What ails Main Street

A very interesting article analyzes some of the factors dragging down traditional retail businesses, and the cities and parts of cities that depend on them.

The assistants at many retailers are abysmally ill-informed, often slovenly in their habits (i.e. needing a shower or shave or haircut, or to change their clothes), and frequently not motivated to sell.  They appear to be there simply as warm bodies going through the motions.  I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve asked a salesperson about a feature of a product I’m interested in buying, only to find that they know nothing about it, and must consult the manual – something I could easily have done for myself.  I’ve even looked up information about it on my smartphone, while they were looking for a supervisor who proved to know as little as they did!  If I’m expected to pay a premium for the “benefit” of having trained salespeople to assist me, I want them to be trained, and have the expertise I expect.  If they aren’t and/or don’t, why should I waste my time there?

Source: What Ails Main Street

Questions nobody is asking…

One day in the 1970s, the officers of a Red Army reserve division in the backwaters of Siberia were summoned to hear a confidential presentation by a young major, who had come all the way from the General Staff in Moscow. What the major said astonished them. In Moscow’s view, the Soviet Union’s chief enemy was not the capitalist West, but the nominally-communist Chinese. War with China was inevitable. This war would be unlike that for which they had prepared in many ways: most important, the Chinese would have numerical superiority. The major showed charts of populations, troop strength, and other statistics making this point. As China grew more populous, it would grow stronger and more acquisitive. Fortunately, the major continued, there was a precedent for a numerically-inferior army defeating a larger enemy. He then presented a detailed analysis of Israeli performance in the 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973 wars. By emulating Israeli tactics and dispositions, the Red Army could crush the Chinese. Future training would be along these lines. The major then asked if the reservists had any questions.
“Comrade Major, do we have enough Jews?”

ACT for America Declares Culture War

Gabriel during her morning address worried that Muslim immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa “basically have no loyalty to our country,” a theme Ryan Fournier elaborated upon during his lunch address.  The Students for Trump national chairman denounced leftists as “see[ing] the world through a fantasy lens.  Their fanatical pursuit of diversity and cultural enrichment is a threat to Western civilization.”  Particularly in Europe, “multiculturalism” and “open border policies have led to a wave of terror attacks,” such that “left-wing politicians have blood on their hands.”  America should learn from Europe’s negative experience that “there is a clear difference between Eastern and Western cultures, and blending the two simply does not work.”

Democrats have no loyalty to our country either.

Source: ACT for America Declares Culture War

That Dystopia Everyone Fears? It’ll Come From the Left

Incidentally, there is a society which demands women dress a certain way and follow men’s every order. Hint: it rhymes with Sharia law in Islam. But we’re not allowed to talk about Islam, are we? The people who fear a dystopian world full of governmental regulations have made any negative mention of Islam forbidden. But Donald Trump is the problem.

Source: That Dystopia Everyone Fears? It’ll Come From the Left

The Intoxicating Effects of Socialist Benevolence

These folks mean well. They seek to boost all mankind up to their own plane of enlightenment. Inequality outrages their sense of justice. They regard conventional habits of behavior as so many obstacles to be overcome on the path to perfection. They see tradition as the enemy of innovation, which they embrace as a lifeline to moral progress. They cannot encounter a wrong without seeking to right it. The idea that some evils may be ineradicable is anathema. The notion that the best is the enemy of the good, that many choices are to some extent choices among evils—such proverbial wisdom seems quaintly out of date. The result is a campaign to legislate virtue, to curtail eccentricity, to smother individuality, to barter truth for the current moral or political enthusiasm.

For centuries, prudent political philosophers have understood that the lust for equality is the enemy of freedom.

The Constitution was written to ‘secure the blessings of liberty’ not equality. That’s why Democrats hate the Constitution.

Source: The Intoxicating Effects of Socialist Benevolence

Leo III’s 1300-Year-Old Lesson: Understand Islam to Defeat Jihad

Nor do I wish to pass over in silence the abominable authorization given by your legislator to have with your wives a commerce that he has compared, I am ashamed to say, to the tilling of fields. As a consequence of this license, a a goodly number of you have contracted the habit of multiplying their commerce with women, as if it were a question of tilling fields. Nor can I forget the chastity of your Prophet and the manner full of artifice whereby he succeeded in seducing the woman Zeda [sic, Zaynab; see Koran 33:37– 38; see further elaboration from the hadith, and jurisprudence, etc. here and here]. Of all these abominations the worst is that of accusing God of being the originator of all these filthy acts, which fact has doubtless been the cause of the introduction of this disgusting law. Is there indeed a worse blasphemy than that of alleging that God is the cause of all this evil?…[F]or I know nothing worse than not holding sin to be such as it is, and that is what you really do in never seeking nor receiving pardon [see Koran 14:4]. In the Gospel God  has commanded the husband not to repudiate the wife save for the cause of adultery, but you act otherwise. When you are tired of your wives, as of some kind of nourishment, you abandon them at your fancy. It had been my intention to conceal, if possible the shamelessness with which you remarry, and how before retaking your repudiated wives you make them sleep in the bed of another. [Koran 2:227– 2:232] And what shall I say of the execrable debauchery which you commit with your concubines? For you are prodigal with them of all your fortune, and then, when you are tired of them you sell them like cattle [Koran 4:3; 4:24– 25; 23:6]

— Letter from Leo III to Caliph Umar II

Source: Leo III’s 1300-Year-Old Lesson: Understand Islam to Defeat Jihad

The NY Times Op-Ed: Another Page from the Left’s Utopian Playbook

Here you have Harvard brokering a “collusion,” literally, between spies and the people studying religions that people don’t like.  If you think by “dissident religions” the Harvard pontiffs refer to Islam, you are probably not paying close enough attention.  The new Branch Davidians, at least in the mind of people engineering this modern-day Inquisition, are probably Christian sects that disagree with Democrats and might defy Democrat-led governments.

In order to defray the possibility of conflict, Barack Obama’s old alma mater has gathered together “religion scholars” whose field research involves spying on the religious opposition to the Democrats and feeding information to the FBI.  You do not have to go far to connect the dots from here to the media, either.

Source: The NY Times Op-Ed: Another Page from the Left’s Utopian Playbook

The Strange Career of White Privilege | National Review

One of the strangest elements of the American obsession with superficial appearance is the habit of very well connected and affluent whites faulting poor whites for their “white privilege.” It has become a sort of rite-of-passage virtue-signaling in which rich, white college students at tony universities damn white privilege and the supposedly racist, nativist, xenophobic, and sexist Trump Neanderthals. With this, they establish their spiritually pure fides or, more practically, earn a sort of insurance policy in case the all-seeing eye of the diversity tower turns its focus on them someday.

Donald Trump rode to victory in part on the furor of voters in the Midwest and rural states who were derided for their privilege (though they did not seem to have much) by those who most certainly did enjoy privilege.

I’ve been homeless for over a year. Where’s my privilege?

Source: The Strange Career of White Privilege | National Review