No. 113: It's All Greek to Me

Good morning, everyone.

Another cool, Fall day in front of us here in Tennessee. There's no better time of the year to waltz around Percy Warner Park. If you need some motivation, read William Harwood's piece below.

Thanks for reading.

🚙 Special Session: Ford Electric Truck Plant

Lawmakers spent the first day of the Ford special session discussing the creation of the West Tennessee Megasite Authority to oversee the project and picked apart the $884 million package offered to the automaker. They'll continue the conversation today.

HEADLINES

• Exit/In afraid of Mercy Complex fate as funds alone can’t save it (Lookout)
• Southern Grist Brewing to Move to Cleveland Park, The Gambling Stick to Move Out of State (Scene)

DEVELOPMENT

• MDHA Approves The Design Of The Bankers Alley Mixed-Use Development. (Now Next)
• Gulch site of bar still eyed for hotel project (Post)
• John Rich sells Lower Broadway's 'Cotton Eyed Joe' building for $24.5 million (Biz Journal)
• Home of construction equipment business sells for $2.45M (Post)

🌳 IT'S ALL GREEN TO ME

If you meditate on the future shouted from the rusty, calcified loudspeakers of D.C. and their apparatchiks at CNN and the New York Times, we wouldn't blame you for feeling depressed. They paint a gray world of regression—a return to a more primitive, pre-industrial state wherein artificial scarcity driven by "numbers" dictates what a person can and can't do so that we, collectively, can lower the global temperature. It's fun to write a sentence like that until you realize that there are people who mechanically repeat that same line without irony.

The negative attitudes have begun to get to the children as well. According to a global survey reported by the BBC, 56 percent of young people believe that humanity is doomed because of climate change and 45 percent say that their anxiety about the climate affects their daily lives. We may not be able to quantify "deaths of despair" as easily as we can "deaths from Covid-19", but rest assured, rhetoric that demonizes a person for merely being alive hangs much heavier in the balance.

And that's not even to mention the proposed solutions to this imminent disaster. As we like to say around here, "Climate change is real, it's the solutions that are fake." To take just one quick bite out of the Green New Deal pie-in-the-sky marketing campaign, consider that in 2019, California — a state lauded by leaders across the fruited plain as a model for sustainable energy production — imported 28% of its total electrical output from neighboring states (including Mexico) all of whom rely mostly on gas, coal, nuclear, or hydroelectric power. The Green New Deal and initiatives like Phil Bredesen's solar energy laundering scheme are good for nothing other than to transfer wealth away from the traditionally conservative-leaning oil and gas sector and into the hands of a group of emerging progressives bent on weening people off of meat, stripping away the boundaries between men and women, and recreating the energy conditions of a third-world country. If this is not the intent, it is the effect, and as far as we are all concerned, the intent does not matter.

Being a life enjoyment maximalist is the only rational response to this madness—wringing every ounce of joy from life as you can. Be fruitful and multiply, eat the best foods, drink the best wines, and spend time with the best people. Insulate yourself from the narratives that attempt to demean and belittle your enjoyment of life. May your cup runneth over. Seize the day. Etc. It is good to be alive. It is good to be a human. Embrace civilization and refuse to cower from the sacred cow of "climate change" as primitive man once did when thunder accompanied lightning. As the three wise men once said, "You have to fight for your right to party."

CLIMATE FAUX PAS

• NEW MONEY LAUNDERING SCHEME JUST DROPPED: To Strike a Climate Deal, Poor Nations Say They Need Trillions From Rich Ones (WSJ)
• Talking Points on California Blackouts (Alex Epstein)
• Fossil Fuel Investment Drops, and Renewables Aren’t Ready (WSJ)

THINGS TO DO

Tonight
⚽️ Nashville SC vs. Columbus Crew @ Nissan Stadium, 7:30p (Info)
🎙 Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit @ Ryman, 8p (Info)

WE SAW IT

🧳 No Time To Die Go see it 🟢
A long and somewhat tedious Bond rendition serving as a poignant capstone to Daniel Craig's time at the wheel before the franchise takes the long, slow fall into woke-ism. As always, there are cars, women, and guns in large quantities.

COMING SOON

🏜 Dune Opening Thursday
Paul Atreides, a brilliant and gifted young man born into a great destiny beyond his understanding, must travel to the most dangerous planet in the universe to ensure the future of his family and his people.

Trends and news concerning everyone's favorite viral pandemic.

🌞 A BRIEF APOLOGETIC FOR LIFE AND PLAY

“Man's maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

An underreported type of "anti-vaxxer" is the healthy young man in his prime with superhuman immunity who skips the jab just to see how long he can go without getting it. It's a game he's playing with himself — an endangered species, that one. The rebel. The rabble-rouser. The daring, masculine resistance to the encroaching shrieks of the feminine nanny-state. In this young man's attitude is expressed play — a jovial rebuttal and a refusal to cave to fear. He laughs in the face of the terrorizing authorities. Within such a man, we find the true spirit of life — an inflammation of the senses and a passionate nearly religious fervor consuming him at all moments. He scorns the reduction of modern man to a bug-like existence whose only preoccupation is how to further prolong his life. This man uses his time.

You may see this man and think him a barbarian, but he would surely listen to your sad condemnations and think the same of you. The civilized man welcomes the excesses that civilization has produced. He partakes in the fountain of life without a second thought. The barbaric man submits to the aloof dictums of the state, muttering state-sanctioned mantras to himself that he heard from state-sanctioned information sources, and crowing on demand for or against the latest state-sanctioned cause. Such a man — crippled then resuscitated by the state's efforts to nurse him back to health — is already dead. Our Wild Man is fully alive and striving for more life.

This Wild Man has shaken off the material chains of modern life in order to strive for something more sublime and palpable — a life beyond the possibilities outlined by the state. He doesn't ask for permission. He realizes he doesn't need it. Be more like this man.

NOTEWORTHY

• More Than 90% of Fox Corp. Employees Are Fully Vaccinated, Rest Will Face Daily Testing (Mediaite) Despite this, the network maintains a fairly stringent "anti-mandate" position across all of its shows. Honorable Stuff.
• Lessons from the Lockdown—Why Are So Many Fewer Children Dying? (CHD) The decline in the number of toddler deaths coincided with fewer visits to the doctor due to pandemic restrictions.
• Is COVID-19 (Almost) Over? (NRO)

HEADLINES

• All 3 FDA-authorized COVID shot companies now employ former FDA commissioners (The Dossier)
• Nearly 40% of California state workers are unvaccinated against COVID despite Newsom order (Sacramento Bee)
• Long-Term NAEP Scores for 13-Year-Olds Drop for First Time Since Testing Began in 1970s (t74)
• Psychosis cases soar in England as pandemic hits mental health (The Guardian)
• Southwest Airlines Backs Off Plan to Put Unvaccinated Employees on Unpaid Leave (Epoch Times)
• F.D.A. to Allow ‘Mix and Match’ Approach for Covid Booster Shots (NYT)
• Washington State football coach fired for refusing COVID vax (NY Post)

Around the Web

🐄 Economists to Cattle Ranchers: Stop Being So Emotional About the Monopolies Devouring Your Family Businesses Agricultural economists manipulated data to block Congress from acting on high beef prices and the destruction of independent cattle ranching. Why? Because they think monopolies are good.

🩺 Psychoanalysis doesn’t work Sigmund Freud was a writer, not a doctor

💭 Men, Or Boys? Reflections on a vanishing ideal

Political Theater Highlight Reel

1. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot says the city’s Fraternal Order of Police is attempting to "induce an insurrection" by opposing vaccine mandate.
2. Taliban Official cannot locate Afghanistan on a globe.

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💵 The Great Seal (🎧 Listen, 7m10s)
Turning to the back of the American one-dollar bill, I behold on the right side the “obverse” and on the left side the “reverse” of the Great Seal of the U.S. I pause to mention that to heraldry experts the “obverse” is the front and the “reverse” is the back of something. Why bring up heraldry experts? Because heraldry is the discipline of designing coats of arms, armorial bearings, and such things, and the Great Seal of the United States is a product of that art combined with the art of the statesman.

Words of Wisdom

"To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death... We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave."

Michel de Montaigne