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The following article, During The Great Depression They Were Called “Hoovervilles”, But Today America’s Shantytowns Are Called “Bidenvilles”, was first published on Conservative Firing Line. To those at the bottom of America’s economic pyramid, it feels like the economy has already collapsed.  When you can’t afford to put a roof over your head and you barely have enough food to eat, nothing else really matters.  During the Great Depression of the 1930s, millions of homeless Americans created large shantytowns known as … Continue reading During The Great Depression They Were Called “Hoovervilles”, But Today America’s Shantytowns Are Called “Bidenvilles” ...

Extraterrestrial activities with acid rock icons. The post The Paul Kanter song about “stealing a starship” with Jerry Garcia and David Crosby first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

Well, we’re a couple of days into the annual festival of malignant narcissism that is Pride Month — a 30-day bacchanal of corporate virtue-signaling and cranky anti-normie bigotry the majority of the population is growing weary of and is beginning to despise. My greeting for this year came on my Facebook, when this happened… Why was the LSU athletic department, which took in just under $200 million last year and managed nonetheless to operate at a loss, engaging in LGBTQ Alphabet People advocacy? The ratio which descended on whichever sports information department functionary vomited that virtue-signal up on the athletic department page was legendary. I’m on Team Christian…. I might not even make the practice squad, but I’m on the team somehow. And then LSU’s baseball team proceeded to lose to North Carolina in an NCAA regional game Saturday night, suggesting that the Baseball Gods were no more amused than the majority of the school’s athletic boosters. It’s not just LSU. North Carolina’s Pride Month virtue-signal might have been even worse… I’m picking on the athletic programs at LSU and UNC, but I could point out any of an innumerable swath of corporate and other brands still flogging Pride Month as some sort of American tradition pulling us all together. But we aren’t together, and the fact of the matter is there are a whole bunch of us — probably most of the country, in fact, though you’re never going to get accurate polling on this — who will never, ever agree to celebrate Pride Month. Anybody want to drink this? Call it “inclusivity” if you want. Generally the only inclusivity this kind of in-your-face celebration of unsustainable lifestyles will create is that its purveyors are included on the calendar of the bankruptcy court. You don’t tend to get our business when you beat us over the head with this sort of thing. We’re not in the streets, though we do chuckle when the Pride crowd runs into the pro-Hamas gang and finds out that Queers For Palestine isn’t actually a thing… Pro-Palestine protesters clash with Philly pride parade participants. Who you rooting for? pic.twitter.com/Of9Iz7Dw8G — Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) June 2, 2024 And by the way, here’s the most unintentionally hilarious thing you’ll see this month… There’s “inclusion” for you, right? The opinions of Normals are not to be included in this “inclusive” celebration. I’ll appoint myself the spokesman for The Normals, at least for the purpose of this column. And I’m qualified for the job, for one particular reason — I don’t give a damn what the Pride Month mob calls me. I know they hate me, and the feeling is pretty mutual, and I’m fine with that. Why? I’m on Team Christian. I wouldn’t call myself a particularly valuable player on my team, I’m definitely a benchwarmer and I might not even make the practice squad, but I’m on the team somehow. I’m not on Team Pagan. That’s why I think Pride Month is an abomination. It isn’t that I’m a homophobe, though I reject the entire concept of homophobia as crap. To prefer heterosexuality to homosexuality is not a mental illness. It isn’t a “phobia.” Heterosexuality, done correctly, produces children, which sustains society. Homosexuality doesn’t. And the more homosexuals and others engaging in Alphabet People lifestyles there are, simple math will tell you, the more work the heterosexuals will have to do to sustain the population. Somehow it’s “homophobic” to recognize this fact? Why on earth would us Normals accept such a formulation? Our way of life is proven through thousands of years of civilizational development. Yours? Not much of a track record. We’re under no obligation to accept this new panoply of habits as equal. Particularly when we know Pride Month is an all-out assault on the nuclear family. And that’s offensive to those of us who are on Team Christian. And by the way, there’s a difference between being gay and being one of the Pride Month Alphabet People. My guess is less than a majority of the former belong to the latter, and I’m pretty confident in my guess. I honestly don’t care if you’re gay. Who you sleep with is none of my business. I have gay friends who agree wholeheartedly with me in this regard, and they’re worthy of respect for it. It wasn’t so long ago that keeping your sex life discreet was a sign of class. Pride Month coming in June reminds me of the old schoolyard insult: you’re like school in summertime — NO CLASS. Well, in most places June is summertime and the schools are closed, and those Pride parades blighting the landscape are definitely no-class affairs. Ugly people wearing too few articles of clothing, bizarre bodily decorations, public profanity on a level which wasn’t even legal in most places not so long ago. We’re supposed to celebrate this? Call me a homophobe. Fine. Here’s my crime: Who you sleep with is none of my business, and I want who you sleep with to be none of my business. Requiring me to celebrate sexual activity and lifestyles that my religious background has taught me are sinful is an offense to me. What else is an offense to me is to claim, as the Pride Month crowd does, that observing the Biblical prohibition of homosexuality as a sin is a sign of bigotry. How narcissistic is that? Those of us on Team Christian are pretty sure that God predates the Alphabet People, you know. In other words, it’s not really about you. It really isn’t. After all, homosexuality isn’t the only sexual activity and lifestyle which is considered sinful. Prostitution, fornication, pedophilia, beastiality, and adultery are all sins as well. But nobody set up a month to celebrate those. Unless we’re going to expand Pride Month to celebrate those as well. Which wouldn’t be much of a surprise, since those Alphabet People letters keep expanding every year and so do those colored stripes and chevrons on that Pride flag they’re demanding be displayed everywhere. Team Christian has no particular animus for homosexuals, you know. The Pride/Alphabet gang does everything it can to sell that narrative, but it isn’t true. It’s a bad-faith attempt to divide people and to disparage Christianity as the basis for Western Civilization — which is something else they can’t stand. The gay lifestyle is sinful. Get upset that I said it all you want; that doesn’t change what’s been true for thousands of years. At Team Christian, though, we recognize that we’re all sinners. I’m anything but holier than thou. I know that it’s going to take a miracle of God’s grace to get me past the Pearly Gates, so I’m hardly in a position to condemn anybody for their worth, or lack of it, in the eyes of the Lord. But acting as though your set of sins is special and that somehow they make you a civil rights constituency is a perfect example of the pagan mentality which has it that if you can amass enough power you can remake the world as though you’re a god. At Team Christian, we even shake our heads in bemusement over the celebration of Pride, even regardless of the sinful lifestyle it denotes. Pride itself is one of the seven deadly sins. Pride in sin is a doubling down on that. And you want us to celebrate this? We’d be celebrating the complete perversion of established morality and tradition based on nothing but the sheer willpower of a small minority of people standing against an order we believe was set by a higher power. You can’t get a better example of a pagan mentality than that. And like I said, I’m on Team Christian, not Team Pagan. So to hell with your celebration of one of the seven deadly sins. I refuse to participate and I reject it out of hand. READ MORE from Scott McKay: Five Quick Things: Pier Pressure Just Call National Review the Stupid Party Review From Now On Trump Extends a Hand to the Libertarians The post Pride Month Is Awful. I Won’t Participate. appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

A day after parting ways with editor Sally Buzbee, The Washington Post published the newspaper equivalent of an Emily Litella “never mind.” “In the pandemic, we were told to keep six feet apart,” the headline reads. “There’s no science to support that.” Who told us the science supported that? The Emily Litella of the medical profession, Anthony Fauci, deserves blame. So, too, to great degree, does The Washington Post. (READ MORE from Daniel Flynn: 10 Reasons Liberals Haven’t Closed the Happiness Gap) For years, he pushed masks, social distancing, and the notion that Covid-19 started naturally. In both the news and opinion sections, The Washington Post acted as a booster sheet for NIAID and the CDC during the pandemic. Dr. Anthony Fauci became a sort of canonized figure for whom criticism became blasphemy and whatever unelected government employees wearing lab coats in front of cameras said amounted to science. And only rubes — the type of Washingtonians who read the Times and not the Post — questioned that. A sampling of the era’s Post headlines tells a story: “To save lives, social distancing must continue longer than we expect,” “Social distancing could buy U.S. valuable time against coronavirus,” “Six feet may not be enough to protect against coronavirus,” and “Why easing off social distancing soon would be a huge mistake.” Never mind. By June 3, 2024, the newspaper reversed course. “It’s still not clear who at the CDC settled on the six-foot distance; the agency has repeatedly declined to specify the authors of the guidance, which resembled its recommendations on how to avoid contracting the flu,” health reporter Dan Diamond wrote Monday. A CDC spokesperson credited a team of experts, who drew from research such as a 1955 study on respiratory droplets. In his book, [former Food and Drug Administration head Scott] Gottlieb wrote that the Trump White House pushed back on the CDC’s initial recommendation of 10 feet of social distance, saying it would be too difficult to implement. The Post’s words easily seduce into thinking one reads a refreshing change of heart from the tax write-off disguised as a newspaper. Alas, the timing, coming hours before Dr. Anthony Fauci testified on Capitol Hill, looks like an effort to reveal to conceal and remove the oomph from hearings that aimed to disclose Fauci’s admission in earlier, executive session that no science buttressed the mantra and mandate of six feet for social distancing. “I think it would fall under the category of empiric,” Fauci said of the CDC staff arrived-at rule establishing six feet as the appropriate distance between humans. “Just an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data or even data that could be accomplished…. it sort of just appeared, that six feet is going to be the distance.” Never mind. Why did not Fauci tell us then what he admits now? Rep. John Joyce, a medical doctor representing Pennsylvania, asked him this and other important questions on Monday. Fauci dodged and passed the buck. “It was a CDC decision,” he explained about social distancing, later saying he did not speak out because “it is not appropriate to be publicly challenging a sister organization.” Fauci sounded like a man who loathes responsibility even as he loves power. Uncredentialed scientists coined a name for such creatures: bureaucrats. And when Fauci behaves as a slippery creature of the bureaucracy and not a trusted man of the medical profession, he gets in trouble — and worse still, gets others in trouble. Also on Monday, an even-keeled Rep. Nicole Malliotakis highlighted government scientists boasting of communicating through personal emails to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests, earning over $700 million for royalties on medical products developed on the government dime, and dismissing the idea that Covid-19 started in a laboratory. She compelled Fauci to admit, “I don’t think the concept of a lab-leak theory is a conspiracy theory.” Never mind. As Fauci reverted to talking points accusing his detractors of relying on misinformation and disinformation, one could not help but sense the man does not grasp his own irony. For years, he pushed masks, social distancing, and the notion that Covid-19 started naturally (away from the Wuhan Virology Institute to which he oversaw grants for gain-of-function research). On Monday, he struggled to explain his own role in not just misinformation — but as his private emails on masks and other matters contradicting his public positions show — disinformation. (READ MORE: This Is Not America. It’s Manhattan.) On all that a nation shuttered schools, held professional sporting events in empty stadiums, and bankrupted so many bars and restaurants. Never mind. The post Anthony Fauci Imitates Emily Litella on Capitol Hill appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.