More than 150 Microsoft employees signed a letter demanding the tech giant cancel a $480 million contract to build a HoloLens for the Pentagon, saying they “refuse to create technology for warfare and oppression.”
I suppose they’re entitled to their opinion. However asinine and juvenile it may be. Let’s just say that it’s a good thing previous generations pitched in and did their part to keep our armed forces up to the job.
And what job is that? Well, reasonable people might argue that our current unwinnable wars, going back to Vietnam, were futile and a tragic loss of our blood and treasure. I’d be inclined to agree, but in no way were these wars of “oppression.”
Unless, of course, one would prefer the many hundreds of thousands killed by Islamic terrorists, Saddam Hussein when he was butcher-in-charge of Iraq, Ho Chi Min and the killing fields of Vietnam and Cambodia.
Then there were the “good wars,” in which category I’d put our Civil War and World Wars 1 and 2. Is it the opinion of these mewling, spoiled brats and overpaid Microserfs (hat tip: Douglas Coupland) that our military “oppressed” the Confederate States of America? Or Nazi Germany?
These spoiled brats appear to have little common sense. It is only with restraint that I don’t use the words I learned in on the streets of the city to describe these morons.
One of the alleged goals of the “Green New Deal” is to replace air travel with high speed trains. This GND goes way beyond mere socialism, as it seems to want to deprive Americans of any freedom to have private health insurance, to drive, or to make money apart from government servitude.
Also, there’s a stupid call to, somehow, refurbish all the buildings in America to meet some as yet unspecified standards of environmental virtue. Every building? Every house, factory, bodega, you name it? This won’t happen any decade soon. Or ever.
On the high speed train front, even the nuts and flakes out in California have given up on the billions of dollars that a single high speed train route would have cost the state. Dreams can die hard, but when even California can’t stomach the pain, can any sane person believe that the United States could, somehow, build a sufficient number of high speed train routes to replace air travel in CONUS?
No, not anyone who is sane and who has some grasp of how much money is available before we start having hyperinflation due to too much paper money being printed.
Venezuela ought to be a cautionary model, with an inflation rate of 80,000% per year in 2018. Oh, but of course, we’re not Venezuela…yet.
Ah, unicorns, dolphins, and a lone orca, under a peaceful, tranquil rainbow. A fitting graphic, indeed, to illustrate the “Green New Deal” being pimped by some Democrats.
David Harsanyi, senior editor at The Federalist gives us “The 10 Most Insane Requirements of the Green New Deal.” Subheading: The Green New Deal isn’t just un-American, it’s also completely bonkers.
From The Federalist, just the bullet points:
Ban affordable energy. GND calls for the elimination of all fossil fuel energy production, the lifeblood of American industry and life, which includes not only all oil but also natural gas — one of the cheapest sources of American energy, and one of the reasons the United States has been able to lead the world in carbon-emissions reduction.
Eliminate nuclear energy. The GND also calls for eliminating all nuclear power, one of the only productive and somewhat affordable “clean” energy sources available to us, in 11 years. This move would purge around 20 percent of American energy generation so you can rely on intermittent wind for your energy needs.
Eliminate 99 percent of cars. To be fair, under the GND, everyone will need to retrofit their cars with Flintstones-style foot holes or pedals for cycling. The authors state that the GND would like to replace every “combustion-engine vehicle” — trucks, airplanes, boats, and 99 percent of cars — within ten years. Charging stations for electric vehicles will be built “everywhere,” though how power plants will provide the energy needed to charge them is a mystery.
Gut and rebuild every building in America. Markey and Cortez want to “retrofit every building in America” with “state of the art energy efficiency.” I repeat, “every building in America.” That includes every home, factory, and apartment building, which will all need, for starters, to have their entire working heating and cooling systems ripped out and replaced with…well, with whatever technology Democrats are going invent in their committee hearings, I guess.
Eliminate air travel. GND calls for building out “highspeed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary.” Good luck Hawaii! California’s high-speed boondoggle is already in $100 billion dollars of debt, and looks to be one of the state’s biggest fiscal disasters ever. Amtrak runs billions of dollars in the red (though, as we’ll see, trains that run on fossil fuels will also be phased out). Imagine growing that business model out to every state in America?
A government-guaranteed job. The bill promises the United States government will provide every single American with a job that includes a “family-sustaining wage, family and medical leave, vacations, and a pension.” You can imagine that those left in the private sector would be funding these through some unspecified “massive” taxation. On the bright side, when you’re foraging for food, your savings will be worthless.
Free education for life. GND promises free college or trade schools for every American.
A salubrious diet. The GND promises the government will provide “healthy food” to every American (because there are no beans or lettuce in your local supermarket, I guess).
A house. The GND promises that the government will provide, “safe, affordable, adequate housing” for every American citizen. I call dibs on an affordable Adams Morgan townhouse. Thank you, Ocasio-Cortez.
Free money. The GND aims to provide, and I am not making this up, “economic security” for all who are “unable or unwilling” to work. Just to reiterate: if you’re unwilling to work, the rest of us will have your back.
Bonus insanity: Ban meat. Ocasio-Cortez admits that we can’t get zero emissions in 10 years “because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast.” The only way to get rid of farting cows is to get rid of beef.
Ain’t that just grand? Taken as a whole, I’m reasonably certain most voters, and all those who pay taxes, would not be amused. Nor would they likely vote for any candidate that espoused that kind of insanity.
However, that hasn’t stopped Sens. Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris or Kirsten Gillibrand, among others, from signing on.
Something tells me that, like most battle plans, any plan to support and defend the “New Green Deal” will not survive contact with The Donald.
In case you missed it, our Social Justice Warrior Pope, Francis, seems to have swiveled from “liberation theology” to warning us of the disasters of global warming, climate change, bad weather, or something, if we don’t mend our wicked ways. Even the True Believers at the WaPo kind of mocked him with the headline, Release of encyclical reveals pope’s deep dive into climate science.
Deep dive, indeed. It seems the more exalted one’s position, the greater one’s celebrity, the less one must think things through before bleating it out for the world to see. But then, Francis is a Jesuit.
Let’s be generous about Jesuits: they are protean, and this may be a good, or a not-so-good thing. In Francis’ case, what comes across is that he has swiveled from the liberation “theology” cheered by his fellow Latin American Jesuits to the sky-is-falling climate alarmism.
I was catechized by Jesuits, and have always had the greatest respect and affection for the order (just happy my name is not Ignatius Xavier…) However, they are often on the lefty side of policy arguments, giving those arguments Christian window dressing. Francis comes across as a politician first, and a shepherd for his flock a distant second.
Preach the Gospel. Leave the politics to others. Have some discernment before accepting and repeating alarmist ravings about global warming, er, climate change, or whatever it will be called when the apocalypse does not come to pass. Francis, remember the coming nuclear winter?
The Daily Beast is a must-read for those of us who would follow the latest in political correctness, multiculturalism, and, in general, turning a blind eye to liberal hypocrisy. Of course, even a blind squirrel finds an acorn every now and again.
The basis for the scare headline? It boils down to this excerpt from the story (and it’s a story in the best use of the term to connote a work of fiction):
Tea Partier Chris McDaniel has taken $800 in donations from Carl Ford, a former lawyer for Sam Bowers, the imperial wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan…
Oh, the humanity. That nasty Kluxer Chris McDaniel is about to go night riding and lynching black people. Well, perhaps not. The scare headline, and the “facts” about it, put McDaniel a mere two steps away from taking money from someone who provided a legal defense to a now deceased Kluxer.
In fairness, the Beast also highlighted the somewhat closer connection between Hillary Clinton and a pedophile who raped a child. A pedophile who Hillary got off on a legal technicality. Do the Democrat’s have the perv vote sewn up yet? See, I can write scare headlines as well…
In the real world, that piece of human garbage was guilty of raping a child. Hillary got him off. And now, according to the Beast, she’s laughing about it.
That is today’s Left: taking a campaign contribution from someone who defended a Kluxer is bad bad bad; being the lawyer who gets a child rapist off on a technicality is a qualification to be our next president?
self evident truths 