How the Democrats first became Unloveable... then Disgusting.

Poor Hunter...

...he temporarily lost his "Democrat Privilege"

Why America's Policies vis Russia Are Destined for Continued Conflict

On Joe Biden's Bought and Paid for Mandarinate

A New Type of Violence?

Jazz Shaw, "Baltimore experiencing "a new type of violence""

Violence on the streets of Baltimore, Maryland has been a problem for a very long time and we’ve covered it here extensively. The annual murder count has been slowly but steadily rising for the past decade or more. You literally have a better chance of living the day out on the streets of Kabul. But there has been one notable shift in the violent crime statistics that is perhaps even more alarming. Both the people being shot and the ones doing the shooting are growing increasingly younger on average. This led Lee Sanderlin of the Baltimore Sun to declare that Charm City is experiencing “a new type of violence.”

Those 19 and under in Baltimore are being killed and shot in 2023 at a pace not seen in at least a decade, according to a new Baltimore Sun analysis of police data. There have been so many victims that it’s the equivalent of one being shot about every two days and one being killed every week…

The shootings happen all over the city: At the Inner Harbor, at parties, at bus stops, at restaurants. Shots ring out near schools and at home.

The victims are almost always students or recent graduates. Sometimes they have jobs. Sometimes they’re athletes or artists. All of them are someone’s kid.

There’s no doubt that the numbers are stark. As of the first week of July, there had been 28 “young people” (aged 19 or younger) killed in Baltimore and another 91 who were shot. At the same time, the total number of murders and shootings was down slightly from the same period in the previous year. That means that young people killing and being killed make up an even larger percentage of the total. The number of minors (under the age of 18) who have been arrested during the same period more than tripled from the same months in 2019.

So the trends demonstrate that more and more young people are involved. But is this really a “new type of violence?” I would argue that it’s the same “type” of violence that has plagued Baltimore for decades. It’s gang violence, though the author appears hesitant to apply the label. And the gangs in many cities have been recruiting new members at younger and younger ages, so these trends, while alarming, should have been wholly predictable.

The gangs see great value in recruiting boys in their early teens and putting them out on the streets to “work.” They know that if they wind up getting caught, the liberal policies in nearly all of the large, blue cities will see them back out on the streets in no time. And the older gang leaders can shake them down for the profits they produce without risking arrest themselves.

Sanderlin focuses much of his attention on the number of guns there are on the streets in Baltimore. While that’s certainly part of the problem, it’s worth noting that there isn’t a single gun shop operating anywhere in the city. Maryland already has some of the strictest gun laws in the country. But more gun laws don’t do anything about gun violence precisely because gang members don’t pay attention to those laws and they buy their weapons on the black or gray markets. None of those gang bangers are canceling their plans for the evening because they noticed a “gun-free zone” sign on the way to their next robbery.

Mayor Brandon Scott has attempted to curb the violence by instituting another curfew for young people over the summer. But when gang members don’t pay attention to gun control laws, do you really think they’re going to go home when curfew time rolls around? On top of that, even the Baltimore Sun grudgingly admits that the data shows that curfews don’t reduce crime rates.

The people who are making the most noise about this and proposing solutions continue to focus on gun control and “more services” for young people in the community. More money has been flushed into those efforts than can be tallied and yet the problem persists. What none of them, including the Mayor want to talk about is the need to reinvigorate the police and get them out on the streets in force. Start rounding up gang members of all ages and locking them up for a good long time. Let them know there is a price to be paid for that “lifestyle” and the cost will be steep. And if they decide to start shooting at the cops, they likely won’t live to see the inside of a cell. But that all sounds “too mean” so nobody is going to do it.

"Democrat" Represents American's Newest Luxury Brand

Noah Rothman, "The Democratic Party Is Becoming a High-End Lifestyle Brand"

The Biden administration has embarked on a crusade against the unrelentingly bleak excesses of the capitalist enterprise. It vows to confront a feature of the marketplace imposed on us by avaricious pirates in control of the economy’s commanding heights: the scourge of fees associated with luxury goods.

“Biden says U.S. capitalism treats workers, consumers like ‘suckers,’” Reuters declared this week. That was how the outlet characterized what it described as President Joe Biden’s “attacks on corporate greed and power.” More specifically, the imposition of “junk fees” on consumers in the market for discretionary indulgences has captured the Democratic Party’s attention. “I’ve said before,” Biden said again, “capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism. It’s exploitation.”

Pairing the uncompromising Marxian flourishes of Slavoj Žižek with the effete tastes of the party’s donor class, Democrats are waging war on the hidden charges that producers tack onto premium goods and services. They are the champions of the frequent flier for whom fees and delays are a dreadful inconvenience. They serve as tribune for the vacationers who find themselves gouged at the hotel checkout counter. Indeed, they “aren’t even resorts,” Biden complained. The gall.

This White House and its Democratic allies have styled themselves advocates for America’s downtrodden concertgoers. “Fans are incredibly frustrated by how hard it has become to buy event tickets,” said Illinois representative Jan Schakowsky in support of a Biden administration effort to impose transparency on ticket vendors. “With every ticketing debacle, from Beyoncé to Taylor Swift, and so many more, their frustration grows.” Indeed, the simmering rage of the “Beyhive” portends a reckoning the likes of which this country hasn’t seen since the Rodeo Drive riots of 2020.

These initiatives provide Democrats with the opportunity to show off their proletarian instincts, according to Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. “When you’re a longtime politician, and you’re in office, people think you get out of touch with their lives, you don’t have any commonsense,” she said of the anti-fee campaign. “This shows, ‘Hey, I am in touch. I do have commonsense.’” Rather, what it illustrates is the Democratic Party’s devolution from coherent political program to high-end lifestyle brand.

Bemoaning the hidden costs in air travel, hotel accommodations, and A-list concerts is the battle cry of the matriculated, beating out Gramscian missives on their iPhones from the backseat of an Uber. The president and his party are self-consciously ornamenting their crusades against the irritations that vex the disposable-income class with the language of the revolutionary vanguard. It would be a bizarre phenomenon in isolation. But in the context of other faddish left-wing causes, progressivism’s evolution into a luxury brand becomes difficult to ignore.

So many of the Left’s remedies for supposed modern maladies involve increasing the costs for consumers with jejune tastes. What else explains the effort to force you into purchasing reusable shopping bags? Certainly not the alleged environmental benefits, which are worse than negligible. The attack on cost-effective home appliances is emotionally manipulative: As all right-thinking people know, the cost of contributing to social virtue is a contemptibly small-minded consideration. It’s not the atmosphere that benefits most when your dark-blue municipality compels you to ditch your gasoline-powered lawn equipment but your neighbors, who can finally hear the ambient Mozart in the air over the roar of combustive efficiency.

The costs of their lifestyle choices present you with a barrier to entry — it’s the price of admission into the upper echelons. But those costs cannot be so high that they become obstacles to adopting the political program their lifestyles afford them. By contrast, the cost of everyone else’s day-to-day existence must grow lest the lifestyles of the hidebound hill folk appear too attractive.

This is increasingly the core message of the Democratic Party. It is the Christian Audigier limited-edition Che Guevara T-shirt, the Rage Against the Machine show brought to you by Capital One bank. It is the secret handshake that offers absolution to those of means — the enlightened embourgeoisement of paranoid class-consciousness.

“Americans are tired of being played for suckers,” the president insists. Nonsense. If the Democratic Party’s bet on the psychology of its voters is any indication, the marketplace for suckers is far from tapped.

How Low Can the 1st Family Go?

Faces of Corruption

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Your Daily Dose of "Kremlin Propaganda"...

The Illusion of Democracy

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Team DeSantis Hits 1st HR of '24 Campaign Season...

We will not allow you to exploit the innocence of our children to advance your agenda.

When you come after our kids, we fight back.

We are no longer silent.

We are united.

We are Mamas for DeSantis.

...and we will elect @RonDeSantis President of the United States.

Join our… pic.twitter.com/jo6HUATaVa

— Casey DeSantis (@CaseyDeSantis) July 6, 2023

Atom Smashing

Lee Booth, "Humanity Should Split More Atoms: The cure for poverty and climate change is nuclear."

A review of The Case for Nukes: How We Can Beat Global Warming and Create a Free, Open, and Magnificent Future by Robert Zubrin (Polaris Books 2023).

In a very literal sense, energy technologies have molded humanity. The invention of cooking with fire by Homo Habilis cut the metabolic energy needed to digest meat and made it safer to consume, allowing the primates to eat more animals. Evolution directed some of these surplus calories to their brains, enabling the hungry organ to grow in size and ability, leading to Homo Erectus, the forerunner to Homo Sapiens.

Over millennia, humans learned to harness fire to smoke meats, craft pottery, bend metal, and more, forming much of the material basis of the pre-fossil fuel world. Wood power (or what is now called “biomass”) was such a good deal that parts of Europe started running out of forests in the 1700s. Britain was the first nation to innovate itself out of this dilemma, which they did by burning coal.

Mastering coal and other fossil fuels prevented energy scarcity, but also led to an unforeseen revolution in human life. Synthetic fertilizer, electricity, cars, plastics, smart phones, x-rays, ChatGPT—nearly all elements of modern life—exist because of fossil fuels. Today billions of people enjoy a prosperity that would be unimaginable to their ancestors.

This history of energy begins The Case for Nukes. Robert Zubrin, an American aerospace engineer of three decades, has penned seventeen books which span from space travel and terraforming Mars to energy security and environmentalism. In his day job, Zubrin is the President of Pioneer Astronautics, a private aerospace research and development firm whose prior customers include NASA and the US military.

Zubrin tells the history of energy to set the stage for one of his core arguments, that humanity should use more energy. Over 700 million people languish in extreme poverty today and billions have not reached a standard of living equivalent to that of a developed country, a situation Zubrin believes can only be alleviated if energy use increases at least tenfold.

In contrast, some environmentalists urge people to use less energy, which they believe is necessary to avert climate and ecological apocalypse. In 1968, prominent environmentalist Paul Ehrlich wrote in his seminal book The Population Bomb that, “Giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”

Zubrin contends that slashing energy use would be so harmful as to be borderline genocidal, but he recognizes that the environmental harms of fossil fuels are unsustainable. Thus he endorses nuclear energy, asserting that only atomic energy can lift all people out of poverty while conserving the environment.

Zubrin makes a strong case that nuclear plants are safe. Unlike what the fear-mongers say, nuclear reactors cannot explode like atomic bombs; it is impossible thanks to the laws of physics. Atomic explosions can only occur if large quantities of highly-enriched fissile material are pummeled with fast neutrons nearly instantaneously. A nuclear reactor contains only low-enriched fuel and cannot create fast neutrons, and thus cannot produce the devastation of an atomic weapon.

To quell radiation fears, Zubrin notes that nuclear reactors actually reduce the amount of radiation that enters the atmosphere. One 1000 MW natural gas plant releases more radiation every month than the entire Three Mile Island nuclear accident, one of the worst nuclear accidents in history.

Nuclear waste is a non-issue. Nuclear waste has never hurt anyone and there is very little of it. One 1000 MW coal plant releases more toxic waste in a day than the US nuclear industry does in a year. The nuclear waste issue also reveals the duplicity of the anti-nuclear movement. Civilian nuclear waste can be safely stored in geologically stable rock formations, a solution already implemented by the US military for its nuclear program, but anti-nuclear activists campaign relentlessly against such a policy for civilian nuclear energy. They then attack nuclear energy as “polluting” because its waste does not have a permanent storage site.

Zubrin also makes a compelling case that cost and time overruns that plague nuclear construction in the US can be solved. For example, the US’s newest reactors, Vogtle 3 and 4, together cost over $30 billion and have been under construction since 2009 (Vogtle 3 went online in April). But the US built nuclear plants in 5 years on average in the 1960s at a cost of several hundred of million dollars, not billions. So what changed?

Simply put, the US federal government has strangled the American nuclear industry with an oppressive regulatory regime. This can be readily seen in the quantity of materials needed for construction. Between the early and late 1970s, the amount of concrete, electrical cable, and steel increased by 27, 36, and 41 percent, respectively.

It gets worse. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) sometimes alters regulations mid-construction, forcing crews to reconfigure already completed systems. To prepare for such situations, builders will include features not required by regulators in original designs, only to see the fresh mandate never materialize.

Zealous rule making increases the time it takes to construct a nuclear plant, which Zubrin argues is the primary driver of skyrocketing costs. Longer construction times increase labor costs, interest rate payments, and inflation. Indeed, every added day of construction typically costs more than a million dollars per day.

Overregulation may actually make nuclear plants less safe. While employed by a state government in the late 1980s, Zubrin coordinated with the operators of a nuclear plant which had to shut down for several months every year to replace corroded piping. The operators concluded that simply changing the piping from carbon steel to stainless would fix the issue, but NRC rules required the company to apply for a new operating license to make such a change, an arduous, costly process by the 80s. Thus, the plant operators did not fix the issue and permanently closed the plant a few years later.

This system exists because of the false safety claims popularized by anti nuclear activists. In 1974, the Executive Director of the Sierra Club, the US’s largest environmental group, issued a memo describing their strategy: “Our campaign for stressing the hazards of nuclear power will supply a rationale for increasing regulation… and add to the cost of the industry.”

Fortunately, most of the book does not dwell on the asphyxiation of nuclear. To describe the arrangement of nuclear reactor components, Zubrin entertains the reader by putting her in the shoes of someone who wants to build her first nuclear reactor. “Excellent pressure vessels can be purchased from the Westinghouse company. They are expensive, however, so ask about their layaway plan.”

In another dose of humor, he warns: “If you are a minor, be sure to get your parents’ permission before building or operating a fusor as it may cause parts of your home to become radioactive, which could negatively impact its resale value and get you in trouble.”

Zubrin relays the story of nuclear reactor development, which shows, among other things, that nuclear engineers have guts. The first nuclear reactor ever constructed, Chicago Pile-1, was built underneath the football stadium of the University of Chicago. For its last resort safety system, a professor stood by with a bucket of concentrated cadmium nitrate to hurl onto the reactor. Fortunately for the UChicago football team, the Pile-1 generated heat from fission without incident.

Later the book describes the creation of the US nuclear navy, which almost never got off to sea. US Navy higher-ups tried to kill the program, fearing nuclear-propelled submarines would make aircraft carriers, their area of expertise, obsolete.

In response to this political pressure, then-Captain Hyman Rickover, tasked with forging the nuclear navy, rushed the submarine reactor R&D. He passed on purchasing a scaled-down test reactor for the first tests, instead ordering a submarine-sized reactor. During its first test at full power, the officers on site ordered the engineers to halt the test after the reactor, the Mark I, operated for twenty four hours. Rickover overruled them and simulated a course across the Atlantic.

After 60 hours, the reactor’s instrumentation and cooling pumps developed problems, along with a condenser tube. Instead of stopping, Rickover instructed his engineers to fix the reactor while it ran at full power, saying “If the plant has a limitation so serious, now is the time to find out. I accept full responsibility for any casualty.”

After 100 hours, the submarine had effectively sailed across the Atlantic, besting the previous record of 20 submerged miles at full power. Here Rickover ended the test. The captain gave his reason for such a brash course, “We had to do it today. They never would have given us a second chance.”

The history of bravery in the nuclear industry exhilarates, as does Zubrin’s subsequent discussion of nuclear powered space travel. A fission-fueled spacecraft could theoretically hit speeds of 12,800 km/s, dwarfing the maximum possible speed of a chemical powered craft of 5 km/s. At this velocity, the fission spacecraft could attain 8 percent the speed of light and reach Alpha Centauri, the star nearest our solar system, in 54 years. Unfortunately, such a speed demands perfect conversion of nuclear energy into thrust which is impossible with current technology. A more reachable speed in the near term is 9 to 50 km/s, still a substantial improvement over chemical fuels.

Because nuclear engineers live dangerously, the simultaneous advent of nuclear weapons and the Space Race led the US Atomic Energy Commission, the predecessor to the NRC, to explore propelling spacecraft with atomic bombs (seriously), which could theoretically reach speeds of 3,000 km/s, one percent the speed of light. Zubrin’s description of engineering of this actual program, Project Orion, is quite delightful for readers who enjoy the quixotic. Of course, the venture was for naught; the US and USSR wisely prohibited the stationing of nuclear weapons in outer space in the 1963 Test Ban Treaty.

Being what the internet would call a “nuke bro,” Zubrin argues that fashionable solar and wind projects cannot meet humanity’s energy needs; however, his review of these technologies is too brief given their political success and general popularity. Zubrin also fails to discuss the relationship between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. While a nation can create a nuclear bomb without a nuclear energy program, the book would be more complete had he discussed proliferation.

Regardless, The Case for Nukes is a persuasive and engaging look at an indispensable technology. Philosophically The Case for Nukes falls firmly within the ecomodernist tradition, a school of thought that sees advancing technology and human prosperity as necessary to preserve an ecologically vibrant planet. Nuclear enthusiasts, physics students, and those interested in optimistic environmentalism would do well to buy a copy of this stimulating book.

Freedom Caucus Loses its' Mind... and then its' Balls

Cristina Laila, "JUST IN: Marjorie Taylor Greene Booted from House Freedom Caucus"

GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was booted from the House Freedom Caucus.

The Freedom Caucus, chaired by Scott Perry (PA), voted on Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s future with the group late last month.

According to Politico, the Georgia lawmakerwas booted from the Freedom Caucus in last week’s vote.

The vote took place shortly after Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, a fellow member of the Freedom Caucus, clashed on the House floor.

According to reports, Greene called Boebert “a little bitch” on the House floor. 

Saw this conversation… not sure if it was a friendly one pic.twitter.com/tpz3z2Phtv

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 21, 2023

Politico reported:

What’s happening? A member of the House Freedom Caucus on Thursday confirmed that the conservative group has voted to boot Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) — a vote first reported by POLITICO last week.

“A vote was taken to remove Marjorie Taylor Greene from the House Freedom Caucus for some of the things she’s done,” said Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.).

Details: The Maryland Republican declined to say how he voted, but called the decision to remove her “an appropriate action.” Pressed if that meant Greene is formally out, Harris, who noted he is on the group’s board, added: “As far as I know, that is the way it is.”

A spokesperson for Greene did not respond to a request for comment on her status within the Freedom Caucus. A spokesperson for the group also didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Reclaim Democracy!

On Our Weaponized Government

Ron Paul, "Weaponization of Politics, an American Tradition"

President Donald Trump is hardly the first political figure who has had the legal and policy processes weaponized against him. In fact, there is a long and shameful history of U.S. politicians and bureaucrats weaponizing governmental powers against their political opponents.

The First Amendment was not even a decade old when fear of influence on America by French agents was used to support the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts. This outlawed “false, scandalous, and malicious writing” against the U.S. government, Congress, or the president and made it illegal to conspire “to oppose any measure or measures of the government of the United States.”

The weaponization of politics is another example of how hysteria over alleged foreign threats leads to less liberty. The claim that opponents of U.S. government policy were serving interests of France is an early example. Sadly, critics of U.S. government policy have been smeared for spreading disinformation to benefit hostile foreign powers many times since.

During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln oversaw the shutting down of newspapers and even the arresting of state legislators. After the U.S. became involved in World War I, Congress passed a new Sedition Act banning “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” toward the military or U.S. government. This act was used to imprison Eugene Debs, who then ran for president as the Socialist Party nominee while in prison.

Opponents of U.S. involvement in World War II were accused by supporters of U.S. military intervention of being a “fifth column” for Germany’s government. Later, opponents of wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and other countries where the U.S. intervened were subjected to government surveillance and harassment.

Critics of U.S. foreign policy may be the first critics of the U.S. government targeted for opposing government policies, but they are not the last. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover targeted the civil rights movement and wiretapped and harassed Martin Luther King Jr. Hoover also kept files on those he deemed subversives, including even the pop music group The Monkees.

Presidents of both parties have used the IRS against their political enemies. As an IRS agent told the head of a conservative organization who was being audited after calling for the impeachment of then-President Clinton, “What do you expect when you target the president?”

The drafters of the Constitution knew those with power would always be tempted to use the power against their opponents. Hence, they created a limited government where power was diffused and checked. Unfortunately, American politicians gave in to the temptation to weaponize the law against their opponents in the early days of the Republic.

Since then, the growth of government has led to the growth of an unelected and unaccountable bureaucracy that plays an important role for the deep state. The deep state pursues its own agenda regardless of the wishes of the people. The deep state works to subvert those who oppose its agenda, using tactics up to and including assassination in the case of President Kennedy.

A lesson of this history is that people who desire liberty should not trust the U.S. government to advance liberty. Instead, they need to be vigilant in ensuring the government acts within the limits stated in the Constitution. Making sure the government is pursuing a policy of peace and free trade abroad is also essential to promoting liberty at home.

Against Our Weaponized Deep State 'Expert' Bureaucracy

Darkness Ahead?

John Mearsheimer's article.