"I will ban fracking—everywhere."[1]
— Elizabeth Warren
"Any proposal to avert the climate crisis must include a full fracking ban on public and private lands."[2]
— Bernie Sanders
"I favor a ban on new fracking and a rapid end to existing fracking."[3]
— Pete Buttigieg
Saturday, December 28, 2019
Idiocy
In the Manhattan Institue, Mark Mills writes a persuasive essay here on how a fracking ban would cause a global recession. Yet, three of the Democratic candidates take a devastatingly stupid stand against fracking.
Kudos to Charlie Brown creator Charles Schulz and Coca Cola!
In Newsbusters, Scott Whitlock reports,
Watching A Charlie Brown Christmas has been a tradition for millions since it first aired on December 9, 1965. While many love the iconic Vince Guaraldi score, the humor and the animation, one part of the special has always stood out and made it unique: Linus’s recitation of the Gospel of Luke.
Explaining the true meaning of Christmas in a network television special broadcast to millions was a controversial move, even 54 years ago. In 2015, The Washington Post published a retrospective on A Charlie Brown Christmas. Michael Cavna explained Peanuts creator Charles Schulz’s mission in making the special:
Charles Schulz insisted on one core purpose: A Charlie Brown Christmas had to be about something. Namely, the true meaning of Christmas. Otherwise, Schulz said, “Why bother doing it?”
To Coca-Cola’s credit, Mendelson says, the corporate sponsor never balked at the idea of including New Testament passages. The result — Linus’s reading from the Book of Luke about the meaning of the season — became “the most magical two minutes in all of TV animation,” the producer says.
Schulz stood strong, despite efforts to talk him out of quoting from the Bible. On December 5, 2005, USA Today recounted:
[Executive producer Lee] Mendelson and animator Bill Melendez fretted about the insistence by Peanuts creator Charles Schulz that his first-ever TV spinoff end with a reading of the Christmas story from the Gospel of Luke by a lisping little boy named Linus.
"We told Schulz, 'Look, you can't read from the Bible on network television,' " Mendelson says. "When we finished the show and watched it, Melendez and I looked at each other and I said, 'We've ruined Charlie Brown.' "
According to a recounting on MentalFloss.com, CBS executives also told Schulz: “You can't read from the Bible on network television.”
Mental Floss writer Kara Kovalchik recounted what happened next:
But CBS had made a commitment to their sponsor, so they aired the special as scheduled on December 9, 1965. And, as often happens in the world of entertainment, the original gut reaction of the suits was completely wrong. A Charlie Brown Christmas drew in 15.4 million viewers, placing it second in the ratings that week after Bonanza. A few months later, Charles Schulz and Lee Mendelson found themselves onstage accepting an Emmy Award for Outstanding Children's Program.
And so, the Charlie Brown creator persevered and created a Christmas classic that endures 54 years later.
In case you don’t remember the iconic moment, here it is:
For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God, and saying: ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on Earth, peace and goodwill towards men.’
“That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”
San Francisco dogs announce a citywide cleanup
From the satirical Babylon Bee:
SAN FRANCISCO, CA—The dogs of San Francisco have announced a citywide cleanup initiative, in which the canines will carry little plastic bags with them wherever they go in order to clean up the massive dumps humans keep leaving on the sidewalk.
The initiative is expected to freshen up the city significantly, ridding the sidewalk of millions of pounds of human waste.
"We need to start taking pride in our city," said one labrador as he scooped up a giant turd his owner had just left on the sidewalk and placed it in a nearby human waste bin. "It's incredibly rude what these humans do. They just see some rando's lawn and decide, 'Yeah, that's a good place to drop a deuce.' It's like, we're living in a society, here."
The dogs have begun putting signs up around the city reading things like, "Please Pick Up After Your Owner" and "If Your Human Poops, You Scoop."
Teaching Trump a lesson
From the satirical Babylon Bee:
The impeachment hearings have been thrown into chaos after President Trump announced that he supports impeachment, forcing Democrats to oppose their own impeachment inquiry.
"Impeachment? I'm for it. Great idea. Best idea, maybe ever," he said, adding that he's "getting kinda sick of all this winning anyway."
"Sure, why not. Impeach me. I love it. Whatever. Now I'm gonna go watch Joker again. Great film. What's that guy's name? Phoenix something. Bob Phoenix, that's it. Tremendous actor---absolutely perfect."
Democrats quickly condemned his statements. Pelosi said, "It's clear that Trump wants to be impeached because he's not good at being president. Well, we're going to show him a thing or two by forcing him to stay in the White House and finish out his term."
"And Joker is alt-right propaganda," she said, falling for Trump's ploy to make Dems condemn one of the most successful, beloved films of the year.
One pundit on CNN suggested that Trump is supporting impeachment at the request of Putin or the guy from Ukraine or "whichever conspiracy thing we're pushing this month, I forget."
At publishing time, Democrats had also withdrawn from the 2020 race to teach Trump a lesson.
Why no FBI or CIA whistleblowers on the spying on the Trump team?
Because it was being run at the highest levels of the FBI and CIA in coordination with Susan Rice, Obama's National Security Advisor!
Friday, December 27, 2019
If there is a better organization than Judicial Watch, I don't know what it would be!
"When are Hillary and Obama going under oath to be asked tough questions about their involvement in spygate?:pic.twitter.com/04PjCbdNHj
— Citizen Free Press (@TheDailyBail) December 27, 2019
"If those responsible are not held to account, this will happen again."
In the American Thinker blog, Frank Watt, who served for over 22 years as an FBI special agent, supervisory special agent, and FBI SWAT team leader, writes in part,
Whichever explanation seems more likely, the end result should be infuriating to every American. Either your nation's premiere law enforcement agency was breathtakingly incompetent when the stakes were the highest, or select officials in that organization made deliberate decisions to break the law, undermine the Constitution, and illegally spy on a fellow American. Either possibility has deeply damaged the reputation of the FBI and DOJ in addition to the reputations of thousands of honest FBI Agents and DOJ attorneys. Despite the legitimate concerns of civil libertarians, the FISA process has indisputably proved an invaluable resource in safeguarding the country from terrorism. If the heinous abuses documented in the I.G.s report result in a weakening or loss of FISA, we will all be the worse for it. If those responsible are not held to account, this will happen again. There is no happy face to put on this episode.Read more here.
"Playing a devious and cynical game"
The New York Times has an opinion piece indicating that men are "dismissing" the latest screen adaptation of the beloved novel "Little Women." Ace of Spades gives us his opinion:
Well, it just so happens that I have the perfect solution to this crisis -- a solution proposed and enforced by the Social Justice Warriors currently complaining that men don't want to see movies made for women.Read more here.
In the past six or so years, whenever Social Justice Warriors and feminists decided that there aren't "enough women" going to see male-starring action movies, the SJWs/feminists always prescribed the same cure: that we entice women by putting more women into the movies.
Make 007 a woman. Make the Ghostbusters all-female. Make the hero in five of the six Disney Star Wars movies a progressive white woman.
So, applying this same solution to "Little Women" -- if the producers of the film wanted men to come, they should have offered more Male Representation in their films, and perhaps have gender-bent most of the female characters to male?
See, if women don't See Themselves on the Screen, they're not being represented, and a great crime is being committed.
So why aren't people outraged that Men Can't See Themselves on Screen in Little Women?
Also, the SJWs always demand more "diversity" in casting. That is both good for business and a necessary virtue signal, they tell us.
So I need to know: Why are there not more black women in Little Women? Where are the transwomen, for that matter?
Or is it that leftwing feminist white women are excluded from the same demands of Gender and Racial Representation they impose on all male-skewing entertainments?
By the way: I don't want any women to think I actually want Little Women to be turned into a mixed-race British version of the Dukes of Hazzard.
I think women should be entitled to have the sorts of entertainments that appeal to them, without being adulterated and distorted by bizarre racial-and-gender bean-counting identity politics.
I'm just asking: Why can't men have the same thing?
I also hope I haven't offended anyone by speaking of white women feminists. Note the "Feminists" at the end.
I like white women, obviously. But White Women Feminists are playing a devious and cynical game in always championing diversity for others, while branding themselves as "diverse" (despite being white, and despite being women, who are the majority of the population) and then just taking most of the Diversity Slots they themselves demanded.
A lot of nonwhite feminists notice this double game, too, and criticize White Women Feminists for using the rhetoric of diversity to get quotas and set-asides for themselves.
None of that applies to white women (or any other women) who are not feminists, of course. It's just White Women Feminists, specifically, who use a lot of black faces in their PR advertisements for diversity, and then fill up the top slots with their own white faces.
Close it up
"It’s not political—it’s personal."
Mark Bauerlein writes in American Greatness,
The liberal elite are in the midst of a crisis of legitimacy. In President Trump’s fate lies their fate. If he survives until November 2020, and proceeds to win reelection, the cognitive dissonance will be excruciating. The elite will never stop believing in their superiority, but they want the rest of the country to recognize it as well. It bothers them to realize that the Great Unwashed despise them as much as the elite deplore the masses.Read more here.
...President Trump is the megaphone and the champion of those the elites despise. That’s what #TheResistance is all about. If Trump goes down, the elite go back up. His ascent is a blow to their collective ego. He’s an insult to their GRE scores and doctoral degrees. They will never stop hating him. It’s not political—it’s personal.
Thursday, December 26, 2019
"We were brainwashed into surveilling ourselves."
In PJ Media, Richard Fernandez cites some New York Times writers:
Fernandez quickly adds,
"Every moment of every day you are under surveillance by your phone and they don't even apply for a warrant. NYT reporters were given a workaday data set collected by application providers.Read more here.
By analyzing these pings, our journalists were able to track the movements of President Trump’s Secret Service guards and of senior Pentagon officials. They could follow protesters to their homes and stalk high-school students across Los Angeles. In most cases, it was child’s play for them to connect a supposedly anonymous data trail to a name and an address — to a real live human being.
Your smartphone can broadcast your exact location thousands of times per day, through hundreds of apps, instantaneously to dozens of different companies. Each of those companies has the power to follow individual mobile phones wherever they go, in near-real time.
That’s not a glitch in the system. It is the system.
If the government ordered Americans to continuously provide such precise, real-time information about themselves, there would be a revolt. Members of Congress would trample one another to be first in front of the cable news cameras to quote the founders and insist on our rights to be free of such pervasive surveillance.
Yet, as a society, without ever focusing on this profound choice, we’ve reached a tacit consensus to hand this data over voluntarily, even though we don’t really know who’s getting it or what they’re doing with it. As the close of 2019 approaches, everybody is searching for the meaning of the decade. Here’s a thought: This is the decade — the period since the founding of the App Store, in 2008 — in which we were brainwashed into surveilling ourselves."
Fernandez quickly adds,
It would have been more convincing if the thundering NYT denunciation of surveillance had not also contained the boilerplate footer. "Like other media companies, The Times collects data on its visitors when they read stories like this one. For more detail please see our privacy policy and our publisher's description of The Times's practices and continued steps to increase transparency and protections." Even the NYT can't help spying on the public any more than anyone else.Read more here.
Our ruling elites have no shame!
In the Claremont Review of Books, Michael Anton wrote in part,
People capable of feeling shame would not have immediately followed up the Russiagate hoax fiasco with another transparently phony—and in “substance” nearly identical—attempt to remove President Trump from office, overturn the 2016 election, and shower deplorable-Americans with contempt and hatred. But our ruling elites have no shame.Read more here.
...Many others have called Russiagate the “biggest political scandal in American history” and, Lord knows, I agree. The amazing thing about it, then, is how little accountability there has been. From what I can tell, two individuals—Peter Strzok and Andrew McCabe, the latter on the cusp of retirement—were removed from their jobs. That’s it. No criminal charges or anything else. What are these “deep-staters” so worried about? They run everything and take care of their own. Even with a president in office who, they allege, hates them and routinely abuses his power, they’ve—as yet—faced no consequences at all.
...I hope that Attorney General William Barr, Special Counsel John Durham, and Inspector General Michael Horowitz will reassure me that American law has not become a tool for elites to enforce, or not, at their discretion and in their interests.
...(Whatever you think of Bill Clinton’s impeachment, it was emphatically not driven or supported by the administrative state, which protected him at every turn.) Trump would likely take this as small consolation, but it’s a measure of how much he’s feared that his enemies are running this play against him now, rather than simply trying to defeat him next year. Which more than suggests they doubt they can.
The secrecy has partly ended—but only after the Democrats gathered its fruits and shaped them into a “narrative” to spoon-feed to the public. The playbook is the same one that failed with the Russia hoax: selectively leak to create a fog, a miasma of vaguely negative-sounding “facts” or allegations that seem ominous but also too complex and in-the-weeds for ordinary folk to follow. Then publicly “confirm” those leaks as the authoritative account of the “scandal.” None of the actual facts adds up to any actual wrongdoing, but the hope is that regular people won’t notice and won’t listen to those who do. Leave it to us experts: we know wrongdoing when we see it! If the actual specifics of what we’re alleging don’t actually appear to you to amount to “treason, bribery, [or] other high crimes and misdemeanors,” as the Constitution’s Article II, section 4 requires, that’s only because you’re not an expert.
Ring of Fire
In Breitbart, Katherine Rodriguez reports,
A partial annular solar eclipse will illuminate the sky with a “ring of fire” during the day in the Eastern Hemisphere the day after Christmas.
An annular solar eclipse takes place when the moon is small in the sky and moves directly across the sun, but does not entirely cover it. Therefore, a “ring of fire” forms around the silhouette of the dark moon.
The natural phenomenon will be visible in Asia and the Middle East, including Oman, the UAE, southern India, Indonesia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Guam, and Malaysia. This eclipse will not be visible from North America.
This annular solar eclipse is the last of its kind this year and will last for about 3 minutes and 40 seconds. It is dangerous to view an annular solar eclipse without wearing proper eye protection.
The Battle of the Bulge: 75 years ago this month. What can we learn?
In PJ Media, Victor Davis Hanson writes in part,
Seventy-five years ago, at the Battle of the Bulge (fought from Dec. 16, 1944, to Jan. 25, 1945), the United States suffered more casualties than in any other battle in its history. Some 19,000 Americans were killed, 47,500 wounded and 23,000 reported missing.Read more here.
...the losing side is often the most dangerous just before its collapse.
...Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, commander of Allied Forces in Western Europe, never expected that a tottering Germany could muster 400,000 attackers with roughly 600 tanks and massive artillery support -- all secretly massed just a few miles beyond Allied lines.
Yet by the second week in January, the month-long offensive had largely failed. The Germans were in retreat. They had lost almost as many men and machines as the Americans but lacked a commensurate ability to replace them.
What can we learn from our bloodiest battle on the 75th anniversary of it?
The deadliest periods of a war are often near its end. The losing side puts up a desperate resistance that is often unexpected by the overconfident, winning opponents. One of the most lethal American battles in the Pacific Theater was fought at Okinawa, costing 50,000 casualties and ending just weeks before Japan surrendered.
...Had the American command followed the rambunctious Patton's recommendation to cut off the overexposed German bulge at its base, rather than conservatively try to push it back at the nose, the campaign would have ended even sooner, with far fewer lost American lives.
...The Battle of the Bulge reminds us that when deadly enemies prove unpredictable, it is sometimes wise to have an even more unpredictable leader on our side.
The decline of Christian moral thought
In American Greatness, Dennis Prager writes about the decline of Christian moral thought. In particular, he singles out the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, Mark Galli, who wrote an article calling for the impeachment of Donald Trump.
In my view, this editorial only serves to confirm one of the sadder realizations of my life: that religious conviction guarantees neither moral clarity nor common sense.Read more here.
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