Links - 26th April 2024 (1 - General Wokeness)

Meme - Hot Takes Nobody Asked For: "wil wheaton was wearing this *punch* shirt at a supermarket. he once had an emotional breakdown after watching larry david pretend to be mean to elmo as a joke."
"Never Stop Punching Nazis"

Disagreeing on same-sex marriage doesn’t make you evil, says Rowan Williams - "he warns that moral debates "have become weaponised in the current culture wars", meaning that nuance is lost. He will also caution that cancel culture means that people of opposing views on contentious issues - such as same-sex marriage, abortion and assisted dying - are seen as “automatically monstrous and oppressive"... “It won’t do to demonise those with inconvenient consciences as automatically monstrous and oppressive.   “You can’t simply ascribe deliberately evil intention to someone who disagrees on principle with the principles you think self-evident. Think, for example, of the debates over abortion or physician-assisted dying.”... Christians now account for less than half of England and Wales's population for the first time in census history."
From 2022. He missed the memo that if you disagree on gay marriage, you're a homophobic bigot and not a decent human being. Since he does not brand them monsters, he must be a terrible and awful person himself

Thread by @fentasyl on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "It's ridiculously profitable to be classified as a "non-profit" by the IRS
1998: $1.0T revenue, $2.3T assets
2016: $2.6T revenue, $6.0T assets
In 1991, there were 516,000 501(c)3 organizations according to the IRS. By 2021, there were 1,431,000. Over 10% of the US workforce is in the NGO industry, doling out $670B in wages 6 years ago... We've maybe reached "peak per capita NGO" in the 2010s, but the 1990s-2000s were a feeding frenzy  Reagan-era Tax changes hugely incentivized NGOs  Used to great effect as tax shelters for the ultra-rich & as taxpayer subsidized political activist orgs disguised as "civil rights". In 2012, NGOs made up a huge amount of the Northeast workforce (surely even more now):
- 27% of DC
- 18% of NY, MA, ME, VT, RI
- 16% of PA
And... whaddya know? The industry is recession-proof. Underappreciated is that NGOs aren't only for money laundering and political activism. You are also personally subsidizing all the activities of:
- Every College/University (yes, even "Private" ones)
- Every pediatric transgender clinic
- Every COVID mass death nursing home
Since 1990, the ultra-rich have funneled some $8+T to their NGOs, all of it deducted away from their fair share of taxes  That is, we pay the wealthy to do this  And once the cash is sheltered in the NGO, it can be spent largely tax free (compared to a "for profit" corporation)... Heck of a racket to produce highly indoctrinated indentured servants, all paid for by the average schmuck USA Taxpayer
What can be done? From easiest to hardest:
- End PSLF
- End the "charitable" tax deduction
- Force schools to underwrite their own students' loans
- Abolish the entire concept of "non-profit organization" and tax them the same as "for-profits""
This won't stop left wingers from insisting that churches be taxes and that since they don't pay taxes they shouldn't "interfere with politics"

I Meme Therefore I Am 🇺🇸 on X - "NEW: The NYC Council began its meeting today by praising Allah as the supreme lord of the world, expressing their reverence in both Arabic and English."
Presumably the new left wing logic is separation of church and state only applies to Christianity because the mosque is not a church

RadioGenoa on X - "Bisexual girl says she would rather live in an Islamic caliphate than a Spain ruled by Vox. What don't these young people understand?"

What Is Systemic Racism? - "The invocation of “systemic racism” in political arguments is both a bluff and a bludgeon.   When a person says, for example, “over-representation of black Americans in prison in the United States is due to systemic racism,” he is daring the listener to say: “No. It’s really because there are so many blacks who are breaking the laws.” And who would risk responding that way these days? The phrase effectively bullies the listener into silence.  Users of the phrase seldom offer any evidence beyond citing a fact about racial disparity while asserting shadowy structural causes that are never fully specified. We are all simply supposed to know how “systemic racism,” abetted by “white privilege” and furthered by “white supremacy,” conspire to leave blacks lagging behind.  American history is rather more subtle and more interesting. Such disparities have multiple, interacting causes, ranging from culture to politics to economics and, yes, to nefarious doings of institutions and individuals who may well have been racist. But acknowledging this complexity is too much nuance for those alleging “systemic racism.”  They ignore the following truth: that America has basically achieved equal opportunity in terms of race. We have chased away the Jim Crow bugaboo, not just with laws but also by widespread social customs, practices, and norms. When Democrats call a Georgia voter integrity law a resurgence of Jim Crow, it is nothing more than a lie. Everybody knows there is no real Jim Crow to be found anywhere in America... Our lives are being remade every decade by technology, globalization, communication, and innovation, and yet all we seem to hear about is race.  My deep suspicion is that these charges of “systemic racism” have proliferated and grown so hysterical because black people — with full citizenship and equal opportunity in the most dynamic country on Earth — are failing to measure up.  Violent crime is one dimension of this. The disorder and chaos in our family lives is another. Denouncing “systemic racism” and invoking “white supremacy,” and shouting “black lives matter,” while 8,000 black homicides a year go unmentioned — these are maneuvers of avoidance and blame-shifting.   The irony is that so many of us decry “systemic racism,” even as we simultaneously demand that this very same “system” deliver us."
"Systemic racism requires institutional collusion.   Systemic racism is being carried out today in America’s elite university system against Asian-Americans"

Meme - i/o @eyeslasho: "Although the percentages aren't very high, white liberals are roughly five times more likely than white moderates, and twice as likely as white conservatives, to admit to often secretly wishing for bad things to happen to people who politically disagree with them.
Source: ANES 2020 Pilot Survey (April 10-18)"
This tracks with left wing violence (though it's usually confined to fantasies and threats). But of course elites just obsess over the "far right"
20% of white liberals wishing it happened often or all the time is pretty high to me

Thread by @FistedFoucault on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - ""Young European men. We need you to urgently volunteer for military service in your respective countries in order to fend off Putler's coming invasion. You will fight for human rights, tolerance, and mass migration, while Google changes all of your history."
"You will fight for our right to call you misogynists, homophobes, racists, and transphobes. You will fight to ensure that young men from all over Asia and Africa can freely move into your lands and displace you socially, culturally, and economically."
"You will fight to ensure that political parties that best represent your interests will never, ever be allowed to come into power. You will fight to protect our right to curtail your ability to speak your minds, as doling so would threaten our democracy."
"You will fight to reduce our carbon footprint, even at the cost of complete de-industrialization, because we need to save Planet Earth from Climate Change. You will fight disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation, the three-headed beast of anti-democracy." "

Jay Van Bavel, PhD on X - "College admission essay content has a stronger correlation with household income (R2 = 16%) than SAT scores. This explains how removing standardized tests can increase inequality. Based on 240,000 admission essays to the University of California."
Essay content and style are strongly related to household income and SAT scores: Evidence from 60,000 undergraduate applications
DEI benefits rich "minorities"

Visegrád 24 on X - "BREAKING: Another massacre against Christian Nigerians perpetrated by Islamist Fulani militias in Plateau State At least 11 were murdered in Bokkos during a night attack. Dozens wounded Homes & churches burned. Children killed Any protest march planned in London? Why not? 🇳🇬"
Gad Saad on X - "Is there a way that we can blame this on the Zionist regime? Clearly, Islam does not permit violence so this must be a false flag perpetrated by the Yahood."
PM - on X - "All religions are cults, money making organizations that kill for it."
Gad Saad on X - "Oh yes but especially the Jains.  They are such bloodthirsty killers that they use a broom to sweep in front of them while walking in order to not inadvertently kill any insects.  All religions are equal; all cultures are equal; criminals are equal but more so than their victims; men are women; borders are racist.  Suicidal empathy = death of the West.  Next book coming."

Meme - Karl Reid @educator2us: "Just boarded an early morning flight wearing my @MIT gear. A seat mate looked at me and asked, "Basketball?" I said, "No. Engineering!" What about me prompted him to think I was playing or coaching basketball?"
The Redheaded libertarian @TRHLofficial: "It's not that deep. You're dressed like a coach, not a nerd."
Sebastian Stern @sternseb: "What is this obsession in western society with projecting victimhood and demanding attention? I really can't wrap my mind around it. It's so sad. It's damaging to the individual, it's damaging to society. We used to champion strength and perseverance. What happened?"
Valspar11 @Valspar111: "POLITICAL POWER. And all that comes with it- the ability to: 1) Steal in the name of the 'oppressed' richest 'poor' on the planet. 2) Lie about any topic and be supported by the leftist media - get away with it over and over again. 3) Hold very well paying 'employment' poisoning the minds of the ignorant, polluting the public square with alien concepts based on envy jealousy and marx. For starters."
Cernovich @Cernovich: "If we are being technical, according to MIT, you work in "outreach" and now DEI"

Keep Social-Justice Indoctrination Out of the Therapist’s Office - "Alexander Adams, a pseudonymous recent graduate of an American Master’s program in counseling, recently wrote an essay for Critical Therapy Antidote entitled, My Master’s Degree in Counseling Psychology Taught me a lot about ‘Social Justice’ But Very Little about Counseling or Psychology. He describes two and a half years of “incompetence and mediocrity”—at a cost of $70,000 in (borrowed) money—during which teachers felt free to lecture students about their political beliefs, and trainees were instructed on “the dynamics and dilemmas of microaggressions,” and “developing a nonracist and antiracist white identity.”  On the same site, a Master’s degree candidate in counseling (identified pseudonymously as “Student J”) asked what this pedagogy would mean for white patients: “When you seek counseling, how [would] you feel knowing that the person supposedly providing you with empathy and care sees you as an oppressor? … How is this healthy and productive for anyone?”  A white woman who recently obtained her doctoral degree in counseling psychology, whom I’ll call “N,” was struck by the overt bias among instructors. They routinely derided conservatives as “ignorant and uneducated,” she told me. Like Adams and “Student J,” “N” noted that antagonism was directed at trainees who questioned the relevance of social justice dogma to their clinical cases. “If we were not combating oppression, we were contributing to it,” “N” said. A therapist is free to personally believe that Black Lives Matter and Ibram X. Kendi should (or should not) serve as guiding lights in the creation of a new kind of social contract. But in regard to clinical practice, Critical Social Justice Therapy violates core tenets of sound psychotherapy. Instead of addressing the individual person in need, it applies a pre-programmed ideological agenda that classifies individuals as oppressor or oppressed based on identity group.  The task of the therapist, said Anthony Storr, the late British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, is “to get the patient to talk as freely as possible whilst he himself stays in the background.” But talking freely is possible only if a therapist assumes a posture of caring neutrality, openness, and curiosity. And learning to maintain compassionate detachment lies at the heart of practitioner training. The mature therapist keeps her private passions from distorting the work. She is attuned to the development of what Freud called “countertransference,” wherein her own emotional reaction to a patient clouds her clinical judgment. Even seasoned therapists engage trusted supervisors to help them understand and manage such complexities as they emerge in therapeutic relationships.   The “therapeutic alliance” between therapist and patient depends on their agreement in regards to the methods employed and the goals pursued. And research has shown that the quality of this alliance can help predict whether the therapy will be successful... When a therapist comes to the first session armed with an ideological program that dictates what the patient should become, such an alliance is doomed. Even insofar as a patient may agree to this program before treatment begins, what they will be receiving isn’t psychotherapy so much as anti-racism cant delivered under the pretext of therapeutic treatment. Where the patient should be inculcated in the habit of self-observation, he will instead be taught to search outside himself for sources of all duress; instead of traveling a path to greater autonomy, he will be instead rewarded for adopting the victim role...   Olden, like most people who pursue psychotherapy, wanted to find clarity, relief from suffering, and freedom from the habits that had imprisoned her for years. Instead, she was told that we were “victims of vague societal forces outside of our control.”... researchers purporting to show the value of “multicultural counseling” typically have failed to even define this therapeutic subcategory with any precision. As well, many of their studies neglected to randomize subjects to control groups; instead, the researchers simply relied on self-reporting by selected clients and therapists. In all, one is hard-pressed to find any systematic evidence that the latest wave of CSJT techniques offer any real benefit...   I’ve heard reports of patients being scolded by therapists for voting the “wrong” way. And I’ve exchanged emails with a former academic who has an informal side gig referring conservative (and ideologically non-compliant liberals) to “non-woke,” neutral therapists"

The warmongers have gone woke - "The recruitment video went viral. It outraged the right for portraying America as weak to its adversaries. And it outraged the left, who accused the CIA of dishonestly ‘co-opting’ progressive politics.  In truth, the CIA has been woke for some time – and no one should be surprised by its drift in this direction. The ‘Humans of CIA’ campaign, which highlights the diversity of the agency’s staff, has actually been running since 2019. A year before, Gina Haspel, despite her alleged involvement in ‘extraordinary rendition’, became the first female CIA chief – a move the Trump administration tried to spin as a victory for ‘women’s empowerment’.  It’s not just the CIA, either. The broader defence establishment is now bound up with woke politics. A watershed moment arrived in 2019 when MSNBC could proudly proclaim that the ‘military-industrial complex is now run by women’. As well as Haspel at the CIA, Andrea Thompson at the Pentagon was America’s lead weapons negotiator and in charge of the nuclear stockpile. The five largest arms contractors – Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and the defence arm of Boeing – were also run by women. In the same year, Raytheon, the world’s largest manufacturer of guided missiles, began its partnership with the Girl Scouts, apparently to ‘close the gender gap in STEM’. Of course, for US militarism to be truly ‘intersectional’ it has to encompass race and sexuality as well as gender. At the weekend, the US Navy celebrated its first ever all-gay helicopter crew. Dow Chemical, which produced skin-burning napalm for the Vietnam war, has drawn media praise for its gay CEO. ‘How Dow Chemical Got Woke’, was how Bloomberg reported it. Earlier this year, ex-CIA chief John Brennan made headlines when he declared that he was ‘increasingly embarrassed’ to be a white man – perhaps not everyone can be ‘unapologetically themselves’ at Langley, after all.   Why do they bother? Why have the warmongers gone woke? Partly it is a question of image. Of course, just as big companies like to align their corporate missions to Black Lives Matter because it is too gauche to say they are out to make a profit, the CIA and the defence establishment cannot simply say that they are out to dominate other countries or defend US commercial interests.   But it is more than just PR. There are a number of aspects inherent to wokeness that make it so appealing to powerful institutions and elites. First, identity politics allows for ‘divide and rule’... an institution like the CIA could never draw moral legitimacy from more democratic ideals like national or popular sovereignty, as it overrides these every day. Secondly, wokeness allows the powerful to pose as being on the side of the weak. If you question these institutions which claim to be fighting racism, sexism and other -isms, it is because you are racist, sexist or some other ‘-ist’.  Then there is the therapeutic aspect of wokeness. On the one hand, this allows the powerful to present themselves as vulnerable... you don’t need a decent wage, or the CIA to stop droning your village — you just need to see a therapist. Finally, there is the vast scope for obfuscation provided by political correctness. Wokeness normalises euphemistic language – ideal for the practitioners of ‘enhanced interrogation’ and the like.  The CIA’s embrace of ‘intersectional’ imperialism should make it clear beyond doubt that wokeness is the ideal ideology of the powerful."

Did Slavery Create American Prosperity? - "Recently there seem to be an increasing number of claims that American prosperity resulted from slavery.  This is presented as justification for the renewed calls for reparations for slavery, which Democrats are using in an attempt to gain support as we approach the next presidential election.  But did slavery actually create the wealth of the U.S.?  Does this claim have any historical basis in fact, or is this a distortion of history to influence the views of voters?... If we consider the historical experience of other nations involved in the slave trade, it could help our understanding of the issue.  The transatlantic slave trade that took place from the 16th to the 19th centuries was a system in which Africans sold members of other tribes, often prisoners, as slaves to Europeans, who then shipped them to the Americas.  During this time period only 5% of the total number of slaves sent across the Atlantic went to the U.S., with the other 95% going mostly to South America and the Caribbean.  If American prosperity is based on slavery, then we would expect other nations that participated in the transatlantic slave trade to also be prosperous.  If we take Brazil, for example, that nation took about 20 times more slaves than the U.S.  So, if slavery leads to great prosperity one would expect Brazil to be much more prosperous than the U.S., since they took many more slaves.  However, the U.S.’s GDP per capita is about four times greater than Brazil’s.  Although the standard of living in Brazil is significantly lower than that of the U.S., other nations in South America are even worse off and among the poorest in the world, despite their historical experience with slavery.   Now if we consider a sample of other prosperous nations that have a standard of living comparable to that of the U.S., would we find that their prosperity resulted from slavery?   In Europe let’s take Switzerland, Germany, and Norway; in Asia, Singapore, Japan, and South Korea; and let’s also consider some other former British colonies, such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.  None of these prosperous nations participated in the transatlantic slave trade.    If American prosperity were based on slavery, then we would expect to learn that in the 1800s the Southern States were wealthier than the Northern States, where slavery was illegal.  However, this was simply not the case.  The Industrial Revolution, which included new mechanized manufacturing techniques along with innovations in transportation and communication, such as the railroads, steamboats, and the telegraph, dramatically increased production.  This was the driving force of the North’s economy, and in 1860, 90% of the nation’s manufacturing output came from the North...  80% of the U.S.’s wheat was produced in the North.  Southern plantation owners had less motivation to invest in modern farm machinery since they owned slaves, so Southern agriculture remained more dependent on labor, which hindered progress and economic growth as the North became more mechanized and productive.  In 1860 per capita income in the South was only 72% of the U.S. average, so there is no evidence that slavery made the South wealthy, let alone the entire U.S... It is also worth noting that in the years after the war cotton production increased dramatically without the use of slave labor... By any objective measure, American prosperity is not based on slavery.  The industrial revolution set the stage for people such as Thomas Edison and Henry Ford and companies such as Boeing and Apple.  It set the stage for all the American entrepreneurs, small businesses, and workers that contributed to American economic growth and prosperity.  This along with a developed legal system, property rights, a high literacy rate, and a market economy is what led to a prosperous nation.  To deny this and distort history to further a political agenda only creates more conflict and division at a time that has already become one of the most divisive in the U.S. since the Civil War."

Rutgers Prof: ‘Officially, I Now Hate White People’ - "James Livingston, the Rutgers University history professor who made the remarks, proceeded to detail “little Caucasian a**holes” that annoyed him at a restaurant.  “OK, officially, I now hate white people,” Livingston said. “I am a white people [sic], for God’s sake, but can we keep them — us — us out of my neighborhood? I just went to Harlem Shake on 124 and Lenox for a Classic burger to go, that would [be] my dinner, and the place is overrun with little Caucasian a**holes who know their parents will approve of anything they do.”  “Slide around the floor, you little s**thead, sing loudly, you moron,” he continued. “Do what you want, nobody here is gonna restrict your right to be white.”  “F**k these people,” finished the professor, noting that he “resign[ed]” from his race."...  “I just don’t want little Caucasians overrunning my life, as they did last night,” Livingston explained later Friday morning on Facebook. “Please God, remand them to the suburbs, where they and their parents can colonize every restaurant, all the while pretending that the idiotic indulgence of their privilege signifies cosmopolitan — you know, as in sophisticated ‘European’ — commitments.”"

"I Hope We Have No Crackers Here": EBF Staff Sanction Racial Slur - "A week ago, residents of Enchanted Broccoli Forest discovered the words “No crackers!” scrawled in paint across their bus...   You would think that residents of a supposedly progressive and racially conscious house would jump to remove a racial epithet from house property. Not so. When a resident posted a picture in the EBF GroupMe last Thursday, peers brushed aside the incident with off-color jokes. Disappointing, but, unfortunately, the story gets far worse. After a week, another resident, Ian Knight — a first-generation, low-income, white Southerner who felt understandably uncomfortable with the slur — raised the issue in the house GroupMe and was immediately dismissed as an apologist for “reverse racism.” When other residents had worried that the “problematic” fake tepee on the porch of their retreat AirBnB represented cultural appropriation, staff members immediately responded: the tepee would be removed by the first car to the house. But when Ian pointed out that something should be done about the blatantly racist graffiti on the bus, his concerns were brushed aside. One resident simply responded “No,” receiving fourteen likes from house members.  Other residents accused Ian of piggybacking on the complaints of people of color to raise his less-important “white” concerns, while others shamefully tried to excuse the slur for being “deserved.” The graffiti didn’t matter because white people are, by nature, oppressive and racist, they said — all while enjoying the best university in the world, while rural whites suffer grinding poverty. If anything, a blatantly racist act of vandalism is far more clear-cut than the murky concept of “cultural appropriation.” Residents repeatedly brushed aside Ian’s discomfort with the racist graffiti. Finally, a staff member explicitly endorsed the message on the bus, telling him (erroneously) that since “the word cracker, has been historically defined to mean ‘racist white person,’” that she agreed with the graffiti. Apparently too enlightened to take ten seconds to read the definition of “cracker” as a term “for white people, used especially against poor rural whites in the Southern United States” (never including the idea of racism), she told her first-generation white Southern resident: “I hope we have no crackers here.” If such ignorant and bigoted remarks are not grounds for immediate dismissal from a staff position, we are not sure what are. EBF can pretend to be socially progressive all it wants, but this incident reveals alarming hypocrisy: the right kind of racism is just fine. While the staff reaction alone is shocking, other EBF residents did not only ignore or play down the slur, but also supported its appalling sentiment. To a mind-boggling sixteen likes from the group, one resident even stated that he was “strongly against removing the ‘no crackers’ spray paint”! He claimed, absurdly, that addressing racism against white people should be delayed until every other possible form of oppression is eradicated. One could only imagine the outcry that would have ensued had this comment been directed at anyone except whites."

ACLU withdraws subpoena for gender clinic whistleblower's messages with journalists after callout - "The American Civil Liberties Union is known for its historic defense of freedom of the press — unless it's prying open the press.  The 104-year-old organization, which championed a House-passed bill in January to prevent "government from compelling journalists to reveal their sources and work product," is seeking a wide range of communications from a conservative journalist, some but not all related to its First Amendment lawsuit against Florida's Stop WOKE Act. The ACLU's Missouri affiliate and Lambda Legal quickly dropped requests for communications with journalists related to their lawsuit against the Show-Me State's law against medicalized gender transitions for minors after a liberal journalist posted the subpoena...   Chris Rufo, who wears hats as a journalist, author, documentary filmmaker and New College of Florida trustee, disclosed Wednesday on X that the ACLU subpoenaed him for "all of my sources and journalistic materials related to critical race theory" as part of a "heavily financed propaganda campaign against my work." His lawyers told the ACLU to "pound sand," but the group has threatened to depose him for more than a year, according to Rufo. "Depose me anytime. But I won't let you hide behind a Zoom screen and the pronouns in your email signatures. You will have to face me in person – and I will wreck you," he wrote.  Rufo gave more details in his newsletter Thursday, saying the ACLU sent "an agent to my home while I was eating dinner with my wife and children" to serve the 18-page subpoena in 2022. It would expose his confidential sources on CRT, Black Lives Matter and "racial justice protests."   He's spilling the beans because of "another misleading attack on my character" by the ACLU, apparently referring to a Feb. 14 broadside targeting Rufo as a "far-right" enemy of "racial equity and free speech" for his activism against diversity, equity and inclusion programs...   Rufo told Rogan the investigation is an "intimidation mechanism" that could involve depositions and subpoenas. It suggests the U.S. is "not far from" a "Soviet Union-style gulag situation in 2029."...   The ACLU didn't respond to queries for its explanation of how subpoenaing Rufo doesn't set a precedent that conservatives can use against similarly activist journalists on the left, such as Nikole Hannah-Jones, in challenges to blue states' laws, and whether Granick's complaint prompted the federal investigation."

Links - 25th April 2024 (3)

How Baseball Betrayed Cuba’s Covert Ops - "On a few occasions, Cuba’s unique fondness for baseball betrayed its covert activities — at home and abroad — to American reconnaissance, thanks to the visible presence or absence of distinctive baseball diamonds... Twice during the Cold War, Cuban troops’ penchant for building recreational baseball fields helped American reconnaissance learn some of Fidel Castro’s secrets.  The first story — dubbed “The Case of the Missing Diamond” in an article by legendary CIA photo analyst Dino Brugioni — begins in 1970. That year, Cuba began to build up the naval infrastructure on Cayo Alcatraz, an island in the port of Cienfuegos. The construction got underway just as a Soviet flotilla consisting of a nuclear submarine and guided-missile ships headed for the island... In an episode that both Haldeman and Kissinger recounted in their memoirs, the presence of soccer fields at the new facility led U.S. analysts to conclude it was meant for the Soviets.  Haldeman writes that Kissinger slapped U-2 spy plane photos of Cayo Alcatraz on his desk and drew his attention to the soccer fields. “Those soccer fields could mean war, Bob,” Kissinger said. “Cubans play baseball. Russians play soccer.” Then-CIA Director Richard Helms concurred. In a Congressional briefing recounted by Brugioni, Helms told congressmen that “clinching the case that all this was for Soviet — not Cuban — use, there are sports facilities for soccer, tennis and volleyball only, and we have yet to see a major Cuban military installation that does not provide for ‘beisbol.’”  “The ubiquitous baseball diamonds are an important part of the Cuban landscape, and photo interpreters often gauge the amount of activity by the number of diamonds present in an area,” Brugioni wrote. The practice dated back at least early as the Cuban missile crisis, according to Brugioni. During the crisis, analysts counted on soccer and baseball fields to distinguish Soviet from Cuban military encampments... Cuba’s fondness for baseball captured the attention of America’s aerial spies on another occasion in 1975. When Angola achieved independence from Portugal during that year, Cuba sent military advisers to assist the leftist People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola in its war against factions backed by the United States and the racist apartheid government in neighboring South Africa.  The Cuban advisers stayed well into the 1980s. Their bases were apparently identifiable to American satellites — because of the baseball diamonds the Cubans built. David C. Miller, Jr., American ambassador to Tanzania during the administration of Pres. Ronald Reagan, recalled that he used to pass images of the fields to Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere in order to convince him of Cuba’s role in Angola... And for whatever secrets Cuba’s baseball diamonds did spill, the Reagan administration’s attempt to use and abuse them also highlights the perils of analyzing intelligence through the lens of simplistic truism.  In the 1980s, Reagan’s National Security Council was hard at work orchestrating the illegal sale of arms to Iran and diverting the proceeds to fund “Contra” rebels fighting the leftist Sandanista government in Nicaragua.  After the scandal broke, NBC’s Tom Brokaw recalled a briefing he’d received in advance of a trip to Nicaragua by one of the maestros of Iran-Contra, U.S. Marine Corps colonel Oliver North. Writing in The New York Times, Brokaw said North excitedly pointed out baseball diamonds in grainy satellite footage of what he alleged was a Cuban training camp in Nicaragua.  “Nicaraguans don’t play baseball,” North told Brokow in an apparent attempt to cast himself as Kissinger at Cienfuegos. “Cubans play baseball!”  Of course, both the Cubans and Soviets supported the Sandanista government in Nicaragua. But as Brokaw quickly realized, North’s contention was astonishingly ignorant of the country’s long history of baseball fandom. “His declaration will come as a surprise to the Nicaraguans who have made it to the major leagues,” Brokaw wrote."

Please Stop Misusing the Phrase ‘Height of the Cold War’ - "Lest you doubt the extent of journalistic abuse of the “height of the Cold War” War Is Boring compiled an utterly unscientific sampling of major news outlets’ use of the phrase.  With the exception of four years spread across the the very beginning and end of the conflict, there’s at least one article in a major news outlet proclaiming every year of the period to be “the height of the Cold War.”... All three men pointed to years leading up to and including the Cuban Missile Crisis as well as the late 1940s and early ’50s, when the U.S. faced off against the Soviets and the Chinese over Berlin and the Korean War. The Cuban Missile Crisis is a fairly obvious choice for the period of greatest tension during the Cold War. U.S. president John F. Kennedy and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev squared off over the Soviet Union’s stationing of nuclear intermediate range ballistic missiles in Cuba, with both sides tiptoeing up to the edge of nuclear confrontation.  “As the most tense ‘height of Cold War’ episode,” Burr says, “the Cuban Missile crisis remains the inescapable candidate in terms of the seriousness of the situation, where both sides realized they faced a dangerous crisis and were nuclear forces were on high alert.”  The period of the ’40s and ’50s, when Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin played a tense game of brinksmanship over control of Berlin with a blockade of the city and the Korean war briefly brought the U.S. to war with China, are also a logical candidate for the Cold War’s rightful “height.”  In the latter half of the Cold War, the superpowers largely duked it out through proxy conflicts in the third world. While those conflicts exacted a bloody real-life toll on the participants, they prevented the U.S. and Soviet Union from facing. Both Burr and Hershberg also mention the events surround NATO’s Able Archer exercise in 1983 as a reasonable—if less widely understood—candidate for the Cold War’s peak.  The election of Pres. Ronald Reagan and the subsequent increases in U.S. defense spending and anti-Soviet “evil empire” rhetoric made the Soviets nervous enough as it was.  The Soviets’ mistaken downing of Korean Air Lines flight 007 and the U.S. deployment of Pershing II nuclear missiles in Europe, which the Soviets feared could allow for a swift NATO nuclear first strike, made the Cold War even tenser... As Russian president Vladimir Putin’s pushes to recapture the former territories of the Soviet Union, sinking U.S.-Russian relations to a low, many are quick to label it a “new Cold War.”  Russia’s actions are dangerous and deplorable. And they certainly put the U.S. on notice that Moscow is willing to use military force to try and restore its former empire.  But a review of the darkest moments of the Cold War — when the West came perilously close to nuclear exchange with Russia — shows that, bad as things might be now, the temperature still has a way to go before it plunges to the icy depths of the Cold War’s darkest days."

Sun Ra: A True Birthday - "Perhaps most affecting is Ra’s solo keyboard track, “Advice to Medics,” titled after his history of playing for what his biographer John Szwed describes as a therapy-through-music group that “included catatonics and severe schizophrenics.” (The biographer reports that one patient, breaking a years-long silence, approached Ra to ask: “Do you call that music?”)"

Meme - @Spacecorgi: "I love that one middle-management ore who kept arguing with Saruman about realistic factory output."

SKorea Hopes New Speed Train Links Will Help Boost Birthrate - "South Korea is launching a high-speed train service that will reduce the travel time between central Seoul and its outskirts, a project officials hope will encourage more youth to consider homes outside the city, and start having babies"

Shirley Temple, the Child Star Who Wasn't a Cautionary Tale - The Atlantic - ""Can the most famous child in the world grow up emotionally unscarred?"  Twenty-five years ago, that was the question that opened the New York Times news service's review of Shirley Temple Black's autobiography, Child Star. It remains the question attached to anyone who could plausibly write an autobiography by that title—and recent examples, from Lindsay Lohan to Justin Bieber, have created a consensus is that no, usually, famous kids don't grow up unscarred.  But Temple, who died Monday night at age 85, is the popular counterexample. After her prepubescent acting gigs, she went on to live a meltdown-free career as a diplomat, political activist, and mother of three.  That fact made her "perhaps the best example of a child star who came out the other side sane and used her fame for a great 2nd act," said entertainment critic Alan Sepinwall on Twitter. Or, as writer Jeff Pearlman put it, she "was Justin Bieber with talent, taste, judgement and 0 inane tattoos."... One thing that stands out reading through the obituaries for Temple is that people probably shouldn't get too nostalgic for the how classic Hollywood treated Temple and kids like her. If she emerged unscarred, it's not for the film industry's lack of trying... In 1939, a woman who thought Temple had stolen her daughter's soul tried to assassinate her during a radio performance. "The tale seemed understandable to me,” Temple wrote of the incident in Child Star. As Matt Weinstock pointed out last year for The New Yorker, that's a shockingly level-headed response in the annals of celebrity brushes with the deranged: "In 1981, Jodie Foster would respond to the Hinckley incident by sinking into depression, demanding to read all her hate mail, and ironically hanging an enormous photo of Reagan getting shot in her kitchen."... "On her first visit to MGM, Mrs. Black wrote in her autobiography, the producer Arthur Freed unzipped his trousers and exposed himself to her," reports the Times. "Being innocent of male anatomy, she responded by giggling, and he threw her out of his office."... many kid actors turn out fine... Parenting likely plays a role, and Temple spoke effusively about how much affection she maintained for her mother over the years. But Temple also seemed like she possessed a steeliness that'd be unique in any era."
From 2014

A (Straight, Male) History of Sex Dolls - The Atlantic - "Pygmalion’s true modern heir might be Davecat, a man who lives in southeastern Michigan with three high-end sex dolls. His first purchase, which he named Sidore Kuroneko, he considers his wife; the other two—named Elena and Muriel—are just intimate friends. Though he didn’t sculpt them, they are his creations. He designed their bodies before they were manufactured and their personalities after they arrived. “There was never a moment when [Sidore]—or any doll, for that matter—was merely an object to me”... he’s part of a community called iDollators. These owners of high-end, anatomically correct dolls use them for sex, love, art, and companionship.  If Pygmalion lived in today’s world, none of this would be too foreign to him. In Ovid’s original story, there is some implication that the sculptor was not only in love with the statue but that he had sex with it before it came to life, according to The Erotic Doll, a book by Dr. Marquard Smith, the head of doctoral studies and the research leader at the Royal College of Art’s School of Humanities... the Greek rhetorician Athenaeus wrote of a man who had a physical love affair with a statue of Cupid... a gardener was reportedly found attempting to get it on with a replica of the Venus de Milo in 1877. Throughout history, men without access to beautiful statues—but with an inclination to make love to women-shaped things—have made do in various ways. Sailors often used cloth to fashion fornicatory dolls known as dame de voyage in French, or dama de viaje in Spanish. In modern-day Japan, sex dolls are sometimes known as “Dutch wives”—a reference to the hand-sewn leather masturbation puppets made by the 17th-century Dutch sailors who traded with the Japanese. Though sailors’ dolls were just generic substitutes for the female form—any female form—there are some instances of men creating dolls as stand-ins for specific women. In 1916, after the Austro-Hungarian artist Oskar Kokoschka was jilted by his lover, the pianist and composer Alma Mahler, he wrote that he had “lost all desire to go through the ordeal of love again.” (This is a refrain that doll owners have repeated through the ages.)... the most public prelude to the modern sex doll was the mannequin-based art created by Surrealists like Man Ray and Salvador Dalí. A work called “Mannequin Street,” featured at the Exposition International du Surréalisme at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts in 1938, included 16 mannequins outfitted by different artists, while Dalí’s “Rainy Taxi” centered on a female mannequin whose half-undressed body was crawling with live snails. Man Ray once claimed that the Surrealists not only infused these works with eroticism but personally “violated” their mannequins.  A persistent urban legend holds that Adolf Hitler charged one of his SS commanders to design sex dolls for German soldiers during World War II, to prevent them from slaking their lust with non-Aryan women. Whether or not this is true, the commercial sex doll does find its origins in Germany.  The Bild Lilli doll—invented in the 1950s and modeled on a sexy, outspoken comic-strip character called Lilli—was an 11.5 inch plastic model, not a penetrable sex doll. In his book The Sex Doll: A History, Anthony Ferguson calls the Bild Lilli “a pornographic caricature.” Although it was marketed to adult men, the doll is widely cited as the inspiration for Barbie, so, you know, take that and run with it... The realism and utility of sex dolls took a giant leap forward in the late 90s, when  artist Matt McMullen started working on a lifelike silicone female mannequin and documenting its progress on his website. Before long, he began getting emails asking if it was … anatomically correct. At the time, it wasn’t. But the demand was there, and so McMullen provided the supply. Hence, the eerily lifelike RealDoll was born. After shock jock Howard Stern got hold of one and seemingly had sex with it on his radio show, McMullen’s company grew quickly, and he now sells anywhere from 200 to 300 high-end customizable sex dolls per year... He insists that actual women have nothing to fear from his dolls. “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Do I think the dolls will replace women or threaten to replace women? Absolutely not.” Throughout history—from Pygmalion and his marble bride to Oskar Kokoschka and his fuzzy companion—the creators and users of sex dolls have been overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, straight men. “In the content analysis I did of magazines and books, I don’t think any of [the examples] involved women,” says Cynthia Ann Moya, vice-president of the erotica database Alta-Glamour.com Book Gallery, who wrote her Ph.D. dissertation at the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco on artificial vaginas and sex dolls from the late 19th century through the 1980s. “This is not to say that it never happened. But the mythologies that people tell each other about these sex dolls all involved men.”... “Why aren’t more women using sex dolls?” and “Why are so many men drawn to them?”  Some answers are purely practical. For instance, only 25 percent of women can consistently orgasm from vaginal sex alone, which makes a doll far from the most efficient sex toy. Also, when it comes to RealDolls and their ilk, everyone I spoke with told me how heavy they are. (Female RealDolls weigh between 75 and 115 pounds.) Some mentioned it sheepishly, others matter-of-factly, but there was a general consensus that the dolls are difficult for many women to move around.  There’s also plenty of speculation about the difference between men and women’s masturbation styles. In his 1936 book Studies in the Psychology of Sex, the English psychologist Henry Havelock Ellis wrote that men are more visual, while women are more imaginative and rely more on their sense of touch... There are some women who buy female dolls. But McMullen says many of them purchase the dolls with a male partner—or with the intention of dressing them up and enjoying them as fashion dolls. “A lot of women like the dolls because they’re like life-size Barbies,” he says... many of the men she surveyed for her research felt shame or embarrassment about owning sex dolls. But contrary to popular stereotypes, they were just as satisfied with their lives, on average, as the general population, and didn’t suffer higher-than-normal rates of depression or other mental illness... Some doll owners are just having fun. Some suffer from social anxiety or even disabilities that might make human relationships difficult. Some people just want to take arty photographs. The whole phenomenon is surprisingly hard to nail down... “Ninety-eight percent of the iDollators and technosexuals I know treat their Dolls like goddesses”... because they don’t meet women’s expectations.” But then he went on: “Dolls don’t possess any of the unpleasant qualities that organic, flesh and blood humans have. A synthetic will never lie to you, cheat on you, criticize you, or be otherwise disagreeable.”"

Malaysian minister says heritage dish status for bak kut teh nothing to do with race, religion - "Stop turning the bak kut teh (pork rib soup) discussion into a religious issue and show respect for Malaysia’s multiracial structure, Tourism Minister Tiong King Sing said... as per the National Heritage Act 2005 (Act 645) discussions on whether to turn bak kut teh into a heritage dish has nothing to do with religion or race.  The Bintulu MP said bak kut teh is not a new dish as it has been part of Malaysian society for a long time.  “We know that there are halal and non-halal versions. There is even a vegetarian version of bak kut teh.  “The recognition of bak kut teh as a heritage food is based on Act 645 and does not involve issues of race or religion,” he said.  With that in mind, Tiong called on all quarters to respect the different cultures and religions in Malaysia so as to protect the harmony in the country... Bak kut teh was among the 10 dishes declared by Heritage Commissioner Mohamad Muda Bahadin on February 24 as national heritage dishes.  Earlier this month, Umno Youth chief Dr Muhamad Akmal Saleh described the action of recognising bak kut teh as a national heritage dish as “extremist,” claiming it showed “a lack of sensitivity towards the country’s Muslim population.”"
Malaysia Boleh!

Malaysia opposition MP slammed for linking Chinese villages under Unesco plan to communism - "Housing and Local Government Minister Nga Kor Ming, who is from the multiracial but Chinese-led Democratic Action Party, last year proposed to ask Unesco to recognise the “new villages”, which were set up by the British across several states in the peninsula to contain the spread of communism after World War II.  His proposal triggered an immediate backlash from some Muslim academics and Islamist parties, who described it as an attempt to grant native status to non-Malays. Global recognition accorded to these villages could be seen as legitimising the struggles of the Communist Party of Malaya (PKM), Ismail Abu Muttalib, a lawmaker with the Perikatan Nasional (PN) opposition front"

April Harding on X - "Matt Taibbi was asked "why doesn't he pay much attention to the sins (or threats) from "the right"?" He gave a great answer: Why I don’t spend a lot of time on the Republicans:
1) There is a enormous army of MSM reporters already going after them from every angle, with most major news organizations little more than proxies for the DNC, to the point where stations hire Biden spokespeople as anchors;
2) The Republicans have very little institutional power nationally. It’s not their point of view prevailing in schools, on campuses, in newsrooms (where over 90% of working reporters vote blue), and especially in the intelligence and military apparatus, which has openly aligned itself with Democrats. Even if Donald Trump were a “threat to Democracy” he lacks the institutional pull to do much damage, which can’t be said of Democrats;
3) The Democrats’ ambitions are significantly more dangerous than those of the Republicans. From digital surveillance to censorship to making Intel and enforcement agencies central players in domestic governance — all plans being executed globally as well as in our one country — they are thinking on a much bigger and more dangerous scale than Republicans. I lived in third world countries and the endless criminal indictments of people like Trump and ongoing lawfare efforts to prevent even third party challenges are classic authoritarian symptoms. The Republicans aren’t near this kind of capability;
4) Last and most important, the Democrats are being organized around a more potent but also much dumber, more cultlike ideology. People like Yuval Harari and his Transhumanist “divinity” concept scare me a lot more than the Rs, and I was once undercover in an apocalyptic church in Texas. Ask your average Russian or Cuban what overempowered pseudo-intellectuals are capable of.
I have a pretty good record of picking dangerous phenomena ahead of time. I feel confident on this one, and that’s before we get to the demographic/class shifts in the parties."
It's only "fascism" if it threatens the left wing agenda

Taliban To Resume Stoning Women In Public For Adultery: Report - " Taliban's Supreme Leader Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada made the announcement - that it is resuming publicly stoning women to death - in a voice message broadcast on state TV."
Weird. We were told they had changed

Meme - "When your girl is pregnant but you never had sex and when your child is born, 3 random dudes that you have never seen show up with gifts for the baby. *Mary and Joseph*"

Meme - "Stumptown Coffee Roasters *woman with 2 stumps for hands with crazy look*"

Meme - *looking at computer screen* "Is that multiplayer?"
"yep."
"Are you any good at it?"
"Well... Not to brag, but I ALWAYS get first or second"
*guy leaves*
Girl playing chess: "No, wait. Come back."

Adidas Bans '44' on Germany's Team Jerseys After Historian Says It Looks Like a Nazi Symbol - "Adidas has banned fans from personalizing the German national team jersey with the number “44” after outrage over the resulting resemblance to Nazi symbolism.  Historian Michael König appears to have been one of the first people to notice the resemblance between the “44” and the symbol for the “Schutzstaffel,” also known as the SS, which was responsible for planning and carrying out the Holocaust under Adolf Hitler. In a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, last Friday, König included screenshots of Germany’s national team jersey, which is sold by the company, with the number “44” and said it was “questionable” to allow the shirts... Fans were able to choose the number “44” because Adidas allows them to personalize some of their apparel with specific names or numbers. In light of the criticism, Adidas quickly disabled the personalization option for the jerseys in its online store."

Meme - "First time doing anal vs when your hoe ass is used to it
*Mufasa from Lion King falling down slope* *Scar from Lion King falling down slope*"

'Tepid' GDP extends Australia's per capita recession, hinting November's interest rate rise may have been 'unnecessary' - "The federal government played a significant role in avoiding economic contraction during the December quarter, according to the ABS data... The government contribution included a one-off boost from all the polling officials temporarily employed to run the Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum."

A longevity doctor says this is the No. 1 mistake that will 'make you age faster' - “Sleeping well is the No. 1 way to slow down aging”

browser - Edge on ALT-TAB to show its windows not tabs - “If you don't want ALT+TAB to show the browser tabs (but show them as one process), you can go to (System) Settings > System > Multitasking > Alt + Tab, and select Open windows only.”

Montpellier introduces free transport: Where else in Europe can you travel without buying a ticket? - “It is the largest French metropolis to boast such a scheme. Local residents can now utilise a free transport pass across the city’s bus and tram network. The scheme aims to slash emissions, reduce pollution and improve accessibility for the city’s residents… French towns and cities have been rolling out such schemes since the country’s transport management was decentralised in 2015. However the majority of these have less than 150,000 inhabitants. With almost 200,000 inhabitants, Dunkirk is the largest city to have embraced free transport so far. After it introduced fare-free bus routes in 2018, passenger numbers increased by an average of 85 per cent. The scheme is funded by a small increase in the Mobility Payment tax already levied on public and private companies in France with more than 10 employees. In total, 39 territories in France have similar schemes, including the Marseille suburb of Aubagne, the port city of Calais and the western commune of Niort… some fear it could discourage investment and development in the transport sector, and that the costs could fall on taxpayers. Increased demand spurred by ticket-free travel may also stretch capacity in busy urban areas, while similar schemes across Europe have not always proven to reduce car use… Two European countries stand out for their trailblazing free transport schemes. Estonia’s capital Tallinn introduced free public transport in 2013. In 2020, Luxembourg became the first country in the world to scrap fares on all public transport. Spain is experimenting with free train tickets for short and medium-distance journeys in a scheme that runs until the end of this year. It aims to reduce the impact of the cost of living crisis, while cutting CO2 emissions. Germany introduced a similar measure between June and August last year with a discounted nationwide public transport pass. It gave travellers unlimited use of local and regional services for just €9 a month. Together, France and Germany are giving away 60,000 free train tickets to young people this summer to encourage cultural exchange. More than 50 cities and towns in Europe have now introduced free public transport, citing climate ambitions and social equality as their primary motivators.”"

Inside one of the most secretive nations on Earth where dirty cars are illegal - "The car rule has come to the country courtesy of Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, Chairman Of The People’s Council of Turkmenistan. It’s reported Mr Berdimuhamedow – who was president of the country until 2022 when he entered into a power-sharing arrangement with his son Serdar – made the rule after ordering the impounding of all black cars in the capital in 2018. Police were said to have subsequently seized black cars and told the owners they had to pay to have them repainted white or silver. The ban was later extended to vehicles of all other colours. No official reason was given for the directive, although it’s known that Mr Berdimuhamedow is a fan of the colour white, believing it to be lucky. Not only do cars have to conform to the colour rules, but they also have to be sparkling clean. In fact, visitors report that driving with a dirty car can land you in trouble with the police, who strictly enforce the rules. And the theme doesn’t stop at cars either. Ashgabat holds the oddly-specific Guinness World Record for the place with the ‘highest density of white marble-clad buildings’... don’t expect to be able to freely use the internet if you visit as you can in other parts of the world. Access to the Internet is heavily regulated there and only a small fraction of the population can access it, with most websites banned other than local ones accessible via the Turkmenet, a censored version of the web available only in Turkmen. And you won’t be able to drop your friends back a home a message telling them about the visually breathtaking sights of the capital. Most social media apps, including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are blocked in Turkmenistan, along with WhatsApp, Telegram and YouTube. While many get round the ban by using VPNs, these are frequently shut down by the authorities."

Turning point for Turkey? Erdogan's AKP suffers biggest election setback in decades - "Despite media and courts stacked against the opposition, the ruling party lost the country’s five biggest cities."

Every Republican Presidential Candidate Is Hitler

Since the website often has issues. From 2016:

Every Republican Presidential Candidate Is Hitler
The “Big Lie” has been around for over fifty years. 

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.

“Except for Adolf Hitler's extermination of the Jewish people, the American bombardment of defenseless peasants in Indochina is the most barbaric act of modern times.”

That quote didn’t come from some Soviet hack coughing up copy for Moscow, but from Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern. (Some years later, McGovern would compare the Communist massacres in Cambodia to the Holocaust and call for some of that barbaric military intervention.)

Vice President Hubert Humphrey also brought out Hitler when running against Nixon, declaring, “If the British had not fought in 1940, Hitler would have been in London and if Democrats do not fight in 1968, Nixon will be in the White House.”  Chicago Mayor Daley had accused Nixon of “Hitler type” tactics.

McGovern had set a record for comparing Nixon to Hitler, which made him very popular with the left, but he hadn’t originated it. Comparing any Republican presidential candidate to Hitler had been a standard Democratic political tactic for some time no matter how inappropriate it might be.

Before McGovern was comparing Nixon to Hitler, he was comparing Barry Goldwater to Hitler. Goldwater had a Jewish father and a distaste for Socialism, which would have made him unwelcome in the ranks of the racially and politically pure National Socialists, but that didn’t stop the Hitler accusations from being hurled by the Democratic party and its political allies in the press.

Governor Pat Brown of California said, “Goldwater's acceptance speech had the stench of fascism. All we needed to hear was Heil Hitler.” Mayor Jack Shelley of San Francisco claimed that Goldwater strategists got all their ideas from Mein Kampf.

Even though Goldwater had been an early NAACP member, NAACP leader Roy Wilkins warned, "Those who say that the doctrine of ultra-conservatism offers no menace should remember that a man come out of the beer halls of Munich and rallied the forces of rightism in Germany. All the same elements are there in San Francisco now."

The NAACP accused Goldwater of appealing to “fear and bigotry”. Martin Luther King said, “We see danger signs of Hitlerism in the candidacy of Mr. Goldwater.”

Union leaders launched a national campaign to denounce Goldwater as Hitler II. "I have drawn a parallel between Goldwater and Hitler and I make no apology for drawing that parallel," George Meany of the AFL-CIO declared. While Goldwater wasn’t Hitler, the CIO part of the AFL-CIO had strong Communist influences and after the Hitler-Stalin pact, some unions within it staged strikes to sabotage production and prevent aid from reaching the Allies who were fighting Hitler. Not only was Goldwater not Hitler, but some of the organizations represented by Meany had aided Hitler when Stalin told them to.

Accusing Republicans of being Hitler for assorted petty reasons dates back to the time when Hitler was still around. FDR accused Republican candidate Wendell Willkie of using “Hitler tactics” by repeating his slogans frequently. But it was the frequent associations of Republicans and Hitler by Democrats that was the true Big Lie. Its only purpose was a senseless association through the repetition of ridiculous and baseless accusations that every single Republican was just Hitler in a better suit.

Typical of this tactic was Senator Tom Lantos ranting, “If you overlook your involvement in the KKK, or the Nazi party, or the Republican Party, you are lying.” The issue at hand had nothing to do with Nazism. It was about Clinton’s Secretary of Agriculture taking bribes. The goal was to associate Republicans with Nazism by classing the two together as frequently as possible regardless of relevance, decency or truth.

In the Iran-Contra trial, Oliver North was accused of “following Adolf Hitler’s official strategy”. What did one have to do with the other? Nothing. But this sort of lazy accusation had become typical and routine. William Shirer, who had also compared Nixon’s bombing of Hanoi to the Holocaust and called Nixon an “apt pupil” of Hitler (Pentagon spokesman Jerry Friedheim was Goebbels), compared Reagan to Hitler for intervening in Grenada. Then Shirer compared Bush I to Hitler for trying to outlaw flag burning.

By the Reagan years, the left had achieved a banality of Hitler analogies. Everything Reagan did was just like Hitler. All of Reagan’s associates were just like Hitler. It was Hitlers all the way down.

President George W. Bush inherited this banality of Hitlers. To left-wing Truthers, open and covert, 9/11 was the Reichstag fire, the Patriot Act was the beginning of a national dictatorship and Bush was a dictator. As Kurt Vonnegut quipped, “The only difference between Bush and Hitler is that Hitler was elected.” Hitler wasn’t elected, Bush was, but you can’t expect a left-wing loudmouth to know history.

Congressman Charles Rangel compared the Iraq War to the Holocaust. “This is just as bad as the 6 million Jews being killed." (Rangel had also claimed that the Contract with America was worse than Hitler.) Senator Durbin compared Gitmo to Nazi concentration camps. Senator John Glenn compared Republican arguments to Nazi propaganda. “It’s the old Hitler business… if you hear something repeated, repeated, you start to believe it.” Like repeatedly accusing Republicans of Nazism.

Congressman Keith Ellison, a former Nation of Islam supporter who had defended its anti-Semitism, compared the September 11 to the Reichstag fire while hinting at 9/11 Trutherism.  Al Gore claimed that “The administration works closely with a network of rapid-response digital Brown Shirts”.

Democratic Senator Robert Byrd, a former Klansman, compared Bush to Hitler stooge Herman Goering. Byrd, who had filibustered the Civil Rights Act, also compared efforts to block Democratic filibusters to Nazi Germany. The “nuclear option” that Byrd was denouncing became a reality under Obama and Reid, but by then using it did not make Senators Democrats into the successors of Nazi Germany.

To most people, Nazi analogies summon up images of the Holocaust and a ruthless dictatorship. To the left however, any populist reaction against their rule is Nazism.  In their world, there is a battle between progressive and reactionary forces. Any movement that dares to run for office by challenging progressive policies is reactionary, fascist and the second coming of the Third Reich. Republican victories are lazily attributed by liberal hacks to mindless public anger being exploited by right-wing demagogues.

And so the only thing we can truly be certain of is that any Republican nominee will be Hitler. It doesn’t matter what he believes. It doesn’t matter if Democrats considered him a moderate 5 minutes ago. Accusations of Nazism remain the default argument for a Democratic Party turned far to the left.

Republicans aren’t progressive. Therefore they’re Hitler. It’s really that simple.

Optimists thought that the Democrats had reached “Peak Hitler” under Bush. But for the left there is no Peak Hitler. The same tired line of attack has been trotted out for fifty years. It will go on limping around the liberal corral for another fifty years or a hundred years. The Big Lie will continue being repeated to indoctrinate each new politically active progressive with the conviction that anyone to the right is Hitler and that every election is a brand new battle to stop Hitler 2.0 from taking over America.

Goldwater was Hitler. Nixon was Hitler. Reagan was Hitler. Bush was Hitler. None of the latter three men declared the Fourth Reich, made themselves dictators for life and ran concentration camps. But the Big Lie retroactively rewrites the past by claiming that last decade’s Hitler was a decent moderate while the latest Republican Hitler is a terrifying monster. Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan were all resurrected as moderate contrasts to each other and then to Bush. The process of recreating Bush as a moderate has already begun. And so each Republican makes the electoral journey from Hitler to a political moderate whom a latter generation of liberals mourns while complaining that this latest Republican really is Hitler.

Links - 25th April 2024 (2 - Climate Change)

$500,000 Massachusetts sand dune built to protect homes washes away in three days flate - "Of course, modern meteorologists are blaming everybody's favorite boogie-force, climate change... However, the problem isn't a new one:
""It's an ongoing battle here," Saab said. "I've been doing this since 1971.""

Meme - End Wokeness @EndWokeness: "10 days apart.
The New York Times: The End of Snow
The New York Times: How can a warming climate increase snowfall?"

Facebook 'Fact Checkers' Punish and Censor Debate on Climate Science - "Steven Koonin is one of the country's top physicists. He worked for President Barack Obama, a Democrat, as Under Secretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy. Science Feedback, one of Facebook's "independent fact-checkers," is barring reviews about his book, "Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t and Why It Matters," and classifying its content as false.  "Mr. Koonin is no 'climate denier,' to use the concocted phrase used to shut down debate," The Wall Street Journal writes in a review of the book. "The word 'denier' is of course meant to associate skeptics of climate alarmism with Holocaust deniers. Mr. Koonin finds this label particularly abhorrent, since 'the Nazis killed more than two hundred of my relatives in Eastern Europe.' As for 'denying,' Mr. Koonin makes it clear, on the book’s first page, that 'it's true that the globe is warming, and that humans are exerting a warming influence upon it.'... At Townhall, we wrote about The Wall Street Journal’s recent review of "Unsettled" and highlighted Koonin’s argument that the science on climate change isn't settled. Because of this, Climate Feedback, an arm of Science Feedback, rated the story as "partly false" and argued we were repeating false information from Koonin's book and The Wall Street Journal piece. Facebook then slowed the reach of our post as a punishment for the rating, which suppressed and censored the story. If the post does happen to pop up in your feed, it will be accompanied by a "partly false" label and a link to Science Feedback's "fact-check." And anyone who dares to try and share the story themselves is prompted to reconsider and review Science Feedback's "additional reporting" on the topic before hitting "post."... Nowhere in the article did we endorse or give credence to the claims made in "Unsettled," we simply reported on what Koonin had written. We, like many others, found it newsworthy that Koonin, a former senior government official and nationally known scientist, has a different perspective on climate change, one outside the main narrative regularly held up in government and media. The "current scientific evidence" Science Feedback cites isn't as conclusive as they'd like everyone to believe. Rather it's cherrypicked data that only supports one side of the debate, Science Feedback's side.   But the censorship of Koonin's book and any outlet that dares to discuss it is just one piece of the broader agenda being pushed by Science Feedback. The organization has repeatedly "fact-checked" Townhall pieces about climate change, labeling them false after ignoring context, falsely rebutting factual climate data, and effectively removing all debate about climate change from Facebook. They also suppress debate on other topics and regularly censor thoroughly-sourced stories about CDC guidance, masks, vaccines and more.   According to Science Feedback's own fact-checking standards, they should be "following an unbiased approach to guarantee objectivity." Instead, the site—sanctioned by Facebook—is engaged in an extremely biased approach to climate and general science by accepting only one view on these issues. Ironically, this is an anti-science approach. True science is dedicated to debate and experimentation, not conforming to a set narrative from Facebook "fact-checkers.""

Charlie Kirk on X - "The left wants to blame "climate change" for this disaster. It's a lie.  Maui's chief emergency management officer, Herman Andaya, had no expertise in disaster management. Instead, he was a lawyer whose only qualifications were previously working for Maui's mayor and watching "online FEMA trainings and workshops."  Water official M. Kaleo Manuel refused to release water resources so that landowners could protect their homes. Manuel, whose college degree is in "Hawaiian Studies," has said that water should be "revered" rather than "used," and should only be shared after "true conversations about equity."  Hawaiian Electric knew that its power lines posed a fire hazard, but spent almost nothing on wildfire prevention while spending enormously on "renewable" energy to comply with state mandates.  106 people (and counting) are dead and hundreds more are missing because the left put ideology, diversity, and mumbo-jumbo ahead of the competence needed to save people's lives."
"Climate change" is a good way to escape responsibility when you screw up

To Ease Global Warming, the Whitest of Paints - The New York Times - "In 2020, Dr. Ruan and his team unveiled their creation: a type of white paint that can act as a reflector, bouncing 95 percent of the sun’s rays away from the Earth’s surface, up through the atmosphere and into deep space. A few months later, they announced an even more potent formulation that increased sunlight reflection to 98 percent... He calculated that if materials such as Purdue’s ultra-white paint were to coat between 1 percent and 2 percent of the Earth’s surface, slightly more than half the size of the Sahara, the planet would no longer absorb more heat than it was emitting, and global temperatures would stop rising... commercial white paints generally reflect 80 percent to 90 percent of sunlight. This means they still absorb 10 percent to 20 percent of the heat, which in turn warms surfaces and the ambient air. The Purdue paint, by comparison, absorbs so much less solar heat and radiates so much more heat into deep space that it cools surfaces to below-ambient temperatures. Still, there are concerns. The standard version of Purdue’s ultrawhite paint uses barium sulfate, which has to be mined, driving up its carbon footprint, though Dr. Ruan noted that titanium dioxide, which is used in the vast majority of commercial paints, also has to be mined."

Eco protesters cannot claim a 'climate emergency' as justification for vandalism, the UK's most senior judge rules - "They were acquitted after a jury accepted their defence of lawful excuse. The case was subsequently referred to the Court of Appeal by the Attorney General to clarify two points of law. The Criminal Damage Act defines lawful excuse as the belief that the owner of the property damaged would have consented to it if they had been fully aware of the circumstances. The provision has seen limited previous use but has become increasingly relied upon in the context of climate change protests."

Melbourne news: West Gate climate protesters get more prison time after appealing sentences - "Two climate protesters who drove a truck onto the West Gate Bridge in peak hour traffic and forced a woman to give birth on the side of the road have had their prison sentences increased. Deanna "Violet" Coco, 33, and Bradley Homewood, 51, faced the County Court in Melbourne today where they appealed their 21-day prison sentences for causing traffic chaos... His barrister Felicity Fox said he did not stand to gain personally from the offending, as she called for him to be released on a community work order. Sexton rejected this and decided the two protesters, who each have a history of similar offending, needed to be deterred. He described the protest as "calculated to cause maximum disruption""

Climate protester facing deportation in April, lawyer says - "Haq grew up in Pakistan before coming to Canada on a student visa, which was revoked after he was arrested and charged with mischief for taking part in a number of climate change demonstrations that blocked traffic and frustrated drivers in Metro Vancouver.  The young man, who ultimately pleaded guilty to five counts of mischief and one count of breaching an undertaking, was involved with the groups Extinction Rebellion, Stop Fracking Around and Save Old Growth, the latter of which he co-founded.  Haq's wife, Canadian climate activist Sophie Papp, sponsored his permanent residency application last May, and an approval before April 22 would prevent the CBSA from deporting him, according to his lawyer...  During Haq's sentencing, the court heard that while he had previously "shown disdain for the rule of law" and "publicly encouraged others to break the law," the activist has since softened his approach to addressing the threat of climate change, partly due to the steep consequences he has faced, including the loss of his visa.  "He now recognizes that it is 'not wise to be engaged in civil disobedience,'" reads a pre-sentencing report excerpted in Judge Reginald Harris's decision.  Haq contacted CTV News to say he was misquoted by the court, and that while he has no more plans to personally engage in civil disobedience, he does not see it as “unwise.”"

Richard Hanania on X - "Harvard cancels geoengineering experiment that could’ve potentially solved global warming. Critics say it would’ve reduced pressure to cut greenhouses gases. But we’re supposed to cut them in order to solve global warming! Almost like making humans suffer is the point."
Harvard has halted its long-planned atmospheric geoengineering experiment | MIT Technology Review - "Proponents of solar geoengineering research argue we should investigate the concept because it may significantly reduce the dangers of climate change. Further research could help scientists better understand the potential benefits, risks and tradeoffs between various approaches.   But critics argue that even studying the possibility of solar geoengineering eases the societal pressure to cut greenhouse gas emissions."
Climate change hysteria is not about stopping climate change

Paris is planning the "greenest" Olympics ever, meaning no AC for athlete housing - "It's not like it's the SUMMER OLYMPICS or anything... if you don't think that the no AC thing is a big deal, last year 5,000 people in France died from the heat, and predictions show this summer is going to be another scorcher, possibly breaking records... The Aussies aren't playing around. They're bringing their own AC units and a "heat specialist" who is in charge of keeping the athletes healthy.  Greece and Ireland are bringing their own AC as well."

Hellish blackouts could yet have a silver lining - "it certainly engendered a community spirit... blackouts could be just the ticket to shake some of today’s youngsters out of that sublime sense of entitlement and self-righteousness. At a time when the sensitive ones need counselling after watching Rod Liddle on Question Time, the horror of losing the means to power up their phones might jolt them back to reality – and back to real-world problems, rather than obsessing about whether Baden-Powell should be cancelled and tapes of Fawlty Towers burned. Meanwhile, a blackout or two might demonstrate the naivety of the extreme net-zero agenda. It’s all very well asserting the evils of fossil fuels when you’re sitting in a junior common room sipping tea, or blocking the M25 on a frantic Friday. But things become trickier once the lights literally go out. Suddenly, you’re grateful for a bit of Norwegian crude."
The left will just double down and claim that the blackouts are because of too few renewables

Irish farmers pressured to cull up to 200,000 cows to meet climate goals - "Ireland’s cows — which belch out methane, the gas responsible for more than a quarter of global warming — are the country’s worst climate offender.  That has prompted the government to float proposals to cull almost 200,000 dairy cows over the next three years... The drastic prospect was seen as a way to help achieve a tough 25 per cent cut in agricultural emissions by 2030"
Mass starvation is an even better way of lowering carbon footprint

‘Net zero is a lie’: farmers converge on Parliament House lawns to protest renewable energy - "'Net zero is a lie': farmers converge on Parliament House lawns to protest renewable energy 6 February 2024 | James Coleman Start the conversation anti-renewables protestors  Reckless Renewables Rally attendees at Parliament House this morning. Photo: James Coleman.  “Basically, we’re opposed to the renewable energy craziness, which consists of solar factories, wind factories and associated transmission and distribution networks.  “They shouldn’t be going anywhere, but they’re going on good farming land, and there’s no actual no point to them because they do not help the wider energy problems, and they just drive up costs for everybody.”... Where she’s from, Walcha in the New England region of northern NSW, the state government has set aside a ‘Renewable Energy Zone’ (REZ) stretching from above Glen Innes to near Tamworth. Through wind, solar and battery projects, it’s hoped this will eventually contribute 8 GW of energy to the national grid.  “It’s prime agricultural land,” Emma says.  “Some people are true believers and they think it’s actually helping, but if they looked into it, nothing about it is ‘green’. We’re not going to take this lying down.” Howard and Jo Holgate have journeyed from Ganmain, a small farming community near Wagga Wagga, because “farming is under attack”.  “What we’re facing here is quite minor compared to most of Europe, but prime agricultural land has been taken up with solar panels and wind turbines … and it just makes no sense … We need to realise net zero is a lie,” Howard says. The National Rational Energy Network (NREN) organised the Reckless Renewables Rally for the first sitting day of the year... the main objective is to call for a rethink of the Federal Government’s target for 82 per cent of Australia’s power to come from renewables by 2030.   They want a Senate inquiry into renewables, a suspension of all renewable energy projects and a lifting of the ban on nuclear power... NREN chair Grant Piper comes from Mudgee in central NSW and has a background in engineering. He says the decrease in the amount of usable farmland due to renewables is only one reason for his opposition.  “The bigger question is, ‘Why are we doing it when it’s counterproductive?’ I mean, if you look at the whole life cycle costs of turbines and solar panels – manufacturing them and installing them is all done with fossil fuel and then they’ve only got a short life before they have to be replaced and disposed of. We can’t just say ‘the sun is free, the wind is free’ – that’s not all there is to it.”... Almost all of the 1000 new projects will be located in regional communities, which feel inadequately consulted.  “In the lead-up to most of these ‘projects’, this government has conducted short, insincere, and unacknowledged community consultation,” the rally’s organisers say."

Canada's electrical grid cannot handle the coming demands - "To solve the constraints on energy generation and to meet net-zero 2050 targets, the federal government projects that grid demand will be twice that of today by 2050. To meet that rising demand, the output of the grid, which we have accumulated since we have had electricity—roughly the past 140 years—will have to double in the next 26 years.  It’s worth emphasizing this point: if Ottawa’s projections are right, we’ll need to essentially build out the equivalent of today’s electricity supply in less than one-fifth of the time in the face of modern environmental regulations, Indigenous and local consultations, and other bureaucratic processes that invariably slow down the construction of major infrastructure.   Canada’s electricity has been so abundant that we have grown used to reaping the benefits, including those seen by exporting major amounts of electricity to the United States. From these largely silent exports, we garner billions of dollars annually and saw record profits in 2022.   Without sufficient surplus to export, these previously reliable financial windfalls will dry up and the provincial ratepayers will face higher costs, while governments who were using these funds to underwrite lower taxes or expanded services may have to re-evaluate. Past yearly trends have shown reductions in total exports, despite continued profits. But the crunch is getting so bad that Quebec, long a source of seemingly limitless electricity, is facing shortages by 2027. U.S. states that have based their decarbonization on Quebec imports are increasingly fearful that agreements will fall through.   The electricity grid is one of our most complex creations, providing power at any point along the gamut from vast industrial steel mills to the most minute individual demands. Large-scale changes can occur, although time is required to ensure that they do not destabilize the delicate balance. Ottawa’s pursuit of more electrification of the Canadian economy is exacerbating the forecasts of supply shortfalls. Although many of the new technologies that will accompany this electrified life will make our lives easier and better, policymakers must recognize that a cheap, abundant supply of electricity must be available. Without it, there is no way we will achieve our objectives.   For example, right now there are conflicting policy signals from Ottawa. It has both mandated that all new vehicle sales be electric by 2035, while also encouraging the expansion of heat pump uptake in homes. Both initiatives face headwinds from the Clean Electricity Regulations, which seek to encourage decarbonization in provincial grids by 2035. Such rapid changes to the electricity grid bring extreme risk. Such risks are not good for reliable electricity supply, and costs from risks taken with the electricity system cannot be avoided if they go wrong. This sloppy policymaking endangers our future electricity supply-demand balance. Across the country, there is provincial buy-in (even in Alberta and Saskatchewan) for a 2050 net-zero target for electricity grids. Ottawa should take this win, drop the confrontational approach it has now, and seek to build on this progress. The Clean Electricity Regulations should be revoked because they contribute to this confrontation, are politically unnecessary, and do not recognize the unique provincial circumstances... Aligning with the anti-gatekeeper message, the federal government should activate the Canada Energy Regulator to break down silos in provincial grids by conducting work to pre-authorize new transmission corridors between provinces. The approval of transmission lines can easily take over a decade, while provincial silos in electricity grids promote unnecessarily expensive construction of new generation sources, causing higher consumer costs.   Additionally, with much of our existing transmission capacity created for Canada-U.S. trade, much of our import/export trade does not occur between provinces but instead between provinces and states. Though this is partly due to the higher prices that will be paid in the U.S., with a lack of interprovincial transmission, there are hard, low, thresholds for internal Canadian electricity trade. For instance, if we look at the three largest electricity exporting provinces in 2022, about 74 percent of British Columbia’s total exports were to the U.S., 63 percent of Quebec’s exports were to the U.S., and 81 percent of Ontario’s total exports were to the U.S"

Opinion: The dirty, but not so little secrets of the federal carbon tax - "Secret No. 1: The carbon tax has never been revenue-neutral. Today, the federal government owes SMEs in eight provinces over $2.5 billion in promised rebates. And it owes Indigenous organizations $282 million. As long as it sits on this money its claims of revenue-neutrality will be false.
Secret No. 2: The government has no mechanism to return past or current carbon tax money to SMEs.
Secret No. 3: Most SMEs would be excluded from rebates under the current design criteria.
Secret No. 4: Ottawa has slashed future SME rebates to help solve its political problems.
Secret No. 5: SMEs should be getting 40 per cent, not five per cent, of carbon tax revenue... Assuming SMEs can pass along something over half the tax they pay, CFIB estimates SMEs pay about 40 per cent of the carbon tax revenue. The main reason government can claim most Canadians are getting more back in rebates than they pay in carbon taxes is that others are getting back far less than they pay. Yet again, SMEs are viewed as the geese that lay golden eggs — with the carbon tax serving as an expensive, income-redistributing shell game. The good news is that these secrets are beginning to get out."
This doesn't stop left wingers continuing to pretend that it's carbon neutral, when it's not even carbon neutral to consumers due to the GST

Chris Selley: Canadian conservatives have more than just newfound confidence on their side - "Climate change is another policy on which the Conservatives needn’t squirm or apologize nowadays. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault have taken so many hatchets to heir own carbon-tax plan that there’s scarcely anything left for them to defend. I still chuckle when I see conservative politicians bemoan how people can’t afford anything anymore, and then in the next breath claim the carbon tax “doesn’t work.” They’re literally describing how the carbon tax is supposed to “work” — by pushing people not buy things they otherwise would in hopes of altering their behaviour. Of course the Liberals could never bring themselves to say this. They insist that their carbon-tax rebates mean hardly anyone is out of pocket by the end of the year at all — practically encouraging people not to change their behaviour, and simply confusing a lot of other people besides. (Why take my money just to give it back?) If the Liberals didn’t think exempting home-heating oil from the tax , but not cleaner-burning natural gas, for nakedly political reasons was the death knell for their plan, then they’re more delusional than we thought. NDP premiers, Liberal premiers, conservative premiers are all demanding the same relief for their citizens. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh mooted abandoning support for the consumer carbon-tax this week, but then walked it back — a bit odd, since New Democrats (not to mention Guilbeault) have always favoured command-and-control measures over dinging the consumer at the till, but it’s not clear anyone in the Jack Layton Building has any idea what they think they’re doing nowadays. Remember when all the pundits decided it was impossible for a Conservative leader to win without a serious, credible climate-change plan? Not so much, it looks like. As it stands Poilievre might waltz to a majority without even releasing a platform."

The Weekly Wrap: The Liberals abandon the centre - "a new report by the Canadian Climate Institute, an Ottawa-based climate policy think tank that does solid empirical work on climate policy. The paper, which aims to estimate the relative role of various policies in meeting Canada’s 2030 emissions reduction targets, finds that while the industrial carbon price is the single biggest driver of emissions reduction (between 23 and 39 percent), the consumer carbon tax (sometimes referred to as the “fuel charge”) is only responsible for about 8 or 9 percent of projected emissions reductions between now and 2030.   Although the paper’s authors caution that it shouldn’t be interpreted as license to abandon the consumer carbon tax, it’s quite likely to cause many to reach that precise conclusion. That the consumer carbon tax is by far the most contentious element of Canada’s climate policy and possibly the sole (or at least main) obstacle to something approaching a political consensus, this new analysis raises a prudential question: is it worth it?"

Dacey Media on X - "RCMP in Alberta have been lined up against peaceful Carbon Tax protesters since early this morning. None of these officers are wearing name badges, none will identify themselves and none of them will speak with the protesters. How do you think this is going to end?"
They should just pretend they are pro-Palestine protesters

At the carbon tax protest in Alberta : Canada_sub - "Seems like a problem the government found a solution to: using our money to militarize the police force.  Genius move tbh"
"While leaving the actual military with piss-poor funding."
Left wingers hate the militarisation of the police - unless they are used against those they hate

It turns out police can stop a protest blockade if they feel like it - "The treatment of the Nationwide Protest Against the Carbon Tax has differed sharply from law-enforcement responses to other protest blockades. It was only four years ago that small groups of anti-pipeline protesters with roughly the same level of organization were able to able to stage days-long blockades of Canadian rail infrastructure, including a near-complete shutdown on Feb. 13, 2020 of eastern portions of the Canadian National Railway. More recently, anti-Israel protesters in Toronto were able to maintain a two-week blockade of a highway overpass servicing a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood. Only after intense political pressure did Toronto police announce that blockaders would be arrested."
Protests are only good if they push the left wing agenda

Swedish government criticised for curbing green policies in budget - "Sweden’s government has come under criticism after unveiling a budget that will dramatically increase carbon emissions.  The budget, unveiled on Wednesday morning, includes a 259m krona (£19m) reduction in funding for climate and environmental measures next year, and tax cuts on petrol and diesel... Other features of the budget were tax cuts for pensioners, more money for the justice system, including plans to expand prisons, lowering tax on snus tobacco, raising taxes on cigarettes and abolishing a plastic bag tax.  Svantesson warned of difficult months to come, with unemployment predicted to increase in the next two years and inflation remaining high. She said: “It’s a tough economic winter for many people.”... The former finance minister Mikael Damberg, the economic spokesperson for the largest opposition party, the Social Democrats, said the budget would “make Sweden poorer”.
From September 2023, on Agenda 2030. Left wingers hate standard economic accounting, so they want voodoo accounting to make people poorer while pretending the country is richer

New study shows climate change is already affecting food prices
Clearly, food prices going up are due to the effects of climate change, not governments screwing with farms for "green" purposes. The genius is that this problem is self perpetuating, which allows the green agenda to be accelerated indefinitely