There are a lot of them this week, and many of them are not cheerful. I have a basketball championship to pay attention to, as well as the crumbling of communism, in Cuba and California alike, to savor.
If this list ever grows to around ninety entries in a week, I will have to look for a cathedral door.
1. Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without. "Rookie year with Milwaukee, the team would give [Giannis Antetokounmpo] just dozens and dozens of shoes and he just refused to wear them. He wanted to wear the same pair over and over. As somebody that had to share a shoe with his brother, he could not stomach the idea of just being so frivolous to have that many shoes."
2. The tragic vision. "In practice, when you remove a source of centralized, unaccountable power, what fills that vacuum usually isn’t some benevolent form of bottom-up democracy. It's just centralized, unaccountable power from a different source.
3. Intersectionality at the turnstile? "Transport authorities in Austria and Germany have said they are phasing out the term ‘Schwarzfahren’ - which literally translates to ‘riding black’ - to describe fare dodging, over racism concerns."
4. Separated and enumerated powers provide the accountability. "Rather than automatically deferring to the presumed wisdom of elected officials, [Justice Samuel Alito] said, courts have a duty to say when those restrictions exceed constitutional bounds."
5. Will they change their behavior? "The silver lining is that there are sensible liberals that still exist and know how they come off to most voters: condescending, self-righteous, and insufferable." And wrong, "The problem is that Democrat policies are bad. They’re destructive. They hit people in the pocketbook and they offend the just sensibilities of America’s sensible middle." Turf. Them. Out.
6. Sorry, impossible. "Congestion-free roadways and ample parking are to the United States what bread and circuses were to Rome." Also impossible: "If use of new infrastructure merely replaces travel on some other route or mode, there isn’t much benefit."
7. Check out the mentally ill progressives.
8. Give yourself no powers you wouldn't want your enemy to have. "Liberal advocates of social media regulation (of whom Warren is a prominent example) should ask themselves whether they would be willing to entrust such regulatory authority to the likes Donald Trump or Josh Hawley."
9. Quarantine Canada. Permanently. "University is worried event titled ‘Beer and Skits’ may offend non-beer drinkers."
10. "Insanity Wrap would be happy to set aside all concerns about election shenanigans in various Democrat strongholds if they’d just stop acting like there’s something to hide." Indeed. Keep it up, Donks. "Democrats are terrified about anything that introduces transparency or security in elections. I’m not implying that fraud is ultimately their goal, I’m stating it outright. Their even bigger long-term goal is one-party rule in the United States, which they know they can’t achieve as long as elections can’t be gamed."
11. Post-modern word salads, everywhere. "[H]igher education has become suffused with innovation-speak and business bullshit, using words to chase cash rather than to strive for accuracy and truth. In a real sense, such talk is a betrayal of the mission of universities." The rot goes beyond the intrusions of neoliberalism. "[Diversity, inclusion, equity] practitioners peddle empty verbiage to fix a problem that is largely imaginary."
12. Cuban, or is it Californian, communism in trouble. Bless their hearts. "A lot of us freedom lovers aren’t big fans of the government, but we know that isn’t how the Times intended it." Where are we? "My sense is that this is a combination of social unrest based on a lack of freedoms, and covid, and economic conditions. The lack of access to electricity. The blackouts. … People are screaming for freedom."
14. By their fruits shall ye know them. "But, more recently, a smug 'cognitive elite' has used marriage, schooling, residence in exclusive neighborhoods and various enrichment opportunities for its children to cement its privileged status. By disparaging those who lack its achievements and who are not similarly skilled in management, leadership and symbolic manipulation, the meritocracy has produced a backlash." Some days, the Hubble Telescope is useful to find those achievements and skills.
15. A faith tradition requires miracles, which aren't always forthcoming. "A specter of invisible and unfalsifiable 'systems' and 'structures' and 'internal biases' arrived to hover over the world. Some of this critique was specific and helpful: the legacy of redlining, the depth of the wealth gap. But much was tendentious post-modern theorizing."
16. Miller Lite addles the brain. "Remember these guys are from the same party arguing that the filibuster is bad and that people should bow to the will of the majority. Just not when they’re in the minority, apparently." Logic is probably ableist. "With their embrace of Texas Democrats’ escapade, left-wing politicos have abandoned even the pretense of using principles rather than short-term political considerations to evaluate the merit of minority rights in government."
17. This woman is a gift to Republicans. "The more she talks, the more Americans start to panic that she’s our backup for the doddering 80-year-old codger who’s supposed to be running this country. Whenever we start asking ourselves if anybody can be worse than Biden, she pops right back up again."
18. The case for pragmatic populism. "If national Republicans have something more to say on this or any other issue than 'Joe Biden is senile and the election was rigged!' then now would be an excellent time to speak up." That noted, you don't have to go to a Seven-Eleven to find the maharajah of hyperbole.
19. Today in Foolish Corporate Speak. "The work experience described at this location is not in line with our brand values. Our franchisee is looking into this situation to ensure this doesn’t happen in the future." That after the entire staff of a Burger King posted, well, "Take This Job and Shove It." OK, it read "We all quit. Sorry for the inconvenience." Nebraska Nice, right?
20. They want to hobble the strong. "But imagine a class in which you have three or four levels. Maybe that will work out for that 40 percent of the class. But the 30 percent who are the top kids will be bored to death. You're going to sacrifice 30 percent of the kids, for what?" For their parents to sort themselves into a neighborhood with better schools or look into a homeschooling pod, that's what.
22. The sponsored research hustle looks after its own. "American tax dollars funded gain of function research at the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] and that research didn’t go through proper oversight (the P3 framework)."
24. I'm sane, all the rest of you are nuts. "Alas, in today’s upside [down] world, where perversion is celebrated and common decency is denigrated, shame is hard to find."
25. Going About It Wrong. "Cubans, actually suffering the oppression that a few million “progressive” snowflakes fantasized they were suffering during the Trump term, are thinking, again, about risking it all to come to America: And our administration will have none of that."
26. Take this charge seriously. "In the final analysis, liberal education is designed to liberate us from ignorance." Unfortunately, ignorance is a social construction, what happens when notions like truth or ethical get deconstructed as power systems. "Truth is empirical, but truthfulness is ethical."
27. The Fourth Turning is at hand. "More likely this could be the end of the old global world, the vanished landscape of old norms that Joe Biden was supposed to restore. Neither social media nor Hollywood could save it. It died under the rise of China, the corruption of Washington, the stasis of Europe, and the madness of Woke culture. COVID, when it came, was simply the coup de grace for the whole teetering edifice. We are emerging from the pandemic, not by the door through which we entered, but into an unfamiliar landscape." Fortunately, that's not as scary as passing through the Eye of Japetus. Bet on emergence.
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