Feb
8
2023

Does Anyone Remember Antonio Prohías?

Michael Ramirez does:

[Spy]

Apparently Spy vs. Spy outlived the genius Prohías, and Mad magazine is still publishing. Who knew?

Briefly noted:

  • But about that balloon. They say good news is hard to find, but Eric Boehm digs some out: By Shooting Down Balloon, the Expensive, Useless F-22 Fighter Finally Won a Dogfight.

    When it officially entered military service in 2005, the U.S. Air Force hailed the F-22 Raptor as an "exponential leap in warfighting capabilities."

    American taxpayers ultimately paid $67 billion to buy 187 of the planes, which had been in development since 1986 "to project air dominance, rapidly and at great distances" with technical capabilities that "cannot be matched by any known or projected fighter aircraft."

    On Saturday, the F-22 scored its first-ever victory against an airborne adversary when it shot down…a balloon.

    There may not be a better metaphor for the costly grandiosity of the American military than the use of a multi-million-dollar fighter jet to dispatch an unarmed, unmaneuverable opponent. But the fact that the F-22 had never won a dogfight before its decisive victory over what may or may not have been a Chinese spy balloon is a nice illustration of why the United States has the world's most expensive military by a massive margin.

    I like to say that I subscribe to both National Review and Reason, and that I rarely get irked by anything I read in either. But one of the rare things I do get irked by in NR is its cheerleading for ever-increased defense spending, with no skepticism or interest about its obvious boondoggles.

  • Oh, yeah, the State of the Union. Apparently it's full speed ahead toward that big iceberg: Biden Promises To Let Social Security's Ship Keep Sinking. Eric Boehm (yes, him again):

    President Joe Biden vowed Tuesday to keep Social Security and Medicare on their current course toward insolvency, promising to block any congressional attempts to reduce benefits in the two major entitlement programs.

    And Republicans loudly agreed.

    "If anyone tries to cut Social Security," Biden said during the State of the Union address, "if anyone tries to cut Medicare, I will stop them. I will veto it."

    Except, well, it's not clear that anyone is trying to cut them. Republican leaders have also said they won't consider cuts to Social Security or Medicare as part of the upcoming debt ceiling negotiations—something Biden acknowledged after Republican members of Congress loudly protested his characterization of their plans during the speech. "I guess there's no problem," he declared.

    Good luck, kids. You'll need it.

  • A Disney+ video clipped by Christopher Rufo:

    Problematic! Disney's sister streaming service, Hulu, is also aiding and abetting the cause with a "docuseries" around the 1619 Project. Rich Lowry rebuts one of the shows' theses: No, Slavery Didn’t Create Capitalism.

    A new episode is devoted to the idea that slavery created American capitalism and is about as subtle as the Disney+ cartoon, relying extensively on the commentary of the Marxist academic Robin D. G. Kelley.

    If there were any doubt about the radical agenda of the 1619 Project — which has made a pretense of a neutral pursuit of the historical truth — the Hulu show should remove it.

    It argues that, as Hannah-Jones puts it, our “economic system was founded on buying and selling black people.” Imprinted by this legacy, American capitalism is brutish and exploitative to this day. In fact, there is a direct line from antebellum cotton plantations to 21st-century Amazon warehouses.

    Yes, there’s very little difference between, say, Joshua John Ward, “the king of the rice planters” who owned more than a thousand slaves in South Carolina, and Jeff Bezos.

    Is there anything more suicidal than Disney adopting this cartoonish Marxist propaganda? Hey, Bob Iger, maybe they'll put you in one of the nicer boxcars on your way to the Gulag.


Last Modified 2024-01-30 6:42 AM EDT