URLs du Jour

2022-05-17

  • Boy, Jeff Bezos is on a tear. This is his response to the Biden Administration's attempt to rebut his previous tweet about inflation:

    I need to go over to Amazon and buy some stuff when I'm done blogging today…


  • The only way to win is not to play. Kevin D. Williamson's Tuesday newsletter is, he says, firmly behind the NRPlus paywall, so I'll quote just a little from The Buffalo Blame Game.

    Before the blood was even dry in Buffalo, Democrats were asking the most important question:

    “How can we well-heeled white progressives most effectively use the murders of all these black people to our personal and political advantage?”

    The murderer in Buffalo didn’t kill anybody you’ve ever heard of, and so the first thing to do if you want to exploit the deaths of all these people — and that is what Democrats intend to do — is to connect the crime to some famous name or prominent institution. It doesn’t matter if there isn’t any actual connection: Just assert it, and that’s good enough for the newspapers and the cable-news cretins and the impotent rage-monkeys on Twitter. And so New York governor Kathy Hochul blames social-media platforms. Amanda Marcotte blames Tucker Carlson. Other hack Democrats blamed Donald Trump, the Republican Party, Fox News, the National Rifle Association, etc. The usual suspects.

    Democrats are looking for something — anything — to cling to politically at the moment, because they are terrified that they are going to get wiped out in the midterm elections. And they probably are going to take a beating: Never mind that the Republican Party doesn’t deserve to win — the Democrats deserve to lose, and that’s what matters at the polls. What can Democrats do about that besides pray that Marjorie Taylor Greene has an extra shot of espresso in her moonbat latte this morning? There are options, but they are tough, and apparently it has never crossed Governor Hochul’s mind (such as it is) to try a different approach: Rather than cheap demagoguery and shunting great streams of public money into her husband’s company, she might try competent governance and see how that works out.

    Apparently, that never occurred to her. Apparently, it never will.

    There's all kinds of deep thoughts about mental illness. No surprise that there's little talk about a one-word-shorter explanation: evil.

    Because we can (at least in our imaginations) "do something" about mental illness.

    Evil? That's a tougher problem.


  • There are no controlled guns. There are only controlled citizens. New York has a full set of "common sense gun control" laws on the books. So Jacob Sullum answers the obvious question: Why New York's 'Assault Weapon' Ban Didn't Stop the Buffalo Massacre.

    The suspect in the mass shooting that killed 10 people at a Buffalo grocery store on Saturday used a rifle that was widely described as an "assault weapon." With certain exceptions that don't apply here, that category of firearms is illegal in New York. Yet The New York Times reports that the shooter legally bought the rifle from a gun dealer in Endicott, New York. How is that possible?

    It turns out that the rifle, a Bushmaster XM-15 ES, was not an "assault weapon" at the time of the purchase, but it became an "assault weapon" after the shooter tinkered with it. The details of that transformation illustrate how arbitrary and ineffectual bans like New York's are.

    When your old laws fail, the only answer is… more laws.


  • Shoe size. What else? Kyle Smith tells us What They’re Not Telling You about the Buffalo Shooter.

    These efforts to make mass shooters sound like they’re ultra-violent op-ed writers is tiresome in the extreme. The Buffalo shooter is a despicable racist who should be executed, but the media are trying to mold him into an acolyte of a talk-show host they dislike.

    “In short, the manifesto is a rant from a 4chan addict, obsessed with ‘the Great Replacement,’ CRT and white grievance,” writes NBC News’s Ben Collins (He’s the “senior reporter, dystopia beat.”)

    It would also be true to note that the presumed shooter is, according to his online manifesto, an anti-conservative environmentalist who says, “We were born from our lands and our own culture was molded by these same lands. The protection and preservation of these lands is of the same importance as the protection and preservation of our own ideals and beliefs.” He says, “sure,” he’s a left-winger and maybe a socialist, “depending on the definition,” but explains that he rejects conservatism because it’s “corporatism in disguise.”

    That's not paywalled, so check it out.


  • Recycling is garbage. But could something be done about that? The Josiah Bartlett Center notes some unexpected opposition: Recycling more plastics is bad? Some activists say so.

    Companies have been working for years on new ways to recycle plastics, and they think they have a breakthrough concept: chemical, or “advanced,” recycling. If the technology is perfected, it has the potential to increase plastics recycling and decrease solid waste.

    Naturally, environmental activist groups hate it.

    In the Legislature this year, a popular, bipartisan bill to speed the development of advanced recycling in New Hampshire drew little opposition — except from some green activists.

    Why? They prefer to abolish the production of single-use plastics. It’s a classic case of the perfect being the enemy of the good.

    The bill reclassifies advanced recycling facilities as manufacturing, rather than solid waste disposal operations. The regulations on the former category are less onerous.


Last Modified 2024-01-22 9:17 AM EDT