Archive for 2024

OPEN THREAD: Enjoy the weekend.

MISTER, WE COULD USE A MAN LIKE JOHN FACENDA AGAIN! In the meantime, this mini-Facenda (I don’t know if it’s a real person or AI simulation) will have to do:

And for those who prefer their backing scores slightly less orchestral:

BIDEN’S LATEST BIG GOVERNMENT INTRUSION TARGETS THE INTERNET:

In the roughly six years since Trump repealed net neutrality, we haven’t seen internet service providers throttle speeds or charge us for every tweet. In fact, internet speeds have only increased, as has investment into broadband access. Yet, for some reason, the Biden administration is nonetheless bringing back net neutrality regulations.

Last week, the Federal Communications Commission voted to reinstate the rules along party lines.

“I think in a modern digital economy, we should have a national net neutrality policy and make clear the nation’s expert on communications has the ability to act when it comes to broadband,” Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, a Biden appointee, said. “This is good for consumers, good for public safety and good for national security.”

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, a Republican appointee, voted against the reinstatement and blasted it as a “power grab.”

In September, Steve wrote, “Net neutrality was Barack Obama’s gift to Netflix, who then gave him a sweetheart production deal a short time after he left office. I wonder what Joe Biden expects to get.”

IT’S NOT AN ENVIRONMENTAL PROTEST:

And hey, remember how the Tea Party protesters left places cleaner than they found them, and the press called them barbarians?

¡NO PASARÁN!: In Spain in 1937 and 1938, many thousands of Leftists of all descriptions, were executed or tortured to death in Communist prisons (one who escaped was George Orwell).

On this day, VICTIMS OF COMMUNISM DAY (spasiba to Tovarich Glenn Reynolds), and in view of Ed Driscoll’s thorough post over at Instapundit on George Orwell and his Spanish War period, I would like to take the opportunity to add to the discussion by quoting from Paul Johnson‘s history of the 20th century, from which there is much to learn, not least the appalling truth about the “Republican” camp during the Spanish Civil War.

Tom Wolfe is quoted as saying that, with the publication of the Venona transcripts, “it turns out that “the Loyalists secretly called in the Soviets at the very outset of hostilities—and if they’d won, Spain would have been the first Soviet puppet state!”

True enough. But according to Modern Times (A History of the World from the 1920s to the 1990s), Paul Johnson points out that while the war lasted, this was already the case: the Kremlin’s Soviet NKVD (forerunner of the KGB), not the Spanish, were in fact already in charge of the country (or of that part held by the so-called Loyalists).

Behind [Prime Minister Juan] Negrin’s complaisant ignorance, the Communists — that is, Stalin’s secret police — took over Republican Spain.  The result was one of the major political tragedies of the century

Read the whole thing.

2024: A LYNDON LAROUCHE ODYSSEY! RFK Jr. potluck complicated by staffers’ fear of microwave radiation among other unusual campaign details: Report.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign and its staffers want to be taken seriously in the middle of two party heavyweights in President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.

They’re also reportedly afraid of microwave ovens, a detail that was included among various tidbits about the campaign dropped into a Wall Street Journal article Thursday.

An excerpt in the article on Kennedy’s campaign hit on the claim while discussing some oddities of the campaign.

“Several staffers fear the electromagnetic radiation from microwave ovens, complicating a volunteer potluck,” the story reads. “(People were advised to bring crockpots.)

Can’t say it’s surprising that RFK Jr.’s staffers share many of their boss’s, err, idiosyncrasies.

(Classical allusion in headline.)