The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (No. 29)

December 3, 2021

THE GOOD

ALL HONOR TO COL. BEN SKARDON: “Army vet who survived Bataan Death March thanks to gold Clemson ring dies at 104.” **A personal note: Mr. Skardon lived here in Clemson. My wife got to know Mr. Skardon (who was then in his 90s), whom she invited to our house on a semi-regular basis for tea and cookies with my then three young children. Meeting with Mr. Skardon was part of our homeschool curriculum. My children would sit spellbound as he told them stories about the Bataan Death March. Ben Skardon was a great man whom my wife and children adored. We mourn his loss.

THE CIVILIZATIONAL ISSUE OF OUR TIME: “We need more families.”

At stake here is something more important than the fate of political parties – namely, the future of civilisation. Western countries, short on labour and funds, cannot play a positive role in promoting economic development in the countries where workforces are still growing. The future could be one of aged nations forced to build barriers against younger nations with little stake in the current economic system.

Yet all is not lost. The new generation hopefully will find Mark Zuckerberg’s pathetic ‘metaverse’ no substitute for the intimacy and psychological rewards of family. As Margaret Mead once said, ‘No matter how many communes anyone invents, the family always creeps back’. It will be up to the new generation to halt the post-familial tide, and discover, like previous generations, how having children changes what it means to be human.

Here’s a simple formula for civilizational success: Work hard, be moral, get married, make babies, raise families, be a leader, be a model for others to follow, be kind, and be benevolent.

GOOD! Now finish the job and end the lockdowns: “UK Becomes First Country To Approve Antiviral COVID Pill.”

BEST DAMN NEWS I’VE HEARD ALL DAY: “LGBT civil war erupts as leftists take aim at their newest enemy: ‘Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists’.”

As trans activists accrue cultural power and consolidate their territorial gains, their movement has begun the process of doing what all revolutionaries inevitably do: hunt down and punish dissenters. They aren’t being subtle about it, either.

But for breathtaking brazenness it is hard to beat a new pamphlet from the Cambridge Student Union’s Women’s Campaign, which advises students on how to identify heretics who still doubt that a man can become a woman simply by saying so. It is titled — subtly — “How to Spot TERF Ideology.” (TERF, for those of you who are new around here, means Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist.)

The pamphlet opens by announcing that there are some women who are not welcome in the women’s movement because those women oppose men in the women’s movement: “Trans liberation is part of feminism. Fighting for autonomy and freedom must be a fight for everyone, and there should be no room for transphobia or TERFs in feminist organising.” . . .

TERFs, we are told, are basically trash because they have “a conservative, binary, essentialist conception of sex as the be-all-end-all, and a deep hatred for trans women, couched in the language of feminism and feminist theory.”

Got that? Radical feminists are conservatives now, because they want to conserve the idea that biological women are women and biological men are not. I can’t wait to see who else becomes a “conservative” simply for refusing to junk a set of foundational scientific facts. In fact, the pamphlet notes that TERFs are not just conservative, but “it may also be worth bringing up that TERFs … spend a lot of time working with the far-right.”

SMALL ACTS OF KINDNESS GO A LONG WAY:  “4 men push elderly woman in broken scooter home in pouring rain.”

BRONZE AGE DIET: “Prehistoric poop fossils reveal Austrians drank beer, ate blue cheese 2,700 years ago.”

NO ENVY HERE: I AM MORE THAN COOL WITH ELON BEING THE WORLD’S FIRST TRILLIONAIRE. He makes my world better even if my income is a grain of sand compared to his: “SpaceX Might Make Elon Musk World's First Trillionaire.”

TIME FOR THE USAIN BOLT OF PHYSICS TO TAKEOVER NOW: “The Marathon Race Toward Fusion Power Could Be Reaching a Sprint.”

EVERYTHING IS BETTER IN TEXAS, WELL, MOST EVERYTHING: “Texas welcomes patients denied lifesaving organ transplants in Colorado because of COVID vaccination status.”

THE BAD

SUICIDE WATCH—American Edition. When parody is all you have left before the Fall: “Arms Race Heats Up: Just As China Reveals Space Nukes, America Responds With Trans Admiral.”

AMERICA HAS THE BEST RULING CLASS: “State Dept. Celebrates ‘International Pronouns Day’ as China and Russia Increase Their Strength.”

IF WE’RE BEING HONEST, WE HAVE TO ADMIT THAT AUSTRALIA IS NOT THAT FAR BEHIND CHINA: “Check out this video megathread showing China's vax checkpoints, forced jabs, and people climbing over barbed wire to escape the dystopia.”

TURNING THE NURSING PROFESSION INTO NURSE RATCHED: “Covid Unvaxxed Teen Boy Denied Medical Treatment.”

FROM EACH ACCORDING TO HIS ABILITY, TO EACH ACCORDING TO HIS NEED: “Taxing Wealth Is Sure-Fire Way to End Up With Less Wealthy Society.”

THE FDA IS A DISGRACE: “The FDA is Holding Up Potentially Life-Saving COVID Treatments.”

We may already have potentially life-saving pills that can treat COVID-19 and drastically reduce the chances of death. It’s just currently illegal to prescribe or sell them, thanks to the Food and Drug Administration.

The treatments in question include a new pill to treat COVID-19 developed by Pfizer. The company says the pill was highly effective in its trials, reducing the risk of an infected patient dying or being hospitalized by 89 percent. According to the Washington Post, “The effect of the Pfizer drug was found to be so strong midway through the study that an independent committee monitoring the clinical trial recommended it be stopped early.” 

Another company, Merck, has developed a pill it says reduces the chances of serious illness and death by 50 percent and requested FDA approval last month. It is still waiting on approval, although it was approved on November 5 in the United Kingdom.   

As far as the Pfizer treatment is concerned, the request for FDA emergency approval has already been submitted. We’re literally just waiting on them to get their act together and meet (virtually!) to discuss it, and apparently the FDA won’t be doing so until after Thanksgiving. This means that the Pfizer treatments won’t start getting administered until December at the earliest.