At the time of the Waukesha massacre, Little Red Lying Hood falsely stated Biden wasn’t going so as to protect local resources:
“Any President going to visit a community requires a lot of assets, requires taking their resources, and it’s not something that I have a trip previewed at this plan, point in time, but we remain in touch with local officials,” Psaki said on November 29, 2021. “And certainly, our hearts are with the community as they’ve gone through such a difficult time.”…”
As if the city of Buffalo has any resources to spare. Tucker puts the faux outrage of the professionally shocked into proper perspective:
Here’s the juice, and the reality of Progressives’ position on the proper place for firearms:
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, NRO‘s brilliant Kevin Williamson echoes Tucker’s thoughts as he recounts the rules of…
“Before the blood was even dry in Buffalo, Democrats were asking the most important question:
“How can we well-heeled white progressives most effectively use the murders of all these black people to our personal and political advantage?”
The murderer in Buffalo didn’t kill anybody you’ve ever heard of, and so the first thing to do if you want to exploit the deaths of all these people — and that is what Democrats intend to do — is to connect the crime to some famous name or prominent institution. It doesn’t matter if there isn’t any actual connection: Just assert it, and that’s good enough for the newspapers and the cable-news cretins and the impotent rage-monkeys on Twitter. And so New York governor Kathy Hochul blames social-media platforms. Amanda Marcotte blames Tucker Carlson. Other hack Democrats blamed Donald Trump, the Republican Party, Fox News, the National Rifle Association, etc. The usual suspects.
Democrats are looking for something — anything — to cling to politically at the moment, because they are terrified that they are going to get wiped out in the midterm elections. And they probably are going to take a beating: Never mind that the Republican Party doesn’t deserve to win — the Democrats deserve to lose, and that’s what matters at the polls. What can Democrats do about that besides pray that Marjorie Taylor Greene has an extra shot of espresso in her moonbat latte this morning? There are options, but they are tough, and apparently it has never crossed Governor Hochul’s mind (such as it is) to try a different approach: Rather than cheap demagoguery and shunting great streams of public money into her husband’s company, she might try competent governance and see how that works out.
Apparently, that never occurred to her. Apparently, it never will.
Apparently, it never occurred to anybody in New York to keep an eye on the lunatic who showed up at school wearing a full hazmat suit. The kid who already was on the radar of the state police and the mental-health bureaucracy. The kid who was asked about his post-graduation plans and answered: murder-suicide.
As with so many shootings of this kind, the massacre in Buffalo didn’t exactly come out of nowhere. The same is true for the less dramatic kinds of shootings, too: There were at least 33 shootings in Chicago over the weekend, and, when the data are in, we’ll almost certainly find that the victims were almost all black and that the shooters almost all had extensive prior criminal records, including prior weapons violations in many cases. This stuff doesn’t just fall out of the sky. It is predictable as the change of seasons. You won’t see a lot of headlines about those 33 shootings, and that is, in one horrifying sense, entirely appropriate: They aren’t really news. News is something unusual, something unexpected.
We talk a great deal about crime in Chicago, because it is a big, dangerous city, and it is one of the five U.S. cities that the national media ordinarily pay attention to. Buffalo is a smaller, more dangerous city, with a homicide rate just slightly above Chicago’s: 18.38 per 100,000 vs. 18.26 per 100,000.
There is much that could be done, if anyone were willing to do it.
Here’s something I am not willing to do: I am not willing to renegotiate the Bill of Rights every time some sexually frustrated loser with a 5.56mm death-boner has a homicidal temper tantrum.
Set aside, for the moment, the inevitable attack on the Second Amendment: Governor Hochul is targeting the First Amendment. Never mind enforcing New York gun laws or funding more proactive policing measures or maybe asking some more pointed questions about the kid who showed up to school in a full hazmat suit, Governor Hochul intends to focus on an area in which she has no authority, expertise, or influence: policing speech online.
…As a matter of constitutional law in the United States, there is no such thing as “hate speech.” It is not a legal term at all — the words have no legal meaning. As such, there certainly is no exception to the First Amendment for “hate speech,” a fact that is well understood and attested to by boatloads of constitutional scholars holding many different political points of view.It is the unanimous position of the Supreme Court. This is not new. Governor Hochul, who has a law degree on her sad little résumé (Erie County clerk and bank lobbyist) ought to know better. Perhaps she has forgotten. Perhaps she missed that day in law school. Perhaps she is a cheap demagogue who ought to be ashamed of herself and of whom New York ought to be ashamed.
There is no such thing as “hate speech” as a matter of constitutional law in the United States, and the sort of thing that is classified as “hate speech” in countries that do have such laws is — pay attention, now — exactlythe kind of speech the First Amendment is designed to protect: offensive, unpopular, detestable, the kind of speech that most people consider immoral and indefensible. The kind of speech nobody likes or wants is the kind of speech the First Amendment is there for — the other kind of speech doesn’t need any protection. Here is a useful heuristic: If you immediately want to suppress somebody’s speech, then that is probably the kind of speech the First Amendment was made for. We write down our laws for a reason, and that reason is because your gut instincts can’t be trusted and because we don’t want our civil rights to depend on whatever kind of daffy electrochemical misfire is happening inside that three-pound ball of meat Kathy Hochul calls a brain on any given Monday morning.
Like “hate speech,” “assault weapon” is a term without meaning. (“Assault rifle” is a term with a formal military sense, and if you think that we should not ordinarily sell them to civilians, then, rejoice: We don’t.) The shooter in Buffalo was armed with an ordinary modern sporting firearm, a 5.56mm semiautomatic rifle — the most common rifle in the United States. It was not, contra the Washington Post, “modified.” The Post headline reads: “Suspect in Buffalo shooting modified Bushmaster so it could hold more ammunition.” But as far as I can tell it was only “modified” by putting this magazine instead of that magazine into the rifle. (Magazines holding more than 10 rounds are illegal in New York State, but the law is effectively unenforceable, and it wouldn’t make any difference in these cases even if it weren’t. EDIT: He would have had to break the lock that keeps the fixed magazine in place, a simple task taking about two minutes, which is what he did. So I suppose the rifle was modified in the sense that a locked-up bicycle is modified when a thief breaks the lock to steal it.) The killer seems to have chosen the Bushmaster brand because it has been associated with similar shootings. This is a reminder that there is no major daily newspaper in the United States of America that is capable of writing about firearms competently.
…Kathy Hochul is an unserious politician representing an unserious party in an unserious state in a largely unserious country that is kept on the road mostly by sturdy guardrails inscribed in an 18th-century document that some guy wrote with a feather. Events such as the one in Buffalo require a serious response, but there is nobody around to provide one, at least not in elected office. What we have is mediocrities, demagogues, and grandstanding ghouls happy to climb atop any pile of dead Americans, no matter how high or how mangled, to do a little TikTok dance in the blood and sing a verse of “Happy Days Are Here Again.”
But, really, I am sure this is all somehow Tucker Carlson’s fault.“
And in today’s installment of the EnvironMental Moment, courtesy of…gasp!!!…Time via our environmental consultant Jeff Foutch, Vaclav Smil, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba, disperses the rainbow unicorn farts which is a green energy future, as he tells us…
“Modern societies would be impossible without mass-scale production of many man-made materials. We could have an affluent civilization that provides plenty of food, material comforts, and access to good education and health care without any microchips or personal computers: we had one until the 1970s, and we managed, until the 1990s, to expand economies, build requisite infrastructures and connect the world by jetliners without any smartphones and social media. But we could not enjoy our quality of life without the provision of many materials required to embody the myriad of our inventions.
Four materials rank highest on the scale of necessity, forming what I have called the four pillars of modern civilization: cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia are needed in larger quantities than are other essential inputs. The world now produces annually about 4.5 billion tons of cement, 1.8 billion tons of steel, nearly 400 million tons of plastics, and 180 million tons of ammonia. But it is ammonia that deserves the top position as our most important material: its synthesis is the basis of all nitrogen fertilizers, and without their applications it would be impossible to feed, at current levels, nearly half of today’s nearly 8 billion people.
The dependence is even higher in the world’s most populous country: feeding three out of five Chinese depends on the synthesis of this compound. This dependence easily justifies calling ammonia synthesis the most momentous technical advance in history: other inventions provide our comforts, convenience or wealth or prolong our lives—but without the synthesis of ammonia, we could not ensure the very survival of billions of people alive today and yet to be born.
…And these four materials, so unlike in their properties and qualities, share three common traits: they are not readily replaceable by other materials (certainly not in the near future or on a global scale); we will need much more of them in the future; and their mass-scale production depends heavily on the combustion of fossil fuels, making them major sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Organic fertilizers cannot replace synthetic ammonia: their low nitrogen content and their worldwide mass are not enough even if all manures and crop residues were recycled.No other materials offer such advantages for many lightweight yet durable uses as plastics. No other metal is as affordably strong as steel.No other mass-produced material is as suitable for building strong infrastructure as concrete (often reinforced with steel).
As for the future needs, high-income countries could reduce their fertilizer use (eating less meat, wasting less), and China and India, the two heavy users, could also reduce their excessive fertilizer applications, but Africa, the continent with the fastest-growing population, remains deprived of fertilizers even as it is already a substantial food importer.Any hope for its greater food self-sufficiency rests on the increased use of nitrogen: after all, the continent’s recent usage of ammonia has been less than a third of the European mean. More plastics will be needed for expanding medical (aging populations) and infrastructural (pipes) uses and in transportation (see the interior of airplanes and high-speed trains). As is the case with ammonia, steel consumption has to rise in all low-income countries with underdeveloped infrastructures and transportation. And much more cement will be needed to make concrete: affluent countries to fix decaying infrastructures (in the US all sectors where concrete dominates, including dams, roads, and aviation get a D grade in nationwide engineering assessments), in low-income countries to expand cities, sewers and transportation.
Moreover, the unfolding transition to renewable energies will demand huge amounts of steel, concrete and plastics. No structures are more obvious symbols of “green” electricity generation than large wind turbines—but their foundations are reinforced concrete, their towers, nacelles, and rotors are steel, and their massive blades are energy-intensive—and difficult to recycle—plastic resins, and all of these giant parts must be brought to the installation sites by outsized trucks (or ships) and erected by large steel cranes, and turbine gearboxes must be repeatedly lubricated with oil. These turbines would generate truly green electricity only if all of these materials were made without any fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels remain indispensable for producing all of these materials.
…Modern economies will always be tied to massive material flows, whether those of ammonia-based fertilizers to feed the still-growing global population; plastics, steel, and cement needed for new tools, machines, structures, and infrastructures; or new inputs required to produce solar cells, wind turbines, electric cars, and storage batteries. And until all energies used to extract and process these materials come from renewable conversions, modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on the fossil fuels used in the production of these indispensable materials. No artificial intelligence designs, no apps, no claims of coming “dematerialization” will change that.“
In other words, when it comes to a green energy future…
At least, not in our lifetime, the lifetime of our children, of for that matter, our grandchildren…assuming we ever get any!
Next, we offer a septet of items specially selected for inquiring Conservative minds:
“When revolutionaries undermine the system, earn the antipathy of the people, and face looming disaster at the polls, it is then they prove most dangerous – as we shall see over the next few months.“
So…
Not to mention maintain a plentiful supply of emergency rations, supplies, and most importantly, weapons and ammo.
(3). Jim Geraghty explains why the record-high cost of diesel fuel is making certain goods, including baby formula, quite literally too expensive to transport.
(4). NRO‘s Charlie Cooke sagely suggests Democrats can’t fix what’s wrong with Joe Biden, citing aPolitico piece which totally misses the point: 46*’s primary problem has nothing to do with intransigent opposition or the death of congressional collegiality he himself pioneered, but the man himself, “who, no matter his means, chooses the wrong ends as a matter of unlovely routine.”
(5). The Morning Jolt brings us the mysterious case of Kathy Barnette, the purportedly Conservative Black female Senate candidate from Pennsylvania who can’t remember when she moved to the state or when she was in OCS, and has thus far declined to provide such basic background information as the name of her hometown and what college she attended.
We’d be willing to bet, if asked, the secretive Barnette would be unwilling to offer here definition of “woman”.
(6). Speaking of those unwilling to define what a woman is, Andy McCarthy documents the next SCOTUS justice’s inability to answer two very simple questions related to the leak of Sam Alito’s draft opinion striking down Roe v. Wade and the resultant incontrovertibly illegal protests outside the homes of her future fellows:
Q: Do you think it was a good thing or a bad thing?
A: I can’t answer that.
Q: What do you think about peaceful protests outside of Supreme Court justices’ homes?
A: I don’t have any comment.
Here’s a second shot of the juice, which you can take to the bank: You can DEPEND on the fact Ketanji Brown Jackson will have plenty of VERY one-sided answers, comments and opinions once she is undeservedly elevated to the highest court in the land.
While we the concept, the very idea brings to mind…
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:
Then there’s these purely political memes from Balls Cotton…
…along with four lighter bon mots:
Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with one more titillating tale torn from the pages of The Crime Blotter, courtesy today of The Blaze, which relates the sordid story of the…
“…“On May 4th, 2022, detectives from the Tucson Police Department Sexual Assault Unit informed the administration of Tucson High Magnet School of an ongoing investigation into one of its counselors, Zobella Brazil Vinik,” read a statement from Tucson Unified School District Superintendent Dr. Gabriel Trujillo. “The administration was informed of an alleged inappropriate relationship between the counselor and a 15-year-old student from Tucson High.”
…On May 11, Vinik turned herself in to the police for the alleged charges of an inappropriate sexual relationship that occurred off-campus. Vinik was charged with one count of sexual conduct with a minor, and was booked into the Pima County Jail…”
“…Zobella was previously a “community advocate” for the ScholarshipsA-Z organization – a self-described “Tucson-based immigrant youth-led organization that works to make higher education accessible to all students regardless of immigration status.”
It appears that her very woke profile on Scholarships-Z has been wiped from the website. However, an archived version states that Zobella majored in Peace and Justice Studies with a minor in Latinx Studies at Tufts University. While in college, she “co-organized a campaign to make Tufts University accessible for undocumented students.”
“Zobella joined the movement for immigrant justice during college where she co-organized a campaign to make Tufts University accessible for Undocumented students,” the since-deleted profile reads. Zobella is “working to unlearn practices maintained by white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy and recommits daily to prioritize mental health, community care, and visions for freedom offered by Queer BIPOC organizers.”
Zobella’s preferred pronouns are “She/Her/Ella.“
Peace and Justice Studies and Latinx Studies…at Tufts. That’s $240,000+ for two meaningless degrees conferred upon a useless, unproductive individual. In other words, the perfect poster child for Biden’s unconstitutional college loan forgiveness program.
Magoo
Video of the Day
Brit Hume lays the blame for the WuFlu fiasco squarely on the shoulders of those who leaped before they looked…without considering any sort of facts or using the least bit of common sense.
Tales of The Darkside
Florida Representative Kat Cammack’s investigation confirms how Liberals lie but once, and that continually.
On the Free Market Side
John Stossel highlights how free market performance is always superior to the results of centralized Socialist planning.
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