Senile Joe Biden

You can't make this stuff up.

Makeovers, Before and After Feminism

Naturally, we do not wish to present this as a post about feminism. We want you to see it as a post about makeovers. And about some very impressive makeovers, performed by women who apparently had a conversion experience and became woke.

Is Her Daughter Making a Big Mistake?

To some extent I agree with Carolyn Hax on one point. The woman who writes her is worried about her daughter’s choice of boyfriend. The reason: the man has significant student loans, but does not seem to have the means of paying them off within a reasonable time period.

Hax will say that the mother should not interfere, should not voice her objections, should not confront her daughter about this issue. She should, as the old saying goes, forever hold her peace.

In this case as in many other letters written to advice columns, we do not know enough to evaluate the situation. We suspect that the boyfriend might one day slough off the debt on his girlfriend. She has no school debt and makes a better living than he does. We suspect that the man is not the breadwinner or provider type. This means that daughter will not have the option of staying home and caring for her eventual children. We suspect that the daughter does not understand fully the implications of getting involved with a man who is basically insolvent... and who might become a parasite.

And yet, we also suspect that any advice from mother will be dismissed. Today’s independent and autonomous women like to make their own mistakes. Unfortunately, at times, they make some very large mistakes. If darling daughter is in love, she might be ignoring the signs that will make a future together more difficult. And if said boyfriend is something of a loser, this will eventually impact the girl’s life.

So, we appreciate that Hax pretends to have total confidence in the judgement of the daughter, and we understand that in today’s world, advice should not be offered unless requested-- and perhaps not even then-- the letter writing mother probably is seeing something that has largely escaped her daughter.

Without further ado, here is the letter:

My oldest daughter, who is pretty, intelligent, kind and hard-working, has been dating a guy who cares for her but has college loans he won't pay off for 15 more years. She has no student loans because we paid for her college. He has a decent job and salary, but she makes more even though she is three years younger. He has to penny-pinch to afford his loan payments.

This doesn't impact her much now because they don't live together. While I certainly know she is an independent adult and would not tell her who to date, I want to caution her that marrying him would mean a lifetime of having to penny-pinch. I don't think she realizes what she would have to give up to marry him, such as buying a house, nice vacations, the ability to afford a dog or have her children play a travel sport like she did or pay for her children's college educations. We worked so hard for her to be financially stable, and now that could all be at risk.

What, if anything, should I say to her, and how do I say it without seeming like I'm telling her to break up with him over money?

— Stressed Over Finances

SOF has described the situation entirely in financial terms. It makes her look less than gracious. Along with financial well-being comes community status and standing. It’s one thing to be constantly short of cash. It’s quite another to marry a man who is not respected in the community. His lower standing will define the way the daughter and her grandchildren are treated.

One can only regret that in today’s world, where people are taken to be self-sufficing and self-involved human monads, children have learned not to take adult advice. It’s a bad strategy, one that causes some considerable pain.

Will the Real Asshole Please Stand Up?

Credit where credit is due. Today’s Ask Polly column in New York Magazine nails it. Polly understands the problem and lays it out clearly and concisely. Of course, she adds her usual quantity of mental drool, but her first response is on point, and thus worthy of praise.

In the letter a woman explains that she does not get along very well with her boyfriend's family. Their interactions have ranged between strained and rudely dismissive. She cannot figure out why this is so, but offers precious little information about herself, her demeanor, her decorum, her general attitudes. Aside from her self-righteousness she tells us nothing about her self. It's the first important "tell."

But, we see quickly that she is quick to take offense, and that she has some excessively hygienic attitudes toward a certain virus. Anyway, here is the letter. I trust that you will see what the problem is:

When I first started dating my boyfriend two years ago, I met his brother about six months into the relationship. It was over dinner while he was in town for work (we don’t live in the same city, thank sweet baby Jesus), and while I proceeded to ask him questions and attempted to engage with him, he couldn’t bring himself to ask me anything or even feign interest in getting to know me. Every time I left space open in the conversation for him to start a new topic or give him the opportunity to ask me something, silence followed. To my bewilderment, he texted my boyfriend after dinner with something along the lines of how great it was to meet me and what a great time he had. I wonder if we attended the same dinner.

I thought his wife would soften the edges around the relationship, but she only made it worse. I met her a few weeks later during a weekend at my boyfriend’s parents’ beach house with a group of friends. The first time she saw me, she made none of the usual pleasantries. She didn’t say it was nice to meet me, she didn’t approach me to hug or shake my hand. She just smiled at me. I ended up approaching her and made all of the above aforementioned pleasantries. She is an impossibly bubbly person who I find, quite frankly, to be a fake-ass bitch. The four of us went to dinner and she spent the entire time talking about herself with her body and eyes turned away from me, even though she was sitting directly across from me. One time she was coming into our part of town and I texted her to see if she wanted to grab lunch. She didn’t respond. It was only after my boyfriend said something to his brother that she then proceeded to be obsequiously nice to me to the point where I felt embarrassed for her because it was clear she had been called out and was overcompensating with an incessant string of texts.

I don’t understand what their issue is with me. I wish I could say the relationship has improved, but it has not. They invite us on group trips, and we see them regularly at their parents’ house. My boyfriend has been incredibly supportive and is in agreement that they are self-centered and have not treated me well. He has gone as far as discussing with his brother how he and his wife need to do better since we are getting engaged at the end of this year. However, I feel an immense amount of anger towards them that I am not sure can be mitigated. I have tried my best to be open-minded and get to know both of them, but they continuously disappoint me. They are hypercompetitive people who seem to derive joy only from keeping up appearances without true regard for what anyone else is going through. The only times that my future brother-in-law will talk to me is when he wants to glean information about certain work-related matters that I understand. Recently, after I wished her a happy birthday, my future sister-in-law took a week to respond to me via text. My boyfriend is fairly close with his brother, and he has stated that he would like to remain so even if the situation between us doesn’t improve. I need to respect this, but quite frankly, I wish my future brother-in-law and his wife would just drive off a cliff.

They are about to have their first child, and I have told my boyfriend that once they do have the child, I would like to wait two weeks before we go see them as I have a lot of anxiety about COVID-19 and the possibility of them contracting it while they are in the hospital. My pandemic precautions have been extreme, so this is not out of character for me. My boyfriend has said that two weeks is a long time to wait before seeing his brother’s first child and that he needs to think about it. If he goes without me, I will need to quarantine away from him for two weeks once he gets back, and then at some point, I will need to go up with him again to see this baby because I’m supposed to care. Why should I care, though? Why should I care that these people who do not give two fucks about me procreated? I know I need to do this and fake nice for the rest of my life in order to keep the peace, but the rest of my life is a very long time, and I am already very tired of being angry.

How do I find the grace and inner peace I need in order to spend the rest of my life with my wonderful boyfriend who comes with this set of asshole siblings?

Angry Future Sister-in-Law

Whatever you think about boyfriend’s brother and sister-in-law, the letter writer is obviously a piece of work. AFSIL, as we will call her, seems to have no awareness whatever of what she is contributing to the situation.

Polly, however, sees it clearly:

But then you had a very bad attitude going into meeting the future brother-in-law’s wife. That energy set the tone. Maybe your brother-in-law helped to fuck that up, too, by telling his wife things about you in advance that were formed mostly from his own fear and insecurity and worries that he’d messed up your initial interaction.

Even if she didn’t have any advance warning that there was a problem, she still would’ve picked up on your dislike and distrust the second you met her. People always know when you’re conflicted. You knew that she was conflicted, and she knew that you were conflicted. The only way she could see to save that dinner together was to perform the part of the enthusiastic storyteller.

As noted, we know very little about AFSIL, beyond the fact that she has a bad attitude. She is generally angry, full of herself and perfectly self-righteous. We do not know anything about her appearance, her manners, what she does for a living, how she treats her boyfriend…. We could go on. 

Here, the woman should take Polly’s advice and do an inventory about her own obnoxious attitude, and the negative energy she is throwing into the mix. I would suspect that the brother and sister-in-law do not like the way AFSIL is treating their brother, but we know nothing about that. I believe that the boyfriend in question should do some soul-searching of his own and start asking some serious questions about his relationship.

American Cities Committing Urban Suicide

Near the end of the nineteenth century French sociologist Emile Durkheim wrote what remains a seminal work on Suicide. In it he identified three types of suicide, egotistical, altruistic and anomic.

For the record, an altruist commits suicide to take responsibility for his bad behavior, and thus to relieve others of their responsibility. Think of the commander who loses a war and commits suicide to assert that the fault is entirely his. Seppuku counts as altruistic suicide.

Anomic suicide befalls someone who is alone and bereft, who is unmoored and cut off from social contact. The term "anomie" means normlessness, and it suggests that people who do not fit into society can end up committing suicide. Feeling like a pariah allows them to feel that they are dead already. When the shunning and shaming becomes unbearable, they end their lives.

As for egotistical suicide, Durkheim believed that some people kill themselves to punish others. The jilted lover who hangs himself in his former lover’s living room is cursing her. He wants to punish her for rejecting her. He is willing to kill himself if he can leave this earth thinking of the pain he is going to inflict on her. This does not make him a fine human being.

These thoughts came to mind as I was reading some newspaper articles on the declining state of America’s cities. I was struck by the fact that the people leading these cities, leftist politicians-- diverse group now exposed as incompetent frauds and as portraits in cowardice-- might be committing urban suicide in order to hurt someone else-- that is President Trump. Surely the teachers’ unions that are now out in force refusing to go back to work know very well that keeping children out of school will damage the economy-- during an election campaign. It's an egotistical urban suicide.

Is there another country on the planet where politicians would allow major cities to be destroyed-- to make political points?

Gerard Baker adds that America’s corporate elites, even its intellectual elites, have been cheering from the sidelines as cities burn. After all, it is not happening in their neighborhoods-- at least not yet. Militants from BLM or Antifa are damaging the interests of those they pretend to represent.  

Poor minority children will suffer the most for not going to school. Minority business owners will suffer as their shops are burned or looted. Property values in minority neighborhoods will head south. The reputations of minority Americans will be damaged, setting back the cause of civil rights for decades.

Baker explains:

Whatever the political consequences of this unprecedented summer, there will be hefty costs, and they won’t be borne by those responsible. As cities are further hollowed out by crime and decay, taxes will rise, further stifling investment and growth, further harming the most disadvantaged, and accelerating a vicious circle of decline.

It’s a needless tragedy engineered by ideologues that is sending into sharp reverse the gains made in large American cities in the early years of the 21st century.

Leftist political leaders are doing it egotistically, in order to damage the Trump campaign. But, what about the corporate elites, and those who do not need to come to the office. To take an obvious example, Google has told its staff members not to come to the office for a year-- why would they stay in declining large cities?

City leaders are now re-creating the social conditions that ruined these cities in the 1960s and ’70s: violent crime; urban blight, crumbling infrastructure. And they’ve added to that list schools run by unions dedicated to radical ideology and the mob in control of the streets in furtherance of an intolerant political agenda.

Worst of all, now we have a corporate elite, safely sequestered from the consequences of all this ruin, loudly helping it along by signaling their own virtue and denouncing our supposed vice.

Consider, Baker continues, the damage done:

For cities like New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle and Portland, Ore., the damage done by this indulgent summer of insanity may never be repaired. For decades these cities have been controlled by monolithic Democratic establishments—though Republican mayors proved they could govern New York. They have milked the more dynamic parts of their populations to feed their own ideological agenda while doing nothing to lift the least advantaged out of misery.

The Great Meltdown of 2020 has exposed how rotten these urban establishments have become.

The lockdown, that soul-crushing exercise in economic suicide, imposed and enforced largely by the people it least affects, has permanently demolished vast elements of the economic base of these cities: businesses that will never return, employees who have moved away or will work from home rather than tolerate the increasingly perilous lottery of commuting and working in a deteriorating urban environment.

Yes, it’s economic suicide, committed for the reasons I outlines above. 

Democratic mayors have attacked and defunded the police. The predictable result has been a spike in crime-- crime that has most often hurt minority communities:

Then, as Democratic mayors actively encouraged an all-out assault on city police forces, a terrifying wave of violence and crime swept the cities. In Chicago last month murder rose 139% over a year earlier. New York had more shootings in the first seven months of 2020 than in all of 2019. The victims of these crimes are almost never the vocal elites, safe in their well-protected homes and offices. They are the poorest and least secure of our neighbors.

As for the pandemic, mayors and governors happily allow mass protests, the kind that are guaranteed to propagate the virus. Yet, they are up in arms if people want to attend religious services:

So, for example, those of us who stayed in New York this summer weren’t permitted to worship in church, but we were allowed—we were more or less instructed—to worship at the feet of those who preach hatred of the police, racial strife and white self-loathing. Friends weren’t permitted to attend parents’ funerals, but the right people were free to travel across state lines to attend multiple funerals for political and public show.

In New York City, the drama is being played out in empty office buildings. Even though more and more of them are open, most are still empty. Nicole Gelinas reports that New York City commercial real estate just lost its appeal.

Now, the city — or, at least, sentient public and private-economy officials who can see implications, a group that notably doesn’t include the mayor — wants people to come back. Office-building managers have replanted flowers for summer and installed cheery greeters.

But people aren’t coming. Midtown is a little busier than in mid-March. It’s still empty. Yes, employers may find that it’s harder to integrate new workers into a virtual workforce or that workers become less productive over time.

Nevertheless, it’s something the city has never seen before, not on the cusp of ’70s turmoil, in 1966; not emerging from ’70s near-bankruptcy, in 1980; not even in 2005, which was too short to matter.

The white-collar workforce has proved it can skip the office not just one day, not just a week, not just two weeks, but for nearly five months now.

For those of us who have been concerned about whether New York City would ever come back, these are ominous signs.

Consider this, from the Wall Street Journal, regarding fashion executive Josie Natari:

Josie Natori is back in the office, but most of her staff isn’t.

The founder and chief executive of women’s apparel company Natori Co. returned to her office on Madison Avenue in New York City in early June. Few others have returned to the business’s midtown Manhattan neighborhood—or Natori’s 50-person office and showroom. Cleaning crews have continued to maintain the premises, and mail and packages are being delivered, but the building’s lobby and halls are empty.

In recent weeks, a handful of designers and product developers have trickled through to take care of things that couldn’t be done remotely. Everyone else is working from home or furloughed.

That is the state of New York employment: working from home or laid off. New York City is in serious trouble. The current leadership does not understand the problem. It has aggravated the problem. After all, if you are walking up or down the priciest real estate location in the country and read: Black Lives Matter on the street-- will you feel welcome, or will you feel that it’s time to pick up and leave? Might you not feel that protesters and rioters, criminals and maniacs now own New York City?

Virtue Goes Clinically Insane

How bad is it out there? Really, really bad, if you will. Alas, I have just read a column by Lance Morrow. He distinguishes himself by being about as pessimistic as I am about the current state of America. He compares it to the McCarthy Era, but concludes that today’s cancel culture is effectively worse.

He describes it as “virtue gone clinically insane.” And hysterical. While the psycho world no longer calls people hysterics, it has replaced it with histrionic personality disorder. Which is about the same thing.

The country’s myriad cancelers emit the odor not of sanctity but of sanctimony, and of something more ominous: the whiff of a society decomposing.

What’s happening on the American left—with surreal rapidity, like the fall of France in 1940—is sinister. Wokeness and the cancel culture represent not idealism but virtue gone clinically insane. Look up the word hysteria: “a psychological disorder whose symptoms include . . . shallow, volatile emotions, and overdramatic or attention-seeking behavior.”

Woke young people are living in a dream. They have detached from reality because they do not know enough to deal with reality. They have received an appallingly bad education and they only know how to destroy what others have built.

Morrow continues:

The indignant woke, who imagine themselves to be righteously awake and laying the foundations for a more just and humane world, ought to pause—to draw back for a moment, and consider the possibility that they are, as it were, fast asleep, caught up in strange, agitated dreams: that they have become a mass joined in a cult of self-righteousness, moral vanity and privilege. One of these days, they will have to be deprogrammed and led back to the real world. Woke institutions will need to be fumigated.

Today's woke youth have two principle obsessions: race and sex. They do not understand that sex differences are one of the basis organizing principles for society. And they do not understand that America has been trying for half a century now to engineer a color blind society. How is that working out?

The woke are especially obsessed with two areas—sex and race. In their dream, nature’s basic working arrangement—sex, male and female, the business of procreation that ensures the survival of the species—dissolves in a frolicsome alphabet soup of identities; human meaning works itself out not in the mind, not in thought or art, but in the territory that lies south of the navel, in restless genital experiments. Men become women on their own say-so, and may bear children, if they choose: Death to the one who denies it! Even pronouns have become narcissistically discretionary.

The media has devoted itself to promulgating a big lie-- namely, that the protests have been largely peaceful, except when they were not.

As for race: In the eyes of the woke—and in most media accounts—this summer’s eruptions (protests, demonstrations, riots, precinct-house occupations, and the “summer of love” in Seattle’s “occupied protest”) have been “overwhelmingly peaceful.” It’s not really true, but the woke are addicted to the meme of their own harmlessness, and so they will it into truth. Destruction, in fact, has been extensive—and inexcusable. Those hardest hit have been residents and shopkeepers in black and other minority neighborhoods that are left in the wreckage after those who did the damage—among them many white anarchists and antifa people—have gone back to their parents’ basements.

What do we need? How about: adult authority. Yes, I know, the American left and the American right are up in arms against authority. One wonders whether they are willing to measure the cost of disrespect in the fact that the looters and rioters are engaged in flagrantly disrespectful assaults on the authority of the police, on civil authority. And do they care that children in our school system no longer respect the authority of their teachers, and thus cannot learn?

What can be done? The gravest casualty of the 1960s was adult authority, which vanished from the land around the time of 1968’s Tet Offensive. Ronald Reagan provided an apparition of authority for a while, but then Bill Clinton, frisking with an intern, restored the adolescent model. The best remedy for the cancel culture would be resistance by strong adult leaders—university presidents, newspaper publishers, heads of corporations and so on—capable of standing up to Twitter. But the odds are against such a miracle. The woke, like hyenas, hunt in packs, and those in authority are craven.

How’s that for bleak?

Cancel Elon Musk?

Yesterday, a SpaceX rocket capsule, carrying two astronauts splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico. Owner Elon Musk was elated, as were many Americans. 

And yet, Musk created some serious controversy when he lit out against American complacency a few days ago. Speaking on the “Daily Drive” podcast Musk called out the citizens on America’s coasts for their indolence, their complacency and their sense of entitlement. 

After all, he is building a new Tesla plant in Austin, Texas and is building another plant in Shanghai. So he was explaining why he wants to reduce manufacturing on the coasts.

In his words:

… I see in the United States increasingly much more complacency and entitlement especially in places like the Bay Area, and L.A. and New York.”

America’s problem, Musk continues, is that it no longer knows how to win.Where have we heard that before?

He then compared the U.S. to losing sports teams: “When you’ve been winning for too long you sort of take things for granted. The United States, and especially like California and New York, you’ve been winning for too long. When you’ve been winning too long you take things for granted. So, just like some pro sports team they win a championship you know a bunch of times in a row, they get complacent and they start losing.”

You would think that these remarks were a simple observation of the state of culture of deep blue America. But, you would be wrong. The Zero Hedge blog read these remarks and practically accused Musk of treason. Keep in mind, this is a conservative or libertarian blog, one that has at times been blocked by Twitter. We often have occasion to link its articles.

So, what did Musk do to incite the ire of Zero Hedge. Why, he made a couple of positive observations about Chinese workers. You would think that it is a reason to get him canceled.

Zero Hedge reports:

On the podcast, reported by CNBC, he called the people of China “smart” and “hard working” while at the same time calling U.S. citizens "entitled" and "complacent". 

As though that were not bad enough Musk went on to praise the cultural environment in China:

When asked about China as an EV strategy leader worldwide, Musk responded:  “China rocks in my opinion. The energy in China is great. People there – there’s like a lot of smart, hard working people. And they’re really -- they’re not entitled, they’re not complacent,

Musk’s advice, roundly rejected by Zero Hedge, is that American manufacturers should worry less about marketing and public relations. They should work to engineer better products. Zero Hedge dismisses Musk’s advice, on the grounds that bumpers are falling off Tesla Model 3s, at this very moment.

Musk then, seemingly unaware that bumpers are falling off of Model 3s as we speak, encouraged entrepreneurs to "focus on the product" when making something new: “My advice, you know, to corporate America or companies worldwide is spend less time on marketing presentations and more time on your product. Honestly that should be the number one thing taught in business schools. Put down that spreadsheet and that PowerPoint presentation and go and make your product better.”

The problem is, Musk is probably right. True enough, we have a more diverse workforce. And our workforce seems to think that marketing and PR are the way to go-- after all, isn’t it all about manipulating minds? In order to engineer better manufacturing you need armies of engineers. And America does not have armies of engineers. It has armies of social justice warriors, lawyers and bureaucrats. 

The shocking point is that Zero Hedge, in full Cold War mode, dismisses some sane advice, from someone who has some skin in the manufacturing game, because saying anything good about China these days should get you canceled, and tried for treason. Or maybe the blog is a stealth supporter of California politics and wants to punish Musk for moving Tesla manufacturing to... Texas. OMG.

So, don’t think that cancel culture is limited to the radical left.