Filed under: Architecture, Bureaucracy, Domestic Policy, France, Intelligence, Law, Media Bias, Politics, Progressivism, The United States
Andy McCarthy has been invaluable as a source for this whole special prosecutor episode, as he has served as a federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, and can explain what’s happening.
Kevin Williamson also has a sharp eye and mind for searching out the reality of a situation:
My own belief is that this was never about removing Trump from office, though of course hamstringing him or humiliating him would have been very satisfying to Democrats. This seems to me to be more about Democrats continuing to tell themselves a comforting fairy tale about why they lost in 2016, and where they really stand politically. Getting cheated out of an election hurts a lot less, psychologically, than getting beat fair and square by Donald Trump — and it does not demand a lot in the way of reconfiguring priorities or rethinking stances. Which is to say, the Democrats’ current commitment to grasping at straws in this matter is, politically speaking, the best news the Trump campaign has had in weeks, the report itself notwithstanding.</>
American Thinker posted a quote from Victor Davis Hanson that beautifully captures the essence of the Notre Dame tragedy in France:
After 800 years, we were the steward of this iconic representation of western civilization, Catholicism, Christendom. And of all the years, 2019, at the height of our sophistication and technology, I’m not blaming the French or anybody, but we were found wanting and we didn’t protect this icon. And we don’t build them anymore.
There’s great churches and cathedrals that go up all over the world, but, Laura, they are in Poland. They are in Cairo. They are in the Ivory Coast, they’re in Brazil, they’re in India. It’s almost as if the places that are less affluent without the technology of western Europe and the United States are like we used to be. They still believe in transcendence. They still believe in something other than this world.And so it’s going to be very hard in our society to ever build a cathedral again, much less to repair them, because we don’t believe in what they represented. And it’s ironic, because we don’t like the past. We are at war with the past. We tear down monuments. We don’t build cathedrals. We erase names. We say to Father Serra or Christopher Columbus, you don’t live up to our standards of race, class, and gender, moral superiority. Shame on you.
Filed under: Europe, Global Warming, News of the Weird, Pop Culture, Science/Technology, YouTube | Tags: Cloudburst, Investigating Words, You Tube
We had a brief cloudburst a little while ago, and now the sun is back out. I started wondering about the word “cloudburst,” wondering if it was an ordinary term or a localism. It is indeed an ordinary term, and I found this brief time-lapse video of a cloudburst over a lake in Austria, taken by a well prepared photographer who captured the moment. “Cloudburst” is also a choral work by Eric Whittaker, a movie – apparently about two elderly lesbians, and large numbers of outdoor equipment pieces ranging from jackets and wearing apparel to tents and backpacks. Who knew? If you have a little time to spare, wondering can lead you down all sorts of interesting side roads.
I have experienced many cloudbursts, but the timelapse video is a marvel. Experiencing a cloudburst will never be the same.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Crime, Democrat Corruption, Domestic Policy, Economy, Immigration, Latin America, Law, Media Bias, Mexico, National Security, Politics, Pop Culture, Progressives, The United States | Tags: "Everybody Knows", Conventional Wisdom?, Democrat Assumptions
Democrats have been quite certain that their stand on illegal immigration will be popular among Hispanics. Certainly the racism implicit in Trump’s border wall will be meaningful to the people who have come to America from Mexico and Central America. Everybody knows Trump is a racist.
A new poll by McLaughlin & Associates finds that the president’s approval rating among Hispanics is 50 percent. McLaughlin is a somewht conservative-oriented company, so Powerline checked with other surveys. A January Marist/NPR/PBS survey put Trump’s approval rating at 50%, February Morning Consult/Political poll put it at 45 percent, slightly higher than Trump’s overall approval rating, But what….?
But then, back when Obama was setting up the DACA program, it turned out that when Hispanics were asked what they should do with these unaccompanied children, they said to send them right back home! Steve Cortes, who helped lead the Trump Hispanic Advisory Council in 2016, cites three factors: (1) the economy (2) immigration, and (3) social issues. Cortes explains:
Leftist politicians and their media allies wrongly assume that Hispanics espouse softness on immigration illegality. In reality, a 2018 YouGov/Economist poll detailed that only 20% of Hispanics support the practice of “catch and release” of families crossing our border illegally.
Indeed, Hispanic Americans often suffer the worst, most immediate consequences of porous borders. Too often, Hispanic workers must compete against unfair, illegal labor.
In addition, dangerous illegal aliens largely terrorize Hispanic citizens. The tragic tales of MS-13 savagery, for example, normally involve Hispanic victims like Carlos Rivas-Majano, one of 27 people killed by the gang on Long Island, N.Y., in just the past three years. While elites like wannabe-Hispanic Robert Francis O’Rourke pontificate about open borders and tearing down existing border walls, the actual on-the-ground consequences flow to people with names like Hernandez, Cabrera, and Cortes.
Hispanic Americans have suffered too many totally preventable losses, such as slain Arizona police Sgt. Brandon Mendoza and young Los Angeles mother Sandra Duran, both murdered by illegal aliens living in America despite multiple prior arrests in the United States.
Paul Mirengoff added: “The assumption that Republicans must be soft on immigration to do well among Hispanics voters may prove to be another bit of conventional wisdom that Donald Trump destroys.”
“It’s an article of faith among white leftists that President Trump is a racist. He stands accused of being anti-Black and anti-Hispanic.” Where do we get our ideas of just what the “conventional wisdom” is? It’s what the media reports, It’s what the TV is saying, and the internet, Twitter and Facebook and the Hollywood celebrities a-n–d …oh. I see! Rather a lot of conventional wisdom has been going by the wayside lately, has it not?
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Domestic Policy, Entertainment, Free Speech, History, Humor, Politics, Progressives | Tags: a capella choral group, Democrats, Sometimes They're Really Funny
Another gem from the Free Beacon! Democrats unintentional humor.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Energy, Environment, Junk Science, Media Bias, National Security, Politics, Pop Culture, Progressives, The United States | Tags: "The sustainbility agenda", Children as Political Tools, The Green New Deal
According to the people who actually measure the temperature of the planet with satellite and weather balloon for NASA, over the last 40 years the earth has warmed approximately 0.25° Celsius or 2.2° Fahrenheit. According to Anthony Watts, a 2° F. warming is roughly equivalent to the warming seen most spring days between 10 a.m. and noon.
So naturally the kids have been skipping school today to demonstrate and march to save them from the catastrophic warming of the earth because we are all going to die in 12 years if we don’t eliminate fossil fuels and save the planet with wind turbines and solar cells. Never mind the annoying fact that the wind does not blow all the time, sometimes not for days, and wind turbines shut down completely when it gets cold. The sun, even the kids might have noticed, sinks beneath the horizon every night. And there are clouds, often lots of clouds. The big solar arrays just don’t produce enough electricity to run much of anything. The European nations that got all excited about solar have pretty much backed off because it doesn’t work.
Have you heard of “The sustainability agenda” This is from a report from the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) in Britain.
The impetus to put the environment and sustainable development at the centre of the education agenda can be traced back to the early 1970s. In these early days of the modern environmental movement, the UN’s Stockholm Conference of 1972 concluded that environmental education was ‘essential in order to broaden the basis for…enlightened opinion and responsible conduct’. By1976, such ideas had taken hold,and an international conference on
environmental education was held in Belgrade to plan the way forward. At its conclusion, the Belgrade Charter was issued, stating that the aim of environmental education was the development of a world population that was educated about the environment, had ‘strong feelings of concern for the environment and the motivation for actively participating in its protection and improvement’.Children as political tools
This revolution in the purpose of education appears to be not only concerned with changing the way children think but also about changing the behaviour of adults, using their children as a lever. The chairman of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri has suggested that a focus on children is the top priority for bringing about societal change, and that by ‘sensitising’ children to climate change, it will be possible to get them to ‘shame adults into taking the right steps’.Pachauri’s ideas are echoed in UNICEF’s manual on climate change education, which, it is claimed, is about helping children to become ‘agents of change’. The EU, meanwhile, has funded schemes aimed at promoting the standard, narrow ideas about climate change and its causes in schools. Their explicit wish is to ‘link students in both primary and secondary schools across Europe to discuss, engage and commit to undertake actions to limit the change in climate.’
The whole report can be found here. It is British, but the general push is quite international as you may have noticed in the “Green New Deal.” Long, but interesting.
Filed under: Economy, England, European Union, History, Humor, Law, Music, Politics, Scotland, United Kingdom | Tags: 17 Million F*ck Offs, BREXIT the Musical, The European Union
If you re offended by a little vulgarity (the F-word) nevermind. If not, this is great fun. Pure English Music Hall, I think though I’ve never been in one.
Filed under: Domestic Policy, Environment, Humor, News, YouTube | Tags: Doesn't Take Much Snow, Snow in Seattle, The City of Seven Hills
Here in the Seattle area, we are recovering from a winter snowfall. It made the national news in USA today. Had a snarky message from an old friend in St. Louis, who had just talked to another friend from home in Idaho who said they had about four feet of snow on the level. Seattle made the national news on the basis of 2 to 3 inches! Fact! Seattle is a city famously built on seven hills. They plowed down some, and nobody counts anyway, but the problem is that there are slopes in every direction, and even small amounts immediately turn to ice. Lots of car crashes in every direction.
However, just across the mountains to the east the same winter storm produced a blizzard west of the Tri-Cities, and 1,600 dairy cows died in the blizzard. Hit the dairy farmers hard. They were not expecting such conditions. They prepared for the snow, but it just wasn’t enough. Cows normally do fine out-of-doors. Snoqualmie Pass was closed all day by avalanche and snow danger.
