True But Forbidden #5

“We’re from MAGA. We’re here to help by beating your ass to a pulp and putting the rope you bought around your neck.”

Elites bought Jussie Smollett’s story because it confirmed their cherished narrative about a hateful America.   The Senate just passed an anti-lynching bill, backed by Senators Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Tim Scott—as if lynchings were a fact of our current reality. Don’t be surprised if Democrats appropriate funding for a new underground railroad. The current anti-racist frenzy is the product of a poisoned academic culture that has declared war on Western Civilization and that teaches students, more than anything else, how to hate—to hate the greatest accomplishments of our civilization, to hate America, and to hate one another. We continue to play with fire.

Cue the “Green New Deal” which is quite actually a very old deal indeed; a regurgitation of a 200-year-old economic recipe (Marxism) which has never worked, which can’t work and like Havel said is actually a bait and switch meant to advance that which it claims to oppose. Now to be sure the newer Marxists don’t really want to control the means of production (Vertical chicken cooperatives? Rooftop vegetable gardens? Worker committee meetings late into the night to decide who gets the wayward pencil of can of beans that week? – its all too much work). No, the new Marxists prefer to control those who control the means of production – exerting oppressive influence over their “Managerial Revolution” as they assure that the managers in our overly managed society think the right things, say the right things, do the right things and – most importantly – ostracize from society the ideas that they find offensive, hurtful… Unsafe. Winning a debate is easier when nobody can say anything; a power grab is best accomplished by scaring off your foes before even having to fight them. —  The Power of Progress | Joel D. Hirst’s Blog

Adrift in the Atlantic “It seems to form part of a system so entirely different from normal existence that it might belong to another planet. But there it is at my feet, alive yet inscrutable. Here and there lights appear in the depths… They look like stars half hidden in a cloudy night sky. The fish around me leap and swim to and fro, protagonists of an unseen and mysterious existence. Life at the surface is only the thin upper layer of another world.” Around mid-November, time began to weigh heavily on Alain Bombard. He suffered a 14-day bout of diarrhea and would go days without sleep. To top it off, the skin on his feet had started to peel away in strips and he was down to his last couple of toenails.

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— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) February 14, 2019

Strange Paradoxes of Our Age |  Paradox No. 2: Green Filth. Ecology and environmentalism are supposedly efforts to prevent the natural world around from being spoiled by man and his modern-day lifestyle. Nowhere is green power stronger than in urban California. And yet nowhere are major cities (such as San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco) dirtier, more dangerous, and more festering as a result of human indifference — or public policy. Medieval plagues such as typhus and tuberculosis ravage street people in California cities, so much so that Los Angeles City Hall had to be deloused to ensure that it did suffer the flea-borne epidemics akin to those of Constantinople in the sixth-century a.d. Feces, trash, urine, discarded needles, and rotting food scraps stain downtown streets; primeval carriers of disease such as rats and scavenging birds feast and defecate among the flotsam and jetsam.

Why the progressive tolerance for such environmental desecration in the age of the Green New Deal? Why would it be felonious to defecate on a Yosemite trail or leave a used hypo at a river bank in Yellowstone, while it’s condoned on Market Street in San Francisco where the potential for human injury is far greater?

Answer: a) Perhaps the primeval stink and disease are seen as organic and are therefore not a dreaded cause of global warming. b) Wealthy, urban people can navigate around the homeless with private security and chauffeured transportations, and by doing business away from hoi polloi. c) The ecological assault is the work of purported victims, not rich white males — a fact known to the homeless who know very well that they are exempt from the law that applies to the middle classes. d) Cleaning up the cities, ensuring modern hygiene, and dealing with the homeless would require lawmakers to make conservative and traditional choices and judgments about human nature — taboo in our relativist society.

As if things couldn’t get worse, the Plains states were hit by plagues of grasshoppers and jack-rabbits in the ’30s. In some waves of grasshoppers, there were an estimated 23,000 bugs per acre. They ate every plant in sight, making the Dust Bowl even worse. Rabbit plagues numbering in the hundreds of thousands spread throughout Dust Bowl states. Communities organized “rabbit drives” to kill the creatures. Those of you who have seen 1943’s Bugs Bunny short Super Rabbit might wonder why the main villain hates rabbits so much – he wasn’t alone: they weren’t soft fuzzy woodland creatures, they destroyed people’s lives. Crazy Images and Facts about the Great Depression ‘Dust Bowl’

Ocasio-Cortez Celebrates Victory Over Billionaire Bezos   Cortez, in her radiance and intelligence here, thinks that the state has $3 billion that it was gonna have give Amazon. But now that Amazon’s not coming, she can get it. Well, the $3 billion was part of $27 billion or $30 billion that Amazon was gonna pay. Before they could get that tax break of $3 billion, they had to start paying taxes. And since they’re not coming, since they’re gonna go back to Virginia, since they’re not locating in New York now, since they pulled out, they’re not gonna be paying a penny in New York taxes. So the $3 billion that Cortez thinks that she can get for teachers and subways isn’t there. Now, this is a new kind of stupidity. It is a new kind of economic ignorance, but, I’m telling you, she is no dumber than the people that elected her.

Autopsy of a Dead Coup –   CNN soon proved that it is no longer a news organization at all—as reporters like Gloria Borger, Chris Cuomo, Eric Lichtblau, Manu Raju, Brian Rokus, Jake Tapper, Jeff Zeleny, and teams such as Jim Sciutto, Carl Bernstein, and Marshall Cohen as well as Thomas Frank, Eric Lichtblau, and Lex Harris all trafficked in false rumors and unproven gossip detrimental to Trump, while hosts and guest hosts such as Reza Aslan, the late Anthony Bourdain, and Anderson Cooper stooped to obscenity and grossness to attack Trump. Both politicos and celebrities tried to drive Trump’s numbers down to facilitate some sort of popular ratification for his removal. Hollywood and the coastal corridor punditry exhausted public expressions of assassinating or injuring the president, as the likes of Jim Carrey, Johnny Depp, Robert de Niro, Peter Fonda, Kathy Griffin, Madonna, Snoop Dogg, and a host of others vied rhetorically to slice apart, shoot, beat up, cage, behead, and blow up the president.

The End Of Atheism |   If you are over the age of 40, perhaps a bit older, you have lived long enough to see a great fad get going, peak and then fade away completely. Lots of fads run their course in a few months, obviously, but social movements tend to build slowly and then stick around for a while, before disappearing down the memory hole. One of those fads is atheism, which had a good run in the 80’s and 90’s. It started to peter out in the 90’s, had a brief revival in the aughts, but now seems to be headed to oblivion.

Why Autocrats Are Replacing Democrats –   And high among the reasons that autocrats are on the rise is that the centrist parties being shoved aside are perceived as having failed the people in their most basic demands — fewer migrants, more secure borders, preservation of national identity, putting their own people and their country own first. Whatever may be said of the autocrats, be it Trump, Putin or Xi Jinping, they are not talkers but doers. They act. And they may very well own the future.

Extinction Rebellion? Little Sign Of A Climate Emergency  The decades of global warming have coincided with the most extraordinary flourishing of humankind. The extraction of hundreds of millions of people from absolute poverty in countries like China and India has been a triumph of the human imagination, and it has been powered almost entirely by fossil fuels. Life expectancy is rising, health outcomes are improving, human happiness is growing. Meanwhile, there is abundant good news from the natural world too. Man-made carbon dioxide emissions have brought about an extraordinary greening of the Sahel – the arid fringes of the Sahara – a development that is unarguably wonderful news both for nature and for the people who live there.

Rocks on the lake Baikal get heated from the sunlight every now and then and melt the ice beneath. After the sun is gone, the ice turns solid again thus creating a small stand for the rock above. It is called the Baikal Dzen.