The New York Dolls.
Sunday, June 19, 2022
Germany Reboots Coal-Fired Plants as Russia Chokes European Energy Supplies
This is a tough time for the climate change cult.
Reality's punching through their worldview of unicorns, rainbows, and electric cars.
At the Wall Street Journal, "Germany Steps Up Measures to Conserve Gas as Russia Slows Supply to Europe":
Berlin to restart coal-fired plants and auction gas to reduce consumption. Gazprom has blamed the shortfall on missing turbine parts that were stuck in Canada due to sanctions. European officials and analysts dismissed the explanation. Germany imports about 35% of its natural gas from Russia, down from 55% before the war, and uses most of it for heating and manufacturing, according to German government estimates. Last year, power generation using natural gas accounted for about 15% of total public electricity in Germany, Mr. Habeck said, adding that the share of gas in power production has likely fallen this year. To accelerate the decline of gas in the power mix, Mr. Habeck outlined a number of steps the government was taking to reduce reliance on gas and build up stores for the coming winter. In a U-turn for a leader of the environmentalist Green Party, which has campaigned to reduce fossil-fuel use, Mr. Habeck said the government would empower utility companies to extend the use of coal-fired power plants. This would ensure that Germany has an alternative source of energy but would further delay the country’s efforts to slash carbon emissions. “This is bitter,” Mr. Habeck said of the need to rely on coal. “But in this situation, it is necessary to reduce gas consumption. Gas stores must be full by winter. That has the highest priority.” The legislation affecting the use of coal is expected to be approved on July 8 in the Bundesrat, the upper house of parliament, Mr. Habeck said. The measure expires on March 31, 2024, by which time the government hopes to have created a sustainable alternative to Russian gas. Mr. Habeck also said the government would introduce an auction system that would motivate industry to reduce consumption. The government released no details about how the auction would work, but Mr. Habeck said it would begin this summer. Mr. Habeck said the new measures are aimed at diverting the dwindling gas deliveries from Russia into storage tanks to be used during the winter.
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
Following-up, "James Baldwin on the Dick Cavett Show (VIDEO)."
A must read, at Amazon, James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time.
Saturday, June 18, 2022
A Manifesto on National Conservatism
This is a clarifying document with much to like (even more so, seeing it moved one writer at the Washington Post to attack it as "fascist").
Some parts are just okay, though.
The document can't reconcile America's role as the "indispensable nation" in world affairs with the current domestic populist isolationist zeitgeist. The United States is simply too powerful to assume that we can completely shrink from what the authors call "liberal imperialism." Political fashions come and go. We've had major populist movements for reform previously, which, for example, later tailed-off into a more New Deal-style liberalism, that is, radical progressive statism, etc. The same in foreign policy. Should Russia and China agree to formally ally against the U.S., and to threaten U.S. interests beyond Ukraine --- say, with a Russian war in Western Europe or the establishment of Chinese forward operating bases in Latin America --- things will change, and the U.S., in its role as the world's liberal hegemon, will be forced to act according to the pressures of national security in an anarchic world of interstate competition and power shifts.
The manifesto's a product of the Edmund Burke Foundation and is endorsed by such big name MAGA-esque figures as Michael Anton, Victor Davis Hanson, and Julie Kelly, among others.
See, "National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles." It's a ten-point program. Here's 8-10:
8. Family and Children. We believe the traditional family is the source of society’s virtues and deserves greater support from public policy. The traditional family, built around a lifelong bond between a man and a woman, and on a lifelong bond between parents and children, is the foundation of all other achievements of our civilization. The disintegration of the family, including a marked decline in marriage and childbirth, gravely threatens the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations. Among the causes are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life. Economic and cultural conditions that foster stable family and congregational life and child-raising are priorities of the highest order. 9. Immigration. Immigration has made immense contributions to the strength and prosperity of Western nations. But today’s penchant for uncontrolled and unassimilated immigration has become a source of weakness and instability, not strength and dynamism, threatening internal dissension and ultimately dissolution of the political community. We note that Western nations have benefited from both liberal and restrictive immigration policies at various times. We call for much more restrictive policies until these countries summon the wit to establish more balanced, productive, and assimilationist policies. Restrictive policies may sometimes include a moratorium on immigration. 10. Race. We believe that all men are created in the image of God and that public policy should reflect that fact. No person’s worth or loyalties can be judged by the shape of his features, the color of his skin, or the results of a lab test. The history of racialist ideology and oppression and its ongoing consequences require us to emphasize this truth. We condemn the use of state and private institutions to discriminate and divide us against one another on the basis of race. The cultural sympathies encouraged by a decent nationalism offer a sound basis for conciliation and unity among diverse communities. The nationalism we espouse respects, and indeed combines, the unique needs of particular minority communities and the common good of the nation as a whole.
RTWT.
'Orange Man Bad!'
At the Other McCain, "‘Orange Man Bad!’ Trump Still Living Rent-Free in the Left’s Collective Head."
Quoting Glenn Reynolds, who quotes the article on the "Progressive Meltdown":
Woke white people are annoying, stupid, and frequently vicious. Fortunately they’re also usually self-destructive and incompetent. But ultimately, this is just Trump exercising a magical power to destroy his enemies via their own ideology:Sooner or later, each interview for this story landed on the election of Trump in 2016 as a catalyst. Whatever internal tension had been pulling at the seams of organizations in the years prior, Trump’s shock victory sharpened the focus of activists and regular people alike. The institutional progressive world based in Washington, D.C., reacted slowly, shell-shocked and unsure of its place, but people outside those institutions raced ahead of them. A period of mourning turned into fierce determination to resist. Spontaneous women’s marches were called in scores of cities, drawing as many as 5 million people, a shocking display of force. (Their collapse in a heap of identitarian recriminations is its own parable for this moment.)
Mark Shields, TV Pundit Known for His Sharp Wit, Dies at 85
At the New York Times, "A former campaign strategist, he became a fixture in American political journalism and punditry and was seen on “PBS NewsHour” for 33 years."
He joined the Marines in 1960:
How Meltdowns Brought Progressive Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History
At the Intercept, "Elephant in the Zoom":
EVERYONE ACKNOWLEDGED THAT Zoom was less than ideal as a forum for a heartfelt conversation on systemic racism and policing. But the meeting was urgent, and, a little more than two months into the Covid-19 lockdown, it would have to do. During the first week of June 2020, teams of workers and their managers came together across the country to share how they were responding to the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis and to chart out what — if anything — their own company or nonprofit could do to contribute toward the reckoning with racial injustice that was rapidly taking shape. On June 2, one such huddle was organized by the Washington, D.C., office of the Guttmacher Institute, the abortion rights movement’s premier research organization. Heather Boonstra, vice president of public policy, began by asking how people were “finding equilibrium” — one of the details we know because it was later shared by staff with Prism, an outlet that covers social justice advocacy and the impacts of injustice. She talked about the role systemic racism plays in society and the ways that Guttmacher’s work could counter it. Staff suggestions, though, turned inward, Prism reported, “including loosening deadlines and implementing more proactive and explicit policies for leave without penalty.” Staffers suggested additional racial equity trainings, noting that a previous facilitator had said that the last round had not included sufficient time “to cover everything.” With no Black staff in the D.C. unit, it was suggested that “Guttmacher do something tangible for Black employees in other divisions.” Behind Boonstra’s and the staff’s responses to the killing was a fundamentally different understanding of the moment. For Boonstra and others of her generation, the focus should have been on the work of the nonprofit: What could Guttmacher, with an annual budget of nearly $30 million, do now to make the world a better place? For her staff, that question had to be answered at home first: What could they do to make Guttmacher a better place? Too often, they believed, managers exploited the moral commitment staff felt toward their mission, allowing workplace abuses to go unchecked. The belief was widespread. In the eyes of group leaders dealing with similar moments, staff were ignoring the mission and focusing only on themselves, using a moment of public awakening to smuggle through standard grievances cloaked in the language of social justice. Often, as was the case at Guttmacher, they played into the very dynamics they were fighting against, directing their complaints at leaders of color. Guttmacher was run at the time, and still is today, by an Afro Latina woman, Dr. Herminia Palacio. “The most zealous ones at my organization when it comes to race are white,” said one Black executive director at a different organization, asking for anonymity so as not to provoke a response from that staff. These starkly divergent views would produce dramatic schisms throughout the progressive world in the coming year. At Guttmacher, this process would rip the organization apart. Boonstra, unlike many managers at the time, didn’t sugarcoat how she felt about the staff’s response to the killing. “I’m here to talk about George Floyd and the other African American men who have been beaten up by society,” she told her staff, not “workplace problems.” Boonstra told them she was “disappointed,” that they were being “self-centered.” The staff was appalled enough by the exchange to relay it to Prism. The human resources department and board of directors, in consultation with outside counsel, were brought in to investigate complaints that flowed from the meeting, including accusations that certain staff members had been tokenized, promoted, and then demoted on the basis of race. The resulting report was unsatisfying to many of the staff. “What we have learned is that there is a group of people with strong opinions about a particular supervisor, the new leadership, and a change in strategic priorities,” said a Guttmacher statement summarizing the findings. “Those staff have a point of view. Complaints were duly investigated and nothing raised to the level of abuse or discrimination. Rather, what we saw was distrust, disagreement, and discontent with management decisions they simply did not like.” A Prism reporter reached a widely respected Guttmacher board member, Pamela Merritt, a Black woman and a leading reproductive justice activist, while the Supreme Court oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization were going on last December, a year and a half after the Floyd meeting. She offered the most delicate rebuttal of the staff complaints possible. “I have been in this movement space long enough to respect how people choose to describe their personal experience and validate that experience, even if I don’t necessarily agree that that’s what they experienced,” Merritt said. “It seems like there’s a conflation between not reaching the conclusion that people want and not doing due diligence on the allegations, which simply is not true.” Boonstra did not respond to a request to talk from either Prism or The Intercept. The six months since then have only seen a ratcheting up of the tension, with more internal disputes spilling into public and amplified by a well-funded, anonymous operation called ReproJobs, whose Twitter and Instagram feeds have pounded away at the organization’s management. “If your reproductive justice organization isn’t Black and brown it’s white supremacy in heels co-opting a WOC movement,” blared a typical missive submitted to and republished on one of its Instagram stories. The news, in May 2022, that Roe v. Wade would almost certainly be overturned did nothing to temper the raging battle. (ReproJobs told The Intercept its current budget is around $275,000.) That the institute has spent the course of the Biden administration paralyzed makes it typical of not just the abortion rights community — Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and other reproductive health organizations had similarly been locked in knock-down, drag-out fights between competing factions of their organizations, most often breaking down along staff-versus-management lines. It’s also true of the progressive advocacy space across the board, which has, more or less, effectively ceased to function. The Sierra Club, Demos, the American Civil Liberties Union, Color of Change, the Movement for Black Lives, Human Rights Campaign, Time’s Up, the Sunrise Movement, and many other organizations have seen wrenching and debilitating turmoil in the past couple years. In fact, it’s hard to find a Washington-based progressive organization that hasn’t been in tumult, or isn’t currently in tumult. It even reached the National Audubon Society, as Politico reported in August 2021:Following a botched diversity meeting, a highly critical employee survey and the resignations of two top diversity and inclusion officials, the 600,000-member National Audubon Society is confronting allegations that it maintains a culture of retaliation, fear and antagonism toward women and people of color, according to interviews with 13 current and former staff members.Twitter, as the saying goes, may not be real life, but in a world of remote work, Slack very much is. And Twitter, Slack, Zoom, and the office space, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former executive directors of advocacy organizations, are now mixing in a way that is no longer able to be ignored by a progressive movement that wants organizations to be able to function. The executive directors largely spoke on the condition of anonymity, for fear of angering staff or donors. “To be honest with you, this is the biggest problem on the left over the last six years,” one concluded. “This is so big. And it’s like abuse in the family — it’s the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about. And you have to be super sensitive about who the messengers are.” For a number of obvious and intersecting reasons — my race, gender, and generation — I am not the perfect messenger. But here it goes anyway...
Friday, June 17, 2022
'Afro' Hair Pick Statue to Commemorate Juneteenth Unveiled in Lafayette Square, New Orleans, Louisiana
This is just dumb.
Sorry not sorry.
Juneteenth is this coming Sunday.
#Juneteenth #Shaft #IsaacHayes 🎶🎶🎶 https://t.co/AgGSAelnLx
— Donald Douglas 📘 (@AmPowerBlog) June 18, 2022
Our Civilizational Destruction
I can't disagree with Ms. Allie:
It doesn’t really matter what anyone thinks, the sexual depravity and gender nonsense our country celebrates signals civilizational destruction. You don’t have to believe it. You can insist otherwise all you want. But it’s a fact that we will all be forced to face soon.
— Allie Beth Stuckey (@conservmillen) June 17, 2022
Paige Spiranac Is World's Sexiest Woman
At Maxim, "WORLD’S SEXIEST WOMAN: PAIGE SPIRANAC IS MAXIM’S 2022 ‘HOT 100’ COVER STAR":
The beautiful influencer and world’s most followed golfer covers Maxim’s Hot 100 issue.
Uvalde, Texas, Has Hired Private Law Firm to Argue That It Doesn't Have to Release Public Records Related to the Mass Shooting at Robb Elementary School
Holy shit wtaf?!!
The records are "highly embarrassing" to the Police Department, causing the police chief and officers severe "emotional/mental distress" from fear of losing everything, hence for all of those who fucked on May 24th, the actual truth of events is "not of legitimate concern to the public."
Now if the city wins the case, this is one summer of urban rioting, right there at Uvalde City Hall, the Police Department, and Robb Elementary, that I could support. Damn.
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