This will be the first time I’ll be having a Christmas tree in my home. If you know anything about me personally, you’d know I am a sucker for 1. lights and 2. decorations. So, naturally, I’ll use any excuse possible to put up lights and decorations.
I’m still also very much Jewish, so when I look for things to buy, I first go to the $5 and under category.
Browsing through the Target website, I noticed these ornaments among the other discounted tchotchkes:
There appear to be a whole collection of these:
There are also, erm, white Santas and friends for sale, and they’re also only at the $3 mark, but they’re not on the $5 and under sale as far as I can see (I checked, twice).
I’m just not sure how it’s possible to have a dark complexion when you live in the North Pole.
On Friday, I shared some news about the county’s plan to rename Lee Highway (and about how only affluent middle-aged white women are responding to the county’s diversity survey). The name is apparently so offensive, that local news neglected to mention it in their post on the matter:
If you are curious, here are the final contenders:
“Loving,” in particular, was also the planned new name for a local high school: Washington-Lee would’ve become Washington-Loving. If you didn’t know the root of the name “Loving,” “Washington-Loving” would surely cause a lot of high school jokes. The school is now named “Washington-Liberty”:
Funny, the Twitter @ “GeneralsPride,” plural, doesn’t make much sense anymore.
What’s interesting to me is the pushback that renaming Lee Highway is getting from the overwhelmingly liberal city/county, especially in the comments section of the local news and on Facebook. This is how Arlington voted in 2020:
The ruckus caused by commenters aside, it seems like Arlington really is on a quest to replace its own history.
The lede: “Arlington is seeking diverse voices in its Dialogues on Race and Equity, but so far the biggest group of respondents have been middle-aged white women who are relatively affluent.”
“It has been interesting… we are seeing predominantly white women, middle aged, homeowners completing the assessment,” Byrd told the County Board last week. “So we really, really want to encourage everyone — so we can hear all of the voices that we typically do not hear — to complete the assessment.”
The jokes just write themselves.
What’s not so funny, however, are the name choices to replace Lee Highway running through town, revealed in October:
“The 20 names up for community consideration are “based on local historical figures, represent broad ideals, or highlight local flora/fauna,” the alliance said. The names are:
Arcova (acronym for Arlington County, Va.)
Ella Baker
James E. Browne
Community
Dogwood
Equity
Green Way
John Glenn
Harmony
Inclusive
Innovation
Justice
John M. Langston
Mildred and Richard Loving
Main Street
Leonard “Doc” Muse
Edward T. Morton
Necostin
Unity
Maggie Walker
“The Working Group will consider street suffix options, such as Boulevard or Avenue, in future deliberations,” the Lee Highway Alliance noted in a press release.”
No doubt that these rich middle-aged white women played a part, along with some low IQ counterparts.
Here is some demographic data for the county, if you’re interested in that kind of thing, from the U.S. Census:
While I was offline and celebrating Thanksgiving, Cato constitutional scholar Ilya Shapiro responded to Kentucky representative Tomas Massie with some pejorative comments about the rest of America:
The Reason libertarian crowd doubled down on this when Massie asked if Shapiro’s position was shared by Cato, the top DC libertarian think tank:
For those who do not recall, here’s some inside baseball for you: this very same Elizabeth Nolan Brown tried to get a college student blacklisted for life, because he tweeted a meme about a sandwich:
ENB said she would delete the tweets, back in 2017, but alas, I was just able to archive them. That tweet, and the replies, are still all up:
Gross behavior from these DC libertarians, indeed!
This afternoon I learned of the passing of Walter E. Williams, who I had the honor of studying under during my time as an undergrad. More than speaking to his accomplishments as an economist–which are plenty, and many have outlined them better than I can–I’d like to talk about him as a person, from just my brief time sitting in his class as a lowly freshman.
I went to George Mason University because I wanted to go to a college where there would at least be some chance of me not failing classes because of my political views. One of the draws of GMU for me was Walter Williams, well-known in conservative and libertarian circles because of his role filling in for Rush Limbaugh, and for his politically incorrect views on racial issues. So, at the first chance I could, I enrolled in Wiliams’ class. It was a ~7:30 AM class. And it required calculus, a prerequisite I had never taken. Way out of my element, I went anyway.
On the first day of class, I sat front row center. I took out my recorder. And when Williams walked in, he asked me, “How do you discriminate when looking for someone to date?” I wasn’t sure the appropriate way to answer for class. But, true to form, Williams came up with the most politically incorrect possible answer of all, one perhaps more politically incorrect than the one in my head. The rest of the course went on similarly. This was a sample question for his final exam prep, for instance:
“Nonsense is forbidden” meant, of course, trying to argue against religion.
The day of my final exam, I was pretty sick. Williams saw that I wasn’t feeling well and, though he had brought bagels and orange juice for the class to enjoy after the test, personally brought me a cup and left it on my desk and told me to feel better. I know it’s a very small gesture, but in the world of academia, and the world of politics, thats something that has still stood out to me since 2011*. Just a simple act of kindness. And he was a kind man.
I never bring my computer with me when I’m going on vacation, so I’ve been MIA while celebrating Thanksgiving with my family (their home also does not have WiFi). I missed this announcement from Katie Miller about the birth of her son:
Stephen and I are elated to announce the arrival of our beautiful daughter Mackenzie Jay Miller who was born on November 19, 2020. She has already captured our hearts, enraptured our souls, and filled us joy beyond measure. pic.twitter.com/mPfZwZCRgh
Of note: some liberals can’t even celebrate this birth because they are such staunch believers in intergenerational sin, that they believe Stephen and Katie Miller’s baby is born evil because they disagree with the parents’ politics.
Which proves, again, some conservatives just don’t get it, and are so very desperate to be accepted by the Washington Post crowd… which will never accept them. Now they’re also seeking employees from the Washington Post’s breed of conservatives, so, hopefully, the Washington Post runs their think pieces one day.
“Coming from the world he writes about, Williamson understands it in a way that most commentators on American politics and culture simply can’t. In these sometimes savage and often hilarious essays, he takes readers on a wild tour of the wreckage of the American republic—the “white minstrel show” of right-wing grievance politics, progressive politicians addicted to gambling revenue, the culture of passive victimhood, and the reality of permanent poverty.
Unsparing yet never unsympathetic, Big White Ghetto provides essential insight into an enormous but forgotten segment of American society.
National Review’s roving and fiery correspondent, Kevin Williamson, is back and this time is taking a deep dive into the dysfunction of the white underclass, poverty, resentments politics, and everyone’s favorite, the Trump phenomenon. In this collection of some of his most popular pieces from National Review, Williamson gives a fresh take on what’s happening both within politics and everyday life across the country in a vibrant, eye-opening manner.”
I guess he’s really gone in from his piece in 2016, called “Father-Fuhrer” (about Trump, of course), that had this real gem in it:
“If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that.
Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down.
The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.
I’ve been MIA a little bit and so I only just saw this now:
And I also missed yesterday:
And this, in between:
From the summary: “In Joe Biden, we have replaced Donald Trump with a more conventional and better-mannered embodiment of the same short-sighted thinking.”
I guess it’s worth reading the whole piece, if you can stomach it. Can’t wait to see the next four years from National Review…
Not to beat a dead horse, but the girl from my last post that thought it was her job to fact-check Giuliani, Fox White House correspondent Kristin Fisher…
… Is apparently filling in for Dana Perino today:
Whoops?
Of course, she is a media darling now too:
Even our favorite conservative news outlet is doing its “YAS QUEEN” dance:
Communism Kills 