URLs du Jour

2020-02-20

  • Michael Ramirez is based at the Las Vegas Review-Journal so his take on the upcoming Nevada caucus is reality-based:

    [Vegas, Baby]

    Goodness, that's a beautiful cartoon.


  • For a text-based analysis of the same subject, look no further than the intrepid Veronique de Rugy at Reason, on Bernie Sanders’ Troubling Agenda.

    In a recent piece in CapX, the Cato Institute's Ryan Bourne makes an excellent case that while many European governments have implemented one or more of Sanders' dream policies, his vision for America still "goes far beyond any modern social democracy in terms of government size and scope." Consider the most recent example of two left-wing European politicians' plan to grow the U.K.'s government: Labour's Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell. As hard as they've tried, what they've dreamt up still isn't as big of an expansion of government control over our wallets and lives as Sanders proposes.

    Bourne notes that Sanders would like to grow spending all the way to 70 percent of GDP. In comparison, Labour's 44 percent of GDP figure is small. While Sanders' policies include pretty much everything that Corbyn had planned, the U.S. presidential aspirant adds a few other cherries on top, like forgiving all student debt, banning private health insurance, and massively increasing spending on infrastructure and climate change.

    The referenced Ryan Bourne article here.


  • Sanders is awful, the other Democrats are not significantly better. But, as Michael Tanner points out at National Review, Debt and Deficits Will Have Huge Impact on Our Future.

    As fiscally irresponsible as the Democrats are, though, anyone concerned about the growing tide of red ink should not look to the Trump administration for a better way forward. Faced with news of trillion-dollar deficits, President Trump’s response at a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser was a dismissive, “Who the hell cares about the budget? We’re going to have a country.” And a quick glance at his record confirms that that’s not just more of his trademark bluster: He has signed $4.7 trillion of new debt into law over his first three years in office. If he wins reelection and continues at that pace, by the end of his second term, Trump will end up having added more to the national debt than President Obama. And he will have done it amid relative prosperity, rather than the recession Obama had to navigate.

    People wanting to vote for fiscal sanity in November will have to hold their noses and vote Libertarian. Or write-in.


  • And nobody paid me to watch last night, so I didn't, but the Washington Free Beacon has mushed together The Most Savage Moments of the Democratic Debate.

    I don't think it's very woke to associate Senator Warren with savagery, even given her proud Native American heritage.


  • John Tierney has been calling bullshit on performative environmentalism for a long time, and continued that proud tradition in the WSJ yesterday: Plastic Bags Help the Environment.

    […] single-use plastic bags aren’t the worst environmental choice at the supermarket—they’re the best. High-density polyethylene bags are a marvel of economic, engineering and environmental efficiency. They’re cheap, convenient, waterproof, strong enough to hold groceries but thin and light enough to make and transport using scant energy, water or other resources. Though they’re called single-use, most people reuse them, typically as trash-can liners. When governments ban them, consumers buy thicker substitutes with a bigger carbon footprint.

    Once discarded, they take up little room in landfills. That they aren’t biodegradable is a plus, because they don’t release greenhouse gases like decomposing paper and cotton bags. The plastic bags’ tiny quantity of carbon, extracted from natural gas, goes back underground, where it can be safely sequestered from the atmosphere and ocean in a modern landfill with a sturdy lining.


  • By now this should be expected, but here's the latest revolution of the euphemism treadmill, as revealed by City Journal: Progressive Elected Officials Abuse Language In An Attempt To Change How We Think.

    A new law in California bans the use, in official documents, of the term “at risk” to describe youth identified by social workers, teachers, or the courts as likely to drop out of school, join a gang, or go to jail. Los Angeles assemblyman Reginald B. Jones-Sawyer, who sponsored the legislation, explained that “words matter.” By designating children as “at risk,” he says, “we automatically put them in the school-to-prison pipeline. Many of them, when labeled that, are not able to exceed above that.”

    "At-risk" will be memory-holed, and replaced with (I am not making this up) "at-promise". The claim is that this will remove the "stigma" currently associated with "at-risk".

    Just how many milliseconds will it take sentient human beings to recognize that this is a linguistic shell game that doesn't alter reality one bit? Whatever "stigma" there is will simply move over to the new terminology.

    And then Reginald B. Jones-Sawyer will have to come up with a new term, and the cycle will repeat. That's why it's called a treadmill.


  • And the Google LFOD News Alert rang unexpectedly for Vishal Gullapalli's review, at a site with the excellent name Adventures in Poor Taste. He reviews a comic book Undiscovered Country #4. With this image (click for original):

    [Undiscovered Country]

    That's Destiny Man, who is allegedly the bad guy in this series. But I'm in concert with Vishal: he seems like a pretty decent sort here. That… whatever it is coming out of his rear is a tad disturbing, though.


Last Modified 2024-02-02 4:53 AM EDT