Archive for 2020
February 25, 2020
THEN LET’S GET TO REPEALING SOME STUFF: Bernie Says ‘American People Will Write Gun Safety Legislation.’
OH, THAT LIBERAL FASCISM. Dem candidate Tom Steyer lays out his plan for a climate police state: “I will use the Executive emergency powers of the presidency to tell companies how they can generate electricity, what kind of cars they can build, what kind of buildings we’re gonna have…”
And it’s not just Steyer, of course: The absurdity of the Bernie Sanders and AOC anti-fracking crusade.
Between gas, nuclear power (including future thorium and fusion power), geothermal, and hydroelectric sources, the U.S. will be able to eliminate nearly all carbon emissions without any more expensive renewable-energy subsidies or noxious social justice activism.
This will surely disappoint environmental fundamentalists. For as Ocasio-Cortez’s former chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti admitted, even her $97 trillion Green New Deal scheme was not really about the environment but about transforming society.
The far Left wants to return the U.S. to Year Zero, radically reorganizing the entire economy. This is not our claim — they say it openly. They want to begin with a cutoff of the abundant energy supply, which makes possible and affordable all the comforts that modern society takes for granted — everything from smartphones to toilet paper. Through central planning, these socialist politicians hope to disassemble profitable industries and reassign labor and capital according to dumb, naive, and poorly planned “five-year plans” and “great leaps forward” — something Ocasio-Cortez reminded everyone of last year with a well-produced animated video.
Every historical attempt at socialism has involved such plans, which always end in failure. Sanders’s plans are no different. The public can avoid relearning history’s lessons about those failures by voting against Sanders and any other candidate who wants to end or curtail fracking.
As Virginia Postrel noted about 20 years ago when discussing The Future and its Enemies with Brian Lamb on C-Span:
The Khmer Rouge sought to start over at year zero, and to sort of create the kind of society that very civilized, humane greens write about as though it were an ideal. I mean, people who would never consider genocide. But I argue that if you want to know what that would take, look at Cambodia–to empty the cities and turn everyone into peasants again. Even in a less developed country, let alone in someplace like the United States, that these sort of static utopian fantasies are just that.
Although socialist North Korea begs to differ:
After the Democratic presidential candidates’ apocalyptic-themed “climate change” town hall on CNN in September, Bryan Preston wrote, “If you like Venezuela, voting for any of them will bring you a whole lot of Venezuela. Thank you, CNN, just for letting these people talk. Do it again next week? Please?”
(Classical reference in headline.)
COMING SOON? Climate My Ass: The Green War on Freedom.
Writer and columnist James Delingpole and director Martin Durkin are teaming up to make a new documentary, Climate My Ass: The Green War on Freedom, and they’re currently in the fundraising stage. Per the film’s Indiegogo site: “The climate bandwagon has rolled on quite long enough. The ‘scientists’ and ‘science’ behind this nonsense have been exposed time and time again, but like some zombie ‘global warming’ refuses to lie down and die. What keeps it going is the political-bureaucratic, publicly funded monster, called the ‘Climate Consensus’. This is the monster which we aim to slay once and for all.” Donations to help produce Climate My Ass may be made here.
As I’m writing this, the Indiegogo page is being updated. When it’s back up, I plan on chipping in.
SUPER GAFFE-O-MATIC ’76! Former VP Joe Biden tells a crowd in South Carolina he is “running for the U.S. Senate” and if they don’t like him they can “vote for the other Biden.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRYfs-iXDq0
UPDATE: More details here: Watch: Joe Biden says he’s a candidate for ‘United States Senate.’
(Updated and bumped.)
HARSH, BUT FAIR.
IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING: Leading Democrats should speak out on Sanders.
I wonder how many other members of the old Journolist are scared of a Bernie candidacy?
IT’S CALLED COMMUNIST PROPAGANDA, AND BERNIE FALLS FOR IT EVERY TIME: Hans Bader:
According to UNESCO, Cuba had about the same literacy rate as Costa Rica and Chile in 1950 (close to 80%). And it has almost the same literacy rate as they do today (close to 100%). Meanwhile, Latin American countries that were largely illiterate in 1950 — like Peru, Brazil, El Salvador, and the Dominican Republic — are largely literate today, closing much of the gap with Cuba. El Salvador had a less than 40% literacy rate in 1950, but has an 88% literacy rate today. Brazil and Peru had a less than 50% literacy rate in 1950, but today, Peru has a 94.5% literacy rate, and Brazil a 92.6% literacy rate. The Dominican Republic’s rate rose from a little over 40% to 91.8%. While Cuba made substantial progress in reducing illiteracy in Castro’s first years in power, its educational system has stagnated since, even as much of Latin America improved.
BULWARKING TRUE CONSERVATIVE CONSERVATISM THROUGH THE COERCIVE POWER OF THE STATE: GOP Ex-Congressman Joe Walsh Will Conserve Conservatism by Voting for the Socialist. “He could say he’s voting Libertarian. He could write in ‘Joe Walsh’ or ‘Marco Rubio’ or ‘Zombie Ronald Reagan.’ He could even sit this one out. But no.”
VIPERS ON DECK: Two USMC AH-1Z Viper helicopters prepare to take off from the flight deck of the amphibious transport dock ship USS Green Bay. Photo taken February 19 somewhere in the Gulf of Thailand.
GRADUALLY, AND THEN SUDDENLY: How The Onion Went Full-On Bernie Bro.
The Onion laid out its new ideology unambiguously in an August 2019 piece titled “Democrat Party: Moving Left Vs. Remaining Moderate.” The article is less a series of jokes than a laundry list of familiar complaints from the activist, Bernie-friendly left about moderate Democrats, like criticizing their foreign policy as “10 percent less than whatever Dick Cheney would do.”
So what happened?
Nackers says it’s not that the Onion has decided to try its hand at actively abetting the Sanders campaign. To him, this campaign is simply the first one its staff has seen that embodies what it has been complaining about all along. Part of it is just how simpatico their policy preferences are: “The Onion started in Madison [Wis.],” Nackers said in an interview, “and people are pretty progressive … a lot of Bernie’s policies are progressive things that we want to back.”
Well, he’s certainly a very big fan of what used to be called “‘Progressives’ in a hurry”; what could go wrong?
Fortunately, America’s Newspaper of Record hasn’t lost its nerve: Bernie Sanders Disappointed To Learn Millions In Campaign Donations Were All In Venezuelan Currency.
BECAUSE PEOPLE KNOW IT’S MOSTLY A B.S. EXCUSE FOR A POLITICAL POWER GRAB: Pew Research 2019 survey: ‘Climate Change’ Still Ranks As Low Priority – 17th place out of 18.
SYRACUSE REMAINS A MESS.
IT’S A 19TH CENTURY IDEOLOGY IN THE 21ST CENTURY, WHAT DO YOU EXPECT? ‘Progressivism’ vs. Progress.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: We Have Come for Your Children—Bernie Sanders Edition. “Democrats don’t really care about poor, put-upon working parents. They’re the ones who are taxing people to death and making them work that much in the first place, after all. The goal here is to get their grubby radical hands on the minds of children when they are most easily molded. They sell this horror by portraying the government as a benevolent caretaker that’s there to comfort you.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, COLLUSION EDITION: College admissions scandal meets foreign bribery.
BERNIE’S STILL RECITING 1960S APPARATCHIK TALKING POINTS, BECAUSE HE’S BASICALLY STILL A 1960S APPARATCHIK: I went to school in Cuba under Castro. Here’s what it’s like, Bernie Sanders.
“You know, when Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program,” you told “60 Minutes” host Anderson Cooper. “Is that a bad thing? Even though Fidel Castro did it?” . . .
See, despite your claims, senator, that it was Castro who started a literacy program in Cuba, a common and often-repeated lie, the girl’s mother worked in a literacy program in the countryside after graduation from a teacher’s college in the early 1950s.
Teachers had to do so to earn their spot in a city classroom.
Facts don’t matter. It’s all about the narrative. Socialists talk about making poor people better off. Capitalists actually do it. In a media culture that rewards talking over doing because it’s run by talkers rather than doers, the socialists get more credit.
Meanwhile: Sanders defends comments praising Castro’s Cuba: ‘The truth is the truth.’ SJWs always double down.
Plus: City Of Miami Announces Big Event After Bernie Makes Pro-Communist Remarks.
WINNOWING THE FIELD: YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG. With 7 Candidates Debating In South Carolina, The Stage Is, Umm, Getting Larger? “We’re at the point in the election cycle — after three states have voted — that the debate stage is supposed to shrink, not grow. But apparently the 2020 Democratic field didn’t get the memo. After six candidates debated in Nevada last week, seven have now qualified for this Tuesday’s showdown in South Carolina. The debate will reunite the six debaters from last week’s heated fracas and also welcome philanthropist Tom Steyer back to the stage.”
More than anything this is an indication that the party elders no longer have the muscle or clout to winnow the field in advance. The GOP has the same problem, but the result was Trump and a lot of #winning. We still don’t know what the same chaos will produce on the Democratic side.