Late August musings

Some clips from my collection of fifty curated files for August 2023, as of August 22.

Rich men north of Richmond

The raw honesty of a former factory worker in what could be the protest song of our generation has become an internet sensation overnight. The song "Rich Men North of Richmond" has skyrocketed to No. 1 on iTunes this weekend.

Oliver Anthony, a former factory worker who decided to pursue a life in music last year and is living in the forgotten part of the US, Appalachia, an area plagued with an opioid crisis and abandoned factories, tells the story of the working-class folk who struggle daily while being ignored and mocked by political elites. Here is the first couple of lines from the song:

I've been selling my soul, working all day, overtime hours for bullshit pay, So, I can sit out here and waste my life away, drag back home, and drown my troubles away.

It's a damn shame what the world's gotten to for people like me — for people like you. Wish I could just wake up and it not be true. But it is. Oh, it is.

Climate idiocy in 14 'progressive' cities

Fourteen major American cities are part of a globalist climate organization known as the “C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group,” which has an “ambitious target” by the year 2030 of “0 kg [of] meat consumption,” “0 kg [of] dairy consumption,” “3 new clothing items per person per year,” “0 private vehicles” owned, and “1 short-haul return flight (less than 1500 km) every 3 years per person.”

Christian rights training for lawyers: DIVERSITY TRAINING IS FOR EVERYONE!

Federal Judge Orders Southwest Airlines Attorneys To Take Conservative Christian Group's Religious Training. "Three senior attorneys for Southwest Airlines have been ordered to take an eight-hour religious liberty training offered by the conservative Christian group Alliance Defending Freedom after a judge said they failed to follow his orders following a flight attendant's free speech case. U.S. District Judge Brantley Starr of Texas said the company's attorneys did not follow his orders to notify employees of their rights against religious discrimination after the court ruled in favor of Charlene Carter, a flight attendant who said she was fired for voicing her anti-abortion views and ultimately won a $5.1 million verdict. . . . Starr's new order included an exact statement he ordered Southwest to send "verbatim" to its flight attendants and he told the company it needed to fly an Alliance Defending Freedom representative to Dallas to conduct a training for the three lawyers, who do 'not appear to comprehend' religious liberties law."

Colleges spend like there's no tomorrow -- "devouring money"

Many university officials struggled to understand their own budgets and simply increased spending every year. Trustees demanded little accountability and often rubber-stamped what came before them. And schools inconsistently disclose what they spend, making it nearly impossible for the public to review how their tuition and tax dollars are being used.

“These places are just devouring money,” said Holden Thorp, who was chancellor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 2008 to 2013 and is now editor in chief of Science. Offering everything to everyone all at once is unsustainable, he said. “Universities need to focus on what their true priorities are and what they were created to do,” he said.

No science then, no science now: Covid lies, damned lies...

Via Healthy Skeptic, this Report for the Scottish COVID-19 Inquiry, providing a retrospective on covid in Scotland, is one of the most useful documents on the disease that I have read. Among other things, it provides a description of viruses, coronaviruses, covid-19, and how vaccines work that is the clearest I have seen. The whole report is eminently worth reading. For now, I want to highlight the report’s laconic conclusions about shutdowns and other anti-covid interventions:

Physical measures against COVID-19 • From March 2020 onwards, and in common with many other governments, the Scottish government recommended or mandated a range of physical measures intended to limit the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus which was the cause of COVID-19.

• The physical measures recommended or mandated by the Scottish government ranged from simple public health practices (the encouragement of frequent handwashing, cleaning of environmental surfaces, the use of PPE in hospitals and care homes) to coercive and / or intrusive measures (face mask mandates outside of healthcare settings; lockdowns; enforced social distancing; test, trace and isolate measures).

• In 2020 there was scientific evidence to support the use of some of the physical measures (e.g. frequent handwashing, the use of PPE in hospital settings) adopted against COVID-19.

• For other measures (e.g. face mask mandates outside of healthcare settings, lockdowns, social distancing, test, trace and isolate measures) there was either insufficient evidence in 2020 to support their use – or alternatively, no evidence; the evidence base has not changed materially in the intervening three years.

• It has been argued that the restrictive measures introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in individual, societal and economic harm that was avoidable and that should not have occurred.

National Review: Classic education returns

The three stages of classical education, also known as the “trivium,” are grounded in the developmental stages of learning. The grammar stage covers kindergarten through sixth grade, teaching the basics of reading, math, and English grammar, considered the building blocks for advanced learning. Seventh through ninth grades constitute the logic stage, addressing students’ growing interest in “why” questions and using reason to explore truth and facts. The rhetoric stage covers grades ten through twelve, using the knowledge and skills developed in the first two stages to help students conduct independent critical thinking and practice persuasion through writing and speaking.

“Classical education is like a very large museum with many beautiful, wonder-filled rooms that could be studied over a lifetime”: That is how the Classical Academic Press website puts it. “It is precisely this kind of education that has produced countless great leaders, inventors, scientists, writers, philosophers, theologians, physicians, lawyers, artists, and musicians over the centuries.”

The end of marriage may mean the end of happiness

(The Free Press, August 16, 2023)

Back in the 1970s, when there was zero maternity leave and the pay gap was at its peak, women reported having higher well-being than men.

Over the past several decades, though, this has reversed. Women’s self- reported happiness has plummeted. While today both men and women are less happy, men report higher well-being than women.

How can this be, when women now make up 59.5 percent of college students and earn the majority of bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees? Today, in nearly half of opposite-sex marriages in the U.S., women earn the same or more as their husbands. A survey by researchers at the Brookings Institution found that U.S. parents, regardless of political affiliation, are now more worried about their sons than their daughters.

Perhaps the reason is the fact that marriage, over the past five decades, has dropped by 60 percent. Indeed, new research from the University of Chicago found that marriage is “the most important differentiator” of who is happy in America, and that falling marriage rates are a chief reason why happiness has declined nationally. The study revealed a stunning 30 percentage point happiness gap between married and unmarried Americans. As the American Perspectives Survey report notes, “No social change has altered the fabric of American life so profoundly as the decline of marriage.”

One reason for the decline in marriage is the rise of cohabitation. The number of Americans cohabitating with their romantic partner has more than doubled over the past three decades. A recent survey found that men in cohabiting relationships are just as satisfied in their relationships as married men—but women in cohabiting relationships are 13 percentage points less likely to say they are satisfied compared with married women. Here’s another example: today, a record 44 percent of women under 30 consider themselves to be liberal, compared with only 25 percent of men in the same age category. But evidence suggests that both liberal men and women are less interested in committed relationships than their conservative counterparts. For instance, a survey from the Institute for Family Studies found that 58 percent of unmarried Republicans are interested in marriage, compared with only 47 percent of unmarried Democrats.

This gap is exacerbated by the fact that as women become more successful, their standards for an acceptable romantic partner tend to increase.

Relative to men, a larger percentage of women say that “not being able to find someone who meets their expectations” is a major reason they are single. If you’re a woman, and you decide to rule out everyone who is right of center, and you want someone with a commensurate degree (young men continue to drop out of education and the workforce), then your dating pool will be very small indeed.

The remaking of America

Victor Davis Hanson, August 7, 2023

We are in the midst of one of the most radical revolutions in American history. It is as far-reaching and dangerous as the turbulent years of the1850s and 1860s or the 1930s. Every aspect of American life and culture is under assault, including the very processes by which we govern ourselves, and the manner in which we live.

The Revolution began under the Obama administration that sought to divide Americans into oppressed and oppressors, and then substitute race for class victimization. It was empowered by the bicoastal wealth accrued from globalization, and honed during the COVID lockdown, quarantine-fed economic downturn, and the George Floyd riots and their a!ermath. The Revolution was boosted by fanatic opposition to the presidency of Donald Trump. And the result is an America that is unrecognizable from what it was a mere decade ago.

Truths: Vivek Ramaswamy

1. God is real.

2. There are two genders.

3. Human flourishing requires fossil fuels.

4. Reverse racism is racism.

5. An open border is no border.

6. Parents determine the education of their children.

7. The nuclear family is the greatest form of governance known to mankind.

8. Capitalism lifts people up from poverty.

9. There are three branches of the U.S. government, not four.

10. The U.S. Constitution is the strongest guarantor of freedoms in history

American Greatness: Who will say 'no more' to the current madness

Victor Davis Hanson, August 10, 2023

America is in existential danger.

The Biden administration has utterly destroyed the southern border—and immigration law with it.

Biden green lighted 7 million illegal aliens swarming into the U.S. without legal sanction or rudimentary audit.

China spies inside and over the U.S. with impunity. Beijing has never admitted to its responsibility for the gain-of-function Covid virus that killed a million Americans. President Biden printed $4 trillion at exactly the wrong time of soaring post-COVID consumer demand and supply shortages. No wonder he birthed the worst inflation in 40 years.

In response, interest rates tripled, gas prices doubled.

Our military is thousands of recruits short. It lacks sufficient munitions.

Following Biden’s humiliating pullout from Afghanistan, vast troves of arms were abandoned in Kabul. Billions more in scarce weapons were sent to Ukraine.

The Pentagon’s woke agenda trumps meritocracy in promotions and advancement. Our enemies—Russia, China, Iran, North Korea—are on the move, while the U.S. seems listless.

The Biden renegade Department of Justice, CIA and FBI have become weaponized. Ideology, politics, and race—not the law—more often guide their investigations, intelligence operations and enforcement.

The problem with the NCAA

Peter Lorenzi, Wall Street Journal, August 7, 2023

After NIL, twice-a-year portals, and multi-billion dollar contracts, maybe the few remaining adults in charge at universities with both a mission and a backbone will recognize this evolving folly cum train wreck, and simply have colleges sponsor professional NFL minor league teams, where the professional team - sporting the college's name -- could be used to promote and better brand the school while generating some funds for he school's academic mission, creates some identify for alums, serving the NFL gods, and not spoiling that aforementioned academic mission. Just hope that their backbone is intact and that they reaffirm their traditional academic mission, ie, meaningful knowledge development and dissemination.