Tuesday, January 2, 2024

My 2023 Years-End Rant

Bear with me. We stand at the precipice of another year of global and political chaos, so I pause to reflect. First up: regarding Climate Change. Stop it. Just shut up. I’m mostly talking to you, NPR. You can’t go five minutes without one of your supercilious, self-absorbed, talking heads droning on about “insert-your-adjective-here” climate change. At the rate they’re going, it will require an entire segment just to say it. Existential climate change. Man-made climate change.  Climate change caused by human activity. Climate change linked to the burning of fossil fuels. Severe weather events caused by climate change.  Enough already. Apparently, everything is a result of climate change including my expletive-ridden tirades directed at my radio. As in Alexa, for [expletive deleted] sake tune the station to anything but NPR. Or MSNBC.  Or CNN. Or anybody playing Taylor Swift. But I digress, only after clarifying that Alexa does not, nor ever will, live in my house. If severe weather events are all caused by man-made climate change then someone has to explain to me how the dustbowl occurred in 1930-1936 when the population of the entire country was 130 million, roughly one-third of what it is today with only a fraction of it industrialized or driving automobiles. Or perhaps clue me in on the ice age when man barely existed at all. And I’m talking about both ends of the ice age. It had to get really cold, then it had to get really warm again.  How exactly did that happen without human intervention? And don’t tell me it was Mammoth flatulence. Seeing as man has been around for some 6 million years of the 4.5 billion years that the earth has been in existence, perhaps we are on a cycle with a timetable that we can’t comprehend. Especially considering we have only been recording weather-related data since 1880, a mere 143 years. Does anyone take college courses in statistics anymore? Further, it may be an existential crisis for us, but the earth will be just fine. As comedian George Carlin once remarked when plastic was considered to be the planet’s most existential threat: we will be long gone and it will just be “the earth plus plastic.” Like the dinosaurs before us, perhaps we are just being spit out or shaken off like fleas. And the solutions to all this climate hysteria are equally preposterous. Banning the burning of fossil fuels for example.  Now don’t get me wrong, if humankind were all on the same page and we were all willing to revert back to a stone age lifestyle, then perhaps we could mitigate or slow down whatever it is that is causing the extreme weather events that we are witnessing. Perhaps.  But while the Western world considers banning gas stoves, fossil fuel burning furnaces and internal combustion engines, not to mention demonizing the consumption of meat and dairy products in the name of eliminating cow farts, a large segment of the population of the third world continues to cook over open air wood fires, Brazil torches hectares of rain forest to make way for agriculture and China opens a new coal-fired power plant every week which makes the whole exercise nothing short of ridiculous. The concept of keeping our own backyard squeaky clean at great monetary expense, stifling our industrial and agricultural productivity while allowing the rest of the world to expel greenhouse gases unfettered implies that somehow we aren’t sharing the same planet. Isn’t it a rather hypocritical worldview after years of enduring the “party of science” explaining to us that if a butterfly flaps its wings in the South Pacific it will somehow affect our weather patterns on the East Coast of the United States? What changed? It’s all climate theater. Arctic wobble, atmospheric rivers, bomb cyclones, heat domes, tornadic waterspouts, thundersnow, and El Nino. Hmmm. So mining rare earth minerals in China with little environmental regulation, only to ship them to a manufacturing facility most likely also located somewhere in China also with no environmental regulation, who in turn ships the batteries to Germany to build electric vehicles that no one wants, that are then shipped to America where the batteries will most likely end up in a landfill is supposed to be an example of responsible climate policy? This is why automobile writer Jeremy Clarkson “reserves a special hatred for the Toyota Prius” calling it a “cynical marketing exercise for the gullible and stupid.” Furthermore, if we are in a climate crisis and the Amazon rain forest is indeed the planet’s “lungs” and we are so concerned about its destruction, then why don’t we just buy it? Surely if we can print enough money to send $113 billion to Ukraine to perpetuate a war that is hardly climate-friendly, we can certainly fire up the presses, print some more cash, and buy the whole damn thing. Maybe some other climate gas-bags like King Charles, Bill Gates, Justin Trudeau, and Emmanuel Macron can chip in a few shekels. I would imagine that the Western world can offer more per acre than some poverty-stricken Brazilian farmer burning down trees to clear the land for farming. And most often it will become grazing land for cattle. And that means more flatulence. Sounds like a win-win. But no, that’s not going to happen.  The climate change czars would rather fly around the globe on their Gulfstream G800s, descending on trendy vacation spots like Davos or Dubai to dine on caviar and Wagyu beef so they can lecture the rest of the world on austerity measures to prevent sea level rise before jetting back home to their oceanfront estates. Pffft. John Kerry could probably buy the entire rainforest with the spare change found in his sofa cushions. So perhaps we should just ban the term “climate change” altogether until the entire world is on the same page, suffers austerity in equal measure, and our elected officials and their media lapdogs appear to be taking the issue seriously instead of manipulating a manufactured crisis to make a buck, or spoon feed the donor class with subsidies. Solar panels, wind farms, and EVs. Uh-huh.  Besides, aren’t you dopes all about equity? You are? Then you go first.  

Hold, I'm not finished venting my spleen. Next up: Language. I’m not talking about foreign language or foul language.  I’m talking about the left co-opting language for their convenience, warping definitions, confusing the voting public, or generally putting forth a word salad designed to provide a smoke and mirror-show to hide their true intent, to engage in obfuscation. Saul Alinsky, he of the famous Rules for Radicals playbook, said it best: “He who controls the language, controls the masses. “ Joe Biden may occasionally engage in word salad accidentally because the synapses are just not there anymore, but Kamala Harris does it regularly and she is supposed to be in possession of all her marbles. Either her speechwriters are idiots, or maybe she is, for actually reading that nonsense in public. But perhaps clarity is not the goal.  Confusion, blurring the lines, remaining noncommittal, or presenting a narrative that can be neither agreed upon nor refuted may be the point of the exercise. Whatever happened to “say what you mean and mean what you say?” And there are subdivisions under this language heading related to race, gender, crime, and border security. Let’s start with the border.  Mayorkas: The border is closed.  Harris: The border is closed.  Biden: The border is closed.  Yet it is well documented that in excess of 1.4 million immigrants have entered this country under the Biden Administration.  And they keep coming in waves. Like a tree falling in the forest, just because the mainstream media doesn’t show it, that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. FOX shows it every day and Border Patrol statistics verify what we’re seeing.  The border is wide open and we are being invaded.  And I have to blame this partly on Bill Clinton.  He started all this “depends on what the definition of is is” gobbledygook and we’ve been stumbling over language ever since.  So must we define what open and closed means? This sort of thing used to be called lying. And any sentence that starts with “look”, “let me be clear” or incorporates the term “root cause” is a dead giveaway that they’re engaging in the dissemination of untruths. Ironic in that Trump is generally lambasted in the press, not to mention by Robert DeNiro, for being a serial liar when in fact the Biden Administration has made it an Olympic-level sport.  And while on the subject, the left has co-opted the term “immigrant” to supplant what used to be called an “illegal alien.” Hold on. My grandparents were immigrants.  They filled out the paperwork, they stood in line, they waited their turn and they were processed through Ellis Island. Legally. These foreign invaders are not immigrants. They have broken the law by setting foot on American soil, they have cut the line, shoving their way in front of those who seek to immigrate into the country legally, especially white Europeans. And like everything else in this country, meritocracy has been cast aside in favor of race. We no longer accept immigrants based on skills that they can provide to better the country. They have used the loophole of asylum to gain entry when in fact they are seeking nothing more than monetary gain. Be it government handouts or actually seeking employment, they are in it for socioeconomic reasons only. And I don’t blame them for that, but let’s not sugarcoat the fact that they’re here illegally. They are not vetted, their caravans harbor criminals and possibly terrorists in their midst that seek to do us harm. It is a coordinated attack on our sovereignty, a violation of our borders and it has been perpetrated by this Administration. Just ask the invaders why they’ve come. The universal answer: Joe Biden invited us. Why? remains the biggest question.  Is it to supply workers to take menial jobs, labor that Americans will no longer do? Or more cynically is it an effort to turn traditionally red border states blue and win those close races to keep Democrats in power? As 2024 progresses, it will be interesting to see if the Democrats seek to get a return on their investment and attempt to allow these immigrants to vote.

Let me pause here and allow you to digest this years-end rant of mine and I’ll have at it again tomorrow morning………

No comments:

Post a Comment