Thursday, October 31, 2024
War on Women
The Democrats are hoping to set a record for insulting voters.
It's a strategy sure to drive them into first place come next Tuesday. "Hey dummy! It's time to listen to your betters."
This time it's Kamala Harris' surrogate Mark Cuban, who keeps making the case for Harris by asserting that she has been lying to the voters and won't really do any of the anti-free market things she is promising.
Now he is telling us that Trump is afraid of strong and intelligent women, and implying that Trump-supporting women are weak and stupid for supporting him.
The odd thing is that they [sic] Democrats have been making a related pitch for weeks. They believe that any conservative woman who votes Republican does so because they are too weak to disagree with their husbands.
"Free yourself from the patriarchy, women! Vote for us and you can live in penury and kill babies!"
Harris surrogates have been pushing the message hard, apparently on the assumption that women shouldn't listen to their family, but seek permission from the transnational elite instead. No woman I know seeks permission from anyone to cast their ballot as they like.
The Garbage Vote
President Trump riffed on his trip on the garbage truck last night at his rally in Green Bay. He did so wearing the reflective vest he donned for the ride. He explains it all in the video below.
I love comedy. This guy is a natural. This five-minute clip is the funniest bit I’ve seen since I can’t remember when. I hope he prevails in the election next week, but if things don’t work out for him on November 5, he could easily do stand-up for a living. He’s got all the necessaries.
Fake
The photo is staged, but someone forgot to prepare the props. Harris is transparent, as they say. Harris is transparently fakin’ it. The paper is blank. The ear plugs are dangling free. The failure of preparation makes it difficult for the audience to suspend disbelief. As the song almost goes, now it’s just another show, don’t forget to cackle when you go.
Somewhere inside Kamala Harris' body is a real person. But we will never see it, judging from her public life.
Her events are stage-managed and rely heavily on others to carry the weight of keeping people engaged. Her speeches are robotically read from teleprompters because she is so nervous (or inebriated) that she can't speak extemporaneously without spewing a word salad filled with canned lines. Her TikTok video vignettes are so fake that they make you involuntarily cringe.
Now we learn, unsurprisingly, that even her books and Congressional testimony are cribbed from others smarter and more articulate than she is. That category includes anonymous Wikipedia editors who can string sentences together.
A Win For Civilization
DeSantis promised to hunt down the miscreants who left a pet to die, and he did just that, to the applause of Floridians. I don't know if the dog was chipped or wearing a license tag, but law enforcement found some way to track down the owners and take them into custody.
It may, to some, seem a small thing and beneath the attention of a governor facing multiple crises to have law enforcement track down the irresponsible owners of a pet, but I beg to differ.
It is about preserving civilization. We track down and shoot looters in a crisis not because we value THINGS above lives but because we need civilization in crises. When civilizations face crises, the civilized are those who put things back together. People descending into barbarians in times of crisis are even more dangerous than the uncivilized when things are going well.
Resilience depends on people being decent to each other. It is why we highlight stories of heroism and sacrifice especially when things are going off the rails.
Not everybody can be a hero, and that is all right. Heroes are heroes because they go above and beyond.
But everybody can and should be civilized, and DeSantis is reminding everybody that this is the minimum standard in our society.
The California Energy Model
California is the model for the country the Democrats want to build, and they aren't even shy about saying so. Liberal states often look to California for policy advice, including my home state of Minnesota, where Tim Walz is open about wanting to adopt California energy standards and automobile policies.
Climate change isn't the cause--it's the excuse to deindustrialize and always has been. Societal resilience is based on ever more reliable and abundant power, and reliable and abundant power are the very things that the left wants to eliminate.
It's not accidental. Expect more of the same in California and much more of the same in the United States if Kamala Harris wins.
We aren't powerless to stop this--yet. At least not in the free states. Trump has promised a full-court press to build our nuclear power infrastructure and stop the ridiculous subsidies for "renewable" power that simply can't meet our needs.
Wind and solar are niche. If I lived off the grid I would get a bunch of solar panels and batteries to store up power when the sun doesn't shine.
But that's not a strategy for a thriving economy; it's a way to live in a cabin, an RV or to power a home in a third-world country.
The Nuclear Revival
You can't blame these companies for going nuclear, and I am not at all bothered that they have. I love nuclear power. It is clean and even more renewable than solar or wind since the infrastructure lasts nearly forever and the fuel, if reprocessed, can last a very long time indeed. Solar and wind are unreliable, and the infrastructure has a very short lifespan. And nuclear plants don't get destroyed by a hailstorm or tornado.
I'm glad they are going nuclear. What I am pissed about is that the very people who are doing so have been wagging their fingers at us, trying (and too often succeeding) to get us to use unreliable power.
Reliable power for me, not for thee.
Wind is pretty stupid, but solar has some great applications for off-the-grid power generation. As a niche product, I think solar power is cool. As a way to generate power for the grid, it is ridiculous. The cost-per-kilowatt numbers are cooked like you wouldn't believe, so forget the phony stats. Wind and solar are expensive when you include all the costs, and they make the grid unstable.
Big tech companies understand these problems and only use solar and wind for show. They use reliable power for themselves, as do all the hypocrites who want to shove renewables at us. Even home solar systems use the grid as a backup because nobody wants to rely on the wind or the sun to keep the refrigerator going.
To the Big Tech companies, I say: have at it. Build all the nuclear you want. But for God's sake, quit lecturing the rest of us about "renewable" energy and send some of your expensive lobbyists to help convince regulators to start approving nuclear plants for everybody.
“Available 24/7” means dispatchable, like coal and natural gas, not weather-dependent like solar and wind.
We are about to witness a rapid resurgence in nuclear energy.
Tuesday, October 01, 2024
Doctrine
The message, in brief: The age of unilateral Israeli disarmament and concessions has come to an abrupt end. If Israel's enemies commit acts of war, they had better prepare for asymmetrical and overwhelming responses. Not only is that the only way to establish deterrence, it should be the doctrine for the entire West, rather than the mealy-mouthed appeasement tactics espoused by Kirby that only leads to perpetual conflict.
Monster
I believed then and still think now that Tim Walz is a monster. He knew what he was doing. And, contrary to what he claimed, the federal government warned the governors that this was dangerous. But he did it anyway.
If I were a cynic, I would think it was to save the state money by killing off an expensive demographic, but is anybody that sociopathic?
Tim Walz has never been held accountable for his manslaughter by depraved indifference. Soon, he may be one heartbeat away from the presidency.
Failing Upward
The United States has a big housing crunch, and one of the biggest reasons (there are many) is that Biden and Harris have let in 10 million+ illegal migrants and "refugees" over the past three years.
In other words, Harris, the Border Czar, caused the crisis to a great extent.
Now, she is promising to build three million homes during her term--a rather big boast.
So it's fair to ask: what is her record when it comes to initiatives she was put in charge of? You know, ones like connecting rural homes to high-speed internet and getting the border under control? How about building out half a million EV chargers?
You know the answer: none of these things happened. In fact, despite over $40 billion allocated for the rural internet initiative nearly three years ago, not a single home has been connected.
What Do You See?
In any case, take a close look at the chart the Post produced, and tell us what you see. A controversy has broken out about what it means, because if it is accurate, it shows that the earth is currently near its lowest temperature for the last 485 million years, until we stopped cooling and started warming recently. Is it a bad thing that we stopped cooling? You can find serious scientists who conclude that a modest warming is a net benefit to the planet (and the IPCC kinda sorta admits this in corners of its behemoth reports).
But the thermegaddonites point to the sharp reversal in the right tail (circled) to suggest that this fully man-made (it is assumed) recent warming is a catastrophe for which we must all give up our cars and start eating bugs. Yet you can also make out several other sharp reversals and warmings when there were no SUVs on the road.
