Authored by Roger Simon via The Epoch Times,

It used to be said that conservative guys just called themselves “libertarian” so girls would talk to them at cocktail parties.

At least one well-known conservative talk show host called them “losertarians” since they didn’t always toe the line and vote Republican.

Nevertheless, many of us are still convinced Henry David Thoreau, sounding very libertarian, was correct when he wrote in his 1849 book “Civil Disobedience” that “the best government is that which governs least.”

Thomas Jefferson and John Locke earlier had said much the same and now, after a couple of hundred years, that libertarian view seems to be growing globally.

Much of this is a reaction to the obvious: Marxism or quasi-Marxism does not work economically and, worse, it has engendered horrendous totalitarian oppression with a massive death count in China, Russia, North Korea, and Cambodia, among others.

Libertarianism has started to look a lot better, especially—and ironically—in the eyes of Karl Marx’s beloved proletariat, unlike the so-called “elites,” who are a protected class.

Here, in the United States, the MAGA movement that now dominates the Republican Party tilts libertarian.

Its leader, 2024 presidential candidate Donald Trump, has also done so in most of his recent pronouncements.

Meanwhile, in South America and Europe, even more overtly libertarian candidates have won their country’s elections.

First it was economist, professor, and sometime rock musician Javier Milei in Argentina, who in reaction to the catastrophic 134 percent inflation and a concomitant rise in poverty in his country, has become the new president-elect.

Then in the Netherlands, longtime political libertarian and strongly anti-immigration gadfly Geert Wilders out-paced all predictions in their elections and will attempt to form a government.

Mr. Wilders success is partly due to the Dutch farmers who were fed up with new “climate change” regulations that would make it impossible for them to make a living—and therefore for many of their countrymen to eat.

The corporate media and their political allies in the European Union and the United States immediately branded Mr. Milei and Mr. Wilders with their now-favorite designation “far-right,” though these men are no more far-right than Jefferson, Locke, and Thoreau, the very figures these so-called liberals and progressives—though they prefer to ignore or “forget”—once considered their intellectual heroes.

What is transpiring now globally is a fight between these rising libertarians of various stripes and the incumbent statists. In recent years, despite the Trump interregnum, the statists have seemed to be in the ascendancy.

The Davos/globalist set, Klaus Schwab et al., was almost assumed to have already taken power under the mantra “You’ll own nothing, and you will be happy,” a phrase that originated in a 2016 video from the World Economic Forum. It was a new supposedly benign form of communism, though oddly reminiscent of the “three rounds and a sound” (bicycle, watch, and sewing machine plus a radio) deemed sufficient for life in the Communist China of the 1950s.

Meanwhile, those advocating this mantra, the aforementioned globalist set, flew in and out of that glamorous Davos resort on private jets to deliver speeches on global warming while their desired constituents, who rarely had a chance to fly business and felt lucky when they were admitted to an over-crowded airport lounge, looked on via television and internet with increasing skepticism.

Globalism was a shell game taking place before their eyes. Bill Gates would never be happy “owning nothing.” He was buying up all the farms in America (that weren’t already bought by the Chinese).

He and his cronies had found a new way get rich (or richer) and stay rich. Globalism was just a mask for oligarchic power, with that oligarchy extending into a one world-wide state. Why think small? National borders are so 20th Century.

So a battle has been joined between these mega-statists and the libertarians (again of various stripes, often nationalist), but for the first time the latter seem to be ascendant.

Mr. Wilders and Mr. Meili are not far-right or “hard-right,” to use the term adopted by The Economist, which called the Dutch leader a “headache for Europe.” (Actually men like Mr. Wilders will be Europe’s salvation, if allowed.) They are not Nazis, as they are sometimes called, or nearly so. The Nazis were socialists—the National Socialist Party—it is always worth reminding ourselves.

Mr. Milei and Mr. Wilders are not far-anything. They are a return to the values enshrined in the United States’ “Declaration of Independence,” the importance of the freedom of the individual.

We are seeing this new ascendancy domestically in the renewed popularity of President Trump as his poll numbers continue to rise.

But is the MAGA movement truly libertarian? In the largest sense, yes, because, after all, “libertarian,” like most political terminology these days, is rather vague. To some, a libertarian is a self-indulgent, pot-lover. (I’m not. I despise pot, though I used to smoke it. There are a number of things about some libertarians I don’t like.)

But MAGA stands firmly against the Deep State, and nothing is more libertarian than that. Cut the bureaucracy, cut the regulations, deep six as many government agencies as possible.

If fact, deep six the Deep State in its entirety.

That sounds pretty libertarian to me.

And while we’re at it, keep the government out of our cars, our refrigerators and stoves, our bank accounts, our medical care, our security systems, our reading material, our cable connections, our emails and text messages, internet, social media, cellphones, or anything to do with our private lives.

It’s a safe bet Mr. Milei and Mr. Wilders would agree.

The world’s population has doubled in size over the last 50 years.

In 2022, we reached the mark of 8 billion living on Earth. According to UN estimates, by July 2023, all the people in the world numbered 8,045,311,447.

In this map, Visual Capitalist’s Nick Routley and Bruno Venditti use population estimates from the United Nations Population Division to illustrate the world’s population as if the Earth had only 1,000 people. Countries with a population of below 7.6 million did not make our cutoff to be visualized, but are included in overall calculations and listed below.

Click here to view interactive version of the map above

Over Half of People Live in Asia

Asia is by far the world’s most populous region, with over 4.7 billion people. The continent, led by India and China, represents 59% of the total population.

Imagining the Earth with only 1,000 people helps illustrate this more easily. India would account for 178 people and China would have 177.

Here is the estimated population in July 2023 for each country, and how many people their residents would constitute out of 1,000:

Africa is the second most populated continent with 182 out of 1,000 people, led by Nigeria (28), Ethiopia (16) and Egypt (14). As of July 2023, Africa’s total population stood at an estimated 1.5 billion people.

Despite seeing a decline in population over the last decades, Europe still is the third in terms of total population, making up 92 out of 1,000 people and led by Russia (18), Turkey (11), and Germany (10).

If the world only had 1,000 people, North America would have only 75 inhabitants, with 42 in the United States. Meanwhile, South America would account for 55 people led by 27 from Brazil, and Oceania would have just 5 people (with 3 in Australia).

Nigeria to Pass U.S. as World’s 3rd Most Populous Country

While population projections to the end of the century do differ, they mostly agree on the same general principle: the global population is rising but that growth rate is slowing. Eventually the population will peak (sometime between 2064-2086) and begin shrinking from there.

Over the next few decades, the ranking of the most populous countries will likely remain relatively unchanged, with India and China at the top of the pecking order. Shortly after 2050, however, the population of Nigeria is projected by some sources to surpass that of the United States and become the third-largest country in the world.

Other countries expected to see significant growth in population are the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Tanzania, the U.S., Uganda, and Indonesia.

Authored by Larry Sand via American Greatness,

I have written about Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, many times over the years, as there is an ongoing abundance of subject matter to be explored. And 2023 has certainly not been an exception.

Picking up where I left off in March…

In April, Weingarten exhibited a textbook example of hypocrisy.

It’s no secret that she and other union honchos hate charter schools.

These schools are rarely unionized and typically do better at educating kids than the traditional public school variety. Perhaps worse for the union crowd, charters are frequently housed in public schools with extra space due to insufficient funding.

Weingarten especially has it in for Eva Moscowitz, who runs the very successful Success Academy chain of charter schools in New York. Under Weingarten’s guidance, her union pressured New York City Mayor Eric Adams to cancel three of Moskowitz’s co-location proposals for the city.

Yet at the very same time, Weingarten, who sits on the board of University Prep, a unionized charter, convinced the NYC Board of Education to approve a co-location for one of their schools. 

Also in April, Weingarten testified before the House Subcommittee on the Covid pandemic.

She was there to answer questions about her union’s influence on school reopening guidelines issued by the CDC.

While Weingarten insisted that her main goal was opening schools, it was anything but.

She constantly argued for keeping schools shuttered through the spring and summer of 2020 when her union aggressively lobbied the CDC to adjust its school-reopening guidance. Two of its language recommendations were adopted verbatim.

Yet, she had the audacity to tell Congress, “We spent every day from February (2020) on trying to get schools open. We knew that remote education was not a substitute for opening schools. We know that young people learn and connect best in person, so opening schools safely – even during a pandemic – guided our actions, which I will describe in detail.”

But her “details” were really quite undetailed.

She dodged, obfuscated, and even used the fact that she was 65 years old to explain her memory lapses.

Additionally, Dr. Tracy Høeg, an epidemiologist, blasted Weingarten, accusing her of fudging a scientific study to wrongly argue to Congress that schools should have been kept closed during the height of COVID-19.

In May, Weingarten opined in an article that “Culture Wars Harm Education.”

She starts off the piece, “Nowadays I am the president of a union, but I am harking back to my years as a civics teacher as I write this column. Governors and education officials in Florida and other states are doing exactly what extremists baselessly accuse educators of doing—imposing their ideological agenda on public schools, rewriting history, stifling free expression and creating intolerance.”

First off, no one is more involved with “imposing their ideological agenda on public schools” than she is. From all the sex and gender craziness to inviting Ibram X. Kendi – probably the most vocal and aggressive CRT proponent in the country – to speak at an AFT conference. His talk was touted as, “Hear from Dr. Ibram X. Kendi in this free-ranging discussion with student activists and AFT members on his scholarship and on developing anti-racist mindsets and actions inside and outside classrooms.” 

Regarding Weingarten’s “years as a civics teacher” – more hooey. Yes, she taught history at Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn for a few years, but in 2011, EAG News obtained her personnel file via a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request. According to the New York City Board of Education, she was hired as a substitute teacher in 1991, received a provisional license in 1993, and a certificate to serve as a substitute in 1994. Additionally, “A 1997 letter indicates she didn’t submit documentation showing she’d met requirements for licensure. No record indicates she ever served as a full-time teacher or was evaluated by a principal or other school official.” 

Yet she has never acknowledged these details or corrected the record. When she ran for president of New York’s United Federation of Teachers in 1998, her opponent Michael Shulman suggested that that she was not a “real teacher,” explaining, “She worked five months full-time that I’ve been aware of, in 1992, at Clara Barton High School.” He added, “Since then, she taught maybe one class for 40 minutes a day.” 

Also, in May, it was revealed that despite her very brief stint as a teacher, she earned 15 years’ worth of pension benefits. 

The New York City teacher union collective bargaining agreement allowed her to have over 11 extra years counted toward her service even though she wasn’t in the classroom. This likely came from “time spent…on union leave as treasurer and then president of UFT (the AFT affiliate in NYC) from 1997 until her election as AFT president in 2008,” Freedom Foundation’s Director of Research Maxford Nelsen notes. 

In June, national security took a hit when Weingarten was appointed to a new Department of Homeland Security school safety advisory council tasked with making recommendations on “emergency management,” “preparedness measures,” and “safety and security” in schools.

“Leaders of our academic institutions and campus life have a great deal to offer in helping us counter the evolving and emerging threats to the homeland,” DHS Sec. Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement.

Senator Rick Scott (R., Fl.), venting his frustration with the appointment, declared Weingarten “is the last person who should be advising anyone on school safety.”

July saw Weingarten’s union hold its yearly convention, in which it tackled such matters as “Affirming LGBTQIA+ Identities in and out of the classroom,” “Education for Liberation: The Role of the Racially Conscious Educator in Combating Oppression,” and “Strategies for Integrating Climate Change into Your Teaching.”

In September, Weingarten’s union launched a major ad blitz to “highlight the important work educators are doing in America’s public schools to help kids, which is in stark contrast to the toxic attacks by extremists trying to weaken and destroy public education.”

Yup, with no sense of irony, the union that is obsessed with race and sexual engineering – think “Affirming LGBTQIA+ Identities in and out of the classroom,” – refers to those of us who are a wee bit more traditional in our approach to education as “extremists.”

Also, in September, Weingarten trashed House Republicans’ “Sham Impeachment Inquiry.” Her press release stated, “While President Biden gets up every day and does the people’s business—strengthening the economy, advancing our national security interests, and bringing back stability and honor to the workings of government—House Republicans have done little other than pursue spurious, fact-free investigations. Not one major initiative, other than a budget bill averting default—which they are now disavowing—has become law.”

“National security interests.” The porous southern border?

“Strengthening the economy.” Record inflation?

“Does the ‘people’s’ business.” He was doing business all right, but hardly the “people’s.”

There’s plenty of evidence that Biden’s son Hunter and others in his family received millions of dollars from foreign partners who believed they were buying influence with his father.

In September, Weingarten really stepped in it when she compared the rhetoric of school choice supporters to that of segregationists.

“I was kind of gobsmacked when I was talking to Southern Poverty Law Center, and they showed me the same words: choice’, ‘parental rights’ and attempts to divide parents versus teachers, and at that point, it was white parents versus other parents. But it’s the same kind of words.”

What is truly gobsmacking is that the union boss actually takes the comment and SPLC seriously. The widely discredited group recently smeared parent activist group Moms for Liberty, equating them to neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan, and labeling them an “extremist group” that is “anti-government.”  

Weingarten then dug a bit deeper into her hole, stupidly averring that pro-school choicers “want to have, basically, a Christian ideology, their particular Christian ideology to dominate the country as opposed to those that was born on the freedom (sic) of the exercise of religion.”

Talking about religion, she furthered her descent into dumb this month.

Weingarten, who once stated that she was a “deeply religious Jew,” was perplexed as to why video footage of an Orthodox Jewish prayer service only showed men.

On X, she asked, “Where are the women?”

She received a quick “community note” which explained that Orthodox Jews have had gender separated prayers for thousands of years and added, “The women were on the other side praying and would not be visible from someone recording in the ‘men’s section.’”

The video footage, supplied by conservative commentator Mark Levin, who is not known for his subtlety, tweeted back to Weingarten, “You’re such a contemptible moron. Get off my timeline you idiot.”

Also, this month, Axios reported, “Homeschooling is now the fastest-growing form of education in the U.S.,” citing a Washington Post analysis. Weingarten was castigated by many on X after she questioned why this is happening. Typical was Manhattan Institute’s Ilya Shapiro, who told Weingarten in a tweet that the growth of homeschooling is due to “the policies you’ve advocated, Covid-related and otherwise. Just like you’re behind much of the increased support for school choice and educational freedom. Congratulations!”

As Mike Antonucci noted in 2022, Weingarten has averaged about 47 tweets a day for more than 11 years.

Maybe if she spent a little more time researching the issues instead of shooting her mouth off willy-nilly, she would be less likely to keep stepping in dog stuff, which she does practically on a daily basis.

To Weingarten’s credit, she recently asserted, “All of us do stupid things, and you know, I’ve done stupid things and I made misjudgments,” but gave no examples.

I’m not sure just what stupid things she is referring to, but there is clearly an abundance to choose from.

Perhaps even sadder than Weingarten’s irritating and gaffe-prone nature is that there are 1.7 million teachers who keep her in office and pay her over $500,000 a year for the privilege. Now that is really stupid.

School districts across the country, primarily in major, Democrat-run cities such as Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco and Oakland, have been offering segregated classes in the hopes of battling a decades-long, race-based achievement gap.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, Evanston Township, a suburb of Chicago, is the latest to introduce the controversial strategy designed to enhance the education experience of students of color – particularly in advanced placement courses. The local school’s 3,600-student high school is 44% white, 24% black, 20% hispanic and 5% asian in a mix of wealthy families and lower income families.

Some have suggested that the voluntary segregation of black, latino, and white students raises crucial questions about the progress made since the Civil Rights Movement. “Our black students are, for lack of a better word…at the bottom, consistently still. And they are being outperformed consistently,” said Monique Parsons, Evanston school board vice president, adding “It’s not good.“

A white standard?

According to Dena Luna, who leads black student-achievement initiatives in Minneapolis Public Schools, “A lot of times within our education system, black students are expected to conform to a white standard,” underscoring what proponents have argued is a need for spaces where students of color can thrive – which, for some reason, Indian and Asian students of color don’t typically require.

The district offers middle- and high-school students electives focused on African-American history and social-emotional support, taught by teachers of color. Created in 2015 for Black boys, the format has expanded to Black girls and will soon expand to Latino students. An internal study showed improved attendance for Black boys in the program in 2017 and average GPAs of 2.27, compared with 2.14 for Black males districtwide.

“In our spaces, you don’t have to shed one ounce of yourself because everything about our space is rooted in blackness,” said Luna.

Evanston’s so-called ‘affinity classes,’ labeled AXLE for black students and GANAS for latino students, have been met with a blend of praise and skepticism. Students in these classes have reported feeling more accepted and represented. “I feel like I represent me and not the whole black race in this AP class,” said one AXLE student, expressing a newfound sense of individuality in the learning environment. “It’s a safe space. In AP classes that are mostly white, I feel like if I answer wrong, I am representing all black kids. I stay quiet in those classes.”

This year there are at least 105 students enrolled in GNAS math courses, while another 72 are enrolled in AXLE math courses, and 14 in AXLE sophomore English class.

A 2019 study on the original program for Black boys offered by the Oakland Unified School District found that students who took the affinity class were slightly less likely to drop out of school. The district also offers elective and advisory classes designated for Latino, Asian Pacific Islander and Arab students, said Jerome Gourdine, director of targeted strategies for the district’s office of equity.

Evanston is taking the strategy one step further, offering courses for Black and Latino students in core math classes: algebra 2, precalculus and AP calculus, as well as an English seminar. Evanston’s classes for Black students are known as AXLE, an acronym for Advancing Excellence, Lifting Everyone, and those for Latino students are called GANAS, from a Spanish expression that means “giving it all you’ve got.”  -WSJ

Meanwhile, both the legality and the social impact of re-segregating classrooms is a topic of fierce debate.

“Integration is a positive social good,” said Max Eden, an education researcher at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, who believes these ‘affinity classes’ undermine the goal of the Civil Rights Act. “We want students to be colorblind and to treat each other only on the basis of who they are as human beings.”

But will it help test scores?

In Evanston, around 75% of white students in 11th and 12th grade enroll in AP classes according to district data, vs. around 25% of black students and around a third of latino students. Of those, in the 2021-22 school year, 80% of white AP test takers earned a score of 3 or higher – the benchmark typically required for college credit, vs 61% of latinos and 48% of black AP students.

As these initiatives continue, their impact on educational equity, racial integration, and societal implications will be closely monitored.

Of course, unless students – regardless of race, are willing to devote hours of their lives to studying, preparing, and grinding out homework, we suspect this is just going to stoke widening racial divides.

Authored by John Maxwell Hamilton via RealClear Wire,

Has it dawned on you that you work for everyone who is supposed to work for you? Have you noticed it is a lonely job?

You work for your bank, which pushes you to spend a long time navigating its automated telephone system after the announcement, “We have installed new features to better serve you.”

You work for your service repair companies. A friend recounts her hurdles getting Sears to fix an ailing refrigerator under warranty. After many telephone disconnects, an email said a technician would be out the following Saturday between 8 and 5. At 4:30 that afternoon a new message announced, without explanation, the appointment would be rescheduled. No one called to ask what was best for her schedule.

You work for your preferred airline (or any airline), which wants you to use its website to solve a computer screw-up to your upcoming ticket. When you call Delta, an automated voice urges you to send a text before it puts you on hold for an agent.

Then there is the discount travel company, Priceline, which recently sent me a customer service telephone number that did not have enough digits to be useful.

I use those companies as examples, but this phenomenon is ubiquitous.

The drive to put us to work for the companies that are supposed to work for us may be efficient for them. It’s often the opposite for us. That’s not all, though. The experience touches on one of the pressing issues of our time: our growing feelings of alienation.

These impersonal and unsatisfactory interactions make us feel frustrated and abandoned. Meanwhile, those companies are laying off paid workers, pushing them to the margins of society. You can have both of these alienating experiences at once.

Let’s start with those recorded messages that say, no matter what the time of day you call, “Due to the unusually high call volume, there will be long wait times.”

As is obvious to anyone who hears this message over and over again, it is disingenuous. The problem is not the high number of callers. It is the low number of answerers. The intention is to discourage you from seeking human help, so more people can be laid off.

This is the culmination of a process that began decades ago. The first step in the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution was automation of the shop floor; then came back-office functions such as accounting. These steps made machinery workers safer and created new opportunities for people with education. The euphemism in business schools for this development is “skills biased” technological change. It could also be called good-bye and good luck.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is to employment what the neutron bomb is to warfare. It aims to eliminate people and save infrastructure. Computers don’t get sick or ask for vacation or more pay.

Companies that adopt these measures always announce them as good for workers generally. Those who lose their jobs to robots and artificial intelligence are assured of getting retraining. But helping displaced workers cope is not high on executives’ agenda, and government programs are inadequate to pick up the slack.

When googling “automation, coping,” one gets a few articles by would-be consultants who have simple nostrums, such as, talk to your employees when you decide to automate. One also finds a recent study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale, who tied automation to rising “deaths of despair,” involving suicide and overdoses.

The total number of jobs to be eliminated in the next years is too high to count accurately. Forbes has reported that a whopping 73 million U.S. jobs could be lost to AI by 2030.

But here is a concrete number. Walmart, which operates abroad as well as in the United States, announced this year that it is planning for 65% of its stores to be automated by 2026. This came a few days after the company revealed plans to lay off more than 2,000 people at facilities that fulfill online orders. Much of this work can be done by robots.

Then there is this problem: Our arm’s length dealings with the companies that are supposed to serve us also exacerbate our disconnection from society. The only sense of community we get from working with impersonal machines is a collective sense of isolation. We are increasingly a nation united by our anger and estrangement.

Everyday dysfunction goes beyond disembodied automated voices on the telephone. More and more we live apart from others. We shop online. We check ourselves out at the pharmacy and the grocery store. We pump our own gas. We use mobile phones to make deposits and ATMs to make withdrawals.

Remember the smiling bartenders in a Norman Rockwell painting? That over-the-mahogany human connection cannot be made with a cocktail dispenser. Robots also check you into hotels and bring you room service.

Workers who keep their service jobs find themselves less frequently interacting with their colleagues. A worker is safer standing at a distance from an automated machine. But a supervisor on the Walmart retail floor is likely to find it less stimulating to manage robots than people.

One is reminded of the joke among automation enthusiasts: Factories will have lots of equipment, one dog, and one person. The dog’s job is to keep the person away from the equipment. The person’s job is to feed the dog.

Of course, automation can make some tasks better for the consumer as well as the worker. But at what social cost? And how far should we go?

If our society needs anything, it is more interaction with everyday people – people who have different lives and different points of view and a shared interest in solving problems.

Our politics cry out for this. Liberals need to understand why conservatives are alienated. Similarly, those on the right need to listen to ideas they find uncomfortable. Our society would benefit from more constructive personal interaction, not dehumanized confirmation of our biases through online anonymous social media accounts that promote bogus information or hyper-partisan news.

Congress is a microcosm of this siloing. Although it may seem like a fairy tale, once upon a time legislators mixed with each other, regardless of party. They had family dinners together. Today legislators censure each other, vote to remove each other from committees, and push each other in hallways, the latter even when they are in different factions of the same party. The idea of compromise is considered by many politicians today to be somehow unprincipled. In truth, compromise is, and always has been, an essential aspect of democracy.

Those of us who are reading this column while on a long telephone hold need to face it. Service, real service, is becoming a luxury item. For those who can pay for it, good for you. For millions of others, the message is, “We are sorry, but we have to disconnect you. Good-bye.”

Authored by John Mac Ghlionn via The Epoch Times,

According to a recent study out of the UCSF School of Medicine, the average American female now lives 5.8 years longer than the average American male. The gap hasn’t been this big since 1996.

Speaking to The New York Times, Dr. Brandon Yan, the lead author of the study, called the findings “unsettling.”

“We need to understand which groups are particularly losing out on years of life expectancy,” he noted, “so interventions can be at least partially focused on these groups.”

When discussing the causes of the life expectancy gap between men and women in the United States, Dr. Yan responded:

“All of these point to a picture of worsening mental health across the board, but particularly among men.”

Which brings us to the demonization of masculinity.

In recent years, it has become frighteningly common to hear the word “toxic” followed by the word “masculinity.” According to another recent study, published in the International Journal of Health Sciences, men who view masculinity in a negative light are more likely to have lower mental well-being than men who view it in a positive light,

The aptly titled study, “The belief that masculinity has a negative influence on one’s behavior is related to reduced mental well-being,” analyzed the beliefs and behaviors of 4,000 men. The findings clearly demonstrate the relationship between widespread misconceptions surrounding masculinity and how these misconceptions affect men’s mental health. The findings also show that masculine attitudes are something to be preserved and promoted, not demonized.

There was a time, not that long ago, when masculine traits—strength, courage, and assertiveness—were celebrated by all Americans, regardless of their sexual orientation or political affiliations. When did things change? In the 1980s, it seems.

Commenting on the comprehensive study, Eric W. Dolan, the founder and editor of PsyPost, suggests that in the 1980s, “there was a notable shift” in how masculinity was viewed. Specifically, the lens through which it was viewed became more critical in nature. Masculinity, he notes, became synonymous “with negative traits like misogyny and homophobia, and linked to issues such as poor mental health and aggressive behavior.” This unnecessary and entirely destructive transition, adds Mr. Dolan, “was partly fueled by sociological theories, leading to what some call a ‘deficit model’ of masculinity—focusing primarily on its negative aspects.”

Mr. Dolan is right. However, he misses the bigger picture. The #MeToo Movement, I suggest, was the final nail in the coffin of masculinity. In 2017, the year Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misconduct became public knowledge, the social expectations of being a man changed—dramatically so. Masculinity went from being “problematic” to being “toxic,” a “virus” in need of a cure. As is clear to see, males who subscribe to this virulent, deeply flawed theory are more likely to suffer than those who rightly reject it.

John Barry, the author of the abovementioned study and the co-founder of the Centre for Male Psychology, found that males who held a positive view of masculinity reported considerably higher levels of overall positivity than the naysayers. Those who dismissed the statement, “Masculinity prevents me from talking about how I feel about my problems,” had better mental health than those who embraced it.

Interestingly, Mr. Barry found that men with a positive view of masculinity were more likely to feel the need to protect women than those who viewed it more negatively.

When society demonizes masculinity, Mr. Barry told me, “it’s not just men who suffer.” He believes “that women are indirectly hurt by this in many ways.” For example, he added, “If a mother sees her son struggle to feel ok being male, his pain will impact her too. A mother might see her son’s self-esteem slowly crushed as he grows older, feeling that as a man he has nothing positive to offer anyone, including potential girlfriends.”

Mr. Barry’s point is a valid one. Women find masculine men attractive. This is an incontrovertible fact. There’s a reason why, for decades, girls have had posters of James Dean, Paul Newman, George Clooney, Tom Cruise, and Brad Pitt on their walls. It’s not rocket science. It’s evolutionary science.

Men who view masculinity in a negative light may have a hard time attracting a partner. This is especially true if, as Mr. Barry noted, “they become underachievers, reclusive, and abandon any sense of being a protector of women and their community.”

Daughters, he added, “might believe the negative narrative about men and see their father in a negative light, but deeply regret this decades later when it is too late to make up for years of a soured father-daughter relationship.”

Barry’s message is clear: “If people are all connected as members of a society—and I believe that we are—then if men are being poisoned, then society is being poisoned.”

Again, he’s right.

Men and women complement each other. More importantly, we need each other.

Authored by Monica Showalter via AmericanThinker.com,

Oliver Stone is a Hollywood leftist who has an odd way of being right at times.

His Academy Award-winning JFK was dismissed as a conspiracy theory.

Turns out he was likely closer to right all along — as Tucker Carlson noted in one of this segments.

That’s not the only one.

His South of the Border documentary about Latin America’s wave of elected leftist dictators was initially criticized as Chavista propaganda, a glossing over of some of the region’s worst rulers … except that if you watch the thing, which I did twice, you realize he did an extraordinary job of revealing these people as the unattractive pigs that they were.

Sleazy, covetous, Imelda-like, sidelong, gangsterly … he actually exposed them in all their glory in a way their worst critics couldn’t.

That was a useful record of the era.

He’s criticized government bureaucracies’ demonization of ivermectin and vaccine mandates which is credibility right there.

His criticism of the way the Vietnam War was run by vested interests and swamp bureaucrats was probably spot on, too.

So now he’s dropped another truth bomb, or at least is circling around it.

According to RealClearPolitics, which showed a segment and transcript of Stone conversing with Bill Maher:

Some of the transcript (they go off on tangents) is here, emphasis mine:

MAHER: Well, I mean, [Trump] doesn’t concede elections. You know, the elections only count if we win theory of government. Okay. Well, come on. You know, Trump has he still has not conceded the election. He has not conceded. He does not honor them. Okay.

STONE: I mean, do you know for a fact that he lost? I’m just curious.

MAHER: Okay. You’re going to make me —

STONE: I just don’t know all of the facts.

MAHER: Well I do. Is there a conspiracy theory that you don’t believe?

STONE: Come on, Bill. You know I’m intelligent.

MAHER: Intelligent? Of course you are. But look, look, I’ve had many people sit here and I’d say the same thing to them. Like, the key to getting along in America is not getting into these tribal things. It’s understanding that you can have somebody in your life who you go for A, B, C, and D, We are so aligned and the person is so smart and they really get it.

And then E each of you thinks the other one’s crazy and there’s a couple of those with us, but we got A, B, C, and D, and so we just.

OLIVER STONE: We’ll start with that.

MAHER: Yes, that’s got to be enough. You can’t make people like agree with you on these things. And you’re right when you —

STONE: I’m just asking you, I’m not an expert on the election. I don’t go on. I’m not a political junkie. You are. And you follow it very closely. Okay.

MAHER: All right, then I’ll give you the thumbnail sketch. They tried it in like 60 courts. It was laughed out of every court, including by Republican judges. Report The people who save this democracy were Republicans. Good Republicans. In states where Trump pressured them like the guy, the one he’s on trial for in Georgia. Find me 11,000 votes. It’s on tape.

A guy like that saying to him, sir, we just don’t do that here. I voted for you. I’m a Republican, but we just don’t do that. That’s what saved us. And they were Republicans. So you don’t take their word for it. I mean, it would.

STONE: I don’t know. I mean, you went through the 2000 election. That was horrifying to me. What happened when the Supreme Court closed that down. What happened there? You know, the popular vote was —

MAHER: What should we do? Do we just keep counting votes forever? Or should we still be counting them now?

STONE: No. Count them correctly.

MAHER: The people who have testified that this was a fair and will [sic] run election. It’s a who’s who of people like Bill Barr. Mitch McConnell. You’re talking about Liz Cheney. You’re talking about dyed in the wool, serious conservative Republicans who went with Trump really further out than a lot of us thought they would go with a guy like McCain’s not a war hero.

[…]

STONE: Well, I don’t know the facts. And I think I would trust the accountants more than the politicians. And I’d like to know what the accountants, the guys who vote, who know the most about votes, who do the Electoral Commission’s, you know. I can’t take Biden’s word for it on anything.

MAHER: It’s not his word. It’s the Electoral Commission. It’s Trump’s own election security guy who said this was the most fair, well-run election that we’ve had ever.

STONE: Really?

MAHER: Yes.

STONE: I don’t know about that. Okay. I don’t know about that.

MAHER: Well, I mean, if there’s nothing that can be said or argued that would convince you —

STONE: You, I think it would shock people —

MAHER: Then they called it —

STONE: — Joe [Biden] got so many got so many votes. You know, that was what was shocking, that he did so well compared to what he was expected to do —

MAHER: Right.

STONE: — because we believed all the East Coast media —

That’s the thinking of an independent thinker, someone who asks again and again what we really know from hard knowledge and what we really know only from the press.

It’s startling in its candor, not a full-blown admission of Trump support, but a person who can critically think and use his own knowledge to reason out strange things that have happened since. He cites the bad media treatment of Pete Rose as his theory on why people stick close to Trump, and his experience with the 2000 election, which he seems to think as stolen, as something that leaves the realm of stolen elections a distinct possibility since he believes it has happened before.

His views are not all that ‘conspiratorial’ as Maher seemed to want to dismiss them as. Polls show that a majority of Republicans believe the elections these days do have fraud — as do a sizable minority of Democrats. They didn’t get into it in the conversation, but many Democrats think our elections are compromised by cheating.

Stone stood his ground and didn’t back away from the questions that Maher had no serious answers to — claiming that the press, numerous neverTrumps and many neverTrump judges had reported the election as free and fair. Just because someone says so does not make it so, and that was why Maher kept misfiring at Stone and Stone held his ground. Stone also suggested that there were a lot of liars out there — from the COVID shambles around vaccines and the like, to Joe Biden himself, whom he couldn’t bring himself to believe a word he said.

One can only hope that Stone looks at this matter ever more closely. He’s onto something. He’s sniffing, he’s asking questions and he might come up with a tremendous new work from it. Once again, he could be confoundingly correct.

There is a fundamental disconnect between the political left and the rest of the world that requires extensive investigation and dissection.  For most people the idea of someone spending a solid portion of their time and finances helping those in dire need could only be considered a good thing.  This is not true for the average leftist, though.  For such activists we tend to find that good is evil and evil is good, and the upside down nature of their thinking bewilders those with normal brains.

For the woke, the more you help people, the more you are hurting them (unless you hold a high place on the victimhood totem pole).  But this juxtaposition is only part of the reason why they seem to loath YouTuber MrBeast so much.

MrBeast (real name Jimmy Donaldson) has made a successful career out of engaging in philanthropy and he gets results; helping people to gain back their eyesight, saving orphanages overseas or giving poverty stricken children shoes.  All of these efforts have for years garnered accusations from the political left and their organizations of “white savior” activities. 

They argue that the white savior trope seen in Hollywood movies (where a white man travels to desperate countries and helps non-white people get back on their feet) is an unacceptable image in our modern era of “equity and inclusion.”  They claim that MrBeast is exploiting the white savior symbol as a way to elevate himself instead of simply helping others.  

In his latest video, MrBeast showcased his program to dig 100 wells in Africa for villages with no access to clean drinking water.  The video triggered yet another social media firestorm in which leftist activists raged about a white man “pretending to help” brown people while taking attention away from what they consider to be more acceptable and progressive non-profits.  They say that brown people must be helped by brown people.  If white people do it, there must be a darker ulterior motive.      

In the western world access to clean water is usually a given and often taken for granted.  Sadly, in many countries clean water is a mere dream, and lack of access holds these communities back from developing and improving their economic situation.  Almost everything relies on water.

The video has garnered over 115 million views so far and earns millions of dollars in ad revenue, all of which goes directly back into his charity fund to continue paying for more wells and other charity projects.  

So what’s the problem?  Is it only that MrBeast is a white guy?  Who among these hundreds of villages in Africa cares that a white man helped them get access to clean water for generations to come?  So far, none of them have complained.  Only hyper-privileged first-world woke activists seem to care.  

Hatred of skin color is only a small part of the greater woke mind virus.  It’s important to remember that leftists are predominantly collectivists, and it is likely that their deeper disdain for people like MrBeast is rooted in their desire to undermine individualism and meritocracy.  

As conservatives commonly point out, good charities and individual efforts to help others are far more effective than taxation and financial appropriation by governments.  Leftists love big government, but  governments waste money, steal money, and misallocate money into non-helpful areas.  Individual crusaders, however, inject money exactly where it needs to go and make governments look bad.  

In the case of MrBeast, he accomplished in a few years what African governments claimed they would do for decades.  Their corruption made viable change impossible, and leftist run programs are limited by their own ideological hangups, making them useless.  All it took was one “white guy” with a YouTube channel and some cash to circumvent all of that and get things done.  

They hate MrBeast because he represents the power of individual effort.  His whiteness is just an excuse they use to avoid admitting that what they really dislike is individualism.  Many defenders have pointed out the hypocrisy of the leftist reaction to MrBeast – They drone on and on about how the mega rich should contribute reparations to help those less fortunate.  Yet, when someone like MrBeast does this on his own, they are outraged.  

The point for these activists is that the hive gets the credit.  They want the mob to be seen as the hero, not the individual.  They didn’t force MrBeast to do good things, he just did them.  Therefore, they don’t get the glory they think they deserve.  The political left is often portrayed as the side of empathy and compassion, but their behavior proves they are not interested in legitimately helping others.  They only care about optics; constantly scheming to steal acclaim while obstructing good men in their charitable endeavors.       

By Peter Tchir of Academy Securities

We Didn’t Learn a Whole Lot Last Week

Data was mixed. Unemployment claims were lower (a sign of strength), durable goods were weak, and Global PMIs were just above 50 (Goldilocks economy). While I don’t pay much attention to CONsumer CONfidence, it is interesting that one-year inflation expectations jumped from 3.2% to 4.5% in two months. That occurred while oil (often a proxy for CONsumer CONfidence inflation expectations) dropped, some major retailers warned about deflating prices, and as far as I can tell, everyone is having some sort of a sale, which doesn’t seem inflationary to me.

The 10-year Treasury inched higher, finishing at 4.47% (up from 4.44%, and it was as low as 4.39%). Since it was illiquid/holiday-oriented trading, we can probably ignore most of those moves as noise.

We also had NVDA earnings, which tend to serve as a “proxy” for AI. NVDA itself is down a touch since those earnings, but the markets as a whole have not suffered. That, along with the ongoing outperformance of the equal weighted indices and Russell 2000, is worth noting.

Since November 9th, the Russell 2000 has led the way, followed by the equal-weighted indices. That trend continued, and could be one of the more useful lessons of the week.

Ultimately, if AI is truly capable of generating efficiencies (today’s costs, versus today’s benefits) we should see more benefits accruing to companies that adopt and incorporate AI, thereby increasing earnings per share and multiples. So far, almost all of the AI benefits have accrued to the companies providing AI, which cannot last forever.

• Either AI works, and the broad economy and a wide swath of companies should benefit, or the current cost/benefit doesn’t work, in which case spending on AI will decrease as we move away from “hype” spending into critical analysis.

Personally, I’m in the “tide will lift all boats” camp but cannot deny that the current up-front costs versus value (especially at today’s higher cost of capital) may slow adoption. We will learn more as we get through year-end earnings and have more time to digest the true “success” stories, rather than just looking at certain investments which seem to be more about “keeping up with the Joneses’” rather than being fully incorporated into corporate strategy (which is a necessary condition for AI to be truly effective).

China

To get more of a sustained rally into year-end, we likely need some positive developments on the Chinese economy via some new deals with the U.S., more domestic stimulus, or some combination of the two. That is a bet that I’m still making for all the reasons listed in prior reports (Rally on Garth, Dictator, and More than a Photo Op).

Credit

CDS index spreads are hovering around their tightest levels of the year (CDX IG closed at 63). Corporate bond index spreads are at the lowest levels of the year (109 bps for the Bloomberg Corporate OAS). That is a little misleading, as the average maturity has been dropping all year (far fewer long-dated bonds have been issued this year relative to short-dated bonds because rates rose and the curve became less inverted).

High yield prices, while not back to levels seen at the start of the year, have rallied nicely and are trading well.

As a “contrarian” it would be easy to be bearish, but I think that we will see spreads tighten further (largely because of the “pain trade” element, but also due to the “safety” element).

• Enormous sums of money that have been allocated to private credit and distressed debt in anticipation of problems may need to be put to work. The “obvious” problems were the weak B credits and CCC credits in the leveraged loan universe. I can agree that this is where the “problems” arose. But if CLOs and private credit funds act like banks used to (“extend and pretend”), then the risk of default may be put off for some time. “Extend and pretend” occasionally is enough for a credit to recover, but it also tends to just delay default and result in lower recoveries. However, that won’t help those sitting on money meant for distressed investments. If the CLO market can open nicely for actual arbitrage deals (deals where non-sponsor/non-manager owned equity looks compelling), we could see a lot of buying interest in these loans that are supposed to be the problem. This could push the squeeze higher.
• Rethinking the “safety” of Treasuries. I remain convinced that we have only seen the start of investors being significantly underweight Treasuries in favor of other asset classes. High-quality investment grade credit is one of the obvious beneficiaries, but anything floating rate, things that don’t trade on a spread to Treasuries, and products that require more work (like ABS) will do very well. Heck, you could even argue that equities and crypto may deserve some “portion” of the allocation being channeled out of Treasuries. There are several reasons why assets trade at a spread to Treasuries
  • Credit risk. Sure, but when was the last time a multinational/highly rated corporate credit haphazardly discussed not paying something on time? The U.S. government has, as recently as this summer. That is a somewhat frivolous argument, but when was the last IG default? The last time (on a quick glance) that CDX IG had a Credit Event was Series 25, launched in 2015! So, in the last 8 years we haven’t had a Credit Event in a CDX index (and my view is that the index committee is always in favor of more volatile names). So why are we getting such a big premium?
• Liquidity risk. Sure, Treasuries are more liquid, but most insurance companies, pension funds, and index funds rarely sell, so why “pay up” (give up yield) for liquidity that they will never use? Even large IG funds that are not indexed don’t tend to manage portfolios in an “actively” traded way, so why “pay up” and “give up” yield for liquidity? Treasury liquidity seems worse than it was years ago, so what are you really getting for that lower yield? Finally, if I had to bet on which bond market was susceptible to a “flash crash” scenario (in which bonds went up for sale, triggering stop loss after stop loss), I’d bet that this would occur in Treasuries before other markets based on market structure.
• Governance. ESG investing has had some fits and starts, but I strongly believe that one thing that has largely changed for the better is corporate governance. I generally like what I see in corporate governance and think that is beneficial to creditors. I do NOT like what I see out of D.C. in terms of debt management or fiscal responsibility.
  • The Debt Diet. While corporations are governed for the benefit of shareholders, the boards are all well aware that if you mess up the debt too badly, the creditors are first in line and can destroy shareholder wealth quickly. So even if we get a mild recession, I expect that corporate governance will demonstrate that not just the top-rated credits deserve to trade at tighter spreads to Treasuries. The case for credit across the board to trade tighter than it does remains in place.

I’m not as bullish as I sound. We are near recent “tights”, I’m bearish on the economy, and this re-allocation will be a slow/long process, but I do like credit spreads here.

Bottom Line

I’m still in the “everything rally” camp.

• 10-year Treasury to 4.3%.
• S&P 500 to 4,600 but expect significant outperformance by the Russell 2000 and equal weighted indices.
• Credit spreads to grind tighter (with CDX outperforming cash and a target of 55 bps).
• At some point if the “Wayne’s World” rally continues, I’m going to have to behave even more immaturely to support it, but we haven’t yet reached “Beavis and Butt-Head” mode (at least I hope not).

I hope that you had a great Thanksgiving and are ready for the next few weeks as we power into year-end!

In his ubiquitously calm, reasoned, non-ad-hominem, and ruthlessly fact-driven few minutes, Victor Davis Hanson dives into the left’s apparent hysteria at the looming shadow of Donald Trump’s potential return.

Hanson articulates a sense of deep-rooted fear among Trump’s opponents, summed up perfectly as follows:

“they look at Trump as a vampire and they put a stake in his heart but they’re afraid that that stake could come out any time.”

This vivid imagery sets the stage for a discussion about the intense paranoia and strategic maneuvering in the political arena, particularly among those who view Trump not just as a political rival, but as an existential threat to their vision of America.

Hanson argues that there is a perception among Trump’s adversaries that he is now more formidable and justified in his anger due to perceived injustices against him:

“They are terrified of him because they think he’s smarter this time and he has just cause to really get angry because of what they did to him.”

They rightly fear that Trump’s potential comeback would be fueled not just by political ambition, but by a personal vendetta, which could make him a more unpredictable and determined opponent.

“…if a MAGA candidate wins and they win the house and the Senate, we’re cooked.”

They are likely right! And Hanson posits a political landscape where power dynamics could shift dramatically, leading to aggressive investigations and possibly even retribution against figures in the current administration.

It’s hard to argue that Trump’s retribution would be unjustified. As Hanson points out in detail, the Democratic party’s strategies and policies – prioritizing ideology over practical governance – are detached from reality and any concept of effectiveness.

He asserts, “nobody in their right mind would do that,” referring to a range of policy decisions from border control to economic management.

In a broader reflection on the state of American politics, Hanson portrays a polarized environment where allegiance to party ideology trumps objective assessment of policies:

“They start with a deductive principle we are better… and therefore the following must happen.”

This reinforces the perceived dogmatism in the political process, where decisions are driven more by ideological conformity than by rational deliberation or public interest.

Rather ominously, Hanson concludes a bleak picture of the current political climate, drawing parallels to authoritarian regimes, suggesting a mentality of ‘us versus them,’ where belonging to the right political faction offers protection and benefits, while dissent leads to persecution.

Indeed, the political landscape is now a battleground of ideologies, with high stakes for those who choose to engage in it.

“Join the winning side, it’s sort of like in the Soviet Union, if you’re part of the nomenclature and you join the party, you’re exempt; if you’re not, well, you’re on your own.”

Watch the full clip below: