Demonizing The Opposition (NY Times version)

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/17/us/republicans-democrats-messaging.html

How would you tell the difference between a Democrat campaign mailing and the NY Times? Possibly because the Times is more partisan and less glossy?

So we have a whole article on the idea that Republicans are trying to "demonize" Democrats over infanticide, socialism, and anti-semetic remarks. Wow.

I guess Democrats don't have to "demonize" Republicans because they support Trump who is racist, sexist, homophobic, nationalist, crazy, a liar, dangerous, etc..

They also don't need to mention that Republicans are religious zealots, anti-science, mysogynists, racists, gun nuts, uneducated, hateful, backward, uneducated, etc.

Why? Because the NY Times ... and NPR, WaPo, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, etc will do it for them!

Trump, Robert Kraft (Patriots Owner)

https://www.aol.com/article/news/2019/01/24/trump-called-new-england-patriots-owner-robert-kraft-every-week-for-a-year-to-console-him-after-his-wifes-death/23652031/

https://www.bostonglobe.com/sports/2013/01/19/patriots-owner-robert-kraft-talks-about-life-loneliness-and-love/5SYgWQrDBwXGWgLZEnZVfL/story.html

Myra Kraft died in 2011 and Robert Kraft took the death very hard. One of the people that helped him through that time was Donald Trump. Here is what Kraft had to say in one interview ...

"When Myra died, Melania and Donald came up to the funeral in our synagogue, then they came for memorial week to visit with me," Kraft told the Daily News. "Then he called me once a week for the whole year, the most depressing year of my life when I was down and out. He called me every week to see how I was doing, invited me to things, tried to lift my spirits. He was one of five or six people that were like that. I remember that."

You know, Donald Trump the anti-semite.

Does this mean that Trump is a wonderful man? No, of course not. What it DOES mean however is that he is not the one dimensional force of evil that the media constantly paints him to be.

So he isn't the devil. I submit there is no way you can rely on the media to figure out how good he really is, but I think it is totally clear why Robert Kraft, and by extension, many in the Patriots organization are not going to buy the media charicature.

Why would you?

Churchill As Villan

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-02-16/churchill-was-more-villain-than-hero-in-britain-s-colonies

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and if you have the power of the #11 richest man on earth (Michael Bloomberg) behind you, you can even get it published. If it suited his fancy to increase his number one share, you could likely even get it published in the Washington Post owned by #1 Jeff Bezos.

So what is a "villain"? I guess in this case, it is whomever "Shashi Tardoor" thinks it is. In his "morality", pretty much anyone of the late 19th and early 20th century educated in the west would be "villain". Nearly all of them believed in Darwin for real -- not the modern watered down version of "survival of the fittest". They believed that "the fittest survive" ... meaning WIN, and that Western civilization had proven superior and thus risen to the top. They ALL "believed" this ... Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Margret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood), Franklin Roosevelt, etc, etc. They didn't even see it as a "belief" ... they saw it as "empirically proven by results".

So there really isn't any difference between Churchill and Hitler ...

Nor can his views be excused as being reflective of their times; his own Secretary of State for War, Leo Amery, confessed that he could see very little difference between Churchill’s attitude and Hitler’s.

Strangely though, neither Stalin nor Mao are mentioned ... Communist leaders that butchered well over 100 million. Somehow I suspect that Tharoor would find them much more palatable. How might he put it? If you want to make an omlette ..

Thinking like this is why we have wealth like Bloomberg and Bezos and why it provides a platform for cultural relativists that want to do away with historical heros so that more people believe that those with the most money have the best right to shape opinion. Might ... and money make right!

I'm sure that Hitler, Stalin and Mao would go right along with Bezos, Bloomberg and Tharoor -- except unlike Churchill, who used words to win his arguments, Hitler, Stalin and Mao would be quick to put a bullet in the head of guys like Bezos, Bloomberg and Tharoor once they were no longer useful to them.

Was Churchill willing to use harsh rhetoric and even harsh methods when he believed required to defend the British Empire and the future of civilization? Especially the Civilization of the English Speaking Peoples? Certainly ... and without him we would likely be speaking German today.

Certainly people like Tharoor have a right to their opinion. That we live in a world where the richest people on the planet give them a forum to spew their opinion without even the merest semblance of conterpoint is great example of #FAKENEWS ... it may be fake, but those billionaires DO have a purpose. Their big purpose is to have you uncritically read such tripe.

In the world that Tharoor apparently imagines as "better" the caste system would still be ruling over millions dying in hopeless filth in India, and the Indians of N America would still be starving and warring with neighboring tribes, including the taking the scalps of even women and children as trophies.

If you want to see the "just like Hitler" calumny debunked, there is a decent job here ... as in biographies that are far from hagiographies.

The IMPORTANT thing to understand is how critical it is to modern "progressives" to destroy any great man of Western civilization. What they desire is to make "something new" that they promise will be "quite wonderful" ... just "tust them" -- oh, and be sure not to say anything they don't like lest they destroy you as well!

Hang on to your guns ... and your scalp!

Futility of Green Energy

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/01/why-green-energy-is-futile-in-one-lesson.php

The simple answer is that the sun never shines at night and some days it is cloudy, the wind also sometimes doesn't blow. News at 11.

So, in general utilities have to have 120% of their highest peak in capacity ... and against this, wind and solar can account for about 20% ... no matter how much wind and solar you have available.

So when it gets cold and it isn't windy ...

Because of the extreme cold, Xcel Energy urged its natural gas customers in Becker, Big Lake, Chisago City, Lindstrom, Princeton and Isanti to reduce the settings on their thermostats, first down to 60 degrees, then to 63, through Thursday morning to conserve enough natural gas to prevent a widespread shortage as temperatures remained 14 below zero. Some Xcel customers in the Princeton area lost gas service, and Xcel reserved rooms for them in nearby hotels.

So the greenies want to stop building pipelines, and they want to not have coal or nuclear provide power.

What they have been telling us since the '90s is that it isn't going to get cold anymore ... at least not "record cold", or the "subzero temps of old" here in the upper midwest. Hey! We are in a new warmer climate zone now! Back in 2012 they were telling us that we were going to have to start worrying about termites, because "sub-zero nights were a thing of the past" in the Twin Cities.

Well, I guess this is "back to the future"! 

National Emergencies, A Dime A Dozen

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/list-31-national-emergencies-effect-years/story?id=60294693

BUT TRUMP!

Otherwise ... well, no issue with 58 National Empergencies since the concept was created in 1976, 31 of them still active. All sorts of directed foreign policy against certain countries / dictators, property, funds, moves against cyber crime, etc ... a laundry list.

The wall? Even the 25 billion is basically chump change. The US Postal Service which is supposed to be solvent lost $5.5 billion in one year, the F-35 fighter, $29 billion a year, in 2013 Medicare made $45.7 billion in "improper payments".

A one time investment of $6, $16 or $26 billion to save a MINIUM of $54 billion a year is a damned good investment! Nobody knows how many illegals we have -- that is the point of "illegal", it is ALL estimates. Conservatives are going to estimate high, liberals are going to estimate low -- AND, they are going to value the contributions of illegals very highly.

Unless we have controlled borders, we will never know!

My preference would be to repeal the National Emergency law -- it is definitely a sign that the executive and legislative branches are unable to govern using the checks and balances that were intended to be used. Has it been, will it be misused? Absolutely -- it's a government law, it HAS BEEN, IS, and WILL BE misused! What part of the reason for smaller more accountable government are you missing?

That said however, the reality is that we DO have it AND the government has been broken for a very long time ... at least since Watergate. We have a royal unaccountable Administrative State that actually calls the shots. That Administrative State **OUGHT** to be under direct control of the executive branch ... it is an active function like the military. Congress is like the Board of Directors ... they control funding and they can pass laws to modify how the Administrative State functions -- but the President out to be able to hire, fire, furlough, etc like any other executive -- and as FDR realized, government employees should NEVER be unionized!

The current situtation is completely simple. "The Party" (TP-D) which controls the Administrative State, the media, most of the professions including law and judgeships, wants open borders to allow "undocumented democrats" to come in as voters and be included in the census (this is why they are fighting to avoid even having a question asking if the person is a citizen on the census!) to add to the already extreme power of TP.

TP is for open borders and against voter ID. Does it really get any simpler than that!

Common Cause On Blue Laws?

https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/10/2/17925828/what-were-blue-laws-labor-unions

An article from VOX that lends support to the lament of "Why Liberalism Failed".

Even beyond the service sector, more and more white-collar workers are having their time invaded by emails, Slack messages, and other work responsibilities. A generalized law restricting the ability of nonessential businesses from functioning one day a week would go a long way to protect workers from the creeping commodification of every second of their time. Put bluntly, it would make sense to legally interdict the ability of your boss to expect you to respond to an email on Sunday morning.

"Creeping" or "crept"? For knowledge workers, it is more the rule than the exception to be available 24x7 by text, phone, etc when your boss / customers / clients / etc "need you".

I was always struck when I went to England or Germany on business how difficult it was to purchase ANYTHING ( gifts for back home, food, office supplies" after "5" or on Sunday. 

It turns out that the Sabbath was made for man ... (Mark 2:27) "Then he said to them, "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath."" 

VOX seems to have figured this out all on their own! Apparently man does not live by "bread" alone (as the hippies called MONEY) while modern man has been converted into pure econoimic man ... a "consumer" rather than a "citizen", let alone a PERSON. 

Perhaps even the left is beginning to see glimmers of the obvious fault in making humans one dimensional! 

Godless Tribal Life and Death

https://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/02/magazine/why-they-kill-their-newborns.html

New York now allows infanticide and the passage of the law has been duly celebrated by the left. The top link points to a deeply scientistic article from '97 that ought to be kept around, here is a summary from near it's end.

So how do you provide grounds for outlawing neonaticide? The facts don't make it easy. Some philosophers suggest that people intuitively see neonates as so similar to older babies that you couldn't allow neonaticide without coarsening the way people treat children and other people in general. Again, the facts say otherwise. Studies in both modern and hunter-gatherer societies have found that neonaticidal women don't kill anyone but their newborns, and when they give birth later under better conditions, they can be devoted, loving mothers.

Ah "the facts" ... you know, "statistics say", "studies say". I found this excerpt to be prophetic;

Full personhood is often not automatically granted at birth, as we see in our rituals of christening and the Jewish bris. And yet the recent neonaticides still seem puzzling. These are middle-class girls whose babies would have been kept far from starvation by the girls' parents or by any of thousands of eager adoptive couples. But our emotions, fashioned by the slow hand of natural selection, respond to the signals of the long-vanished tribal environment in which we spent 99 percent of our evolutionary history.

The "invisible hand" of amoral evolution, whose only possible morality is exactly the same as the "morality" of Science ... "what works", "might is right", "the fittest survive". Science provides "the facts" ... it sets up the experiments or studies and Science decides what are "legitimate questions". "Truth" is a "repeatable experiment".

Strange though, the article was written in 1997 and the scientific minded author assumed that tribalism was "long gone"! Yet, in less than 20 years, BOistan has moved back to being a completely tribal state. The Governor of Virginia agreed with the 1997 article from the left one week, then an old picture of him was found wearing blackface a week later. The R tribe is very angry about killing babies. The D tribe is fine with baby killing, however the blackface was enough to momentarily label him an R before they went back to their usual practice of just not putting a party label on a badly behaving D (CNN)!

What would the "Scientific Facts" say about the morality of wearing blackface in 1984? See "the facts" don't support any sanctions against infanticide, so we ought not have them. What does Science tell us about wearing blackface, supposedly in a Michael Jackson dance contest? Does the fact that Michael Jackson attempted to LIGHTEN his complexion and enjoyed having sleepovers with underage kids affect the "morality"? 

What one would think would be completely obvious at this point is that tribalism is a natural behavior of humans, and the largest single thing that allowed us to rise above it was religion, with the grand champion religion being Christianity, one of the foundations of Western civilization. Some of us older people are still vaguely aware of Western civilization, and I know, ULTRA amazing, are still believing practicing Christians! 

As late as the late '90s, one would have to have journeyed to Borneo, Paupa New Guinea, or the deep jungles of the Amazon to observe humans in their natural tribal state. Now we can watch congresswomen dress all in white and synchronize their actions like native women in the jungle on live national TV as they assume that they are doing something that the rest of their tribe will be impressed by! 

Without transcendence, usually provided to the masses by religion, humans operate in the way their genes tell them to. "Education" about "facts" does nothing with emotions, and as even science is increasingly aware, our "reason" is largely used to explain our emotions. We are rationalizing rather than reational creatures. 

Infanticide, genocide, slavery, the use of might to vanquish and even exterminate the weak -- all are exemplary of homo sapiens in our natural state, and Civilization / Culture was the UNnatural "cultivation" that allowed us to be more than "natural humans". We gave that up though ... so we could more like the "very flower of  humanity" as Star Trek explored in "Mirror, Mirror".