WHILE DOING ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO MITIGATE THE PROBLEM IT PURPORTS TO MITIGATE: Unintended Consequences: Mask Mandates Resulting in “Mask Pollution”.
In other words, the typical lefty “solution.” It doesn’t fix what it’s supposed to fix, it breaks a bunch of other things, but it makes you feel important and caring.
SHOCKED SHOCKED SHOCKED. BEHOLD MY SHOCKED FACE: Southeast Greenland Sea Surface Temperature 1° – 2°C Warmer In 1940 Than Today, New Study Shows.
WE KNOW THAT “RENEWABLES” IS INSANITY: Texas frozen wind power – outages ensue, electricity now at unheard of $9000 per megawatt-hour.
And now everyone knows it’s insanity. Seriously. If we can get one fact through the left’s head let’s try for this one: scientific innovation and discovery is not affected by your wishes. It happens when it happens. And right now, as far as renewables go, the science is not there. Like most of the idiocy forced on society by lefty regulations, it doesn’t work as well and pollutes and destroys more than what it’s attempting to replace.
THE REPEATED CALLS FOR THIS MEAN THAT THE LEFT KNOWS ITS LOST CONTROL: Jacobs: “Truth Commission” Needed To Control Common Narrative.
WE KNOW. CANCELING IS WHAT MIDGETS DO TO GIANTS: George Washington Deserves Our Thanks, Not Our Cancellation.
Because the giants make them feel bad. Also because destroying is easier than building. And the let is all midgets.
RESPECTED NEWS SOURCES LIKE THE GRAUNIAD GUARDIAN HAVE AUTHORITY: The dangers of playing Call of Duty Warcraft on the internets.
Them kids and their computer games, keep getting radicalized, instead of listening to our super-respectable and important opinions!
BUT THE BEE IS JUST SATIRE, RIGHT? The New York Times Retracts the Sicknick Story.
THE BABYLON BEE, AMERICA’S PAPER OF RECORD: Ignorant Senator Shares New York Times Article Thinking It’s Real.
WHY DEMOCRATS ARE AFRAID: Hero’s welcome in Florida for Trump as supporters line his route home from the golf course on Presidents’ Day – amid backlash against Republicans who voted to impeach him.
If the goal was to separate Trump from his supporters, it failed.
UPDATE: Don Surber: “Democrats have diminished themselves. The impeachment turned a hollow victory in November into a humiliation.” It was an unwise deployment of resources.
OPEN THREAD: What are you doing to make things better?
ROGER SIMON: The Year of No Science.
I am writing this locked in my Nashville house, not by COVID, but by snow and ice that do not allow me to drive my car down my driveway without landing in a ditch.
In about an hour, another six to eight hours of non-stop snow and ice are predicted. Neither my wife nor I are likely to able to leave home to shop for food for several days. (We have emergency supplies.)
I gather things are worse in Texas, to the South of us, where millions are without power in freezing weather.
Fifteen years ago, Al Gore, in his Oscar-winning film “An Inconvenient Truth” predicted “Within the decade, there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro.”
We all know how ridiculous that sounds now (well, everyone but John Kerry and Joe Biden and an endless stream of miseducated social justice warriors who have never read, nor heard of, Bjorn Lomborg.)
Of course, those were the days of “global warming,” before it morphed conveniently into the factually meaningless “climate change.”
After all, you can’t get the lusted-after political power and financial gain if you say the sun is vastly more important to our weather and climate (a distinction, we are told, is important, so I put them together) than human endeavors.
So maybe we have been living in the Year of No Science for a long time, since the days people thought the world was flat, which was most of history by far.
Related: Historic winter storm freezes Texas wind turbines; millions without power. And speaking of “the year of no science:”
WHAT THE NEW YORK TIMES’ HIT PIECE ON SLATE STAR CODEX SAYS ABOUT MEDIA GATEKEEPING:
One starts to get the feeling that the Times simply wants to tarnish every view that exists outside its own narrow purview, perhaps because the Times has appointed itself the gatekeeper of the unsayable and resents having to relinquish this role to newer media ventures.
“Slate Star Codex was a window into the Silicon Valley psyche,” writes Metz. “There are good reasons to try and understand that psyche, because the decisions made by tech companies and the people who run them eventually affect millions. And Silicon Valley, a community of iconoclasts, is struggling to decide what’s off limits for all of us.”
The idea that a clinical psychiatrist’s blog is the embodiment of Silicon Valley’s psyche is very odd, probably wrong, and at the very least unproven throughout the article. But notice the grander concern: A community of iconoclasts is struggling to decide what’s off-limits for all of us. What the Times actually means is that not enough speech is being rendered off-limits: The new gatekeepers are not nearly as interested in policing strict boundaries.
Many members of the media, including and especially those who report on tech, fret constantly about the potential for inaccurate speech to appear on social media. Their complaints frequently expose their own biases: Times tech reporter Kevin Roose once tweeted that “Facebook is absolutely teeming with right-wing disinformation right now,” and linked to four news stories that had attracted significant web traffic on the platform. But the headlines of all four were accurate, as Roose later conceded—a particularly powerful example of an emerging phenomenon in which journalists label something as disinformation or misinformation, not because it is false, but because they don’t want the American public to hear or read it.
Newspapers changed for the worse when millions of people went to see All the President’s Men, and many of them decided to adopt Woodward and Bernstein as their journalistic role models. These days though, apparently The Lives of Others is a de rigueur a how-to guide for ambitious J-school students.
ABOUT MITCH MCCONNELL’S SATURDAY SPEECH: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s angry speech on the Senate floor following President Donald Trump’s second acquittal on impeachment charges wasn’t really about Trump, it was about all of us outside the old corporate Republican Establishment, according to Christopher Bedford at The Federalist. It won’t soon be forgotten.
YES, BUT WHEN DO I GET MY ORION NUCLEAR SPACECRAFT? Report recommends NASA accelerate space nuclear propulsion development.
There’s actually an argument that the Outer Space Treaty may override the Test Ban Treaty to make nuclear explosions used as part of a space propulsion system legal. I spoke at a space law symposium on that last week, and was surprised at how well it was received, even by standard international law types who aren’t spaceheads. I guess I’ll have to write that article now.
THE DESIRE NAMED STREETCAR: A Global Leader in Obsolete Technology.
Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg wants to make the United States the “global leader” in high-speed rail. That’s like wanting to be the world leader in electric typewriters, rotary telephones, or steam locomotives, all technologies that were once revolutionary but are functionally obsolete today. High-speed trains, in particular, were rendered obsolete in 1958, when Boeing introduced the 707 jetliner, which was twice as fast as the fastest trains today.
Aside from speed, what makes high-speed rail obsolete is its high cost. Unlike airlines, which don’t require much infrastructure other than landing fields, high-speed trains require huge amounts of infrastructure that must be built and maintained to extremely precise standards. That’s why airfares averaged just 14 cents per passenger-mile in 2019, whereas fares on Amtrak’s high-speed Acela averaged more than 90 cents per passenger-mile.
Highways require infrastructure but not this level of precision. While a four-lane freeway costs about $10 million to $20 million a mile, California ended up spending $100 million a mile building its abortive high-speed rail line on flat ground, and it predicted building in hilly territory would cost at least $170 million per mile.
Graft is what government-run passenger trains are all about.
Flashback: Mass Transit, The Pandemic Petri Dish The Left Loves.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: People Who Moved To Texas From California Finally Feeling At Home Now That Power Is Out.
BARI WEISS: Gina Carano and Crowd-Sourced McCarthyism.
There are different standards—or ought to be—for actors, who get paid to play other people, and politicians, who serve the public and should know the history and implications of such an image. When the then-leader of the Labour Party objected to the destruction of that mural, it was in the context of a litany of other data points.
As I wrote in The New York Times in November 2018:
“He paid respects at the memorial of the Palestinian perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. . . He participated for over a decade in the activities of a group called Deir Yassin Remembered, which was led by a Holocaust denier. He publicly defended a virulently antisemitic vicar named Stephen Sizer. He invited an Islamist preacher who believes Jews use gentile blood for religious reasons to tea at Parliament. And so on.”
Still, I wondered, was I wrong to have leapt to Carano’s support? Was this meme proof of a darker worldview?
So I reached out to Carano for answers.
Read the whole thing.
Related: The Culture War is Coming For You Whether You Like it Or Not.
#JOURNALISM: Naming Names and Petty Vindictiveness.
HERE COMES THE END OF PRIVACY, POLITICAL SPEECH AND RELIGIOUS FREEDOM: But other than that, there really is nothing at all wrong with the Equality Act President Joe Biden and the Democrats on Capitol Hill are preparing to shove down America’s throat.
IT’S NOT NICENESS, IT’S MORE LIKE FASCISM:
The roots of this ideology, often labeled corporatism (a word derived from a vision of society as a single body), can be found in a line of primarily Catholic thought that evolved from reactionary beginnings but by the end of the 19th century included a firm commitment to ‘social justice’. That these ideas should lead to fascism was not inevitable. Corporatism also influenced the establishment of post-war West Germany’s social-market economy, a democratic success story if ever there was one.
The Nazis may have linked, in their rhetoric and in some measures, elements of their Volksgemeinschaft to corporatism, but it’s no surprise that Mussolini, the leader of a strongly Catholic country, did more to institutionalize corporatism than the Führer to his north, despite there being more than a touch of Potemkin about Italy’s corporatist structures. Thus employers and workers participated in ‘syndicates’ organized on an industry basis, and the Italian legislature’s lower chamber was eventually rearranged on nominally corporatist lines. At around the same time, corporatism became, to varying degrees, the political creed of other equally (if less bluntly fascist) Catholic states, including Portugal, Spain, Austria and Argentina.
These countries may have failed to measure up to corporatist ideals in practice, but that does not detract from corporatism’s potential as an instrument of social, economic and political control. To take one instance, Silvio Longhi, one of fascist Italy’s senior lawyers, explained that under corporatism, ‘the state recognizes and safeguards individual property rights so long as they are not being exercised in a way which contravenes the prevailing collective interest’; a less than reassuring reassurance.
Fast forward to 2019 and a statement by the Business Roundtable (which has now been signed by over 200 of America’s leading CEOs) purporting to ‘redefine the purpose of a corporation’. The longstanding principle that corporate executives’ primary obligation is to their shareholders has been ‘modernized’: companies are now to be run for the benefit of ‘stakeholders’, more specifically, customers, employees, suppliers, ‘the communities in which we work’ and, oh yes, shareholders.
If this statement were a one-off, it could be regarded as a piece of largely meaningless PR put out by businesspeople alarmed by the extent of American disenchantment with the existing economic order. Unfortunately, it is not. C-suite after C-suite is abandoning shareholder primacy (a concept denounced by Joe Biden as ‘a farce’) in favor of ‘stakeholder capitalism’. Stripped of euphemism, that means overriding shareholder property rights based on what Silvio Longhi would have described as ‘the prevailing collective interest’.
Read the whole thing.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
● Shot: Bill Gates: How the world can avoid a climate disaster.
—CBS News, yesterday.
● Chaser: Bill Gates Joins Private-Equity Firms in $4.7 Billion Deal for Private-Jet Company.
—The Wall Street Journal, February 5th.
I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who tell me it’s a crisis start to act like a crisis themselves, to coin an Insta-phrase.
PLANNING FOR 2022: Republicans mount campaign against Democrats over lost pipeline jobs.
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