RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/pizzeria-mural-city-government-regulations-sign-code/

But a mural of something else (burgers, cars, unicorns … ) would be just fine.

The government of Arlington, Va., just forced a local pizza restaurant to paint over a mural of pizza that was outside of it — because the mural was of pizza and not something else.

So, you might ask: What could possibly be the problem with an artistic depiction of pizza? After all, I myself saw a lot of cartoon pizza in episodes of Ninja Turtles as a child, and I can confidently say I have suffered absolutely no damage — emotionally or physically — because of it.

Well, according to an article in Reason, the pizza place (called “Goody’s”) was forced to paint over the mural because of the county’s sign code, which prohibits any business from having a mural outside that depicts what’s sold inside. So, basically, the pizza place could have had a mural of pretty much anything else (aside from, like, violence and/or pornography, probably), and it would have been just fine. Here’s the thing, though: Why the hell would the pizza place have a mural of something other than pizza, if the goal of the mural was to get people to buy more pizza? Not to mention the obvious fact that there is literally no discernable reason that a business shouldn’t be able to advertise its legal, family-friendly products using a mural if it chooses to do so. After all, I did a little research, and I was able to find exactly zero examples of anyone being killed (or even injured!) by a painting of dough, sauce, and cheese.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/transgender-teen-study-results-unchanged-activists-forced-review/

A Brown University professor’s study of a “social contagion” effect among transgender teenagers was republished with its results section unchanged Tuesday following an unprecedented post-publication review prompted by a wave of backlash from transgender activists and researchers sympathetic to their cause.

Dr. Lisa Littman’s paper, “Parent Reports of Adolescents and Young Adults Perceived to Show Signs of a Rapid Onset of Gender Dysphoria,” explores a little-understood phenomenon in which a statistically abnormal number of teens, mostly girls, belonging to the same established friend group claim they are transgender within a short period of time.

The study, which relied on findings from a 90-question survey completed by 256 parents of transgender youths, immediately drew the ire of trans activists when it was published in August 2018, because its findings suggested that rising rates of gender dysphoria among teens may be the result of socialization, rather than inherent biological factors.

Brown University removed a press release announcing the study’s publication after the academic journal PLOS ONE conceded to activists’ demand that it take the highly unusual step of ordering a post-publication review. But following that review, the paper was republished with an unchanged results section and a few additions included to provide “additional context.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/sheila-jeffreys-radical-feminist-debunks-transgenderism/

Sheila Jeffreys, an English radical feminist and author, has spent more than forty years fighting for women and girls’ sex-based rights. In 2014 she wrote a book Gender Hurts which controversially rejects the politics of transgenderism. Last week she was in New York with the Women’s Human Rights Campaign helping to launch the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based rights. Here is a quote from an interview she gave with National Review. You can listen to the full audio of the interview below.

If you look at WPATH [World Psychological Association of Transgender Health] for instance, which is putting out a lot of the ideas and theories about transgenderism, purporting to be a medical organization, you need to look at who the funders are. And of course, it’s drug companies. It’s all the major drug companies. All the major names you’d expect to be there. Because the situation with children is that it’s very, very profitable for drug companies. If the children come in at quite young ages then the drug companies are able to delay puberty with drugs like Lupron… it’s off label. It is not approved for these purposes.

Jeffreys’s insights on transgender politics are fascinating, especially on medical harms for children. Listen here.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/03/politics_and_music.html

“Politics is for old men.” Thus a Serbian friend informed me when I visited Belgrade shortly before everything fell apart. He wanted me to send him Beatles albums not easily obtainable at the time so he could listen to “happy music,” by which he meant just music. Unfortunately, politics is for young men (and women) too, and although good music uncorrupted by politics can still be found, bad music with a political or subversive agenda abounds.

As Michael Walsh argues in his magisterial The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, “we must see music and art as separate and apart from politics, no matter the quotidian circumstances that give them birth.” Certainly, aside from military marches and national anthems, music is for the most part not the right medium for political feelings, commentary and themes — except indirectly, as in Country and Western, when the singer expresses his or her love of country or commitment to traditional ways of life.

Far too much music exists to peddle a political or disruptive message, often a predictably leftist screed. Historian Victor Davis Hanson ruefully states in an essay titled Epitaph for a Dying Culture that many people now skip popular music “on the expectation that it is not just vulgar and foul, but incoherently politicalized.” As I pointed out in an earlier article for American Thinker, typical examples are furnished by such truly execrable groups as Rage Against the Machine, the violence-prone deathcore Slipknot (whose fans are known as “maggots”), the ludicrously named Prophets of Rage, the ostentatiously punky Red Hot Chili Peppers, along with Vampire Weekend and Foster the People shilling for socialist hack Bernie Sanders, the manically feminist co-ed War On Women advancing its new wave feminism agenda, and the hardcore rocker band Stick To Your Guns, the latter dedicating their piece of cacophonic rubbish “What Choice Did You Give Us” to the families of hooligans like Eric Garner, Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bioethicists-urge-animal-research-into-male-uterus-transplants/

Years ago the crassly utilitarian Fletcher — who has been called the “patriarch of bioethics” –swooned at the prospect of males giving birth in his 1988 book The Ethics of Genetic Control:

[T]ransplant or replacement medicine foresees the day, after the automatic rejection of alien tissue is overcome, when a uterus can be implanted in a human male’s body—his abdomen has spaces—and gestation started by artificial fertilization and egg transfer.

Hypogonadism could be used to stimulate milk from the man’s rudimentary breasts—men too have mammary glands. If surgery could not construct a cervical canal the delivery could be effected by a Caesarean section and the male or transsexualized mother could nurse his own baby.

It was a classic “it will never happen” argument. Nobody took it seriously. But once again, we find that if radicals envision it, eventually we will try to go there.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/op-ed-use-partner-instead-of-boyfriend-or-girlfriend-to-be-politically-correct/

Partner sounds so businesslike. How about “colleague” or “consort” or ” comrade” or “sidekick”??? rsk

Simply giving something a different name doesn’t change the fact that it’s still the exact same thing that it was before you changed that name.

According to a piece in the Daily O, people should stop using the words “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” to refer to their significant others and use the word “partner” instead — because that’s “politically correct.”

“The term ‘partner’ — with its gender-neutral connotation — is politically correct and socially appropriate,” Saonli Hazra writes in a piece titled “Why it is time to move from the conventional ‘boyfriend’ or ‘girlfriend’ and switch to ‘partner’ instead.”

“With the growth of the Internet, and a transformation in the social order where casual dating, open relationships, delayed marriages and other such practices are finding favour, terms like ‘boyfriend’ or ‘girlfriend’ have a certain undesirable vibe,” she continues. “Mostly, these set limitations of gender roles — of what each partner ought to bring at the relationship table.”

“Partner,” she argues “has a nice, positive ring to it, and neither party feels the suffocating or debilitating pressure of trying to live up to certain preset notions.”

“‘Wife’ or ‘girlfriend’ usually come with patriarchal riders, and therefore, a women’s status within the marriage is often unequal,” she explains.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/02/culture-society

By the naïve gullibility of liberals, the conceit of socialists and the deceit of Gramscian Marxists, the march through the institutions continues, all too often aided by those who should know better. With history as our guide, the result is and has always been the descent into dictatorship and tyranny.

DARWINIAN theory suggests that our ancestor Homos have lived in evolutionary continuity with even older primate ancestors over several millions of years. Friedrich Hayek, in his book The Fatal Conceit : The Errors of Socialism suggested that, at its most basic level, human interaction is still controlled by simple, early primate behaviours. Think of the ‘flight or flight’ reaction, for instance. These are not learned responses but totally conditioned reflexes.

Hayek looked at remnant, innate behaviours in modern humans and suggested they included two separate patterns of behaviours for two separately identified groups of people. These he named as an ‘inner group’, comprised of family and close relatives, who could expect generosity, charity and altruism withing their circle, while ‘outer groups’ would be met with fear, suspicion and aggression. Hayek suggested that these behaviours are hard-wired, inherited from our primitive ancestors and developed over thousands of generations from an era when people lived in very small isolated groups in direct competition with neighbouring groups. Darwin would suggest these behaviours persisted because they conferred an evolutionary advantage to our hunting-and-gathering ancestors, who only rarely came in contact with ‘outsider’ groups.

Hayek also pointed to the significance of ‘culture’. With increasing interaction between groups caused by rising population densities, culture evolved as the set of learned behaviours which sit above this earlier innate behaviour and ameliorate its consequences. Culture is the set of negotiated ‘rules of conduct’ passed down orally, rather than genetically, which allowed people of an ‘inner group’ to deal with those of the surrounding ‘outer groups’ without having to resort to aggression, suspicion and fear.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/02/infantile_disorder_on_the_left.html

There are many ways to measure cultural decline, but the most important one might be emotional regression to infancy. This idea is old, but it has been studied carefully since Sigmund Freud saw it in Vienna. Freud himself came home one day and saw his house surrounded by Hitler thugs. He went at them with his heavy walking stick, and they scattered.

Freud was already in his sixties, but the family realized that Vienna was no longer safe. Freud and his daughter Anna moved to England, a land he had always loved. The Freud Museum today is not in Vienna, where he lived, but in London.

Since that time, social scientists have taken a serious look at emotional “regression,” as it’s called, because it shows grownups falling back into infantile rage and “splitting.” Mature coping includes problem-solving in the real world, and also rationalizing one’s emotions and working out personal issues through the arts and work. Nobody was ever killed by rationalization, or by the arts and music.

But regressive people live in a kind of nightmare, like infants in the Terrible Twos, switching between fits of rage and demanding love and worship. Normal parents start to wonder what they did wrong, but it’s not they; it’s the kid going through a phase.