Ah, the Ivy League: always insisting on telling us what we already knew

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A reader sent me this story a week ago and I replied that I'd wait for confirmation because, bad as things are, I didn't believe they could be this bad. As usual in these matters, I was wrong

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2 December 2015: Known terrorist and threat to the nation Rep. Tulsi Gabbard at her promotion to Major

Biden/Harris Put Tulsi Gabbard on Terrorist Watch List

David Strom turns out to have had exactly the same reaction:

When I first saw this a few days ago, it sounded implausible.

I mean, come on, there have to be SOME limits to the scale of totalitarianism that the Democrats will impose. 

Nope. There isn't. They really did put TULSI GABBARD, a disaffected Democrat, war veteran, and Biden/Harris critic on the terrorist watch list and have her followed in airports and on her flights. 

That's not a cackle, nor is it the sound of air rushing in one ear and out the other, unimpeded, it’s “a full-throated explosion of mirth”. Whew!

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WaPo flak does his best “Jeffrey Toobin on a Zoom call” impression.

Harris … laughs a lot. It’s a full-throated, heaving explosion of mirth that, to be honest, can sound excessive, even a little strange. But it is not phony. Her eyes sparkle, her smile stretches wide, and she puts her whole body into it. Stopping the outburst sometimes seems authentically hard for her.

“I have my mother’s laugh,” she has explained. “And I grew up around a bunch of women in particular who laugh from the belly.” A two-minute compilation of her laughing jags that has been going around the internet was undoubtedly devised as an attack video. In reality, it’s kind of charming.

Do you, too want release a full-hearted explosion of mirth or, as it was known until two weeks ago, cackle? Lesson here:

Harris's answer to the 30% rise in food prices during this administration: blame it on greedy corporate price gougers

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And her audience of know-nothings cheers.

And that group very much includes the clueless “journalists” and academics who’ve rushed to follow their masters’ orders

The Media Has Hit Peak 'Kamala-Love,' and It's Reached Surreal Proportions

RICK MORAN | 12:36 PM ON AUGUST 08, 2024

For a failed presidential candidate who was forced to drop out of the 2020 race two months before the first primary, Kamala Harris is undergoing a rehabilitation that any drug-addled Hollywood celebrity would kill for.

She has been transformed. Gone is the bumbling, stumbling vice president who spouts nonsense and cackles like the wicked witch of the West. Now, we have Kamala the Brave girding her loins, joining forth to do battle with The Evil One.

Then, there's outright lying,

"Trump has never had to face someone with Kamala Harris’s raw talent," said John White, a professor emeritus at Catholic University.

Exactly so

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this is the woman who is designing your future

Real estate activity has slowed to almost nothing as the August doldrum descends, so why not talk of politics, which hasn’t paused since 2015? EV cars, for instance.

The EV Scam: A Likely Reason for So Epic a Folly

After several paragraphs detailing some of the (many) defects of battery cars, Canadian David Solway gets tp the heart of the matter

The obvious question has to do with the reason governments have invested so heavily and at such expense in forcing so radical and risky a policy as the complete transformation of the auto sector and the introduction of EVs known to be unreliable, dangerous, and inefficient. After all, the automotive industry is a key element in national prosperity. According to the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, the standard vehicle manufacturing automotive ecosystem “drives $1 trillion into the U.S. economy each year—nearly 5 percent of GDP— and creates 9.6 million jobs coast to coast and $105 billion in exports. Every direct job in vehicle manufacturing supports 10.5 additional American jobs. More than $220 billion in federal and state revenue is generated annually by the manufacturing, sale, and maintenance of automobiles in the U.S.” 

Why tinker with the golden goose, the cash cow, or any other theriomorphic image one might wish to use? Why sell one’s birthright for a mess of pottage, which is what the EV industry actually is? Todd Lewis, a commenter on my previous article on PJ Media, put it succinctly. “It is a way for governments to advance totalitarian control of the populace, wreck the economy, and disempower the middle class.” His thesis is backed up in Joel Kotkin’s masterpiece "The Coming of Neo-Feudalism." Kotkin chronicles how the once-numerous and thriving middle class is relentlessly being phased out of existence by a power elite intent on re-medievalizing society while advancing their own social, political, and economic supremacy. Like the serf who lacked freedom of movement and was bound to the lord’s estate, the enfiefed EV owner for various reasons is tethered to a sort of manorial orbit. 

The fact is that EV obsession has nothing to do with “saving the earth,” replacing fossil energy with presumably “clean” alternatives, or reducing across-the-board costs involving transportation and maintenance — all of which reasons are contra-indicated by the facts. They are delusions, mere fetishes, or outright lies that a modicum of sober research would render null and void. The real issue has to do with the ongoing battle between a market economy and a command economy, between a business-oriented system and a centripetal Marxist political organization, and between an individualistic political economy and oligarchic socialism. 

The EV project is a major strategy in a political program that envisages replacing not simply fossil fuel propulsion with electrical power, which is neither feasible nor even conceivable, but swapping a free market economy, in which the law of supply and demand determines output and prices, for a centralized government authority that dictates production, prices, and distribution. Top-down control supersedes private enterprise. 

In a command economy, the managerial class and state officials control the means of production, set prices, determine production goals, and limit or prohibit competition — as opposed to private individuals and joint-stock companies freely transacting business for personal profit or in the interest of stockholders, their decisions based on consumer demand. 

You buy the car you want to drive, not the car the central planners have forced you to drive. You live the life you want to live within the structure of an ordered society governed by the ballot — that is, the unperverted ballot — not the life pre-determined for you by the administrative state. For, as Aristotle writes in Book I of Politics, “that man who would be a citizen in a republic would very often not be one in an oligarchy.”

….

EVs see to it that your power source is limited, your time and expense prohibitively exploited, your safety insecure, and your automotive range severely curtailed. It should be obvious that if your freedom is restricted in one dimension, you can be sure it will be limited in others. 

Valor isn't the only thing these people will steal: our constitutional freedoms are on their “to-grab list” as well

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Mind you, as avowed socialists, they also intend to steal our purses, but that’s just part of the game.

UPDATE: Seth Dillon makes an excellent point

So there I was in the rice paddies, standing shoulder-to shoulder with Dick Blumenthal and Hillary, gooks firing rockets and auto-rifles at us, when ....

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stolen valor

Hell, even CNN — CNN! — can’t let this fraud go unchecked.

‘No Evidence’: CNN Reporter Delivers Devastating Fact-Check On Walz’s Claims About Military Service

“No evidence” meaning, in CNN speak, “the guy’s a flat-out liar”.