Monday, February 24, 2025
Extremist
In Germany, as in the U.S., an “extremist” is someone who thinks the lights should go on when you flip the switch; who doesn’t want energy costs to triple or quadruple; who thinks it desirable for domestic manufacturers to be able to compete in global markets. If our elites continue to define the sensible as “extreme” and the absurdly fanciful as “moderate,” we will see more and more “extreme” results, as in today’s German election.
WWII Rules
This calls the entire strategy into question -- as should have happened after October 7. The Israelis set a high store on getting hostages back, and they pay a high price to do so. All that does is incentivize hostage-taking, and now the Israelis are paying for it with these spectacles intended to humiliate them. At some point, the Israelis have to make the price for hostaging the permanent and total defeat of Gaza and the destruction of its infrastructure until capitulation. That is the only way to end wars when one side insists on fighting for annihilation.
Also:
It's time to deal finally and forcefully with Hamas' billionaire boys club in Doha. No more 'safe zones,' and no more cheap talk. These people run the Iranian proxy army that killed dozens of Americans on October 7 and kidnapped several more, using them as leverage against Israel and the US. The only message Hamas and all of the other Iranian toadies will understand is utter destruction. So let's quit pussyfooting around and give them a demonstration that they will never forget.
And:
Enough is enough. This war won't end without the utter annihilation of one of the belligerents, because the belligerent most likely to lose an all-out war keeps trying to annihilate the one who keeps cutting deals. After twenty years of this, the game should really be over, and WWII rules should apply -- utter destruction or complete capitulation. The Gazans have to be forced to choose, since they keep choosing war.
Oxymoron
Under Article II, the concept of an “independent executive agency” is an oxymoron. Executive powers are vested in the President. For liberals, lack of accountability is a feature, not a bug. But it is not what the Constitution contemplates.
Your Laptop, Please
In Germany, it is a crime to insult someone—even a politician!—in public, and even more so on the internet. So is anyone being prosecuted for insulting leaders of the Alternative For Germany, the reviled anti-immigration party? Oddly, the 60 Minutes reporters never asked that question.
The 60 Minutes narrator says, “We were with state police as they raided this apartment,” looking for evidence of posting a “racist cartoon.” In German, “state police” is Gestadt Polizei. I’d swear I’ve heard that phrase somewhere before. You could shorten it into something catchy…
If the rest of us see echoes of the Third Reich in these efforts to criminalize wrongthink, the Germans themselves—consistent with their reputation—seem blind to the irony.
Green Grifters in Retreat
The tide has turned on “green” energy, which in fact is devastating to the environment. Every day, we are seeing a return to common sense and a re-prioritization of affordable and reliable energy. This obviously is the philosophy of the Trump administration, but the same thing is happening around the world. And, in a sign of the times, Greta Thunberg has moved on from being grotesquely wrong about energy to being grotesquely wrong about the Middle East.
The ACLU is Trash
Did you know that the Constitutional role of the federal bureaucracy is to prevent the elected President of the United States--the CHIEF Executive--from doing things that he was elected to do?
That is the legal opinion of the ACLU, which also argues that the First Amendment requires the censorship of Americans' speech by the government and that sterilizing and mutilating pre-pubescent children is a human right.
Math: Enemy of the Green Grifters
Around the world, green fantasies are colliding with reality. What may save us from an even more costly debacle is the fact that the tech industries have, out of necessity and because they employ people who can multiply and divide, switched their allegiance from Green to Keep the Lights On.
A President of the United States of America
So what is the Trump administration supposed to do when it finds that an executive branch agency is wasting money, engaging in corrupt practices, or spending resources in ways that actually undercut the administration’s policies? According to the Democrats, nothing. Once Congress has appropriated money to USAID or any other agency, the Trump administration has no option but to spend it—and, apparently, to spend it in the ways that the unelected bureaucrats in that agency choose.
Of course, if you look at the appropriations bill that covers USAID, you will see no reference to transgender operas. Nor will the phrase “transgender comic book” appear. USAID’s funding is allocated in broad categories that sound noble. But where the money actually goes, Congress has no idea.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has talked about this. When he was in the Senate he tried to exercise oversight over USAID. Employees of that agency would appear before his committee, and he would ask them how money in a particular category was being spent. Where is this money going? Who is being paid, and for what purpose? And the USAID witnesses would refuse to answer. They didn’t have to say; they were independent.
That is a constitutional absurdity and a policy outrage. And it also is one of the reasons why Democrats love the fourth branch. They use vague appropriations to enable spending for which they would never want to take responsibility. Can you imagine a Democratic House member trying to explain to constituents why he voted to fund a transgender opera in a foreign country? But no such explanation ever becomes necessary. The fourth branch is shrouded in secrecy and “independence.”
If you take seriously the fact that the President runs the executive branch—indisputable, under Article II—then, if the president learns that money is being wasted, that an agency has gone rogue, that its officials are pursuing policies that contradict those of the administration they serve—the president’s duty is to stop it. Stop the spending, fire the employees, neuter the rogue agency.
Of course it is true, as the Democrats say, that the President doesn’t have the power to abolish an agency that Congress has created. Thus, for example, President Trump cannot, by executive order, abolish the Department of Education. But he can run the Department of Education, and if that department is spending resources in ways that are wasteful or that contradict his administration’s policy goals, he can stop or redirect that spending.
The Democratic Party press has the current crisis exactly backward. The fact that President Trump is asserting control over the federal employees who work for him is a natural, if long-overdue, return to constitutional norms. The idea that the executive branch is somehow beyond the control of the president is the real crisis, one that has been long in the making. Ultimately, the Supreme Court will sort out the respective powers of Congress and the President with regard to the agencies that are established by Congress. In the meantime, President Trump needs to continue to assert his constitutional responsibility for the executive branch.
More here.
But I Was Told Musk Being Unelected is a Threat to Democracy
Those grants and subsidies that truly go to life-saving activities not covered by statute could be brought to Congress. Elected representatives and senators could then look at those activities and fund them through either a budget resolution or a separate statute. In fact, that's how a democracy-based constitutional republic is supposed to work. Self-governance means decisions that send $50 billion annually should be made by people with direct accountability to voters, not by unelected and sinecured bureaucrats issued [sic] blank checks who believe that the officers elected by the people have no control over those decisions -- in either the legislative or executive branches.
So Atwood and Democrats in the House and Senate are free to introduce bills in both chambers to specifically authorize grants to specific organizations. That would require them to defend such spending, as well as the recipients of those grants. It would also allow all of us to know where our money goes and the purposes for which it will be used. We won't need a platoon of twenty-something data-scientist geniuses to brute-force a deliberately opaque system to get the kind of transparency that self-governing republics require.
Wanna bet that Democrats wouldn't dare to float a majority of these grants and recipients publicly?
More here:
All of this ignores an obvious point: Congress could restore funding for any worthy efforts at USAID that the administration has terminated. They could earmark those funds in the State Department budget (now that Congress has re-enabled that process) or fund it with direct legislation. There are no legitimate reasons that the funds for worthy projects should have to come out of a slush fund that defeats accountability, both fiscal and political. That is precisely how spending is supposed to function in our constitutional system of self-governance, in fact.
They're Enemies of the Civilized World
No, the problem is not that evacuating the Palestinians from Gaza is cruel or unfair--although arguably, it is the latter. It's that the Palestinians have proven to be political and social poison wherever they settle. Ask the Jordanians. Ask the Lebanese. Wherever large numbers of Palestinian "refugees" settle, chaos and death follow.
Where Palestinians go, wars follow. And I am not referring to Israelis fighting Palestinians--that is a given because Palestinians are committed to killing Israelis until the state no longer exists. No matter where Palestinians settle--in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Europe, or the United States--they are trouble for the ruling regime.
Next Step
What I don’t know is how detailed Congress’s AID appropriation is, and how much latitude the administration has to shift dollars away from counter-productive, left-wing ideological fantasies and toward spending that advances American foreign policy, or at least does some charitable good.
Destroy Big Wind
One of the most felicitous aspects of the new Trump administration is its determination to drive a stake through the heart of the zombie wind industry. Because it is an absurdly inefficient and unreliable way to generate electricity, wind power was doomed from the start. But the Trump administration is seeing it off.
Old School
I don’t think “counter terrorism” works long-term, no matter how good you are, when the entire population supports terrorists. It then requires a much less surgical approach designed to break the will to fight, a la World War II.
Defeated By Basic Math. Again.
Spontaneous battery combustion is just one of many reasons why the ballyhooed “energy transition” will never take place. The Manhattan Contrarian, who, inconveniently for the Left, is able to multiply and divide, explains why batteries are so central to “green” energy. An enormous amount of battery storage would be needed for wind and solar energy to be remotely feasible as principal energy sources.
Friday, January 31, 2025
Science Is Not Dogma
"Settled science" is the product of scientism, which is yet another substitute for religion for the atheists. Dressing up your beliefs, your hunches, your identity as science is a belief structure. Certain scientists become your high priests, and you celebrate your "rationalism" when in fact you are living in a closed bubble of firmly held opinions.
Well Done, "Joe!"
There is much that one could say about this, starting with the fact that the ACLU—a worthless left-wing organization—gave the Biden White House a list of 2,500 “non-violent drug offenders” for Biden (or whoever) to pardon.
This is pretty revealing—a left-wing White House outsourcing the president’s constitutional pardon power to a left-wing policy organization. Sure, Joe Biden is senile. But was there ever any serious possibility that—forget about Joe—his staff would take the trouble to look into the ACLU’s list and verify that the people on it met the Left’s low bar for clemency? No. The ACLU provided the list, and Joe, probably not knowing where he was or what day it was, signed the document.
One wonders, too, about the role of the ACLU. Did the ACLU know about Peeler’s history as a killer? They may have. Peeler was sentenced to 25 years for the murders—not nearly long enough—but it was OK, since he was also sentenced to 35 years on the federal drug dealing charges, which would follow after the state incarceration. So the ACLU may well have thought that, as to the current sentence that would have kept the murderer in prison for another 35 years, Peeler was a “non-violent drug offender.”
This is the corrupt world, not just of the Biden administration, but of liberalism in general.
Because They're Evil
But I will make the same point I made here. These arrests could and should have been made long ago. Officials in the Biden administration didn’t round up these Venezuelan gangsters because they didn’t want to.Also, from David Strom:
Why didn’t they? It seems inexplicable. The Biden administration preferred to give a vicious Venezuelan prison gang free rein to terrorize Americans, deal drugs, and break pretty much every law. This was a conscious choice. On what theory was it a good idea? Diversity is our strength?
Occam’s Razor, in its broader version, suggests that the simplest and most straightforward explanation is probably correct: Biden and his minions hate America, and they were using Venezuelan gangs, among many other tools, to damage our country.
But one thing stands out to me as ICE sweeps up pedos, rapists, and other well-vetted model citizens: they are apprehending hundreds every day with the efficiency of an atomic clock ticking off milliseconds.
As the leftists whine about invading schools (not happening) and mamacitas being terrorized by Tom Homan chasing them with cattle prods (not happening), the real story is that ICE and law enforcement knew all along where so many of these bad hombres were.
Mayorkas, NGOs and churches, and local government officials were actively protecting the worst of the worst just because they preferred helping illegal aliens to protecting Americans.
Think about that and let it sink in: ICE isn't grabbing up these guys in large-scale dragnets, sorting the wheat from the chaff. They are making targeted raids on specific, known bad guys, and yet the people weeping and whining claim the mantle of decency and compassion.
Multiculturalism Is Awful
But beyond the legal arguments there is a pressing moral argument about citizenship and nationhood that lies at the heart of our current debates about the 14th Amendment and birthright citizenship. The moral argument engages a different and arguably more important set of questions. What is an American? Who is America for? What is the purpose of immigration? What do immigrants or would-be immigrants owe to the native-born population?
For a long time, conservatives didn’t want to talk about these things because doing so risked being labeled a xenophobe or a racist. It was easier to take refuge in platitudes about how we should crack down on illegal immigration but expand legal immigration, as if we were all agreed that mass immigration was a net positive, we just need to make sure it’s orderly. It was easier to affirm the conventional wisdom that America was a “propositional nation,” an idea, and that anyone could be an American if they adopted our idea.
This was a mistake, and not just because it’s a lie. This way of thinking and speaking prevented us from getting beyond the platitudes and coming to terms with some hard truths, like the fact that America is not in fact a merely propositional country. Contrary to what has been drilled into most of us since grade school, not everyone can really become an American. Being an American means more than simply assenting to live by our laws and paying taxes, because America is more than an idea. (As others have noted, if America is just an idea we can write it down and send it overseas, and foreigners need not come here at all.)
Simply put, America is a nation. We have a common language and a shared history. We have a certain way of life and customs. We have a distinctly American identity. Our system of government is founded explicitly on Christian claims about God and man. For most of our history, Christian morality has been the basis of our civic life. We are bound together by family ties, by our connections to the land, by shared experience, by what Abraham Lincoln in his first inaugural address called the “mystic chords of memory.”
Every foreigner who comes here understands what this means as it applies to their own homeland. It has been a grave error that we have insisted for so long that none of it applies to us. Making a case against birthright citizenship will mean making a case against the pernicious ideology of multiculturalism, which we have been taught makes us strong but in reality makes us weaker and poorer.
It will also mean asserting that it’s not actually the case that someone whose parents emigrated to America from a foreign country, and whose family has only been here a single generation, is “just as American” as someone who traces their ancestry to the American Revolution. It will mean admitting that America would be much better off not only with zero illegal immigration but with only a very low level of legal immigration, which would help preserve our cultural and community cohesion, and encourage the complete assimilation of all newcomers.
Via John Hinderaker.
DEI Vocab
But here’s the thing for the identitarians scrambling to find new euphemisms: It won’t work. “Diversity, equity, and inclusion” are the holy trinity of this racket—their “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” This is literally true: like land acknowledgements, the invocations of DEI sound like an academic version of the Nicene Creed. Have you ever noticed that virtually every DEI proclamation sounds exactly the same? (In fact, Vanderbilt University’s DEI office got caught a few years ago using AI to compose some DEI messages.)
The point is: the DEI racket depends on a common vocabulary of cliches. If they have to modulate their language, the way Star Trek ships modulate their shields against enemy particle beams, the identitarians won’t know what to say. It is just like the scrambling of the languages at the Tower of Babel. They will need endless translations for everyone to understand that they are the same old comrades hating on white people. If you think the identitarian racket is absurd now, it will be even more comical when they have to speak in ever more esoteric and ridiculous coded language. The whole DEI racket was Orwellian already; now it will be beyond even Orwell’s imagination.
The Sense of Entitlement Is Off the Charts
Go back to that quote from above: "In interviews, many of the women said that citizenship would guarantee their children access to health care and other vital benefits during their childhood..." Exactly. I understand why these women want this for their children. I also understand that the way they get it is by making the people legally here pay for it.
Diabolical Nature
You are seeing here the core demographic that supported the Biden administration: vicious criminals, illegal aliens (often the same people) and those who think it is a good idea to harbor such people because they hate America.
What is striking about these apprehensions is that the government knew who these people are, what their criminal records are, and where they would be found. Under Trump, they were under arrest within 72 hours. Under Biden—or whoever was running the “Biden administration”—they were deliberately left alone, to terrorize American citizens. We have had bad administrations before, but have we ever seen anything to match the diabolical nature of the “Biden administration”?
This is not just some policy difference.
Add-Ons
If you can’t keep electricity flowing, people will die. Which means that every country has to assure itself of access to dispatchable (i.e., reliable) power sufficient to meet minimum needs. Wind and solar can never fit that description, and therefore will always be expensive and essentially irrelevant add-ons.
Energy Race
Scott Bessent:
Senator Wyden, just to frame this for everyone in the room, China will build 100 new coal plants this year. There is not a clean energy race. There is an energy race. China will build ten nuclear plants this year. That is not solar. I am in favor of more nuclear plants, and I would note that the IRA (Inflation Reduction Act) as scored by the CBO is wildly out of control in terms of spending on the upside.
Via Steven Hayward.
This Idiotic Pro-Illegal Immigration Argument Again
A lot of my libertarian friends, especially at the currently drifting but once-great Cato Institute, like to defend their clueless open-borders disposition by pointing to statistics that purport to demonstrate that illegal immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans. Even if you assume the crime statistics are complete and accurate these days (and usually it is libertarians who express doubt that our law enforcement bureaucracy reports accurately), it misses two points obvious to a first-grader, but not apparently to the pre-school mentality of some libertarians: if we actually controlled our borders, the crime rate from illegal immigrants would be near-zero, whatever the actual prevalence. (Just ask Laken Riley, who would be alive right now if we did have serious border control.) But second, the true illegal immigrant crime rate is 100%; it’s indicated in the title itself. Duh.
Monday, December 30, 2024
No Plausible Defense
My only point here is that Biden has been exactly like this for years. His incapacity has been obvious to anyone who paid attention.
The pretense that he suffered a precipitous decline in recent months may be absurd, but it is necessary. Without the myth of a late-term decline, the national press, the White House and Congressional Democrats would have no plausible defense to the charge that they sacrificed national security and well-being for partisan advantage.
We Need Industrial Scale Grifter Capture
This is the point--all this talk about addressing climate change is mainly an excuse to rip people off and line the pockets of those who are selling the panic.
No doubt there are millions of people who genuinely believe that CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere is a looming disaster, and while I disagree with them I understand their concern. But as a practical matter these people are being defrauded, sold a lie that all this "investment" will get them closer to "Net Zero."
Industrial scale carbon capture is the environmental equivalent of wearing cloth masks--it is symbolic but accomplishes nothing other than funding the cloth mask industry. For the rest of us it just makes our lives worse.
"Strategic Reserve"
This is all sheer fantasy, with one exception: the need for a “strategic reserve” of natural gas, although five percent is no doubt much too low. Why is that “strategic reserve” necessary? Because, no matter how much you spend, there will always be times—frequent times, in fact—when the wind doesn’t blow and the Sun doesn’t shine. So a reliable energy source will always be needed.
The financial numbers currently being bandied about in Great Britain are scarcely more realistic than the fantasy calculations upon which the “green revolution” was launched, years ago. The brutal reality is that no government can subsidize lousy sources of energy like wind and solar enough to make them viable.
If so much wealth were not being destroyed, it would be rather entertaining to see the entire “green” energy enterprise collapse before our eyes.
The Covid Coverup
That is what we used to call evidence. It certainly would be a smoking gun revelation, even to non-intel investigators, if politics were not involved. And yet this, along with Dr. Bannan's work in parallel, didn't just get discounted in this August 2021 presidential briefing but entirely suppressed.
Why? The obvious reason is that Biden didn't want to confront China over its role in creating the virus as well as refusing to cooperate in fighting it. To conclude that China manufactured the virus would prompt the US to cut off any more cooperation with China on medical research, a step that should have been taken well before the pandemic based on the deficiencies already known at WIV. Biden wanted to differentiate his administration from Trump's pugnacious China policies, perhaps in no small part because of Biden Inc interests that Hunter Biden had cultivated in the Obama administration.
Instead of dealing with the obvious, the Biden administration kept insisting on the zoonotic-transfer hypothesis despite a lack of any evidence for it. And then they worked with censorship groups funded in part by the State Department to punish anyone who dissented from that conclusion as "conspiracy theorists" and supposedly dangerous purveyors of "disinformation."
And it worked, too. It has taken three years to start getting the truth, and even then only because voters kicked Biden and Harris out of office. The incoming administration will get a chance to look at the records, and the current custodians know it.
Also, from John Hinderaker:
I am just a rank amateur, but to me it seems highly significant that after more than four years of diligent searching, no one has even found a bat (or any other animal) in the wild that was infected with COVID-19. So the “jump” from a wild bat to humans is entirely hypothetical and, as time goes by, less plausible.
If They Want the War to End, the Savages Can Surrender
Hamas started this war as the governing body of Gaza and with the support of the Gazans on October 7, 2023. They are now losing it, and badly. If they want an end to the war, they can capitulate and ask for terms. If they want a hostages-for-prisoners exchange, they can negotiate that as a separate issue. But after Hamas violated every one of their previous nine cease-fire agreements with Israel -- including the one in place on October 7 before Hamas massacred 1200 Israelis in a single day -- they have very little standing to demand "assurances" on anything from the Israelis.
And in about four weeks, that pressure will end when Trump takes office. He'd prefer to have this deal done before his inauguration so as to eliminate a distraction, but Trump may also be looking for an opportunity to remind the region of what an American "red line" should look like. Hamas is all alone now in providing An Example To Others, if you know what I mean, and Trump will likely waste little time in driving that point home.
Civilizational Breakdown
Heather’s long piece eloquently sets out the case against vigilante assassination, which I guess is a public service. But it is depressing that we have come to the point where we have to explain why murder is a bad thing.
Of course our education system is awful, but when a near-majority of young adults think that murder is A-OK as long as the “right” people are being killed, we are looking at something closer to civilizational breakdown. These people presumably had parents, who evidently taught them nothing. My guess is that a large majority of those who applaud Luigi did not attend Sunday School and do not now attend church or synagogue. Likewise, I’m pretty sure that very few of them were Boy Scouts, or participated in any other activity that might have helped to inculcate even the most rudimentary moral sense.
The Executiveless Branch
I don’t doubt that various people, including the press, conspired, but the fact that Joe Biden was senile was open and obvious. It was obvious even before he became president. He ran a basement campaign in 2020, while Donald Trump, who is nearly as old as Biden, toured the country putting on one massive rally after another. I assume everyone understood the reason for that contrast: Biden wasn’t up to running anything like a normal presidential campaign.
Biden’s disability was obvious throughout his presidency. He couldn’t talk without a teleprompter. On the rare occasions when he wasn’t reading a script, he quickly veered into incoherence or worse. Even with a teleprompter, he couldn’t be trusted. He would read instructions like “Pause” and “Repeat line.” An intelligent fifth-grader would have done better.
Biden fell down (or up) steps. He wandered aimlessly. He was officially on vacation half the time. The fact that his aides protected him from public exposure was obvious. And it’s not as though no one was talking about his evident incapacity. Power Line was one of many, many news sources that repeatedly commented on Biden’s dementia. And videos documenting his pitiful state were ubiquitous.
Vast numbers of people, including every salient Democrat and every relevant reporter, knew that Biden was dysfunctional—knew that he was not up to the standard of a normal adult, let alone a normal president.
What is striking to me is not the conspiracy to cover up his condition, which was hardly more successful than the alleged conspiracy to cover up the fact that smoking is bad for you.
What is striking is how few people on the Left—approximately zero—cared about the fact that we didn’t have a functioning president. Why were Democrats so unconcerned about having a president who was basically a cardboard cutout? Because they don’t really think the president is very important. They were content to have the Executive Branch run by nameless White House aides and by party grandees like Barack Obama. They thought, understandably, that the real power in government lies in the administrative agencies, and that those agencies would carry on perfectly well without a sentient being in the White House.
“Joe Biden” was just a name on the ballot, served up because, as of 2020, he had wide name recognition but not a far-left image. A perfect combination! And one that did not require him to do anything at all, once in office. A vote for Biden was simply a vote for things as they were: a government trending always to the left, with trillions of dollars being dispensed by a benign bureaucracy—the real power in America, the fourth branch that is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution.
Make Our Culture Great Again
What can we make of these appalling findings? Presumably the 41% who say that cold-blooded murder is A-OK don’t go to church. So they rely for moral instruction on the public schools, which border on complete uselessness, and their parents, assuming they have parents. And on the popular culture, which can fairly be described as depraved.
What we are seeing here is a culture in steep decline. Donald Trump never set out to be a moral leader or exemplar, but maybe he can play a role in restoring sanity to our public discourse.
X Post of the Year
I’m not sure why these chestless fan femboys want to create an environment where violence resolves disputes because they are so personally unsuited to that medium. https://t.co/IXEAn4z4OL
— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) December 5, 2024
Via David Strom.
Saturday, November 30, 2024
Stone Age Parliament
Democracy: The Revenge
More important, 2024 marked a resurgence in democracy. The Democratic Party policies that voters rebelled against were profoundly undemocratic. Opening the southern border to admit 10 million or more illegal immigrants—when did Americans ever vote to do that? We didn’t. The Biden Administration exploded the national debt, driving up the cost of groceries by 20% or more. When did Americans vote for that? We didn’t. The Democrats’ top priority is DEI, which is to say, race and sex discrimination. When did Americans vote for that? We didn’t. To DEI the Democrats added trans-insanity, with genital mutilation of minors and men on women’s sports teams. When did Americans vote for that? We didn’t.
Far from representing an abandonment of democracy, the 2024 election was seen by most Americans as an opportunity to—finally!—assert democratic control over a government that was running rampant over their rights via executive and bureaucratic fiat. (Of course the icing on the cake, in terms of democracy, was that the Democrats nominated a candidate who had not gotten a single vote for the office of president.) Until the Democrats acknowledge that reality, they won’t be able to mount a comeback.
Healing
The ritual humiliation of Trump's implacable enemies is a wonder to behold, and as much as anything, a sign that the world is healing. There was no place left to go once the public rejected the "Trump is Hitler" attacks. What more could possibly be said? For a decade, the left has thrown every single accusation they could at Trump, impeached him, fueled riots, rigged elections, jailed his allies, and inspired assassination attempts, and none of it worked.
The Pravda media lost, and Trump won.
Hating Trump has been a good gig for these grifters. It paid well, required no thinking skills at all, and was a ticket to all the right parties.
But the grift is done. The world is healing.
Girl Math
Winning: Energy Edition
With his solid background in science and energy, he is going to be the most knowledgable secretary of energy the nation has ever had. The climatistas are going to cry hard on this one, but I can’t wait for his Senate confirmation hearings, which I expect Chris will deliver a tour de force to the likes of the egregious Sheldon Whitehouse.
Unlike some energy executives, Chris is not defensive about his industry one bit. Quite the opposite. His company issues an annual ESG report entitled “Bettering Human Lives” that makes the argument for why oil and gas make our environment better and the world safer. He turns every leftist cliche on its head and demolishes it.
So he's nothing like the current Secretary of Energy, that unqualified dunce, Jennifer Granholm, I guess.
Justice Dingbat
Can anyone who saw Harris getting questioned about her policies and track record imagine what a Senate confirmation hearing would look like? Why would any Democrat put their credibility on the line -- let alone the party's credibility -- to support the trainwreck that would result? Put aside that she failed the bar exam on her first try, which isn't exactly a measure of legal excellence associated with this level of appointment. Harris didn't even practice law for long, and not much when she did; she grossly exaggerated the number of cases she personally prosecuted, the record of which would come out during a confirmation process. What makes anyone think she'd be able to consider legal-philosophy questions and precedents in depth and under pressure?
Abomination
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.
Monday, September 30, 2024
Obsolete Product
Charging is somewhat cheaper if you use a slow charger rather than a “rapid” one, which itself, of course, is nowhere near as fast as filling your tank with gas. Slow chargers are OK if you don’t need to get where you are going, or if you think your time has no value. And the cost of the electricity needed to charge an EV will skyrocket if governments proceed with their plans to generate electricity primarily or exclusively from inefficient, intermittent wind and solar power.
Electric vehicles are an obsolete product whose time is always coming, but never arrives. An enormous amount of wealth is being wasted as we await the inevitable crash.
Really? What Kind?
It’s a classic instance of Kamala’s weirdly inappropriate laughter. But does she really own a firearm? (It would be delightful for some journalist to ask her to detail the manufacturer, caliber, barrel length and so on of her gun, but of course that won’t happen.) And is she really prepared to shoot an intruder?
Electric Downgrade
How do you heat houses without burning fossil fuels? The Greens’ answer is: heat pumps. They are pushing heat pumps as an all-electric solution, and the Biden/Harris administration has enacted major subsidies to try to entice homeowners off fossil fuels and onto heat pumps.
If you are not sure what a heat pump is, you are not alone. Neither am I. I am told that it is basically the same as an air conditioner, only in reverse. Heat pumps can, indeed, generate heat, but at what cost? Like all “green” measures, they are absurdly inefficient and therefore expensive. If you haven’t heard much about heat pumps yet, you should start paying attention. They are right up there with wind turbines in the Greens’ plan to downgrade your standard of living.
Also:
But all of this is battlespace preparation on the part of the Left. First they cajole; then they bribe; then they use naked force. Liberals have every intention of depriving you of the option of heating your home (or driving your car, or turning on your lights, or cooking your food, or mowing your lawn) with fossil fuels, the greatest contributors to human material well-being in all of history. Rather, you will be forced to use absurdly inefficient technologies like heat pumps, whether you like it or not, and no matter how much the cost degrades your standard of living.
She Looks Like a Psychopath
John drew attention to Mrs. Tim Walz’s performance of the the Harris campaign’s Turn the page theme over the weekend (video below). No disrespect intended, Mrs. Tim looks a tad demented, if not rabid. This makes for uncomfortable viewing.
Mind Your Own Damn Business
Give Walz some credit. At least he's not setting up a hotline for Harris supporters to start snitching on friends and family planning to vote for Donald Trump. Yet, anyway.
And say ... whatever happened to "mind your own damn business," anyway? Is accosting strangers in the grocery aisles and lecturing them on your politics another form of Walz' "neighborliness"?
Needless to say, this will not end well if these activists actually take Walz' advice, especially in grocery stores. That's where Americans feel the pain and failures of Bidenomics most acutely, and where they are already reminded of the need for a change from the status quo that produced it (in the produce aisle, even!).
Follow the Money
We shouldn't expect too much to come of this. The tiny climate warrior remains a darling of the international press and liberal globalists still trip over themselves seeking new ways to shower honors upon her. But this latest incident reminded me yet again of some of the questions surrounding Thunberg that never seem to be explored thoroughly or receive adequate answers. Among the biggest of these has to be precisely what it is that Ms. Thunberg does for a living. What is her "job" assuming she has one? After all, everyone needs a certain amount of money and resources to get by in this world.
I once again spent a little time today going through her brief biography. In terms of actual substance, it's a brief read indeed since she is only 21 years old. Her parents were a musician and an actor, so they probably weren't penniless, but she clearly wasn't born with a silver spoon in her mouth either. She has received honors and awards from many climate groups, but she doesn't seem to have ever taken a paying position with any of them. And it's not as if she's spent all of this time getting an advanced education. She only received her high school diploma last year at the age of twenty. She's constantly hopping around the globe for protests and awards, so it must be hard to hold down a professional gig of any sort.
We do know that many of the larger climate activist cult groups around the world have flooded cash and resources into activities that Greta Thunberg has endorsed and participated in, so that might explain her travel expenses and perhaps even lodging during protests. But has any of that money gone directly into Thunberg's own pockets? That's really not how charitable donations (for any cause) are supposed to operate unless the recipient is a paid member of the organization. In that case, records are supposed to be kept as to who was paid and how much they earned. A failure to do so can land you behind bars in some countries. Of course, that's only the case if anyone bothers to ask the questions and review the records. It's unclear if Greta has ever undergone that sort of scrutiny. Meanwhile, she continues to show up here, there, and everywhere while demonstrating no meaningful source of legitimate income. Don't the rest of us deserve some documented answers to these questions?
