"He was under the influence of the idea that some aspects of reality are more real than others: that the seedy side of life is more genuine, more authentic, than the refined and cultured side – and certainly more glamorous than the bourgeois and respectable side. This idea could be said to be the fundamental premise of modern popular culture." -Dalrymple, Theodore.

Are seat belts worth it? Yeah, but not by much.

“This is Africa. These are just bodies dumped into a river. Hundreds. Thousands. No one will ever count. No one will ever try to check an identity, contact a family, find out which limb was severed. Because this is Africa, and they don’t count the bodies in Africa.” -Keith Richburg

Being a kid teaches you how to not be bullied by the strong.  Being a parent teaches you how to not be bullied by the weak.

If government will pay the bill, or is expected to, students will worry less about accumulating debt than otherwise. Which incentivizes universities to care less about controlling costs. Democrats are tossing old tires onto the fire in an alleged attempt to smother it.

"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward -- reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read." -Michael Crichton

"Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things." –GK Chesterton

If people are born in the wrong body, why are there so many now? And why are there so few middle-aged women coming out and so many teens?

"A playground is a great place to be a bully, and a terrible place to be a victim, if the teachers don’t care who started it." -Eliezer Yudkowsky

“If we are going to save America, it will not be done with a badge, it will not be done with a uniform. It will be done by individuals who have simply had enough.” –Terry Jones

https://unherd.com/2022/05/you-cant-be-born-in-the-wrong-body/

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jeyvzALDbjdjjv5RW/pretending-to-be-wise

To know what one ought to do is certainly the hardest thing in life. ‘Doing’ is comparatively easy. – Astronomer Maria Mitchell Life, Letters, and Journals Sept 10, 1855

Liz Cheney

Norah O'Donnell

Serena Williams/Feminism

“Feminism liberated women from the natural dignity of their sex and turned them into inferior men.” -Francis Parker Yockey

“Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.”

― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

Anne Heche had a "huge heart" yet was content to roll the dice on mowing down a family.  I have only a normal heart yet I don't plow into residences.

Salman Rushdie has been stabbed, which exposes an odd aspect of Islam:  In one respect, it's as bad for you as you say it is.

“What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accomodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? – The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world.”

― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

If we need women in our defense forces, we must not need much defense. –Joseph Sobran

Men have better reflexes than do women, blink a lot less often, and are much stronger.

And yet we let women become cops.

Abraham Lincoln once asked an audience how many legs a dog has if you count the tail as a leg. When they answered “five,” Lincoln told them that the answer was four. The fact that you called the tail a leg did not make it a leg. –Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America

At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.” -Abraham Lincoln

"In May 2022, a physician-scientist lost her NIH funding for a drug trial because the trial population did not contain enough blacks. The drug under review was for a type of cancer that blacks rarely get. There were almost no black patients with that disease to enroll in the trial, therefore. Better, however, to foreclose development of a therapy that might help predominantly white cancer patients than to conduct a drug trial without black participants." -Heather Mac Donald

“Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.” -Eric Hoffer

https://www.city-journal.org/the-corruption-of-medicine

"All those who do not follow the line that I have set out will be smashed." -Ho Chi Minh

I bought the book "Requiem," a book about wars in Indochina in the postwar period. What I got was Communist propaganda.

"This, of course, lays bare the curious moral stance of our age: it is not wrong to bash an innocent woman to death with a brick, but it is wrong to condemn the deed and its perpetrators." -Theodore Dalrymple

“There are people who are not interested in the war. Unfortunately, the war is interested in them.” -Fannie Hurst, 1941

I have saved up ~70 stories about the negligence of our justice system from this year. I'm going to tell you about six.

"Here lies Dennis Prager. He fought evil." -Dennis Prager, on his preferred epitaph.