The Week in Review

How many times must my worldview pop before I let myself lapse into ataraxia? I was dogmatically Lutheran and then became Catholic. I was anti-libertarianism and then converted to a Hayekian-Sowellian view of things, with a touch of Rothbard (though I still think Ayn Rand was a nasty Satanic skank). I used to vote enthusiastically Republican and now tend to view voting as a mortal sin because it just encourages the bastards.

And I used to think women were congenitally incapable of being funny, but I've run across three funny broads in the past year (about eight more than I thought existed).

Nikki Glaser cracked me up at the Tom Brady roast (yes, I watched it well after it first aired), Nellie Bowles cracks me up at "T.G.I.F.," and now one of her co-columnists, Chelsea Jacobson, at The Free Press is cracking me up.

Unfortunately, you'll probably need a subscription to get past the pro-Israel propaganda that litters The Free Press these days, but if you can get to the second half of the column, it's packed with funny lines.

On people who don't use earphones while on public transportation: And now, to make matters even worse, people are starting to take video calls at 30,000 feet thanks to Starlink’s superfast Wi-Fi. Apparently, people are taking work meetings and FaceTiming on flights. If you do this next to me, you better hope there’s a federal air marshal on board because I will turn violent. I’m all for due process, but my preference is to give these people the electric chair. And one that works.

On the Cornell 7 and Today's Sex Education at Colleges: These kids are 18 years old and self-report that they’re barely having sex. In 2024, 69 percent of Harvard students said they entered college as virgins. But Cornell still wants them filling out worksheets on their favorite sex positions. It seems like we blew past the “sweet spot” in the middle when we decided to make sex education less about the birds and the bees and more a bureaucratic exercise in risk management, with a kink manual attached. And now we’re surprised when students end up either sexless or caught in a hellish ketamine orgy. Luckily, there’s a solution: Bring back first dates.

On the French riots: They’re running around fighting police and starting fires. It’s very French, in a sense, because those romantics love to riot. But now they’re rioting while waving Palestinian flags, which is not particularly French, if you ask me.. . . How long before heads roll? In France, if you combine the words revolution and the greater good, a guillotine inevitably appears and it might just be for you.

On a British gang getting busted for helping immigrants appear gay so they can get asylum (which, IMHO, was the best story of the week): Apparently the gang offered a “comprehensive package” to manufacture its clients’ homosexuality, including staged photographs at gay clubs. Migrants were also encouraged to attend LGBT centers to provide more evidence. Are we sure this “gang” isn’t a men’s a capella group? . . . In Britain, a conviction for asylum fraud carries a maximum sentence of up to 10 years in prison. Some of these asylum seekers will end up in jail, where they may find themselves dating men after all.

Rome Always Tugs

This dude runs Playboy, is actively homosexual, and describes himself as a Christian. The article is kinda hard to read . . . my head kept intuitively turning away as I glanced down the page and tried to avoid all the sexually perverse dialogue . . . but it's interesting that even a male who is apparently dedicated to destructive living now feels like he might be drawn back to his Catholic roots, first prompted to return to Christianity after attending International Muslim Women’s Day. We'll take the return sheep however we can get 'em.

Pope Leo has “made him reconsider” the possibility of returning to Rome, he says—and not because Picardi thinks Leo will do anything to change the church’s stance on homosexuality. He doesn’t think that will ever happen. It’s actually because of Leo’s criticisms of AI.

“Pope Leo inspires me so much because, whether we realize it or not, I think what he’s doing is laying the groundwork for a religious exemption to AI in the workplace,” says Picardi. As in, he thinks the pontiff’s moral authority will indirectly mean employees feel empowered to resist the robots.

Gas Station Heroin

Note: A previous version of this piece appeared on Thursday for "Members Only"

I don't want to turn you into a jittery mess every time you go into a store, but please: go in mentally armed like you're about to get interrogated by crooked cops for a kiddie porn crime you're pretty sure you didn't commit.

Here's a historical rule of thumb: If Western culture gave birth to something between 1889 and 1914, handle it like a grenade wrapped in a uranium protective sheath. That's the era from the Paris Exhibition of 1889 with its Eiffel Tower to the outbreak of World War I.

Modernism, Jacques Barzun observes, "rightly belongs to those twenty-five years [1889-1914] in which nearly every idea in the twentieth century was hatched." A Stroll with William James.

This applies to marketing and advertising.

During this era, marketing definitively shifted from "informational" to "manipulative." The first proto-Don Drapers were discovering that you could actually convince people to buy stuff they didn't need. From there, the marketing industry snowballed quickly. By the 1920s, Edward Bernays was showing that, not only could you convince people to buy stuff they didn't need or even want, but you could convince them they wanted stuff they didn't want.

The sons-of-bitches have been perfecting the approach over the past 100 years. You can't walk into a brick-and-mortar store without being attacked by silent marketing gremlins.

One of the marketing SoBs' fundamental rules: Put stuff most suited for impulse buys at the checkout counter. If it's at the checkout counter, it probably sucks. I mean, honestly, if cigarette packs have to display that worn-out Surgeon General warning, convenience stores oughtta be required to post signs that say, "We're Awful People to Be Playing On Your Impulse Buy Psyche Right Now."

But alas, the convenience store lobby today is stronger than the tobacco lobby in the 1960s, so we have no such warnings.

And products like $9 bottles of Feel Free fly off the shelves like flat-screen TVs during a Black Lives Matter mostly peaceful protest.

What's Feel Free? It's a two-ounce bottle of fun and productivity. It makes it easier to study and socialize, which, for a college student, are the only two things that matter. It also contains a healthy dose of kratom, which is pretty dang addictive, prompting some to refer to Feel Free as "gas station heroin."

And so a few folks got hooked. "Colin" says he was drinking eight every day even though the label told him not to do more than one per day.

It's awful, but I kinda feel about this like I do about the Cornell 7 and She Who Was Too Skanky Even for a Fraternity House. I have virtually zero doubt that the first three men are innocent, I can't make up my mind about the second group of four men, and I'm positive the skank is guilty of skankery, but my overall attitude: "The heck with the lot of them." They're all reprobates whose collective moral compasses aren't worth the ink spilled on this story.

I feel bad for Colin, but come on, dude: The actual drug pusher himself told you to stop at one per day.

I get it: He's young, his prefrontal cortex isn't fully developed yet, he's "old enough to kill but not for drinkin'" (Barry McGuire). But use common sense. Don't do a drunken threesome in a frat house and get shocked when the other Cornell Hells Angels pile on and don't drink multiple bottles of Feel Free every day.