There is not a single good article in English about the French tax protests and riots occurring all around that nation. This is the journalism we must endure.

It’s not about fuel tax increases, really, as the English-speaking press reports. That’s just the spark. The real animus behind the tumult is regressive, neoliberal-style taxes levied against the French people. Being regressive, they will and are hitting average workers and wage-earners much harder than they are the rich. That is Macron and his ilk’s modus operandi. Why spend your money when you can take it from the workers?

Particularly telling is the “frais bancaires.” That means “bank fees.” Who pays bank fees? Not anyone with money. And electricity tax up 17%? Hugely regressive. “PV stationnement” is a roadworthiness certificate, kind of like inspections some states in the US have.

How Loneliness Is Tearing America Apart. When people have a hole in their life, they often fill it with angry politics.

I’ve wondered how much of Fox News taking over the older demographic is just simple loneliness. I’ve often seen old people in the grocery store so starved for human contact that they have inappropriate or overly-long conversations with swamped retail workers. People like that will reach out to and react to anything that seems to provide them a hold and even makes an effort to explain their predicament and that alleviates their extreme isolation.

Work is one of the key sources of friendship and community. Think of your own relationships; surely many of your closest friendships — perhaps even your relationship with your spouse — started in the workplace.

This is one of the reasons I have a huge problem with most of left’s bogus “protection from harm” boss-coddling causing workplace relationships (platonic and non-) to become verboten.

There’s a lot to disagree with and a lot this article ignores, being penned by someone from the AEI — but it’s more right than wrong, and loneliness is an enormous problem that is only getting worse as we retreat behind screens and algorithms.

The problem with the “open borders” cant of the Left is that there is no plausible path from that state and concordant with that absurd demand to anything else that the Left or progressives claims to stand for.

And so today talk of “open borders” has entered mainstream liberal discourse, where once it was confined to radical free market think tanks and libertarian anarchist circles.

While no serious political party of the Left is offering concrete proposals for a truly borderless society, by embracing the moral arguments of the open-borders Left and the economic arguments of free market think tanks, the Left has painted itself into a corner. If “no human is illegal!,” as the protest chant goes, the Left is implicitly accepting the moral case for no borders or sovereign nations at all. But what implications will unlimited migration have for projects like universal public health care and education, or a federal jobs guarantee? And how will progressives convincingly explain these goals to the public?

I believe that de facto or de jure open borders are incompatible with any sort of welfare state, for a variety of reasons. The evidence isn’t conclusive but also points this way as well. And I care about what works and what is most likely to be true rather than my (or anyone’s) feelings. And I care about risk and opportunity cost — two things almost everyone else ignores.

In the heightened emotions of America’s public debate on migration, a simple moral and political dichotomy prevails. It is “right-wing” to be “against immigration” and “left-wing” to be “for immigration.” But the economics of migration tell a different story.

The transformation of open borders into a “Left” position is a very new phenomenon and runs counter to the history of the organized Left in fundamental ways. Open borders has long been a rallying cry of the business and free market Right.

That in particular is what is puzzling to me. Rarely have I seen progressives embrace and even extend hard-Right positions — stances that are obviously harmful to them, their priorities, and to all Americans and legal immigrants who wish to become Americans.

To paraphrase a drill sergeant of mine, compassion isn’t a plan. Just letting half the world in and hoping for the best won’t help us and it won’t help (for long) the people we allow to immigrate.

I am strongly against open borders. It’s a failed experiment in the making, and as the article states it’s a “victory for the bosses.” As for birthright citizenship, I am ambivalent on that, but leaning against. The worry I have is that its revocation could lead to a permanent class of stateless people with no protection or recourse — in other words, the same place “open borders” is far more likely to take us toward.

I think “intuitive eating” has to be one of the stupidest ideas I have ever heard of. Someone was doing some intuitive cracksmoking when they came up with that body-destroyer. Intuitive eating could just as easily be called “How to weigh 500 pounds in a year or less.”

Also, aye:

Clueless parent in coffee shop.

Gives her 4yo boy sanitiser to clean hands. He then proceeds to eat an iced doughnut the size of his head.

Overplaying short-term 'germ risk'; unbothered abt food/health risk.

Note: A d'nut won't kill u, but contrast is an anthropological study

— GuruAnaerobic (@GuruAnaerobic) November 17, 2018

Suspect in Chicago hospital shooting booted from fire academy for alleged aggressive acts toward women.

Why is that nearly every one of these gun-happy losers has a history of harming or hating women? It’s almost a 1:1 correlation. We need a #himtoo movement to put these nutterbutters on an island somewhere, far away from the rest of us.