Category Archive: These Are The Crazy Years

TDS is a horrible disease.

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General Curmudgeonry, These Are The Crazy Years, Trump Derangement Syndrome Watch

Wednesday, 11 March 2020 15:47

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Presented for your consideration, columnist Bret Stephens, who used to be a conservative:  New York Times columnist Bret Stephens declares coronavirus is Trump’s ‘Chernobyl’

Not even close, you NeverTrump moron.

Chernobyl was preventable, not only in hindsight, and could easily have been seen barrelling down the highway toward disaster, but the Soviet system didn’t work that way. Result: Meltdown. (Something that’s never happened in the US, not even at Three Mile Island, where so little radiation was released, it almost couldn’t be measured. And certainly not at Hanford-N, which was the closest thing we had to a Chernobyl-style reactor, and which was engineered properly with plenty of safeguards so it would not have done what Chernobyl did.)

Conversely, nobody saw Covid-19 coming. And if anyone is to blame, it’s the Red Chinese for not reacting appropriately. (I’m not giving any credence to the conspiracy theories, so don’t look for that here — but even if they were true, the Red Chinese still did not react appropriately.)

The fact is, totalitarian regimes do not handle disaster well. On the other hand, I can’t see where Trump has set a foot wrong on this to date. Yeah, he tweets a lot of BS and says a lot of things that might or might not be true, but that’s not indicative of what’s going on behind the scenes. You solve a pandemic by closing borders, stopping flights, advising people to increase social distance, and telling those who are exposed to go home and stay away from other people for a couple of weeks unless they develop symptoms, in which case you call the hospital and tell them you think you have the virus so they can be ready to handle you when you get there (like Community North handled the case that landed on their doorstep last week). These things are all being done, despite the seeming inability of the CDC to get their sh*t together until they were prodded to do so.

Other than throw a ton of (borrowed) money at the problem, I don’t see what Trump’s detractors in Congress have done to slow down what WHO is finally calling a pandemic (as if we didn’t all know that weeks ago). Mostly his Congressional detractors have simply lied through their teeth about Trump’s response to the problem. The media, for their part, have gone into full panic mode and the markets are just following the panic. (The markets will be fine. The media, not so sure of that.)

We’ve finally seen universities telling students to stay home after spring break and not come back to classes; they’ll teach classes online for a few weeks and hopefully prevent the virus from running rampant through their hallowed halls. Strangely enough, some of their students are protesting this, which only points up once again why the voting age should be raised to a minimum of 21 (I would be more comfortable with 40) and why children should, by and large, be seen and not heard. Even IU is going to do this. Talk about cats and dogs living together. IU never closes. Ask my wife.

So in many ways, the crisis is being handled well, and Dr. Benton Quest Trump (and his Race Bannon look-alike sidekick, Pence*) are due a lot of credit for that, even if the nutbags at the New York Times and the Washington Post are near to committing seppuku over the failure, once again, of their anti-Trump narrative.

And the NeverTrumpers are showing their true colors as usual, so angry and spiteful (and out of government) from TDS they need double windscreens on their microphones to keep from spitting all over them. Believe it or not, Bret Stephens used to be a fairly smart guy. Now he’s just another soi-disant “conservative” fool who’d rather burn down the country than save it. To the devil with him, and the rest of all NeverTrumpers.

_______________

* Come on.  Admit it.  If you grew up watching Jonny Quest, you want Race Bannon handling this kind of thing.

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Thoughts and prayers

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General Curmudgeonry, Perversity of Humanity, Progressive Derangement, These Are The Crazy Years

Tuesday, 4 February 2020 12:22

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I have not listened to Rush Limbaugh for literally years, ever since I got tired of the constant “inline” ad breaks and frankly what I considered to be an alarming trend in his love of his own voice resulting in fewer and fewer minutes of caller input.  And in general, three hours of political yak yak in the middle of the day during the Obama misAdministration didn’t sit well on my stomach, most days.  Bottom line, the signal to noise ratio had dropped considerably, and I had better things to do.  (Maybe this has changed but it’s too late for me to go back to find out.)

So despite the fact that I know he’s long been a connoisseur of fine cigars, it nevertheless came as a shock to hear that he had announced his diagnosis of advanced lung cancer.

Naturally, this announcement brought out the usual gleeful left-wing suspects talking about, for instance, what a great world it would be without Rush Limbaugh in it, and so forth.  But at least one person on the left took the high road, instead:

Now, I don’t care for her politics, but damn, the lady is a class act. If the rest of the Democrats had half her grace and honesty, this primary season might be bearable. They could (and will) do a lot worse than nominate Ms. Gabbard.

All the best to Rush. Cancer is apolitical and indiscriminate. We should support its sufferers ditto.

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Mr. McConnell, tear down this impeachment.

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Democrats Own Defeat, These Are The Crazy Years, Trump Derangement Syndrome Watch

Monday, 23 December 2019 17:51

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SCOTUS: No Articles of Impeachment or a Trial Are Required For The Senate to Acquit President Trump

[T]he Supreme Court has ruled – in the Nixon case [Nixon v. United States, 506 U.S. 224 (1993)] – that how the Senate goes about acquitting or convicting any impeached person is non-justiciable, in that the Senate’s power is plenary and the Supreme Court may not even review it.

This means that if the Senate acquits Trump immediately – without a trial – the Supreme Court has no authority, whatsoever, to review the Senate’s acquittal, and there isn’t a damn thing the House can do about it.

Which means that the Dems arguing that Trump hasn’t been impeached yet and the Senate must wait for the articles to be “transmitted” are a bunch of lying sacks of shite.

That SCOTUS ruling, by the way, was 9-0. Even the liberal Democrats then on the court concurred.

It’s time to end this farce, Mr. McConnell. The Senate must take action. Bring it to the floor and proceed to a vote.

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The walls are closing in on freedom.

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General Curmudgeonry, These Are The Crazy Years

Tuesday, 3 December 2019 10:37

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Seen on MeWe and Facebook:

As my friend Robert Evans says on the two platforms, “Transhustler “Jessica” Yaniv is at it again, wanting a gynecologist to examine her his girlballz.”

To which I replied, this is why it is so important to run Obama and Clinton judges out and replace them with judges who have at least half a brain. This is no different than “bake that cake” or “take that photo” or “serve that pizza.”

We are not free if we can be forced to do things that go against our beliefs or are prima facie idiotic. Someone particularly needs to take a stand against the gender warriors and tell them to man or woman up — there are only two genders and you are and will be treated as the one you were born as, period, full stop, end of subject.

And parents who try to raise and/or transform their little boys as little girls and vice versa need to be lined up against the wall and shot.

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The stupid, it burns.

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General Curmudgeonry, Progressive Derangement, These Are The Crazy Years

Friday, 20 September 2019 11:57

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Damn it, another day, yet another fucking idiot to make fun of.

Last week, a Native American botanist argued that the genetic modification of crops is a form of rape. Perhaps the next step in the #MeToo movement involves returning to the low crop yields before the Green Revolution, which saved billions of lives by making food more available through genetic modification, among other things.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist, member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at SUNY-Syracuse, called corn “one of our deepest and oldest relatives.” In an interview with Wisconsin Public Radio, she humanized corn as the “Corn Mother,” saying, “Corn is sacred because she gives us her children in return for protecting us.”

Kimmerer wasn’t talking about the sweet corn Americans love to eat today, but rather the Native corn that comes in hundreds of varieties. She contrasted this wild corn with the genetically modified corn her neighbor grows.

“There’s a word for forcible injection of unwanted genes,” Kimmerer said. “Rape.”

There’s also a word for people who try to anthropomorphize non-sentient plants:  Fucking idiots.

OK, that’s a phrase, not a word, but same difference.

We eat well today, and so does much of the rest of the world — including the shitholes that used to bury millions who suffered and died from malnutrition and plain old starvation — mainly because of one man who sparked the Green Revolution mentioned above:  Norman Borlaug.

What blows my mind is that the whole idea of genmodding crops is only a step removed from the old ways of farming for greater yields, which involved things like culling, grafting, and selective breeding — all of which changed the genetic makeup of crops over thousands of years so that we actually have the non-GM crops we have today.

Wheat was just a grass.  Corn (maize) was also just a grass.  Vegetables we take for granted today like cauliflower, broccoli, and others of the family of Cruciferous vegetables, are all descended from the humble mustard plant.

And none of them got where they are today without someone — a lot of someones — selectively breeding them for desired qualities, including the size of the “ear”, that is, the seeds.  Wheat originally had little gluten content, but modern strains have lots of it.  Borlaug himself created high-yield strains of wheat by crossbreeding existing strains and combining their qualities — he might take one strain known to produce large ears, and another strain known to be resistant to some particular disease or fungus that was plaguing the first strain, and combine them until he had a new strain that had both large ears and disease resistance.

Genmod simply takes the ancient practices and goes a little deeper.  We get things like golden rice that way, which saves millions of Third World children from vitamin A deficiencies and prevents them from going blind.  We also get wheat that is resistant to stem rust that way.

So as the article continues,

Wisconsin Public Radio noted that the sweet corn “has been altered by agribusiness,” but the article did not mention the role genetically modified corn has played in the Green Revolution, which has been credited with saving 1 billion lives and averting the doomsday prediction of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb.

[snip]

The Green Revolution combined genetic modification with new fertilizers and agro-chemicals, controlled water supply, and new mechanical cultivation. These new methods may strike an advocate for native practices as strange or even barbaric, but they saved more than a billion people across the world.

Those who wish to see corn as a sacred “Corn Mother” represent a return to the ancient animistic view of the world. Treating plants as sentient beings may sound hip and “progressive,” but Kimmerer’s rejection of genetic modification is backward, and it could be dangerous. Would she really want to reverse the Green Revolution and bring back pre-modern levels of starvation?

Well, I don’t know, but she sure sounds like she would.  There sure isn’t any going back without condemning millions of people to starvation and death.

People with this level of Luddism and idiocy are dangerous, and really need to be removed from positions of influence and authority before they do actual harm.  Sadly, they’ll probably stay right where they are for years, and continue to sell their brand of stupid to successive classes of mush-for-brains college students.  We can only hope that they’ll shake it off in later life and realize how fortunate they are to live in a modern age where most of us don’t have to worry about food shortages, famine, and starving to death.

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Sheila Jackson Lee is an idiot…but I repeat myself.

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General Curmudgeonry, Progressive Derangement, These Are The Crazy Years

Tuesday, 17 September 2019 17:37

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Sheila Jackson Lee, you are an idiot, a poseur, and a disgrace to the House of Representatives — insofar as anything can disgrace it further. You have proven you know nothing:

“I don’t know what else it takes but I don’t believe we can stop at the door of the United States House. I believe there will have to be an emergence of members of the House flooding the United States Senate for Senator McConnell to understand that these initiatives today, my gun storage bill, my bill that I’ve introduced dealing with the caliber weapon, I’ve held an AR-15 in my hand, I wish I had it. It is as heavy as 10 boxes that you might be moving and the bullet that is utilized, a .50-caliber, these kinds of bullets need to be licensed and do not need to be on the street.”

  • An AR-15 is “as heavy as 10 boxes you might be moving.” What? Clearly Ms. Jackson Lee has never moved house by herself before. Or she’s talking about 10 shoeboxes. Or smaller.  (Someone in the comments to that linked article suggested 10 one-pound boxes of cocaine…which would still be about three pounds heavy.)
  • The bullet “is a .50-caliber”. No. It’s a 5.56mm. .223 caliber if you really want to be a stickler.  Yeah, you can buy a .50cal upper for an AR-pattern weapon.  It doesn’t shoot the .50BMG like the Ma Deuce, it shoots .50 Beowulf, which is usually used as a feral hog cartridge, or so I’m told.  By and large, citizen owners of the AR-15 don’t have that mod, anyway, and aren’t interested in using it for home defense — I hope.
  • Jackson Lee first calls whatever rifle she’s talking about “the caliber weapon”. This is like Carolyn McCarthy calling the AR’s folding stock “the shoulder thing that goes up.”

These stupid statements show that she knows nothing whatsoever about the firearm she is trying to ban. Which is pretty sad, when you get right down to it. Ignorance of these things shows that she is a knee-jerk statist gun banner who doesn’t care that the vast, vast, VAST majority of AR-15 rifles in private hands in this country have never been used for any illegal purpose. I mean, read this for more illogic and “must protect phoney baloney job” rhetoric:

“We’re at a domestic crisis and it’s toxic and it’s combined with hatred and besides the toxicity of hate, we have guns, and we cannot wait any longer,” she said. “We’re good people in Texas but we’re frightened and so what I’m hearing from people is they are frightened, that they believe they cannot live in this kind of status and definition of what Texas is.”

“We cannot wait any longer.” Right. Like Glenn Reynolds said after Sandy Hook,

“When people say things like ‘don’t let this moment pass without acting on gun control,’ what they’re really saying is our arguments are so unpersuasive that they can only succeed when people aren’t thinking clearly.”

And I’d like to see her get her Dumbs through the Senate’s sergeant at arms to “flood the Senate”. If I were Mitch McConnell, I’d have the Capitol Police up there ready to arrest any of them who try.

Citizens of Texas, you need to rid yourselves of this hideously stupid boil on the ass of the body politic. And that, soon.

And Ms. Jackson Lee?  Your constituents (and many other patriotic Americans) have long had a saying (though I have it on reliable authority that the Spartans said it first):  Come and take them.

We dare you.  Because we know you don’t have the guts to do it yourself, any more than Xerxes did at Thermopylae.

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Destroying our history to save our country … doesn’t work.

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General Curmudgeonry, These Are The Crazy Years

Saturday, 25 May 2019 16:16

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The City of Dallas has declared its statue of Robert E. Lee — removed from a city park two years ago — as “surplus property” and is putting it up for sale.

To say that this is ridiculously stupid is to treat the issue with kindness and charity.

You may call Lee and the rest of the leaders of the Southern Confederacy traitors (and many under-educated Americans do), but the fact is that none of them were ever tried as traitors, and indeed, all but one of them accepted amnesty and was eventually restored to citizenship.  The same is true clear down to the soldiers in the trenches — anyone who applied for amnesty got his citizenship back.

In the end, not treating anyone but Jefferson Davis as a war criminal (and that was mostly his own fault, but a strong case can be made that Davis was mentally disturbed during at least the last year of the war, and then for the rest of his life) is what glued the country back together.

Now in our modern day, we see those who would tear the country down destroying monuments to the men who, probably more than anyone else, kept things from flying apart after Appomattox. They were formidable and honorable soldiers, but they also knew when they were licked, and they laid down their arms without a lot of fanfare. And when the Army of Northern Virginia paraded through the Union lines to lay down their arms, they were saluted by the Union troops, and in turn saluted back. Thus the healing began.

Lee himself urged many, many butternut soldiers, both in person and in writing, to sign the amnesty forms and get their citizenship back. His own would have been restored had it not been for Secretary of State William Henry Seward, one of the biggest jackasses in Lincoln’s cabinet short of Edwin M. Stanton. Instead, it had to be restored posthumously in 1974 by vote of Congress, after someone discovered in the National Archives Lee’s amnesty form that had been hidden away by Seward after he received it.

If you have not studied the Civil War and its aftermath, you probably have no idea how many soldiers pleaded with Lee to disappear with them into the mountains to continue the resistance against the Federals — and the fact that he did not, and indeed scolded them for even considering such a doomed pursuit, is another mark in his favor. To tear down his monuments is to deny his importance to our history, regardless of his actions in the field between April 1861 and April 1865.  The same is true of the monuments raised to other great men of the Civil War, including some like Major General George H. Thomas, who fought for the Union, but is now denigrated because his family in Virginia owned slaves.

Full disclosure: I’m a Hoosier, born and bred. Members of my family fought on both sides. It doesn’t matter because it ended over a century and a half ago, with the Union restored and slavery ended. That being said, I believe in my heart that the South was correct about States’ Rights, and we see the result of their defeat on that subject today in our massively expanded Federal Government, which operates far beyond the pale of what was agreed upon in Philadelphia during that hot summer of 1787.

You really want to tear the country apart? Keep tearing down our history. That will do it just fine.

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Stupid people doing stupid things

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These Are The Crazy Years

Tuesday, 14 May 2019 13:51

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Two separate articles in the WSJ this morning bring the asshattery.

One is on page A2 of the dead tree edition, entitled “Measles Outbreaks Show No Sign of Slowing”.  The last paragraph is idiotic:

Skepticism about vaccines is growing in the U.S., particularly in insular communities, where several measles outbreaks have occurred in recent years.

In what FUCKING world would that make anyone a skeptic about vaccines?  Or keep any but the most stupidly stubborn from allowing that maybe vaccines would be a good idea, since WE ERADICATED MEASLES FROM THE US IN 2000????  What do they think we used to do that?  Witch doctor mumbo jumbo and dancing around bonfires?

Fucking clueless idiots.

Then on page A3, there’s this, entitled “Rising Rents Give Rise to New Lenders”.  Again, the last couple of paragraphs illustrate the stupidity of some people:

Alexander Kaplan, a tech entrepreneur, moved back to New York after years of living abroad.  He had paid roughly $500 a month to live in what he called “the Soho” of Belgrade, Serbia.

“Coming back here I was quite shocked,” said Mr. Kaplan, who rents a studio apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side for $2,800 a month.  He borrowed $10,000 last year from a loan startup focusing on young college graduates facing hefty move-in costs.

More asshattery.  You moved to New York City.  To the Upper West Side.  And you think you’re going to get an apartment for $500 a month? Moron.

According to Wikipedia,

Like the Upper East Side, the Upper West Side is an affluent, primarily residential area with many of its residents working in commercial areas of Midtown and Lower Manhattan. … The Upper West Side is considered to be among New York City’s wealthiest neighborhoods.

When I lived in Washington DC for a year in 1995, I had a crappy one-bedroom apartment up in Silver Spring that cost $973/month.  When I moved home to Indy the next year, I got a nice two-bedroom (well, it was really a one-bedroom with a loft which I used for my office) apartment on the north side near my folks’ for $525/month.  (And that same apartment is still only around $600/month over 20 years later.  Neighborhood’s not as nice anymore, though.)

What is perhaps more moronic is that this article is talking about lenders who are lending money to people who can’t afford their rent.  Specifically one person says it’s because her pay is sporadic.  (She’s a model and designer in Hollywood.  Isn’t everyone?  That, or an actor or a writer.  And they all seem to be waiting tables when they’re telling you this.)

I mean, I get payday lending, but lending specifically designed to help you pay the rent?  Holy shit.  What have we come to?  This is as bad as student loans, if you ask me.

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The economic fairyland of the modern progressive

Categories:

General Curmudgeonry, Perennial Indignancy Watch, These Are The Crazy Years

Monday, 10 December 2018 16:33

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A friend — sadly, a progressive friend — recently got all bent out of shape because the little cafe at Target now boasts an automated “front of the house”, thereby putting someone out of a job.  This is, according to him and his little progressive friends, little more than the rich getting richer, giant tyrannical Target Corp. with more money than it needs simply grubbing for more of the same.

Yeah, right.  Before you go to the barricades, think about this.

Automation at this level was never worth the candle until mandated minimum wages outstripped the value of human labor.

You can blame the rich all you want, but the fact is, at $15 an hour, nobody can afford to have humans doing this sort of work. And without a reasonable return on investment, businesses shut down. Even the little cafe at Target can’t afford to operate at a loss, because on the company’s balance sheet, it’s a cost center that needs to turn a profit at the end of the day. So unless you want to pay $10 for that $3 hot dog, it’s going to be a self-serve proposition.

Minimum wages were never intended to be living wages. They were supposed to be entry-level wages for inexperienced workers, like high school kids working part time at the local burger joint. Do these types of jobs have value? Sure. They teach basic skills to entry-level workers. And they’re not worth $15/hour plus all the other expenses incumbent on employers, like unemployment insurance, workman’s comp, employer’s half of Social Security — all of which are based on a percentage of the worker’s pay as opposed to being a flat cost, so whenever the minimum wage goes up, so does all that hidden-to-you cost to the employer, which runs (according to an MIT study that you can Google) another 25 to 40 percent of the employee’s base salary.

If you’ve never run a business or made a payroll and then had to pay all the additional squeeze to the government, that’s all invisible to you. And you complain when prices go up or something like Target automating their little cafe happens, and you don’t understand why that could possibly be, or how it could be anything but an amoral money grab on the part of a rich corporation, because Target obviously has more money than it needs.

Why this sort of thing happens is just basic economics. I understood that in high school, maybe before.  Yet one of my friend’s little Commie commenters opined, “Avarice is not just a sin. It is a sickness. They just can’t get enough. I do pity those poor wealthy souls.”

Yeah well…fuck you, you fucking idiot.  Go crack a book on econ, sometime, if you want to learn why businesses don’t like paying $15/hr minimum wages.

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Beavering away at beating a dead horse

Categories:

General Curmudgeonry, Perennial Indignancy Watch, These Are The Crazy Years

Thursday, 6 December 2018 09:34

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Badgering us with this cock and bull is very pig headed of them and displays a very dog in the manger attitude. I believe they’re just crying wolf, and the whole dog and pony show will go away because in a dog eat dog world hounding people to go along with something like this, like lambs to slaughter, is a harebrained idea – because a leopard can’t change its spots. They’re just setting themselves up as a shaggy dog kangaroo court.

— Seen on Facebook, in response to PETA’s campaign to eliminate “anti-animal language”

Seriously, PETA steps on their dick a lot these days with their brain-dead ideas on how to make the world safe for veganism.  Google “Jimmy’s Seafood” for a pretty good example of a business punching back.

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