Climate Change ‘Science’ = Propaganda

Posted on | March 15, 2022 | Comments Off on Climate Change ‘Science’ = Propaganda

Considering how certain neocons are treating Ukraine skeptics, I’ll imitate them: “If you’re anti-fracking, that’s treason!”

For years, world leaders have accused Russia of funding environmental groups in Europe to steer nations away from energy independence and strengthen Russia’s iron grip over the continent. As nations across the globe begin shunning Russian oil in response to the country’s invasion of Ukraine, U.S. leaders are also questioning how deep Russia’s ties go in the environmental community.
“The Russians actually fund some of the most rabid environmental groups in Europe because they sic them on the energy projects that aren’t Russian,” James Carafano, vice president of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at the Heritage Foundation, told Fox News Digital in a recent phone interview.
Back in June 2014, just months after Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine, European leaders sounded off that Russia was using disinformation operations with environmental groups to steer countries away from fracking in favor of Russian oil.
“I have met allies who can report that Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organisations – environmental organisations working against shale gas – to maintain European dependence on imported Russian gas,” Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former prime minister of Denmark and then-secretary-general of NATO, said, according to the Guardian. . . .
By 2016, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Scotland and Bulgaria had all banned fracking, either temporarily or permanently. Russia’s power over European energy grew large by 2022, providing roughly 40% of the continent’s natural gas supply. Lithuania, for example, gets 83% of its oil imports from Russia, Poland gets 58% and Finland 80%, The Hill reported.
“You’re not really an independent nation if you depend on foreign countries so heavily for your energy supplies,” Michael Shellenberger, the best-selling author of “Apocalypse Never,” told Fox News earlier this month.
Shellenberger said that 15 years ago, “Europe produced more natural gas than Russia,” but that all changed as “Russia increased its natural gas production and Europe reduced it.”
“Europe decided not to frack in large part in response to climate activists,” Shellenberger told Fox News. “We now think there is strong evidence suggesting [the climate activists] were supported directly through financing from Russia.”

If Mitt Romney can accuse Tulsi Gabbard of treason (!!!) because she believes the U.S. was operating bioweapons labs in Ukraine, then why can’t I accuse every climate change activist of treason? Aren’t they promoting Putin’s propaganda? Isn’t it all “disinformation”?

And if anyone is Putin’s puppet here, how about Joe Biden?

President Joe Biden reassured donors Monday that he would use his executive powers to act on climate change, even as energy prices are at record highs.
“The climate crisis is the existential threat. That’s not hyperbole; it’s a fact,” Biden said after taking the podium at a Democratic National Committee Fundraiser in Washington, DC.
Biden promised to take “aggressive” executive actions on climate regulations even if the Supreme Court overruled him. He acknowledged that progress on the issue of climate change was difficult to achieve in Congress, hinting that donors could help him pressure lawmakers.
“There’s a long way to go, but we’re running into some obstacles that I’m going to need your help on in terms of individuals, as well as circumstances,” he said.

Got that? Biden is going to ram the pro-Putin “climate” agenda down your throat, and you’re just an “obstacle” if you don’t like it.

Category: Global Warming, Joe Biden, Russia, Science

In The Mailbox: 03.14.22

Posted on | March 14, 2022 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 03.14.22

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Happy Pi(e) Day! I had a slice of banana cream with lunch today. What did you have?
Silicon Valley delenda est.
OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Pay No Attention To The Doctor Behind The Curtain
EBL: Mitt Romney, Asshat Of The Day, also, Tom Brady Is Back
Twitchy: Deranged Ex-Sports Guy Says There’s A Case For Gabbard & Romney To Be Detained By The Military, also, “Congratulations, Feminists!”
Louder With Crowder: Attention Whore Kaepernick Says He’s Ready To Play After Comparing NFL To Slavery, also, Bill Maher Tells Ben Shapiro That Liberals & Media Have “Blood On Their Hands”
Vox Popoli: Zelensky’s Challenge, Reversing Demographic Decline, and The Canadian Tea Party
Stoic Observations: Scale & Memory, also, Alas, Poor Roland
Gab News RT News Joins Gab TV After Being Banned By YouTube

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Conservative: Tell Me How Ukraine Ends
American Greatness: Analyses Of CDC Data Show Massive Spike In Excess Mortality Among Millennials After Jab Mandates, also, Reliving A Moment Of American Madness
American Power: Russia Asked Red China For Military Assistance In Ukraine, also, Joe Biden’s Dangerous Energy Policy
American Thinker: The Unsung WH Official Who Tried To Warn Trump The Deep State Was Trying To Prematurely End His Presidency, also, Awash In A Sea Of Stupid
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday
Babalu Blog: Cuba’s Sockpuppet President Dances The Rumba While Innocent Cubans Are Thrown In Prison, Water Is A Luxury In Communist Cuba, and Dictatorship Opens Another Luxury Apartheid Hotel In Havana
BattleSwarm: Ian McCollum On The Russo-Ukrainian War & Civilian Firearms Ownership, also Shocking Discovery – Paying People Not To Work Makes People Not Work
Behind The Black: Pushback – Teacher Sues After Being Suspended For Defying Pronoun Demands, Mesa In The Martian Northern Highlands, and Russia Confirmed It Will Return ISS Astronaut As Planned
Cafe Hayek: A Matter Of Principles, also, Then Why Not Also Compensate The Losers From Tariff HIKES?
CDR Salamander: It’s A Mid-March Midrats Melee, also, Yes, Ukraine & Russia – But The Varsity Game Is Red China
Chicago Boyz: How To Relax
Da Tech Guy: My Aaron Rodgers Question, Foolishness From “Fact-Checkers”, and Inflation Doesn’t Bother This Key Biden Voting Demographic
Don Surber: Earmarks Aren’t The Problem, Lawyer Up, Republicans, and Joe Biden – Agent Of Red China
First Street Journal: Killadelphia! also, I Had No Idea Larry Krasner Was Lou Anna Red Corn’s Mentor
Gates Of Vienna: We’ll Take Ukrainians Any Day!, Energy & Inflation, and Requiem For A Sarvisberry Tree
The Geller Report: A Bill Banning Zuckbucks In Virginia Elections Is Headed For Gov. Youngkin’s Desk, also, Judge Orders Corrupt Wisc. Speaker To Turn Over Deleted E-Mails & Texts About 2020 Election Review
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, Could A Black Hole Ruin Your Planet? and Saturn On The Radio
Hollywood In Toto: Woke Media Rages Against Rogan For Stating The Obvious, also, Renaissance Woman Rocks Faith-Based Film World
The Lid: Title 42 Was Upheld March 4 And Biden Scrapped It On March 12, also, If Biden Really Wanted To Improve The Economy & The Environment
Legal Insurrection: Ohio Policeman Cleared In Shooting Of Ma’Khia Bryant, Woke Agenda At The American School In London Leads To Downgrade From British Officials, and Hating Breitbart Re-Released With Free Streaming
Nebraska Energy Observer: Random Observations, also, Mix
Outkick: Lou Holtz Campaigning For Trump, Tennessee Finally Wins SEC Tournament, and Nets’ Kevin Durant Calls Out “Stupid” Jab Policy & Mayor Adams
Power Line: Global Warming Quantified, Kevin Roche – When Do We Get Our Apologies? and End Civil Service Protection?
Shark Tank: Florida Democrats Slip In Polls, Party Leaders Scramble
Shot In The Dark: Honor Among Bureaucrats, also, Couldn’t Happen To A Nicer Movement
STUMP: Drug Overdose Deaths Part 2
The Political Hat: Happy Pi Day! also, The Great Lakes Are People Too
This Ain’t Hell: Long Gray Line Snorts Long White Lines, Criticizing The Veep For Inappropriate Laughter Is Misogyny & Racism, and Another Two Are Known
Transterrestrial Musings: The Need For Less Speed, also, The End Of The Age Of Fragility
Victory Girls: Elon Musk Vs, Vladimir Putin – 21st Century Gladiators, also, Texas Order On Transgender Children Halted By District Judge
Volokh Conspiracy: University Adjunct Prof Fired For Labeling Microaggression Flyers As Garbage, also, “We Will Never Be Brothers”
Watts Up With That: The Ill-Fated Franklin Expedition Contradicts Mann’s Hockey Stick, also, House Democrats Cancel Looming Embarrassment With Oil Execs
Weasel Zippers: Kamala Harris Says Democrats Have To Remind Voters They’re Getting What They Voted For, also, Joe Manchin Joins Senate GOP In Sinking Jamie Raskin’s Wife’s Nomination To The Fed
The Federalist: Liz Cheney Has Completely Destroyed Her Father’s Reputation In Wyoming, The Baseball Settlement Isn’t The One Fans Deserve, and Kanye West Isn’t Just Clashing With Pete Davidson
Mark Steyn: Stranger In A Strange Land – Alfred Hitchcock Goes Screwball, also, You Are My Sunshine

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Category: Linkagery

The Arithmetic of ‘Equality’

Posted on | March 14, 2022 | Comments Off on The Arithmetic of ‘Equality’

John Sexton reports on a failed educational experiment:

Last summer the Washington Post published a report about California’s consideration of a plan to do away with tracking in the state’s math classes. As the report was quick to point out, the argument for de-tracking was one connected to race and to a desire to reduce the achievement gap. . . .

Advocates for the new California math guidelines say “de-tracking,” or mixing together students of varying academic performance, can help all students, particularly those who would have languished in lower-level classes. It can also unravel racial segregation inside schools. Almost everywhere, White and Asian American students are more likely to be placed in higher tracks, with Black and Latino students more likely to be placed in lower tracks.

Anyone who knows anything about education could have predicted that this would fail. The purpose of “tracking” — grouping students in classrooms based on ability — is so that each student can be taught material suited to their level of skill. The simplest way to do this, of course, is a “test-in”/”test-out” approach to advancement by grades, so that no student is admitted to, say, an algebra class unless he can demonstrate a certain level of mathematical proficiency (i.e., to “test in” to the class), nor is any student moved on to the next grade without demonstrating proficiency in the course work (“testing out”). For example, at age 7, I was required to memorize the multiplication table up to 12×12 before I could be promoted to third grade.

The possibility of failure — being “left back,” as they used to say — was very real back in the day, before education professionals yielded to the political pressure for “equality.” Insofar as outcomes are not statistically equal between racial groups, this is an injustice, according to radical egalitarians, and so the possibility of failure was eliminated, and under the new regime of “progressive” educational, nobody flunks second grade — or third grade, or fourth grade, or any other grade.

That’s how you get results like Patterson High School in Baltimore, where 97% of students are below grade-level proficiency in math, and 79% are doing math at an elementary-school level.

Having decreed that everyone must go to high school — even if they have the math skills of a fourth-grader — the problem becomes what to do with all these kids who have been promoted without regard to scholastic performance, which is where “tracking” comes in. If you have 300 ninth-graders in a large high school, only a third of whom are actually capable of doing ninth-grade math, then you put those kids in “advanced” classes, put the middle third in “intermediate” classes, and put the lower third into “Let’s Try to Learn Counting to Ten” classes.

To eliminate tracking is to remove from the system every remaining vestige of academic standards, in the name of “social justice.” The idea that this will somehow magically produce “equality” can only be premised on the likelihood that if nobody is learning anything, everybody’s equal. If half the kids in a ninth-grade classroom are incapable of doing the work, the effort to remediate these dummies will distract the teacher so that there will be less time to instruct the more advanced students, who will in effect be punished for the sake of “equality.” Nor is it likely that the lower-achieving students will benefit much from such experiment, for the simple reason that you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken manure.

If you promote a child to the ninth grade who is barely capable of doing fifth-grade math, there is only so much that can be gained by extraordinary efforts to bring him up to speed. He would probably not be so far behind if he did not suffer a general deficiency of intelligence. Smart kids will manage to learn something even in the worst schools, but dumb kids aren’t going to learn much even if you gave them one-on-one tutoring from MIT professors. The “social justice” advocates don’t want to admit this, however, so the fact that Asian-American brainiacs are crowded into the advanced math classes must be construed as some sort of newfangled “segregation,” an injustice that requires elimination.

Because my readers are generally common-sense people, rather than intellectuals or bureaucrats, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that the claims of success for “de-tracking” turn out to be bogus:

[Education policy analyst Tom Loveless] compared test scores on a test taken by students in grades 3-8 and once again in grade 11. Since the [San Francisco] de-tracking reform happened in 2014, it’s now possible to compare students who were in grade 11 before the change to those who reached grade 11 after the change. What Loveless found was that de-tracking has changed the achievement gap but not in the direction reformers were hoping.

As displayed in Table 1, [San Francisco United School District]’s scores for 11th grade mathematics remained flat from 2015 (scale score of 2611) to 2019 (scale score of 2610), moving only a single point. Table 1 shows the breakdown by racial and ethnic groups. Black students made a small gain (+2), Hispanic scores declined (-14), white students gained (+17), and Asian students registered the largest gains (+22).

The raw numbers don’t really convey what the gap means but 2474 is the mean score for 4th grade math. So, on average, black students in 11th grade were performing just above that at 2479. Hispanic students, on average, were scoring 2498 in 11th grade which was the mean score for 5th graders. Meanwhile, white students and Asian students were both testing at a high school level.

“Social justice” is simply a formula for destruction. It is helpful to note that, in the San Francisco school district, 35% of students are Asian, 31% are Hispanic, 14% are white, and 9% are black, so that using the term “racial segregation” to describe the situation there is absurd, invoking as it does comparison to Jim Crow, when less than a quarter of the students are either black or white. The “achievement gap” that affects San Francisco is largely between two racial minorities — Asians and Hispanics — who are mostly the children and grandchildren of immigrants who didn’t arrive in American until after the civil-rights era.

Of course, the Washington Post doesn’t explain the details of the demographics in California public schools while carelessly slinging around the word “segregation,” as if grouping students by their scholastic ability was self-evidently an unfair policy of racial discrimination.

Category: Education, Racism

Rule 5 Sunday: “Violent” 2D Girls

Posted on | March 14, 2022 | Comments Off on Rule 5 Sunday: “Violent” 2D Girls

— compiled by Wombat-socho

If you don’t get the joke, feel free to ask in the comments.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

Ninety Miles From Tyranny: Hot Pick of the Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #1652, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns

Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Rerun Friday, also, the Saturday Gingermageddon

EBL: Rita Hayworth & Fred Astaire, MAGA Vs. Bidenflation Blues, Ariana DeBose, Ukrainian Tank Girls, Dolly Parton, Cyd Charisse, Joan O’Brien, Linda Cristal, and Anna Netrebko.

A View From The Beach: Zoë Kravitz Turns Cat Woman Bi, Scientists Listening in on the Fish, Fish Pic Friday – Alexa Tetrault, Thursday Tanlines, Wednesday Wetness, Good News! Muskrat Season Still Open, Tattoo Tuesday, The Monday Morning Stimulus, Beach Report 3/6/22, Palm Sunday, and Saturday Politics “It’s the “Big One” Elizabeth!”

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Shop Sex & Sensuality Gifts

Category: Rule 5

The Internet Is Making Kids Crazy

Posted on | March 13, 2022 | Comments Off on The Internet Is Making Kids Crazy

Selfies from Helena Kerschner’s ‘male’ phase.

Saturday was Detrans Awareness Day, calling attention to cases of people who formerly identified as transgender before “detransitioning” and re-identifying with their biological sex. Ed Driscoll at Instapundit called attention to the case of Helena Kerschner, now 23, who began testosterone injections at age 18 and continued for more than a year before the mental health issues — testosterone is a helluva drug, y’know — forced her to quit. From her account of her college experience:

The anger started as a smoldering anger at first. I found myself feeling more irritable, less able to put up with the little things that bothered me about other people. I was uncomfortable with my newfound tendency to get bent out of shape at everybody so I started isolating myself, trying to hide this awful person I thought I was turning out to be. I didn’t make the connection between this and the testosterone, I just thought I was a bad person. I didn’t feel like being around people, and when I was, I felt so unlike myself that I didn’t know how to relate to them. . . .
I had always had emotional problems, but this was different. In high school, I had always banked on the future where I would be in college, transitioning, and part of me genuinely thought testosterone would somehow make me into this outgoing male jock archetype and I would be handsome, have lots of friends, and love life. That wasn’t really panning out. I was lonely, enmeshed in toxic and stressful relationships, on academic probation, in legal trouble due to substance use, and feeling possessed by some sort of demon I now recognize was at least partially the testosterone’s worsening grip on my mind.

Checking out Helena’s Twitter timeline, I found her expressing great sympathy for men, perhaps due to her hindsight realization of what men have to deal with in terms of their rage issues. Boys must be taught to restrain their temper, and the common feminist complaints about men “not being in touch with their emotions” is misguided, if you understand that men’s natural “emotions” are so often an urge to strangle somebody or pound them into a bloody pulp. You want to see a guy “in touch with his emotions”? Do a Google search for “mass murder suspect.”

You think of me as a happy-go-lucky guy, but you’ve never seen me in a traffic jam, yelling obscenities at the top of my lungs, and struggling to restrain my urge to ram those idiot drivers off the road. These are the feelings — our beastly primal nature — that every man has been dealing with since he was 12 years old, and those of us who didn’t end up in a prison or an early grave can congratulate ourselves on our success in this basic struggle of manhood. The idea that teenage girls would inject themselves with testosterone to become “men” strikes most people as completely crazy, but the transgender movement has created this myth of people being “born in the wrong body,” which is accompanied by a “transition-or-death” propaganda. Pointing to high suicide rates among transgender youth, the movement blames this on “transphobia” so that the regime of synthetic hormones and surgery is presented as “lifesaving treatment,” and if you are opposed to this, well, you just want teenagers to kill themselves. Never mind, of course, the fact that research indicates that “transition” doesn’t cure these suicidal tendencies; if self-hatred is at the root of transgenderism, you’re not going to solve that problem by medical interventions. But I digress . . .

Helena Kerschner is not an unattractive woman. She has a certain pre-Raphaelite beauty — the kind of face you might find in a Rossetti painting — and yet she spent her adolescence feeling ugly:

By the time I was thirteen, I was isolating myself, self-harming, and had developed an eating disorder. In eighth grade, I lost touch with most of my school friends, and was too self-conscious and preoccupied with my eating disorder to put myself out there again. I started skipping school, spending lunch in the bathroom, and in general just keeping my head down, trying to get through the day unnoticed.

She found a “community” in the Internet’s septic tank — Tumblr:

Between sharing photos, drawings, and fanfiction, these girls were posting about their lives and going into deep detail about their struggles. Many were social outcasts like me, also struggling with things like self-harm and eating disorders. Finding a community of such like minded people felt amazing, and I quickly began spending nearly every waking moment on Tumblr or messaging some friend I had met on there.

The self-selecting nature of online communities is insufficiently understood. To be part of such a “community,” after all, you have to spend a lot of time online, whether it’s ranting about politics on Twitter or sharing “fanfiction” on Tumblr. And the people who become obsessed with this — the core of any such online community — tend to be “social outcasts” who lack healthy real-world connections with actual human beings. Kerschner recognizes this factor in hindsight:

Being such a secluded platform with a fairly homogenous user base not only demographically (mostly teenage girls, many of whom white and middle to upper middle class), but especially in terms of personality type, [Tumblr] developed its own culture, distinct from the youth culture of the general population. Because many of its users were like me, using Tumblr as an all-day alternate reality escape from the real world, this “culture” should be understood in the most literal sense of the word. One should think of Tumblr, especially from 2009-2016, as a secluded island nation whose people rarely interact with the outside world, and thus have language, customs, hierarchy, and history that is entirely unique and at first incomprehensible to people from other nations visiting the island. There’s something about it that almost selects for a particular type of person, and I’ve heard so many times from normal people (for lack of a better word) that they “tried Tumblr, but couldn’t figure it out.”

It was within this environment — an online hive of unhappy, introverted teenage girls — that transgender mania took hold. Under the weird “social justice” peer pressure, Kerschner found herself seeking “evidence that deep down, I wasn’t really a girl”:

I hated my body; it must be because I don’t like that its female. Boys have never been interested in me like they are with other girls; well, maybe I would be attractive as a boy, and then I could be like all these cute “gay trans boys” I saw dating each other online. I didn’t have many friends, it must be because being a girl isn’t my “authentic self”, and that was getting in the way of my social life. Plus, people were nicer to me since I said I was trans so that must be an indication that being trans is the right thing to do to make friends.

Strange as this might seem, it gets even weirder:

Female sexuality is hypersexualized and pornified, yet it’s supposed to be “empowering” for women to do porn, be prostitutes, or have dangerous, kinky, scary sounding sex with many different men. I heard that my discomfort with this made me “vanilla”, and a girl who is vanilla has no chance of really pleasing a man when competing with “empowered” women.

WTAF? Where are girls getting this message? But this was the kind of liberal “pro-sex” feminism that was in vogue 10 years ago when eighth-grade Helena Kerschner was struggling with her adolescent awkwardness. Of course, in just a short time, by 2014, there was a drastic shift into a very different sort of feminism, as the “rape culture” hysteria took hold on university campuses and suddenly any guy who so much as looked at a college girl was guilty of harassment. Any attempt to get to second base with a girl was almost certainly sexual assault, and as for actually hooking up — well, “PIV is always rape, OK?”

The craziness of feminism, which communicates contradictory messages about sexuality, could be confusing to anyone, but imagine being a socially awkward middle-schooler trying to make sense of it while immersed in a hive of teenage Tumblrinas. But like her Tumblr comrades, Helena Kirschner was also getting confused messages about sexuality from another source on the Internet:

Online pornography, which studies show most kids are now exposed to by the age of 13, has become virtually inescapable. Faster than we can even measure its impact, this new world of porn is drastically changing how young people form their perceptions of sexuality and adult relationships. It would be foolish to think that it wouldn’t have major consequences. In my own life, I can see how being inundated with pornographic imagery as a young woman, much of it violent, and being repeatedly told that this was normal and even cool led me instinctively to look for an escape from womanhood. . . .
As a young woman who both identified as transgender as a teen and grew up in a very online, pornography-influenced environment, I believe there is a profound connection between this new way of exploring sexuality and the identity confusion that we are seeing in so many young people today.
Many young girls today, including those that identify as trans as I did as a teenager, internalize a hyper-sexualized caricature of what a girl or a woman is. It mirrors the image of women as extreme sex objects that boys derive from porn, but whereas for boys that may be titillating, for some girls it becomes the reason why they feel they aren’t really a “girl.”
On social media, it’s become normal for women to farm engagement and money by either presenting a highly sexualized image of themselves or outright selling homemade pornography. . . .
Most of the explicit content online isn’t about healthy sex between two people who love and trust each other; it’s about bizarre kinks and degradation.
In these porn-saturated circles, submission, degradation, abuse, and suffering are all highly associated with women.

The mainstreaming of S&M “kink” captured public attention when Fifty Shades of Grey first became a bestselling book (2011) and then a movie (2015). It is obvious that this phenomenon has been fueled by the prevalence of Internet porn. When I was in college in the 1970s and early ’80s, there was a joke: Masochist says to the sadist, “Hit me, beat me, make me feel pain!” To which the sadist replies, “No.”

Joking aside, however, nobody I knew back in the day was into that kind of whips-and-chains stuff. If there was any kind of widespread “kink” subculture in America back then, I never encountered it, and certainly I was no prude. But the Internet seems to have changed that, and the mainstreaming of BDSM culture through online pornography has spawned all manner of real-world consequences.

One of these consequences appears to be that girls are afraid to become women because, in the porn-warped view, being a woman means being something that no one in their right mind would want to be. Having imposed this fear via Internet pornography, the online world then offers “transition” as the solution. Satan himself could scarcely have imagined anything more wicked. Y’all need more Jesus.

Turn off the Internet and pick up a Bible.

Category: The Transgender Cult

FMJRA 2.0: Jump

Posted on | March 12, 2022 | Comments Off on FMJRA 2.0: Jump

— compiled by Wombat-socho

It was indeed a good week in Washington for the Senators, as we took two out of three from the division-leading Injuns (we would have won the third game, too, but Sudden Sam McDowell had other ideas) and then swept the Reds in a two-game series. Next up are the AL West-leading Pilots, who have a two-game lead on the perpetually-moaning Minnesota Twins. I am almost tempted to start my worst pitchers against the Pilots, because the Twins’ tears are delicious, but that would be Wrong, because we are, after all, Professionals. Also, I hate losing, and all three of the games in our last series were close, even with “Limp” Dick Allen in their lineup.

Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

Sunny skies and cheerful music waft over RFK Stadium this week.

Rule 5 Double Scoop Sunday: W*ng D*ng Sw**t P**nt*ng
Animal Magnetism
Ninety Miles From Tyranny
A View From The Beach
EBL
Proof Positive

Ukraine: Russia Agrees to Temporary Cease-Fire in Besieged Mariupol
EBL

Never Take Military Advice From (Or Give Money to) #NeverTrump Grifters
EBL
357 Magnum
Proof Positive

What ‘Intellectuals’ Believe
EBL
357 Magnum

FMJRA 2.0: Somebody
A View From The Beach
EBL

Why Ukraine Is Winning (So Far)
EBL
357 Magnum
Proof Positive

In The Mailbox: 03.07.22
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum
Proof Positive

In The Mailbox: 03.08.22
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum
Proof Positive

Two Russian Generals Reported Killed as Ukraine Invasion Becomes ‘Clusterf**k’
EBL
357 Magnum

‘Baltimore-Area Women’
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

Sweet Payday for Jeff Zucker
EBL

Ukraine Smashes Tank Column Near Kyiv, Kills Commander of Russian Regiment
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 03.10.22 (Afternoon Edition)
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum
Proof Positive

‘A Difficult Midterm’
Gregor Mendel Blog
A View From The Beach
EBL

Judge Sentences Jussie Smollett to Jail; Hate Hoaxer Freaks Out Completely
EBL
Proof Positive

In The Mailbox: 03.10.22 (Evening Edition)
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum
Proof Positive

Crazy People Are Dangerous
EBL

In The Mailbox: 03.11.22
EBL
357 Magnum
Proof Positive

Top linkers for the week ending March 11:

EBL (18)
357 Magnum (11)
Proof Positive (9)
A View From The Beach (8)

Thanks to everyone for all the links!

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Category: FMJRA Award

‘Simply Not True’

Posted on | March 12, 2022 | Comments Off on ‘Simply Not True’

Joe Biden believes he is honest, and that anyone who disagrees with him is lying, or is ignorant, or has been deceived by liars.

So deeply convinced is Joe Biden of his own honesty that he thinks his very name is synonymous with truth-telling:

“I give you my word as a Biden: I will never stoop to President Trump’s level.”
— Nov. 20, 2019

“I give you my word as a Biden: If I am elected president I will do everything in my power to protect our children from gun violence.”
— March 10, 2020

“I give you my word as a Biden: When I’m president, I will lead with science, listen to the experts and heed their advice, and always tell you the truth.”
— March 18, 2020

When I first noticed him using this “my word as a Biden” phrase during the 2020 campaign, I was puzzled. Has the Biden family been so prominently associated with honesty that when Joe says this, most Americans say, “Well, that settles it”? Of course not. In fact, Biden’s first presidential campaign, in 1988, collapsed in disgrace specifically because of Joe’s dishonesty, when he was caught plagiarizing others — most notably British Labour leader Neil Kinnock — in his speeches:

Democratic presidential candidate Joseph R. Biden Jr., a U.S. senator from Delaware, was driven from the nomination battle after delivering, without attribution, passages from a speech by British Labor party leader Neil Kinnock. A barrage of subsidiary revelations by the press also contributed to Biden’s withdrawal: a serious plagiarism incident involving Biden during his law school years; the senator’s boastful exaggerations of his academic record at a New Hampshire campaign event; and the discovery of other quotations in Biden’s speeches pilfered from past Democratic politicians.

Joe Biden lies about a lot of things, including his own biography. It is fair to say he is notoriously dishonest, and yet he seems to believe that nobody knows this, and that he enjoys a reputation as a truth-teller.

Twice in the past week, Biden has used the phrase “simply not true” to dismiss criticisms of his administration’s policy. On Tuesday, after accusing “oil and gas companies and . . . the finance firms that back them” of being engaged in “padding profits . . . profiteering . . . price gouging,” Biden said: “First, it’s simply not true that my administration or policies are holding back domestic energy production. It’s simply not true.” He then offered various statistics which he seemed to think disproved criticism of his policies. But let’s go to Marc Thiessen:

Biden blames Russia for a 75-cent rise in gas prices. But the price has risen $1.85 since he took office. The week before Biden’s inauguration, the price of a gallon of regular gas in the United States was $2.46; at this writing it is $4.32. Before the war in Ukraine, Biden presided over the largest year-over-year price rise in at least 30 years.
What drove those record price spikes? We can start with Biden’s war on fossil fuels. Upon taking office, Biden implemented a policy of energy disarmament. He rejoined the Paris climate agreement, canceled the Keystone XL pipeline, suspended all oil and gas leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and began working on his pledge to ban all “new oil and gas permitting on public lands and waters.” He came into office having promised that his administration would “end fossil fuel.” When you announce your intention to tax and regulate the fossil fuel industry out of existence, investors and workers listen. The results are less production — and higher prices.

But this is “simply not true,” Biden tells us, and expects us to believe him because his “word as a Biden” is so trustworthy. And the same with his remarks Friday at the congressional Democrats’ retreat in Philadelphia:

So, I’m sick of this stuff. We have to talk about it because the American people think the reason for inflation is the government is spending more money. Simply not true.
I don’t think we need any lectures from our friends on the other side about fiscal responsibility, for God’s sake. Look, we have an ambitious agenda. So let’s go get it done.

Notice the clever pivot there. After denying that increased government spending causes inflation — which, in fact, is provably true — Biden then takes a shot at Republicans as unfit to speak about “fiscal responsibility,” thus returning to a Democratic talking point from the 1980s. Democrats claimed then that federal deficits were caused by Reagan’s tax cuts, even though it was easily demonstrated that federal revenue increased after the tax cuts were enacted. (Thus the proof of the so-called “Laffer Curve,” with lower marginal rates causing economic growth that actually produces more tax revenue.) Because Democrats were so committed to a “tax the rich” policy, and also committed to continuing expansion of the Welfare State, they refused to acknowledge the basic economic truth involved and, instead of doing anything to reign in government entitlement spending, blamed “Reaganomics” for the deficit.

We may grant that Republicans in recent years have not approached a Barry Goldwater ideal of fiscal restraint, to put it mildly, without endorsing Biden’s belief that pouring trillions of new federal spending into the economy has nothing to do with record-breaking inflation. Yet in his mind, any criticism of his “ambitious agenda” is “simply not true” — no one can honestly oppose or criticize Joe Biden.

The problem, in an age of political polarization, is that about 40% of the population will automatically believe anything a Democrat tells them, even if it contradicts the most basic principles of economics, and there is a vast media establishment which won’t even question Biden’s bizarre counterfactual claims about inflation, energy policy, etc. All that matters to them is the cynical question, “Cui bono?” Who benefits from a particular belief — Democrats or Republicans? If a certain belief is favorable to Republicans, then this belief will be attacked as a “myth,” and will endlessly be undermined by media “fact-checkers.” Whereas if a belief benefits Democrats — e.g., increased government spending does not cause inflation — the media will advocate and defend that belief.

Thus does “truth” become a partisan prize, over which one party claims a monopoly. By selling their souls to advance this belief system, the media destroy their own credibility. Then they wonder why we don’t trust them.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!