RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://nypost.com/2023/04/17/budweiser-releases-new-pro-america-ad-with-iconic-mascot-in-wake-of-anheuser-busch-mulvaney-controversy/?dicbo=v2-dStmkAs

Budweiser has released a new patriotic advertisement as its parent company struggles with controversy over its endorsement partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney.

The advertisement, which was released on social media Friday, features one of Budweiser’s famous Clydesdale horses traversing the country from New York City to the Grand Canyon, passing by scenes in the American heartland as a narrator delivers a patriotic message.

“This is a story bigger than beer,” the ad’s narrator says in the ad. “This is the story of the American spirit.”

As the ad plays, the Clydesdale horse passes by some of the most famous American landmarks, showcasing the New York City skyline, the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC, small towns, and farmland.

At one point, the ad showcases two people raising an American flag as one places her hand over her heart.

“Brewed for those who found opportunity in challenge and hope in tomorrow,” the ad’s narrator says as the horse passes by the flag raising duo and the Lincoln Memorial.

The patriotic ad comes as Anheuser-Busch, which owns Budweiser, continues to deal with backlash over a partnership between another one of its popular brands, Bud Light, and Mulvaney.

Anheuser-Busch has suffered a financial hit as calls to boycott its brands have spread across the country, with one Missouri bar owner telling Fox Business last week that sales of bottled Bud Light dropped 30%, while draft sales dropped 50%.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/teen-takeover-terrorizes-chicago-hundreds-children-destroy-property-attack-tourists

Hundreds of teenagers stormed the streets of downtown Chicago, smashing car windows, attacking bystanders and sending panicked tourists running from the sound of gunfire.

“Where are their parents at? That’s my question,” a woman who identified as a Chicago native told Fox 32 as the unruly scene played out in downtown Chicago on Saturday night.

Fox 32 cameras captured video of teenagers crowding the streets and police seeking to restore order to the area.

Large groups of teens were seen blasting music from Bluetooth speakers and roaming in front of traffic, with some attempting to gain access to the city’s Millennium Park, which is off-limits to those under 21 after certain hours, and the downtown Art Institute. 

Some teens in the group began jumping up and down on cars, smashing windows and attacking people inside. One woman told Fox 32 her husband was attacked from the driver side of his vehicle and beaten after a group of teens jumped up and down on the couple’s windshield. The man was taken to a local hospital for treatment.

Hundreds of police officers assisted by SWAT teams descended on downtown in an attempt to restore order as gunfire was reported multiple times amid the unfolding scene.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/if-western-civilization-dies-put-it-down-as-a-suicide-goldman-sachs-pronouns-merit-ideology-23c3c6c8

A few years ago the then-boss of Goldman Sachs explained to me the main reason he thought the firm had risen to such a dominant position in global investment banking over the previous half century. At the start of that period, banking was still dominated by a blue-blood class. In London especially, where I began my career in finance, the City was a place in which, in a still heavily regulated market, a slot in one of the big institutions was a coveted ticket to a life of riches.

But the tickets were available mainly to men from the right sort of background. The rules for identifying and selecting these men were opaque. There was no formal bar on anyone from a particular socioeconomic status being admitted to the magic circle—that would have been crass and, even then, illegal. Instead a complex system of semiotics did the job of weeding out the riffraff. A flattened vowel pronunciation, a vulgar word for lavatory, the wrong sort of shoes, and you were excluded without even understanding why. In Britain, the system’s overseers had an acronym by which the untouchables were designated: NQOCD, for “not quite our class, dear.”

Goldman came along and cut through this thicket of asinine, self-perpetuating privilege. It simply hired the best people for the job, however they spoke, whatever they looked like. As long as you were smart, driven, ruthless and committed to making money and beating the living daylights out of the competition, you were in. It worked.

I was reminded of this when I read last week that employees at Goldman have recently been encouraged by their leaders to embrace a full rainbow range of “pronouns” when identifying themselves in communications, including such neologisms as “ze,” “zir” and “zemself.”

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/04/history-as-progress-history-as-horror/

Looking recently at a picture of a demonstration against the celebration of Australia Day, I could not help but notice a person of Aboriginal descent dressed in that traditional item of costume, the T-shirt, employing that equally traditional instrument, the megaphone.

The megaphone is the perfect instrument for the expression of one of the most reliable and gratifying of all emotions, self-righteousness. The megaphone is versatile: it is also the perfect instrument for the demagogue. It couldn’t be better for making dialogue impossible, for drowning out dissension and for the propagation of half-truths.

Historiography is now the favoured subject of the self-righteous demagogue. As a science (I use the word in its loose, continental European sense), historiography’s influence on mass psychology is much underestimated. With the rise in the number of educated persons—by which I mean persons who have spent at least a fifth of their lives in supposedly educational establishments—it has become ever more salient, ever more influential.

The protests against the celebration of Australia Day were an illustration of the effect of changing historiography. A day intended to celebrate the founding of a successful, free and prosperous country was turned by demonstrators into its very opposite, a day of lamentation for that very founding. Thus, the same event more than two centuries ago, the arrival of the First Fleet, gave rise to diametrically opposite assessments of its moral and political significance.

All historiographies are incomplete, of course, for they cannot encompass all that happened in history, and therefore are open to attack by those who object to what they omit. I began to think about this matter when I took an interest in medical history. The first book I read on the subject was Singer and Underwood’s A Short History of Medicine (not so short, I thought it), which was in essence an account of the progress of medicine to its state of enlightenment as of 1962, when the book was published. It consisted of brief descriptions of the work of men who had contributed the new and improved ideas that contributed to the science’s upward march, each contributing his mite, with a few, such as Harvey, Pasteur, Lister, Koch and Ehrlich, contributing much more than a mere mite.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/04/vivek_ramaswamy_is_willing_to_stand_behind_strong_conservative_principles.html

I realized why I like Vivek Ramaswamy when I heard Sen. Tim Scott announce that he’s created an exploratory committee to decide whether he should run for president. Scott speaks like a politician; Vivek speaks like a conservative. The former says what his consultants tell him to say; Vivek offers unfiltered insights into his thinking and is willing to say what politicians have been trained not to say. That’s clear from Vivek’s 25 goals as president and his honesty about so-called “transgenderism.”

Briefly, regarding Tim Scott, I admire him as a person: He’s a highly intelligent man who overcame a difficult childhood to become a successful businessman and politician, and he’s mostly conservative. However, Scott has been marinated in D.C. politics and, to my ear, he’s lost his authenticity. His video about his exploratory committee sounds like it went through two focus groups and three consultants before it finally came out of his mouth:

The same was true of Nikki Haley’s announcement that she was throwing her hat into the ring. In both cases, they as if you could open a 1970s-style catalog called “Politicians,” leaf through its pages for the “generic conservative” line, and find their pictures. (I may learn to think they’ve got what it takes but, for now, I’m reserving judgment.)

Trump wasn’t and isn’t like that. He is a complete original, an iconoclast who loves his country, makes great deals, and is unfettered by any leftist or Uniparty ideas—something that’s true despite his having been a Democrat. Heck, I was once a Democrat, too.