Thursday, March 17, 2022


The Progressive Mindset is Evil

Derek Hunter

I try not to spend a lot of time focused on the enemies of America, but they are plentiful, and a growing percentage of them reside within the United States. Hell, a lot of them are in Congress, the courts, or the White House. But most of them live in academia, many times in between stints in government. They are actively working to make this country worse.

The progressive mindset is one of, quite honestly, evil. Think of all the progress our species has made throughout all of human history, and we’re watching these people do their damnedest to destroy it.

Nothing exemplifies this more than the modern left and Martin Luther King Jr. in his “I Have a Dream" speech. King lays out, in terms so basic even Joe Biden can understand them, his desire for the country to get past the color of a person’s skin.

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” is one of the most influential lines ever spoken.

The left is voiding their bowels all over it on a daily basis.

For example, Donna Johnston was applying for a job at Bridgewater State University. She didn’t get it because she couldn’t justify her skin color, which is white.

The Boston Globe reports, “Johnston, a licensed social worker from Plainfield, Conn., said she was floored by the question while interviewing to teach sociology at Bridgewater State University last summer, when she was also asked to contemplate ‘your white privilege.’ Then in a follow-up, Johnston said she was told that ‘Black students may not be able to relate to you because of your white privilege.’”

This is the essence of the progressive philosophy – you are your skin color, sexual orientation, gender, or whatever else the left cooks up to divide people, and nothing more. Stray from what a progressive Democrat thinks you should believe based on any of those irrelevant characteristics and you are their enemy, and no holds are barred when it comes to destroying anyone the left deems an enemy.

The Globe, which then quoted a filing from the university, reported, “Any possibility of discriminatory motive is contradicted by the fact that the university ultimately hired two Caucasians," and that a third hire was a black woman.

Isn’t this the equivalent of saying you’re not a racist because you have black friends? Liberals always attack these statements, which is stupid because someone who actually is a racist would be very unlikely to have friends who are of the race they hate people over, aren’t they? I mean, that’s what being a racist means, or at least used to.

Now, racist means you are white. It’s really not any more complex than that. If you’re white, you’re a racist; a racist who benefits wildly from your skin color. No matter your life circumstances – parents, upbringing, schools, family, whatever – you had your life laid out for you because you’re white.

I had no idea I had it so good as I was burning up on rooftops across Detroit slopping down 500-degree tar roofing in 95-degree weather. I probably should’ve just sent my landlord my 23 & Me report and a picture of my forearm, rather than busting my ass like a sucker. Does my white privilege get me a refund on the sweat equity and actual financial outlays I’ve had to make? Where do I go to get the time I wasted working toward goals?

I honestly hope students avoid Bridgewater and any institution (educational or otherwise) that blatantly present themselves this way.

The progressive left has turned the country, especially academia, into a pit of racial obsession. It’s like a Coachella for the Klan, with people segregated in every way we can be differentiated and told to stay away from others, your skin color is your wristband. It’s evil.

Feel badly because of what your skin looks like, feel like a victim because of yours. The Democrat Party has turned from Martin Luther King’s dream to a racist dystopia. How do you do that and still live with yourself? I don’t know, and I don’t want to.

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Men can’t do anything right

Men can’t do anything right, and International Women’s Day proved it. The New Zealand All Blacks marked the day by honouring women, only to be criticised for honouring the wrong kind of women.

The world’s most famous rugby team must have felt like they were doing a good thing when they used their official Twitter account to acknowledge the day.

But if the burly footballers were expecting bouquets for being tender-hearted, New Age, sensitive types – they were badly mistaken.

Like a man who has completely misjudged a woman’s mood (by which I mean every man who has ever lived) the All Blacks found themselves in the doghouse, wondering what on earth had just happened.

If women are a Sudoku puzzle, inside a cryptic crossword, surrounded by Rubix cubes, strapped to a jihadist who is screaming in a foreign language, then International Women’s Day is even more confusing.

The All Blacks’ tweet, accompanied by a photo of the players with their wives and daughters, went like this:

‘Forever grateful to all the women in our lives that allow us to play the game we love. Partners, mothers, daughters, doctors, physios, referees, administrators, and fans. Appreciate you every day.’

Nice, right?

No, it’s not nice you sexist, misogynistic, Neanderthal pig! What’s wrong with you?

The All Blacks were immediately crash-tackled by feminists furious that the tweet had failed to mention New Zealand’s female team, the Black Ferns.

‘Tone deaf!’ they screamed.

Former English rugby player Kate Merchant insisted that the All Blacks shout out to women on women’s day only served to illustrate why International Women’s Day was necessary.

‘Black Ferns are current world champions, yet this post chose to ignore their existence and instead thank the women who “allow” men to play. #dobetter,’ she tweeted.

Of course, it’s possible that the All Blacks’ failure to mention the Black Ferns had nothing to do with toxic masculinity and everything to do with men wanting to appreciate the women actually in their lives.

But such a perspective provides no reason to claim you are being oppressed. And, in 2022, who are you if you are not being oppressed?

Indeed, when the theme of International Women’s Day 2022 is ‘break the bias’, you really must find some people to judge guilty of bias in order to be able to claim that you ‘broke’ something and so justified the day’s existence, not to mention your own part in it.

That the greatest example of bias against women in New Zealand is that a rugby team forgot to appreciate a scrum of women they didn’t know, while honouring the domesticity of women they did know, is proof of just how good women have it in the ‘Land of the Long White Karen’.

Women in Saudi Arabia would laugh at the whiny feminists screaming ‘misogyny’ over a tweet.

But on and on they screeched.

Some sarcastically complained that the All Blacks’ tribute ‘forgot to mention women in the kitchen’ and ‘read like an after-match speech from 30 years ago’.

Missing from the Woke sisterhood’s hissy fit was any allowance for the fact that not every woman wants to don footy boots, pack down in a scrum, and bash the living daylights out of other women while rushing an inflated pigskin across a white line.

Some women genuinely prefer to embrace traditional gender roles. And their families – including their husbands – genuinely appreciate it.

But caring for children, providing home-cooked meals, and providing nurture and support must be eschewed in order to encourage more women to find their true destiny as props, loose-heads, and hookers.

Predictably, the All Blacks immediately deleted the offending tweet and issued a grovelling apology; the kind of statement put out by hostages begging for mercy from tyrannical captors.

‘We are listening,’ they cried. ‘We didn’t get it right with our celebration of International Women’s Day and we apologise.’

The All Blacks went on to gush about how inspiring female players were to people right around the world, and how 2022 was a big year for women’s rugby because women would be playing rugby in lots of women’s rugby games inspiring women around the world, or something.

Proving that hell hath no fury like a woman unacknowledged on Twitter during International Women’s Day, the apology was met with ridicule.

They only apologised to limit the PR damage. They didn’t truly own their mistake. They always do this. They need to demonstrate real change, and with actions rather than words…

Hang on, that wasn’t women replying to the All Blacks tweet; that was my wife berating me last night for something she imagined six years ago. But I digress.

‘If Rugby is to be a major sport around the world our difference has to be our values and advocacy for all our communities in a leading and inclusive way. Go women’s rugby!’ wrote one woman.

Well actually Karen, no.

No one goes to an All Blacks game saying, ‘Gee I hope we see some values and a bit of on-field advocacy tonight.’

We go to the rugby to see men built like brick outhouses charge at each other with the force and ferocity of wild animals.

To expect these same men to be across the nauseating niceties and never-ending nuances of International Women’s Day is to expect the impossible.

For the first time in their lives the All Blacks would likely be thinking ‘we just can’t win’.

And they’d be right.

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All Housing Is Affordable Housing

All housing is affordable housing. If developers build cheap housing, the price of all housing except the very most luxurious will fall. Alternatively, and perhaps less obviously, if we build more luxury housing, then the price of all housing will fall, as there will be less pressure for gentrification or “teardowns.” This is hopeful: All we need to do to solve the housing crisis, and quickly, is to make it legal to build housing.

Generally, in functioning market settings, price signals convey information that is rapidly transmitted to three sorts of actors. If there is scarcity, prices rise rapidly (if they are allowed to do so). The result is:

Consumers buy or use less

Producers make more (if they are allowed to do so)

Entrepreneurs come up with substitutes (if they are allowed to do so)

In housing, this system is not working, because it is not being allowed to work. The regulatory agency Freddie Mac has estimated that the shortage approaches 4 million units nationally, and that undercounts the degree of the shortage in terms of people who would like to move to larger or “closer to work” locations. Why is the price mechanism not working?

The short answer is that it is effectively illegal to build housing, so #2 is blocked. And innovation—microunits, accessory dwelling units, etc.—is discouraged, so #3 is ruled out. The only “solution” offered by America’s city governments is scarcity, as far as the eye can see. In a growing consensus that crosses partisanship and ideological boundaries, including this remarkably candid Obama administration report, analysts have concluded we need to make it legal to build housing.

How could it be illegal?

The housing advocacy group “Up for Growth” estimates that between 2000 and 2015, 23 US states used intentional restrictions to block more than 7 million new dwellings that would have been built without the regulations. Even more importantly, perhaps, is the finding that even for the units that were built as much as 30 percent, and sometimes more, of the final cost was caused by regulatory uncertainty, waiting for approval, or the submission of repeated traffic reports, environmental impact statements, and jumping through other regulatory hoops.

What, specifically, makes building new housing illegal? The following categories of zoning, regulatory, and licensing restrictions all play a role:

Minimum unit size/maximum number of units in new development

Height restrictions on buildings

Setback and lot size minimums, or extorted greenspace concession

Off street, often underground, parking requirements, even in poor neighborhoods near mass transit

In my own neighborhood, Raleigh and Durham, North Carolina, an amalgam of these requirements would work out to something like this: New developments require an inefficiently large amount of land, much of which is required to be used as parking, in buildings no more than 4 or 5 stories tall. The housing units themselves generally must be 1,000 square feet or more. (Durham recently “allowed” a building of smaller “microunits,” starting at 387 square feet for $1,200 per month; all the units were immediately occupied).

You can just do the math, in city after city. A Brookings Institution study documents the problem, noting that all three major components of cost—land, labor, and materials—face substantial and in some cases unnecessary and unintentional cost bottlenecks. The result is that costs for almost any sort of new unit in areas with burdensome regulation and high land prices will exceed $250 per square foot.

For a 1,000 square foot apartment—smaller than many cities allow without expensive variance permit processes—a developer would need to charge at least $2,750 per month just to break even. Now, the usual definition of “affordable” is housing that costs 30 percent or less of the renter’s income. But let’s expand that, and call 40 percent of income affordable. A worker would still need a pretax annual salary of $75,000 to be able to afford our hypothetical minimally legal new apartment.

Worse, municipal restrictions are also the main driving force behind “gentrification,” where (relatively) rich people occupy parts of what little affordable housing does exist. Since cities allow wealthy neighborhoods to make it illegal to build market rate housing, it’s hardly surprising that newcomers, or current residents looking to expand their living space, look to poorer neighborhoods. A recent working paper by Dr. Kate Pennington of the US Census Bureau has an interesting finding: while what we might call “static” gentrification displaces low income housing, the more “dynamic” form of gentrification, or building new market-rate multifamily buildings in poor areas actually reduces the cost to renters in the area. The problem is that building new multifamily units is prohibitively expensive, and faces lengthy regulatory and legal delays for approval.

The entire system is oriented toward hypersensitivity to local concerns, with requests for “public comment” built into a system that requires prolonged and expensive petitions for the “right” to build new housing. On December 14, 2020, Russ Roberts did an Econtalk podcast with Katherine Levine Einstein, on her book Neighborhood Defenders. As Dr. Einstein put it:

We create a process where if I’m proposing a new housing development, I have literally no idea how many hearings it’s going to take and how expensive it will be, how I should think about my budget. Because, it could be one hearing, cut-and-dry, or I could end up with, like, five hearings and a year and a half of delay. And, that unpredictability is deeply problematic.

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Groundbreaking Conference Reveals Health Risks of Seed Oils

Medical doctors, researchers, and other experts spoke on March 3 at the “Future of Fat” virtual summit, the first-ever meeting dedicated exclusively to the harmful effects of oils made from vegetables or seeds, including canola oil, corn oil, cottonseed oil, soybean oil, and sunflower oil.

Such oils have been linked to heart disease, diabetes, weight gain, cancer, macular degeneration, and other chronic diseases.

“There are other conferences that focus on oils and fats broadly speaking. We don’t know of any other that have brought together MDs, Ph. Ds, doctors, and environmental scientists to discuss the impact of vegetable/seed oils specifically,” said Jeff Nobbs, co-founder, and CEO of Zero Acre Farms, in an email interview with The Epoch Times.

“Vegetable oils are ubiquitous in restaurants and fast-food and packaged food including bread, crackers, cereal, granola, chips, dried fruits, salad dressings, mayonnaise, sauces, fried foods, ice cream, baked goods, and other snacks,” he said. “Vegetable oils now account for 20 percent of our daily calories, which represents the greatest increase in sources of calories in the last 100 years, since the globalization era began.”

Zero Acre Farms organized the “Future of Fat” event. The startup, which just raised $37 million in venture funding from Coldplay, Robert Downey, Jr., and other investors, aims to replace seed oils with oils produced through fermentation.

Seed oils are rich in polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), including an omega-6 PUFA known as linoleic acid. When cooked at a high heat—almost always part of the industrial process for producing commercial seed oils—linoleic acid oxidizes very rapidly.

Dr. Cate Shanahan, a family physician, and metabolic health expert, told The Epoch Times that high dietary intake of PUFAs can cause fat cells to malfunction.

According to Shanahan, who serves as an advisor for Zero Acre Farms and spoke at Future of Fat, the oxidative stress induced by PUFAs overwhelms the antioxidant system, driving the dysfunctional inflammation and elevated toxin levels that trigger many chronic diseases.

“This is not just theoretical,” she said. “No one who understands the science of it would argue with me.”

Dr. James DiNicolantonio, a cardiovascular research scientist at Saint Luke’s Mid American Heart Institute, and another Future of Fat speaker drew The Epoch Times’ attention to multiple papers by Dr. Christopher Ramsden of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

One 2013 meta-analysis by Ramsden and others found that men who replaced saturated fats obtained from animal fats or other sources, with omega-six linoleic acid obtained from vegetable oils, had higher rates of heart disease and even death.

Shanahan considers the American Heart Association (AHA) a prime culprit in the rise and dominance of seed oils.

In her own writings, she has highlighted the role of Dr. Ancel Keys, an influential cardiologist and founding member of the AHA’s Council on Epidemiology and Prevention.

“After [Dr. Ancel] Keys made the cover of Time Magazine on Jan 13, 1961, the American public was introduced to the idea that saturated fats were clogging their arteries.

“That idea ultimately led to a sea change in the foods we eat. Real fats would increasingly be replaced by factory-made seed oils, and the era of chronic disease would begin,” she wrote in that blog entry.

Shanahan and others have pointed out that the AHA first rose to public consciousness thanks to a multimillion-dollar donation from Procter & Gamble, the inventors of a vegetable oil-based alternative to animal fats, Crisco.

Thanks in part to the AHA, beef tallow and other animal fats, staples of the traditional American diet, were replaced by vegetable oils. That change ran in parallel with the rise of chronic disease.

The Epoch Times has reached out to the AHA for comment on Future of Fat.

In an email, The Epoch Times referenced AHA’s “Healthy Cooking Oils” webpage, which states that “replacing bad fats [saturated and trans] with healthier fats [monounsaturated and polyunsaturated] is good for your heart.”

The AHA’s webpage recommends that its readers choose “non-tropical vegetable oils like olive, corn, canola, peanut, and sunflower oil.”

AHA responded by directing The Epoch Times to language taken from that same webpage, including at least some text apparently aimed at alternative perspectives:

“When you hear about the latest ‘diet of the day’ or a new or odd-sounding theory about food, consider the source.

“The American Heart Association provides dietary recommendations based on the best available scientific evidence.

“As more research emerges, you can be sure that the American Heart Association will continue to update its science and bring you the facts,” their webpage continues.

“I’m a doctor, and I want people to get healthier—and the main barrier to that is the American Heart Association,” said Shanahan.

Twitter Phenomenon

Opposition to seed oils has also taken off on social media.

“Healthy Oil Respecter” and “Seed Oil Disrespecter,” a husband-and-wife novelty Twitter account act, have attracted thousands of followers.

In real life, “Seed Oil Disrespecter” is a physician. Like many social media users in the post-Woke era, he has chosen to remain anonymous to avoid reprisal.

He told The Epoch Times that he didn’t expect his account to gain this much traction. The memes he posts are meant to be over-the-top and funny—the better to capture what he sees as the genuinely outrageous dangers of seed oil consumption.

“I would say splitting the seed has had worse consequences than splitting the atom,” he said.

He too serves as an advisor for Zero Acre.

“I was skeptical at first, knowing nothing of their operation or details. Then I learned folks who have been public with their ancestral health work, including on seed oils, were advisers. It piqued my interest,” he said.

“Seed Oil Disrespecter” said quitting seed oils freed him from irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), lowered his blood pressure, and generally made him healthier.

He isn’t alone among the many anonymous Twitter users who have responded to anti-seed oil activism.

One told The Epoch Times about the benefits he and his girlfriend experienced when they removed seed oils from their diet roughly eight months ago.

“My skin improved significantly—brighter complexion, less redness, less irritation,” he said in a message.

“I used to have terrible heartburn all the time which improved dramatically. And both my girlfriend and myself experienced way higher energy levels.”

Because seed oils are so ubiquitous in restaurants, he and his girlfriend cook virtually all of their meals themselves from scratch.

Another anonymous Twitter user described similar effects when he and his wife cut their intake of seed oils: “For me, weight loss to some degree [though I was hardly overweight before], but definitely fewer digestive problems, more energy, and better skin.”

The Epoch Times has reached out to the Institute of Shortening and Edible Oils, a U.S. trade association for the refiners of seed oils and various other edible oils.

In addition, The Epoch Times has approached multiple medical experts known for ascribing health benefits to various seed oils.

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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