I ate a kid's meal in McDonald’s this morning.
His mom was furious.
*.*
A guy picks up a five-dollar hooker and gets the crabs from her.
Seeing her the following week, he confronts her and says, "You gave me the crabs!"
She replies, "What did you expect for five bucks, lobster?"
*.*
News Highlights:
Vice-President Pence has announced that members of the new U.S. Space Force will be called "Guardians" instead of astronauts. Commander Peter Quill said he approved.
A new study out of Australia claims that kangaroos can communicate with humans. The first they'd like us to know - keep your hands out of their pouch!
Mutant strains, huh? The way this year is going, before it's over, I'm expecting to hear about Teenage Mutant Virus Strains.
More than 70 West Point cadets have admitted cheating on an online math test. When asked why he resorted to cheating, one cadet responded that he wasn't 120% sure.
2020 is now a swear word: "That's a load of 2020", "What the 2020!" and the new classic, "Shut the 2020 up!"
*.*
Top 5 signs you're at a lousy Medieval Faire:
The king is pretty creepy looking and keeps pushing the burgers.
I'm pretty sure Lancelot's father was not Darth Vader.
Round table actually a card table.
Tournaments use Nerf products.
Lady Bob.
*.*
Why are bacteria so bad at math?
Because they multiply by dividing.
Quote of the Times;
Fact checkers didn’t exist until the ugly truth started to come out. – Sorbo
Link of the Times;
https://dailycaller.com/2020/12/10/tendency-for-interpersonal-victimhood-research-rahav-gabay-boaz-hameiri/
Issue of the Times;
No Families, No Children, No Future by Rod Dreher
Here’s a fascinating article from New York magazine on the massive gender gap between Trump and Biden supporters. It contains this eye-popping claim, buried deep down:
Neither the societal shift away from traditional gender roles nor the downstream cultural consequences of that shift are anywhere near complete. As Rebecca Traister has incisively argued, the growing prevalence of singledom among America’s rising generation of women is one of the most potent forces in contemporary politics. In 2009, for the first time in history, there were more unmarried women in the United States than married ones. And today, young women in the U.S. aren’t just unprecedentedly single; they also appear to be unprecedentedly uninterested in heterosexuality: According to private polling shared with Intelligencer by Democratic data scientist David Shor, roughly 30 percent of American women under 25 identify as LGBT; for women over 60, that figure is less than 5 percent.
David Shor is one of the best data people the Democratic Party people has. Take this seriously.
Has anything like this ever happened to any society, ever? Three out of ten women under the age of 25 consider themselves to be gay or transgender. Five percent, sure. Maybe even eight percent. But thirty? Will they always think that? Maybe not, but these are their prime childbearing years. The US fertility rate is at a 35-year low, and there’s no reason to think it will rise. Some critics blame structural difficulties in the US economy that make it harder for women to choose to have children, but European nations make it vastly easier for mothers, and still cannot get their fertility rates above replacement.
What’s behind this is primarily cultural. We have become an anti-natalist society. And further, we have become a society that no longer values the natural family. We see everywhere disintegration. Yesterday, on the Al Mohler podcast, I talked about going to a conservative Evangelical college a few years back, and hearing from professors there that they feared most of their students would never be able to form stable families, because so many of them had never seen what that’s like.
And now we have 30 percent of Gen Z women claiming to be sexually uninterested in men. There is nothing remotely normal about that number. It is a sign of a deeply decadent culture — that is, a culture that lacks the wherewithal to survive. The most important thing that a generation can do is produce the next generation. No families, no children, no future.
In 1947, Carle C. Zimmerman, then the head of Harvard’s sociology department, wrote a book called Family And Civilization. He was not a religious man; he was only interested in the cultural values that allowed civilizations to thrive, and those that caused civilizations to collapse. His general thesis is that family systems determine the strength and resilience of a civilization. Zimmerman wrote:
There is little left now within the family or the moral code to hold this family together. Mankind has consumed not only the crop, but the seed for the next planting as well. Whatever may be our Pollyanna inclination, this fact cannot be avoided. Under any assumptions, the implications will be far reaching for the future not only of the family but of our civilization as well. The question is no longer a moral one; it is social. It is no longer familistic; it is cultural. The very continuation of our culture seems to be inextricably associated with this nihilism in family behavior.
And:
The only thing that seems certain is that we are again in one of those periods of family decay in which civilization is suffering internally from the lack of a basic belief in the forces which make it work. The problem has existed before. The basic nature of this illness has been diagnosed before. After some centuries, the necessary remedy has been applied. What will be done now is a matter of conjecture. We may do a better job than was done before; we may do a worse one.
He wrote this in 1947. Zimmerman missed the Baby Boom coming, but otherwise, he was right on target.
Earlier this year, David Brooks wrote a big piece for The Atlantic in which he observed that we are living through the most rapid change in the structure of the family in human history. In the piece, Brooks writes:
Eli Finkel, a psychologist and marriage scholar at Northwestern University, has argued that since the 1960s, the dominant family culture has been the “self-expressive marriage.” “Americans,” he has written, “now look to marriage increasingly for self-discovery, self-esteem and personal growth.” Marriage, according to the sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, “is no longer primarily about childbearing and childrearing. Now marriage is primarily about adult fulfillment.”
Sex is also primarily about individual fulfillment — and maybe solely about individual fulfillment. Young people today see no connection between sex, family, and a greater purpose. I wrote about this more or less in a 2013 essay, “Sex After Christianity,” that remains one of the most read pieces I’ve ever published here at TAC. In his book, the sociologist Zimmerman, in listing the signs of a dying civilization, mentions a decline in family formation and a rise in homosexuality. Again, he was not a religious man, but his social science convictions led him to conclude that from studying the historical records of ancient Greece and Rome.
It’s far too simplistic to say “homosexuality brought down Rome.” Homosexuality didn’t mean the same thing in those societies that it means in ours. More importantly, the idea is that the greater tolerance for and acceptance of homosexuality was an indicator of the collapse of the shared belief that forming families to produce the next generation was the most important purpose of the civilization, and that a culture’s structures and norms should be constructed to support that mission.
We are going to have to endure a civilizational collapse before we begin the Great Relearning. I am beginning to see now why a sociologist I heard speak a few years ago said that losing awareness of the gender binary is going to mean the end of us. He meant that we will lose cultural memory of the basic fact needed to ensure the future of our civilization. We are living through the fall right now. This is why I wrote The Benedict Option. The newer book, Live Not By Lies, is about enduring acute marginalization and persecution; the older book is about constructing a strongly countercultural community capable of surviving in the ruins of our civilization.
Thirty percent of women aged 25 and under have no interest in sex with men. If that does not alarm you as a religious traditionalist or conservative, then you might actually be dead. We absolutely must form right now — not tomorrow, right now — communities that socialize our children into the goodness of marriage and family. The broader culture knows what it believes, and it preaches this confidently. The churches are barely pushing back. And it shows.
News of the Times;
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/did-fauci-just-admit-he-lied-about-herd-immunity-trick-americans-vaccine
https://www.propublica.org/article/leaked-documents-show-how-chinas-army-of-paid-internet-trolls-helped-censor-the-coronavirus
https://bigleaguepolitics.com/wtf-mainstream-media-urges-men-to-freeze-sperm-before-getting-covid-19-vaccine-due-to-infertility-concerns/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/12/voter-fraud-display-houston-ballots-signature-address/
https://www.foxnews.com/health/vitamin-d-other-everyday-vitamins-could-counter-coronavirus-effects-report
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/12/24/our_upside-down_postelection_world_144915.html
https://hotair.com/archives/jazz-shaw/2020/12/25/ho-ho-ho-ny-governor-gives-christmas-pardons-commutations-illegal-aliens-murderers/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/11/liberal-media-refuse-report-meaningful-data-covid/
https://pjmedia.com/culture/robert-spencer/2020/12/23/book-criticizing-cancel-culture-gets-canceled-because-author-criticized-islam-n1227256
https://vdare.com/posts/anarcho-tyranny-antifa-who-ran-over-proud-boy-not-even-charged-james-fields-still-has-400-years-to-serve
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/12/330000-americans-die-china-coronavirus-closer-20000-died-china-coronavirus/
https://www.naturalnews.com/2020-12-27-whos-murdering-all-the-covid-scientists.html
https://www.jpost.com/health-science/tel-aviv-research-999-percent-of-covid-19-germs-dead-in-30-seconds-with-uv-leds-653315
https://www.rooshv.com/tomi-lahren-and-the-tragedy-of-modern-dating
https://hotair.com/archives/jazz-shaw/2020/12/26/police-fleeing-portland-unprecedented-numbers/