Transgender fiction is about political control
Transgender fiction is about political control
Elite gather at G20 and in Glasgow to talk about their religion
Once again, the transgender issue has attracted much media attention. The usual suspects are trying to censor any speech that isn’t entirely supportive of leftwing orthodoxy on the matter, while our own government is propagating the fiction at home and abroad.
Twitter suspended Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) for taking a shot at Rachel Levine, who as head of the U.S. Public Health Service is technically a full four-star admiral, even though she commands no seamen. You may recall Levine from her tenure as Pennsylvania’s top public health autocrat, a role which she used to implement an onerous shutdown on the state’s economy. Whereas Caitlyn Jenner goes to great lengths to look feminine, Levine looks like Sam Kinison threw on a dress and reported for work.
Banks’s offense came in response to people celebrating the first woman four-star officer. He tweeted: “the title of first female four-star officer gets taken by a man.” For this offense, which the corporate media cried an intentional “misgendering,” Twitter suspended a member of Congress without discussion or recourse.
Comedian Dave Chappelle continued to take heat for poking fun at people with gender dysphoria. Failing to detect even an iota of irony, leftwing NBC News lamented that Netflix released Chappelle’s show instead of censoring it, noting that otherwise, “Netflix has also established itself more generally as a destination for forward-thinking and diverse offerings.”
Even though Netflix hasn’t yanked Chappelle’s show, it seems likely he has done his last project with the company. To his infantile detractors, Chappelle said: “You said you wanted a safe working environment at Netflix. Well, it seems like I am the only one who can’t go into the office anymore.”
Chappelle also said that movie distributors are shunning a film about him, and various oh-so-artistic festivals pulled invitations for him to present the movie. He will instead seek to distribute the film directly, which will probably be a boon to beleaguered theaters that participate: Chappelle has been performing to sold out shows in London with ticket prices of $100-300. He is hinting at a U.S. tour.
Not to be left out of the hoopla, our State Department, taking time away from neglecting the Americans and allies it left behind in Afghanistan, and still not back at work after nearly two years off, has started issuing passports that can list an “X” instead of male or female for sex. The gradually wokening Wall Street Journal reports:
Dana Zzyym, an intersex and nonbinary U.S. Navy veteran who sued the State Department in 2015 over the issue, was the first person to receive the passport with this designation, according to Lambda Legal, which represents Mx. Zzyym, who uses the gender-neutral honorific.
I’ll be really impressed if Mx. Zzyym becomes the first person to present this type of passport to border authorities in Iran.
Why is America contorting its politics, culture, and even the English language over people with gender dysphoria, which even government agencies packed full of wokistas concede make up much less than one percent of the population?
At first I thought that self-appointed gay groups and the Democrats who oversee their modest plot on the party’s plantation needed a new topic. With gay equality and marriage in all fifty states and broad acceptance of gays and lesbians in most walks of life, rice bowls of professionally aggrieved groups risked going empty. No well-funded pressure group ever declared victory, returned extra funds to donors, and declared it to be Miller Time. Just keep affixing more letters to “LGB” and there will be no need to get real jobs.
But I was wrong. If that were the cause it would be easier to ignore or defeat. The reality is far more sinister and dangerous, even if most of those emoting over gender dysphoria don’t understand what they are being caused to do.
Transgender radicalism is actually about forcing you to accept something you know to be a lie. It is a powerful form of tyranny. Basic propaganda, doublespeak, or newspeak might just obscure the truth and force people to doubt or step around the obvious. Deliberately forcing you to accept and embrace something you know to be a lie is a step farther. It is not for nothing that at the end of George Orwell’s 1984, the teary protagonist doesn’t just pretend to love Big Brother, he actually does.
I am reminded of what Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said in the documentary “Created Equal,” which was censored by Amazon for thoughtcrime. Contrasting segregation in Savannah when he was young, which placed a park off limits to blacks, to those who tried to silence Thomas for thinking the wrong way as a black man, he concluded:
How is that different from being told ‘you can’t walk across that park’? ‘Oh, you can’t think those thoughts.’ How is that any different? You know what? I’d prefer to be excluded from the park because I can live my life quite freely without having set foot in a park. But you can’t live it freely without having your own thoughts.
The small minority of activist radicals who are driving the transgender issue, who have so successfully seized the heights of our culture and dominated wimps in corporate America, while warping our language at its most fundamental level, could care less about people suffering from gender dysphoria, which can be debilitating. Rather, once they can force you to believe and espouse this particular lie, they can do so with other topics. You say that American meritocracy wasn’t racist, that our history is noble and worthy of celebration, that Japanese culture, for example, is superior to Haitian culture, that climate alarmism just raises energy costs and doesn’t help the environment, or that open borders will further divide America and undermine democracy? Today, espousing these realities will just exclude you from polite company and important jobs. Tomorrow, you may not be allowed to have them at all. Say them aloud or simply be suspected of having the thoughts and you will be made an unperson.
Conservatives need to wake up and smell the tyranny. The glee club made up of groups like Wall Street Journal editorial page, Heritage Foundation, House GOP Caucus, and Club for Growth doesn’t like to talk about icky and divisive cultural issues? Man up. These cultural matters are the key fight of our time.
Worshipping the Angry Sun God
Joe Biden conceded recently that he should probably visit the southern border, which his policies have turned from a place brought under control through Trump actions into a lawless free-for-all. Claims that Democrats want to bring in 10 million new people through illegal immigration and refugee admissions during Biden’s current term no longer seem outlandish. Rather, the efforts seem like a concerted move to dilute the rest of us with those who are likely to be dependent on government and supportive of the Democrat Party. This factor is reinforced by the Democrats’ preference for illegal aliens and refugees. Those groups are far more likely to depend on the state than the long line of people who have followed the rules and are seeking to immigrate lawfully.
While Biden doesn’t have the time to mosey down to the border, he is taking several days to travel to Europe. He will meet the Red Pope, attend the G20 summit, and then be in Glasgow for the COP26 hootenanny where the elite talk about their religion, climate change alarmism. All three endeavors are pointless. The Red Pope is an anti-American, anti-capitalist toady of the Chinese government, to which he gave a veto over the appointment of clergy. He has managed the delicate pirouette of being hyper-progressive but somehow still anti-gay. He has also said nothing as the world’s most prominent Catholic layman, Jimmy Lai, rots in a Hong Kong prison for advocating democracy and freedom of religion.
The G20 summit arose in 2008, about the last time everyone considered America down for the count, and I challenge you to identify one thing it has accomplished since then except fill up airline seats and call girl appointments. The larger the number next the “G,” the more the body resembles the UN General Assembly, which also serves little purpose.
The coming COP26 meeting in Glasgow is the reason you have been seeing a plethora of news reports and radical proposals over climate change alarmism. Like pagans sacrificing to the sun god in antiquity, our elite will soon gather to sacrifice our economies to this angry and powerful deity. Climate scientist Judith Curry, a doctor like Jill Biden, sums up some of the problems with today’s assumptions about climate change, which true to our times, are not allowed to be debated:
“In a nutshell, we’ve vastly oversimplified both the problem and its solutions. The complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity of the existing knowledge about climate change is being kept away from the policy and public debate. The solutions that have been proposed are technologically and politically infeasible on a global scale.
“Climate model predictions of alarming impacts for the 21st century are driven by an emissions scenario, RCP8.5, that is highly implausible. Climate model predictions neglect scenarios of natural climate variability, which dominate regional climate variability on inter-annual to multi-decadal time scales.
“Whether or not warming is ‘dangerous‘ is an issue of values, about which science has nothing to say. According to the IPCC, there is not yet evidence of changes in the global frequency or intensity of hurricanes, droughts, floods or wildfires. In the U.S., the states with by far the largest population growth are Florida and Texas, which are warm, southern states. Property along the coast is skyrocketing in value. Personal preference and market value do not yet regard global warming as ‘dangerous.’
“Climate change is a grand narrative in which manmade climate change has become the dominant cause of societal problems. Everything that goes wrong reinforces the conviction that that there is only one thing we can do prevent societal problems – stop burning fossil fuels. This grand narrative misleads us to think that if we solve the problem of manmade climate change, then these other problems would also be solved.
“Does all this mean we should do nothing about climate change? No. We should work to minimize our impact on the planet, which isn’t simple for a planet with 7 billion inhabitants. We should work to minimize air and water pollution… Whether or not we manage to drastically curtail our carbon dioxide emissions in the coming decades, we need to reduce our vulnerability to extreme weather and climate events.
That is the type of common-sense, science-centric approach to climate change that you will hear from zero reporters and delegates in Glasgow. Instead, you will see a feckless global elite devising new ways to elevate the cost of energy, which in turn raises the cost of everything from food to transportation to housing. They are doing this undaunted by recent lines for gasoline in Britain, citizens across Europe at risk of going cold amid a shortage of natural gas, and the price of oil now consistently above $80 per barrel.
Those in Glasgow need to understand that while Americans pay lip service to climate alarmism, they are not on board for the proposed solution, contrary to what our representatives say. A poll asking if Americans would pay an extra $10 per month on their electricity bill for climate measures found that 68% would not. Furthermore, delegates should know that any promises issued by the Biden administration will be rescinded by the next Republican president. Just as George W. Bush terminated our participation in Kyoto and Trump ended our involvement in Paris, the next GOP president will undo whatever Biden’s staff have him endorse.
Profiting from Dumb Policy
As we recently discussed on a podcast episode of Simon & Whiton (video|audio), investors can profit from companies that are actually increasing oil and gas production. Such companies man not be as easy to identify as one might imagine. For example, activist board members are already tampering with Exxon’s future development plans, and Shell, which was previously ordered by a Dutch court to commit suicide (appeal pending), is now being pressured by activists to break up. Will one offshoot produce oil and the other sell cappuccinos?
Nonetheless, smaller companies out there actually increasing production to take advantage of higher demand and prices should do well. So too should the Russian economy, writ large. Energy prices have a strong impact on Russian GDP and the country is increasing its dominance over European energy markets (exception: France, which gets 70% of its electricity from nuclear). Russia’s central bank recently increased its key interest rate to 7.5% and the ruble has appreciated modestly against the dollar, with more appreciation likely. I’m long on Russia through the VanEck Russia ETF (ticker: RSX).
Mediocrity of the Week
We need to talk about Cathie Wood again. Yes, awarding her mediocrity of the week is rapidly becoming a weekly tradition, but some people are just up to the challenge. Wood made news again by responding to Twitter boss Jack Dorsey’s claim that “Hyperinflation is going to change everything. It’s happening.” Dorsey is foolish and wrong about many things, but might be right about this one. As the boss of Square, he has access to real-time pricing information across the fruited plain that is superior to official government statistics.
Wood repeated the official wisdom that inflation is transient and would end after Christmas. Then she added:
As with much of her public information, Wood has stumbled onto a facet of the truth that unfortunately obscures the actual truth. Velocity of money is the rate at which money changes hands or moves from one use to another. True enough, during the Obama years, massive creation of new dollars and near-zero interest rates did not lead to rampant inflation in part because velocity of money slowed. With Washington running wild and amid new regulatory requirements and tax hikes, banks and other businesses hoarded cash instead of using it. Fewer dollars chasing the same amount of goods means lower inflation.
Unfortunately for Wood, her claim that velocity continues to slow is just plain wrong. All it takes is a few seconds on the web to verify this reality.
Inflation ahoy.
Superman: Gay or Super Gay?
You’ve probably been up at night wondering if Superman is gay, what with his snappy outfit that fits awfully tightly. While Superman himself may or may not be gay, DC Comics has informed the public that his son is in fact gay. Or at least bisexual, even though that’s not a thing in America. The article about this important news in the leftwing Guardian also declared of Superman’s son that, “His boyfriend is also revealed to have special powers.” I’ll bet he does.
The wokifying of Superman will also involve DC Comics terminating his creed, “Truth, Justice and the American Way.” Now it’s “Truth, Justice and a Better Tomorrow.”
The indispensable Babylon Bee couldn’t help itself, running an article titled: “Aquaman Comes Out As Even Gayer.” According the Bee, Aquaman declared, “I’m way gayer than Superman. For a long time, you all knew I was gay, but I’m really more like 27 gay men trapped in one gay man’s body.”
Have a great weekend!