Posts Tagged ‘Jordan B. Peterson’

Meet The New Boss, Eh/Same As The Old Boss, Eh

Monday, March 10th, 2025

Up in the 51st state leftwing Canukistan, Justin Trudeau is stepping down after nine long years in power in favor of banker Mark Carney.

Former central banker Mark Carney won the race to become leader of Canada’s ruling Liberal Party and will succeed Justin Trudeau as prime minister, official results showed on Sunday.

Carney will take over at a tumultuous time in Canada, which is in the midst of a trade war with longtime ally the United States under President Donald Trump and must hold a general election soon.

Carney, 59, took 86% of votes cast to beat former Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland in a contest in which just under 152,000 party members voted.

“There’s someone who’s trying to weaken our economy,” Carney said of Trump, spurring loud boos at the party gathering. “He’s attacking Canadian workers, families, and businesses. We can’t let him succeed.”

“This won’t be business as usual,” Carney said. “We will have to do things that we haven’t imagined before, at speeds we didn’t think possible.”

Trudeau announced in January that he would step down after more than nine years in power as his approval rating plummeted, forcing the ruling Liberal Party to run a quick contest to replace him.

“Make no mistake, this is a nation-defining moment. Democracy is not a given. Freedom is not a given. Even Canada is not a given,” Trudeau said.

Carney, a political novice, argued that he was best placed to revive the party and to oversee trade negotiations with Trump, who is threatening additional tariffs that could cripple Canada’s export-dependent economy.

Trudeau has imposed C$30 billion of retaliatory tariffs on the United States in response to tariffs Trump levied on Canada.

“My government will keep our tariffs on until the Americans show us respect,” Carney said.

Yeah, Trump is not exactly known for giving in to demands for “respect.” And given that the United States makes up some 77% of Canada’s world trade, while the Canada only makes up some 13% of America’s $9 trillion in global trade, the power dynamic between the two countries is hardly equal. Canada is much, much more exposed to economic hardship in a trade war than the United States is. I expect Carney’s and Canada’s resolve to work about as long and well as it did in the South Park “Canada on Strike” episode.

Can we expect Carney to undo some of Trudeau’s most heinous policies?

Don’t get your hopes up.

  • Mark Carney: “While America engages in the war on woke, Canadians value inclusiveness.” So Canada’s government will continue the same woke policies that helped drive Trudeau (and Canada) down.
  • Jordan Peterson: “The inevitable Grand Pooba of the currently wretched, but still dangerously powerful, Liberals, one Mark Carney, is one of the world’s prime advocates of the insane inanities of Net Zero.”
  • JP: “He is a man who has planned, in writing, not least in his bestselling book Values, the complete destruction of the fossil fuel industry. Bye-bye Alberta.”
  • JP: “If that’s not bad enough, and it is, he’s also simultaneously an advocate of the same postnational view of Canada defined by Trudeau Jr and his moralistic minions.”
  • JP: “What are we, according to such good thinkers? Nothing. Nothing, but if anything, the oppressive, patriarchal, white-supremacist, identityless, colonial settler state defined by the progressive ideologues in the think tanks and elite dining rooms in eastern Canada.”
  • Dave Rubin: “If you live in western Canada, particularly where oil and natural resources are important, this man is basically trying to destroy your livelihood.”
  • Don’t expect anything to change until Canadian federal elections later this year.

    LinkSwarm For December 13, 2024

    Friday, December 20th, 2024

    Because I had to get out my book catalog last week, I’ve been as busy as Kathleen Kennedy on Ruin Star Wars Day, so this is another two-weeks crammed into one LinkSwarm. It’s just been a packed two weeks, with so many major stories breaking up not going to tease them up here, so let’s jump right in.

  • 21 Soros-linked district attorneys replaced since 2022 by voters seeking ‘tough-on-crime’ policies.”

    A new report has revealed that 21 George Soros-linked district attorneys across the United States have been replaced by “tough-on-crime” prosecutors. The report also noted that four have left office, either through recall efforts or other means.

    Among those listed by the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund were former Portland District Attorney Mike Schmidt, who lost a May election to Democrat challenger Nathan Vasquez, Western Judicial Circuit District Attorney Deborah Gonzalez, who lost her reelection bid to Kalki Yalamanchili, and Kim Foxx, the former Cook County State’s Attorney who in 2023 announced that she would not seek reelection.

    For those who were removed from office, there is Hinds County District Attorney Jody Owens, who in November was indicted on federal bribery charges, and Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price, who was recalled last month after serving just 18 months in office, per The National News Desk.

    Replacements also noted by the report were Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon, who lost to challenger Nathan Hochman in last month’s election, and former Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, who lost the 2022 Democratic primary election to Ivan Bates. Since her election loss, Mosby has been found guilty of one count of mortgage fraud.

    All of them need to go.

  • Speaking of Soros tools: Subway Samaritan Daniel penny found not guilty on all charges. Just like Kyle Rittenhouse, he never should have been charged in the first place. Soros tool Alvin Bragg needs to be impeached and removed from office.
  • Christopher Wray steps down as FBI head. This shouldn’t keep the Trump Administration from prosecuting for his manifest interference in the political process.
  • More Democratic Party fundraising fraud. “ActBlue, the massive online fund-raising platform for liberal causes, has informed Congress it did not automatically block donations made with foreign-bought gift cards until recently.” Almost like the entire party is a giant money laundering scam…
  • Busted. “Georgia Court Removes Fani Willis from Trump Case over Relationship with Special Prosecutor.”

    An appellate court removed Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis (D) from the racketeering case against President-elect Donald Trump over her romantic relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade.

    Georgia’s court of appeals ruled Thursday that Willis will be removed from the case because of the appearance of misconduct surrounding her relationship with Wade, but did not throw out the case all together.

    “While we recognize that an appearance of impropriety is generally not enough to support disqualification, this is the rare case in which disqualification is mandated and no other remedy will suffice to restore public confidence in the integrity of these proceedings,” the three judge panel ruled.

    Left unstated is that her lawfare attack on Trump was both illegal and unconstitutional.

  • Law enforcement arrested and charged a suspect on Monday in connection with the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, which occurred in New York City on Wednesday outside a Manhattan hotel. Luigi Mangione, 26, of Towson, Md., was stopped by auth0rities in Altoona, Pa., on Monday. The detained suspect had a handwritten manifesto that criticized the health care industry.
  • Biden’s Department of Education spent $1 billion to infect schools with DEI, because of course they did.
  • He also handed Iran access to $10 billion, because promoting terrorism, plotting to destroy Israel, and trying to build nuclear weapons are activities that Democrats seem eager to reward.
  • Winning. “ABC News and anchor George Stephanopoulos have reached a settlement in a defamation suit brought by President-elect Donald Trump, which requires the network to apologize, contribute $15 million to a ‘Presidential foundation and museum to be established by or for Plaintiff,’ and pay Trump’s legal team $1 million.”
  • Believe it or not, that wasn’t the biggest settlement ABC owner Disney agreed to pay out this month. They also agreed to pay $233 million to settle a minimum wage lawsuit.
  • How DeSantis and Abbott bussing illegal aliens to blue sanctuary cities changed the game.

    As Saul Alinsky once said, make your enemies live up to their words.

  • Let the Democratic Party Civil War commence.

    The battle lines are now drawn between West Coast liberals, Bernie Sanders-socialists and moderate technocrats in the Midwest, who insist the party has completely lost touch with the average American voter.

    But first, there is one thing that all sides seemingly agree on: The current political establishment must be chased out of national politics for good. A reckoning is coming.

    ‘The people that are responsible for this s**tshow are the Obama people. They’re just grifters,’ a well-connected Democratic donor exclusively told Daily Mail. He singled out Jen O’Malley Dillon, who went from Biden 2024 campaign chair to serve in the same role for Harris’s camp, and David Plouffe, an ex-Obama 2008 campaign manager turned top Kamala adviser.

  • “Trump sues Des Moines Register, pollster for ‘brazen election interference’ over faulty polling in presidential race.” I think it’s very unlikely that Trump will win this lawsuit, thanks to First Amendment protections and the “absence of malice standard.” Plus pollster Ann Selzer can always just claim “I just sucked at my job.” She retired after the election.
  • After Assad fell, Israel pounded the snot out of his remaining military assets.

    Israel pounded Syrian army bases on Tuesday in strikes it says aim to keep weapons from falling into hostile hands, but denied its forces had advanced into Syria, toward Damascus, beyond a buffer zone at the border.

    Regional security sources and officers within the now-fallen Syrian army who spoke to Reuters described Tuesday morning’s airstrikes as the heaviest yet, hitting military installations and airbases across Syria, destroying dozens of helicopters and jets, as well as Republican Guard assets in and around Damascus.

    The rough tally of 200 raids overnight had left nothing of the Syrian army’s assets, said the sources.

    The Israeli Air Force has carried out over 300 airstrikes in Syria since the collapse of the regime, destroying advanced weapons and other capabilities.

    Strikes reportedly carried out by Israel in Damascus’s Barzeh area completely destroyed a defense ministry research center, AFP correspondents reported on Tuesday. Western countries including the United States struck the facility in 2018, saying it was related to Syria’s “chemical weapons infrastructure.”

    Plus they sunk the entire Syrian navy.

  • Speaking of pounding the snot out of things:

  • Videos of Russia buggering out of Syria.
  • Ukraine hit a solid rocket propellant plant in Russia.
  • “Palantir CEO Alex Karp Eviscerates Democrats: Voters ‘Do Not Want To Hear Your Woke Pagan Ideology.'”

    Alex Karp, the co-founder and CEO of Palantir, said late last week that Democrats lost the 2024 election because they did not understand the fundamental human desire to feel safe.

    Karp made the remarks during a panel discussion at the Reagan National Defense Forum while talking about what Americans expect out of the U.S. government.

    “Americans are the most loving, God-fearing, fair, least discriminatory people on the planet,” he said. “They want to know that if you’re waking up and thinking about harming American citizens, or if American citizens are taken hostage and kept in dungeons, or if you’re a foreign power sending fentanyl to poison our people, something really bad is going to happen to you and your friends and your cousins, and your bank account and your mistress, and whoever was involved.”

    He continued, “When Americans are spending a trillion dollars on ‘defense,’ what I want and what I think my peers want is: why are these people keeping our citizens as hostages, torturing our people, attacking our allies, maligning us in what was once called the United Nations — basically a discriminatory institution against anything good? We need to stand up and those people need to be scared.”

    He said that it was critical for the U.S. to dominate because “we have the best products in the world, and we can not have parity.”

    “Our adversaries do not have our moral compunction,” he said. “If it is even, they will take advantage of our niceness, our kindness, our desire to be at home in Nebraska and New Hampshire or wherever we live, in our peaceful environments.”

    “They need to wake up scared, and go to bed scared, and if you give that to the American people, the American people will go back and say — and honestly, I probably shouldn’t say this, this is why I thought the Democrats were going to lose the election, and why they did, because people want to live in peace,” he continued. “They want to go home. They do not want to hear your woke pagan ideology. They want to know they’re safe. And safe means the other person is scared. That’s how you make someone safe.”

  • Democrats are now, finally, pissed at Obama. “There are people there are people who are now multi-millionaires as a result of the Harris campaign, and we know exactly who they are. And I just want to say that half a billion dollars in advertising went to just four well-heeled Democratic firms. This whole thing is deeply incestuous.”
  • China cracks down on economists telling the truth about how much their economy sucks rather than parroting Beijing’s approved lies.
  • “Ozy Media Founder Carlos Watson Sentenced To Hefty Prison Term For Defrauding Investors. [He] was sentenced to 116 months, or nearly ten years, in prison for conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and aggravated identity theft in an unusual case that briefly captivated the media world.”
  • Crystal Mangum admits to fabricating 2006 Duke lacrosse scandal accusations.” And by “scandal” they mean “false accusations of rape.” So when can we expect apologies from Nancy Grace and Amanda Marcotte? (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • “Biden’s EPA just made the first-ever “climate change” related arrest.”
  • More of that voting fraud Democrats swear doesn’t exist. “2020 Carrollton Mayoral Candidate Admits to Mail Ballot Fraud. Zul Mohamed pleaded guilty Monday to 109 voter fraud felonies.”
  • “After Donald Trump flipped his county for the first time in a century, longtime Democratic Webb County Judge Tano Tijerina has announced he is switching parties to the Republicans saying that “the [Democratic] party left me, and the people of South Texas behind.”
  • Three soldiers arrested for smuggling illegal aliens into the country.

    Three U.S. Army soldiers have been arrested in Texas on criminal charges relating to smuggling illegal aliens.

    The three soldiers were based at Fort Cavazos, which is near Killeen in Central Texas.

    Fort Cavazos is The Fort Formerly Known As Fort Hood. I might have been a little more worked up over the name change if Hood hadn’t been such a shitty general.

    U.S. Border Patrol agents made an initial traffic stop of a suspicious vehicle in the city of Presidio, located in West Texas on the Rio Grande. As an agent approached the vehicle’s passenger side, the driver sped away—hitting a second Border Patrol vehicle and injuring the agent inside.

    The vehicle was eventually stopped by local law enforcement officers who detained four individuals in the car. Three were illegal aliens, and one was identified as U.S. Army soldier Emilio Mendoza Lopez.

    The driver of the vehicle was reported as being another soldier named Angel Palma, who fled on foot from the vehicle but was located in Odessa a day later.

    Presidio is nearly 500 miles away from where the soldiers were stationed.

    “Mendoza Lopez and Palma allegedly traveled from Fort Cavazos to Presidio for the purpose of picking up and transporting undocumented noncitizens,” announced the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas. “A third individual, Enrique Jauregui, is alleged to be the recruiter and facilitator of the human smuggling conspiracy.”

  • Tren De Aragua Gun Runner Released by Biden Admin Charged in Texas Capital Murder.” Democrats sure love murderous gang members… (Hat tip: Issues and Insights.)
  • Laredo Educator Arrested for Production of Child Pornography. Carlos Jobany Castaneda Lechuga was a lecturer at Texas A&M International University, but has since been removed from the staff directory.”
  • Three More Texas Teachers Nabbed for Child Porn.”

    Three Texas teachers made news last week over charges of child pornography—also known as child sexual abuse material, as the images and videos depict sex crimes being committed against minors.

    The educators worked in Dallas, Leander, and Wall Independent School Districts. Two of the three taught band.

    On December 13, Dallas Police arrested Sean Turner, 34, and charged him with possession of pornography featuring a child younger than 10 years old—a first-degree felony.

    Snip.

    Retired principal Curtis John Locklear was arrested December 12 and charged with felony possession of child porn.

    Locklear was arrested by the Montgomery County Precinct 3 Constable’s Office working with the Houston-area Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task force.

    Snip.

    Also on December 12, a federal judge sentenced Joshua Carroll to 30 years in prison for possessing and producing child porn.

    Carroll was an assistant band director in Wall ISD from January 2022 until his crimes were discovered earlier this year.

  • Texas Republican Congressman Dan Crenshaw got dinged by the Internet for insider trading. So then Crenshaw attacked the Internet. It didn’t go well for him.
  • Phllly man awarded $41 million for overturned murder conviction is back in jail for murder.
  • AOC loses an election to be the ranking member of the Oversight and Accountability Committee to 74-year-old Gerry Connolly. “Connolly is undergoing chemotherapy and immunotherapy for esophagus cancer.”
  • In addition to being a brutal dictator, Bashar Assad was also a drug pusher.
  • Google unveils a newer, more powerful quantum chip.

    Google on Monday introduced a new chip called Willow, which solved in five minutes a computing problem that would take a classical computer more time than the history of the universe.

    Tech companies are chasing quantum computing in hopes of developing systems that perform at speeds far faster than traditional silicon-based computers.
    The building blocks of quantum computers, called “qubits”, while being fast, are error-prone, making it hard to ensure quantum computers are reliable and commercially viable.

    The more qubits used in quantum computing, the more errors typically occur. But Google said on Monday it found a way to string together qubits in the Willow chip so that error rates decline as the number of qubits rise, adding that it can also correct errors in real time.

    My understanding of how quantum computers work is limited to popular explanations, but D-Wave is evidently still in business, so maybe they work?

  • It’s been a long time since I found Louis Black funny, but this rant on the Democrats post-election reactions is pretty good.
  • MSNBC viewers haven’t returned.

  • City in Florida tries to fine man over $1 million for 10 year old code violation fines against the previous owner for a home the new owner bought on foreclosure.
  • Company YesMadam surveys employees to see how stressed they feel…then lays off employees feeling stressed. Then reveals the whole thing was a publicity stunt.

  • Assad had a really shitty survival bunker. Plus a garage of luxury cars.
  • Jordan Peterson Flees “Totalitarian Hellhole” Canada For U.S. Due To Censorship, Taxes.” Welcome to the land of the free and the home of the brave.
  • How Now, Woke Longhorn? An Open Letter to University of Texas President Jay Hartzell.”
  • “Trump announces $100 BILLION investment to create 100,000 US jobs from Japanese company Softbank.”
  • Add Big Lots to the list of retail chains that died thanks to the Biden Recession. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Broadcom hit $1 trillion in market cap this week.
  • Jaguar is going all in on woke thanks to new CEO Adrian Mardell, and the infection is spreading to fellow Tata subsidiary Land Rover.
  • First reaction to Mufasa: The Lion King: “Profoundly awful.”
  • The trailer for James Gunn’s Superman dropped. I’ve never seen a Superman film in theaters, and this will not be getting me in. But you’ve got to give Gunn credit for thinking way outside the box and including Krypto the Superdog and Hawkman, two characters that absolutely no one in the greater viewing public was clamoring for.

  • Don McMillan has cracked the Hallmark Christmas movie code.
  • Heh:

  • “Now Now, Let’s Not Be So Hasty To Find And Assassinate Everyone Responsible For The Healthcare Crisis,’ Says Nervous Obama.”
  • “Assassin Luigi Mangione Takes Lead In 2028 Democratic Primary Polls.”
  • “Members Of Congress Explain They Need Pay Raises To Keep Up With The Inflation They Caused.”
  • “Biden Calls For New Gun Laws He Can Pardon His Son For Breaking.”
  • “Running Low On Ideas, God Makes Oklahoma.”
  • “Unclear If Pianist Total Beginner Or Professional Jazz Player.”
  • In you go:

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Observing 2024 Victims Of Communism Day

    Wednesday, May 1st, 2024

    Today is May 1st, which means that once again it’s time to observe Victims of Communism Day, remembering that a false, brutal ideology killed over 100 million people.

    VictimsofCommunismDay

    Last year I featured a Jordan Peterson video on the crimes of communism. This year, here’s a different Jordan B. Peterson video on the crimes of communism. This one takes a couple of minutes before he gets to the question.

    Quick pull quote: “Here’s a fun story: Do you know that it is now illegal for physicians to list starvation as the cause of death for a Venezuelan child in a hospital?”

    Here’s a list of memorials to the victims of communism.

    More information on the Holodomor can be found in Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. Conquest estimated that for the entire Collectivization/”De-Kulakization”/Holodomor period (including the Soviet suppression of the Kazakhs and the Crimean Tartars, etc.) some 14.5 million died due to the actions of the Soviet government.

    I know that November 7 is also designated as Victims of Communism Day, but the crimes of communism are so vast that there’s no reason we can’t observe Victims of Communism Day twice a year.

    What Changed Jordan Petersen’s Mind

    Sunday, January 14th, 2024

    Here’s a short, interesting interview segment of Jordan Peterson with Dave Ramsey talking about why he stopped being a socialist, and how conservatives have trouble articulating their principles.

  • “I was very young, when I was 16, 13 to 16, I worked with a Socialist Party in the province of Alberta, which is where I grew up. I was fortunate enough to know the leader of the Socialist Party in in my home province of Alberta, who was the only opposition member of parliament in the whole province. It was like 36 conservatives and one socialist, and the only reason the people in my home district voted for this man was because he was a good man. He was a labor leader, and most of the socialists at that time in Canada were former labor leaders, and they did stand at least in part for the genuine interests of the working class.

  • “I worked with them for a few years, and I got disenchanted, in part, because when I went to the conventions of the party, I met the radical types, and they were the same as they are now. I thought ‘What the hell’s up with you people? You’re just bitter and resentful.'”
  • “You claim to be caring for the poor but that’s just a lie. You’re just bitter and resentful.”
  • “So that set up cognitive dissonance in my imagination. I thought, well, if this end of the political distribution has the moral upper hand why the hell is it producing all these resentful activists?”
  • I served on the Board of Governors of this little college that I went to, Grand Prairie Regional College. And all of the people who were on the board were people, I presume, people like you. They were all owners of small businesses, and they’d been successful. And the towns that I grew up in in Northern Alberta were, like, 50 years old. You know, they’d just been scraped out of the prairie. It was the last of the frontier. And everyone there was an immigrant, so most of the people who had started these small businessmen were immigrants who came there with nothing and built something. And even though I didn’t share their political views, I found them individually admirable. And I also found that the same applied to the small businessman that I worked for at that point. I thought “Well, you’ve actually done something with life.” And there’s a solidity there, a productive solidity exactly. And so it was at that point that I realized I didn’t know anything, and just stopped working on the political front.

  • “I realized that it was the people who had built productively that had the moral upper hand. They might not have been very good at expressing their ethos, intellectually or explicitly, but in terms of their character, they had they had established a victory.”
  • “I think this is actually the problem on the conservative front broadly across the world. They’re people of solid character, but they’re not good at articulating the foundations of their ethos, and then when the radical leftists come along and take them apart ethically, they don’t know what to do.”
  • “Someone comes up to you on the street and says ‘Justify marriage!’ and you think, well, I thought we sorted that out like 25,000 years ago. You don’t know what to say, you have no idea how to justify marriage.”
  • Discussion of Christmas tree symbolism (light of Christ in the darkest time of the year) snipped.
  • “When you’re married, you’re acting out a very deep ethos as well, and you don’t know what it is, but everyone’s agreed on it. And a lot of your conservative virtues are things that everybody’s already agreed on. And so when an intellectual comes along and says justify that, you don’t know what the hell to say, and then you can be picked apart.”
  • Same thing for the profit motive. “If you’re generating profit, it’s obviously the case that that can be used by you for narrow personal reasons, right? You can buy a you can buy a yacht and fill it with supermodels and cocaine if you want. But people don’t.”
  • “We’re in a situation where you probably do have to learn to articulate it. Because what’s happening is that that central ethos, that traditional ethos, even voluntary exchange, it’s under such vicious attack that if you don’t learn to defend it and articulate it, it’s going to be taken from you.”
  • “The problem is, you probably have something better to do. But it is doesn’t matter, because at the moment if you abdicate that responsibility, then the radicals are going to take it.” As they did in education.
  • Food for thought…

    Bill Maher Interviews Jordan Peterson

    Wednesday, July 26th, 2023

    Bill Maher is a liberal Democrat who has been increasingly red-pilled following the Flu Manchu lockdowns and his party’s increasing embrace of censorship. So when I saw that he had Jordan Peterson, a veritable walking red-pill dispensing machine, on his interview show Club Random, that definitely piqued my interest.

    I’ve only watched a small fraction thus far, but it looks like it’s going to be another busy day, so here it is.

    BM: I read a quote from Justin Trudeau that was so dumb—
    JP: Which one?

    The Democratic Media Complex Really Hates Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

    Monday, June 26th, 2023

    I was going to do a post rounding up the sudden spat of absolutely unhinged attacks on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has had the unmitigated gall to actually primary Slow Joe Biden. Only to find out that Tucker Carlson had already done it for me.

    Some takeaways:

  • There’s never been a candidate for president the media hated more than Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. You thought that title belonged to Donald Trump. Of course it must! But go check the coverage. Trump got a gentle scalp massage by comparison when he announced. When Trump rolled out his presidential campaign in 2015, the New York Times waited until the 17th paragraph of the story to attack him. “But as well known as he is,” the paper said at the time, “Trump is also widely disliked.” Then they cited a poll to back it up. That was the attack on Trump. Eight years later, the Times attacked Bobby Kennedy in the very first sentence of the story. Quote, “Robert F Kennedy, Jr.” the paper declared, “announced a presidential campaign on Wednesday built on relitigating covid-19 shutdowns and shaking Americans faith in science.”

  • “You’d think Bobby Kennedy just declared war on the enlightenment!”
  • “NPR devoted an entire segment to savaging Kennedy, not just as a candidate, but as a human being. NPR described him as someone who, for his own perverse reasons, has made, quote, debunked and false and misleading claims that undermine trust in vaccines, and who in his spare time provides moral support to crazed extremists.”
  • People magazine didn’t even bother to report a single word of anything Kennedy said at his announcement, and instead wrote an entire story about how his relatives hate him.” Having the entire Kennedy clan hate him would only increase my (admittedly low) estimation of him.
  • When did the Democratic Media Complex start hating him? July of 2005. “That’s the moment that Kennedy published a magazine article suggesting there might be a link between the rise in diagnosed autism cases and the ever-expending schedule of mandatory childhood vaccines.”
  • “The Pharma Lobby rolled out the most ferocious public relations campaign in memory and both [Rolling Stone and Salon] swiftly caved. Both pulled the story, and then disavowed it groveling as they did.” Both of those outlets were already on shaky ground, though neither was as bad as they become later.
  • No one in the national media bothered to explain why autism diagnoses had skyrocketed. If it wasn’t the vaccines, and maybe it wasn’t, then what was it? To this day there has not been a convincing explanation. Instead, reporters just attacked Bobby Kennedy. They’ve called him a lunatic and a Nazi. Instagram shut down his account YouTube just last week pulled down a perfectly reasonable interview he did with Jordan Peterson.

  • Speaking of which, here RFK Jr. explains to Jordan Petersen how he thinks ObamaCare got the Democratic Party in bed with Big Pharma.

    I’ve omitted a lot of Carlson providing example after example of various Democratic Media Complex personalities viciously attacking Kennedy.

    I’m no fan of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. His a lefty scumbag on many (perhaps most) issues, has more than a whiff of fringe lunacy about him, and (through no fault of his own) I find him hard to listen to, due to his spasmodic dysphonia. (Though obviously he’s much more coherent and articulate than Biden. As is the average third-grader.) And I think he’s more wrong than right on the vaccine-autism link.

    Still, the degree to which the Democratic Media Complex has thrown away even the merest pretense of dispassion about him due to his threat to either a Biden second term or the wishes of Big Pharma (to the extent those two can be disentangled) makes me more inclined to listen to him, and more readily defend his right to speak in the public space. The DNC seems hellbent on presenting any fair challenge to Biden in the Democratic primary, which makes me very curious about just what they’re so scared of…

    Observing 2023 Victims of Communism Day

    Monday, May 1st, 2023

    Today is May 1st, which means that once again it’s time to observe Victims of Communism Day, remembering that a false, brutal ideology killed over 100 million people.

    VictimsofCommunismDay

    Here’s Jordan Peterson on the crimes of communism:

    If you want a candidate for the sin against the holy ghost in the 21st century, the statement “communism, real communism, was never tried” with the underlying idea that if you had been the person implementing it, it would have worked, I think that’s a pretty good contender for something for which you should never be forgiven.

    Here’s a list of memorials to the victims of communism.

    More information on the Holodomor can be found in Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. Conquest estimated that for the entire Collectivization/”De-Kulakization”/Holodomor period (including the Soviet suppression of the Kazakhs and the Crimean Tartars, etc.) some 14.5 million died due to the actions of the Soviet government.

    I know that November 7 is also designated as Victims of Communism Day, but the crimes of communism are so vast that there’s no reason we can’t observe Victims of Communism Day twice a year.

    Jordan Peterson on Joe Rogan: 2023 Edition

    Monday, January 30th, 2023

    Jordan Peterson always makes a great Joe Rogan guest, and the new interview they did last week is no exception.

    Discussing the Twitter files, Critical Race Theory and Marxism, victimhood identity politics, postmodern theory, and falseness of reducing everything to power dynamics.

    On the World Economic Forum:

  • “Globalist Utopian Tyranny” is a great phrase.
  • They follow in the wake of “Paul Ehrlich, in the 1960s, who really believe, really believe, truly, that maybe the planet should only have 500 million people on it.”
  • There then follows a devastating take-down of the immortality of pushing 350 million of the world’s poorest to the brink of death through higher energy prices in the hope that maybe 100 years from now life for the poor will be better. I encourage you to watch the entirety of this segment for that.
  • “It’s a little bit too convenient for me that your prescriptions to save the planet are accompanied by this insistence that the only way forward to that is to give you all the power. It’s like there’s a bit of a moral hazard in, that don’t you think?”
  • “Do you want to save the planet, or do you want the power? And let’s let’s put the second one first, because the probability that you’re a saint or the messiah is pretty damn low. So that’s the danger of the Davos crowd.”
  • I suspect I’ll be putting up more snippets from this interview sometime this week…

    LinkSwarm for January 6, 2023

    Friday, January 6th, 2023

    Greetings, and welcome to the Friday LinkSwarm! By the time you read this, Kevin McCarthy will have lost more elections than Pat Paulsen.

  • Stop me if you’ve heard this before: “More U-Haul Trucks Left California Than Any Other State In 2022, Texas Top Destination.”

    More moving trucks left from California than any other state in 2022 for the third year in a row, while more Americans are flocking to Republican-led states like Texas and Florida, a new study published on Jan. 3 has found.

    The study was conducted by the moving truck rental company, U-Haul, and found that Texas, Florida, and the Carolinas were the preferred destinations for one-way moving trucks in 2022, with those states ranking as the top growth states on the annual U-Haul Growth Index.

    U-Haul’s Growth Index is compiled according to the net gain of one-way U-Haul trucks arriving in a state or city, versus those departing from that state or city each calendar year across the U.S. and Canada and is a strong indicator of what kind of job states and cities are attracting and maintaining residents, according to the company.

    Texas is the top destination for U-Haul trucks for the second consecutive year and the fifth time since 2016, according to the study. That is followed by Florida, which has been a top-three growth state for seven years in a row. South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Arizona, Georgia, Ohio, and Idaho also saw strong growth rates in 2022, the study found.

    I think I’ve posted a variation on this story just about every year I’ve published this blog…

  • Speaking of people fleeing high taxes, New York is hemorrhaging taxpayers as well.

    From July 2021 to July 2022, 300,000 more people moved out of the state than moved in. New York had the largest population loss—in both percentage and absolute terms—experienced by any state during that period.

    Sadly, this was both predictable and preventable.

    In March 2021, a study of New York found that its already staggeringly high tax burden had worsened due to an increase in the top marginal tax rate to almost 15% for those in New York City. The study projected that the flood of people leaving would only accelerate—and it did.

    Even before that study, the Empire State lost so many people that it cost New York a seat in Congress after the 2020 census. This exodus is a direct response to New York’s obscenely high taxes.

    Just how bad is it? Compared with other states, New Yorkers:

    • Pay the highest total tax burden and highest share of personal income (14%) in taxes.
    • Endure the second-worst overall business-tax climate.
    • Face the highest individual income-tax rate and income-tax collections per capita.
    • Pay the second-highest state and local corporate income tax collections per capita.
    • Have the fourth-highest property taxes and local sales-tax rate (on average).
    • Pay the highest cigarette taxes and ninth-highest gasoline taxes.
    • Pay the sixth-highest capital-stock tax rate.
    • Are tied for third-highest estate-tax rate.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Speaking of California: “California Officially Becomes a Sanctuary State for Child Mutilation.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Things that make you go “Hmmm“: “Virgin Islands AG Fired Three Days After Suing JPMorgan Over Jeffrey Epstein.”
  • Three Biden tax hikes that took place January 1. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Remember how I’ve noted that semiconductor memory manufacturers make money hand-over-fist in boom times and barely break even during busts? “Samsung Profits Plunge 69% As Global Chip Demand In ‘Full-Fledged Ice Age.'”
    

  • Turnabout is fair play: “U. Houston Prof Tells Students to Report Teachers Berating ‘White People or Christians to DEI Office.'”
  • Denver Mayor Michael Hancock takes pride in virtue signaling his city as a refuge for illegal aliens. Guess what?
  • Former Pope Benedict XVI dies at age 95.
  • Thanks to green energy policies and the Russo-Ukrainian War, it’s now too expensive to break bread in Europe. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • U.S. passes Qatar as world’s largest LNG exporter.
  • “How is it like being homeless in Portland?” “It’s a piece of cake really.”
  •  Jordan B. Peterson: “People camouflage themselves against the herd.”
  • This story should piss you off. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Drone swarm vs. carrier group simulation.
  • Ouch!
  • Some pretty amazing skiing.
  • Cereal experiments lame.
  • Jordan Peterson Wants You To Wake Up

    Tuesday, February 22nd, 2022

    The idea of a Jordan B. Peterson music video sounds like an idea that might be wall-to-wall cringe. But this is actually a pretty effective ditty that combines early Kate Bush with The Wall-era Pink Floyd.

    “Wake Up: Dedicated, under the current unfortunate conditions, to the Prime Minister of Canada, the Right Honorable Justin Trudeau. “