2019 in Photos
- October 9, 2019: Anything less than school choice is unfair
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Even Occupy Democrats sees how unfair it is to deny school choice.
The unfairness of government monopolies is impossible to deny. The latest Occupy Democrats meme to hit my Facebook feed decries the unfairness of putting a mother in jail for the crime of… exercising school choice.
According to Occupy Democrats, Tanya McDowell went to jail for five years because she lied about her district in order to get her child into a better school.
Ignore for the moment that the real reason McDowell went to jail is for selling drugs. Under conservative proposals for school choice, their hypothetical McDowell wouldn’t have had to lie about where she lived to send her child to a better school. Lying about her address would never have had to be a part of that plea bargain. Even as a homeless person she could have sent her child to whatever district she wanted, and her child’s portion of school funds would have followed that choice.
The choice of district is one of the simplest forms of school choice that conservatives support.
The unfairness of our current government-run school system is so obvious that even the far left, pro-big-government, Occupy Democrats can’t resist using it to highlight the blatant racism of the system.
Because it is blatantly racist. Whenever Democrats criminalize school choice, they’re always criminalizing the choice of underserved communities, the choice of poorer parents, the choice of minority children. When Democrats shut down school choice options, they are almost always school choice options that save predominantly minority communities from failing schools.
It wasn’t Republicans who cancelled the DC Voucher program. It was Democrats, under President Obama—who sent his own children to a very expensive private school.
It’s Democrats who keep criminalizing school choice, who trap children in failing schools, who continually force parents to throw good money after bad instead of allowing parents to choose what school best fits their children. Instead of letting parents decide. The hardest thing for politicians to do is to let us make our own decisions. It is the nature of politics that politicians think they know better than us what we need; making our choices for us is why they got into politics.
- September 4, 2019: What the f*** is wrong with Americans?
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Pretty sure decency also involves not assuming people have something “fucking wrong with them” just because they disagree with you on the best way of providing quality health care.
There is something obscenely wrong with you if you disagree with the left. You’re not a decent f***ing human being unless you support the Canadian health care system of long waits and no choices.
What the fuck is wrong with Americans who aren’t on board with free healthcare. I’m Canadian and I don’t care that I pay extra taxes so a little boy in Alberta can have open heart surgery, or an elderly man in Nova Scotia can get the heart medication he desperately needs. It’s called taking care of your people. I’m glad I pay so that people can have a good quality of life. It’s called being a decent fucking human being.
The left used to use Britain’s National Health Care as an example of caring for other people. But with two recent high profile examples of literally keeping patients—children—under armed guard to keep them from leaving the system, I’m not surprised they’ve given up that example. Before that they used to praise the Veterans Administration’s government-run health care. They turned on a dime, albeit a large one, when the immense corruption at the VA became public, and the veterans who died because of delayed medical treatment. I received political mailings for a few weeks claiming (correctly) that single payer would be just like VA-care before that reference went the way of the dodo.
Neither of those institutions did a good job “taking care of their people”. Despite the massive taxes required to pay for those government services. People who have to interact with the VA and the NHS have far from “a good quality of life”.
What the fuck is wrong with Americans is that we do not want armed guards forbidding us from choosing our doctor when the government-provided doctor fails us.
The VA and the NHS are exactly what happens with monopolistic health care. Corruption and long waits, refusing to allow challenges to the system. Now the only place remaining for the left to praise is Canada. It’s not a great choice, but the only other option would be admitting they’re wrong.
- April 24, 2019: The Collusion National Network
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When it comes to the seven stages of loss, CNN’s stages after Mueller’s conclusion of no collusion all seem to be bargaining: no collusion must mean collusion! We’ll agree that there was no collusion but only on condition that it proves collusion! If people read the Mueller report, they are colluding! We read the 400-page report in 15 minutes. We find collusion! Collusion! Collusion! We were always skeptical of collusion, so believe us when we say collusion!
This Babylon Bee article is barely satire. My social media feeds are filled with sophistry explaining why no collusion doesn’t mean no collusion. And most of them seem to be from CNN.
Congratulating themselves for having been skeptical of the collusion story, and literally at the same time pushing the conspiracy theories that there was still collusion.
They have become completely unhinged. CNN’s Toobin, for example, seems to think that most people would be perfectly happy to be subject to an investigation like this for two years. Not being happy with it—or being happy that it’s finally over and you’ve been vindicated—is acting like a guilty man. Because all of us look forward to IRS tax audits, and are sad when they finally realize, hey, we shouldn’t have been destroying your life and your reputation for two years.
You know what guilty people do when their lies are exposed? They double down, making their lies more and more outlandish and less and less believable.
CNN’s Brian Stelter has decided to do an impression of Kevin Bacon in Animal House. Remain calm! All is well! Avoid partisan interpretations of the Mueller report! At the same time that CNN is running a panel of partisans talking about the Mueller report. You know, following two years of unhinged partisan interpretations of the Mueller investigation. And any other random, unbelievable allegation that came their way.
Although if you’re going to go into an unhinged meltdown, there is no greater movie. I just picked up the soundtrack on Record Store Day and it’s still amazing. Will CNN escalate into driving the Eat Me! vehicle into FBI headquarters?
- April 17, 2019: Science by consensus is barbarism
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Scientists have again landed a spacecraft on a proverbial dime on a planet 40 million miles away that rotates at 241 meters per second. Think I’m gonna trust them on this climate change stuff.
“Sound reasoning” was the comment. But there is no reason in that paragraph. It’s about as far from science and reason as you can get. Regardless of how you feel about spacecraft engineers and climate researchers, they are not the same people, and science does not work by some magical transference of authority. That’s its whole point. Science is not a tribe. It’s a method.
Tribalism as science is unsound, unreasoning, and barbarous. That because these engineers over here built something that works, those researchers over there must be right, merely because they are part of some fungible tribe of scientists. Science by consensus is literally—and I use the word literally, literally—anti-scientific thinking and about as unsound, unreasoning, and barbaric a method of solving problems as you can find; it will create far more problems than it solves, and some of them will be deadly.
Science is about the scientific method; it is the opposite of tribal consensus. It’s “the belief in the ignorance of experts.”1
Belief in the infallibility of experts is pre-scientific thought. Only priests are never wrong. Science by consensus is and always has been barbarism. Everyone knows the earth is flat. Only hicks believe in flaming rocks that fall from the sky. Some people are not people, and so can be treated as animals.
And the flip side of that, that people are people, and are more important than animals, is a civilized value easily lost to the new barbarism.
The scientific method is pure, distilled civilization, and it is completely unnatural. Constructing a theory and then trying as hard as possible to prove it wrong is completely unnatural behavior. But it is the only way science works.
- March 27, 2019: The left’s vicious racial shaming
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This is a lie, designed to create racial hatred in America.
There’s an old saying that when a Republican does something wrong, the fault is on the Republican Party, but when a Democrat does something wrong, the fault is on America. It’s a variation of the name that party game, where a Bob Filner’s party is hidden deep if mentioned at all, and a Democrat like Virginia’s Governor Northam is reported as a Republican as soon as he shows up in blackface and his wife starts handing out cotton.
This goes back to the founding of the Republican Party and its opposition to the racial politics of slave-holding Democrats. Democrats wanted to break up the Union. So they accused Lincoln of wanting to break up the Union.
Projection is not just a river in Egypt.1 The left loves to project their faults on the rest of America.
In the wake of Jeremy Northam’s blackface, Elizabeth Warren’s redface, Ilhan Omar’s antisemitism, and other racist and sexist scandals among Democrats, the left is desperate to divert attention from their own failures by blaming America. This recent meme decries white privilege, not among the elite like Northam and Warren, but among everyone else. It compares two people without a job who endangered their children. One, a black Arizona woman who left her children in the car while she was at a job interview, had her child taken away and was sentenced to jail; the other, a white Arizona woman who got high and drove away with her child on the top of her car, kept her child and got probation. The hashtags? Black Lives Matter. White privilege.
It is worse than fake news. It uses real names of real people and makes up the rest. Both women were sentenced to probation for about the same period of time. Both had their children taken away. Arguably, both should have. Regardless of how you feel about leaving kids in cars, Phoenix, Arizona, is not the place to do it.
More 2019
- The Year in Books: 2019
- 2019 was a great year for reading old books.
More Live Blog
- 2020 in Photos
- For photos, memes, and perhaps other quick notes sent from my mobile device or written on the fly during 2020.
- 2018 in Photos
- For photos, memes, and perhaps other quick notes sent from my mobile device or written on the fly during 2018.
- 2017 in Photos
- For photos, memes, and perhaps other quick notes sent from my mobile device or written on the fly during 2017.
- 2016 in photos
- For photos, memes, and perhaps other quick notes sent from my mobile device or written on the fly during 2016.
- 2015 in photos
- For photos and perhaps other quick notes sent from my mobile device or written on the fly during 2015.
- Five more pages with the topic Live Blog, and other related pages
Remember: Trump reassures crowd after assassination attempt fails. (read more…)
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