FLASHBACK: Stanislav Petrov, ‘The Man Who Saved The World,’ Dies At 77. Two years gone, but still a hero. Except to his bureaucratic bosses. “Petrov said he received an official reprimand for making mistakes in his logbook on Sept. 26, 1983.”
Archive for 2019
September 23, 2019
WELL, IT’S A BLUE STATE, SO . . . Most Hawaii residents say state elected officials don’t care about them.
AT AMAZON, save on Bestselling Watches.
OFF THE RESERVATION: Free-Thinking LGBT Activists Say the ‘Gay Mafia’ Is ‘Harming Gay People.’
MAKING DISHWASHERS GREAT AGAIN: The faster we can clean up our dishes and our federal regulations, the better.
I ASSUME THERE’S A PAYOFF: Jerry Brown partners with China to fight climate change.
JOE BIDEN VERSUS THE INTERNET: Can a candidate still compete electorally without significant online backing?
The late John Lukacs once argued that social change is not the result of material conditions but a result of ‘the accumulation of opinions’. Ideas, organized and ruthlessly disseminated are what really change the world. ‘And such accumulation can be promoted, and for some time even produced, confected for the majority by hard small minorities.’
There is a small hard minority in the Democratic party that would rather swim in the local bog than see Uncle Joe nominated. The ideas they’re confecting are part of a renaissance of leftist thought that are revising the politics of the young in Britain and France too.
Perhaps these people are not real; perhaps Joe Biden is. But if you want to know who is on the wrong side of history, ask yourself this. In a decade will the Democratic party look like Joe Biden, or will it resemble Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?
As Zhou Enlai never said about the French Revolution, “Too early to say.” But this recent headline might provide an answer: Joe Biden Just Lost Any Claim to Being a Moderate With His Embrace of the Green New Deal.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
● Biden Attacks Warren: “She’s Going to Raise People’s Taxes.”
—Americans for Tax Reform, today.
● Biden calls paying higher taxes a patriotic act.
—NBC, September 18, 2008.
For the last time, anything you put on that ‘prompter, Ron Burgundy will read!
WHY THE NAVY IS DITCHING TOUCH SCREEN CONTROLS.
SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: Bunch of Swiss Hikers Hold ‘Funeral’ for Glacier Killed by Climate Change or Whatever.
Did they confess their climate sins to the shrubbery afterwards?
(Classical reference in headline.)
THE CURIOUS CASE OF ANDY NGO: How the mainstream media downplay left-wing violence.
Many journalists resent Ngo’s politics, ethics, and sudden success. Yet the establishment media’s approach is the same when Ngo is out of the picture. Antifa is a subject that major media outlets tend to cover once, as a box to be checked. Far-left attacks are treated as isolated incidents rather than episodes in an ongoing story. They are not to be covered like violence from the far right or white nationalists. Andy Ngo covers the story that way—and the media do not like it or the mirror he holds up to them.
The establishment media’s lopsided approach to political violence ultimately damages both our politics and journalism. Politics are supposed to function as nonviolent dispute resolution. Weimar-style street brawling is a signpost on the path to the collapse of normal politics, one we ignore at our peril. Pretending that groups such as Antifa are not a problem is a tactic that will be noticed by at least half the country, accelerate the vicious cycle of our political discourse, and desensitize partisans to political violence of all stripes.
Turning a blind eye to left-wing violence may have the corollary effect of burning up whatever moral and institutional capital the establishment media have left. The media will be seen as knuckling under to—or even embracing—Antifa’s core beliefs. After all, many progressives already believe hate speech is no different from physical assault, which is the root of Antifa’s belief in preemptive violence.
To blame Andy Ngo for injuries he suffered while reporting on Antifa, even if one finds him biased, is to tacitly accept Antifa’s general demand that its members are not to be photographed or identified on threat of violence. No respectable journalist would accept that demand from the Ku Klux Klan. Those who accept it here will similarly lose public respect. The establishment media need to do the right thing covering left-wing violence, if only out of self-interest. Whether they will is another story.
Not based on this item today at Twitchy: Journos sneer at ‘weasel’ Andy Ngo for drawing attention to Portland Antifa suspect’s cache of potential weapons.
Just think of the media as Democratic Party activists with bylines, and Antifa as the Democrats’ muscle, and it all makes sense.
WHAT MARGARINE CAN TEACH US ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE.
VIDEO: Greta Thunberg Rips World Leaders at the U.N. “When someone castigates their own audience, and the audience applauds, then the castigation is not meant. It’s nothing but a theatrical affectation for TV cameras — a hoax perpetrated by the speaker and the audience, together. I doubt someone Thunberg’s age knows the ins and outs of speechmaking to understand that, but that whoever handles her, does. Certainly the people there at the UN got exactly the TV clip they wanted, even at the ‘price’ of pretending to be publicly shamed.”
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for September 23, 2019. “De Blasio quits, Warren rises, Sanders falls, Harris freefalls, Booker’s going broke, Klobuchar shows signs of life, Messam registers, and everyone is all-in on Iowa.”
GO AWAY, KID, YOU BOTHER ME: ‘How dare you’: Greta Thunberg tears into world leaders over inaction at U.N. climate summit. As a friend says on Facebook, when an emotionally disturbed sixteen-year-old is the spokesperson for your movement, maybe it’s not really about science. Poor kid — she’s just a younger, more vulnerable Cindy Sheehan, and like Sheehan will be discarded as soon as she’s no longer of use. In the meantime, her moral theatrics have grown tedious.
JERRY NADLER (D-NY): “I don’t know if human life will survive fifty years… If the oceans acidify, which they’re beginning to do, they will destroy the entire food chain and essentially all that will be left will be bacteria and maybe some plants.”
50 years? at the beginning of the year, AOC assured us we only had 12 years left. The Green Nude Eel is paying dividends already!
Or perhaps, they’re really winging this stuff. It wouldn’t be the first time:
(Via Maggie’s Farm, which is loaded with many more links today.)
LITERALLY. AND I’M USING “LITERALLY” CORRECTLY: ‘Shut Down DC’ Climate Protesters Start a Dumpster Fire.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Every 2019 and 2020 Full-Size Pickup Truck Ranked.
#CLIMATESTRIKE GETS PERSONAL: Can You Save the Planet with Your Choice of Razor?
IF THEY WISH TO SHUT DOWN DC PERMANENTLY, I’M BEGINNING TO LIKE THE CUT OF THESE CLIMATE STRIKERS’ JIBS! Take that evil govt. man! Footage of ‘climate change activists’ from #ShutDownDC will SURELY win over hearts and minds (watch).
Barring that, why not simply implement Glenn Reynolds’ plan to remove air conditioning from Federal office buildings? As Glenn proposed, “If our rulers think global warming is a crisis, let them be a good example for the rest of us.”
UPDATE: “White privilege is not having to work on Monday morning so you can stop people in a majority POC city from getting to their jobs,” David Marcus of the Federalist tweets.
OBVIOUSLY, IT’S DUE TO INCREASING ATMOSPHERIC CARBON DIOXIDE: The Amazon’s Tallest Trees Are Growing 50% Bigger, And Scientists Don’t Know How.