Tag: Evil Bastards

The Forgotten Communist Traitor

History, Marxists

…forgotten, that is, except by people like this guy.  And me.  But along the way, in reading about this bastard, we see the following:

Leftism in America isn’t really a political commitment, though of course the left takes and supports a recognizable range of political positions. Leftism is, first and foremost, a fashion accessory that indicates a certain type of social status, similar to a Gucci handbag or a Rolex watch. It is a way to define oneself, and proclaim one’s solidarity with a self-conscious elite, and one’s social superiority to a hated group of outsiders. In America, the higher one rises in position, wealth, power, and status, the more leftward one’s political commitments move. This is counterintuitive at first glance, but it is nevertheless true. All their rhetorical arm-pumping about equality, revolution, income-redistribution, and hatred of Wall Street notwithstanding, left- liberals are primarily the representatives of the ruling class in America. They are not an absolutely dominant ruling class, but that is not for want of trying. They very strongly believe that they have the right and duty to govern all the rest of us.

More importantly:

The defense [of Hiss by the Left] is perfectly understandable if we read it as a claim to aristocratic privilege: Hiss is a member of the governing elite; by definition he can do no wrong! This is the same claim made by any mandarin class, whether the Prussian Junkers in Wilhelmine Germany, the landed gentry in Victorian England, the nomenklatura in the Soviet Union, or the upper-level managerial class in American corporate life today. People in such aristocracies sincerely feel that they have an inherent right to rule, and cannot be brought to book; they are a protected class immune from prosecution.

What happened in the Alger Hiss case was really important per se.  But what it reveals about the Left — then and now — is more important still.  Read the whole thing.  (It’s quite long, but if you read nothing else today…)

Marxist Economics

Elections, Marxists

From POTUS-wannabe Pocahantas comes this policy proposal:

Democrat presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren wants to use federal excise taxes to reduce gun and ammunition sales.
Her gun control, made public in August on Medium, shows Warren believes the current ten percent excise tax on firearms is too low. She wants to raise that tax to 30 percent while increasing the tax on ammunition to 50 percent.
Because excise taxes are paid directly by the consumer–the taxes are added to the price of the goods–this means a $500 gun would immediately cost $515 and the price for a $20 box of ammo would immediately rise to $30.
Warren claims this taxation policy would “bring in new federal revenue” that can used for “gun violence prevention.” And she simultaneously suggests the tax would raise the price on guns and ammo to a level sufficient to stifle sales.

So using her “economics”  it would go something like this:

  • Currently, 1,000 rounds of 7.62x39mm (eeevil AK ammo) @ $300* yields $33 (@11%) in excise tax revenue

So therefore Madame Marxist suggests that with her plan:

  • 1,000 rounds of eeevil AK ammo @ $300 would yield $150 (@50%) in excise tax revenue… whoopieeeeee a net gain of $127 stolen taxed by the gummint.

Except of course that in the real world, AK ammo sales would fall to 100 rounds and yield only $15 in excise taxes (a 50% loss in revenue).  “Yay yay yay, but ammo sales have fallen!” she would pronounce.  But why  would sales fall so precipitously, she asks?  Because of the higher tax?

Because, you Commie coksucquer, during the months before you could enact this poxy tax increase, we AK owners would buy countless millions  of rounds of ammo, so that we’d have enough stored for the lean years — just like we did before the term of that other socialist asshole Barack Obama — and resume buying once an actual American became president again.

Ditto all those eeevil AR-15s and AK-47s you hate so much:  we’d buy so many before you could touch them, the gun factories would have to institute 365-day / 24-hour shifts just to cope with the demand.

I swear, I’m a huge fan of the First Amendment and I like to hear politicians spell out their proposed policies;  but I would also propose that anyone using idiotic economics theory (like the above) to create policy should be forced to wear a dunce cap and be beaten with wet spaghetti — just because of their naked stupidity.

And this phony bitch wants to run things?

* (example) Wolf Performance (WPA) is $304 / 1,000 at Cheaper Than Dirt at time of writing.

Wish I’d Done That

Eco-Crap, Weather

Found via Insty (thankee, Squire), is this incredible piece of investigative journalism done by someone who, I suspect, isn’t a journalist:

Horrifying: Media and Climate Hoaxers (But I Repeat Myself) Report That Literally Everywhere on Earth is Warming at Twice the Rate of the Rest of the Earth

You’d think an actual journalist (I know, more rare than a virgin at a Clinton cocktail party) would have noticed this, but as the headline suggests, most of the journo persuasion are riding the Doom Wagon (no relation) for all it’s worth.

Anyway, follow the link and read it all the way to the end, where Ace makes this conclusion:

One begins to suspect that climate “scientists” have made up a scheme of dozens of “adjustments” they have granted themselves to make to the actual data, enabling them to tweak any temperature down and any other temperature up.

As we say here in Texas:  ya thank?

Foreign Entanglements

Elections, Marxists, Politics

I’ve been wondering where Socialist POTUS-candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have been getting the foundation for their Lefty economic policy proposals because, frankly, neither strikes me as much of an intellectual heavyweight — Warren’s tokenist Harvard Law degree notwithstanding.

I wonder no more, and the headline to this article alone tells us why:

Two French economists from Berkeley advising Warren and Sanders on wealth tax

As the expression goes, it’s hard to see how you could fit much more annoying shit into a single sentence.  As for their economic philosophy, we have this:

There are competing explanations for the rise in inequality. Those on one side argue that wealth concentration is natural as a result of globalization, technology gains, and economic growth, which give enormous rewards to the smartest, innovative, and most hardworking people. Drastically increasing tax rates, they say, would discourage innovation and hurt the economy.
The other camp sees rising inequality as unfair, immoral, and a threat to society.
Saez and Zucman are firmly in the second camp.
…
Saez, 46, and Zucman, 32, are both originally from France and have each worked in the past with Thomas Piketty, the famous French economist whose research on wealth and income inequality made him a best-selling author.

Ah, jeez.  Piketty’s work is horribly slanted — it’s full of the Chomskyist research “methodology” so eloquently debunked by Bill Whittle, in that by taking a shovelful of beach sand and extracting a few black grains and discarding the rest, one can “prove” that all beaches contain not white, but black sand.  Ditto Piketty, whose oh-so data-driven proposals for taxing wealth (as opposed to just income) were initially latched onto by many European governments:

So far, at least 15 European countries have tried wealth taxes. All but four, though, have repealed them, most recently Saez’s and Zucman’s homeland of France.

As we saw recently with Frogland, when their dotgov imposed more and more restrictions on wealthy Frenchmen, capital and its owners simply fled the country for more tax-hospitable climes.

Which of course means that despite the documented failure of such policies, our own home-grown Lefties like Warren and Sanders are keen to implement them Over Here.

But that’s the Left for you:  never let facts get in the way of theory.  And the Marxist “problem” of “income inequality” has proven to be, well, insoluble short of outright Leninism — confiscation of wealth and murder of an entire economic class (the kulaks) being the hallmarks thereof.  (And for Lenin’s “kulaks”, read our modern-day Leninists’ “gun owners” as the disposable class, cf. Beto and Swalwell’s statements thereof.)

Which should tell you all you need to know about Warren and Sanders.  It’s not just your guns they’ll confiscate:  it’s your pension fund, your property and your livelihood as well.

Prove me wrong.

Medical Care Under Socialism

Elections, Health, Marxists

Apparently Bernie Sanders, socialist Senator and POTUS wannabe, had a heart attack on the campaign trail but survived after some pretty nifty (and quick) medical care — after which the Commie asshole had the nerve to bellow:  “Medicare For All!” (his campaign slogan).

As Dan Greenfield has pointed out:

While Bernie’s timetable of getting an angioplasty within a day might not sound that impressive to Americans, in the British NHS system, the median time from assessment to treatment is 55.3 days.  Mean times for treatment have been cited as being 80 days.  The maximum NHS waiting time is supposed to be 18 weeks and almost 16% of patients in the UK have to wait more than 3 months for an angioplasty.
Canada’s socialist system has angioplasty waiting times of around 11 weeks.  And that’s after you get an appointment to see a specialist.
…
Bernie waited a day in Vegas to get his angioplasty.  In Norway, he would have waited 39 days.
In Finland, which Bernie has also cited as an inspiration for his socialist program, he would have waited 22 days.  In Sweden, another favorite of American socialists, Bernie would have waited 42 days.

Greenfield also points out (and I paraphrase) that as President Sanders, the man who would have implemented socialized medical care, Our Bernie wouldn’t ever be subject to the same kinds of waiting periods imposed on others:  oh no.  He’d have been whipped into Bethesda Naval Hospital within the hour, and had an angioplasty a couple hours later.

Which is always the way with Communists:  the ordinary people suffer while the nomenklatura  get only the best.  And under socialism, ordinary individuals’ lives are irrelevant as long as the principle is upheld.

Well, I wish the evil old bastard had croaked, just on principle.