#Kevin Dolan

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Gaby Del Valle at Politico Magazine:

The threat, we are told here this weekend, is existential, biological, epoch-defining. Economies will fail, civilizations will fall, and it will all happen because people aren’t having enough babies.

“The entire global financial system, the value of your money, and every asset you might buy with money is defined by leverage, which means its value depends on growth,” Kevin Dolan, a 37-year-old father of six from Virginia, tells the crowd that has gathered to hear him speak. “Every country in the developed world and most countries in the developing world face long-term population decline at a level that makes growth impossible to maintain,” Dolan says, “which means we are sitting on the bubble of all bubbles.” Despite this grim prognosis, the mood is optimistic. It’s early December, a few weeks before Christmas, and the hundred-odd people who have flocked to Austin for the first Natal Conference are here to come up with solutions. Though relatively small, as conferences go, NatalCon has attracted attendees who are almost intensely dedicated to the cause of raising the U.S. birth rate. The broader natalist movement has been gaining momentum lately in conservative circles — where anxieties over falling birth rates have converged with fears of rising immigration — and counts Elon Musk, who has nearly a dozen children, and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán among its proponents. Natalism is often about more than raising birth rates, though that is certainly one of its aims; for many in the room, the ultimate goal is a total social overhaul, a culture in which child-rearing is paramount.

NatalCon’s emphasis on childbirth notwithstanding, there are very few women in the cavernous conference room of the LINE Hotel. The mostly male audience includes people of all ages, many of whom are childless themselves. Some of the women in attendance, however, have come to Austin with their children in tow — a visual representation of the desired outcome of this weekend. As if to emphasize the reason we’re all gathered here today, a baby babbles in the background while Dolan delivers his opening remarks.

Broadly speaking, the people who have paid as much as $1,000 to attend the conference are members of the New Right, a conglomeration of people in the populist wing of the conservative movement who believe we need seismic changes to the way we live now — and who often see the past as the best model for the future they’d like to build. Their ideology, such as it exists, is far from cohesive, and factions of the New Right are frequently in disagreement. But this weekend, these roughly aligned groups, from the libertarian-adjacent tech types to the Heritage Foundation staffers, along with some who likely have no connection with traditionally conservative or far-right causes at all, have found a unifying cause in natalism. At first glance, this conference might look like something new: A case for having kids that is rooted in a critique of the market-driven forces that shape our lives and the shifts that have made our culture less family-oriented. As Dolan later tells me in an email, declining birth rates are primarily the fault of “default middle-class ‘life path’ offered by our educational system and corporate employers,” which Dolan says is “in obvious competition with starting a family.” These systems, he believes, have created a consumer-driven, hedonistic society that requires its members to be slavishly devoted to their office jobs, often at the expense of starting a family.

But over the course of the conference, the seemingly novel arguments for having children fade and give way to a different set of concerns. Throughout the day, speakers and participants hint at the other aspects of modern life that worried them about future generations in the U.S. and other parts of the West: divorce, gender integration, “wokeness,” declining genetic “quality.” Many of the speakers and attendees see natalism as a way of reversing these changes. As the speakers chart their roadmaps for raising birth rates, it becomes evident that for the most dedicated of them, the mission is to build an army of like-minded people, starting with their own children, who will reject a whole host of changes wrought by liberal democracy and who, perhaps one day, will amount to a population large enough to effect more lasting change. This conference suggests there’s a simple way around the problem of majority rule: breeding a new majority — one that looks and sounds just like them.

In recent years, various factions of the old and the new right have coalesced around the idea that babies might be the cure for everything that’s wrong with society, in the United States and other parts of the developed West. It’s not a new argument. Natalists made similar claims in the early 20th century, when urbanization drove birth rates down and European immigration kept the U.S. population afloat. Then, too, people attributed the drop in fertility rates to endemic selfishness among young people.

Throughout it all, some religious conservative cultures have continued to see raising large broods as a divine mandate. White supremacists, meanwhile, have framed their project as a way of ensuring “a future for white children,” as declared by David Lane, a founding member of the white nationalist group The Order. More recently, natalist thinking has emerged among tech types interested in funding and using experimental reproductive technologies, and conservatives concerned about falling fertility rates and what they might mean for the future labor force of the United States and elsewhere in the developed world. The conservative think tanks the Center for Renewing America and the Heritage Foundation — the latter of which was represented at NatalCon — have proposed policies for a potential second Trump administration that would promote having children and raising them in nuclear families, including limiting access to contraceptives, banning no-fault divorce and ending policies that subsidize “single-motherhood.”

[...]

The speakers who lay out this bleak state of affairs are a motley crew of the extremely online right, many of whom go by their X (the website formerly called Twitter) handles rather than their names. Via Zoom, anonymous Twitter user Raw Egg Nationalist warns us about endocrine disruptors in everything from perfume to bottled water. Ben Braddock, an editor at the conservative magazine IM-1776, claims that antidepressants and birth control pills have permanent, detrimental effects on women’s fertility. Together, the speakers paint a dire picture of a society that has lost its way, abandoning fundamental biological truths and dooming itself to annihilation in the process. The solution, of course, is to have more babies. Peachy Keenan, a pseudonymous writer affiliated with the conservative Claremont Institute, urges attendees to “seize the means of reproduction” — as in, to out-breed liberals, who are already hobbling their movement by choosing to have just a couple children, or none at all. “We can use their visceral hatred of big families to our advantage,” Keenan says. “The other side is not reproducing; the anti-natalists are sterilizing themselves.”

Here lies the project, spelled out in detail: The people who disagree have bloodlines that are slowly going to die out. To speed up that process — to have this particular strain of conservative natalist ideology become dominant quickly in the United States — everyone in this room has to have more kids, and fast. But it’s only when the speakers get to who should have babies and how they should raise them that their deeper concerns, and the larger anxieties behind this conference, become clear. The goal, as put by Indian Bronson, the pseudonymous co-founder of the elite matchmaking service Keeper, is “more, better people.” But the speakers lack consensus on the meaning of the word “better,” as they do on the subject of using technology to encourage the best and brightest among us to breed.

Keenan, who has previously celebrated her sense that it is now acceptable to say “white genocide is real,” says better means conservative. Pat Fagan, the director of the Marriage and Religion Institute at the Catholic University of America, says good children are the product of stable, two-parent Christian households, away from the corrupting influences of public school and sex ed. (Christian couples, he adds, have “the best, most orgasmic sex,” citing no research or surveys to support this.) To protect these households, we must abolish no-fault divorce, declares Brit Benjamin, a lawyer with waist-length curly red hair. (Until relatively recently, Benjamin was married to Patri Friedman — grandson of economist Milton Friedman — the founder of the Seasteading Institute, a Peter Thiel-backed effort to build new libertarian enclaves at sea.) And to ensure that these children grow up to be adults who understand their proper place in both the family and the larger social order, we need to oust women from the workforce and reinstitute male-only spaces “where women are disadvantaged as a result,” shampoo magnate and aspiring warlord Charles Haywood says, prompting cheers from the men in the audience.

The far-right natalist movement's goals are to cause a population explosion of people who think like them.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The threat, we are told here this weekend, is existential, biological, epoch-defining. Economies will fail, civilizations will fall, and it will all happen because people aren’t having enough babies.

“The entire global financial system, the value of your money, and every asset you might buy with money is defined by leverage, which means its value depends on growth,” Kevin Dolan, a 37-year-old father of six from Virginia, tells the crowd that has gathered to hear him speak. “Every country in the developed world and most countries in the developing world face long-term population decline at a level that makes growth impossible to maintain,” Dolan says, “which means we are sitting on the bubble of all bubbles.”

Despite this grim prognosis, the mood is optimistic. It’s early December, a few weeks before Christmas, and the hundred-odd people who have flocked to Austin for the first Natal Conference are here to come up with solutions. Though relatively small, as conferences go, NatalCon has attracted attendees who are almost intensely dedicated to the cause of raising the U.S. birth rate. The broader natalist movement has been gaining momentum lately in conservative circles — where anxieties over falling birth rates have converged with fears of rising immigration — and counts Elon Musk, who has nearly a dozen children, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán among its proponents. Natalism is often about more than raising birth rates, though that is certainly one of its aims; for many in the room, the ultimate goal is a total social overhaul, a culture in which child-rearing is paramount.

NatalCon’s emphasis on childbirth notwithstanding, there are very few women in the cavernous conference room of the LINE Hotel. The mostly male audience includes people of all ages, many of whom are childless themselves. Some of the women in attendance, however, have come to Austin with their children in tow — a visual representation of the desired outcome of this weekend. As if to emphasize the reason we’re all gathered here today, a baby babbles in the background while Dolan delivers his opening remarks.

Broadly speaking, the people who have paid as much as $1,000 to attend the conference are members of the New Right, a conglomeration of people in the populist wing of the conservative movement who believe we need seismic changes to the way we live now — and who often see the past as the best model for the future they’d like to build. Their ideology, such as it exists, is far from cohesive, and factions of the New Right are frequently in disagreement. But this weekend, these roughly aligned groups, from the libertarian-adjacent tech types to the Heritage Foundation staffers, along with some who likely have no connection with traditionally conservative or far-right causes at all, have found a unifying cause in natalism.

At first glance, this conference might look like something new: A case for having kids that is rooted in a critique of the market-driven forces that shape our lives and the shifts that have made our culture less family-oriented. As Dolan later tells me in an email, declining birth rates are primarily the fault of “default middle-class ‘life path’ offered by our educational system and corporate employers,” which Dolan says is “in obvious competition with starting a family.” These systems, he believes, have created a consumer-driven, hedonistic society that requires its members to be slavishly devoted to their office jobs, often at the expense of starting a family.

But over the course of the conference, the seemingly novel arguments for having children fade and give way to a different set of concerns. Throughout the day, speakers and participants hint at the other aspects of modern life that worried them about future generations in the U.S. and other parts of the West: divorce, gender integration, “wokeness,” declining genetic “quality.”

Many of the speakers and attendees see natalism as a way of reversing these changes. As the speakers chart their roadmaps for raising birth rates, it becomes evident that for the most dedicated of them, the mission is to build an army of like-minded people, starting with their own children, who will reject a whole host of changes wrought by liberal democracy and who, perhaps one day, will amount to a population large enough to effect more lasting change.

This conference suggests there’s a simple way around the problem of majority rule: breeding a new majority — one that looks and sounds just like them.

In recent years, various factions of the old and the new right have coalesced around the idea that babies might be the cure for everything that’s wrong with society, in the United States and other parts of the developed West.

It’s not a new argument. Natalists made similar claims in the early 20th century, when urbanization drove birth rates down and European immigration kept the U.S. population afloat. Then, too, people attributed the drop in fertility rates to endemic selfishness among young people.

Throughout it all, some religious conservative cultures have continued to see raising large broods as a divine mandate. White supremacists, meanwhile, have framed their project as a way of ensuring “a future for white children,” as declared by David Lane, a founding member of the white nationalist group The Order.

More recently, natalist thinking has emerged among tech types interested in funding and using experimental reproductive technologies, and conservatives concerned about falling fertility rates and what they might mean for the future labor force of the United States and elsewhere in the developed world. The conservative think tanks the Center for Renewing America and the Heritage Foundation — the latter of which was represented at NatalCon — have proposed policies for a potential second Trump administration that would promote having children and raising them in nuclear families, including limiting access to contraceptives, banning no-fault divorce and ending policies that subsidize “single-motherhood.”

Though Dolan opens the conference by talking about the potential economic consequences of a global birth dearth, he and the other NatalCon speakers aren’t primarily concerned with the utilitarian arguments for raising birth rates. “I’m not trying to have grandkids so they can fund Medicare,” Dolan says. “We’re here because we agree that people are beautiful, that life is beautiful, and that it should go on.”

Dolan, a conservative Mormon and a former Booz Allen Hamilton data scientist, resigned from his job in 2021 after a group of self-proclaimed anti-fascist Mormon activists exposed his anonymous Twitter account, which tied him to the far-right Deseret Nationalist movement. Having lost his livelihood and security clearance, Dolan started the EXIT Group, a “fraternity of like-minded men” who are preparing for the supposed collapse of American society — and who, as of recently, have taken on the decline in birth rates as their pet cause.

On his podcast, Dolan says he was first alerted to the problem of demographic collapse by a member of the EXIT Group, which claims to have 171 members. Dolan came up with the idea for NatalCon after watching “The End of Men,” Tucker Carlson’s documentary about “collapsing testosterone levels” in the West. The global drop in sperm concentrations has indeed puzzled scientists for decades and is believed to be one of the factors that has contributed to the global downturn in birth rates. But NatalCon’s organizers and attendees seem more interested in combating social institutions — like corporate employment and the educational system set up to support it — that, in Dolan’s words, have suppressed fertility by being “hostile to life.”

Most of the first day of the conference is spent defining the problem. In a nutshell: Sperm counts are historically low. Our bodies are full of microplastics. Public schools are indoctrinating children against the good Christian values with which they were raised. Dating apps have gamified romance, tricking lonely singles into believing that a better prospect is always around the corner. Women have been convinced that they can have it all — kids and a career and endless vacations and so much more — only to end up unhappy, infertile and alone.

The speakers who lay out this bleak state of affairs are a motley crew of the extremely online right, many of whom go by their X (the website formerly called Twitter) handles rather than their names. Via Zoom, anonymous Twitter user Raw Egg Nationalist warns us about endocrine disruptors in everything from perfume to bottled water. Ben Braddock, an editor at the conservative magazine IM-1776, claims that antidepressants and birth control pills have permanent, detrimental effects on women’s fertility. Together, the speakers paint a dire picture of a society that has lost its way, abandoning fundamental biological truths and dooming itself to annihilation in the process.

The solution, of course, is to have more babies. Peachy Keenan, a pseudonymous writer affiliated with the conservative Claremont Institute, urges attendees to “seize the means of reproduction” — as in, to out-breed liberals, who are already hobbling their movement by choosing to have just a couple children, or none at all. “We can use their visceral hatred of big families to our advantage,” Keenan says. “The other side is not reproducing; the anti-natalists are sterilizing themselves.”

Here lies the project, spelled out in detail: The people who disagree have bloodlines that are slowly going to die out. To speed up that process — to have this particular strain of conservative natalist ideology become dominant quickly in the United States — everyone in this room has to have more kids, and fast.

But it’s only when the speakers get to who should have babies and how they should raise them that their deeper concerns, and the larger anxieties behind this conference, become clear.

The goal, as put by Indian Bronson, the pseudonymous co-founder of the elite matchmaking service Keeper, is “more, better people.”

But the speakers lack consensus on the meaning of the word “better,” as they do on the subject of using technology to encourage the best and brightest among us to breed.

Keenan, who has previously celebrated her sense that it is now acceptable to say “white genocide is real,” says better means conservative. Pat Fagan, the director of the Marriage and Religion Institute at the Catholic University of America, says good children are the product of stable, two-parent Christian households, away from the corrupting influences of public school and sex ed. (Christian couples, he adds, have “the best, most orgasmic sex,” citing no research or surveys to support this.) To protect these households, we must abolish no-fault divorce, declares Brit Benjamin, a lawyer with waist-length curly red hair. (Until relatively recently, Benjamin was married to Patri Friedman — grandson of economist Milton Friedman — the founder of the Seasteading Institute, a Peter Thiel-backed effort to build new libertarian enclaves at sea.) And to ensure that these children grow up to be adults who understand their proper place in both the family and the larger social order, we need to oust women from the workforce and reinstitute male-only spaces “where women are disadvantaged as a result,” shampoo magnate and aspiring warlord Charles Haywood says, prompting cheers from the men in the audience.

Haywood’s final words to the audience elicit raucous applause: “The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its progeny are probably the single most destructive set of laws in American history, and all should be wiped forever,” he says before getting off stage. (A few women told me afterward they and others disagreed with Haywood.)

Notably, most of the speakers do not make a case for more immigration to counter the trend of declining birth rates. Immigrants can’t solve our population problem, Dolan says, because they’ll eventually realize they were brought here to pay into Social Security for old white people. (On X, Dolan has used the word “replacement” to refer to immigration.)

Some at the conference are interested in the genetics of the children they believe everyone should be having. Evolutionary biologist Diana Fleischman and writer Jonathan Anomaly argue that genetics are destiny. (“I shouldn’t say Good quality children,” Fleischman says after speaking at length about how people with mental illness are statistically likely to marry other mentally ill people and pass those genes along to their children, suggesting some children are indeed biologically better than others.)

Razib Khan — a geneticist and science blogger who in 2015 was hired and quickly fired by the New York Times opinion section after Gawker reported on his ties to racist far-right publications — illustrates the problem of current demographic trends in the West compared to other regions by pointing to Ethiopia, which had nearly as many births in 2020 as the entire European continent. “This is the future we’re already in,” says Khan, who is Bangladeshi-American. “Many of you have young children. … They will live to see this world.”

Over and over throughout the conference, anxieties over the drop in birth rates — the issue that brought the speakers and audience together — gave way to fears that certain populations were out-breeding their betters. Though few speakers explicitly mentioned race, the conference provided an opportunity for those with genuine concerns about population decline to join forces with, and perhaps be influenced by, those who espouse racist or regressive views. During the second day of the conference — a closed-door, phone-off event dedicated to brainstorming ways to reverse the population crisis — VIP ticket holders mingled with Jared Taylor, the publisher of the white supremacist magazine American Renaissance, according to multiple people in attendance who wanted to remain anonymous because having their name linked to the conference would jeopardize their work.

The following day, I talk with Malcolm and Simone Collins, the husband-and-wife founder of Pronatalist.org who went viral in 2023 after the Telegraph dubbed them the “elite couple breeding to save mankind.” They are entrepreneurs and investors and previously served as co-CEOs of a travel agency company; Simone is also currently running for a seat in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.

The Collinses tell me they want to promote a plurality of cultures and protect everyone’s right to be “weird.” Malcolm says they want to make their movement a “big tent” and were initially worried about what kinds of people the conference would attract. “Are they going to be like, ‘[No] transgender people reading kids books?’ Are they going to be racist nut jobs? It’s a real concern,” he says.

The Collinses — parents of four children — present themselves as rationalists, techies trying to solve the looming depopulation crisis by any means necessary. (Simone was pregnant with the fourth child during the conference. That baby, Industry Americus Collins, was born in April.) With their third and fourth children, the Collinses used a preimplantation genetic test that allowed them to select an embryo with optimum genetic makeup.

But they, too, are far more interested in the cultural implications of declining fertility rates than their fascination with reproductive technologies might lead you to believe. The couple is committed to fighting the “urban monoculture” that they claim has tricked a generation of young Americans into spending their most fertile years chasing professional achievements and personal fulfillment at the expense of building a family.

“The monoculture is not an evil thing,” Malcolm says over panang curry and pineapple fried rice at a Thai restaurant the day after the conference’s VIP event, but, he continues, it’s built on false promises. “It promises people, if you join us, you can do whatever makes you happy, so long as it doesn’t interfere with other people’s quality of life, and you can be affirmed for whoever you want to be.” In reality, though, they become casualties of an elitist scam.

The urban monoculture, Malcolm explains, breeds childlessness and therefore must poach other people’s children to survive. It lures them out of small towns and into large cities, encourages them to eschew their religious upbringings in favor of hedonistic secularism, and then leaves them to die alone.

Malcolm compares the “urban monoculture” to the boarding schools the Canadian government forced Native children into, in which indigenous children were forcibly assimilated into white culture. (The U.S. government had similar boarding schools.) “It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to convert them to a culture that’s closer to mine — what you’re doing is wrong,” he says. When I tell him the boarding schools were a state program, not a voluntary form of acculturation, Malcolm becomes animated. “This is a state project! What’s going on in the public schools is a state project! The mechanisms that the urban monoculture uses to de-convert people are primarily a state funded educational system,” he says. (In a subsequent email, he describes the urban monoculture as “one of the descendants of European imperialism.”) The most important and effective way to fight the monoculture, Malcolm later tells me via email, is building “school systems not dedicated to cultural genocide.”

The goal, though, the Collinses tell me, is not to convert the childless, or even to counteract the phenomena that contribute to the “unplanned childlessness” that has become endemic among millennials: it’s to encourage people with a lot of children to have even more. “Some people matter less than other people in getting fertility rates up,” Malcolm says. “Helping somebody who has four kids but wants eight is more important than helping someone who has none but wants one.”

Ultimately, this is what unites the Collinses with the more “trad” wings of the natalist movement, from the nativists to the Christian nationalists: pushing back on social and cultural changes they see as imposed on them by outside forces. To do that, these conference attendees have coalesced around a solution that won’t require them to persuade skeptics to join their cause. If everything goes as planned, the competition will go extinct on their own. All the natalists have to do is have enough kids so that, in a generation or two, they’ll be the ones who inherit the earth.

[cannondisabledcharacters]

Today’s disabled character of the day is Kevin Dolan from The Good Doctor, who has dyslexia

Requested by Anon

[Image Description: Photo of Marcus Gladney Jr playing Kevin. He is laying in a hospital bed with red bruises how his chin, under his right eye, and on his left cheek. He is wearing a light blue hospital gown. He has short brown dreadlocks and brown eyes.]

[arcticdementor]

Last Wednesday in Baltimore, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a suit against the convenience store chain Sheetz, arguing that their use of criminal background checks in hiring violates federal civil rights law. To be clear, the government hasn’t found any evidence that Sheetz deployed the background checks in a racially conscious way — the EEOC is challenging the use of criminal background checks per se.

…

In a similar case in 2012, Pepsi was ordered to pay $3.13M and invited in the future to “take into consideration the nature and gravity of the offense, the time that has passed since the conviction and/or completion of the sentence, and the nature of the job sought in order to be sure that the exclusion is important for the particular position.” In other words, the government won’t tell you what the rules are: you have to guess. They dangle multimillion-dollar payouts in front of “marginalized” employees, and demand that employers anticipate what the EEOC’s subjective judgment of their actions might be. Discrimination complaints of this kind are heard by your local EEOC investigator, who takes statements and makes a “preliminary” determination as to whether illegal discrimination has occurred. But the EEOC gets the outcome they want from the district judge 96% of the time — and attorneys on both sides know this — so only 0.1% of cases go to court. If the EEOC bureaucrat says to pay up, you pay up. The investigator has no obligation prove anything; they just have to find “sufficient reasonable cause” to believe that discrimination occurred.

…

This risk is existential for small and medium-sized businesses, which is one reason that labor-intensive businesses are dominated by massive conglomerates. You have to pay to play. Conservative commentators love to characterize HR and DEI as “dead weight” patronage jobs, as if they were the product of bureaucratic bloat or laziness — but DEI mandarins aren’t lying when they say they perform a business-critical function. If you are identified as a thought-criminal with respect to any legally-protected category, and your employer fails to discipline or terminate you, then any gender creature at the office can decide that you make them Feel Unsafe, and start building a case to put their hand in the company’s pocket. Corporations don’t hire sprawling HR and DEI departments out of inertia, or because they’re afraid of popular pressure: they do it because they need an internal constituency that is as crazy as their craziest employee — that can keep the organization up to date with the latest progressive moral panic, and punish dissenting employees long before they generate a lawsuit. A DEI department is as practically necessary to the modern American corporation as Legal or Accounting. Your local Chief Inclusion Officer is an agent of US state security, empowered to conduct intelligence and enforcement operations against ideological enemies beyond the jurisdiction of the regular authorities. It’s a brilliant workaround — it would, of course, be unconstitutional for the regular police to monitor your private communications and punish you for ideological crimes — but the EEOC built a $30B network of internal informants and political officers (twice the size and 3X the budget of the KGB at its peak) who are not accountable to the Constitution, and got your boss to pay for it.

…

Under these conditions, institutional pressure can only ratchet in one direction: away from acknowledging any human distinctions which pertain to the categories protected by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which is literally all human distinctions.) Part of the inevitable unfolding of this process is the type of lawsuit now faced by Sheetz, in which businesses are punished by the state for failing to employ (and retain, and promote) convicted criminals. Why? Because criminality is unequally distributed. There is no standard of human behavior whatsoever by which humans are equal in practice; therefore it is illegal to hold or advocate any standard of human behavior. Aptitude tests must be eliminated in schools, citizenship requirements waived from law enforcement, creditworthiness ignored in issuing loans. The only self-limiting factor to this process is collapse: institutions at war with competence will eventually become too incompetent to prosecute the war. But there’s a great deal of ruin in a nation, and these systems can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

…

It’s not an accident that the most outspoken dissidents either have happy family lives and independent income streams, or they have no professional or family relationships to threaten. It’s also not a coincidence that you see such political polarization in the tech industry. There is no other industry that can provide such massive returns to a team of “picked men” at a scale well below the thresholds of the Civil Rights Act. If you want to make a billion dollars with total freedom of association, it can really only be done in software.  (Which is why software has been the only domain of meaningful American innovation since 1964.) Simultaneously, there is no other type of company that can become such an irresistible host for leftist parasitism, gargantuan and bloblike in its latter stages. The political orientation of every tech company reflects this life cycle. Economic sovereignty means earning your living through channels where HR has no legal jurisdiction — profitable businesses with fewer than 15 employees (exempt from Title VII of the Civil Rights Act) or 100 employees (below the threshold of EEO reporting).

(@mitigatedchaos, here's another reason why the left's not going to put away the "woke" race stuff just because you asked them to — they've got this nice, big apparatus for squashing political dissent, and you propose that they dismantle it, with nothing to replace it? How does that benefit them?)

[spilladabalia]

Abecedarians - The Misery Of Cities

[kaitlinj16]

Icons

Animal Kingdom (2016-2022)

🖤🖤🖤

♡ like / reblog if you save / use ;)

[lakings9]

Credit: LA Kings

[probablyasocialecologist]

Natal’s website claim the conference has “has no political or ideological goal other than a world in which our children can have grandchildren”, but the Guardian can reveal its organizer Kevin Dolan has been promoting the event on the far-right podcast circuit, and has explicitly linked the conference’s “pro-natalist” orientation to eugenics.

What a paragraph.

[teaandfiction-28]

Happy Sunday Lovely Readers! 💛

We are halfway through Turn Back Time 🤯 This has most definitely been the most challenging of the three books to write, simply because I haven't had as much time to spend writing so I very much appreciate those of you who still like/comment/interact with these stories.

Chapter Fifteen is taking shape and is titled For Old Time's Sake...a little sneak peak below the cut if you're interested 😉

Their assessment of their suspect’s evasion techniques was cut short when Trudy appeared in the doorway of the garage. 

“The tap you put on the girlfriend’s phone just payed off. He wants her to meet him at the Red Bridge tonight at ten o’clock.”

It wasn’t a venue Kate was familiar with but, from the knowing look that Trudy shared with Hank, she could only assume that there was a case file somewhere with at least one member of the intelligence unit’s name attached and thankfully she didn't have to wait much longer before Hank confirmed her thoughts.

“Years back, Antonio got into some hot water with a diamond dealer.” Hank explained, casting a withering glare at Ruzek who looked as though Christmas had come early. “Case led us to a sex club called the Red Bridge.”

“A sex club?” Kate clarified, both brows lifting in surprise at the thought of the experienced ex-vice detective managing to get himself tangled in a web of debauchery that, given the nature of his day job, he was all too familiar with. 

“It’s a place where people go to have se-“

“Yeah, gathered that Ruz.” She interrupted with a roll of her eyes. “What I meant was what kind of sex club are we talking here?”

“Membership only.” Jay replied with a casual shrug, confirming her assumption that he had been one of the detectives leading point on the last undercover gig. “Light BDSM, swingers, power play…but mainly just Chicago’s elite paying a small fortune to indulge in their kink for voyuerism.”

It seemed that Chicago was no different to any other city she had policed over the last decade in that it was often the richest and most prominent members of society who deemed themselves important enough that they needn't be concerned with abiding by the law.

“I’m guessing that there’s a number of Chicago dignitaries on that membership list preventing us from getting a warrant?” She asked with a huff of irritation, shaking her head in disbelief when Hank dipped his chin into a nod. 

“Well this girl clearly means somethin’ to him if he’s meeting her instead’a gettin’ his ass  outta town.” Kevin said, folding his arms across his hulking chest and Kate had to admit, the same thought had crossed her own mind the moment Trudy mentioned Dolan’s  contact with his girlfriend. After narrowly avoiding capture on not one but two occasions, there weren’t many people who would chance their luck one more time in the name of a quick screw. 

“Clearly she’s the one if he’ll risk it all to have her with him.” Kim offered, a rosy blush staining her ivory cheeks when Adam glanced over at her with a wry smile, the two of them sharing a moment before Hank cleared his throat and Kim’s eyes dropped back to the floor. 

“That or he’s more of an idiot than we thought.” He grumbled, once again questioning his life choices when he caught Burgess and Ruzek sharing lovelorn looks at one another instead of focusing on the task at hand. “We’re gonna need to get some eyes inside.”

“Yeah but we’ve all been burned.” Jay said, scrubbing an irritated palm over his sweaty forehead. “Dolan’s gonna bolt the second he sets eyes on us.” 

“I haven’t.” 

Kate had been dropping off Alexis at daycare when Kevin, Adam and Kim had pinned Dolan down at a bar in Rogers Park and both she and Kevin had been watching the front of the house earlier when Jay and Hailey barricaded him in his backyard before he’d managed to flee. It wasn’t lost on Hank that this was the first time that Kate had willingly offered to take a UC assignment since the incident with Pulpo but he couldn’t be sure if it was because she was the only member of the unit Dolan wouldn’t recognise or because she genuinely felt ready but, regardless of her intentions, he was quick to dispel any discussion around the prospect of sending her in alone.

“You’re not going in solo.”

“Who said anything about going solo?” She retorted and for a moment he wondered if she was going to suggest drafting in young Torres for the assignment but, from the impish quirk of her lips, it soon became apparent just whom it was that she was suggesting as her UC partner. 

“How ‘bout it Sarg? For old time’s sake?”

[justthegreat1]

Blood, Sex, and the American Dream: X review

Pictured above is the “X” poster. Image credit: A24

I’m aware that this movie came out on March 18, 2022 which makes me a little late to do this review, but it’s better to be late than never covering this movie. The reason I haven’t covered this movie yet is because I didn’t have a Tumblr account or the “X” DVD yet. So, let’s just cut to the chase and start this review. I’m going to give you my spoiler free thoughts on this movie.

X is a 2022 slasher horror film directed by Ti West who also produced and edited this movie (The House of The Devil and The Sacrament). X is produced by Jared Connon, Scott Mescudi, Dennis Cummings, Jacob Jaffke, Harrison Kreiss, Ashley Levinson, Sam Levinson, Karina Manashil, Peter Phok, and Kevin Turen. The soundtrack is done by Tyler Bates and Chelsea Wolfe. The cast involves Mia Goth as Maxine “Max” Minx/Pearl, Jenna Ortega as Lorraine, Scott Mescudi (Kid Cudi) as Jackson, Martin Henderson as Wayne, Owen Campbell as RJ, Brittany Snow as Bobby-Lynne, Stephen Ure as Howard, James Gaylyn as Sheriff Gentler, Simon Prast as Televangelist, Geoff Dolan as Deputy, Matthew J. Saville as Officer Mitchell, and Bryony Skillington as Store Clerk.

The plot:

A group of actors set out to make an adult film in rural Texas under the noses of their reclusive hosts---an elderly couple with a farm and boarding house for rent. But when the couple catches their young guests in the act, the cast finds themselves in a desperate fight for their lives in this tantalizing slasher from writer-director Ti West.

Positives:

One positive I have about this movie is the cast, each cast member played their parts perfectly…especially Mia Goth and Jenna Ortega. I think that every horror fan must have seen the Jenna Ortega scream scene in the trailer, and it gave me chills when I was watching that scene. That might have been one of the best screams I have ever heard…in my opinion. The characters were extremely likeable, and you feel bad when something awful happens to them…the movie also makes you sympathize with the villains in this movie…especially the character of Pearl.

Pictured above is Jenna Ortega in X (2022)

Image Credit: A24

The second positive I have about this movie was the special effects as it seems like every kill has been done practically which has been missing in modern horror films…okay not all modern horror films. The special effects in this movie are amazing and the makeup and special effects department deserve more credit. The elderly makeup on Mia Goth makes her look unrecognizable.

The third positive I have about X was the atmosphere as I feel like they nailed the 70’s aesthetic with the clothing choice, the cinematography, and the music. It felt like a 70’s-late 80’s slasher which is one of my favorite eras in horror history.

Pictured above is Mia Goth as Pearl in this stunning red lighting.

Negatives:

The only negative I have about X is that the motives of Pearl and Howard aren’t clear, we get hints throughout, but it doesn’t pay off. However, don’t let that negative affect your viewing of X as this movie is rewatchable.

My overall thoughts:

After watching this movie, I can say that this is an excellent throwback to late 70’s-early 80’s slashers. This is a fun movie, and it gives you likeable characters to keep you invested. Oh, and I forgot to mention that this movie keeps you on the edge of your seat.

Where to watch X?

X (2022) can be watched on digital retailers, Showtime, Blu-Ray, and DVD.

[6-degrees-of-keroro]

Kevin Bacon is 3 degrees away from Keroro Gunso

Kevin Bacon played Jimmy Dolan in The Air Up There

Keiji Fujiwara played Kevin Bacon's character, Jimmy Dolan, in the Japanese dub of The Air Up There

Keiji Fujiwara played Paul and Nyororo in Keroro Gunso

Additionally, they also both played John Graham in In the Cut

[arcticdementor]

Last night, Gaby del Valle published her exposé from the dark right-wing underbelly of NatalCon 2023.

…

Yes, the global economic system will collapse if demographic decline isn’t addressed; and yes, mainstream scientists actually agree with Twitter anon “@babygravy9” that endocrine disruptors are ubiquitous and seriously bad for human reproductive health; and yes, the life of a modern single man or woman is largely sterile and alienated and miserable — but the people saying these obviously true things have also said scary right-wing things. Doesn’t this Far Right Obsession with keeping the wheels on human civilization Give You the Ick? Some of this is just a consequence of the narrative terrain: it’s really hard to plant your feet on the ground that babies are bad — that life is bad — without asking yourself some pretty searching questions.

…

Having said all that, we should deal with what she actually wrote. Since it’s hard to attack the idea of having babies, this is an article about Far Right Extremists and their Hidden Agenda. She had to accuse us of secretly, surreptitiously wanting the babies to be healthy, or liking our babies best, or not putting enough effort into selling childless careerist progressives on having babies. Perspectives varied at the conference, but as for me, a dangerous far-right extremist, I would like to publicly confess: • I am in favor of healthy, happy babies who grow up big and strong and have healthy babies of their own. • I care about your kids, but I definitely care about my kids more. •There are so many childless people who desperately want kids that I admit I am not dedicating much mental effort to converting skeptics. I do believe that it’s impractical (and immoral, on several dimensions) to import young immigrants from poor countries as tax cattle to fund the retirements of wealthy, childless, elderly profligates. I do believe that the dominant ideology of Western societies is unsustainable and self-terminating. I don’t celebrate the loss of the people who are caught up in that destructive ideology, but I do celebrate the fact that my grandchildren won’t have to grow up surrounded by the loneliness and nihilism and neurosis and mutilation that defines our time. The most interesting accusation — that we are crowing over the inevitable demise of progressive ideology, or “giving up on making converts” — is simply an attempt to make it our fault that liberals refuse to raw for the cause. Apparently we’re supposed to try to make them make liberal babies. Their feelings about this are obviously complex.

[arcanespillo]

🦷 for your ask game :)

My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To 2020 Directed by Jonathan Cuartas, Ash 2019 Directed by Andrew Huculiak, Marrowbone 2017 Directed by Sergio G. Sánchez, Super Dark Times 2017 Directed by Kevin Phillips, As You Are 2016 Directed by Miles Joris-Peyrafitte, Mommy 2014 Directed by Xavier Dolan, The Hand of God 2021 ‘È stata la mano di Dio’ Directed by Paolo Sorrentino, Dogtooth 2009 ‘Κυνόδοντας’ Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, Mysterious Skin 2004 Directed by Gregg Araki, Brick 2005 Directed by Rian Johnson, Nowhere 1997 Directed by Gregg Araki, Felidae 1994 Directed by Michael Schaack, Christiane F. 1981 ‘Christiane F. - Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo’ Directed by Uli Edel

[my-chaos-radio]

Release: January 31, 2014

Lyrics:

After your faith has let you down

I know you'll want to run around

And follow the crowd into the night

But after the disco

All of the shine just faded away

Oh oh oh oh

Do what you want

Do what you will

Don't tell me it's not our time

'Cause I'm

Waiting here much too long and

Don't assume

That I need your love

The chill of night has got you dancing away

And I'm

Not the dreamer or the dream you're

Out there looking for

How did I get in this winding maze of love?

And there's something wrong and it's sending you

Round and round 'til we go nowhere

I see the ashes on the ground

I know the world is burning down

And under the cold and empty moon

But after the disco

All of the shine just faded away

Oh oh oh oh

Do what you want

Do what you will

But you can't hide

Oh oh oh oh

Do what you want

Do what you will

Don't tell me it's not our time

'Cause I'm

Waiting here much too long and

Don't assume

That I need your love

The chill of night has got you dancing away

And I'm

Not the dreamer or the dream you're

Out there looking for

Songwriter:

How did I get in this winding maze of love?

And there's something wrong and it's sending you

Round and round 'til we go nowhere

Brian Burton / James Mercer

SongFacts:

'After the Disco' is the second studio album by American alternative rock band Broken Bells. Recorded with the seventeen-piece Angel City String Orchestra and a four-piece choir, the album was released by Columbia Records.

The album was primarily recorded by the band at Mondo Studio in Los Angeles, California. The album, which started recording in early 2012, was recorded with a four-piece choir. The album was also recorded at two secondary recording studios, Sonora Recorders, also located in Los Angeles, and Firehouse Studios, located in Pasadena, California.

Orchestral and string recordings were conducted at the Glenwood Place Studios, located in Burbank, California, with The Angel City String Orchestra. With an arrangement of eleven violins, three cellos and three violas, conducted by Daniele Luppi, the orchestra recorded music for "Leave It Alone", "The Changing Lights", "Lazy Wonderland", "The Angel and the Fool" and "The Remains of Rock and Roll". Additional musicians, respectively playing tenor saxophone, trombone and trumpet, were also recorded for the ninth track "No Matter What You're Told"

At Alternative Press, Mike Usinger rated the album four stars out of five, and felt the album was "the perfect soundtrack for the morning after" a night out hurling it up. Edna Gunderson of USA Today rated the album three-and-a-half stars out of four, writing that the band "raise their game" on the release "by simply delivering fatter hooks, juicier melodies, dreamier vocals and more of the dark shimmer that enveloped the duo's 2010 debut." At Rolling Stone, Jon Dolan rated the album three-and-a-half stars out of five, stating that the release "is at once sleek and world-weary, often homing in on that sexy moment of malaise when the Seventies wanted to turn into the Eighties so badly but didn't quite know how to do it yet." Kevin Liedel of Slant rated the album two out of five stars, cautioning that the album is a "yawner made by two artists whose impressive discography makes its failure that much more confounding."

[lakings9]

Credit: LA Kings

|12/05/2023|

Pheonix Copley (26/29, .897 SV%)

10-0-0 on the road…

Tied for NHL record.

Kings Goals:

1st Goal: Phillip Danault, Assists: Roy, Moore

2nd Goal: Phillip Danault, Assists: Gavrikov, Fiala

3rd Goal: Arthur Kaliyev, Assists: Anderson Dolan, Gavrikov

4th Goal: Drew Doughty, Assists: Kopitar, Kempe

Three Stars:

⭐️ Phillip Danault (2 G, 2 P)

⭐️⭐️⭐️ Drew Doughty (1 G, 1 P)

[kp777]

By Peter Certo

Common Dreams Opinion

May 25, 2023

The news sure makes it sound like President Joe Biden and Republicans have been haggling over the national debt. But that’s not what’s really happening—not at all.

Biden wants to spend more money and run up the deficit, the story goes. Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) wants to rein the Democrats’ “addiction to spending” and reduce the debt.

This is wrong—enormously so—for several reasons.

“If McCarthy wanted to reduce the debt, he could simply pass President Biden’s proposed budget.”

First, as my Institute for Policy Studies colleague Karen Dolan has written: “If McCarthy wanted to reduce the debt, he could simply pass President Biden’s proposed budget.”

She’s right!

Biden’s budget continues and modestly expands many important social services, jobs programs, and clean energy investments, Karen’s written. But because it also reverses some of President Donald Trump’s tax cuts for corporations and the very wealthy, Biden’s budget would reduce the deficit by $3 trillion over 10 years.

Republican tax cuts for the rich have been the single largest driver of the federal deficit over the last two decades. The Bush and Trump tax cuts together are responsible for 57% of the increase in our ratio of debt to gross domestic product, the Center for American Progress found—and 90% outside of emergency spending during the recession and pandemic.

But Republicans don’t want to raise taxes for the rich. In fact, they’re planning to introduce a bill to make those massive tax cuts for the rich permanent—at a cost of trillions. That’s a lot more debt.

The other major driver of debt? Unfunded wars and military spending.

Together with nuclear weapons, border enforcement, and so on, the IPS National Priorities Project found recently that “militarized spending” takes up nearly two-thirds of the budget Congress sets each year.

That’s a bipartisan problem—Biden’s own budget proposal unwisely hikes Pentagon spending even after the end of a 20-year war. But here again, Republicans have refused to cut any of this funding as part of their spending crackdown. In fact, they’re calling to increase it far above even Biden’s proposal.

So Republicans rejected a budget proposal that would bring down the deficit. And they rejected addressing either the high-end tax cuts or out of control military spending that drives the debt—in fact, they’re pushing for more debt in both categories.

What does that leave? The barely one-third of discretionary spending that covers education, corporate regulation, scientific research, many anti-poverty programs, and other worthwhile items.

Republicans are demanding deep cuts here that could mean more homeless veterans and hungry seniors, hundreds of thousands of Americans who can’t afford an education, tens of thousands of kids who can’t get into Head Start, more pollution, fewer green jobs, and worse besides.

And unless they get those cuts, they’ve threatened to default on America’s debt by refusing to raise the debt ceiling.

The debt ceiling doesn’t reduce the debt by one dime—it only determines whether we pay the debts we already owe. Republicans raised it three times under Trump without complaint even as he ran up one of the biggest deficits in history.

Defaulting would do nothing about the debt—but it would destroy millions of jobs, wipe out trillions of household wealth, and send interest rates skyrocketing for home, car, and credit card loans.

The current debate has nothing at all to do with debt. It’s about whether we invest in programs the American people count on—or if we kneecap those programs to fund more tax cuts for rich people and handouts to military contractors.

Let’s choose wisely.

Peter Certo is the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) editorial manager.