it’s not about race because it is.” More than once during the season, Clark was blindsided by a black opponent for no obvious reason except, well, the obvious reason.Good grief. Mr Nocera notes that sometimes it might be best to let the kids play, and leave the culture studies to the obscurity of the Antioch College common room.
Soon after the Time magazine cover was on the newsstands, Sheila Johnson, the black owner of the Washington Mystics, echoed Wilson, telling CNN that the only reason Clark was getting the acclaim was because she was white.
“I feel really bad because I’ve seen so many players of color that are equally as talented and they never got the recognition that they should have.” Wilson added, “Why couldn’t they have put the whole WNBA on the cover and say ‘The WNBA is the league of the year?’ ”
A commenter on X quickly pointed out that 31 percent of the Mystics attendance for the entire season came from the two games they played against Clark’s Indiana Fever. Indeed, the Mystics last game against the Fever drew close to 21,000 fans—an all-time record for the WNBA. Several games had to be moved to larger arenas to accommodate all the people who wanted to attend.
I’ve been watching women’s basketball since the mid-1990s, and I can say with confidence that I’ve never seen any woman play basketball the way Caitlin Clark does. She is a truly transcendent talent, who can shoot practically from half-court—her shooting is what initially dazzled fans—and who throws some of the most gorgeous passes you’ll ever see. To my mind, she’s the female Larry Bird. Why does she fill up arenas? Because she’s fantastically fun to watch. Her presence in the WNBA is lifting all boats.Yes, it took a while for her Indiana team-mates to figure out some of those passes, occasionally of the Brett Favre improvisational type. In the Time interview, she offered comments that might have been a potted version of what comes out of the Antioch common room, and got lit up accordingly. That was an unforced error, but perhaps, that's a reiteration, let the kids play.
To put it bluntly, black players—or black owners—who refuse to acknowledge that reality are practicing their own form of racism.
Caitlin Clark is a 22-year-old woman from West Des Moines, Iowa, who is one year out of college and finds herself, unwittingly and unwillingly, the center of ongoing controversies over race. She knows how to win on the court. But in the culture war—caught between black resentment and white scorn—she doesn’t stand a chance.Twenty years on, Diana Taurasi is still playing. You might have to have a Ph.D. in semiotics to determine whether she, by virtue of her birth in Argentina to Italian emigrant parents, qualifies as a woman of color. Let her play too.
I started watching the WNBA when my then-favorite player, Diana Taurasi, joined in 2004. So I know what I see when I watch Caitlin Clark: not an avatar of the culture wars but simply a preternaturally gifted basketball player who happens to be white. As for her “privilege,” well, what would you expect from a young college graduate? Let’s let her grow up a little. She didn’t ask to be part of any culture war; all she wants to do is play basketball. Give her a little grace.
On the eve of the 2020 election, then-President Donald Trump showed up here in Butler for a rally that was one for the ages. People wondered why.The first time Donald Trump secured the presidency, the more reflective coastal cosmopolitans gave some thought to life in these United States away from the airports and the conference rooms. Apparently, after 2020's elections, more than a few of them thought they could return to business as usual.
Seventeen months ago, he showed up in East Palestine after the devastating train derailment spewed deadly toxic chemicals throughout the village and the region. It was a visit President Joe Biden failed to make.
These are my favorite books from the year, with my entire reading list linked at the end. I love to read and this is meant to be fun, so please treat it in that spirit.He offers a familiar bibliophile's complaint.
I know some of you will be disappointed that I don’t read more planning, engineering or urbanism books. I’m sorry, but they rarely interest me. I do read many of these books during the year, but unless I remember them (I generally read them in hardcover and don’t mark them down anywhere), they don’t make my list. So, this post is the actual list of books that I read in the past year.
I read only what interests me.
The older I get, the more I’ve found myself unwilling to spend time on books that I don’t find an immediate urgency around. They might be amazing books, but if it’s not what I’m burrowing into at the moment, I’m very unlikely to dive in.There's some of that at work here at Cold Spring Shops, where there are lots of books that qualify for a review, but getting excited enough to write one is another matter.
It was all part of a strategy to raise money while keeping your enemies close, but I can’t imagine being the family that paid big money for the hereditary appointment allowing them to remove the king’s chamberpot each day. Yet, someone did, as others did for hundreds of menial posts, all to have privileged access to the king.There's much more, concluding (correctly) with modern monetary theory being an "apologia for our current bad economics."
Merci à tous ceux qui ont oeuvré pour le sauvetage, la préservation et la restauration de Notre-Dame de Paris. ❤️#NotreDameDeParis pic.twitter.com/Y0NYG9tt47
— France tv (@FranceTV) December 7, 2024
Une magnifique interprétation de "Ave Maria" de Hiba Tawaji ❤️#NotreDameDeParis @PhilharRF @radiofrance pic.twitter.com/1Zf2WMIWdf
— France tv (@FranceTV) December 7, 2024
BREAKING 🚨 This young lady stunned the world and sang ‘Amazing Grace’ in France at the Notre Dame Cathedral
— MAGA Voice (@MAGAVoice) December 7, 2024
Jesus Christ truly is King. I am brought to tears 🙏 pic.twitter.com/BikFP3GioQ
President Joe Biden is commuting the sentences of roughly 1,500 people who were released from prison and placed on home confinement during the coronavirus pandemic and is pardoning 39 Americans convicted of nonviolent crimes. It's the largest single-day act of clemency in modern history.In principle, the action sounds reasonable, if people who are under house arrest and have behaved themselves, perhaps they have earned clemency. That appears to be Our President's thinking.
The commutations announced Thursday are for people who have served out home confinement sentences for at least one year after they were released. Prisons were uniquely bad for spreading the virus and some inmates were released in part to stop the spread.
“America was built on the promise of possibility and second chances,” Biden said in a statement. “As president, I have the great privilege of extending mercy to people who have demonstrated remorse and rehabilitation, restoring opportunity for Americans to participate in daily life and contribute to their communities, and taking steps to remove sentencing disparities for non-violent offenders, especially those convicted of drug offenses.”He's not done, though, and what he has done thus far is not sitting well with everyone.
The clemency follows a broad pardon for his son Hunter, who was prosecuted for gun and tax crimes. Biden is under pressure from advocacy groups to pardon broad swaths of people, including those on federal death row, before the Trump administration takes over in January.
Just because someone wasn't convicted of a violent crime doesn't mean they haven't committed violent crimes for which they were never caught. With the way plea deals work today, a good lawyer can plead down almost any crime to a misdemeanor.Yes, there are two Illinois white-collar criminals that some flatlander pundits would prefer to be kept out of circulation. "President Joe Biden on Thursday commuted the sentences of two of the Chicago area’s most notorious fraudsters: former Dixon Comptroller Rita Crundwell, who embezzled nearly $54 million from the tiny town to fund a lavish lifestyle, and Eric Bloom, the onetime leader of a Northbrook management firm who defrauded investors of more than $665 million." The comptroller misappropriated state property to support her equestrian hobby, and the investment manager crashed his company.
It's an abuse of the president's clemency power. Historically, clemency, for the most part, has been granted selectively and carefully. But Biden's mania for being the first president to name someone of this race or gender to an important job or be the first president to visit this or that country or be the first president to do the most, the largest, the most spectacular, the most awe-inspiring feat in history knows no bounds.
Put simply, some of those Obama-Trump-Biden voters from 2020 might have switched back to Trump, and some of them, having seen both Trump 1.0 and Biden 1.0 saw enough that was unsatisfactory in either presidency to have stayed home this time. A Politico analysis of turnout and voting in six swing state cities (Atlanta, Charlotte, Las Vegas, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Phoenix) suggests as much.We were aware of those motivations last July, thanks in part to some thinking by Daniel McCarthy. "He refers, there, to the base voters, although in that litany of policy failures, he's calling attention to the more glaring reasons for the reluctant Biden voter — not necessarily a Republican-leaning voter — to this time stay home, vote for the Free Soiler or Cornel West or who have you, or even tick the Trump box." And I cautioned you, dear reader, not to draw any conclusions until all the votes were tallied and the counts certified. "Let's all enjoy Thanksgiving and the beginning of Advent and wait for those certified totals, generally coming in mid-December, before claiming anything more nefarious than more than a few 2020 voters staying home on Election Day this year."
How was it that he couldn’t be pushed any further? When you get somebody from that background—and a lot of domestic terrorists in our history have been from privileged backgrounds, like the Weather Underground people—if you’re going to have the Elizabeth Warren attitude that you’re entitled to do whatever you need to do by any means necessary because you’ve been pushed too far in your own lived experience, that’s a recipe for disaster. Unfortunately, it’s a recipe that is prevalent on a lot of campuses.Barrington Moore might be long dead, and yet there are lots of fourth-rate successors around, riling up students.
Jeffrey Kallberg, deputy dean of the UPenn School of Arts and Sciences, also issued a statement Wednesday calling the professor’s viral posts “antithetical” to the university’s values.Whether her research into "radical leftist politics" includes "struggle session" and "constructive self-criticism" is yet to be determined.
“Upon reflection, Assistant Professor Alekseyeva has concurred that the comments were insensitive and inappropriate and has retracted them,” Kallberg stated. “We welcome this correction and regret any dismay or concern this may have caused.”
An English and media studies professor, Alekseyeva’s research includes “radical leftist politics.” In April, she won an award from the university for “distinguished teaching.”
“Julia is one of Penn’s most innovative, rigorous, and effective teachers. Her teaching combines academic rigor with the ability to inspire and motivate students,” the award announcement stated.
The medical practice of treating children who are distressed about their gender started out with good intentions. But this case, at its core, represents the profound failures that have occurred in our institutions. Failures that began when activism took over science. Failures that can only be corrected by the courageous, and now the courts. It should never have reached this point, but here we are.And if my child claims to be Thomas the Tank Engine, does medical science recommend we book him into the Brighton works for new flues? Or if she claims to be Squirtle, do we give her a sphere to curl up in and sink it in the tub with her in it? At least in those hypotheticals, common sense is ahead of The Science. Those kids who think (for this week?) they're in the wrong body aren't as fortunate.
These failures began with the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society. These medical organizations quite suddenly embraced the idea that any child who expressed gender distress must immediately be affirmed and swiftly medicalized.That was once the practice with tonsillectomies, but the complications therefrom were not as severe.
This then spiraled as risk-management departments and ethics boards at major hospitals grew fearful of raising questions about why there was an explosion of children and teens who wanted this treatment. Not only were these treatments moneymakers for hospitals—it quickly became career-threatening to raise any concerns about this new branch of medicine and the dangers of subjecting young people to lifetime treatments with unknown consequences.
At our gender clinic, patients often had glaring comorbidities like depression, anxiety, ADHD, and eating disorders, or were on the autism spectrum. Many were young people who, if left alone, would most likely grow up to be gay men and lesbians, like myself. Yet we sold our patients the idea that if they are at all different, or gender nonconforming, they must be trans.Oops. And where is today's Lionel Trilling to call attention to the irritable mental gestures of the transgressive?
I saw teenage girls, with no history of dysphoria, being approved after just one meeting with a therapist. My colleagues could see social contagion as a potential factor in other conditions like Tourette syndrome, tic disorders, and “multiple personalities.” But with gender dysphoria, even suggesting there was a social aspect at work risked accusations of “transphobia.”
I saw teenagers lose their sexual function before they could understand what this would mean for them. A 17-year-old female ended up in the emergency room thanks to a hormone prescription from the clinic. The testosterone she was taking had thinned her vaginal tissues, and her vaginal canal had ripped open after intercourse, requiring surgery.
I saw regret in my patients a few months after it was too late. An 18-year-old girl who had a double mastectomy, only to decide to accept her female identity, begged us, “I want my breasts back.”
The visceral response from people across this country who feel cheated, ripped off, and threatened by the vile practices of their insurance companies should be a warning to everyone in the health care system. Violence is never the answer, but people can be pushed only so far. This is a warning that if you push people hard enough, they lose faith in the ability of their government to make change, lose faith in the ability of the people who are providing the health care to make change, and start to take matters into their own hands in ways that will ultimately be a threat to everyone.She subsequently recognized that what might be a discussion point in a political science workshop is beyond the pale for an elected official. “Violence is never the answer. Period. I should have been much clearer that there is never a justification for murder.”
Speed of Execution.In the academy, you show your erudition by coming up with ever-less-likely worst-case scenarios. "The consensus comes after endless peacocking and straining at gnats in meetings, and a process in which word-smithing and tweaking of designs ensures that everybody holding a stake gets some of the garlic cloves. And it's all with the best of intentions, anticipating all possible contingencies."
US: "Let's make it happen." Jump on a call. Refer through networks. Action-first mentality.
UK: "Let's be realistic." List all problems first. Worst-case scenarios. Every reason NOT to try. They ship while we shuffle.
WNBA player Caitlin Clark explained in an interview with TIME that she has been the beneficiary of white privilege, which strangely feels a lot like getting the crap kicked out of her by giant black lesbians.We'll be able to evaluate that statement next summer, when the 2025 season tips off.
Though she admitted that "white privilege" was a bit of a nebulous term, Clark explained that she seemed to most often experience it as getting punched in the face or elbowed in the stomach.
"The fact is, I clearly have experienced white privilege. No one else gets beat up routinely on national television by enormous black lesbians," explained Clark. "That's obviously a privilege that I have, being white. I recognize that this league was built by these gargantuan lesbians, and we must honor all the work they do punching me because of my skin color."
Though sociologists stated that white privilege could manifest in many forms, they agreed that sometimes it does feel like getting shoved to the floor on a basketball court. "It feels different to different people," explain sociology professor Dr. Ray Adams. "For some, it may be that you do not have to worry about security at a store eyeing you suspiciously. For some, it's being wrestled to the ground and having your eyes poked by a 200-pound black lesbian. It's highly variable."
At publishing time, the WNBA had reported excellent progress in its ten-step plan to becoming irrelevant again.
The world's oldest valley girl is vice-president, and that puts the party of Silent Generation governance in a bad place. "At 28 percent approval, say goodbye to Kamala Harris being Plan B to an aging Biden." That makes it all the more important to keep the de jure president, who is in his late seventies, alive.Well, there was an unintended double entendre with that "plan B," wasn't there?
History is either "one damned thing after another"--a chaotic collection of random events--or there are connections between events that are not readily visible. The study of history includes both rooting around for more factual evidence to aid our understanding, and interpreting what is known--both the factual evidence and what people living at that time described and thought was happening.He's going a little overboard with all the bolds and italics. But his thesis draws an instructive contrast with an observation in Cold Spring Shops from nine years ago. "Seventy years of relative peace, with first fascism, then general poverty, then Communism, vanquished, and the Zeitgeist is that the Gray Champion is obsolete." I wrote that while the final years of the Obama presidency still looked like a continuation of Business as Usual, and Donald Trump was more a figure of fun than the harbinger of a social movement, although I raised a warning. "You might profitably look at the list of the most popular boy names these days and note the absence of any of the traditional one-syllable names of The America That Worked(TM). But as surely as fire will burn us, some of these infants might have to reacquire the heroic virtues, despite the best efforts of the deconstructionists to deconstruct."
Two recent events invite interpretation: the sudden collapse of Syria's regime and the assassination of an American CEO in America's financial capital. These can be viewed as unique one-off events of little future import or they can be viewed as watershed events, harbingers of a future far different than the present.
A systemic case can be made that the grey swans circling above us are harbingers of transformative change. What is a grey swan? A grey swan is an event that is known and possible to happen, but which is assumed to be unlikely to occur. The term derives from Nassim Taleb's black swan theory, which describes an event that is unlikely but unknown.
Buc-ee’s is our Parthenon, The Automobile is our Athena, and that chubby and cheerful wood-chewing rodent is her symbolic owl stand-in.Read on, though, and maybe there's a "just kidding" at the end.
I am currently writing this post from the passenger seat of a road trip across this gloriously fucked up nation. In addition to the amber waves of grain and purple mountains majesty, the highways and byways of America are pockmarked by the occasional arrival of the bucktoothed bastard’s concrete haven. The large yellow sign rises above the landscape to request your presence. You must tithe to your god, little one. Bless me father, for I have sinned. It has been two years since my last fill up on pump 82.
This country is a seriously bizarre place to live, and Buc-ee’s is a microcosm of our American existence at present. This combination gas station-grocery store-way of life is a mirror we have erected to show us ourselves. It’s the highway equivalent of junk food. It almost certainly shouldn’t exist, and we are worse as a culture for having had it, but goddamn does it flip the right switches in our collective brain. It is truly junk that shouldn’t be great, but the rot at the core of America is what makes us who we are. Buc-ee’s, the Bass Pro Shops pyramid, and ordering shit we’ll throw away in a month from Temu, these are the new Gods of America, and they deserve their shrines.My peregrinations are more likely to take me into Casey's or Kwik Trip's or Speedway's or sometimes Wawa's turf, generally for the mundane purposes of providing a pit stop for the car and for the driver, it being bad form to use the loo without making a purchase afterward. Props to those stores that are again stocking Nacho Cheese Combos.
Of course, being the trash bag normie all-American dork that I am, I fucking love the place. Buc-ee’s is the store we deserve. I am a beaver believer. There are cathedrals everywhere for those with the eyes to see.
Buc-ee’s are popping up all over America. It’s to the point that the beaver-emblazoned beacon is becoming a roadside attraction in its own right. Why? Convenience and cleanliness - the giant gas stations are known for having massive, ultra-clean restrooms. There’s also every kind of snack, sandwich and soft drink you could ever want all under one roof. It’s no surprise then that a Trump-hating writer for Jalopnik (yep, we never heard if it either) would call these shrines to roadside comfort and capitalism, a ‘sickness'.It's possible that a lot of people rage-reposted the link to the article without reading to the end. "It’s easy to imagine the next Jalopnik roadtrip article will focus on how horrible McDonald’s is and then have a last paragraph reveal of ‘I really love it, fooled you! The fries are delicious!’ So boring."
But the claims ignore how domestic disaster relief and foreign aid are funded. Congress separately determines funding for each through appropriations or supplemental bills. The claims also ignore the $3.1 billion the Federal Emergency Management Agency has spent so far responding to Hurricane Helene, which left a trail of destruction across six states in late September, and Hurricane Milton, which struck Florida in October.The fun begins when you look at the various ways Congress spends that money.
"Comparisons between foreign aid and domestic disaster funding often reflect a misunderstanding that aid to other countries reduces resources available for domestic disaster survivors," said Francis Torres, associate director of housing at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. "In reality, these funds come from different accounts, with Congressional authorizations for foreign assistance being separate from appropriations for disaster relief and recovery programs."
Complaints about spending taxpayer money on foreign aid instead of U.S. citizens are common.
The money Biden pledged for aid in 31 African countries had already been appropriated by Congress to federal agencies. Most of it comes from the United States Agency for International Development, which is providing about $823 million of the $1 billion. Of the $823 million, more than $202 million comes from the U.S. Agriculture Department’s Commodity Credit Corp., and nearly $186 million comes from the State Department, a USAID press release said.Congress can write supplemental appropriations, and they can also write supplemental rescissions should the correlation of forces favor them. Doing so might make governing more transparent. But defenders of business as usual tend to treat appropriations as set for all time, and they engage in all sorts of verbal gymnastics to defend them. Case in point: Hal Sparks, on Saturday (and I really ought to bring CDs along for any midday Saturday trip, as that's the time for investment and home improvement programming even less interesting) and he was making the case that rolling back government was going to be hard because of common law and Congressional appropriations. It's not that hard, go through all the statutes and flag all the "The Secretary shall issue" passages and have the new departmental secretaries issue new, simpler regulations. But when a president is grousing about "subsidized dumping," will he be more receptive to zeroing out the Commodity Credit Corporation, and how will his rural voters react?
The remaining money comes from a supplemental bill Congress passed in April, the press release said. The bill provided funding to U.S. agencies "for assistance to Ukraine, Israel, and U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific region," which includes Africa’s east coast.
Stupid people like you and I think that our taxes go to Washington, and policymakers spend it in ways that, at least theoretically, are supposed to best benefit the American people. There are priorities that get evaluated, and the limited resources available are distributed based on sound (or not-so-sound) judgments of how best to meet those priorities.It was on Militant Normals to call attention to those line items for the Commodity Credit Corporation and public radio and the national endowments and the essential air subsidy, and to pressure their Members of Congress to reduce or eliminate those things. One reason the debt-ceiling-government-shutdown-continuing-resolution drama goes on and on is the manufactured crisis mentality is a good way to sneak in all those things while people pay more attention to whether the "omnibus" or "supplemental" or what have you passes than to what's in it. Thus we have to pass it to find what's in it.
How naive! What really happens is that the pie gets divided up into various pots of money determined by political considerations, and each pot of money is treated as independent of all the others. And, as a practical matter, the bureaucrats in charge of any one pot are determined to get as much of the available cash (plus whatever they can from deficit spending) away from the other pots of money.
If you are part of the blob, that seems perfectly normal, and Politifact is little more than the propaganda arm of the blob. Hence the absurdity of saying that the failure to take care of North Carolinians is a separate issue from raining cash from helicopters in Africa or now Syria.
They are totally different pots of money!!!! Are you stupid? Don't you see?!
