Category Archives: Education

How Dumb Is AOC?

I think she pegs the meter. As Sarah Hoyt notes, blondes are telling jokes about her.

[Update a couple minutes later]

The rebirth of socialism: Where it came from, and how to stop it.

[Late-morning update]

I suspect that AOC will be successfully primaried after this latest jamming of both feet in her mouth. She just cost her constituents a lot of jobs.

[Noon update]

The worms are starting to turn on her.

The “Green New Deal” And The Left’s Grand Plans

Thoughts from Neo.

Yes, it could well be that the purpose of this ridiculous proposal is to start with something so far out there that whatever awful thing Pelosi actually pushes almost looks reasonable in comparison.

[Update a few minutes later]

The New Gods:

It must be said at the outset that climate change is real and observable, and the consensus that human activity contributes to that change (though to what degree has not yet firmly been established) is all but unassailable. But for a certain set of activists, there is only one acceptable response to the challenge: privation. The technological innovations attributable to market forces—innovations that have led to the dramatic reduction of American carbon emissions—are dismissed, not because their contributions are not observable, but because they undermine the notion that a simpler, monastic life is the only real source of collective absolution.

Critics of the activist class’s evolving policy prescriptions are attacked as “deniers.” Those who predict catastrophic, near civilization-ending disasters resulting from unchecked climate change are deemed “prophets.” Oracles forecast “the end of the world” within our lifetimes absent the adoption of their preferred paradigm. And any critical reflections on this new eschatology, the portents of which have often proved irreparably flawed, is dismissed with fervent passion.

A faith requires its pieties, and the so-called “Green New Deal” amounts to a sacrament. To true believers, its implausibility and impracticality is not a mark against it. Just the opposite; it is an expression of zeal, an acknowledgment of the righteousness and urgency of the cause it seeks to address. Its efficacy is measured in the number willing to genuflect before it.

I remain an agnostic (in fact, in this case, an atheist).

[Update Sunday morning]

This is Sandy’s war:

War is the most ancient avenue of glory, but it isn’t for everyone: Many of our progressive friends believe that American military might is a force for evil in the world, and that the military itself is malevolent, backward, and hateful. But there are war substitutes and war analogues to be had. My friend and colleague Jonah Goldberg is the poet laureate of “meow” — the Moral Equivalent of War — and its baleful effects on our political thinking and discourse.

…Meow has many cynical political uses: If every political opponent is the moral equivalent of Adolf Hitler, if every political initiative tantamount to D-Day, then there is much that can be excused in the way of underhandedness, rhetorical excess, demagoguery, and the like. As Goldberg reminds us, war and war alone has been the great champion of socialism, because it provides an emergency pretext for the authoritarian project of reorganizing an organic society in accordance with the necessarily synthetic model decocted from ideology, bias, bigotry, eccentricity, and the self-interest, always unavoidable, of the planners empowered with drawing up the blueprints of this or that brave new world or utopia.

And, hence, the Green New Deal: Our war, requiring a “new national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II.” Under whose command? That of Field Marshal Sandy, of course.

About the details of the Green New Deal, such as they are, there is not really much to say. On Friday, I spoke with one of the world’s leading authorities on North American building practices and asked him about the plan to “retrofit” these structures in the service of a “net-zero energy” agenda. Neither “scathing” nor “derisive” quite captures his response. He has been involved in a number of net-zero retrofits and understands how complex and expensive they are — and how they can destroy a building when done poorly. Ask a farmer, an aerospace engineer, the manager of an electric utility, or a truck-driver about these highfalutin’ schemes and sentiments and you will get another superfluous proof of Robert Conquest’s maxim — “Everyone is conservative about what he knows best” — and Williamson’s First Law: “Everything is simple if you don’t know a f*****g thing about it.”

RTWT.

[Update a few minutes later]

AOC: The perfect graduate of today’s biased colleges.

The “Green” “New” Deal

As I noted on Twitter, it’s neither new, or green, and you know these morons aren’t serious about CO2 reduction when they try to shut down nuclear as fast as possible. Mike Shellenberger relates the history of this insanity in Vermont:

[Update a few minutes later]

The ten most insane requirements of it:

It is not hyperbole to contend that GND is likely the most ridiculous and un-American plan that’s ever been presented by an elected official to voters. Not merely because it would necessitate a communist strongman to institute, but also because the societal cost are unfathomable. The risible historic analogies Markey and Ocasio-Cortez rely on, the building of the interstate highway system or moon landing, are nothing are but trifling projects compared to a plan [that] overhauls modernity by voluntarily destroying massive amounts of wealth and technology. That is the GND.

These people are out of their minds. And Markey has always demonstrably been an idiot.

[Update a while later]

[Update a few minutes later]

Pelosi to AOC and Markey: It’s a “suggestion,” of which they’ll receive many. Translation: She’s not as stupid as they are. It’s DOA.

[Late-morning update]

More from Tyler O’Neil.

[Update early afternoon]

The “Green New Deal” represents everything that is wrong with “progressive” environmentalism.

[Update a while later]

[Late-afternoon update]

This is hilarious. It’s OK, Occasional Cortex, we’re laughing at you, not with you.

[Evening update]

The “Green New Deal” FAQ is now available for download, despite the fact that it was “taken down.”

I’m thinking I should come up with some other ideas left on the cutting-room floor. It could be fun. And these people are now officially unable to be parodied.

Kamala Harris

Roger Simon: I was too easy on her. She’s an awful human being. And yes:

After all all this–although, as most readers know, I favor Trump–I still very much want Schultz to run, and not just for the benefit of Donald. Call me an old timer who is sentimental about the two-party system, but I don’t want to see the Democrats turn into an American version of the Labor Party of Albania with a soupçon of anti-Semitism thrown in, as they now seem hellbent on doing. Even if they careen off a cliff from their left-wing lurch, it’s bad for all of us. And if they don’t, it’s worse.

The one thing we don’t need (nobody does) is socialism–quasi or otherwise. How many more lessons do we have to have? Weren’t the tens, maybe hundreds, of millions of deaths ascribed to that system in China, the Soviet Union and Cambodia enough? There’s nothing remotely like it in human history. But no. Students–indoctrinated in socialism by their professors who pay no attention to what’s happening in front of their noses in Venezuela–are being turned out of our schools by the millions. What that’s going to do to our society in the future, no one knows. But it doesn’t look good.

It’s frightening.

[Update a couple minutes later]

How far left will the Democrats lurch next year?

I hope far enough that they get blown out. Make it 1972 again.

The Democrats

lose their minds:

Let’s see … what else happened in the busy world of crazy … excuse me while I flip through my files … Ah yes, there was congresswoman Ilhan Omar, parroting the Kremlin-Havana-Tehran line on the democratic uprising in Venezuela, calling it “a U.S. backed coup.” A few days later, Omar, a supporter of the anti-Semitic Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement whom the Democrats have awarded with a place on the House Foreign Relations Committee, said she “almost chuckles” because “we still uphold” the Jewish State of Israel “as a democracy in the Middle East.” I chuckle—and begin seriously to worry—that someone who cannot distinguish between tyranny in Latin America and democracy in the Middle East commands such acclaim and receives such attention. Omar has former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett in her corner. When Omar dismissed Congressman Lee Zeldin’s criticism of her views by Tweeting, “Don’t mind him, he is just waking up to the reality of having Muslim women as colleagues who know how to stand up to bullies!”, Jarrett replied, “Shake him up!” Zeldin is a Jewish Republican.

Finally, as the week came to a close, the Democrats went beyond their support for partial-birth abortion to defend—the very fact that I have to write the following words saddens me to no end—post-birth abortion. This practice has been known throughout history as infanticide, and it flourished widely in the ancient world before being condemned in the Judeo-Christian tradition. As we “progress” from that tradition—a progression that is in fact a reversion—the morals and values that bind us to a culture of life slowly fade away. They are still there, of course, gossamer-like and tenuous, which is why Kathy Tran, the Fairfax County delegate to the Virginia Assembly who sponsored a bill lifting all state restrictions on abortion, hesitated before admitting that her legislation authorized the termination of a pregnancy up to the moment of delivery.

I’m not sure that this is anything new as much as Trump has simply made it much more obvious.