LINDSEY GRAHAM 2.0 STILL KICKING AOC: Dems Squirm as Graham Calls for a Vote on the Green New Deal.
Archive for 2019
February 9, 2019
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TOCQUEVILLE TALKS: A FAREWELL TO JOHN DINGELL. “Eet says ’ere, that, in ’eez book, Monsieur Dingell advocated the abolition of the Senate. Is this a popular opinion in the United States today?”
“But Congressman Dingell took issue with more than just the pace of the Senate — he also saw great danger in how unrepresentative it has come to be of the American people.”
“’ow so?
“Oh, his district in Michigan alone boasts a greater population than say, the entire state of Vermont.”
“And so he says…”
“How can the Senate address the needs of his constituents when they enjoy a fraction of the voice per capita compared the people of Vermont?”
“Ah, but surely they understand that the Senate does not exist for this purpose? To address their needs, and wield their power, les Michiganders ’ave the state government of Michigan. Through this tool they can craft their little society, without a care for the whims of the ’ill people of Vermont. The Senate exists to treat the issues from the perspective of the states themselves, not the individuals who live in them. Recall, as I wrote, that the ‘Federal system was created in order to combine the various advantages of large with those of smallness.’”
Read le whole thing.
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Also, Bargains In Beauty.
CHRISTIAN TOTO IS ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Here’s Why the Super Bowl Half Time Show Bombed.
Maroon 5 and co. weren’t hyper focused on making a stunning show. They knew they couldn’t offend select members of the audience. They feared the repercussions of any moment considered politically or culturally significant. They knew every gesture, every lyric would be analyzed and scrutinized. And, if the social justice crowd deemed it problematic, the band would hear about it in short order.
Is that any way to create art? No, and we’re seeing the results.
As Phil Mushnick writes at the New York Post, “Super Bowl halftime act denigrates Martin Luther King legacy:”
King’s legacy is too great to be eclipsed by a QB who supports the convicted police murderer Joanne Chesimard, granted exile in Fidel Castro’s Cuba, and no-trials executioner Che Guevara in the name of pick-and-choose justice.
But at halftime, the NFL seemed to go out of its way — as far as possible — to degrade King and his legacy by inviting two vulgar, N-wording, women denigrating, boasting, no-upside, backward-pointed rappers, Travis Scott and Big Boi, to perform.
Both have made their fame and fortune by promoting and perpetuating every negative stereotype of black America. Don’t take my words for it; look up — or down — their lyrics for yourself.
The NFL invited Scott fully knowing and anticipating that his lyrics would be so objectionable that he was three times bleeped while performing. The NFL knew what it had, knew what was coming — and that still met with its certification as entertainment to over 100 million viewers.
Why were they invited? So the NFL could fill its annual quota of objectionable performers? Why, especially in Dr. King’s conspicuously revived presence, did the news media not note, let alone decry, such a slap in Dr. King’s face? Or would it be impolite to offend the offensive?
And so it passes, quietly, of course, that this year’s Super Bowl, as per Roger Goodell’s stewardship, carried two non-football themes: A celebration of all that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. lived and died for, and the repudiation and degradation of everything he lived and died for.
Not to mention the repudiation and degradation of everything Pete Rozelle lived for — I’d like to think that the man who worked hardest to transform the NFL into entertainment for the whole family would be shocked that the Super Bowl halftime show now requires a five second tape delay in case someone drops an F-or-N-bomb.
WE’VE ACTUALLY BEEN DRILLING HOLES IN SKULLS SINCE AT LEAST THE NEOLITHIC, BUT THIS IS DIFFERENT: Drill treatment could help patients with brain hemorrhage.
VIRGINIA CLOWN SHOW UPDATE: Legislative Black Caucus, Kaine, Warner, and Virginia Democratic Party to Fairfax: Resign. Now.
Related: Kevin Williamson on how “The Democrats’ new puritanism will lead to their undoing.”
Northam must go, as a matter of character. On that we have the word of such figures as Joe Biden, a plagiarist who once cited his ability to navigate the linguistic challenges of buying coffee at a 7-Eleven as evidence of his good relations with the Indian immigrant community; Terry McAuliffe, a former fixer for Bill Clinton; former Virginia governor Douglas Wilder, who once used a government airplane to pay a private visit to a former softcore porn actress he appointed as a university regent; Sen. Bernie Sanders, author of bizarre rape-fantasy political tracts; Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Cherokee impersonator; and Hillary Rodham Clinton, chief tactician of the “bimbo eruption” unit all those years ago.
If Northam goes, the governorship passes to his fellow Democrat Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, who now faces impeachment as two women have come forward to accuse him of sexual misconduct — at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and at Duke University in 2000.
The Democrats, hot off insisting that mere accusations of misconduct — as a high-school student — were sufficient to keep Brett Kavanaugh off the Supreme Court, are thereby put in a pickle. They might turn to the third in line, Attorney General Mark R. Herring, also a Democrat — and also someone who recently acknowledged wearing blackface at a college party. That would bring the Dems to the fourth in line, House Speaker Kirk Cox, who insists he’s never donned the racist makeup. He is also a Republican.
As Sean Davis asked yesterday:
WELL, GOOD: Updated antibiotic can treat pneumonia, skin infections. More updates, please.
A faith requires its pieties, and the so-called “Green New Deal” amounts to a sacrament. To true believers, its implausibility and impracticality is not a mark against it. Just the opposite; it is an expression of zeal, an acknowledgment of the righteousness and urgency of the cause it seeks to address. Its efficacy is measured in the number willing to genuflect before it.
This is not a serious policy proposal. Its goal is the elimination of fossil fuels in transportation and power generation, though it also would phase out emissions-free nuclear power plants. It seeks to retrofit every free-standing structure in America, pare back America’s industrial agriculture industry to “local” (or, presumably, subsistence) scale, and virtually eliminate domestic air travel within the continental U.S. by transitioning entirely to high-speed rail (which, assuming perfectly uniform topography, would still force bicoastal Americans to a nearly 20-hour trip). This would all be done in a single decade.
All this disruption to the economy isn’t much of a problem, of course, because the plan assumes that the displaced will simply transition directly into new, unionized green jobs. And for those who spent their lives acquiring expertise that is no longer valuable, the proposal would impose a “just transition” into a lifestyle more befitting this brave new world.
The Green New Deal’s central planners aren’t so hubristic that they cannot admit uncertainties. For example, they admit that it’s unlikely that they could “fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast.” The ethics associated with industrial-scale bovine slaughter are unaddressed. The Green New Deal is its own moral imperative.
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In the absence of a national religion, Americans have frequently adopted a variety of civic codes that mimic the inviolable tenets of a faith. Some of them are healthier than others. With each passing day, the dogma of the green revolution looks less like a healthy expression of political agency and more like a cult.
Once Nietzsche declared “God is dead,” the entire history of “Progressivism” became an exercise in replacing Him with various and often interconnected cult-like pseudo-religions. As the late Tom Wolfe wrote in his epochal 1976 article, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” “It is entirely possible that in the long run historians will regard the entire New Left experience as not so much a political as a religious episode wrapped in semi military gear and guerrilla talk.”
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Try reading this piece by Arthur Allen Leff for more on this phenomenon.
HEY, SIRI — READ MY LIPS: Silent speech recognition enables covert communication. It didn’t work out that well when HAL 9000 could read lips.
SOYLENT GREEN NEW DEAL: Human Composting and the Dead as Sewage.
ARE YOU SURE IT’S NOT A CLOAKED ALIEN SPACESHIP? A Rare Asteroid Has Been Spotted Orbiting The Sun Closer Than Venus.
WELL, THAT’S A PLEASANT CHANGE FROM RECENT EXPERIENCE: This Year’s Flu Vaccine Effective Against Top Influenza Strains: Scientists’ predictions about which flu virus strains to include in this season’s vaccine were spot on.
NEO: The Green New Deal and the left’s grand plan [Part I].
Got it? This GND initiative is a counter to Trump, that troglodyte non-believer in AGW. The GND is not meant to be serious legislation for now, but to burnish the Democrats’ reputation as caring about climate change and the Republicans’ reputation for not caring. And the Democrats are counting on just about no one—except the right, and the far left—to read what’s actually in the GND.
Meanwhile, think about this: the Democratic Party wins these days by appealing to blocs of voters who will vote nearly monolithically for Democrats. Just as one example, black voters. “Young people” are also a bloc that puts Democrats over the top in many races. And many many of today’s young people are terrified of AGW.
Read the whole thing.
Gaslighting is the only fossil fuel exempted by the Green New Deal.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: The Beginning of the End Week in Higher Education.
JOEL KOTKIN: Technological Progress and the Global Sex Recession. “We may live amidst what seems a libidinous culture, but oddly also an increasingly sexless time. Of course, the drop in early teen sex – and even more so, teen pregnancies – represents positive developments, but when lack of social interaction leads to celibacy in the twenties, thirties and beyond, the implications are less than wholesome. . . . Those who grew up in the shadow of Paul Ehrlich’s ‘population bomb,’ or amidst the wanton sexuality of the 1960s and 1970s, now confront an unimaginable future. There may be some good out of these trends — for the environment, reducing abuse of women and the threat of mass unemployment. But in the end the prospect of an ever more sexless, and family free, world seems a grim one, and slightly less than human.”
Well, machines get better every year. People are not showing similar rates of improvement. Indeed, there’s a good argument that the same society that’s giving us better machines is giving us worse people. And Ehrlich’s book was a lie, and an immensely destructive one.
TORAH ON ONE FOOT: The Secret to Happiness.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, INSTITUTIONAL SEXISM EDITION: Jordan Peterson, dozens of academics support complaint alleging Ivy League anti-male bias.
Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychology professor signed onto a Title IX legal complaint against Ivy League school Cornell University claiming anti-male bias.
University of Southern California Ph.D. student Kursat Christoff Pekgoz filed the complaint and more than 185 professors, scholars, and activists signed onto it. The complaint alleges instances of anti-male bias by Cornell, according to documents obtained by Campus Reform.
The 28-page-long document, which was sent to the Department of Justice and the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, includes a “List of Exclusionary Programs” at Cornell. Pekgoz claims these programs discriminate against men. The complaint is predicated mainly on the fact that there are no male-only programs at Cornell, compared to a significant number of university-sponsored female-only programs.
“There are no male-only programs operative at Cornell University which can balance the female-only programs listed herein,” the complaint states. For example, the complaint includes the Cornell Women’s Resource Center as alleged evidence of anti-male bias, alleges that the center violates Title IX, and states that there is not an equivalent “Men’s Resource Center” at Cornell. Additionally, the complaint takes issue with the Iris Cantor Women’s Health Center, stating that there is no comparable Men’s Health Center at the university.
“There is no equivalent program at Cornell University which focuses on the cardiological needs of men. This is despite the fact that men are twice more likely to have heart attacks through life than women. Also, men are more susceptible to heart diseases than women,” the complaint says, referencing Weill Cornell Medicine, which it says funds or endorses the Women’s Heart Program.
Pekgoz’s complaint also alleges that Cornell violates Title IX by endorsing 390 scholarships on its website, all of which are only open to women.
“There is no rational basis for this endorsement,” the complaint says. “Title IX prohibits an institution from even listing external programs which are discriminatory. The overall effect is clearly discriminatory, given the massive number of female-only scholarships endorsed for the female majority.”
If the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights thinks the complaint has any merit, it will open a formal investigation into the school.
I hope it does decide to look into this.
VIRGINIA CLOWN SHOW UPDATE: Calls for Va. lieutenant governor to resign grow.