BETTER GET GOING ON THOSE NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS, THEN: European Union sets goal to block sales of gas-powered cars by 2035.
Archive for 2022
October 30, 2022
According to Ellison, Soliah/Olson was a social justice warrior fighting the good fight. The case had nothing to do with the attempted murder of police officers; that was but a pretext. The Los Angeles district attorney was pursuing the case in bad faith: “This is not about justice. This is not about accountability, this is not about public safety. THIS is about SYMBOLISM. This is about MAKING A POINT. This is about saying to you and to me that we are going to get you if you ever try to stand against what we’re about. WE’RE GOING TO GET YOU. And we’re going to lock you up and we don’t care how long it takes, we’re going to get you. There might be people who get book deals, or there might be private revenge, there might be all these things, but no prosecution like this would really float unless it had a very important, symbolic meaning that tied it together for the people involved in it. And it is the idea that the people who fought for social justice and to elevate humanity in the 60’s and 70’s were WRONG! They were wrong and we’re going to prove it because we’re going TO LOCK HER UP. That’s what it’s about.”
In 2006 Greg Lang dug up the text of Ellison’s speech as edited by Ellison himself and posted it on a site Lang dedicated to the Soliah case. Fearing that the site might disappear, as it has, I posted the speech in its entirety here on Power Line. The whole thing is indeed worth reading. To say the least, it reveals Ellison to be hostile to impartial enforcement of the law and indifferent to the lives of police officers. It is a shocking speech that betrays his unfitness for any public office, let alone attorney general. Then Star Tribune metro columnist Katherine Kersten devoted a column to Ellison’s National Lawyers Guild speech at the time Lang dug it up. When she sought out Ellison he declined to comment on his current view of Soliah/Olson or Chesimard/Shakur and he has not been asked about it since.
From the time of his third year at the University of Minnesota Law School (1989–1990) through the 2000 National Lawyers Guild speech Ellison was a hustler peddling the toxic Nation of Islam line. By 2002, when he ran a second time for office as a state legislator, he had jettisoned the Nation of Islam baggage. The vicious radicalism remained.
Vicious radicalism, you say?
ONCE, BIG TECH WOULD HAVE HAD A LOT OF SUPPORT IN THE U.S., BUT NOT SO MUCH NOW: Europe prepares to rewrite the rules of the Internet: EU hopes DMA will force Big Tech platforms to break open their walled gardens.
DON’T GET COCKY: Rick Scott Predicts GOP Will Win at Least 52 Senate Seats in Midterms.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Vaginal Testosterone Shows Benefit in Post-menopausal Women.
BUT NOT FLATULENCE LEVELS: Fermented foods and fiber may lower stress levels, says new study.
LET ME JUST GET OUT AHEAD OF THE STORY AND SAY THAT ELON MUSK DID NOT COMMIT SUICIDE: It’s Elon Musk’s Twitter now and his reply to Hillary Clinton … well … pop that popcorn.
“Grab the popcorn, baby! It’s on! Maybe a questionable decision this early in his tenure as Chief Twit, but we’re here for the show, and we couldn’t write a better opening episode. This tweet would have gotten flagged for disinformation or taken down by Twitter in the before times. Now it’s out there in all its glory for people to read, debate, criticize, and all the other things that should happen in a free society where ideas are discussed with words INSTEAD of resorting to violence. It’s a new day!”
LOCKDOWNS: THE GREAT GASLIGHTING.
More than two years since the lockdowns of 2020, the political mainstream, particularly on the left, is just beginning to realize that the response to Covid was an unprecedented catastrophe.
But that realization hasn’t taken the form of a mea culpa. Far from it. On the contrary, in order to see that reality is starting to dawn on the mainstream left, one must read between the lines of how their narrative on the response to Covid has evolved over the past two years.
The narrative now goes something like this: Lockdowns never really happened, because governments never actually locked people in their homes; but if there were lockdowns, then they saved millions of lives and would have saved even more if only they’d been stricter; but if there were any collateral damage, then that damage was an inevitable consequence of the fear from the virus independent of the lockdowns; and even when things were shut down, the rules weren’t very strict; but even when the rules were strict, we didn’t really support them.
Put simply, the prevailing narrative of the mainstream left is that any upside from the response to Covid is attributable to the state-ordered closures and mandates that they supported, while any downside was an inevitable consequence of the virus independent of any state-ordered closures and mandates which never happened and which anyway they never supported. Got it? Good.
Live look at the left erasing the memory of 2020 from the population’s brains:
ROGER KIMBALL: Free Bird.
There are, I think, two major things to bear in mind about Musk’s takeover of Twitter. One is that, although he is not himself a conservative, the fact that he supports a robust view of free speech in which a wide variety of opinions are not only tolerated but encouraged means that he will be regarded as an existential threat by the progressive establishment.
That establishment is right to regard him as a threat. For its guardians require strict conformity in dispensing their twisted gospel of “diversity” if they are to maintain their power and perquisites. Open the door just a little, let just a little sunlight in, and pow! The magic spell that made it seem OK to say that men are women, that “climate change” is a threat to humanity, that COVID is a peril on the same plane as the Black Death, or that BLM and Antifa were justified in burning down our cities—suddenly that spell is broken, and so is the hold over the narrative that these new guardians of conformity had enforced.
The second thing to bear in mind is that the establishment will not sit idly by as Elon Musk challenges their narrative. Everything about Musk is an insult to the coddled, low-testosterone consensus that has been ruining America this last decade through the promulgation of its dependency agenda. It is no accident, as the Marxists say, that even as Musk pushes ahead with his reformation of Twitter, the coercive busybodies of the state have begun making minatory noises about “investigating” Musk. Thus we read that Tesla is under federal investigation over autopilot claims.
Expect more of that. Beatings will continue until morale improves. As Glenn Reynolds put it at Instapundit, “The Bureaucracy Mobilizes Against A Threat.” Were the midterms not just around the corner, I might be worried about this coalescing threat against Elon Musk. But come November 9, the clock will be ticking against that sclerotic, freedom-hating consensus. The bird is freed, and we will be too. Fiat Musk!
Read the whole thing.
“DEFUND THE POLICE:” Another bad idea from Higher Ed.
WHY REMAKE A 92-YEAR-OLD OSCAR-WINNING MOVIE? All Quiet on the Western Front director explains.
Despite their nearly 100-year gap, both movie versions of Erich Maria Remarque’s enduring 1929 novel are echoes of each other, due largely to their reliance on the book.
Young men are lured into battle by passionate speeches; the brutal reality of battle sinks in quickly as they scrounge for food and watch each other die; Paul, the protagonist played by a haunting Felix Kammerer, kills a Frenchman in hand-to hand combat and immediately regrets it; and in the end, there is only ignominious defeat.
But [Edward] Berger’s version reaches a new level of poignancy and even urgency given the tenor of the times.
It does so first by focusing on the way in which young German boys were turned into cannon fodder by adults spouting nationalist dogma, and secondly by spotlighting how Germany’s capitulation at the end of World War I – and the sense of shame in defeat stoked by politicians – gave rise years later to Nazism and ultimately World War II.
In that, says Berger, is a lesson for us all in 2022.
“I’m sensitive to nationalist movements, so with the rise of Trump and Brexit and the far right in Hungary and Italy, it’s important to remember that 100 years ago, this all led us to a catastrophe,” he says.
Which seems odd considering Trump started no new wars while in office, Brexit seems like a pretty benign decoupling from the legalistic yoke of the EU, and “Matteo Renzi, a former [Italian] prime minister who is liberal, threw cold water on the idea that `[Giorgia] Meloni is a fascist or a demagogue on CNN. ‘She’s my rival, we will continue to fight each other, but there is not a risk of fascism in Italy,’ he said. ‘It is absolutely fake news.’”
WHITE HOUSE REPORT CARD: Zogby says, ‘Week belonged to GOP.’
Dems are desperate enough that they’re fabricating hate crimes.
ANDY KESSLER: The Deadly ‘De-Growth’ Craze.
The modern world is constantly subjected to crackpot movements that eventually fail, but not before causing serious damage. Karl Marx was a crackpot. So was the John Birch Society in its mission to fight communism “behind every tree.” The latest is Modern Monetary Theory and unlimited dollar creation for government spending, which caused today’s runaway inflation.
In the 1970s, the Club of Rome insisted that for the world to be ecologically sound, we needed a “no-growth economy.” This was as dumb as the debunked Malthus theory that population growth would outstrip food. The disgraced Club of Rome thankfully went dormant. But it’s baaaack.
The new craze is “de-growth.” Proponents demand we “put well-being ahead of profit.” Normally, I’d say “Pfffft, ignore them,” but none other than the Davos dudes of the World Economic Forum are featuring arguments for de-growth. Weird because mostly growing global companies pay the WEF’s bills—tributes to the woke dons. The WEF’s website is filled with scholar-infested nonsense including a video asking, “What would a post-economic-growth world look like?”
It wouldn’t be pretty. Like Manta rays that must keep swimming or die (sharks too), societies that don’t grow eventually devolve into oppression, chaos, anarchy and then ruin. The Roman Empire. The Soviet Union. Venezuela. De-growth is living with less. Capitalism’s productivity is doing more with less. Big difference.
What would this mean for the U.S.? No growth means no investment for innovation. This leads to stagnation—freezing everything in place. Then comes command and control. Experts to allocate slices of a finite pie. Unions (see how they treat independent gig workers as meat to organize). True collectivism. Eventually “Lord of the Flies” chaos. The Fyre festival. Everyone for himself.
Growth is oxygen. Growth is how we afford virus vaccines and cures for cancer, Alzheimer’s and ALS. Growth is how we take people out of poverty. Growth lifts all ships, not just oligarchs’ yachts.
No growth is deadly, so why do so many push it? Joseph Stalin called his naive allies “useful idiots.” The no-growth movement has more than its share of dunces pitching policies to kill economic growth. Do they realize this? To be nice, I’ll call them No-Grows.
They are wrong, but they are also evil. Their ideology makes them quite literally enemies of humanity.
ANDREW SULLIVAN: The British Barack Obama? The unlikely rise of Rishi Sunak — and the American left’s staggering silence.
Sunak is, for example, an openly practicing and proud Hindu. He lit Diwali lights around 11 Downing Street and took his oath on the Bhagavad Gita. That’s not someone running from his heritage. And he is also a Brexiteer from conviction, and, unlike Truss, a fiscal conservative who’s a realist about what can and can’t be done in a period of extraordinary economic stress for Brits and massive post-Covid debt.
All of this suggests something too many liberals have forgotten. These countries of alleged “white supremacy” have less racism than almost anywhere else in the world. It is hard to imagine a non-white president of France or Germany or Italy — let alone China or Russia or anywhere in Central Europe. It is hard to think of another empire that was deliberately unwound by its architects, and who then, within two generations, installed the grandson of former colonial subjects to its most powerful office. And Obama, of course, was twice elected with more heartland white support than Hillary Clinton.
Sunak has, moreover, been selected by the Tory party — that bastion of alleged bigotry that has already had three female prime ministers in its history, and now also a non-white man, James Cleverly, as foreign secretary, and a woman of Indian ancestry, Suella Braverman, as home secretary. Three of the top four ministers of state in Sunak’s cabinet are non-white. The new chairman of the Conservative party is Nadhim Zahawi. I’m telling you this because the US MSM — who are usually obsessed with racial representation in every single mundane situation — suddenly aren’t that interested, when some of their woke priors are rattled.
This is true of the broader American left. A faction obsessed with racial “equity” cannot take a moment to observe a historical moment of extraordinary proportions. Some, like Trevor Noah, have even completely invented a racist “backlash” against Sunak that simply hasn’t happened, apart from one call on one radio call-in show. (I was on BBC Radio this morning talking to an interviewer who was simply baffled by the projection.)
Noah has the excuse of being a comedian.
Like his predecessor at The Daily Show, Noah can always fallback on the “clown nose on/clown nose off” defense.
Related: Can We Please Have Some Racism? “The Left hungers for racism–of the approved sort–but it is hard to find. Trevor Noah, the host of the Daily Show, went looking for racism in the ascension of Rishi Sunak as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Noah purported to see a ‘backlash’ against Sunak, for which there is zero evidence. To be fair, though, when has a total lack of evidence ever stopped a liberal comedian–isn’t the Daily Show supposed to be comedy?–or newsman?”
DEAL OF THE DAY: Fanttik X8 Portable Tire Inflator. #CommissionEarned
QUESTION ASKED: Are we living through ‘Weekend at Biden’s?’ America needs to know, but the complicit media won’t ask.
Are staffers covering up for President Joe Biden the way they did for Senate candidate John Fetterman?
Tuesday night’s debate revealed Fetterman’s debilitated post-stroke condition — and thus also exposed both the campaign staff who’d hidden the truth and the Dem-loving members of the media who for months covered for the progressive politico, even stomping on any reporters who raised doubts.
Like Fetterman, Biden keeps the media at arm’s length — vastly more so than any recent prez. He did only nine formal press conferences in all of 2021, and eight so far this year. He’s done just 20 sit-down interviews (many of them softball) through the first year-and-a-half of his presidency.
And that follows his “hide in the basement” presidential campaign, which also required massive media complicity. When he did appear before cameras he often delivered immortal lines like his “Look, fat” while addressing a voter in Iowa.
Turning 80 next month, Biden’s already the oldest man ever to serve as president. And for all his lifelong habit of gaffes and verbal bumbling, it’s becoming harder and harder to watch the man without thinking he has some serious neurological problems.
Related: Watch: Joe Biden’s Senior Moment of the Week Vol. 17. Exit quote: “Am I don’t have the same pace?”
ONE THING LEFT OFF THEIR “TOP 10 THINGS LIKELY TAKEN OVER BY CATS”: YOUR HEART: Cats have 5 major personality types, pet owners believe.
GREENS HATE HUMANITY AND WANT US TO LIVE WORSE LIVES:
NEWS YOU CAN USE: How to clean your keyboard with the best products, per an expert.