Eco-Fascists

Social Media’s War On Free Markets! (Must Read Articles)

Published by Papa Giorgio

I have always said that the Left are “totalitarians,” and that is because they want “total thought” — in other words, homogenized thinking through the filter of Leftism (race, class, sex: the “unholy trinitarian” goal of the Left). Here is the latest on this fight for societal freedom.

This is the excuse the totalitarians are looking for, PJ-MEDIA has a must read:

….While conservatives rightly denounced the violence this week, this response bodes ill for conservative speech not just on social media, but in the public square and even in private organizations.

In the aftermath of the Capitol riots, Twitter suspended President Donald Trump’s account for the first time and Facebook permanently banned the president. After Trump deleted the tweets Twitter had flagged and had his account restored, Twitter proceeded to ban him entirely on Friday, and then it banned the official President of the United States (POTUS) account.

Facebook throttled the great Rush Limbaugh, notifying him that his “Page has reduced distribution and other restrictions because of repeated sharing of false news.” Limbaugh left Twitter in protest after the platform banned Trump. Apple and Google attacked Parler, claiming that the new haven for conservatives had allowed people to plan the violence of the Capitol riots on its platform.

House Democrats filed articles of impeachment that explicitly blame President Trump for the Capitol riots, even though he never told his supporters to invade the Capitol. While the president’s exaggerated rhetoric inflamed the rioters, Democrats repeatedly did the same thing this summer. Before and after Black Lives Matter protests devolved into destructive and deadly riots, Democratic officials repeatedly claimed America suffers from “systemic racism” and institutionalized “white supremacy.”

Big Tech did not remove House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s accounts when she called for “uprisings” against the Trump administration. Facebook and Twitter did not target Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez when she claimed that allegedly marginalized groups have “no choice but to riot.” These platforms did not act against Kamala Harris when she said the riots “should not” stop.

This week, Joe Biden condemned the Capitol rioters, saying, “What we witnessed yesterday was not dissent, it was not disorder, it was not protest. It was chaos. They weren’t protesters, don’t dare call them protesters. They were a riotous mob, insurrectionists, domestic terrorists. It’s that basic, it’s that simple.”

Yet he refused to speak in those terms when Black Lives Matter and antifa militants were throwing Molotov cocktails at federal buildings, setting up “autonomous zones,” and burning down cities. Instead, he condemned Trump for holding up a Bible at a church — without mentioning the fact that that very church had been set on fire the night before.

Despite this hypocrisy, Biden’s speech on Thursday proved instructive. Biden used the Capitol riots to condemn Trump’s entire presidency, accusing Trump of having “unleashed an all-out assault on our institutions of our democracy from the outset.” Biden twisted Trump’s actions into an attack on “democracy.” He claimed Trump’s originalist judges were a ploy to undermine impartial justice — when they were truly the exact opposite. Biden claimed Trump’s complaints about the Obama administration spying on his campaign were merely an “attack” on America’s “intelligence services.” Biden said Trump’s complaints about media bias constituted an attack on the “free press,” when the Obama administration actually attacked the free press.….

(READ THE REST!)

UPDATED post via PJ-MEDIA… who points out that these social media tech giants think they are the arbiter of speech as well as the type of information you consume. What is the free market solution? To start your own “companies,” or outlets of free speech. However, as PARLER is succeeding against Twitter and Facebook as a place to speak freely, Big Tech is going after those, too. More via PJ in a minute.

Many #NeverTrumpers love David French’s views — as he is the intellectual leader of the rational side of the movement. This article by THE FEDERALIST needs to be gone through, here is the portion I think is most relevant, but the entire thing should be read (I linked to it in a conversation I just had with a #NeverTrumper):

….National Review writer David French has criticized the bill for attempting to regulate free speech. He argues that this invites a dangerous level of government involvement in public discourse. Subjecting social media companies to government scrutiny may sound appealing with a Republican president in power and a predominantly Republican Senate, but this could backfire if Democrats take control: “Will a Kamala Harris administration decide that disproportionate conservative success violates political neutrality?”

Bad Examples Abound

Besides taking a rather Pollyannaish view on conservative success on social media—never bothering to mention the blatant partisan censorship of conservative voices like Steven Crowder, Prager University, or Live Action—this argument from French and those of other like-minded critics rests on two counterexamples where government cannot regulate speech without violating the First Amendment: a controlled forum like a college classroom, and a public utility like a telephone service.

However, these two examples do not have any bearing on what is meant by free speech. In the case of regulating a public utility, this does not involve actual speech. Speech, in the First Amendment sense, consists of arguments made to a public audience. A telephone service is a means of communication, not a platform for facilitating speech. Therefore, the federal government cannot demand a company like AT&T refuse service to pathological liars or criminals because they perpetuate harmful speech.

Furthermore, if AT&T executives did start to do this, on the grounds that they work for a private company and can do what they want, customers could rightly charge them with discrimination (violating the 14th Amendment). They must provide phone service to all who agree to pay them, not just those who meet their speech guidelines—again, because their service does not pertain to speech, but basic communication, a utility.

In the case of a college lecture hall, the speech in question is not actually free. The professor can make his arguments and say whatever the school permits him to say. He also sets the rules for what students can say. If Dr. Kevin Sorbo tells his students that God doesn’t exist, as he does in the Pure Flix movie “God’s Not Dead,” his students are not free to debate him unless he allows it—which he foolishly does, much to his demise. Nevertheless, they do have the right to free speech outside his class (unless they attend Harvard University) and can complain about their atheist professor all they like.

This is different from students who request government action when they feel their free speech rights are somehow violated because a professor has an opinion that they dislike. Hawley’s bill would not require the fictional Dr. Kevin Sorbo or the real Dr. Fang Zhou to change their views or speech policies to uphold political neutrality in their classroom. It only applies to large social media companies and is meant to prevent silencing any particular view, conservative or progressive.

It’s Naive to Think Big Tech Companies Will Die Out

Given that these social media platforms have billions of users altogether, and will simply buy up any worthy competitor if it stumbles on a new idea (which is the ongoing plotline of the television series “Silicon Valley”), it is misguided to assume that they will pass away like the social media companies of yesteryear (Myspace, Friendster, etc.). The Big Tech platforms are less like a few popular channels on television and more like the whole cable and basic television package. The truth is that they won’t need to change; conservatives who try to create content on their sites will.

Without any laws to check them, Big Tech companies are removing conservative voices and clearing the way for the Democratic narrative that Trump is terrible and more government can save America. Heard often enough, this narrative will convince Americans who have no way of knowing better to vote for Democrats. And it is not a stretch to assume that the first order of business for any Democratic president will be to impose speech laws that suppress conservative ideas or grant greater authority to the Big Tech thought police.

In this, French is right to ask what a Harris administration would do to free speech if given the chance, but wrong to conclude that she would exploit Hawley’s law to do it. She doesn’t need to. Speaking for most Democrats, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi opposes taking away social media’s legal protection (Section 230), considering it a “gift.” She recognizes that Democrat politicians will continue to benefit from the bias dominating all media and only stand to lose if conservatives compete on a level playing field.

It is nonetheless worth noting that even with numerous obstacles put in place, conservatives still dominate the internet because most Americans recognize that they have the better argument and discuss more relevant issues. By contrast, leftist publications depend on skewed narratives and bad arguments and tend to focus on tired topics like the Mueller report, Trump’s tax returns, and Joe Biden.

When given the chance, viewers will watch the watch Crowder over Vox’s Carlos Maza because Crowder is funnier, smarter, and doesn’t rely on people’s sympathy for his success. Of course, if Crowder stops producing his show because YouTube demonetizes his videos, viewers will not have a choice anymore.

In light of this fact, it is probably more accurate to frame the issue of regulating social media as more a matter of a free market than one of free speech, although one depends on the other. Many people on the left want to eliminate competition online and stop losing to conservative content creators. Allegations of hate and radicalization are merely a pretext to this.…

(READ IT ALL!)

Now, here is the continuation of PJ-MEDIA….

….After the social media platforms nixed Trump, people appeared to leave platforms in droves.

Nancy Pelosi, Ayanna Presley, and other Democrats have egged on rioters in the streets. Their social media accounts are still intact.

Conservative Americans have left the platforms in the understandable belief that if they could cut off the most powerful man in what used to be known as the free world, then they stood no chance.

They’re right.

To avoid the speech police, Americans have been leaving those platforms for Rumble and Parler, social media sites that promise to have few filters on speech. Parler does not allow illegal activity on its site under its terms of service.

But even as conservatives fled Facebook and Twitter for Parler, Big Tech decided to censor the site.

As I reported at PJ Media, Google Play cut off the Parler app from its app store and Apple followed suit in short order.

On Friday, a group called the “Amazon Employees for Climate Justice” wrote a screed to management demanding the tech behemoth boot the Parler app from its servers.

[….]

On Saturday, Amazon capitulated to the leftist rage mob and informed Parler it was getting rid of the social site from its servers.

Parler CEO John Matze announced that at midnight Sunday, Amazon would expunge the app content from its servers. Furthermore, he alleged that the tech giants conspired to orchestrate their moves to make it harder for Parler to stay afloat.

Sunday (tomorrow) at midnight Amazon will be shutting off all of our servers in an attempt to completely remove free speech off the internet. There is the possibility Parler will be unavailable on the internet for up to a week as we rebuild from scratch. We prepared for events like this by never relying on amazons [sic] proprietary infrastructure and building bare metal products.

We will try our best to move to a new provider right now as we have many competing for our business, however Amazon, Google and Apple purposefully did this as a coordinated effort knowing our options would be limited and knowing this would inflict the most damage right as President Trump was banned from the tech companies.

This was a coordinated attack by the tech giants to kill competition in the market place. We were too successful too fast. You can expect the war on competition and free speech to continue, but don’t count us out.

#speakfreely

This is tyranny. This is groupthink.

To sum up:

  • Big Tech censored you and the president on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter
  • You left to go to other social media sites such as Parler, MeWe, Minds
  • Big Tech didn’t want you to leave for more freedom
  • Big Tech refused to let another social media platform, Parler, use their app stores
  • Big Tech then booted the social media site Parler from their servers

Double standards abound. No one on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram was tossed off those platforms for protesting, rioting, looting, and vandalizing on behalf of Black Lives Matter and antifa. Lobbing Molotov cocktails wouldn’t get a group booted off a platform.

Ayatollahs and the Chinese death camp operators are held in higher regard than the president of the United States of America – and his supporters – because of Wednesday’s siege on the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.

The line is drawn.

UPDATE!

RED STATE and WEASEL ZIPPERS notes the latest attack on free-markets and free speech by the Tech Giants:

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Mocks Parler after Coordinated Big Tech to Take Down His Competition

…So with this coordination to take down the right and any other alternative to Twitter, you would think that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey would be standing up for free speech, right? Just kidding.

Not only are they cool with booting off folks on the right from their site and removing the followers from virtually every right leaning account on Twitter, they’re also cool with their competition being stomped on. Indeed, if we were looking into antitrust questions in the coordination of all this, what Jack just posted would be Exhibit #1 in that action.

Here’s Jack celebrating that instead of Parler being the number 1 App on the App Store, his Signal App private messenger is instead. With a little help from his friends.

WEASEL ZIPPERS continues:

Amazon Kills Parler Server

You are not allowed an alternative either. They’re pulling them down tonight at 11:59 p.m. so Parler is looking for a new server.

Via BizPac Review:

Calling it a “coordinated attack,” Parler CEO John Matze informed the social media platform’s users Saturday that Amazon kicked Parler off their web hosting service, which will wipe them off the internet until they find a new host.

This devastating blow coming after Parler was removed from Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store.

The narrative employed to justify the Big Tech attack on Twitter’s biggest competitor is to link Parler, a free speech site being billed by the corrupt media as a “pro-Trump” site, to last week’s U.S. Capitol protest, claiming they allowed “calls for violence.”

Keep reading…

MORE: 

Biden’s Regulatory Administration

Published by Papa Giorgio

A motto for this strain:

A friend and I had a quick soiree that was based off of my OP (original post) that read thus:

BIG TECH PURGE: Facebook permanently bans Conservative #WalkAway group because it supported Trump

Just as we said they would, Facebook is using the Capitol riot as an excuse to begin purging conservatives from their platform, especially the ones who supported President Trump:

(MORE AT RIGHT SCOOP)

All conservatives are being treated as pariah… this is only the beginning. Already a majority of Democrats believe Trump and Republicans are “racist/bigoted/sexist,” which is why social platforms feel like they can shut down businesses and ban conservative ideas from their platforms. While this maligning is historical:

  • From Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush, Newt Gingrich, George W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Donald Trump, the Tea Party, the NRA and Republicans everywhere, Democrats have played the race card to tattered, unrecognizable bits. They have all but destroyed the ability to even have a constructive conversation about race. (REVOLUTIONARY ACT)

The difference is you have an entire generation raised on the government tit being taught “critical race theory” in some way that truly believe we are Hitlerian in some way. Thus, “deplatforming” conservatives is thought of as being on the side of angels. Even banks have “redlined” conservatives (WALL STREET JOURNAL). (See also my post where I note the tribalism is being created by deplatforming.)

Like telling Jews they cannot do business in society. The storefront is literal as well as digital in today’s world. Conservatives are the current bogeyman:

  • 49% of Democrats think Trump voters are racist — July 2019
  • 83% of Democrats think Trump is racist — June 2020

Here is the conversation with some visual editing for increased access. I post a Rick Wilson Tweet to remind Jim of the people he admires and how far from being a “Reaganite” [whom Jim invoked] he and his peeps are, as, he is a fan of the Lincoln Project. So, this is where we left off, and really the response after it is for everyone to get a feel for what is coming.

So, my response is simple, Biden and Harris (Harris is the MOST LEFTIST senator available — showing Joe Biden is not moderate. See below as well). And Trump lies, but crowd size and ego building lies is a sign of a politician… and? But Trump’s lies are not equal to the administration Biden was in previously:

LIES

IRAN DEAL & Ben Rhodes:

Remember that time the White House deceived those gullible Americans about the Iran deal? Haha, good times!

That was the undeniable tone of a recent New York Times profile of President Barack Obama‘s national security advisor Ben Rhodes. In the profile, Rhodes goes on at length about his failed attempt to become a novelist, and how he sees his work at the White House as essentially the same kind of storytelling and narrative-weaving. And when crafting his non-fictional storylines involved selling the American people fiction, well, Rhodes was more than up to the task.

Apologies for the long block quote, but it really does need to be read to be believed:

Rhodes’s innovative campaign to sell the Iran deal is likely to be a model for how future administrations explain foreign policy to Congress and the public. The way in which most Americans have heard the story of the Iran deal presented — that the Obama administration began seriously engaging with Iranian officials in 2013 in order to take advantage of a new political reality in Iran, which came about because of elections that brought moderates to power in that country — was largely manufactured for the purpose for selling the deal. Even where the particulars of that story are true, the implications that readers and viewers are encouraged to take away from those particulars are often misleading or false. Obama’s closest advisers always understood him to be eager to do a deal with Iran as far back as 2012, and even since the beginning of his presidency…

In the narrative that Rhodes shaped, the “story” of the Iran deal began in 2013, when a “moderate” faction inside the Iranian regime led by Hassan Rouhani beat regime “hard-liners” in an election and then began to pursue a policy of “openness,” which included a newfound willingness to negotiate the dismantling of its illicit nuclear-weapons program. The president set out the timeline himself in his speech announcing the nuclear deal on July 14, 2015: “Today, after two years of negotiations, the United States, together with our international partners, has achieved something that decades of animosity has not.” While the president’s statement was technically accurate — there had in fact been two years of formal negotiations leading up to the signing of the J.C.P.O.A. — it was also actively misleading, because the most meaningful part of the negotiations with Iran had begun in mid-2012, many months before Rouhani and the “moderate” camp were chosen in an election among candidates handpicked by Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The idea that there was a new reality in Iran was politically useful to the Obama administration.

By obtaining broad public currency for the thought that there was a significant split in the regime, and that the administration was reaching out to moderate-minded Iranians who wanted peaceful relations with their neighbors and with America, Obama was able to evade what might have otherwise been a divisive but clarifying debate over the actual policy choices that his administration was making. By eliminating the fuss about Iran’s nuclear program, the administration hoped to eliminate a source of structural tension between the two countries, which would create the space for America to disentangle itself from its established system of alliances with countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel and Turkey. With one bold move, the administration would effectively begin the process of a large-scale disengagement from the Middle East.

It’d be one thing if the New York Times dug through archives, spoke with anonymous government officials in hushed tones, and independently came to the conclusion that the White House was lying to Americans about the purpose and history behind the Iran deal. That factoid alone ought to be the front page headline in papers across the country rather than consigned to page 44 of the Sunday magazine.

To say nothing of that last paragraph, where we learn that the long-term policy goal of the administration is to “disengage” from Israel and our Arab allies and wash our hands of the Middle East. In line with that policy, the purpose of the Iran deal is not to protect our allies, but to abandon them…..

(MEDIA’ITE | and see TWITCHY)

This old story reminds me of talking to millennial’s who listed to comedy shows as their source of political moral guidance on what is the case in our body politic. Here is the WASHINGTON TIMES noting the gullibility of these younger persons who really haven’t read much or watched much outside of what they had to for their bachelors in literature of psychology or business administration:

…Ben Rhodes, the man who majored in creative writing and then ended up the Deputy National Security Adviser for President Obama, told The New York Times about the “echo chamber” he was able to create and feed:

In the spring of last year, legions of arms-control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social media, and then became key sources for hundreds of often-clueless reporters. ‘We created an echo chamber,’ [Rhodes] admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. ‘They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.’

“The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. … They literally know nothing,” Rhodes bragged.

And the know-nothing millennials loved him for it. And, apparently, they still do….

KEEP YOUR DR. & HEALTH CARE PLAN

I don’t know how crowd size compares to that, but let’s continue. Can you name a lie that Trump made that is as big as a lie made to take over a large portion of the economy (one-sixth, some say one-fifth) comparable to Obama/Biden? “If you like your health plan, you can keep it.” “If you like your doctor, you can keep him/her.” That was a lie that captured MORE government control of the economy.

POWERLINE has a good link fest to various “Obamacare Lies.”

Calling Trump & Republican’s Hitler

RUSSIA & UKRAINE

MOVIE: The Plot Against the President

…For the past two and a half years this nation has been roiled by the incessant drumbeat of accusations that its newly elected President, Donald Trump, was a clandestine agent of Russia and colluded with them to alter the outcome of the 2016 election.  On their face, these accusations were so preposterous that anyone with a modicum of common sense would have thought them totally unbelievable.  

Nonetheless, within 7 months after Trump’s inauguration 54% of all Americans believed he had acted illegally or unethically in his dealings with Russia (80% of Democrats).  Within 14 months after the inauguration 66% of Democrats believed Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Trump elected and 59% accepted the premise that there were improper relations between the Trump campaign and Russia before the 2016 election. 

In what was a staged and unnecessary inquiry, and despite turning over every marginally relevant leaf and conducting a dogged 22-month investigation using partisan prosecutors, Robert Mueller was unable to link Donald Trump or his campaign to even the minutest degree of collusion with the Russian Government.  Nonetheless the drumbeat of lies and insinuations was a major factor in the Democrats taking control of the House of Representatives in 2018.

The American citizenry now definitively knows that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians during the presidential campaign of 2016.  Further, based on the testimony of Rod Rosenstein and others involved in the Special Counsel probe, the Russians did not tamper with any vote tallies. 

How were the Democrats, and their allies in the mainstream media able to suspend rationality and manipulate the emotions of so many Americans for so long?  

[….]

From January 20, 2017 (Inauguration Day) through March 21, 2019 (791 days), the major networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC evening newscasts produced a combined 2,284 minutes of “collusion” coverage.  During this period no other issue received more than 10% of this level of attention.  Further, the spin of the overall network coverage of Donald Trump was 92% negative. 

Two cable networks, CNN and MSNBC, each devoted, on the average, nearly 2 to 3 hours per day on Trump and Russia collusion, or an estimated 1,978 hours (118,700 minutes) since the inauguration.  Virtually all the coverage was negative with innumerable false and misleading reports, accusations of treason, supposed imminent arrests and the unabashed reporting of any salacious or unproven rumor or allegation. 

The print media went down the same path as their counterparts in the electronic media.  The New York Times and The Washington Post between them published nearly 1,000 front page articles on the subject and had to issue numerous retractions days later after the damage was done.  That process was repeated by news services such as the Associated Press and Reuters, pumping out to its newspaper, radio and television station subscribers throughout the United States daily stories negative to Trump regarding collusion.

On a near daily basis, so-called celebrities in Hollywood and the entertainment establishment unabashedly regurgitated to their untold millions of followers on social media virtually all the false stories and innuendos promulgated by the media and the Democratic Party.

The illegal and unethical maneuvering of the upper echelon of the FBI and Department of Justice immediately after the inauguration to appoint a special counsel added gravitas to the accusations regarding Trump and the Russians, as well as a means of finding anything that would either implicate Donald Trump in any potential criminality, or misbehavior outside of the Russian matter that could lead to impeachment.  Further, their willing accomplices in the media breathlessly reported, without hesitation or confirmation, any leak or innuendo from these same denizens of the deep state.

The Democrats in Congress, undeterred by ethics or the laws of slander and defamation, were free to fabricate or leak stories regarding Russian collusion that were accepted at face value by their allies in the media….

(AMERICAN THINKER)

Hugh Hewitt and Generalissimo Duane read the phone call Trump had with the Ukrainian President. One debunked position people attribute to the call was that President Trump used military aid as a bargaining chip to get what he wanted from Ukraine. However, the far Left magazine, The Nation, notes this about the issue:

  • Democratic leaders and media pundits are convinced that Trump extorted Ukraine by delaying military aid to compel an investigation into Biden. Their theory may prove correct, but the available evidence does not, as of now, make for a strong case. Trump had held up military aid to Ukraine by the time of his call with Zelensky, but if the public transcript is accurate, it did not come up during their conversation. According to The New York Times, Zelensky’s government did not learn that the military aid was frozen until more than one month later. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, who met with Zelensky in early September, said that the Ukrainian president “did not make any connection between the aid that had been cut off and the requests that he was getting from [Trump attorney Rudy] Giuliani.” It will be difficult to prove extortion if Trump’s purported target was unaware. (THE NATION)

GLENN BECK has a good reading too:

Another big lie from the Left/Democrats is that Gender is assigned, and not inherent to our nature.

Another charge made over and over by the left — the mainstream media, academia and the Democratic Party — that the Trump election had unleashed an unprecedented amount of anti-Semitism was proved to be yet another left-wing hysteria based on a left-wing lie.

NEWSBUSTERS Notes CNN’s Fareed Zakaria admitting to what I have argued for a long time, that is — if Trump were in cahoots with Putin, whay was he tougher on him than Obama?

“I think in general, there isn’t going to be as much difference as people imagine. The Biden folks are pretty tough on Russia, Iran, North Korea. You know, the dirty little secret about the Trump administration was that while Donald Trump had clearly had a kind of soft spot for Putin, the Trump Administration was pretty tough on the Russians. They armed Ukraine, they armed the Poles. They extended NATO operations and exercises in ways that even the Obama Administration had not done. They maintained the sanctions. So I don’t think it will be that different.”  

Wait a second! It was a “dirty little secret” that Trump was tough on Russia? WHY?? Who kept it a secret and for what purpose?? 

And the obvious answer is that the liberal media/Democrats were intent on pushing Russia Russia Russia. Admitting that President Trump was in fact tough on Russia would undermine that line of attack. And so they buried it: kept it a “dirty little secret.”

See my post: Trump, Tougher On Putin Than Obama

REGULATION

Besides Trump cutting Federal programs, getting rid of regulations that held back small business, factories, and agriculture — he also added t he fewest laws to the Federal Registry:

The Trump administration issued the fewest new regulations during 2019 than in any year since the government began keeping track more than four decades ago, as President Trump cuts away at Obama-era red tape.

The Federal Register for Dec. 31 has published 2,964 final rules in its pages, the lowest number since records began in 1975, said Clyde Wayne Crews, policy vice president of the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute think tank.

Mr. Trump’s previous low for new rule-making was 3,281 in 2017.

“It is a notable achievement that all three of the lowest-ever annual rule counts belong to Trump,” Mr. Crews wrote in his blog on Forbes’ website. “This an even more significant development given that some of Trump’s ‘rules’ are rules written to get rid of or replace other rules.”

(WASHINGTON TIMES)

Biden and Harris will outdo themselves to break spending and regulatory records.

FARMERS (WOTUS):

Biden will reimplement regulation that will retake (under fiat) 247 Million Acres of Farmland. Among other regulatory increases. What it is….

WOTUS gave the federal government effective authority over water use on 247 million acres of American farmland.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, together with Secretary of the Army for Civil Works Douglas Lamont, signed a proposed regulatory rescission of WOTUS. As soon as the proposed rule change can be published in the Federal Register, under Docket ID No. EPA-HQ-OW-2017-0203, the public will have a 30-day comment period to “review and revise” the definition of “waters of the United States.”

The EPA took to Twitter at #WOTUS to call its action a significant step to return power to states and provide regulatory certainty to the nation’s farmers and businesses. The EPA added that its decision is consistent with the Executive Order signed by President Trump on February 28, aimed at “Restoring the Rule of Law, Federalism, and Economic Growth by Reviewing the ‘Waters of the United States’ Rule.”

The Obama administration’s WOTUS regulatory expansion cleverly redefined the term “navigable waters” to include “intermittent streams.” Environmental activists hailed the WOTUS’s expansion of federal jurisdiction over land and water use as an essential common-sense-rule to protect water for wildlife and drinking water supplies for 117 million Americans….

(BREITBART)

The Biden Administration has all but promised a rescinding of this huge shrinking of government intrusion into the lives of the individual. Here is a small excerpt of a wonderful resource via RED STATE:

….Who is looming EPA Chief Michael Regan?  All you have to know is – Leftists LOVE him:

“Several environmental advocacy groups lauded the selection….Regan…is known for prioritizing environmental justice, which…’helped win him the post.’”

Here’s Regan Tweeting:

“Climate change is the most significant challenge humanity faces. We’ll make meaningful progress together by listening to every voice—from our youth & frontline communities to scientists & our workforce. I will be honored to be part of that work as EPA Administrator.”

I’m quite sure Regan won’t actually be listening to any farmers’ voices at all.

Can you feel the EPA mojo coming back?  Farmers certainly can – and they’ll hate it.

Who is looming Interior Chief Deb Haaland?  All you have to know is – Leftists LOVE her:

“Even before her selection, Haaland was drawing broad support from environmental groups, indigenous peoples’ advocates and members of Congress, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who released a statement on Wednesday saying ‘Haaland knows the territory, and if she is the President-elect’s choice for Interior Secretary, then he will have made an excellent choice.’”

It looks like Interior too will get back its exceedingly awful mojo:

“Haaland’s selection positions Biden’s Interior Department to build on the budding alliances between tribes and environmental groups that have been formed in recent years to battle fossil fuel projects like the Dakota Access pipeline, expand land conservation and keep water in overdrawn rivers.”

Water, you say?  More mojo a-coming…:

“(T)he Waters of the U.S., or WOTUS, rule…could be a top priority should the former vice president win the White House in November — right after reinstating President Obama’s Clean Power Plan and reining in President Trump’s revisions to a rule for National Environmental Policy Act compliance.

“‘I think there’s going to be considerable pressure to deal with the Waters of the U.S. mess,’ said Vermont Law School professor Pat Parenteau, referring to the regulation that defines the scope of the Clean Water Act. ‘I think what he really has to do is what Trump did, in reverse, and flip the script.’”

Farmers yet again hardest hit…..

PARIS CLIMATE ACCORD

  • If power corrupts, as it is said, Americans are going to feel a jolt of degeneration when Joe Biden plugs back into the climate-change network. Rather than save the world from global warming, a President Biden would force Americans to spend more of their hard-earned dollars just to keep the wheels turning and the lights burning. One pledge the presumptive Democratic president-elect has chiseled in stone is that when he first sets foot in the Oval Office, he would rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement, from which President Trump’s 2019 withdrawal became final on Election Day 2020: “Today, the Trump Administration officially left the Paris Climate Agreement,” Mr. Biden tweeted. “And in exactly 77 days, a Biden Administration will rejoin it.” (WASHINGTON TIMES)

Executive Orders

On January 20, 2021, Biden will be sworn in as the 46th President of the United States. As soon as his first day in office, Biden plans to sign at least five executive orders that could reverse several of President Donald Trump’s policies. He’ll also focus on addressing the Covid-19 pandemic, improving the economy and providing financial stimulus. These executive orders may include:

1. Paris Climate Accord

  • Biden wants the U.S. to rejoin the Paris climate accord.
  • Biden said he would build upon President Barack Obama’s efforts to fight climate change.
  • As part of his plan, Biden proposed $2 trillion in clean energy and infrastructure spending. Biden also wants net zero emissions by 2050.

(FORBES)

FLASHBACK: The Paris climate agreement was a terrible deal for the US

…Pulling us out of this bad deal is good news. As it was negotiated under the prior administration, this agreement imposed a goal of reducing U.S. carbon emissions by nearly 30 percent over a decade. The so-called “Obama pledge” accompanied a host of related federal regulations that would have damaged the economy, killed jobs, and driven up energy prices for families across the country.

Sticking with the deal could have cost 2.7 million lost jobs by 2025, according to a National Economic Research Associates study. And the effects would be widespread, including a loss of 440,000 manufacturing jobs, according to NERA’s numbers. Meanwhile, according to proponents’ own data, the agreement would have no discernible effect on global temperatures.

And the longer the agreement ran, the worse it would get, according to NERA’s data. By 2040, production (and thus employment) would be decimated in a host of industries, including a 38 percent cut in iron and steel, 31 percent in natural gas, and 86 percent for coal. At that point, the total economic cost to the U.S. would approach $3 trillion in lost gross domestic product and 6.5 million industrial jobs.

Speaking last week, Trump correctly noted that the damage is not spread evenly across the globe, noting that China and India can proceed with adding coal-fired capacity well into the future. “The agreement doesn’t eliminate coal jobs, it just transfers those jobs out of America and the United States and ships them to foreign countries,” he noted.

Other good news from last week is stopping future U.S. payments to the Green Climate Fund, part of what Trump rightly described as “a massive redistribution of United States wealth to other countries.” The federal government has already sent $1 billion of U.S. taxes to prop up energy projects in foreign countries.

Taxpayers and ratepayers have seen firsthand how green energy subsidies fail to deliver on promises of long-term job creation and energy affordability — it makes little sense to repeat these mistakes abroad. The Green Climate Fund is essentially an international version of Solyndra, the solar panel manufacturer that took $535 million in taxpayer money before going belly-up.

Exiting the agreement means the U.S. can lead with strength in promoting energy and environmental policies, protecting U.S. jobs and easing the costly regulatory burden across the country. Now the Trump administration can push ahead with a plan that conserves the environment while protecting economic competitiveness and promoting affordability and reliability. He should keep these priorities in mind as he engages in future negotiations with international stakeholders on energy and environment policies.

What is on the horizon for more tax-payer expenses

….It was the heavy burden on the American economy compared to the easy terms given to industrial powerhouses like China and India that convinced Mr. Trump to bail. U.S. participation in the pact would cost the average family of four $20,000 and the national GDP $2.5 trillion by 2035, according to The Heritage Foundation. The resulting reduction in global temperatures: a nearly unmeasurable 0.015 degrees Celsius in 2100.

It’s unsurprising, then, that environmental extremists argue a Biden return to Paris won’t cut it. “Paris is a good starting point, but we need to go well beyond Paris now to achieve the reductions that are necessary,” climate activist and climatologist Michael Mann tells NBC News. That means reaching even deeper into American pockets.

A Biden administration would queue up a modified version of the $93 trillion Green New Deal that environmental firebrands like Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez favor. The Biden plan would build the nationwide infrastructure for “clean, American-made electricity to achieve a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035.” With it would come a transition to electric vehicles….

TAXES

California Wildfires… Policy vs. Rhetoric (Tom McClintock/John Kobylt)

Published by Papa Giorgio

(2018) California’s leaders are promoting the idea that the state’s in a “new normal” of more extreme wildfire, but fire scientists say it doesn’t have to stay that way, even in the face of a climate that’s getting warmer.

I posted previously on related topics for the interested:

(This is mainly a government issue – federal and state) John and Ken interview Congressman Tom McClintock (4th District of California) discussing the issue of forest mismanagement, and how since the 1980’s 80% less logging has been allowed.

Some good articles are these:

  • How Misguided Environmentalism Is To Blame For California’s Wildfires (THE FEDERALIST, 2018)
  • California Has Always Had Fires, Environmental Alarmism Makes Them Worse Than Necessary (FORBES, 2020)
  • Wildfires Caused By Bad Environmental Policy Are Causing California Forests To Be Net CO2 Emitters (FORBES, 2019)
  • The Same Old, Same Old California Suicide (NATIONAL REVIEW, 2020)
  • California’s Disastrous Forest Mismanagement (NATIONAL REVIEW, 2020)
  • Western Wildfires Are Due to Arson and Stupidity, Not Climate Change (AMERICAN THINKER, 2020)

PRAGER U

The following video is done by John Kobylt of the The John and Ken Show 640AM-KFI: “This is appalling. And not nearly enough people have been given this information.”

Corrupt politics overriding California wildfire prevention efforts, Republican John Cox says (SEE AT FOX NEWS)

120 Years of Climate Scares (American Thinker)

Published by Papa Giorgio

This is all AMERICAN THINKER, with a hat-tip to ACE OF SPADES:

I sometimes ask myself, “Why is the New York Times allowed to exist?” And I don’t mean: “Why doesn’t the government ban the paper?” because that’s not how I roll. But why is it that this roiling cesspool of lies continues to be supported after decades of outright lies, propaganda and just plain bad reporting. This is the paper that gave us Walter Duranty, for crying out loud. This is the paper that constantly warns of the dire threat of weather, whether warming or cooling, as this great roundup from American Thinker shows. (Notice how many other “respectable” journalistic institutions get in on the act that also still exist.)

— ACE OF SPADES

That’s the gist of an amazing chronology of the last 120 years of scare-mongering on climate, assembled by butnowyouknow.net and reprinted by the estimable Anthony Watts in Wattsupwiththat, who updates it to the present.

— AMERICAN THINKER

This list is dated. It hails from 2014:

  • 1895 – Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again – New York Times, February 1895
  • 1902 – “Disappearing Glaciers…deteriorating slowly, with a persistency that means their final annihilation…scientific fact…surely disappearing.” – Los Angeles Times
  • 1912 – Prof. Schmidt Warns Us of an Encroaching Ice Age – New York Times, October 1912
  • 1923 – “Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada” – Professor Gregory of Yale University, American representative to the Pan-Pacific Science Congress, – Chicago Tribune
  • 1923 – “The discoveries of changes in the sun’s heat and the southward advance of glaciers in recent years have given rise to conjectures of the possible advent of a new ice age” – Washington Post
  • 1924 – MacMillan Reports Signs of New Ice Age – New York Times, Sept 18, 1924
  • 1929 – “Most geologists think the world is growing warmer, and that it will continue to get warmer” – Los Angeles Times, in Is another ice age coming?
  • 1932 – “If these things be true, it is evident, therefore that we must be just teetering on an ice age” – The Atlantic magazine, This Cold, Cold World
  • 1933 – America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-Year Rise – New York Times, March 27th, 1933
  • 1933 – “…wide-spread and persistent tendency toward warmer weather…Is our climate changing?” – Federal Weather Bureau “Monthly Weather Review.”
  • 1938 – Global warming, caused by man heating the planet with carbon dioxide, “is likely to prove beneficial to mankind in several ways, besides the provision of heat and power.”– Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society
  • 1938 – “Experts puzzle over 20 year mercury rise…Chicago is in the front rank of thousands of cities thuout the world which have been affected by a mysterious trend toward warmer climate in the last two decades” – Chicago Tribune
  • 1939 – “Gaffers who claim that winters were harder when they were boys are quite right… weather men have no doubt that the world at least for the time being is growing warmer” – Washington Post
  • 1952 – “…we have learned that the world has been getting warmer in the last half century” – New York Times, August 10th, 1962
  • 1954 – “…winters are getting milder, summers drier. Glaciers are receding, deserts growing” – U.S. News and World Report
  • 1954 – Climate – the Heat May Be Off – Fortune Magazine
  • 1959 – “Arctic Findings in Particular Support Theory of Rising Global Temperatures” – New York Times
  • 1969 – “…the Arctic pack ice is thinning and that the ocean at the North Pole may become an open sea within a decade or two” – New York Times, February 20th, 1969
  • 1969 – “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000″ — Paul Ehrlich (while he now predicts doom from global warming, this quote only gets honorable mention, as he was talking about his crazy fear of overpopulation)
  • 1970 – “…get a good grip on your long johns, cold weather haters – the worst may be yet to come…there’s no relief in sight” – Washington Post
  • 1974 – Global cooling for the past forty years – Time Magazine
  • 1974 – “Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age” –Washington Post
  • 1974 – “As for the present cooling trend a number of leading climatologists have concluded that it is very bad news indeed” – Fortune magazine, who won a Science Writing Award from the American Institute of Physics for its analysis of the danger
  • 1974 – “…the facts of the present climate change are such that the most optimistic experts would assign near certainty to major crop failure…mass deaths by starvation, and probably anarchy and violence” – New York Times

Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age

  • 1975 – Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate is Changing; A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable – New York Times, May 21st, 1975
  • 1975 – “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind” Nigel Calder, editor, New Scientist magazine, in an article in International Wildlife Magazine
  • 1976 – “Even U.S. farms may be hit by cooling trend” – U.S. News and World Report
  • 1981 – Global Warming – “of an almost unprecedented magnitude” – New York Times
  • 1988 – I would like to draw three main conclusions. Number one, the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements. Number two, the global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect. And number three, our computer climate simulations indicate that thegreenhouse effect is already large enough to begin to effect the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves. – Jim Hansen, June 1988 testimony before Congress, see His later quote andHis superior’s objection for context
  • 1989 -“On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but – which means that we must include all doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.” – Stephen Schneider, lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,Discover magazine, October 1989
  • 1990 – “We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing – in terms of economic policy and environmental policy” – Senator Timothy Wirth
  • 1993 – “Global climate change may alter temperature and rainfall patterns, many scientists fear, with uncertain consequences for agriculture.” – U.S. News and World Report
  • 1998 – No matter if the science [of global warming] is all phony . . . climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.” —Christine Stewart, Canadian Minister of the Environment, Calgary Herald, 1998
  • 2001 – “Scientists no longer doubt that global warming is happening, and almost nobody questions the fact that humans are at least partly responsible.” – Time Magazine, Monday, Apr. 09, 2001
  • 2003 – Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue, and energy sources such as “synfuels,” shale oil and tar sands were receiving strong consideration” – Jim Hansen, NASA Global Warming activist, Can we defuse The Global Warming Time Bomb?, 2003
  • 2006 – “I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.” — Al Gore, Grist magazine, May 2006
  • 2006 – “It is not a debate over whether the earth has been warming over the past century. The earth is always warming or cooling, at least a few tenths of a degree…” —Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at MIT
  • 2006 – “What we have fundamentally forgotten is simple primary school science. Climate always changes. It is always…warming or cooling, it’s never stable. And if it were stable, it would actually be interesting scientifically because it would be the first time for four and a half billion years.” —Philip Stott, emeritus professor of bio-geography at the University of London
  • 2006 – “Since 1895, the media has alternated between global cooling and warming scares during four separate and sometimes overlapping time periods. From 1895 until the 1930’s the media peddled a coming ice age. From the late 1920’s until the 1960’s they warned of global warming. From the 1950’s until the 1970’s they warned us again of a coming ice age. This makes modern global warming the fourth estate’s fourth attempt to promote opposing climate change fears during the last 100 years.” –Senator James Inhofe, Monday, September 25, 2006
  • 2007– “I gave a talk recently (on fallacies of global warming) and three members of the Canadian government, the environmental cabinet, came up afterwards and said, ‘We agree with you, but it’s not worth our jobs to say anything.’ So what’s being created is a huge industry with billions of dollars of government money and people’s jobs dependent on it.” – Dr. Tim Ball, Coast-to-Coast, Feb 6, 2007
  • 2008 – “Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress” – Dr. John S. Theon, retired Chief of the Climate Processes Research Program atNASA, see above for Hansen quotes

Section updated by Anthony:

  • 2009 – Climate change: melting ice will trigger wave of natural disasters. Scientists at a London conference next week will warn of earthquakes, avalanches and volcanic eruptions as the atmosphere heats up and geology is altered. Even Britain could face being struck by tsunamis – “Not only are the oceans and atmosphere conspiring against us, bringing baking temperatures, more powerful storms and floods, but the crust beneath our feet seems likely to join in too,” – Professor Bill McGuire, director of the Benfield Hazard Research Centre, at University College London, – The Guardian, Sep 2009.
  • 2010 – What Global Warming Looks Like. It was more than 5°C (about 10°F) warmer than climatology in the eastern European region including Moscow. There was an area in eastern Asia that was similarly unusually hot. The eastern part of the United States was unusually warm, although not to the degree of the hot spots in Eurasia. James Hansen – NASA GISS, August 11, 2010.
  • 2011 – Where Did Global Warming Go? “In Washington, ‘climate change’ has become a lightning rod, it’s a four-letter word,” said Andrew J. Hoffman, director of the University of Michigan’s Erb Institute for Sustainable Development.   – New York Times, Oct 15, 2011.
  • 2012 – Global warming close to becoming irreversible-scientists. “This is the critical decade. If we don’t get the curves turned around this decade we will cross those lines,” said Will Steffen, executive director of the Australian National University’s climate change institute, speaking at a conference in London. Reuters, Mar 26, 2012
  • 2013 – Global-warming ‘proof’ is evaporating.  The 2013 hurricane season just ended as one of the five quietest years since 1960. But don’t expect anyone who pointed to last year’s hurricanes as “proof” of the need to act against global warming to apologize; the warmists don’t work that way. New York Post, Dec 5, 2013
  • 2014  – Climate change: It’s even worse than we thought.  Five years ago, the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change painted a gloomy picture of our planet’s future. As climate scientists gather evidence for the next report, due in 2014, Michael Le Page gives seven reasons why things are looking even grimmer. –New Scientist (undated in 2014)

LaRouchites Recommend Eating Babies To Save The Planet

Published by Papa Giorgio

After having a run in with these guys a few years back in the SCV and noting that Texas voted in a Democrat from the group, I looked into them a bit. I ended up posting 3-times on them in the past (and as a warning, many of the links in those posts may be dead).

What I found out is that they do stuff to grab attention. In the past however, their tactics allowed the mainstream media to portend that the TEA Party peeps were right-wing racist by highlighting in their stories posters of Obama with a Hitler stache at the TEA Party events. But as my two June posts show clearly is that an elected Democrat was holding the same signs, as she was part of this organization. And the founder himself (Lyndon LaRouche) ran for office 7-times… as a Democrat.

Well, this Leftist Political Cult (more cult than Leftist) is at it again in grabbing headlines. What irked me is that many of the conservative sites I went to assumed this lady was an AOC fan. As soon as I watched the video I knew it was a prank of some kind… I just thought it was some comedian or radio morning show prank. The newly silk screened shirt gave it away. But I wasn’t tracking with it being a LaRouchite ploy.

Here is the video (look how caught off guard AOC looks — if anything, the look on her face meeting people from a crazier cult than she is from is priceless:

Here are examples of just how wrong people got the the “baby eating” troll by this LaRouchite chapter. GLENN BECK said this was an “environmentalist activist,” Emma Vigeland of THE YOUNG TURKS said this was a “Trump Troll.” Even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed that the woman who suggested “eating babies” was a solution to climate change “was a Trump supporter.” Others claimed she was mentally ill.

As an aside, all the sites that say AOC should have clearly denounced cannibalism [eating babies] otherwise she by default supports it are wrong. She doesn’t have to denounce it because it is automatically assumed this position is sick and the nuance of publicly rejecting it is silly. JUST LIKE those asking Trump to continually reject “white nationalism” are just as silly as rejecting eating babies.

Here is the tracking down of this woman on Twitter and her affiliation with The Lyndon LaRouche cult:

THE DAILY CALLER had a good post on the group/incident. In it Shelby Talcott (the article’s author) rightly notes the following (EMPHASIZED):

The LaRouche PAC, a fringe political action committee, took credit for the stunt Thursday evening on Twitter. The group responded to multiple tweets on the incident, writing “it was us” repeatedly, The Washington Post reported.

[….]

THE GROUP’S STUNT IS “A FAIRLY WELL-ESTABLISHED TACTIC” FOR IT, MATTHEW SWEET, A HISTORIAN WHO HAS DOCUMENTED THE GROUP, SAID ACCORDING TO WAPO. CONSPIRACY THEORIST LYNDON H. LAROUCHE JR. FOUNDED THE LAROUCHE PAC.

“THEY’VE BEEN DOING THIS SINCE THE ’70S,”

Sweet told WaPo. “The tactic is you go to a political meeting and you create a disturbance that disrupts the meeting, and more importantly, that creates a kind of chaos.”

The article continues on with all the finger pointing going on in our “immediate” social media world. (I just told my own two sons to wait a couple of days to see where the chips fall.) The article then continues on with the more important issue of the groups history and aims:

LaRouche Jr. built up his following, which reaches across the world, “based on conspiracy theories, economic doom, anti-Semitism, homophobia and racism,” WaPo wrote in an obituary on LaRouche Jr., who died in 2019. He ran for president eight times between 1976 and 2004.

A judge sentenced LaRouche Jr., who once was a member of the U.S. Labor Party, to 15 years in prison in 1989 for defaulting on over $30 million in loans from his supporters and planning to defraud the IRS, The Associated Press reported.

He “has managed to attract a small but fanatical following to his conspiratorial view of the world,” the conservative Heritage Foundation said in a 1984 report according to WaPo. The cult advocates for economic recovery and wants to implement its four economic laws, according to its website.

LaRouche’s four laws are restoring the Glass-Steagall Act, making a new national bank, creating a crash program to develop fusion power and space, and increasing productivity for credit applications, Newsweek reported….

The instigator is right about the Swedish professor though. The professor spoke about cannibalism being a sustainable food source (the report in the Swedish language can be seen HERE) — and if you haven’t heard of this guy yet, here is CLIMATE DEPOT’S post on professor Söderlund’s ideas, pre-ceeded by Ezra Levent’s show with Marc Morano:

:

….A conference about the food of the future called Gastro Summit being held in Stockholm Sweden featured a presentation by Magnus Söderlund claiming that we must get used to the idea of eating human flesh in the future, as a way of combating the effects of climate change.

As reported by the Epoch Times:

In a talk titled: “Can you Imagine Eating Human Flesh,”  behavioral Scientist and Marketing Strategist Behavioral Scientist and Marketing Strategist Magnus Söderlund from “Handelshögskolan” (College of Commerce) argues for the breaking down of the ancient taboos against desecrating the human corpse and eating human flesh

Boy that makes me very happy I keep Kosher because humans don’t have split hooves and chew their cud, so I won’t be eating human flesh.

Söderlund refers to the taboos against it as “conservative.” Yep,  he claims those who don’t want to eat your dead relatives are old fogys who don’t want to save the planet.  He adds that people can be sold on the idea little by little, first by persuading people to just taste it. Tasting it? Over my dead body—-er maybe that’s not the correct phrase, but you get the idea.

Conflating resistance to eating human flesh with capitalist selfishness, the seminar’s talking points ask:

“Are we humans too selfish to live sustainably?

Capitalist selfishness? Just another reason to hate Socialism.

“Is Cannibalism the solution to food sustainability in the future? Does Generation Z have the answers to our food challenges? Can consumers be tricked into making the right decisions? At GastroSummit you will get some answers to these questions—and also partake in the latest scientific findings and get to meet the leading experts.”

In his talk, Söderlund asks the audience how many would be open to the idea. Not many hands go up. Some groaning is heard.  When interviewed after his talk, he reports brightly that 8 percent of conference participants said they would be open to trying it. When asked if he himself would try it, he replies: “I feel somewhat hesitant but to not appear overly conservative…I’d have to say….I’d be open to at least tasting it.

What about the fact that science has proven that eating other people can make you crazy.

[….]

It’s bad enough that fans of the climate change hypothesis want to destroy the economy for their worldwide redistribution of income scheme, but this is just too gross….

FLASHBACK WEIRDNESS

Mind you, this isn’t the first time a “wild eyed” proposal was made by crazies! The Guillotine was proposed by a Democrat Georgia House of Representatives, Doug Teper (D-61), as a better way to impose the death penalty on others. Rep Teper did receive an award: Honors and Awards Young Democrats of DeKalb DEDICATION TO THE ENVIRONMENT. 

In 1996 in the US, Georgia State Representative Doug Teper[37] unsuccessfully sponsored a bill to replace that state’s electric chair with the guillotine.[38]

[37] “Representative Doug Teper (D-61)”. Georgia House of Representatives. Retrieved 3 October2013.[permanent dead link]

[38] “Georgia House of Representatives – 1995/1996 Sessions HB 1274 – Death penalty; guillotine provisions”. The General Assembly of Georgia. Archived from the original on 4 October 2013. Retrieved 3 October 2013.

(WIKI ZERO)

Another blogpost post zeroes in on the possible animus for such proposals (and mind you, I am speaking of this partly to put into the record here at RPT these old proposals by Democrats to put them into the search history of my site to recall them in discussion):

…The Arizona assembly considered a bill that would give prisoners a choice of their method of execution: lethal injection or having their organs harvested for transplant.  The bill was voted down in light of the American College of Physicians statement that physicians should not be involved in the execution process.

Georgia State Representative Doug Teper proposed writing legislation that would give prisoners a choice between death by electrocution or guillotine.  Those opting for the guillotine would be given the option to donate their organs. The legislation was never brought before the state senate…

Utopianism at it’s most dreamiest.

Ban Everything | 2020 Democrat Platform (Updated)

Published by Papa Giorgio

GATEWAY PUNDIT noted: …CNN hosted a seven-hour climate hysteria event on Wednesday and Democrats went hog wild. By the end, they’d called for bans on plastic straws, red meat (especially cheeseburgers), incandescent lightbulbs, gas-powered cars, airplanes. They also want an end to fossil fuels, oil drilling, fracking, natural gas exploration and coal plants, along with nuclear energy.

Adapted a bit from LOUDER with CROWDER:

ONE: culling the population of undesirables (the poor) through genocide.

[….]

TWO: Deciding what we can and cannot EAT!

“My body, my choice” my ass. Now you’re telling us what we can and cannot consume.

Kamala says she wants to “ban certain behaviors.” Not like killing your baby. No that’s fine. Especially if it’s some poor brown baby. But eating cheeseburgers or meat at all, that’s verboten.

Oh sure, Kamala is talking about reconstituting the food pyramid and “incentivizing” certain behaviors. But let’s play this out. Take a cheeseburger and treat it like cigarettes, which have a “sin” tax to de-incentivize smoking. The sin is just eating that which tastes good….

[….]

FOUR: Banning things we use, as small as a plastic straw to as large as our gasoline-powered cars….

Almost all the candidates want to stop oil, gas, and coal selling/production. Gas powered cars will be a thing of the past — almost immediately — if they get their way.

DAILY CALLER video

GRABIAN video

I updated a post showing the impossibility of Trump being a “Russian Asset” as the MSM and Democrats said for almost 3-years. Here is the updated portion:

…when oil prices rise above $60-$65 a barrel… fracking increases supply, serving as an effective cap on energy prices. (Broadly speaking, the same principle is true of natural gas prices.) Putin’s government revenue and foreign policy are dependent on high crude prices and foreign nations buying their crude from Russia. Lower prices due to U.S. or other nations’ competition cost him a lot of money, and put the Russian economy and his public support at risk. Even more importantly, it deprives him of the tool of energy blackmail, which he has used to extort other countries into adopting Kremlin-friendly foreign policy choices. This is why Russian intelligence services have been so active in supporting western environmental groups and other interests opposed to fracking. (WASHINGTON EXAMINER — in other words, our energy policy, under Trump, is anti-Putin. By contrast, ALL of the Democratic 2020 candidates energy policies will enrich Putin.)

WATTS UP WITH THAT has a linked DAILY CALLER article that highlights 7-BANS by the candidates:

1: Biden Applauds The Green New Deal

“I think the Green New Deal deserves an enormous amount of credit,” former Vice President Joe Biden told CNN’s Anderson Cooper before listing off what he considers to be the problems with the much-criticized idea to stop global warming.

He noted that “85 percent of the problem” (climate change) is coming from the rest of the world.

2. Harris Says She Would Ding The Filibuster To Implement The GND

“If [Republicans] fail to act, as president of the United States, I am prepared to get rid of the filibuster to pass a Green New Deal,” Sen. Kamala Harris of California said to audience applause.

Harris said Republicans should “look in the mirror and ask themselves why they failed to act,” calling the fight for the GND one “against powerful interests.” Democrats would need to win Senate control along with the presidency to have any hope of ending the longstanding tradition.

3. Yang Won’t Talk About Electric Cars

Yang skirted questions about whether every American will need to drive electric cars in the future. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Yang why he would promise federal funds for “potentially risky” and experimental means of energy production.

“We’re here together because we can. This is a crisis. In a crisis, all solutions have to be on the table. If you were attacking on one side, you should be researching various alternatives on the other side. That to me is just responsible management and responsible leadership,” Yang explained.

4. Sanders’ One Word Answer To A Question About Light Bulbs

“The Trump administration announced plans to overturn requirements on energy-saving lightbulbs. … Would you reinstate those requirements?” CNN’s Cooper asked Sanders, who has described himself as a self-avowed democratic socialist.

The Vermont senator answered with one word: “Duh.” Sanders’ comment came several hours after the Trump administration announced new rules Wednesday rolling back requirements for energy-saving light bulbs.

(Read it all at WUWT)

See some more articles:

Does Honey-Nut Cheerios Cause Cancer?

Published by Papa Giorgio

Glenn Beck and his crew hilariously explain just how many bowls of Cheerios you would have to eat each day for 80-years to get a chance at contracting cancer. Another Leftist scare down in flames. But remember, Monsanto is the BIG BAD whipping boy of the eco-fascists.

ASSUMED TRUE: The following is taking the study at face value – as if it were true. Remember, the people that presented this study did not have their work peer-reviewed, nor did they release or make public their criteria to say how they reached their numbers. But let’s assume they are correct. ANOTHER NOTE: By merely saying “glyphosate,” or putting the word, “Monsanto,” as a descriptor/company name in front of the stated concern… does not make-magically a statement true. We are thinking individuals. JURY AWARDED: Remember, a jury awarded a guy money for a supposed connection to “Round-Up” (glyphosate). A jury in [*megaphone FX with a thundering echo] SAN FRANCISCO saw a “connection.” Maybe, just maybe, they were biased in their view? It is San Francisco after-all. It is like saying just because a jury said O.J. Simpson was not guilty, therefore, he didn’t murder two people in a fit of selfish psychotic rage.

California’s standard is 1.1 milligrams of “Round-Up” to be consumed (say, in cereal) to be safe. Which means you would have to eat 80 bowls of Honey Nut Cheerios a day… for 80-years… to MAYBE have cancer caused by this consumption. I say MAYBE because then you would have about a 1-in-10,000 person that genetics may be susceptible to “Round-Up.” So, a single person out of 10,000 people MAY have an ill-affect from consuming that amount (California standard is 1.1 milligrams) a day… for 80-years

But wait, that 1.1 milligrams was for a child consuming glyphosate. We grow up and become ADULTS (some of us at least). An ADULT would have to consume 2.4 million bowls a day for 80-years to have the 1-in-10,000 chance of cancer.

Why Can’t America Fill a Pothole?

Published by Papa Giorgio

Why can’t America build or repair infrastructure on a par with countries in Europe or Asia? Why are our bridges, roads, and airports not what they should be? Aren’t we the richest and most technologically savvy country in the world? Who or what is holding us back? Kyle Smith of National Review has the surprising (and frustrating) answer.

The Green New Deal | Hugh Hewitt

Published by Papa Giorgio

This is more of some commentary by Hugh Hewitt on The Green New Deal. Hewitt makes the point that this isn’t socialism, but Communism. Jonathan Swan of Axios (TWITTER) joins Hugh in discussing the utter lack of thought involved in this New Green Deal.

Hugh Hewitt reads through the Green New Deal and has some fun time with the grammar and lunacy of the text and ideas. I include TARZANA JOE’S (below) poem dealing with the New Green Deal. Long but informative.

POEM:

This year, the job’s been put to me

And so I should begin

Reporting as per statute

On the state our nation’s in

Unemployment’s at new lows

The market’s at new highs

But don’t be fooled, these numbers are

Disasters in disguise

What you don’t understand

About what these statistics show

The folks who process food stamps

Will soon have to be let go

And no sign is more ominous

No harbinger more fervent;

More damning to our country

Than an angry civil servant

And so I call on businesses

To do this town a solid

So we can hire more bureaucrats

To send help to the squalid

To quote the Madame Speaker

When quite rightly she reflects,

Nothing gives more stimulus

Than unemployment checks

Our Green New Deal will be the boon

For which we’ve all been yearning

And power plants, instead of coal,

Will run on yearbook burning

Now any time a country’s fate

And future are addressed

It’s right the situation

At the border be addressed

Some view immigration

Dourly and dimmingly

But I’ve been to the Rio Grande

And things are going swimmingly

Walls are just immoral

Brick and Mortar, a disaster

So our new legislation will soon outlaw

Lathe and plaster.

I could go on with my report

But it might bring me tears

And sad to say it stays this way

For two (or six) more years 0000000000 0

Everything the Left Touches is Harmed (Military Standards)

Published by Papa Giorgio

(Originally Posted December 2013)

This UPDATE comes by way of MOONBATTERY, and is followed by the an excerpt from the larger piece:

By necessity if not design, political correctness corrodes standards of value. That’s why its first victim is excellence. Those who draw attention to the corrosion are punished as thought criminals.

Progressives are in the process of reducing the military to a social engineering laboratory. It provides an example:

Two Army Green Berets are fighting for their military careers after being associated with an anonymous email that accused their commanders of lowering standards to enable more soldiers — particularly female — to graduate from its prestigious Q-course.

The anonymous email, signed, “A concerned Green Beret,” accused the leaders of the school of “moral cowardice” for lowering the standards…

The author of the email has already been punished. Now the Army is rooting out people who seem likely to agree with it….

Here is more information via BREITBART:, one can understand some of the disciplin, IN THAT, it became widely public. Here is a bit from the email that could have been more constructive… maybe?

  • “[The school] has devolved into a cesspool of toxic, exploitive, biased and self-serving senior officers who are bolstered by submissive, sycophantic, and just-as-culpable enlisted leaders,” the email said. “They have doggedly succeeded in two things; furthering their careers, and ensuring that Special Forces [are] more prolific but dangerously less capable than ever before.”

However TRUE it may be… someone’s macheezmo was butt hurt. Here is more on the other two Green Barretes:

Now, the two additional Green Beret instructors, Sergeant First Class Micah J. Robertson, 33, and Sergeant First Class Michael Squires, 31, say they are being punished by association.

Robertson said in an interview that after the email was sent out, commanders put together a list of about seven suspects, including them. He said he believes they were suspected because they had previously brought up concerns during town halls with leaders that were held to solicit their feedback.

Both have been instructors since 2016, before Sonntag took command in June 2017, and say they have witnessed the changes.

“Although Micah and I had nothing to do with it, it spoke true to what’s happening in the regiment. This guy Sonntag, who’s basically the one who’s trying to screw us over — he’s trying to make his career about putting a female through the course,” Squires said. He added that he did not oppose women in Special Forces, but opposed lowering the standards.

“Not only doing that, he’s changed it to where the guys who are coming through the Q-course are not even the same quality of guys we had back in the day. Guys who should have been kicked out for several different things … As instructors, they took our power away.”

Both Robertson and Squires were also served with Article 15s related to the email, as well as to an online app they started building in September 2017 named Kayu, aimed at helping travelers and veterans with similar interests connect.

The Article 15 accused both men of using their positions as instructors “for the purposes of personal gain” by “sourcing information from students that had no relevance to training,” or having their students sign up for the app. Robertson called that “hogwash.”

[….]

Former Green Beret and Ultimate Fighting Champion superstar Tim Kennedy said Army recruitment challenges hit the Green Beret force especially hard.

“[For] Special Forces specifically, we are gonna have the biggest deficit of eligible… population, to select from,” he said on The Joe Rogan Experience on May 17. “You have to have a certain level of intelligence, a certain level of physicality, just to be eligible for Special Forces to pick you… that pool is the smallest that has ever been in history.”

Sonntag himself acknowledged those challenges shortly after taking command. He said at a symposium in November 2017 that all three of the Army Special Operations regiments are facing serious challenges in “force structure changes, pipeline production, and recruiting.”

“We are currently not meeting our production numbers. The restructuring of the 85th [Civil Affairs] Brigade has created an imbalanced CA force structure. And our recruitment is down. If something doesn’t change soon, we will short the operational force drastically over the next five years,” he said.

Robertson said lowering standards in order to produce more Green Berets goes against a fundamental SOF truth that every Green Beret is taught….

I wanted to post some commentary on this issue, the first comes from a Marine posting some open thoughts on this “social engineering” grab by the Marines… joining the other branches in making it less safe on our front-lines in the name of Political-Correctness:

Didn’t see this coming Female Marines have received ample time (over a year) to prepare for this test which, oh by the way, still isn’t to the same standard that it is for males. Sure, they have to get the same bare minimum of 3 that males get. However, their max is 8 whereas mine is 20. So, on a maximum 300 point physical fitness test (PFT) where each of the 3 events (pull ups, crunches, 3 mile run) has the potential to give you 100 points, a female Marine only has to do 40% of the work I have to in order to get 100 points for her pull ups on her PFT. I call bogus. That enables her to be as competitive for promotion as me without having to do the work that I do. Not to mention that she can run her 3 miles in 21 minutes to receive 100 points for that while I have to run it in 18 minutes. If you’ve ever run a 5K, 3 minutes is an eternity between two runners.

Some of you will say “Well, that score is only part of what is looked at when considering promotion.” I will submit this to you. Every promotion board for E-6, E-7, and E-8/E-9 (this board is conducted jointly) in the Marine Corps has an after action review written for it. In every one of those after action reviews, the board members are asked “What is the first tie breaker between two Marines if there is one spot left in their MOS field to promote?” The answer is ALWAYS “Their PFT score.”

Now, some on this site will say that I am butt hurt because 3 females passed our infantry course. That is mentioned in the article. Not the case. When I know that 16 females began the course and only 3 passed, I’m not worried. Of the 16, 9 failed due to performance reasons. That leaves 7. Of those 7, 4 broke due to hip and knee problems. Those are the classic female breaking points that I’ve seen in most female injuries. Those occur very frequently at Parris Island as well. So, we have the 3 left. Now, for males, approximately 79% make it through infantry training. 10% of them are dropped for medical reasons. That leaves approximately 11% for performance/legal issues. For those of you who are Marines, it’s the classic, always spoken of, 10% that fail. Also of note, the females were required to carry each other during casualty evacuation, movement courses, etc. So, a female weighing 110lbs-140lbs is carrying around her equivalent weight while the males are slinging whichever casualty they see over their shoulder.

Again, I call bogus. I’m not a big fan of this social engineering crap. DADT was another issue. I wasn’t a supporter of that. It wasn’t performance based. A gay guy can fireman’s carry a casualty just as effectively (though the casualty may be uncomfortable) as a straight guy. But the vast majority of females cannot do the same. This is a performance thing for me. It is a logistical thing. It is a morale thing. Our military is the best in the world yet we want to mess with the very core of its competence. The members of it. I’m not a big fan.

…read more…

Technicalities of Gender Differences in Injuries

The above graph comes from a 1998 journal article in The Royal Society of Medicine (you may enlarge the graph by clicking it). The below is from Runners Connect:

[color-box]

The risk of running injuries in women

From looking at the scientific literature, we can see that women indeed do, on the whole, get injured more often than men do.  But the difference is not quite as drastic as popular wisdom might hold—a 2002 study of around two thousand patients at a Vancouver, Canada sports injury clinic found that women represented 54% of injuries, with men taking up the other 46%.  But among some specific injuries, women are at significantly higher risk.

In particular, the following injuries are 50% more common in women than men:

The LEFT loves to try and change, yes, even what nature has wrought!

[/color-box]

Libertarian Republican opines on the topic as well:

…About 55 percent of female recruits tested at the end of boot camp were doing fewer than three pullups; only 1 percent of male recruits failed the test. Upper body strength critical for combat

Continuing:

The Marine Corps has been using it to test upper body strength for men for more than 40 years. And that upper body strength, they say, is necessary to serve in ground combat: to pull yourself out of a canal in Afghanistan, to climb over a mud wall, to carry an ammunition box.

Exit question – So, how many male Marines have to die in combat in order to satisfy the liberal PC affirmative action crazies before women in combat is repealed?

To which I respond, a maximum amount can never satisfy the Left, look at the MILLIONS killed by the progressive Left’s attack on the black African’s lives via the non-existent DDT scare!

As I do in these cases, I always like to post David Mamet’s depth on this topic. I say depth because as a lifelong liberal… he finally applied common sense to his views and you have the following:

There is a Liberal sentiment that it should also punish those who take more than their “fair share.” But what is their fair share? (Shakespeare suggests that each should be treated not according to his deserts, but according to God’s mercy, or none of us would escape whipping.)

The concept of Fairness, for all its attractiveness to sentiment, is a dangerous one (cf. quota hiring and enrollment, and talk of “reparations”). Deviations from the Law, which is to say the Constitution, to accommodate specifically alleged identity-group injustices will all inevitably be expanded, universalized, and exploited until there remains no law, but only constant petition of Government….

Another legislative act talked about in the shop after this conversation about polygamy took place, are politicians listening to environmental activists and legislating the regular light-bulb illegal. In January it will be officially against the law to sell most forms of the standard — incandescent — light-bulb (Breitbart).  The idea is that if we use higher efficiency bulbs we will “save the planet” from those evil* fossil fuel emissions. (*I picture ‘blood’ dripping from the word as well as evil laughter off in the distance somewhere)

The problem? In every bulb that researchers tested they found that the protective coating around the light creating ‘phosphor’ was cracked, allowing dangerous ultraviolet rays to escape (RPT). You got it… through legislation, the power of government has made many people, in their own homes mind you, at a far greater risk for skin-cancer. A risk that this Irish-man knows all too well. What sounded good and altruistic, “saving the planet,” ironically has deadly consequences.

(RPT post on Polygamy)

We cannot live in peace without Law. And though law cannot be perfect, it may be just if it is written in ignorance of the identity of the claimants and applied equally to all. Then it is a possession not only of the claimants but of the society, which may now base its actions upon a reasonable assumption of the law’s treatment.

But “fairness” is not only a nonlegal but an antilegal process, for it deals not with universally applicable principles and strictures, but with specific cases, responding to the perceived or proclaimed needs of individual claimants, and their desire for extralegal preference. And it could be said to substitute fairness (a determination which must always be subjective) for justice (the application of the legislated will of the electorate), is to enshrine greed—the greed, in this case, not for wealth, but for preference. The socialistic spirit of the Left indicts ambition and the pursuit of wealth as Greed, and appeals, supposedly on behalf of “the people,” to the State for “fairness.”….

….But such fairness can only be the non-Constitutional intervention of the State in the legal, Constitutional process—awarding, as it sees fit, money (reparations), preferment (affirmative action), or entertainment (confiscation)….

….“Don’t you care?” is the admonition implicit in the very visage of the Liberals of my acquaintance on their understanding that I have embraced Conservatism. But the Talmud understood of old that good intentions can lead to evil—vide Busing, Urban Renewal, Affirmative Action, Welfare, et cetera, to name the more immedi­ately apparent, and not to mention the, literally, tens of thousands of Federal and State statutes limiting freedom of trade, which is to say, of the right of the individual to make a living, and, so earn that wealth which would, in its necessary expenditure, allow him to provide a living to others….

…. I recognized that though, as a lifelong Liberal, I endorsed and paid lip service to “social justice,” which is to say, to equality of result, I actually based the important decisions of my life—those in which I was personally going to be affected by the outcome—upon the principle of equality of opportunity; and, further, that so did everyone I knew. Many, I saw, were prepared to pay more taxes, as a form of Charity, which is to say, to hand off to the Government the choice of programs and recipients of their hard-earned money, but no one was prepared to be on the short end of the failed Government pro­grams, however well-intentioned. (For example—one might endorse a program giving to minorities preference in award of government contracts; but, as a business owner, one would fight to get the best possible job under the best possible terms regardless of such a pro­gram, and would, in fact, work by all legal and, perhaps by semi- or illegal means to subvert any program that enforced upon the pro­prietor a bad business decision.)*

Further, one, in paying the government to relieve him of a feeling of social responsibility, might not be bothered to question what in fact constituted a minority, and whether, in fact, such minority con­tracts were actually benefiting the minority so enshrined, or were being subverted to shell corporations and straw men.✣

* No one would say of a firefighter, hired under rules reducing the height requirement, and thus unable to carry one’s child to safety, “Nonetheless, I am glad I voted for that ‘more fair’ law.”

✣ As, indeed, they are, or, in the best case, to those among the applicants claiming eligibility most capable of framing, supporting, or bribing their claims to the front of the line. All claims cannot be met. The politicians and bureaucrats discriminating between claims will necessarily favor those redounding to their individual or party benefit—so the eternal problem of “Fairness,” supposedly solved by Government distribution of funds, becomes, yet again and inevitably, a question of graft.

David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture (New York, NY: Sentinel Publishing, 2011), 116-117, 122, 151, 154.

You see… the left loves to feel good. In doing so they ruin the quality of what they touch. From the lives of those who have contact with our first responders, to even composers looked at as the best in history:

Further poisoning musical judgment is the Left-wing value of diversity. In 2011, Anthony Tommasini, music critic of the New York Times, published his list of the ten greatest composers who ever lived. Absent from the list was Haydn, who Tommasini acknowledged was the father of the symphony, father of the string quartet, and father of the piano sonata. Indeed, one of the avant-garde’s most celebrated modern composers (and a justly celebrated conductor), Pierre Boulez, “thinks Haydn a greater composer than Mozart,” and one of the greatest pianists who ever lived, Glenn Gould, thought Haydn’s piano sonatas were superior to Mozart’s. So, why did the New York Times music critic omit Haydn? Because, he wrote, “If such a list is to be at all diverse and comprehensive, how could 4 of the 10 slots go to composers—Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert—who worked in Vienna during, say, the 75 years from 1750 to 1825?” Diversity, not greatness, helped determine the New York Times list of the greatest ten composers. That is why Bartok, Debussy, and Stravinsky made the list but Haydn (and Handel) didn’t.

Dennis Prager, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph (New York, NY: Broadside Books, 2012), 52-53

Professor Sommers & the Tyranny of Niceness

“The ideal of liberty and freely speaking your mind is so quintessentially American.”

FIRE Board of Advisors member Christina Hoff Sommers is no stranger to speaking her mind. As the author of books such as The War Against Boys and One Nation Under Therapy, Sommers has taken firm stances on many hot button issues.

But in FIRE’s latest video, Sommers argues that today’s students are afraid to express their own potentially controversial viewpoints. She believes students are enveloped within a cultural phenomenon she calls “the tyranny of niceness.” So concerned with not offending their peers’ beliefs, students are hesitant to take a stand for what they believe in.

“What [students] are supposed to be doing is developing ideas and challenging them, learning how to debate,” says Sommers. “We have a generation of kids who can’t argue. They think that will create tension or there’s something wrong with it. Well, if you can’t argue, you can’t think.”

F.I.R.E. has a FaceBook (https://www.facebook.com/thefireorg), a YouTube account, as well as a Twitter account.

Education is the same… the dumbing down of children in the pursuit of “fairness” and “equality” is one of these examples that harms our children’s future. First a commentary about high-school, with a video as an example of the harm done to higher education by the PC crowd ruining education:

It has been no secret that we are having an educational crisis in the United States.  Public schools are doing worse and worse, unable to compete with private schools, homeschooled children, and for that matter the rest of the world. Some suggest that this is on purpose. By dumbing down our children we are preparing the future generations for more easily accepting authoritarian control by leftist systems of governance.

We are raising young people in our public schools that are illiterate. We are cramming them with bad information from experimental teaching techniques, political correctness, and liberal philosophies so that they will be good, obedient citizens. Informed voters think for themselves, and seek freedom. A dumbed down population is always eager to depend on the government overlords. Mind-numbed followers don’t ask questions.

History is our students’ worst subject. They can’t even answer the simplest questions about history in regards to the Revolutionary War, World War II, or the Korean War. The fault partly lies in the fact that history textbooks are poorly written, and partly because they are not being taught the information in the first place. I remember when my nephew came to me upset because in his History Class they skipped the chapter about the U.S. Constitution. When he inquired why, the teacher explained to him that the class was limited in time and had to skip unnecessary lessons.

In addition to skipping over important parts of history, new history uses political correctness, and caters to pop culture and particular groups in an effort to appease the same groups the leftist political wing-nuts are also trying to appease. As a result, the generations of students that come out of our schools don’t know our past, and as the old dictum goes, he who forgets the past is doomed to repeat it.

Educational malpractice in the public schools is not only a problem presented by liberal democrats and Marxists that have infiltrated our educational system, but is also the fault of bone-headed, and unconstitutional, legislation like the “No Child Left Behind” Act. The law that was Bush 43’s baby, despite its good intentions, worsened our education system, took the emphasis away from knowing our history, and of course was unconstitutional just like the Education Department. The federal government has no authority over education in this country. That is a local issue, and for good reason.

The problem is, the local systems have been so influenced by federal dictate that they have also become a part of the madness that is dumbing down America. An example revealed itself recently in Florida schools where, because only 27% of the students were able to pass a fourth grade state written exam, the Florida Department of Education lowered the performance level standard. The decision was made by a four-three vote, reasoning that the kids did so poorly because the test was too hard.

Yes, I just defended that our schools belong in local hands, and here we are with a state board doing stupid things too. Understand, though, that is because of the federal, and hard left, influence.

…read more…

See also FIRE’s list of “10 Worst Colleges for Free Speech: 2013”

California Falls Off Alternative Deep End

Published by Papa Giorgio

WTH is wrong with California?? Oh yeah, D E M O C R A T S:

Due to moonbattery, California is headed off the rails; let’s hope it doesn’t take the rest of the economy with it. The irresponsible kook Gavin Newsom — who has promised free healthcareto any illegal aliens who can sneak into the state — hasn’t even taken office as Governor yet, and plans to impose absolute lunacy are already underway:

The state assembly on Tuesday passed S.B. 100, a proposal to transition California to 100 percent emissions-free electricity sources by 2045.

You can’t run the world’s fifth largest economy on wind turbines, solar panels, and pious green thoughts….

(MOONBATTERY)

Crazy California vs. Straws (John and Ken)

Published by Papa Giorgio

I combine two different segments of John and Ken discussing California’s #FakeNews regarding straws and the environment. (The first segment is from Thursday’s show, the second is from Wednesday’s show [starts at the 7:15 mark]) Some funny and frustrating stuff.