Isn’t It Funny?

Isn’t it funny that socialists always insist that they are doing whatever it is they are doing for the benefit of the poor. Yet in case after case it is the poor that ultimately suffer the most under socialist leadership?

Pick a country, any country… Venezuela is a good recent example. They are practically starving to death and they spend most of their day trying to find food.

And to think of it Obama praised the genius behind the decline, Hugo Chavez, “Mi amigo…” And, of course, Bernie Sanders loves what Venezuela’s recent leadership has done with the place.

Myron Magnet Speaks the Truth

Myron Magnet is one of my favorite writers. He can often be read at the indispensable City Journal.

I can’t do any better than this takeaway from the recent election, “Donald Trump and the Rejection of Progressivism.” It begins with this and gets better: “One message to take away from Donald Trump’s presidential victory: Americans don’t want to be ruled.”

Go read and enjoy. This week the future of this country suddenly became much brighter.

The Heart of Darkness… er… Socialism

“You didn’t build that,” one of King Barry’s chestnuts, is a pure distillation of socialism.

It eliminates the possibility of property ownership or enjoying the fruit of one’s labors thus mitigating one’s control of one’s self and one’s place in the world. Such a mentality is designed to render all to the control of the state.

I noted this in “We’re All Renters Now.” People like Obama, the Democratic Party, liberals, bureaucrats, etc., believe in the state’s primacy, the citizens are mere temporary occupants — they too shall pass but the state shall ever be.

They do not accept the organic generation of a democracy and a society — that a civilization is the sum of its people. The analogy is that the organic view sees civilization as a mountain and its citizens are the rocks, dirt and trees; therefore the mountain has no existence without the rocks (including the bedrock), dirt and trees. It is what they are.

The liberal views the civilization as the color and surface of a ball; a mere superficiality. The ball is the state and the citizens are the air making up that ball. They can come and go, make the ball inflate or deflate but, ultimately, they are transient. The ball can always be refilled with new citizens.

And, importantly, to the liberal, the air serves the ball. Don’t forget that. Obama and his ilk think that way.

They also view themselves as the ball.

Socialism Is Like Honeysuckle

The thought for the day.

Socialism is like honeysuckle — it smells sweet but will ultimately consume and strangle everything it touches.

Don’t be deceived, root it out before it takes you over.

Change=Socialism

I was amused hearing Hillary Clinton castigate Donald Trump because he wants to “Make America great again.” According to her he was implying that it is no longer great. She (and Michelle Obama, the newly crowned Pericles, taking the crown from her husband) insists that America is great right now.

Yet, coming out of the other side of Hillary’s mouth was a series of promises of “change” for America. So, Hill, if it’s so great why the desperate need for “change”? Or is this just a buzzword that polls well with our idiot Millennials (and Gen Xers)?

It’s acknowledged that the “change” pitch is aimed at Sanders’ socialist lumpenproletariat, which of course means that Hillary is actually covertly peddling socialism (as Obama did in his 2008 campaign). She’ll make great use, as Obama did in 2008 with “race,” of masking that with the “Making History” cloak enabled by their practice of identity politics.

I’m also amused about her running a campaign on “competence” and “foreign policy successes.” Like “honesty” and “trust,” those are two terms that one can’t seriously associate Hillary Clinton with. Yet one characteristic of the modern liberal is the belief that one simply has to assert something for it to be true. Its actually truth is immaterial in comparison to the assertion.

We’ve already suffered nearly two terms of one such president.

Starbucks Socialists

An amusing thing is to watch young Bernie sanders supporters and other socialists hanging around Starbucks or Whole Foods or some boutique market or hipster restaurant. After the running down of everything Republican, conservative, American, they’ll sometimes launch into their favorite new iced coffee, wine , cheese, veggie from some organic farmer, expensive item imported from a far off land, obscure movie from an obscure filmmaker, etc.

The thing that’s really amusing is that they think such things would exist under the very socialist system that they and Sanders advocate.

They actually think that that all those boutique restaurants, coffee importers, organic farmers and food providers filling the bins and shelves at Whole Foods or the local co-op would continue to exist in a socialist system. They don’t understand that it’s the hated capitalist and free market system that produces all these goodies.

Imagine these little socialists get their way. Do they really think that an organic farmer is going to go to the trouble to work hard when the only price that Bernie’s Dept. Of Agriculture, Agency of Organic Products, Vegetables Division, Leafy Greens Office, Region 1 Inspectorate will let him charge will be the lowest price? Do they really think that a cheese artisan will work his behind off to create a special Gouda when all he’ll get for it is a money-losing price determined by a bureaucrat eager to keep cheese prices low and inflexible? What baker will make the extra effort on a birthday cake when she can’t get the special flour, chocolate or powdered sugar needed for the cake — and she can’t charge extra for it either? Everyone can have the same cake stamped out of the cake factory — assuming they’re being delivered this week.Say goodbye to a capitalist indulgence like the Cheesecake Factory.

Why would a couple work hard to make their bed and breakfast the star of the region when they are commanded to keep the rates low and they receive a warning about making their place too nice because, contrary to good socialist fashion, they are standing out from the crowd? Can’t charge more than Motel 6!

My point is that young socialists (and some old ones too) are fascinated with expensive, boutique and exclusive items (no Campbell’s soup for us!) that the “masses” either don’t want, can’t afford or can live without. They live on the hippest cheese, wine, coffee, trinket, etc. “Orange Is the New Black” wouldn’t come from the TV series factory run by a government.

Socialism didn’t come up with your iPhone! And Apple would disappear if it had to price things in a socialist manner. Whaddya think about that, commie kids?

True socialist countries are famous for their bare-shelved stores, lack of choices and lack of products. Look at the old Soviet Union, Communist China in its heyday, Cuba for the last 50 years and, even now, Venezuela. Why do these youngster think a socialist U.S. would be any different?

We’ve learned this lesson before but the kids don’t know it and with their contempt for the past, don’t want to learn it. (They think the past can teach them nothing except what not to do.)

We’ve already heard Bernie complain that there are too many choices of deodorant available. Just think about what that really means.

How ’Bout That Utopia!

I was a little tied up with finalizing my book last week so I didn’t get this up but it can’t be said much better than this, “Garry Kasparov: Hey, Bernie, Don’t Lecture Me About Socialism. I Lived Through It.” Kasparov exposes Bernie Sanders for the dimwit that he is. Must read.

Must Reads From Flynn & O’Sullivan

Sounds like a law firm but it isn’t. Here’s a pair of recommended reads — one from the smartest man alive as far as I’m concerned, John O’Sullivan. The other is a nice piece on the hollowness and failure of socialism in the United States from Daniel J. Flynn. Don’t worry, it’s not an academic piece. Quite digestible.

As is typical of O’Sullivan, “Trump and the Rise of the Undocumented Republicans,” is a measured, thoughtful piece. It’s a good contrast to the hysterics that are tending to fulminate these days when it comes to analyzing the Donald Trump phenomenon (both pro and con).

Flynn’s “Socialism, the Nightmare That Never Dies,” is a quick tour of socialist politics in the U.S. — a history that never seems to get told by our educational establishment, MSM or Hollywood (which inexplicably idolizes socialism). Bonus money quote: “Capitalism works for men who do. Socialism works for men who don’’t.”

Class Warfare’s Enduring Charm

The always interesting Joel Kotkin has a good piece at the Daily Beast — “We Now Join the U.S. Class War Already in Progress.”

It never ceases to maze me that after nearly a century of unending failure and broken promises, leftism/socialism still gathers masses of supporters. Socialists didn’t invent class warfare but, when socialism is boiled down to its constituent motivation, that seems to be all it offers.

The Glorious Future of the Apple Minternets

Here’s a little note that came out just ahead of Apple’s WorldWide Developer Conference (WWDC) this week: Apple is thinking about building out its own content delivery network.

In English that means that the consumer products manufacturer so beloved by liberals is planning its own branch of the Internet to guarantee that its audio and video streams get to the consumer in decent shape.

Rewind to last year — when so-called “Net Neutrality” was all the rage on the left — the idea that a company could pay the titans of the Internet a little extra to make sure that their digital audio and video streams arrived to consumers in one piece was considered the height classism. The peak of snobbery. A brutal drubbing of the wretched poor’s noses in the digital dirt.

It was apparently a shocking idea, that some people might pay more for better service. Whoah! What kind of crazy talk was that? Pay more for better service? Not in our wonderful Socialist future! Everybody pays the same (except those that don’t pay anything or those living on subsidies) for the same – from a granny only wanting to check her grandchildren’s Facebook pages once a day to a hardcore multiplayer online gamer to a vast corporate with workers in a hundred different places. There will be no differences allowed!

Net Neutrality Forever! crowed one Barack H. Obama, Democrats far and wide along with a phalanx of “consumer” groups such as Public Knowledge, Free Press, etc. Everyone must have the same Internet packet speed because lack of high-speed broadband, with every packet of data delivered in the same way, was the only thing keeping the less fortunate down. If they had access to broadband Internet then they’d get college degrees, start businesses, cure cancer and vault into the lucrative high-tech future, they sang.

Of course so many of these technocratic experts had no idea what they were talking about (and the ones that did were snowing the gullible). I’ll let you in on a little secret. There already is a data packet hierarchy. It’s been around pretty much since the modern Internet began. It’s about the only way it can function without clogging.

For instance, your email packets aren’t high priority so they can wander around the Internet, be reassembled and you don’t notice the fragmentary seconds in delay. But if your video or audio packets did the same, you’d end up with chatter, hitches and lock-ups. In fact, it’s because some packets are more equal than others that your Verizon FiOS, AT&T Xfinity, et al, flow so smoothly. For your beautiful hi-def cable TV, it’s Net Neutrality-Shmet Neutrality under the hood.

But for the eternal envious grasping of the Free Stuff crowd, such things must not be allowed! They think that they’ll be able to force the big telcos/cable companies, the main builders of the fiber optic infrastructure, to cut prices and still keep building out expensive infrastructure. And that they’ll be able to control the final consumer price structure as well. It’s all about control and making other people pay for things that you deliver to your supporters (often in the name of ‘fairness’). These companies aren’t stupid. If Net Neutrality becomes the controlling facility, they’ll suddenly find reasons to stop building out high-speed fiber-optic networks. We’ll all be treated to an Internet trapped in amber – kind of like Cuba and its fleet of 1959 automobiles. Except…

Except companies like Google and Apple will build out private networks, if they have to. These superhigh-bandwidth broadband Minternets (a neologism of mini and Internet) will be built in the more affluent ZIP codes and will be essentially unregulated (because once regulation starts it will only grow, if only to placate the baying of the populists and socialists). The Minternets will be joined by the growing semiprivate IP networks being constructed by a handful of universities to create an elite computer network that will be capable of handling virtual realities and 8k television/movies. This will be while everyone else is scraping by on a slowly decaying public Internet trapped in mid-2010s technology. You’ll be able to thank the Net Neutrality folks for that.