Labubus, Ditching the SATs, and Simon Cowell on God
A few stories from the week ...
A couple of months ago, I decided to watch South Park for the first time in ages.
In the episode (Season 27, Wok Is Dead), the kids become obsessed with collecting “Labubu dolls.” The obsession turns (comically) violent when two little girls go from gushing over their dolls to accusing each other of having a fake Labubu.
Eventually PC Principal has to come and break up the fight.
When I watched that episode, I had no idea what a Labubu was. Heck, I didn’t know if they were even real. So naturally I didn’t fully get the parody.
They are of course real, and if you want to understand the craze, my colleague Pete Earle and April Liu offer a breakdown at The Daily Economy. Value is subjective, but it turns out that paying $60,000 for a Labubu might have been a big mistake, because asset bubbles are real.
Speaking of mistakes, I warned people years ago that universities were making a big one by ditching standardized tests (ala the SAT and ACT) for college admissions. Turns out I was right.
Sadly, the results are even worse than I imagined. If you think I’m joking, read my article at the Washington Examiner and find out the percentage of students at UC San Diego who failed to answer the following equation correctly:
7 + 2 = [ ] + 6.
Finally, Simon Cowell was interviewed by The New York Times. For reasons I can’t explain, I read the piece—even though I never watched American Idol and don’t know a whole lot of Cowell.
The interview was good. Cowell strikes me as an honest chap (lord knows he was always direct). He seems comfortable with who he is today and seems capable of growing. (I’m not saying this to be condescending. It just occurs to me more and more that growing is part of our job as humans. We need to grow and change, and if we’re not, there’s something wrong. Yet I see all around people who don’t grow and can’t change. I’ll probably write more about this soon.)
An example of what I’m talking about comes at the end of the interview, when Cowell is asked if he still wants to be, er, cryogenically frozen.
Now, I’ve always found the idea of extending one’s life beyond the natural bounds of science strange, but apparently it’s pretty common. (Just a couple of weeks ago, Richard Hanania was writing how shocked he was that Charles Murray wouldn’t want to take a pill that would allow him to extend his life another 30 or 40 years.) Anyway, Cowell had apparently told people he was interested in being frozen and coming back in a few thousand years.
How does he feel about this today? the Times asked.
“Forget it. No,” Cowell responded. “I’m not interested.”
Cowell didn’t say precisely why he’s no longer interested. But he did offer a clue: his faith. Immediately after discussing his wish to no longer be frozen, Cowell said this.
“I do believe in God, and I really do hope and believe that there’s something good that happens afterward. I don’t know what it is. My mum had a lot of faith, which genuinely made her happy. And I started to think a lot about that. Not because I’m getting older or I’m going to die tomorrow. Just, does it make me happy? Actually, yes, it does.”
Now, I don’t believe in God because it makes me happy. And I’ve never liked Christian utilitarianism.
But faith begins in different places for different people. And it made me happy to learn that Simon Cowell believes in something much bigger than our material world.
Finally, if you haven’t heard, my home state was involved in a massive fraud scheme. Reports initially said the fraud totaled a billion dollars. Now reports are saying it could be up to $8 billion.
How did it happen? Saul Zimet explains.