Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
When I was a teenager, the cool kids smoked cigarettes. Today they cut off their weiners. A mom writing for Substack’s “Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans” is claiming that her kid went full trans-tard after going to a new, woke, trans-happy school. She starts her article with this: “My teenage daughter has decided that … Read more
During her appearance on the Pod Save America podcast last week, White House press secretary Jen Psaki suggested that before August 31 of this year, the Biden administration intends to make “a decision . . . about canceling student debt.” Psaki’s asseveration was thrown in casually — as an aside, almost. But there is nothing … Read more
Yesterday, Governor Ron DeSantis issued a proclamation instructing a special session of the Florida legislature to review whether Walt Disney World’s 50-year-old “independent special district” status should be rescinded now that the Walt Disney Company has had the temerity to annoy the Republican Party. Disney’s status, DeSantis wrote, should now be subject to a “review” … Read more
When your party controls the presidency and Congress but produces disappointing results, that ought to tell you something about your political assumptions. Joe Biden, like many (probably most) Democrats, often speaks about the economy in moralistic terms. Like most politicians, he is more likely to speak about it in moralistic terms when he and his … Read more
Baltimore City Public Schools CEO Sonja Santelises has made more than $1 million to watch her city’s schools fail. Last year, 41% of all Baltimore public high school students earned a GPA below 1.0. That’s one of many systemic school failures in Charm City. Despite this, Santelises received a salary hike to $375,688. She is … Read more
This past week the legislative committee of the Episcopal Church met via Zoom as part of their 80th General Convention. There were 196 resolutions in total; eight were oriented, in one way or another, toward criticism of Israeli policy with regard to the Palestinians. Three were about “apartheid,” variously titled “confronting apartheid,” “recognizing apartheid,” or … Read more
How bad is the environment for Democrats this fall? So bad, that Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics and the most prominent Biden apologist on Wall Street, is throwing in the towel on the White House’s inflation problem. Today’s Washington Post quotes the “go-to” economist for Democrats as saying: “I think the economic … Read more
“Who wants to live in a city like this?” a Sunset Park man asked a TV reporter Tuesday, then answered his own question: “Nobody wants to live like this no more.” Indeed. Nobody wants to live in the city New York is becoming. Another nail in the coffin — that’s what the Brooklyn subway attack … Read more
“What’s the matter?” I ask a student sitting on a cold cement bench in the courtyard of our school on a rainy March afternoon. He looks very distraught. “My uncle was just found overdosed on the sidewalk in front of our house,” he says. “Fentanyl?” I ask. When he responds in the affirmative, I tell … Read more
From Imran Khan to Donald Trump to Hillary Rodham Clinton, beware those who cloak themselves in patriotism to avoid political embarrassment. Imran Khan, the numbskull playboy cricketer who somehow found his way into the highest office in an unstable country with nuclear weapons, tried to out-Trump Donald Trump: Faced with a no-confidence vote he was … Read more
When I think about America’s wide-open southern border with Mexico and the utter lawlessness such chaos represents–a record two million illegal immigrants streaming in last year and thousands more every day–I consider the politics. Can a nation survive without borders? How long can political leaders rationalize their own refusal to enforce the law and protect … Read more
“Poor Single Mothers Need Money,” reads the headline at Bloomberg News, “Not Husbands.” Talk about dismantling the patriarchy! It seems the assault on fathers is coming from all corners these days. What does the research tell us? Children raised without a father present are far more likely to be raised in poverty, to be involved … Read more
“Groomer” has become the fashionable charge to level against anyone who opposes Florida’s parental-rights bill. It’s counterproductive. And not because it isn’t super creepy to see so many liberals invested in ensuring prepubescent kids, trapped in state-run schools, are force-fed post-modern, pseudoscientific ideas about sexuality and transgenderism in direct contradiction of the wishes of their … Read more
The major political players enthusiastically promoting Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson for the Supreme Court — from President Joe Biden himself to veteran Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee to several liberal interest groups that have been around for decades — would like people to forget their history. As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden … Read more
The city of Chicago issued more than 2.8 million speeding tickets to drivers last year, according to a new analysis. That’s more fines than there are residents in the Windy City. The analysis was conducted by the Illinois Policy Institute. Last year, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot lowered the threshold on when motorists would be assessed … Read more
In his zeal to evangelize for electric vehicles, President Joe Biden promised last week that “a typical driver will save about $80 a month from not having to pay gas at the pump.” He even called this “the most important thing my plan will do right away.” If that’s the “most important” thing he’s doing, … Read more
John Karr isn’t a priest. He’s a teacher. Most teachers are dedicated, hard-working people who wouldn’t dream of hurting a child. The same is true of priests. If the suspect in the 1996 murder of JonBenet Ramsey were a priest, there would be a fresh outcry about a decades-long cover-up in the Catholic Church. Commentators … Read more
“Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours…. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville … Read more
Twenty-first-century America may be dominated by oligarchic elites, but arguably the biggest threat to our economic and political system might be located further down the food chain. This most dangerous class comes from the growing number of underemployed, overeducated people. They’re what has been described in Britain as the lumpenintelligensia: alienated, angry, and potentially agents … Read more
President Joe Biden was babbling dangerously during his recent trip to Poland to shore up the NATO alliance against Russia’s murderous invasion of Ukraine. And as he babbled and babbled, his White House staff poured sawdust on the puddles and tried cleaning it up again and again. The man just would not stop. Biden’s wide-open … Read more
Can the state of California control how farmers in other states raise their pigs? Today the Supreme Court said it will weigh in on the matter. California voters in 2018 approved Proposition 12, a ballot initiative that banned the sale of pork and chicken if the livestock was not raised in pens large enough for … Read more
Coming from a Nobel Peace Prize winner, Abiy Ahmed’s call for restraint and diplomacy to end the war in Ukraine might have attracted more attention if the Ethiopian prime minister hadn’t stained his laurels with the blood of his own people. Reports of hideous war crimes committed by his forces and those of his Eritrean … Read more
It was a week to Christmas, but Lincoln Eccles wasn’t feeling the Yuletide spirit. The boiler in the 14-unit building he owns in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood had gone belly up a few months before, and supply chain issues were making it impossible to find a good replacement. It was getting cold in New York, … Read more
As the agency groans under the burden of administering the tax code, it also suffers from the growing weight of its processing and administrative problems. here is little doubt that the Internal Revenue Service is groaning under the burden of administering the tax code, which now exceeds more than 4 million words (up from 1.4 … Read more
It is as true today as it’s ever been that freedom is not only a moral good but also a practical one. The lesson of the hour: Unfree societies are weak. The allure of strongman nationalist government — Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, the America that Donald Trump and his acolytes … Read more