NEW SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” HARDEST HIT: Amazon is eyeing a return to New York City.
Archive for 2019
May 28, 2019
OUR PATHETIC RULING CLASS:
FOUNDATIONS BACK APPRENTICESHIP PROGRAMS: This is very good news. But it also needs to be kept in mind that apprenticeships work better for some jobs than for others. The key tends to be that employers need to know that they will get a return on their investment in the apprentice’s education. Put differently, they need to know that after they spend their time teaching the apprentice he won’t skip out and work for a competitor (which can offer higher wages because it doesn’t have to finance its own apprenticeship program) before the agreed-upon term is over. In practice, alas, it means that jobs that require licenses are best suited for apprenticeships. I am not a fan of unnecessary licenses; we already have too many. On the other hand, if we want businesses to finance apprenticeship programs, the incentive to complete the apprenticeship in order to get a license helps.
IN THE MAIL: From a very smart guy, The Social Media Upheaval.
ROGER SIMON: No Heroes Left — the MLK Revelations.
Is the moral of it all the danger of having heroes? They will betray us in the end. That other great paragon on non-violence–Gandhi–had his issues.
At the beginning of this piece, I called these revelations disturbing. They were more than that for me. I spent the summer of 1966 as a civil rights worker in Sumter, South Carolina living in a rooming house owned by MLK’s cousin, the local mortician. I never met King personally, although I met several family members and saw him speak twice. He was certainly a hero to me then, probably more than anyone in our history, sad as that is to think now. He still is for what he believed then and did then, but not for what he was. Maybe I should leave it there. It’s the old Shakespearean dichotomy between the doer and the deed.
Related: “I hope Dr. King remains celebrated; I also hope that his sexual behavior (again, assuming this story is true) is not forgotten. And in the future, when someone on the Left advocates the abolition of Columbus Day, or the taking down of monuments to Washington or Jefferson or many less well-known figures, I hope that people bring up Dr. King, NOT in the spirit of ‘Whataboutism’, but in order to remind them that there is no incompatibility between celebrating the achievements of people in the past and acknowledging that those people had – as we all do – major flaws.”
SALENA ZITO: Coming Home: American Freedom Is Paid for a Thousand Different Ways.
Just click over already.
OLD EUROPE: Germany tells Jews to pretend they’re gentiles.
Felix Klein, Germany’s government commissioner on anti-Semitism, recommends that Jews in his country would be wise to avoid wearing yarmulkes [aka kippahs or skullcaps] in public to avoid being attacked by anti-Semites. He did not, however, advise Muslim women to avoid wearing hijabs [head scarfs] or niqabs [face coverings] to avoid being attacked by Islamophobes, the same white supremacists who would attack both groups.
To be fair, Germany has a history of trying to tell Jews what to do.
BUT OF COURSE: Marine vet running for Congress vowed to fight socialism and now Democrats & MSM are accusing him of ‘threatening violence.’
In his ad, Republican Harrison Floyd promises to fight socialists in Congress just like he fought terrorists overseas. The ad shows the socialists in Congress, and it also shows him fighting overseas. That’s how videos usually work, with both pictures and words.
But bad faith Democrats and mainstream media hacks are pretending that they haven’t spoken English all their lives, and don’t understand metaphor, terms of art, narratives, or campaign ads. And therefore, the white opposition candidate Carolyn Bourdeaux is capitalizing on the moment to try to find some kind of advantage over the young, black, war veteran from a family with a history of service to this country.
Naturally, the media is playing dutifully along.
Rightwing speech is violence. Leftwing violence is speech.
I’M ACTUALLY NOT AT ALL SHOCKED BY THIS: Gun Control Lobbyist Arrested for Assault, Domestic Violence, and False Imprisonment. “Robert Blaisdell, managing partner for Demers, Blaisdell & Parsol Inc. and a lobbyist for Michael Bloomberg’s “Everytown” gun control group, was arrested earlier in May on a whole host of charges in Queen City, New Hampshire. He was charged on domestic violence-related crimes of simple assault, false imprisonment, and criminal mischief.” But because he’s a lefty this is just getting the “local crime story” treatment from the media.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Illinois Will End Residential M.B.A. in Favor of Online Program.
All is proceeding as I have foreseen.
AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases – Updated Every Hour.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Media Worried About Leaking of Dossier Sources After Leaking Dossier Sources. “Obama administration officials along with their media wet nurses and a motley crew of partisans are worked up. They are troubled over President Trump’s directive to his wing man, AG William Barr to declassify the documents surrounding the investigations into the Trump’s involvement in the RUSSIA collusion investigation. The spin coming from these malefactors and conspirators focus around the ‘danger’ of releasing classified information. Does this sound familiar? It should, we heard the same clap trap when the Nunes-run House Intel Committee wanted to release their report on the RUSSIA collusion scandal.”
MILLENARIAN THINKING LEADS TO HELL, NOT TO HEAVEN: Every once in a while, people start believing that the end of days is near and that if we don’t all repent immediately that end will be very bad. Almost always they are wrong.
It’s hard not to notice that we’re in a bit of a millenarian moment right now. That’s true even if climate change is a genuine problem that will need, in one form or another, to be addressed. The way Members of Congress flocked to AOC’s “The world is going to end in 12 years” Green New Deal was truly astonishing. Who would have thought that anyone would jump to support a policy that reads like it was cooked up by a college sophomore on a binge weekend?
And don’t get me started about Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager who is leading the children’s crusade against global warming in Europe (and being treated like a sage by European leaders).
If it looks and sounds like millenarianism, it is millenarianism.
Not every society has managed to pull itself back from the brink. Consider the fate of the mid-19th century Xhosa people of Southeastern Africa. Their “prophetess” was Nongqawuse–a teenage girl who was the Greta Thunberg of her day. She led her people to ruin.
One day in April or May of 1856, she went down to the river to do her chores. When she returned, she said that she had encountered the spirits of several of her ancestors who told her that her people must destroy their crops and kill their cattle. In return, the sun would rise red on February 18, 1857, and the Xhosa ancestors would sweep the British settlers from the land and bring the Xhosa fresh, healthier cattle. (Some of their cattle had been suffering from a lung ailment, which may or may not have been brought by the British settlers’ cattle. Millenarianism is often arises in response to a real problem.)
Nongqawuse’s story struck a chord with some. It started gaining momentum.
Stunningly, Sarhili, the Xhosa chieftain, agreed to do exactly as she urged. Over the next year, a frenzy occurred in which it is estimated that between 300,000 and 400,000 cattle were killed and crops destroyed. Historians sometimes call it the “Great Cattle Killing.”
But on February 18, 1857, the sun rose as usual. It was not red. And the Xhosa ancestors did not show. But the Xhosa people had destroyed their livelihood. In the resulting famine, the population of the area dropped from 105,000 to less than 27,000. Cannibalism was reported. Following Nongqawuse’s advice was a calamity of staggering proportions for the Xhosa people.
Like Nongqawuse, climate millenarians tell us that the sun will soon rise red over the land. Well, maybe. But already the models that gung-ho climateers have relied upon have been proven wrong. The intense period of warming that Al Gore predicted would arrive soon never came to pass. Yet we are repeatedly told that it’s still coming. In the meantime we are urged put the brakes on our use of energy–the very thing that makes the modern world possible–to avoid antagonizing the spirits of our ancestors … I mean in order to avoid climate disaster.
There are two more parallels to the Great Cattle Killing that are worth pointing out. First, Nongqawuse’s urgings did not come out of nowhere. Some of the cattle were indeed sick. The problem is that her proposed course of action was utterly disproportionate to the problem, just as the Green New Deal and other “the end is near” proposals are disproportionate given the state of our knowledge about climate. Second, some historians believe that the Great Cattle Killing was in part motivated by class animosity. The Xhosa people had been losing ground to white settlers for years, and some members of the tribe blamed their more prosperous members. Cattle were a status symbols, and initially at least, the burden of their destruction seemed to be something that would fall disproportionately upon elites. The cattle were, in effect, the big carbon footprint of their time.
We don’t need Sarhilis in Congress. For the record, I should point out that he perished in the famine.
(This is a re-working of an essay I wrote 10 years ago. The evidence of a coming climate apocalypse decreased during that decade, while millenarian fervor increased.)
NOW OUT: My new book, The Social Media Upheaval. Please buy a copy.
BYRON YORK: As Barr mulls declassification, a familiar tune from critics.
In February 2018, the House Intelligence Committee released the so-called Nunes memo. In four pages, the document, from the committee’s then-chairman Rep. Devin Nunes, revealed much of what the public knows today about the FBI’s reliance on the Steele dossier in pursuing since-discredited allegations that the Trump campaign and Russia conspired to fix the 2016 election. Specifically, it revealed that the FBI included unverified material from the dossier in applications to a secret spy court to win a warrant to wiretap Trump foreign policy volunteer adviser Carter Page.
All that was classified. To release it, the committee appealed to President Trump, who made a declassification order. That is the only way Americans know about the Page warrant. From that knowledge came later revelations about the FBI’s use of confidential informants and undercover agents to get information on Trump campaign figures.
It is good that the public knows such things, just as it is good that the public knows what is in the Mueller report. But in the days before the Nunes memo was declassified, many of the nation’s top current and former intelligence officials, members of Congress, and analysts in the press warned that declassification would do grave damage to American national security.
It didn’t happen.
Now, some of the same people are issuing somber warnings of the damage that will be done if Attorney General William Barr declassifies documents showing what else the nation’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies did in the 2016 Trump investigation.
It’s not national security they’re worried about. It’s their own.
Related: Lindsey Graham says intel officials concerned about exposure of 2016 misbehavior.
Also Related: Overwhelming Majority Want Investigation into Obama DOJ Spying of Trump.
Flashback, March 2017: “Hypothesis: The spying-on-Trump thing is worse than we even imagine, and once it was clear Hillary had lost and it would inevitably come out, the Trump/Russia collusion talking point was created as a distraction.”
ANDREW MCCARTHY: Bill Barr’s Declassification Kerfuffle: The media panic notwithstanding, the buck still stops with the president. They’re just panicked about what it might reveal.
UNEXPECTED HEADLINES: Owners of replica Noah’s Ark sue insurers for flood damage compensation.
AT AMAZON, Captains of Crush Hand Gripper.
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: CRUEL SALVATION.
On the other hand progressives are compassionate by definition. Thus when conservative cruelty saves multitudes it creates a logical problem. If Italy’s policies are evil it must be not because they save lives but because Salvini’s motives are impure. If holding out the lure of European residence to Africans causes drowning it is still compassionate because … it simply is.
That is because atheistic Marxism is founded to an extraordinary degree on the absolving power of good intentions. When CIA agent Felix Rodriguez asked a captive Che Guevara why he executed so many by firing squad in Cuba, Guevara explained that “we only put to death foreigners” When Rodriguez retorted that “you’re not a Bolivian … you are a foreigner” Che was defiant, saying Rodriguez couldn’t possibly understand the reasons for revolution. The difference apparently was philosophical. Che killed the side of compassion while Rodriguez did it in the name of cruelty. . . .
The solution of the Woke to the Problem of Evil was simply to stipulate the Left was moral and the Right was cruel and that was the end of it. The difficulty even a brilliant writer like Hobsbawm faced is what happened when the facts disagreed. How, socialists wondered, can self interest produce good? Why are Amerca’s poor fat and driving cars while socialism’s blessed are starving in darkness? How could the virtuous fail?
Tis witchcraft! Or akin to it. To salvage the theory of ‘capitalist cruelty ‘ vs ‘socialist kindness’ ideologues have resorted to the mechanism of exploitation. According to that theory the Woke fail because capitalism is stealing from socialism. It’s all the fault of saboteurs, capitalist wreckers and CIA plotters. Yet even there the facts betray them. Socialism can only survive and only temporarily by expropriating from non-socialists, and in the end by stealing from everyone. Once there are no more capitalists, socialist redistribution stops working. The Venezuelan example is embarrassing for that precise reason.
That’s why our betters are so eager not to talk about Venezuela. If they could blame the disaster on Trump, it would be a nonstop Circus Of Compassion.
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update. “Biden continues to lap the field, Buttigieg’s boomlet bottoms out, O’Rourke stabilizes, Messam registers, Klobucher shows a tiny bit of life, and mentions of John McCain, Jimmy Carter and Alannis Morissette.”
ONLY IF YOU CARE ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT, AS GREENS CLEARLY DO NOT: Why We Should Embrace Our Age of Nuclear.