Showing posts from August, 2019

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Whom Will Socialized Medicine Kill?

Four of the 2020 Democrats fighting to claim the White House have endorsed banning private health insurance and forcing everyone into a national socialist medical system overseen by the government. “Health care for all is a right, not a privilege,” Senator Bernie Sanders said. His call to abolish private health insurance was endorsed by Senator Kamala Harris, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Senator Cory Booker. Sanders promises that government health care will cover everyone, provide everything, at no charge, and will be open to everyone. His models are the national socialist medical systems of European nations. Like the NHS. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in his first speech, argued that it shouldn’t take three weeks to see a GP under the NHS. Despite the well-known failings of Britain’s National Health Service, financial, medical, and ethical, it continues to be touted by, among others, MSNBC, as a model for the United States. And yet the NHS also shows how a national socialis

How the Left Gets the Statue of Liberty Poem Wrong

Being a writer means never knowing what you might be remembered for. Or how badly. That poem that Emma Lazarus became famous for was forgotten, remembered again, and has been misused, quoted out of context and transformed into a battle cry for open borders and a disastrous immigration policy. Its lines about “wretched refuse” and “poor” immigrants have been taken literally. And yet the vocal advocates for the poem imprinted on the Statue of Liberty would have loathed the Confederate socialite and the Zionist writer who are responsible for the words they claim to love. At the age of 34, Emma, a New York poetess with a bad case of writer’s block, was asked to submit a poem for a fundraiser to build a pedestal for a statue that most people hadn’t seen yet. That included Emma. Her first response was to turn down the request. Though she didn’t know it yet, her life was nearing its end. Five years after she wrote what would become her most famous poem, she would be dead. But the

Amazon Should Not Control the Military Cloud

Millions of Americans brought Alexa into their homes only to learn, belatedly, that not only software, but human beings, were listening in on them. Amazon employees and contractors from Costa Rica to India were caught reviewing thousands of recordings, of casual requests, private conversations and intimate moments, and sharing clips that they thought were funny in chat sessions with each other. The Amazon product is always listening and maintains recordings of your conversations indefinitely. But now there’s something bigger at stake than privacy violations. Amazon expects a $10 billion cloud contract for the military. The $10 billion contract was a sweetheart deal for a politically influential company that seemed unstoppable until President Trump suddenly slammed the brakes on JEDI. The deal had always been dubious and many critics had questioned how or why a single company could expect to have a monopoly on the JEDI cloud for the United States military. Amazon’s cloud business

And With Free Government Internet For All...

Things have never been as bad as they are now. Not only is unemployment at a 50-year low, but last year saw the largest annual wage gain in a decade. 46% of Americans say jobs are plentiful. The number claiming that jobs are hard to come by declined from 15% to 12%. But it’s at 100% in a field facing 96% unemployment in under a year. The 2020 Democrats. “Who is this economy really working for?" Senator Elizabeth Warren demanded to know. How bad is this economy really? So bad that Warren rolled out a plan to have the government guarantee Netflix 4K streaming internet for all at the modest cost of merely $85 billion. That’s enough to pay for over 5 billion Netflix accounts which would cover most of the human race. In her latest 5-year plan, Warren called for a “public option” for broadband. If her public option for the internet works the way that her public option for healthcare did, private internet will soon be banned. And the government internet will keep shutting off b

How Trump Started a Civil War Between the UN and Hamas

Even within the United Nations, a sprawling multinational bureaucracy linked by luxury dining, corruption and complicity in terrorism, the UNRWA stands out for waste, corruption and terror. The UNRWA’s abbreviation leaves out its full title, United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, and its heavy focus on Gaza. The UNRWA classifies 1.4 million or 73% of the people living in Gaza as “refugees” even though it’s an independent territory run by Hamas. There are really two UNRWA agencies. One is a UN agency run by a small number of international staffers. Another is an arm of Hamas which employs thousands of “Palestinians”. Many if not most of these are members of Hamas. Some, like Suhail al-Hindi, the former head of the UNRWA union, who was also a member of Hamas’ leadership, serve in the upper echelons of the terror group. While a handful of European UN employees act as the public face of UNRWA, the actual agency is run by Hamas operatives who c

Environmentalists Killed More Europeans Than Islamic Terrorists Did

"Do Americans Need Air-Conditioning?" a New York Times piece asked in July. Air conditioning, it argued, is bad for the environment and makes us less human. It ran quotes suggesting that, "first world discomfort is a learned behavior", and urging "a certain degree of self-imposed suffering". If environmentalists ruled the world, air conditioning wouldn’t exist. And there’s a place like that. 90% of American households have air conditioning. As do 86% of South Koreans, 82% of Australians, 60% of Chinese, 16% of Brazilians and Mexicans, 9% of Indonesians and less than 5% of Europeans. A higher percentage of Indian households have air conditioning than their former British colonial rulers. Temperatures in Paris hit 108.6 degrees. Desperate Frenchmen dived into the fountains of the City of Lights with their clothes on. Parisian authorities announced that they were deploying heat wave management plan orange, level three, which meant setting up foggers i

Marianne Williamson Shows the Dems are a Cult

How did Marianne Williamson, the author of 21 Spiritual Lessons for Surrendering Your Weight Forever, and other stuff you might see on the bottom layer of a garage sale, end up on the 2020 debate stage? The obvious answer is that she’s been there for a very long time. Lefties love to claim that they’re the movement that believes in science. But the Third Law of Thermodynamics isn’t something you believe in. Fermat’s Principle doesn’t give your life meaning. Marianne teaching you spiritual lessons about weight loss on an episode of Oprah does. Hillary Clinton held a séance in the White House. The seance overseen by Jean Houston, the author of The Hero and the Goddess: The Odyssey as Pathway to Personal Transformation, encouraged Hillary to contact Eleanor Roosevelt. Hillary and Houston hit it off after the Clintons invited self-help book authors to Camp David to help them cope with their defeat. The authors included Marianne Williamson. Marianne Williamson had reportedly part

The Hijabs of Our Banana Republic

When a company runs into trouble, it tries to go forward or backward. And when Banana Republic faced a 3% decline in sales, it decided to go all the way back to the 7th century. Hoping to tap into the lucrative market of concealing bruises and strangulation marks, Banana Republic rolled out a line of hijabs for the discerning woman who knows better than to leave home without the permission of a male guardian. While women in Iran were being beaten and imprisoned for taking off their hijabs, Banana Republic decided to celebrate the courageous spirit of those women who want to live as second class citizens. But if the Gap brand thought that displaying some garments of female subjugation between its ugly purple purses and its eighteen-dollar scrunchies would win over Islamists, it had another thing coming. Modern lefties iconize hijabs without having the faintest idea of what they mean or what they’re for. All they know is that to properly display diversity, you need to add a woman in

Control Criminals and Crazies, Not Guns

Mass murder is not a gun control problem. In 2003, Kim Dae-han, a middle-aged taxi driver, killed 192 people and left 151 others wounded, by setting a South Korean subway train on fire using paint cans filled with gasoline. In 2016, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a Muslim terrorist, killed 86 people and wounded 458 others by ramming a truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in France. In 2001, Muslim terrorists killed 2,977 people and injured 6,000 more, by using box cutters to hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings. Guns are a tool. There are a whole lot of other devastating ways to kill lots of people. American mass killers often use guns because they’re convenient and available. There are plenty of alternatives like trucks, boxcutters, pressure cooker bombs and paint cans full of gasoline. Mass murder isn’t caused by the tools you use. The Nazis were not inspired to kill Jews by the invention of Zyklon B. The Japanese did not decide to kill hundreds of thousands of Chi

Nationalism and Idealism at the Border

The Border Patrol is to the millennial lefty what the Marines in Vietnam were to his grandpa. The problem with both is not that they wear uniforms and carry guns. A heavily armed force dedicated to policing carbon emissions, hate speech, and non-biodegradable straws would be entirely copacetic. The trouble is that the Border Patrol and the Marine Corps are nationalistic forces. And nationalistic forces are the wrong kind of forces because they exist to secure the physical existence of America. Idealistic forces that exist to protect ideas, like the evils of the industrial revolution, politically incorrect speech, or violations of UN human rights accords, from threatening the ideal society are good. Threats to our ideas about the world must be urgently fought. And reality is the greatest threat to those ideas. The threatening thing about borders is that they define the nation as a physical reality, not an ideal. Lefties prefer America as an ideal rather than a reality. The ideal nat