OPEN THREAD: Shut up and dance.
Archive for 2022
May 1, 2022
I’VE ALWAYS BEEN A BELIEVER IN NIVEN’S LAW OF TIME TRAVEL: Time travel could be possible, but only with parallel timelines.
SADLY ACCURATE: Global Stagflation Won’t Be Just a Squall That’ll Blow Over.
WHOOPS: Russians plunder $5M farm vehicles from Ukraine — to find they’ve been remotely disabled.
The contact said the process began with the seizure of two combine harvesters, a tractor and a seeder. Over the next few weeks, everything else was removed: in all 27 pieces of farm machinery. One of the flat-bed trucks used, and caught on camera, had a white “Z” painted on it and appeared to be a military truck.
The contact said there were rival groups of Russian troops: some would come in the morning and some in the evening.
Some of the machinery was taken to a nearby village, but some of it embarked on a long overland journey to Chechnya more than 700 miles away. The sophistication of the machinery, which are equipped with GPS, meant that its travel could be tracked. It was last tracked to the village of Zakhan Yurt in Chechnya.
The equipment ferried to Chechnya, which included combine harvesters — can also be controlled remotely. “When the invaders drove the stolen harvesters to Chechnya, they realized that they could not even turn them on, because the harvesters were locked remotely,” the contact said.
Tibor’s Tractor remains eternally loyal, however:
Flashback: Vox “journalist” attempts to dunk on Trump; discovers the hard way that farm tractors can connect to the Internet.
I’D BE HAPPY IF THE GREENS WOULD get on board with space manufacturing, but the only reason to do that would be to make the planet cleaner, and that’s clearly not a priority for greens. See also power, nuclear.
INSERT AN ENTIRE UNIVERSE OF FACE-PALMING PICARDS HERE: Russian foreign minister: So what if Zelensky’s Jewish, so was Hitler.
NEVER LET A CRISIS GO TO WASTE: Obama retread Samantha Power tells former Clinton press flak George Stephanopoulos: “‘Fertilizer shortages are real now because Russia is a big exporter of fertilizer. And even though fertilizer is not sanctioned, less fertilizer is coming out of Russia. As a result, we’re working with countries to think about natural solutions like manure and compost. And this may hasten transitions that would have been in the interest of farmers to make eventually anyway.’”
Power telling Stephanopoulos that potential food shortages are a way to nudge farmers in a direction the administration wants them to go is akin to their frequent arguments that high gas prices should be encouraged to nudge drivers into electric cars.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): In Sri Lanka, Organic Farming Went Catastrophically Wrong.
Plus: Sri Lanka facing imminent threat of starvation, senior politician warns.
TREAT YOURSELF: Peugeot Elis Pepper Mill with Blue LED Light Bundle with a Lumintrail Spoon Set. #CommissionEarned
I’M ONLY OKAY WITH THEM IF THEY’RE BUNDLED WITH NEW NUCLEAR PLANTS: Joe Manchin calls EV tax credits “ludicrous” in Senate hearing.
DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE AND THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY: Harvard’s student newspaper endorses “Boycott, Divest, Sanction and a Free Palestine.” The editorial also defends the newspaper against ‘accusations’ that its stance is antisemitic.
OUT ON A LIMB: Tulsi Gabbard Suggests Obama Devised Biden’s ‘Ministry of Truth’ Disinformation Board. “‘Biden is just a front man,’ Gabbard tweeted Sunday. ‘Obama, April 21: social media censors ‘don’t go far enough,’ so the government needs to step in to do the job. Six days later, Homeland Security rolls out the ‘Ministry of Truth’ (aka Disinformation Governance Board).’”
MEDICAL SEXISM: Osteoporosis in men overlooked by doctors and patients.
Richard Delgado, an early champion of speech codes and now more famous as a founding scholar in the field of Critical Race Theory, cites the Rwandan genocide (more on this in the next entry), along with Weimar Germany, as cautionary tales against free-speech purism. The problem is that neither historical precedent supports the idea that speech restraints could have prevented a genocide.
As I explained in my review of Eric Berkowitz’s excellent book, “Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, from the Ancients to Fake News,” Weimar Germany had laws banning hateful speech (particularly hateful speech directed at Jews), and top Nazis including Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch and Julius Streicher actually were sentenced to prison time for violating them. The efforts of the Weimar Republic to suppress the speech of the Nazis are so well known in academic circles that one professor has described the idea that speech restrictions would have stopped the Nazis as “the Weimar Fallacy.”
A 1922 law passed in response to violent political agitators such as the Nazis permitted Weimar authorities to censor press criticism of the government and advocacy of violence. This was followed by a number of emergency decrees expanding the power to censor newspapers. The Weimar Republic not only shut down hundreds of Nazi newspapers — in a two-year period, they shut down 99 in Prussia alone — but they accelerated that crackdown on speech as the Nazis ascended to power. Hitler himself was banned from speaking in several German states from 1925 until 1927.
Far from being an impediment to the spread of National Socialist ideology, Hitler and the Nazis used the attempts to suppress their speech as public relations coups. The party waved the ban like a bloody shirt to claim they were being targeted for exposing the international conspiracy to suppress “true” Germans.
And once in power, “Far from stopping Hitler, they only made his day when he became Chancellor. They enabled Hitler to confront Social Democratic Party chairman Otto Wels, who stood up in the Reichstag to protest Nazi suspension of civil liberties, with a quotation from the poet Friedrich Schiller: ‘Late you come, but still you come,’ Hitler pointed at the hapless deputy. ‘You should have recognized the value of criticism during the years we were in opposition [when] our press was forbidden, our meetings were forbidden, and we were forbidden to speak for years on end.’ The Nazis would have been just as repressive without this excuse, but being able to offer it made Hitler’s task easier.”
Meanwhile, back in 2022:
DUMBEST ARGUMENT FOR TSA YET: IT CREATES JOBS. REALLY? NO: Why You Shouldn’t Celebrate the TSA for Employing 47,000 Workers.
OUR SCHIZOPHRENIC OVERCLASS:
Shot: As Democrats debate high gas prices, ‘Buy a Tesla’ remains their default policy — even for the poor.
—The Washington Examiner, Friday.
Chaser: Morning Joe Hopes Twitter Buyout ‘Brings Down Musk’s Entire Business Empire.’
—NewsBusters, Friday.
ROGER SIMON: Biden Administration Tops Orwell with ‘Disinformation Governance Board.’
Communism comes in various stripes.
The Soviets had their version, the Chinese have theirs—these days quaintly called “Socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The North Koreans have “Juche!” The Cambodian Khmer Rouge had theirs (thankfully short-lived) and the Cubans a pretty traditional Marxist-Leninist state with the creepy addition—they have long embedded secret police in the neighborhoods to keep an eye on everybody.
But they all have in common what they most loathe: freedom of speech.
Joining them in this abhorrence of the cornerstone of democracies is now the current U.S. administration that is about to install, through its Department of Homeland Security, a “Disinformation Governance Board.”
How Orwellian can you get!
But to call that Orwellian is both an understatement and an insult to the great George Orwell whose “Ministry of Truth” was a far more clever construction that contained the ironic overtone intended by the author.
There’s nothing ironic about the bureaucratic Biden era locution that seems thought up by the totalitarian dullards of our Deep State as a warning lest we peons get out of line and think for ourselves. It owes more to Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels than to the author of “Animal Farm” and “1984.”
We could also call it—using Chinese rhetoric, since it is their form of communism ours most now resembles—“Socialism with American Characteristics.”
As in China, this allows for an oligarchic class to continue to enrich itself without untoward intrusions from the lowly serfs.
That this comes from Homeland Security and its chief Alejandro Mayorkas is more than slightly ominous. Adding to the threatening intent of the initiative is his choice to lead this assault on the First Amendment, Nina Jankowicz.
Jankowicz was such an “expert” in the field of “disinformation” that she was one of those most loudly calling the Hunter Biden laptop story Russian disinformation, which makes her either an idiot or a liar. I’ll go with the latter.
She was also involved in “strategic communications” (“Deep Statish” for propaganda) in Ukraine during the days all the hanky-panky was going on with Burisma.
But it’s worse still. Via Breitbart, we learn that the “talented” Ms. Jankowicz recorded a song on YouTube with the lyrics “Who do I have to [world’s most well-known expletive deleted] to be rich, famous and powerful?”
Well, we now know the answer: the American people. Second answer: the Bill of Rights.
Evergreen:
Related: What could go wrong? Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on CNN: Ministry of Truth won’t “‘monitor American citizens … the board does not have any operational capability. What it’ll do is gather together best practices … and disseminate those best practices to the operators that have been executing & addressing this threat for years’…Mayorkas then suggested that the board would simply be addressing disinformation from foreign sources — such as Russia, Iran, or China — that would pose a national security threat.”
ANALYSIS: TRUE. The Democrats have become the party of miserable, whiny grumps.
BIDEN POLICY: Two Weeks to Flatten the GDP. Before this is over, flat will seem good.