I Want a New Left

Two Quotes

Here:

If you keep making predictions and all the ones you get wrong are memory-holed by CNN, eventually one of them will turn out to be right. It’s like how the media predicted public disorder from the right for years but in 2020, had 500+ riots from the left and basically none from the right. Finally, on January 6, 2021 they get their riot from the right and will never ever let anyone forget it.

And here:

Michael Capuzzo, a New York Times best-selling author, has just published an article titled “The Drug That Cracked Covid.” The 15-page article chronicles the gargantuan struggle being waged by frontline doctors on all continents to get ivermectin approved as a Covid-19 treatment, as well as the tireless efforts by reporters, media outlets and social media companies to thwart them. [italics mine]

Heh.

Karma, I mean Carjacking, in Atlanta

See here. A city councilman who is running for mayor in Atlanta had his car stolen shortly after he got out of it. There are all kinds of amusing elements to this story:

• He wants to defund the police, yet he called the police.

• He whined that he was on hold for five minutes and that it took 45 minutes for the police to get there.

• From the video at the link we can see two officers at the scene, both of them black. So, he wants to cut their funding, eh?

• The thieves were children whom the victim described as no older than about 12, with one who was around 6.

• The victim declined to press charges. What was the point of calling the police, then? And what good will it do?

• The victim blamed it on generational poverty and said it has to stop. Well, their stealing his car, a Mercedes, is a way to reduce that poverty, right?

One sensible thing the victim said was that there was no amount of police on the streets who could have prevented this. Correct. But presumably this was in support of his belief that the police should be defunded. Actually, however, it shows that the police aren’t the problem, but rather that black America took a wrong turn a few decades back and that our elites refuse to acknowledge this. The police, after all, are like hospitals. As we all learned a year ago, hospitals can’t cope if nearly everyone is sick. Likewise, the police can’t cope if nearly everyone is a criminal or a supporter of criminals. (As I recall, the bystanders in the George Floyd case made it necessary to transport him elsewhere because bystanders were not being co-operative, which meant that the paramedics didn’t get to him as soon as they could.) Pre-teen car thieves should be a warning sign that things are not going well in black America. (I’m presuming they were black, and since we were not told that they were white, it is a good guess that they were black.) Ditto for knife fights among high-school girls, two teenaged girls stealing a car and in the process killing the owner, and now a mother who has led some teenaged girls into a school to beat up another teenaged girl (here). None of this is typical for other races, and it shows what expectations the police have when they encounter a George Floyd.

THE ELITES ARE TO BLAME.

The Crazy Housing Market

Nearly a year ago, a friend died unexpectedly. His brother cleaned out the house and sold it to a realtor, who spent quite a bit of time and money fixing it up. The house was put on the market this past week (here), and six of us (including the brother and his wife) looked at the photos and the price. All of us declared that it was not to our taste and that the price was way too high (by maybe $100K). By Thursday night, a sale was pending. Incredible. Obviously, we were all wrong about the price.

Regarding the Source of the Virus, Pigs Are Flying; Plus, the Nature of Today’s Gullible

Suddenly, there has been this startling 180 degree turn among the powers-that-be regarding the source of the Wuhan virus. A year ago or so we heard them say that the idea that it came out of a lab was nothing but a conspiracy theory from the right and that, therefore, such talk needed to be suppressed. Now suddenly they are acknowledging it as a possibility, and social media entities are scrambling to reverse their loathsome censorship. But why now?

Here is one account that says it started with an article in Science magazine. Here is a different account from Ann Coulter saying that the science writer Nicholas Wade wrote something about it in Medium. Whatever the case, it seems that respected people in science started expressing doubts about the ruling-class’s theory. And then Fauci had to acknowledge them, and a cascade of changes began.

Naturally, all of this reinforces my belief that John Stuart Mill was right about wanting free speech rather than all of the censorship that dominates on social media. We need to be hearing about alternative possibilities, if only to strengthen our own views. Moreover, as Nicholas Wade points out (as quoted in Coulter’s column), once our ruling class makes a decision, it is very difficult for scientists to speak out against that decision because they will lose access to grants.

But what is even more surprising in all of this is the gullibility of so many highly educated people. People with Ph.D.s who know that dealing with evidence can be tricky, that there are often two or more well-supported opinions on many subjects, and that caution is needed in complex affairs nevertheless accept the ruling-class media’s pronouncements on many things and believe that the science is settled. And these people further accept that suppressing alternate opinions is fine. They aren’t any better than people from a century ago who had only an eighth-grade education and who had only the dimmest notion of how science worked.

It’s all very pathetic.

The Fantasy of Electric Cars

Here is a post by Instapundit about an announcement by Ford that it has decided that 40% of its vehicles will be all-electric by 2030. Instapundit links to someone who thinks that Ford will be forced to make even more than 40% because of popular demand, but Instapundit’s take is that we won’t be able to keep up in terms of generating electricity.

This is what I am inclined to think, too. We need to generate all this electricity to charge up these cars, and it is supposed to be from green sources, and I suspect we won’t be able to do it. If we had put more effort into nuclear over the past fifty years, this probably wouldn’t be a problem, but the greens didn’t like, and still don’t like, the nuclear option.

However, let me say that this skepticism sounds like the talk about “peak oil” which has never really hit, so maybe Ford is right. Maybe the electricity won’t be a problem. Still, we need to be cautious about pushing for anything green because we really don’t know what the future holds. The green future seems to require a lot of obscure metals that may experience shortages for political or other reasons, while we are reasonably certain of being able to drill for more oil.

“Society Is To Blame” — No, Elites Are

I don’t know who came up with the saying that “society is to blame.” I presume it was a leftist trying to deflect blame from someone they considered marginalized who had engaged in criminal activity. Anyway, my idea is that we on the right should replace it with “our elites are to blame.” There are various reasons:

1. It is more likely to be true than saying that society is to blame. Elites have more power for choosing policies than “society” does.

2. The elites we have now seem to be particularly bad at choosing good policies. “Math is racist.” When have any elites said anything so obviously false and stupid?

3. Our elites need to feel some heat for a change. They are constantly attacking the rest of us, so we need to attack them. This is why so many people liked Trump as president.

So, who are the elites? I’ll get around to defining them some other time. Meanwhile, just remember: society is not to blame, but our elites are.

A Muslim Who’s a Hitler Lover

This is a little bit old, but see here. Well, I’ve been saying for years that our era’s fascists are the Islamists, but no one on the left will listen. It is beyond pathetic that nearly twenty years after 9/11, there is still not a single leftist who could even state my position on Muslims, much less disagree with it intelligently. Hey, leftists, they hate you and your values. They hate feminists, gays, and secularists. Why do you want them here?

Amusing Report from CNN, Plus Minneapolis Continues to Decline

I stumbled onto this report from CNN from last summer about the CHOP zone in Seattle. Keep in mind that this is a report that is pretty much on the side of the people involved, which means that things must have been much worse than they actually said. For example, they fail to note that a young man who was shot and killed in the zone, Lorenzo Anderson, was black and was shot by another black man. Still, what they reported was bad enough. Here are some of the more amusing points:

• “There were constant rumors that White power groups were just hours away, ready to bring violence.”

• The firefighters and paramedics wouldn’t go in unless the police went in, and the police were not going in. The activists didn’t seem to understand this because they expected paramedics to come in when there were emergencies.

• “Protesters said they felt they’d been expected to solve society’s most difficult problems on their own.” Well, yes. If you start your own little country, then that is what you need to think about.

Meanwhile, in Minneapolis there was a gathering to commemorate the death of George Floyd at the site where he died. This area is a no-go zone for the police, and almost predictably, shots rang out. See here. I have to say that this is pretty funny, except for the fact that the clueless will almost certainly blame white supremacists.

Freedom!

Today was the first day in months that I was able to go to the local Kroger without having to wear a mask. Their new rule is that it is not needed if one has been vaccinated, and plenty of people (including some workers) took advantage of this. It was great to be back to normal! Hurray!!!

There are, of course, still plenty of neurotics who seem afraid to go out without a mask, such as the scientist (a chemist) I heard about who has this attitude. But I say to them, fine, just so long as the rest of us don’t need to wear those stupid, useless things.

Stock Mystery Explained

The other day I noted that we had been invited to vote at the annual meeting of a company whose shares we didn’t own. It turns out that both I and my wife forgot that she has a separate brokerage account (whose money is intended for her sister, who is too irresponsible to be trusted with any big sums), and the voting relates to that account and not our joint account. Mystery solved.