Barack Hussein Obama’s presidential portrait, as you can see above, is characteristically incongruous when viewed among portraits of his predecessors.
And there just could be a concealed subtext to be found in his choice of artist. Not every president has himself painted by an artist best known for paintings of black women cutting off the heads of white people.
Consider, though, the case of Archbold’s bowerbird, which lives in New Guinea. As in other bowerbirds, the male builds an elaborate bower of twigs and ferns and therein tries to seduce females. The female inspects the bower and mates with the male if she likes the workmanship and the decorations, which are usually objects of one unusual color. What is peculiar about Archbold’s bowerbird is that the best decorations consist of feathers from one particular kind of bird of paradise, known as the King of Saxony. These feathers, which are several times longer than the original owner’s body and stem from just above his eye, are like a car’s antenna sporting dozens of square blue pennants. Because they are molted once a year, do not grow until the bird of paradise is four years old, and are much in demand among local tribesmen, the plumes must be very hard for the bowerbird to acquire. Once acquired they must be guarded against other jealous male bowerbirds anxious to steal them for their own bowers. So, in the words of Jared Diamond, a female bowerbird who finds a male that has decorated his bower with King of Saxony plumes knows “that she has located a dominant male who is terrific at finding or stealing rare objects and defeating would-be thieves.â€
So much for the bowerbird. What about the bird of paradise itself, the rightful owner of the plumes? The fact that he survived long enough to grow plumes, grew longer ones than any other male nearby, and kept them in good condition would be an equally reliable indicator of his genetic quality. But it reminds us of the thing that most puzzled Darwin and got the whole debate started: If the point of the plumes is to indicate his quality, might not the plumes themselves affect his quality? After all, every tribesman in New Guinea is out to get him, and every hawk will find him easier to spot. He may have indicated that he is good at surviving, but his chances of survival are now lower for having the plumes. They are a handicap. How can a system of females choosing males that are good at surviving encumber those males with handicaps to survival?
It’s a foolish society that chooses for its teachers and storytellers people who hate that society.
All too often our children are being taught by people who have no experience of our society and no success within it. Their indoctrination at collectivist “education†schools has made them openly (and ignorantly) hostile to America.
What if one of the requirements to teach K-12 was that you be at _least_ 50 years old, with proven success in the society (in business, a trade, parenthood)? You needn’t have made a million or be a top-level executive–so long as you have functioned effectively within American society.
Forbes interviews Gilder on the future of Big Tech.
Q: One of your lifelong theories, which reaches back to your 1980s bestsellers https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1596988096?ie=UTF8 and The Spirit of Enterprise, is the role of the human spirit and human agency, something economists and governments don’t see or don’t want to acknowledge.
Gilder: It’s the greatest of all forces. Think about what’s going on in the U.S. today, particularly in our university system. As Tyler Cowen describes in his book The Complacent Class, we’ve adopted a kind of ideology of cautionary principles and stationary states. He really puts his finger on it. We’re not living in an age of boldness and abundance, but in an age of retrenchment and shrinking horizons and careful rearrangements of existing resources. A lot of it is epitomized by this whole idea that unless human beings stop moving, the climate’s going to collapse on us.
The climate-change paralysis has been very destructive, not only to our national economy but particularly to Silicon Valley. Every time I find a company that’s doing everything right, I discover a peculiar feature of its technology that’s designed chiefly to stop it from emitting carbon dioxide. And that feature twists the technology into a pretzel, making it less useful and less promising. Take Google. It’s making an elaborate effort to render all of its massive data centers around the world “carbon-neutral.†They’re all linked up to various druidical Sunhenges of solar panels or quixotic kites or windmills. I mean, that’s some archaic way to produce energy!
I think we’re really in the middle of a loss of confidence, a loss of courage that is expressed and perpetrated by a massive expansion in regulations. This began in the Bush era, was vastly expanded during the Obama years, but has now been marginally retrenched. My hope is that the Trump retrenchment signals a truly new approach to the world and the human predicament.
Heritage Auctions, 2018 March 7 Rare Books Signature Auction – New York #6186:
Friederich Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations, 1874, an early work by this major philosopher with author’s presentation inscription.
Opening bid: $15,000 (plus 25% buyer premium.)
Friedrich Nietzsche. Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen. Zweites Stück: Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben. [Untimely Meditations, Part II]. Leipzig: E. W. Fritzsch, 1874. First edition of the second work (of four completed) in Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations series, this being on the subject of history; association copy, inscribed by the author on the front wrapper to Wilhelm Vischer Bilfinger who appointed Nietzsche, sans dissertation, to the First Chair of Philology at the University of Basel: “Herr Rathsherr Prof. Dr. Vischer / in treuer Gesinnung und mit / der Bitte um Wohlwollen und / Nachsicht überreicht vom / Verf.” Octavo (8.75 x 5.5 inches; 223 x 140 mm.). 111, [1, printer’s note] pages. Twentieth century green cloth, spine lettered in gilt; edges sprinkled gray; patterned endpapers; publisher’s bluish green wrappers laid down and inserted. Spine gently leaning, spine ends and corners very lightly worn; boards very slightly splayed with a touch of soiling. Front endpaper with some light pencil erasure causing some minimal bruising; wrappers very lightly soiled; front wrapper with a couple horizontal closed tears, expertly mended when laid down, just a single letter of the inscription affected (the “N” in “Nachsicht”); rear wrapper with some paper filled in in the gutter margin; title-leaf faintly browned; text-block with some trace foxing. Near fine. Dr. Vischer died shortly after publication, in July of 1874, making this an early presentation. Carl Pletsch. Young Nietzsche. New York: 1991. pp. 99-100. From the Marilyn R. Duff Collection.
The Tweet comment by Charlie Kirk above provoked this response from author Jesse Farrar:
————————-
Tweet subsequently removed by Twitter.
—————————
Farrar’s Tweet in turn prompted conservative commentary and criticism, so now Farrar is using his homebase at Vice to explain why he is really the victim here.
A newfound object of vitriol from conservatives all around the internet, Farrar received a deluge of death threats and harassment. One Twitter user replied to a picture he tweeted of his dog by saying, “I’d like to drown that dog.” Another man messaged him his home address, daring Farrar to try to drown him. “I will beat that ass until all your liberal snowflake friends can’t even recognize you,” the man threatened.
So many people reported Farrar’s tweet, his account is now restricted (meaning he can’t tweet) for the next seven days. I called up Farrar to ask about his newfound infamy, and whether or not he has any regrets:
VICE: Can you tell me about the Twitter interaction with Charlie Kirk yesterday that led to this madness?
Jesse Farrar: It’s a mythical idea to begin with, that colleges are a bastion of left-wing thought. Even if that were true, the idea that they were like, “Oh that guy has an American flag on his shirt, he gets an F now” is just so dumb. I was just sitting around, and I think I probably phrased it pretty badly—um, I think that’s fair to say. I maybe did not turn the most delicate phrase when I said that conservative students should be drowned. Well, I said their heads should be held underwater until they stop breathing, which, not to split hairs, but it’s not exactly the same thing.
I didn’t say I was going to do it, which seems to be a big misconception. I don’t have access to that much water or college campuses. It would be a logistical nightmare for me to pull that off.
IJR was the first place to write about your tweet. But then FOX & Friends picked it up. Did they ask you to be on the show?
Nah. One guy asked from a campus college magazine [asked me for comment], and I told him I was the president of VICE, but he didn’t print that. Also, that’s not true. Nobody has asked me anything or said anything to me at all. It’s very strange. Either it’s the death threats, or it’s my friends saying, “Wow, that sucks.” But it’s not really anything in the middle.
It’s kind of ironic that you’re getting threats for making a death threat joke.
L.L. Bean has a more fashionable and up-to-date customer base these days, and they are consequently dropping their famous “No Questions Asked — Lifetime Warranty” policy. NPR reports:
L.L. Bean’s outdoor gear — including its signature Bean Boots prized by campers and hipsters alike — is no longer guaranteed for life.
In a letter to customers Friday morning, the company said it has updated its return policy to give customers one year to return purchases, with a receipt. The previous lifetime guarantee, which enabled customers to return products years — or even decades — after purchase, has long been a selling point for the company.
[Emphasis added]
“Increasingly, a small, but growing number of customers has been interpreting our guarantee well beyond its original intent. Some view it as a lifetime product replacement program, expecting refunds for heavily worn products used over many years. Others seek refunds for products that have been purchased through third parties, such as at yard sales.”‘
L.L. Bean says the policy update will affect only a “small percentage” of returns and pledged to keep its mission of selling “high quality products that inspire and enable people to enjoy the outdoors.” The company says if a product is defective, it will “work with our customers to reach a fair solution” even after a year.
The return policy on the site now reads:
“If you are not 100% satisfied with one of our products, you may return it within one year of purchase for a refund. After one year, we will consider any items for return that are defective due to materials or craftsmanship.”
A Business Insider reporter put the policy to the test last year by returning four-year-old shoes with broken stitching. He recounts that the cashier immediately accepted the return and asked for no proof about when he purchased the shoes. “Two days later, the brand-new shoes were waiting on my doorstep,” Business Insider writes.
At the time, an L.L. Bean spokesperson told the site that the return policy was taken advantage of less than might be expected.
“Our guarantee is not a liability, but rather a customer service asset — an unacknowledged agreement between us and the customer, that always puts the customer first and relies on the goodwill of our customers to honor the original intent of the guarantee,” spokesperson Mac McKeever told Business Insider.
The company traces its origins to 1911, when a Maine outdoorsman developed a hunting shoe with leather uppers and rubber bottoms. Its rugged products were designed with hunting and fishing in mind.
In recent years the company has taken steps to appeal to a hipper, less outdoorsy clientele. As Maine Public Radio reported, L.L. Bean has been “looking to really create a new updated fit and style.”
In the old days, L.L. Bean used to sell to real Americans, hunters and fishermen. In my family, we always wore Pennsylvania-made Woolrich coats in deer season, but we preferred the fit, features, and durability of Bean’s canvas hunting coat for Upland Game season. Maine was far away, and Bean’s hunting coats were expensive, but you only ever needed to buy one once. That hunting coat would last your lifetime.
Now, in the old days, nobody in the former customer base would have thought of ripping off L.L. Bean by going out and buying a shot-down pair of 50-year-old Maine Hunting Shoes at a yard sale and then invoking the life-time guarantee.
But, when you go out there and start trading with the hipsters and the liberal fashionistas from the city, the kind of people who shop at Patagonia and the revived gender-ambiguous “Abercrombie & Fitch,” well, it just ain’t the way it used to be anymore. Those new customers are not your friends and neighbors.
Karin McQuillan says that she learned in the Peace Corps in Africa that Trump Is Right.
Three weeks after college, I flew to Senegal, West Africa, to run a community center in a rural town. Life was placid, with no danger, except to your health. That danger was considerable, because it was, in the words of the Peace Corps doctor, “a fecalized environment.â€
In plain English: s— is everywhere. People defecate on the open ground, and the feces is blown with the dust – onto you, your clothes, your food, the water. He warned us the first day of training: do not even touch water. Human feces carries parasites that bore through your skin and cause organ failure.
Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that a few decades later, liberals would be pushing the lie that Western civilization is no better than a third-world country. Or would teach two generations of our kids that loving your own culture and wanting to preserve it are racism. …
Senegal was not a hellhole. Very poor people can lead happy, meaningful lives in their own cultures’ terms. But they are not our terms. The excrement is the least of it. Our basic ideas of human relations, right and wrong, are incompatible. …
Take something as basic as family. Family was a few hundred people, extending out to second and third cousins. All the men in one generation were called “father.†Senegalese are Muslim, with up to four wives. Girls had their clitorises cut off at puberty. (I witnessed this, at what I thought was going to be a nice coming-of-age ceremony, like a bat mitzvah or confirmation.) Sex, I was told, did not include kissing. Love and friendship in marriage were Western ideas. Fidelity was not a thing. Married women would have sex for a few cents to have cash for the market.
What I did witness every day was that women were worked half to death. Wives raised the food and fed their own children, did the heavy labor of walking miles to gather wood for the fire, drew water from the well or public faucet, pounded grain with heavy hand-held pestles, lived in their own huts, and had conjugal visits from their husbands on a rotating basis with their co-wives. Their husbands lazed in the shade of the trees. …
The Ten Commandments were not disobeyed – they were unknown. The value system was the exact opposite. You were supposed to steal everything you can to give to your own relatives. There are some Westernized Africans who try to rebel against the system. They fail.
We hear a lot about the kleptocratic elites of Africa. The kleptocracy extends through the whole society. My town had a medical clinic donated by international agencies. The medicine was stolen by the medical workers and sold to the local store. If you were sick and didn’t have money, drop dead. That was normal.
So here in the States, when we discovered that my 98-year-old father’s Muslim health aide from Nigeria had stolen his clothes and wasn’t bathing him, I wasn’t surprised. It was familiar.
In Senegal, corruption ruled, from top to bottom. Go to the post office, and the clerk would name an outrageous price for a stamp. After paying the bribe, you still didn’t know it if it would be mailed or thrown out. That was normal.
One of my most vivid memories was from the clinic. One day, as the wait grew hotter in the 110-degree heat, an old woman two feet from the medical aides – who were chatting in the shade of a mango tree instead of working – collapsed to the ground. They turned their heads so as not to see her and kept talking. She lay there in the dirt. Callousness to the sick was normal. …
All the little stores in Senegal were owned by Mauritanians. If a Senegalese wanted to run a little store, he’d go to another country. The reason? Your friends and relatives would ask you for stuff for free, and you would have to say yes. End of your business. You are not allowed to be a selfish individual and say no to relatives. The result: Everyone has nothing. …
I couldn’t wait to get home. So why would I want to bring Africa here? Non-Westerners do not magically become American by arriving on our shores with a visa.
Qaisar Mahmood, a Muslim born in Pakistan, is the new head of the Swedish National Heritage Board. This is an extremely anomalous appointment, since he readily admits that he has not read anything about Sweden’s cultural heritage. But his new job is not really about preserving and protecting Sweden’s cultural heritage and historical sites at all.
Qaisar Mahmood, who once rode his motorcycle around Sweden in an apparently failed attempt to discover what being Swedish consisted of, is using his position as head of the Swedish National Heritage Board not to highlight and celebrate that heritage, but to downplay Sweden’s cultural heritage and history, and to create a false narrative that will help compel Swedes to accept mass Muslim migration. He says he doesn’t want simply to alert people to Viking artifacts and the like, but to use Sweden’s history to “create the narrative†that will make Muslim migrants “part of something.â€
We have already seen how that works. Remember the fake news story about the Viking burial cloth bearing the word “Allah� Last October, a Swedish researcher gained international headlines by claiming that burial costumes from Viking graves dating back to the ninth and tenth centuries had been found to be inscribed with the name “Allah.†The intent of this was obvious: to convince Swedes that Islam had always been a part of Sweden, all the way back to the days of the Vikings, and so they should not be concerned about the mass Muslim migration that was now bringing Sweden unprecedented rape and other crime rates. Islam has always been a part of Sweden! Stop opposing mass Muslim migration!
The Viking burial cloths didn’t really feature the name “Allah†at all, as Stephennie Mulder, an associate professor of Medieval Islamic art and archaeology at the University of Texas at Austin, proved shortly thereafter, but by then the damage had been done. The idea had entered, however dimly, the popular consciousness: the Vikings were really Muslims. Islam is Swedish. Sweden was Islamic before it was Christian. The Muslim migrants are Swedes.
The “Allah†Viking burial cloth propaganda offensive was one manifestation of what Qaisar Mahmood and others like him are doing. There is no Muslim history in Sweden, but Qaisar Mahmood is working to change the very idea of cultural heritage and fabricate fictions about a historical Muslim presence in Sweden in order to advance his political and sociological agenda.
Qaisar Mahmood, as a Pakistani, of course has no Swedish heritage of his own. His admitted lack of knowledge of Swedish heritage and history ought to have disqualified him from his position, but this is how Sweden is obliterating itself and committing cultural and national suicide. After all, Swedes appointed Qaisar Mahmood to this position. It is Swedish leaders who want to destroy Swedish cultural and national identity.
Congratulations on the purchase of your new cursed Instant Pot multi-use programmable Pressure Cooker. Instant Pot is the #1 selling 7-in-1 multi-cooker that reduces cooking times up to 70% by summoning the horrible black magical powers of Baphomet, the Sabbatic Goat God. Your cursed Instant Pot will change the way you cook kitchen staples like soups, stews, meats, rice, potatoes, hard boiled eggs and so much more!
Before you get started here are some Frequently Asked Questions.
What is the Instant Pot?
The Instant Pot is a smart Electric Pressure Cooker that lets you spend less time in the kitchen and more time with your family.
How does my cursed Instant Pot cook food so quickly?
The cursed Instant Pot uses a high-pressure cooking chamber, advanced microprocessor technology and the black magic of an ancient pagan deity, Baphomet, our unholy dark lord and savior, to reduce cooking times and energy usage by up to 70%.
Developed by top food scientists, engineers, and necromancers, the Instant Pot uses cutting-edge, lab-tested algorithms to control cooking pressure and temperature while keeping the revolting powers of an atavistic goat-god safely trapped within a shard of shimmering jet black obsidian.
What can I make with my cursed Instant Pot?
Your cursed Instant Pot is perfect for slow-braised meats and stews, cooking rice, steaming vegetables and even making yogurt!
Does my cursed Instant Pot mock God?
Yes. Summoning the powers of a profane occultist nightmare to save time in the kitchen is an abomination and an affront to God.
If this concerns you, please consider one of the many non-cursed Instant Pots available on our website.
I added ingredients to my cursed Instant Pot and they disappeared forever into a cold and infinite swirling abyss. Is this normal?
Make sure the stainless steel Inner Pot is set firmly inside the Cooker Base and making contact with the heating element. When positioned properly the Inner Pot should prevent ingredients from falling into an endless expanse of pain and suffering.
When I open my cursed Instant Pot I hear a chorus of distant screams.
Due to our unique manufacturing process and uneasy accord with a heathen idol, you may occasionally hear the tortured and infinite wails of the damned emanating from within your cursed Instant Pot. If the screams become too frequent or anguished, try recalibrating by holding down the KEEP WARM and TIMER buttons for 5 seconds.
Paul Glasco explains that they have really piled on the paperwork and special requirements to get one of the 100,000 1911s being released by the Army to the Civilian Marksmanship Program. All this foofaraw will add to your costs and artificially inflate the price of these pistols.
In my parents’ generations’ day, you could simply mail order surplus firearms from the CMP if you were an NRA member. My uncle had a stockpile of Springfield and 1917 Enfield actions he had purchased for peanuts stored in the floor joists of his basement ceiling to be made into sporters, one rifle at a time, by the gunsmith Al Compton of Ringtown when each of the boys in the family made it to hunting age.
