You can get away with a lot of illiberal theatrics and demands in a liberal society, and one of the great, eternal challenges for democratic governments is to figure out how much one can tolerate before the forces of illiberalism corrode the liberal order. Jonah Goldberg (2018)
George Rebane
‘Google gives back’ gushes the 13aug18 Union reporting that the company “invests $100K (gasp!) for Nevada workforce development”. The affair lasted one day and was a marketing event for the company’s business software under the guise of “helping Nevadans develop digital skills needed for job placement and advancement”, which ‘development’ in one day is a joke. But it did give Reno’s JOIN, a government sponsored workforce development agency, a little feather in their cap – at least they’re doing something. Meanwhile, Google got a real PR boost and advertising multiplier by spending less than they accidentally drop off their loading docks on any given day. The real news to note was the mention of Nevada’s net yearly migration rate of 5.5% – #2 in the nation – ably boosted by emigrants from California driven out by our state’s butt stupid palette of public policies, regulations, and taxes.
Trump’s ‘the press is an enemy of the people’ understood contextually is something that has needed to be said and explained in more detail than possible in a punchline tweet. The few center right news outlets, compared to the legions of leftwing outlets, survive primarily because of their outsized audiences who frequent them for the markedly more comprehensive coverage of what’s happening than is available in the carefully self-censored lamestream media. A local confirmation of that over the years have been RR’s leftwing readers whose comments reveal that they first ‘hear’ of events, ideas, and happenings from RR commentaries and its commenters. They then label and attack the same as products of a few isolated and fevered far-right brains from these foothills, being completely unaware of the related national reportage and debates. If CNN, MSNBC, HuffPost, NYT, … didn’t cover it, then it never happened. When such news coverage blankets the country, then Americans who are already overly challenged, under-educated, and busy with their daily affairs are effectively propagandized from one perversely ideological perspective.
Today’s contribution from our cartoonist RL Crabb, filched from the pages of the 14aug18 Union, is a view from the purported mid-road vantage that appears to suffer a bit from Bob’s ongoing bout with TDS. I wonder what pinned dolls he would have pictured with Obama had he been so inclined.
Speaking of the lamestream’s promotion of the ‘white supremacist threat’, it turns out again that there is no such threat simply because the number of white supremacists in the country is insignificant. Their only voice is the one manufactured and given to them by the Left which needs an ideological bogeyman against which to play their socialist siren song. The weekend’s ‘Unite the Right 2’ march of the 20 gave ample evidence of that, as it also demonstrated the alt-Left’s ability to marshal mobs of counter demonstrators, numbering in the thousands, whose hate-filled prescriptions for the United States and its leadership were duly recorded on numerous videos, of course, not aired on the lamestream.
“Curmudgeon” nobelist VS Naipaul (Literature, 2001) died over the weekend. Naipaul had the courage to observe that all cultures are not of equal worth or quality, and “unapologetically insisted on the universality of Western beliefs.” For this he was vilified by progressives as a racist. Naipaul identified “the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement” as the tenets of a “universal civilization” contributed by the west that stood in stark contrast to the Islamist world’s “philosophical hysteria”. This hysteria has yet to be recognized and denounced by the Left, whose elitists see it as a manageable and existential force that can be used to weaken and bring down western civilization.
[15aug18 update] Sen Fauxcahontas Warren (D-CT) finally exposed her communist destination for us by introducing legislation in Congress that would launch the biggest government grab of private property in the country’s history. She describes it in ‘Companies Shouldn’t Be Accountable Only to Shareholders’ in the 15aug18 WSJ. There she instructs us that “American corporations exist only because the American people grant them charters. Those charters confer valuable privileges—such as limited legal liability for their owners—that enable businesses to turn a profit. What do Americans get in return?” Well, for openers, the answer to that is EVERYTHING that we see around us.
Her Accountable Capitalism Act would remove corporations generating more than $1B annually from shareholder control and make them assume “fiduciary responsibilities beyond their shareholders”. The new order would make such businesses into “benefit corporations” under a hodgepodge board and management structure which is guaranteed to completely truss up for-profit enterprises in new deep layers of regulation and litigation. More specifically, “Benefit Corporations fundamentally change how a company is permitted to act. In addition to creating shareholder value like other for-profit companies, a Benefit Corporation must provide a general public benefit, namely, a material positive impact on society and the environment as a whole. Specific examples include providing low-income individuals or communities with beneficial products or services, preserving the environment, promoting economic opportunity, and improving health in the community.”
If that socialist cum communist has her way, then ‘Venezuela here we come’ will be the new tune on everyone’s lips.
The Democratic Party is now our openly declared socialist party in fact and deed. It has finally realized the reason the Socialist Party of America closed its doors in 1956 – ‘the Democrats are adopting all of our social goals’ – as its former members migrated to their new political home. Today, according to a just released Gallup poll, almost three of five Democrats view socialism favorably over capitalism, and confirm that ‘Democrats are Officially the Party of Socialism’. But you can bet the farm that once they get back in power, they ain’t stopping there (see Fauxcahontas above).
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