Tuesday, August 8, 2023

The Country Fails the Swimming Test


A sizable portion of BookTok, a book lovers’ community on TikTok, is devoted to romance. Creators share spicy reading recommendations throughout the genre, including hockey romances. When it comes to posts about this particular category of romance novel, quotes from books will appear on top of video edits of real NHL players, sometimes doing suggestive groin exercises on the ice.
Posters gravitate to players who remind them of their favorite book boyfriends, and one popular choice is Seattle Kraken center Alex Wennberg. His team initially courted BookTok with posts and hashtags in the same style, and flew out a popular creator for a playoff game…
Within the subcategory of sports romance, hockey dominates. Right now, all 10 of the top sports romances on Amazon involve hockey.

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The legacy of the New Deal was, more than anything else, a matter of ideological change. Henceforth, nearly everyone would look to the federal government for solutions to problems great and small, real and imagined, personal as well as social. After the 1930s, the opponents of a proposed federal program might object to its structure, its personnel, or its cost, but hardly anyone objected on the grounds that the program was by its very nature improper to undertake at the federal level of government.--Higgs

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WOD
heart-whole

MEANING:
adjective:
1. Unattached: not in love.
2. Sincere; wholehearted.

ETYMOLOGY:
From heart, from Old English heorte + whole, from Old English hal (whole). Earliest documented use: 1470.

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The Country Fails the Swimming Test

Fareed Zakaria had a strange editorial. He started with the 'China Shock,' where the low prices of labor displaced American manufacturing. Then he turned to the Fitch downgrade which he attributed to the second 'shock,' the 'Trump Shock,' the result of an attack on the institutions of the country.

Can this be explained in any terms other than gibberish? There are plenty of problems we face, many self-imposed. We have stopped our energy industry. We have shut the economy off for 18 months. The damage to our institutions has been a function of trust. That was earned. And is anything more certain than the Left's erosion of Western institutions?

Trump is philosophy-free--except for some old-time protectionism (and he has been out of office for almost three years) and, if anything, the government's hostility to him is more damaging than he could be.

As long as there is Trump, there will be witches. And these perceived leaders and thinkers will always see our problems as metaphysical, as they search for witches' marks.

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