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Evangeline Lilly appeared in a five-minute video this weekend with a direct appeal to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau concerning the ongoing protests against vaccine mandates in that country. The protests began in late January in the Canadian capital, Ottawa, led by cross-border truck drivers, and has since spread to other cities. The Ant-Man and Lost star, who was born and raised in Western Canada, published her cri de coeur on the Instagram page of Bridge City News, a daily program out of Alberta that airs on The Miracle Channel, Canadas first over-the-air religious television station.

In a calm tone with noticeable "oot"s for "out"s, Lilly opens by telling Trudeau she has concerns about his current approach to, and current treatment of, our fellow Canadians who are protesting your federal vaccine mandates. They have asked to meet with you, Prime Minister; medical experts, top scientists, doctors, nurses, parents, grandparents, intelligent, loving, concerned citizens. Why won't you sit with them?

She goes on to request he listen to what they have to say with a mind open to hearing things that might go against the ideas you are entrenched in. She also suggested he listen to Needle Points by Norman Doidge, the name of a four-part essay published in Tablet Magazine last November, and also the name of a January podcast hosted by Jordan Peterson, the ubiquitous controversial Canadian professor. Lilly says that Doidge, the best-selling author of The Brain That Changes Itself, has painstakingly and comprehensively laid out why these protestors are not unreasonable."

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In late January, Lilly attended an anti-vaccine-mandate hullabaloo in Washington, D.C., the same one where Robert F. Kennedy Jr. compared current American public health initiatives to the policies of Nazi Germany. Even in Hitler Germany [sic], you [could] cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in an attic, like Anne Frank did, he said, then later apologized after the Auschwitz Memorial's social media arm called his comments a sad symptom of moral & intellectual decay.

From that event, Lilly posted some black and white shots to her Instagram to support bodily sovereignty while Canadian truckers were rallying for their cross-country, peaceful convoy in support of the same thing.

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Following these remarks, Lillys Ant-Man co-star David Dastmalchian, as well as fellow Marvel hero (and Canadian) Simu Liu, made social media comments about of their own about the value of Covid vaccines and the appropriate use of a wide platform.

The third Ant-Man picture, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, is scheduled for release in July 2023.

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Evangeline Lilly Appeals to Justin Trudeau To Hear From the People Sitting Out in the Cold at Your Door - Vanity Fair

Kansas coach Lance Leipold reacts during the first half of the team's NCAA college football game against TCU on Saturday, Nov. 20, 2021, in Fort Worth, Texas. TCU won 31-28. (AP Photo/Ron Jenkins)

The Kansas football team has hired Oscar Rodriguez Jr., a Kansas native who finished last season as Akron's interim head coach, as a defensive analyst.

Rodriguez will work with the defensive backs, though as an analyst, he is not allowed to coach players on the field. Jordan Peterson has been the Jayhawks' defensive backs coach the last two seasons.

His roots in Kansas are deep. Born and raised in Liberal, Rodriguez played safety at Emporia State in 2001, transferred to Coffeyville Community College in 2002 and then played two seasons at Fort Hays State. He then began coaching, first at a high school in Texas, and earned a master's in educational administration in 2008 from Washburn, where he was the defensive backs coach. He then coached at Baker, Hutchinson Community College, Emporia State and Garden City Community College and served as the defensive coordinator at each school.

Rodriguez then left Kansas before the 2015 season and spent three seasons at La Verne, a Division III university in California, where in 2017 he was named the Division III National Assistant Coach of the Year by the American Football Coaches' Association. He then became the assistant head coach and inside linebackers coach at Chattanooga in 2018 and moved to Akron the following season, when he was the safeties coach before coaching the inside linebackers beginning in 2020.

Akron coach Tom Arth was fired in November after nine games and Rodriguez was named the interim coach for the final three. The Zips lost all three, and new coach Joe Moorhead did not retain Rodriguez after he was hired on Dec. 4.

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Kansas hires former Akron interim head coach Oscar Rodriguez Jr. as analyst | Boyer on the Beat - KUsports

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, Apple has been requiring all customers to wear a mask in its retail stores, a policy the company unsuccessfully tried to discontinue last year. However, it seems that the company once again wants to drop the mask mandate for Apple Stores in the United States.

As reported by Bloomberg on Tuesday, the company told its employees in a memo that customers will no longer be required to wear a mask in eligible stores. However, Apple Store employees will still be required to wear masks. At the same time, Apple says it will continue to recommend that everyone should wear masks in its stores.

The new policy applies to Apple Stores located in Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, and other states that no longer require people to wear a mask. The report notes that the mask mandate will remain valid in a few states like Hawaii, which have stricter guidelines on wearing a mask.

After dropping the mask requirement in November 2021, Apple reinstated the mandate in its retail stores in December as the numbers of COVID-19 cases rose again in the United States due to new variants. The company has also shut down multiple stores across the United States and Canada during the past three months to prevent the spread of COVID.

As the situation improves, Apple also plans to resume in-store classes and other activities that have been suspended in Apple Stores. The company didnt provide a public statement about the new policies.

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Apple once again drops the mask mandate in its US retail stores - 9to5Mac

Once, having drinks, I got into a somewhat animated conversation with a friend over a statement I casually threw out: that, contrary to popular belief, women actually initiate the mating process. They make the first move. Subtly, either by non-verbal actions or gesture or even more subtly by pheromones, a woman signals interest first, leaving it up to the man to make the actual approach. For some reason, it set my friend off, with her going on an extended rant about social constructs and the patriarchy.

Now this recollection is made because it illustrates todays problem when talking about social policy issues: the emotional refusal to consider opposing views, even concrete scientific information, for the sake of political correctness and feelings. Take for example discussions surrounding that of female hypergamy.

Hypergamy, so says psychologists including Jordan Peterson is the inclination of women to date across or up. That women prefer dating men that are at least their equal or have more in terms of income, status, or looks.

In evolutionary terms, this makes impeccable sense: a woman will seek a mate that ensures her survival, provides the best possible genes for her offspring, and wont abandon her while she takes care of her children. Income, status, and education are essentially evidence of intelligence, perseverance, and overall good health, including the psychological ability to commit.

This necessity was more apparent in really primitive days when humans had to hunt to survive, all the way up to a bigger part of the last century when women were not allowed access to education or work.

However, in these quite supposedly egalitarian times, when there are more educated, working, and independent women than at any time in history, hypergamy should not be a thing, right? Wrong. As psychologists and sociologists are finding out, hypergamy is even more deeply embedded in women than ever before.

As per Whither hypergamy (Institute for Family Studies, Jan. 29, 2020): Hypergamy turns out to be a stubborn thing. It seems that the highly credentialed alpha female still prefers a mate above her pay grade. In one of the most widely cited papers on the subject, demographer Yue Qian compared couples in the 1980 Census and in 2012 American Community Survey. She found that during the intervening decades, though wives became more likely to marry down in terms of educational achievement, the tendency for women to marry men with higher incomes than themselves persisted. In fact, women with the same or more education than their husbands were more likely to marry up.

Even in Sweden, whose commitment to gender egalitarianism is close to a state religion, the results of a study conducted there published in the December 2019 issue of The European Sociological Review, confirms Qians findings. Thus, when it comes to income, hypergamy re-asserted itself. In every union type, including those with a more educated female partner, men are the most likely to be the main earners. Which leads to this conclusion: women appear to have an especially strong preference for men who out-earn them. If the Swedes are any indication, couples are blase about gender equality, but not about hypergamy.

Whats the point of all this? Because hypergamy, despite its obvious significance in understanding human relations, is set aside and completely ignored to appease feminist ideology and political correctness. And yet, years and years of that same feminist, liberal progressive indoctrination in the academe and media, as well as indulgences with online gaming and porn, are clearly taking their toll: more and more men are dropping out of universities and the workforce.

In the US, for example, the number of working men age 25 to 54 dropped from 96% in 1970 to around 88% in 2021, with non-college educated men working even fewer at 84%. Also, American colleges and universities now enroll roughly six women for every four men. This is the largest female-male gender gap in the history of higher education, and its getting wider. Last year, US colleges enrolled 1.5 million fewer students than five years ago, The Wall Street Journal recently reported. Men accounted for more than 70% of the decline.

Considering female hypergamy, the foregoing obviously does not bode well for the mating prospects of substantially many, if not most, men. The result? Official figures for England and Wales reported a record 50.1% of women being childless by the age of 30. This is the first time ever that there are more childless 30-year-old women than mothers since records were kept in 1920.

Add the fact that social media has given women even greater options, if only illusory, to date across or up at the global scale. This, ironically, however permitted a smaller number of men to corner the sexual market, the number of available women enabling such men access to casual sex and irresponsible behavior, depriving a substantial number of women the benefits of a committed relationship, and leaving an even greater number of men feeling sexually inadequate, frustrated, and alone.

The negative consequences for society are quite apparent: more broken families, more dysfunctional relationships, more depressed and mentally unhealthy people, less productivity, less social stability. Some experts, culling data from the United Nations and the Pew Research Center, are predicting a possible baby bust or even zero population growth by 2100. Or worse: a population collapse.

The lesson here is that when discussing issues of paramount societal importance, particularly about marriage and the family, including discussions about contraception, divorce, and same sex marriage, it is best to keep a level head and focus on scientific data, logical experience, and reality. A wise man once said: facts dont care about your feelings.

Oh, and by the way, I was right: as Psychology Today puts it (The Many Subtle Ways Women Signal Romantic Interest, Oct. 26, 2017), research shows that it is women who typically signal whether a man can make an approach in the first place initiating the entire [mating] process.

Jemy Gatdula is a senior fellow of the Philippine Council for Foreign Relations and a Philippine Judicial Academy law lecturer for constitutional philosophy and jurisprudence

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Hypergamy and the rise of childless women - BusinessWorld Online

There are few things so terrible that a white man can do that the media won't still find a way to romanticize him. Even Ted Bundy and David Koresh got the Hollywood treatment that portrays them as glamorous and sexy. In an environment where even murderous sexual predators get romanticized, I suppose it's no surprise that the standard-issue American dirtbag is getting a media glow-up, reframed as daring rebels because they stand up for the millennia-long tradition of letting men skate by with the bare minimum of effort. And yet, it's still annoying.

"Populist flamethrowers rock media," blares a headline at Axios. The text describes "Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy," as well as Substack writer Bari Weiss and comedian Dave Chappelle as people who "brand themselves 'free thinkers' untethered to political dogma." The piece goes on to quoteSaagar Enjeti, a supposedly "anti-establishment" YouTuber: "They explicitly say: 'Screw you.'... I would say that is the heart of a lot of their appeal." Weiss, in a particularly goofy bit of self-congratulation, describes herself as committed "Wrongthink," even though her newsletter is largely dedicated to conservative nostalgia for the days when one's dumbest prejudices could be expressed without discomfort.

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Even in our bullshit-heavy era, this Axios article is truly off the charts. Repeated self-assertions of rebellion from these figures does not change the basic fact that they are, in reality, the opposite of freethinkers, rebels, or any of the other self-aggrandizing terms they may apply to themselves. On the contrary, the appeal of Rogan, Weiss, Musk, and others to their fanboy base is simple: They are selling validation to a lazy, incurious men who fear change.They are soothing figures, stroking the heads of their D student audiences, telling them that they are in the right to react to any intellectual challenge or threat of social change with a childish tantrum.My god, Weiss wants to start a fake university, so tender-minded conservatives can get an "education" without ever having to grapple with an uncomfortable idea. Not exactly a profile in courage, there.

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Sadly, it's not just Axios who insists on recasting whiny reactionaries are rebels, and the people they hate feminists, anti-racists, LGBTQ activists who are the real rebels advocating for real change as the "establishment." As the article notes, Atlantic writer Derek Thompson fell into the trap of labeling these figures the "DGAF Populists." Which....no. These folks very much do give a f*ck, especially when their unearned status or privilege is challenged, or they are asked to actually learn a thing or two about an issue before opining at length about it.

The laundry list of recent or ongoing controversies these folks kick up demonstrates how much a big ol' whiny f*ck they give if the "right" of crappy white men to impose their ignorance on others is challenged in any way. Musk, for instance, recently drew criticism when he tweeted a comparison of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Adolph Hitler, because of the measures Trudeau took to stop the far-right blockade of Ottawa. The blockaders were making life hell in the city, constantly honking horns and harassing residents, all in an effort to force their fringe, authoritarian views as well as to demand the "right" to spread COVID-19 by refusing vaccination on an unwilling public. By siding with the blockaders, Musk was siding with the view that a fanatical right-wing minority should be able to rule by fiat on everyone else not exactly the view of a DGAF person who believes in freedom and democracy and doing your own thing.

RELATED:Bari Weiss' field of right-wing dreams: Will the "University of Austin" ever actually exist?

With Chapelle, the situation is equally dark, as he's built his resurgent career on being an obsessive jerk about trans people, doing an entire Netflix special built around his outrage that anyone dare challenge his reactionary attitudes about the issue. The ensuing fallout led to a trans worker at Netflix getting fired for objecting to the anti-trans orthodoxy and Chappelle getting a bunch of new specials, where he and his snowflake-delicate new fans can wallow in their shared anger at having their hidebound ideas about gender and biology contested.

As for Rogan, the two biggest controversies of late involve behavior that would have read as outdated and reactionary a century ago, much less today. First, there's the racism.Rogan bizarrely ranted on a recent episode about someone "100% African from the darkest place where they're not wearing any clothes all day," which is a stereotype that even white people in the early 20th century clocked as over-the-top racism. He also was recently exposed as a frequent dropper of a certain racial slur, as well.

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Then there's the anti-science crap, which is so bizarrely reactionary that it's reminiscent of the medieval church's reaction to Galileo saying the Earth revolves around the sun. Rogan and his guest Jordan Peterson another whiny reactionary who largely focuses on throwing tantrums over challenges to patriarchal authorityand threatens to sue feminists who question him recently unleashed a bunch of complaints about the science of climate change that really would have felt comfy to a 16th century priest defending heliocentrism. And, of course, there's Rogan's ongoing campaign against the Covid-19 vaccination, which is rooted in a fear of scientific advancement that's so out of control that one would not be surprised to next hear him come out against germ theory.

There's, of course, a strong thread linking the priests who locked up Galileo, the 19th century doctors who rejected germ theory, and Rogan's weird paranoia about vaccine technology. All are rooted in a desire for the simplicity of patriarchal authority, where "truth" is whatever rich men in charge want it to be, and the mind is unbothered by troubling questions about evidence, research, and the discomfort of having to abandon prior assumptions in the face of new facts.

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Despite the surface claims to be somehow non-partisan, the actual arguments of the Rogan/Weiss/Peterson world are, in actuality, no different than what's coming out of the openly right-wing world of Fox News. Just Tuesday, Tucker Carlson was making a defense of Russian President Vladimir Putin a man who literally has journalists murdered on, uh, "free speech" grounds.

Carlson's desires aren't mysterious. He wants a world where one can be racist without being confronted or challenged, where white nationalist and misogynist ideas aren't questioned. And he sides with dictators who will literally use violence to silence dissent. But when knee-jerk reactionaries are recast as "rebels" and fear of robust discourse is rewritten as "free speech," is it any wonder that Carlson feels he can get away with this kind of doublespeak that paint his censorious, authoritarian urges as "freedom"?

But there's also just old-fashioned laziness and entitlement. Thinking is hard. Learning is even harder. Dealing with new ideas from the socially constructed nature of gender to the scientific theory of mRNA vaccines requires work. A lot of that work can be genuinely uncomfortable, especially if it also requires confronting your own prejudices. Picking up a feminist text or reading the history of how the vaccine was developed means giving your brain lots of exercise, some which can be disagreeable as previous assumptions get questioned and cognitive dissonance is suffered. Easier to tune into Rogan's show or read Weiss's newsletter, wrapping one's self in the comfy blanket of never having to the mental work of contending with novel ideas.

Axios marvels at how much money these faux-populists make peddling intellectual lethargy to their audiences, but they shouldn't be. Pandering to laziness has always been profitable in a capitalist society. It's not a surprise that so many of these folks also market supplements or fad diets, such as Peterson's "meat only" nonsense. Such products rely on the wish to have a fit body without the bother of exercise and a balanced diet. Rogan, Weiss, and others are playing the same game, but for the mind: Selling the fantasy that one can be an "intellectual" and a "freethinker" without ever doing much in the way of actual thinking. It's opportunistic and exploitative, but certainly not romantic. Dull people pouting because others find them tedious is nothing new, and it certainly isn't any form of intellectual rebellion.

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The problem with the populists "free thinkers" they are just lazy - Salon