George Rebane
The Dems’ Chorus of Cacophony is now shrieking at Trump for taking out Soleimani the terrorist as a prophylactic for imminent acts of terror, exactly the same thing they blamed and still blame Bush2 for NOT taking out Bin Laden in order to prevent 9/11. We recall it was Bill Clinton who declined to take out Bin Laden when he was actually in our cross-hairs.
More liberal worthies are also blaming Trump for Iran’s downing of the Ukrainian airliner, claiming that our president caused the deaths of the innocent passengers. No doubt all subsequent atrocities committed by the rump ISIS contingents will now be blamed on our president since he also took out ISIS leader al-Baghdadi. Such accusations are a daily testament to the anti-American propaganda of our progressives who promote the longevity of every leftwing tyrant across the globe.
Our voting teenagers should make US foreign policy a “higher priority” argues a learned 17-year-old in the 10jan20 edition of The Union (here). The young man appears to have been successfully inculcated in our public schools to embrace TDS as the proper political support for voting decisions (he likes Buttigieg), while ignoring the capacities of his much less knowledgeable and more malleable peers. His point would be better made were our schools really a forum for open discussion of ideas instead of founts of mind-melding progressive propaganda.
'Tax the robots' is the new cry arising across the land as a way to slow down automation and save the jobs of the un- and less-skilled. This, along with universal basic income (q.v.), appears to be the half-way solution to the advent of systemic unemployment. Other deep thinkers are of the mind that smart machines will be like all other past innovations, they’ll create more new jobs as they change and take away old jobs. No one yet knows how to tax this latest advance in what used to be called automation. And you can be sure that nothing promising about all this will come out of our polarized legislatures. The real problem of systemic income was outlined in these pages some years back (here, here, and here).
[12jan20 update] The winds of woke. Oh it’s hard to be a progressive without getting daily instructions from PC Central. For years they taught us about the benefits of adopting cross-cultural artifacts, arts, and affectations into our supposedly banal and racist western culture – inclusivity and globalism and all that. Now suddenly it has become ‘misappropriation’ to do any of that – a definite no-no for all the woke folks. The latest is that white women should no longer wear hoop earrings which were originally connected with African women’s adornments. Gotta stay current.
"The ongoing turmoil in U.S. politics is part of a larger political crisis that is shattering old alignments of left and right in North America and Western Europe. On both sides of the Atlantic, embattled establishments are besieged by populist insurgents. The rebellion takes different forms in different countries—the election of Donald Trump in the U.S., Brexit in the U.K., the revolt of the yellow vests in France. But the underlying dynamic is the same: the revolt of alienated, mostly but not exclusively native and white working-class voters against post-national metropolitan elites." So argues University of Texas Prof Michael Lind in a major 11jan20 WSJ essay (here). New insights, definitely worth a read for those paying attention.
[13jan20 update] ‘Stack & Pack’, an important objective of Agenda21 (now Agenda2030), takes a huge step forward in California under SB50 which Gov Newsom will sign into law. Here’s the headline – “Senate Bill 50 tramples over local control to push densification”. Our leftwingers will again sing the A21 conspiracy song. And again I reply that with Sacramento’s one-party system of governance, there is no conspiracy needed to promote collectivist central planning and control. (H/T to reader) Oh, and did I mention AB5?
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