Wednesday Potpourri

First, on the Bud Light death watch, the fat lady is warming up. Apparently, the losses are so bad that serious marketers are saying that the brand will never recover from the Dylan Mulvaney mess.

The Daily Mail has the story:

Bud Light's damages are so severe, there is concern over whether the brand can ever fully recover after the prolonged decline in sales and loss of consumer confidence ever since the Dylan Mulvaney marketing debacle six months ago. 

The damage to the brand is now being described as 'quasi-permanent,' according to Beer Business Daily publisher Harry Schuhmacher. 'The Bud Light situation has actually gotten worse,' he told Fox News Digital.

Despite initial hopes of a rebound, the brand remains down around 30 percent in volume compared to last year, persisting since May or June, and consumers might be lost 'forever.' 

Second, in Once-Great Britain, the National Health Service is prescribing palliative care for anorexics, not re-feeding. The new slogan is: Let them not eat… anything.

The Telegraph reports:

Patients as young as 18 who are at risk of dying from anorexia may be given palliative care rather than treatment to prolong life under new NHS guidance seen by the Telegraph.

The leaked document sets out how patients with severe eating disorders can be placed on a “palliative pathway”, with treatment no longer aimed at pursuing recovery through re-feeding.

Depriving young people of care. It is a step in the direction of the Canadian approach to economizing on health care-- assisted suicide.

Third, on the Joe Biden dementia watch. Our president said this in India:

The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salam, excuse me, Mohammed bin Salman ... and since he’s not speaking today, I wanted to — well maybe he is speaking today. I had a note he wasn’t speaking. Any rate, I’m gonna stop there.

Fourth, Andrew Sullivan takes the full measure of Joe Biden and declares that he should not be running. I quote this for the prose, as well as for the thought:

Every time you hear him speak, he’s also just a little off, eyes now barely visible in the ancient, botoxed, fillered face, words often slurred, a ghostly white mane peeking over his collar in the back, occasionally rallying to the point, or strangely loud-whispering,' wrote Sullivan.

'This is the man the Democratic Party says will be fully able to function as president for five more years through the age of 86. No one rooted in human reality believes it, or should believe it,' he added.

Fifth, considering all the wonderful things that aerobic exercise can do for you, it is not surprising that it can work to diminish the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.

From The Daily Mail:

The reason exercise can prevent Alzheimer's disease has been discovered and could lead to new treatments for the incurable condition.

Experts have shown that a hormone called irisin released during a workout clears plaques in the brain associated with the memory-robbing condition.

In a study in a lab, amyloid beta proteins exposed to irisin showed 'remarkable reduction.'

Physical exercise has been shown to reduce amyloid beta deposits in various mouse models, but the mechanisms involved have remained a mystery.

Now the study, published in the journal Neuron, solves the puzzle and promises new ways to prevent or cure the condition.

Sixth, a word from Wesley Yang’s Twitter. It regards the idiotic concept of gender identity:

They just fabricated a term -- "gender identity" -- some ghostly essence detached from one's bodily reality -- that would have to exist in order for any of this frenzy to make sense. But of course this non-observable entity knowable only through self-report is a fabrication.

Seventh, Heather Mac Donald reminds us that sometimes a kiss is just a kiss. Apparently, feminists disagree. They just canceled the president of the Spanish soccer federation, Luis Rubailes for kissing a female soccer player after Spain won the women's world cup.

Apparently, winning is not enough for our friendly feminists.

Mac Donald describes what happened:

One player, Jennifer Hermoso, grabbed the president of Spain’s official soccer federation, Luis Rubiales, around the waist and lifted him off his feet as he laughed and shouted. When she let him down, they rocked back and forth in a mutual embrace. In rapid succession, he pecked her on the cheek while she patted him on his back, then he took her head in his hands, and planted an instantaneous kiss on her mouth. He immediately moved her head away from his, and still laughing and shouting, sent her down the receiving line with two loose-wristed thwacks on the back.

No one made very much of the event, until feminists piled on and labeled the kiss an assault. Mac Donald responded:

There was nothing sexual about the split-second kiss; it was a spontaneous expression of joy. Rubiales’s lips were closed, and the kiss had no predatory aftermath. As soon as Rubiales greeted the next player coming down the reception line, he lost awareness of Hermoso. Spain’s Social Rights minister had adduced the kiss’s public nature as evidence of the shamelessness of Spain’s anti-female culture. It is precisely that public nature that rendered the idea that this was a sexual assault even more absurd.

And then,

Feminism, however, cannot tolerate toleration. It is a brittle ideology, unforgiving of human foibles. In order to maintain female grievance in a world increasingly dominated by females, it requires rigid enforcement of draconian rules that condemn males as unrepentant aggressors. To convince coddled Western females that they are always and everywhere unsafe, feminist complaint requires the inflation of minor misdeeds into major transgressions. Females are allegedly so tough that they are fit to serve cheek-by-jowl with males in military combat units. Yet they also claim fragility, vulnerability, and weakness. Which is it?

Nicely stated by Heather Mac.

Eighth, when a species in nature overproduces, it dies back. Such has been the fate of the wave of diversity officers hired by companies across America in the aftermath of death of George Floyd.

Daniel Greenfield reports:

Like the Norway Rat or the Great American Bedbug, DEI executives suddenly popped up at every Fortune 500 company in the aftermath of George Floyd’s drug overdose death. They subjected employees to racist unconscious bias training, warped product lines and corporate communications to reflect leftist politics, and could be found sitting in First Class seats while flying to DEI conferences all around the country to coordinate with more of their kind.

Now, however, the DEI party is over:

In a tough economy, corporations are cutting waste and nothing is more wasteful than people who do nothing except Zoom seminars in which they somehow try to string buzzwords like “impactful”, “representation” and “best practices” into a 15 minute presentation.

In a refreshing revival of best practices, the representatives of representation are being impactfully kicked out on their asses. DEI execs had notoriously short tenures at major corporations, leaving before anyone could realize how useless they were, but now they are exiting almost as quickly as woke Disney movies are bombing at the box office.

Ninth, from the Washington Post, on   Bidenomics:

U.S. poverty spiked over the past year, with child poverty more than doubling, the U.S. Census Bureau reported Tuesday, while the proportion of people lacking health insurance in 2022 dropped to an uncommonly low level.

The new figures reflect the uneven pace at which the government has ceased some forms of pandemic assistance as well as the calamitous effects of record inflation on household finances. Tuesday’s data offer the first statistical snapshot of how the wind-down of such programs has begun reshaping the country.

The poverty rate, taking into account government aid programs to the poor, was 12.4 percent in 2022, up from 7.8 percent the previous year, the census data shows. That spike follows two years of declines and coincided with the end of increased child tax credit payments and other government interventions.

Tenth, from Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, via the New York Post:

A discredited, disgusting, antisemitic book will be taught at one of America’s most prestigious universities this year.

A fall course syllabus at Princeton includes “The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability,” which unapologetically promotes vicious blood libels against Jews.

It accuses the Israeli military of harvesting Palestinians’ organs and Israel of adopting the deliberate maiming of Palestinians as official policy.

Such conspiracy theories echo the antisemitism of 1930s Nazi Germany.

Yet Princeton’s president and leaders responded with mealymouthed indifference.

Their inaction is unsurprising: American universities tolerate Jew-hatred.

Of course, no one cares. The reason-- the perpetrators are not white supremacists. Thus, the events do not fit the narrative and the American left goes all-ostrich, sticking its head in the sand.

I do not need to tell you which groups are responsible for this flagrant discrimination. Nor do I need to tell you which groups chased one Bari Weiss out of the New York Times for the crime of being a Zionist.

As I said, it is not white supremacists, so the media ignores the story.

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