It’s Friday, February 10th, 2017…but first, we borrow a phrase from the great Thomas Sowell and offer a few Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene, beginning with yet another picture worth far more than a mere thousand words:
Next, there’s the ignorance of the facts…deliberate or otherwise…displayed by Audi with its Super Bowl commercial, as described by Larry Elder:
“…An Audi commercial highlighted the alleged problem of women receiving unequal pay. A male voice says: “What do I tell my daughter? Do I tell her that her grandpa is worth more than her grandma? That her dad is worth more than her mom? Do I tell her that despite her education, her drive, her skills, her intelligence, she will automatically be valued as less than every man she ever meets?” Audi also tweeted: “Women are still paid 21 percent less than men.”
It is a lie that women make less money than men for the same work. How do we know? (That is, oOther than the results of every credible study ever completed!) Audi admits it. Turns out, Audi pays its female employees less than its male employees. In response to this inconvenient fact, Audi said: “When we account for all the various factors that go into pay, women at Audi are on par with their male counterparts.” Of Audi’s six-person management board, there is not a single female. Of Audi’s American top-management staff of 14, two are women…”
Physician, heal thyself! In the meantime, as we informed them, Audi can remove us from their customer data base:
Dear Audi, I am the owner of a 2013 S8, and frankly planned on being an Audi customer for life. That was until I saw your Super Bowl commercial. I took great offense not only at the gender-based income disparity myths your commercial presented as fact, but the utter hypocrisy of your position given the Audi’s own pay policies.
Should you choose to run a commercial retracting the gross inaccuracies featured in your Super Bowl ad, I’ll be more than happy to consider becoming a customer once more. But until then, count me as one consumer who will take his future car-buying business elsewhere.
Sincerely,
Magoo
Lastly, as we’ve previously stated ad nauseam, we’re neither a fan of The Donald, nor will we ever act as an apologist for his unseemly utterances and boorish behavior. That being said, we find the reaction to a number of Trump’s supposedly singular statements increasingly curious given the prior precedence established by previous Presidents. Sure, The Donald equating the deliberate depredations of Russia’s version of Vlad the Impaler to America’s mostly inadvertent errors should certainly cause concern; but no more so than when The Dear Misleader attempted to dismiss the import of Islamic terror by recalling the crimes of the Crusaders and the Inquisition.
Given that Acre, the last Crusader stronghold in the Levant, fell in 1291, and Tomás de Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor, shuffled off his mortal coil in 1498, Trump’s comparison, however unfair and inaccurate, at least has the advantage of relative timeliness. Oh, need we mention the complete absence of indignation on the part of the MSM on the occasion of The Obamao’s prevaricative pronouncement?!?
And as the following video from CBS…yes, THAT CBS…confirms, Trump is hardly the first Chief Executive to criticize the courts:
Not that such precedence matters to those intent on demonizing The Donald.
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, writing at NRO, Hillsdale College professor of philosophy and religion Nathan Schlueter offers…
“One of the most intriguing developments in our current unpredictable political climate has been the Left’s co-opting of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 as a dramatic warning of the dangers of the Trump administration. The book has surged to first place on Amazon’s best-seller list, and a stage production is in the works. Michiko Kakutani’s recent New York Times article “Why ‘1984’ Is a 2017 Must-Read” highlights the kind of connections liberals are making between, say, Kellyanne Conway’s appeal to “alternative facts” and “Newspeak,” the reductive language of 1984 designed to “narrow the range of thought.”
I, for one, wholeheartedly endorse Kakutani’s suggestion that people take up and read 1984, not only because any increase in substantive reading by ordinary Americans is a good thing, but also because readers may discover there something quite different from what they are being lead to expect, something that they have great need to know. 1984 is not a warning against populist despotism, troubling as that possibility may be. It is a warning against socialism, whose inner dynamic always tends towards totalitarianism.
If it weren’t for Newspeak, Progressives couldn’t speak at all!
…In conclusion, the person reading 1984 for insight into America’s current political situation should ask a number of questions: Which political party had a leading presidential candidate proudly declare himself to be a socialist? Which party’s president consistently sought to expand the regulatory administrative state, often by lawless means? Which party dominates the institutions of higher learning, where the possibility of truth has been consistently undermined by assumptions of skepticism, scientism, and value relativism, and where utility has replaced contemplation as the end of education? Which party controls America’s public-school system, where these same ideas are consistently promoted? Which party is most closely associated with Hollywood’s celebration of sexual liberation and sentimentalism? Finally, which party has sought to elevate the state over God by coercing private individuals to violate their consciences?
In sum, if 1984 has a practical lesson, it is this: There is a world of difference between a despotism dedicated to the expansion of socialism through federal-government power and a despotism dedicated to dismantling it. The former suffocates; the latter, though not without its serious dangers, just might create room to breathe. Conservatives must work to ensure that this breathing space becomes the occasion for the revival of true conservative ideas, principles, and sentiments.“
Regardless, also courtesy of NRO, Kevin Williamson confirms…
“Hillary Rodham Clinton has had an odd career for a feminist icon. Her main occupation has consisted of being the long-suffering wife of a powerful man, infamous for treating subordinate women as disposable conveniences, who abused her ruthlessly and humiliated her publicly. In exchange for standing by her man, she was given an orphaned Senate seat in New York, where she did not live, and two shots at the presidency, which she lost to an unknown back-bencher from Chicago in 2008 and to a reality-television host in 2016.
Margaret Thatcher she isn’t.
She is back to her habitual form of paid work: Making speeches that are so vague as to be nearly content-free, her famous face and bland, almost affectless mode of speech serving as a kind of blank screen onto which those gathered can project their fantasies about having been present for Something Very Important.
Whatever that might be.
This week’s speech was for the MAKERS conference, a project of AOL, which still exists. MAKERS is a collection of web videos about famous women, featuring exactly the sort of women you’d imagine appealing to mid-level executives of AOL, which still exists: Lena Dunham, Oprah Winfrey, Shonda Rhimes, Lilly Singh. The women of the world were, one assumes, simply crying out for well-lighted videos of humorless American (Miss Singh is Canadian, i.e., American Lite) multimillionaires repeating the most tedious banalities imaginable. And so they now have them, courtesy of AOL, which still exists. (Steve Case’s concerted efforts to enrich himself while rendering our investment in AOL valueless notwithstanding!)
Mrs. Clinton’s remarks were remarkable for one line: “The future is female.”
…Mrs. Clinton is in fact a familiar political type, whose intense and lifelong focus on the pursuit and maintenance of that pettiest and most ephemeral of things — political power — has left her intellectually stunted, which is obvious to anyone who ever has heard her speak. No doubt she already is planning her 2020 campaign, without anyone around who cares enough to explain to her why this is absurd. She is, in truth, a tragic figure.
Bereft of anything like an original thought, she tends to repeat dopey slogans like “The Future Is Female,” without giving much thought to what they mean.
Which, in this case, is nothing.“
Another take on the same subject from Heather Wilhelm, also brought to us by NRO:
“…Imagine, if you will, an audience of little boys — let’s pretend they’re second- and third-graders — forced to sit in an auditorium and listen to Hillary Clinton’s short speech. They swing their legs. They fidget a bit. “The future is female,” Clinton declares, beamed in on a giant screen. What are they supposed to think, other than that girls matter more than they do?
Fortunately, if I’m reading the tea leaves correctly, Clinton isn’t exactly destined to live as a leading trend-setter and guru for America’s young men. Unfortunately, we don’t need to force America’s cohort of young males into goofy feminist conference rooms for them to hear her message. All they need is a brief dip into our culture at large. What does “the future is female” even mean? Is one half of the human race going into hiding? Fading into irrelevance?
Take Disney’s “Dream Big, Princess” campaign, which informs cartoon viewers that girls can and should do anything they want in life — Astronaut! President! Celebrity chef! — while boys merit no mention at all. Other ad campaigns take a darker note, suggesting that men and women are constantly pitted against each other in the demolition derby of life, rather than partners who work together. At this year’s Super Bowl, Audi ran a sad-sack advertisement bemoaning the oppression of women, which cited the debunked myth of a large and sinister gender-based “pay gap.” The lesson was clear: Men are the bad guys.
The irony of Clinton’s gender-centric “future is female” declaration thickens when you remember that the political Left has spent the past few years rabidly insisting that gender is fluid and that gender identities can shift. Well, whatever. Consistency be darned: At this point in history, the Left seems to have one gear, and that gear is identity politics.
There’s a final, sadder subtext to the whole “future is female” fiasco: It’s steeped in a movement that relentlessly champions on-demand abortion, even as unborn girls are targeted for sex-selective abortion all over the world. It’s a movement that ignores and alienates pro-life women, while celebrating people such as Cecile Richards, the CEO of Planned Parenthood.
Unsurprisingly, Richards is a featured speaker at this year’s MAKERS conference. In 2015, she blithely explained her personal abortion to Katie Couric, noting that she and her husband, married and financially sound, had simply decided that they had enough kids. “It wasn’t a difficult decision,” she said. Really? Well. Wow. We’ll never know whether that baby was female; its future was brought to an abrupt end.“
Were the incomparable Winston Churchill still alive to comment on the innumerable inanities issued by Liberals of late, he likely would have observed, “Never in the field of human politics has so much been so said by so many which means so little.”
And in today’s installment of the Environmental Moment, former Conservative stalwarts confirm crony capitalism is alive and well on both sides of the aisle:
“A group of prominent Republicans and business leaders, including former Treasury Secretaries Hank Paulson and James Baker, will meet with some of President Donald Trump’s top advisers at the White House Wednesday to push a plan to tax carbon dioxide in exchange for lifting a slew of environmental regulations.
“Unlike the current cumbersome regulatory approach, a levy on emissions would free companies to find the most efficient way to reduce their carbon footprint,” Baker and former Secretary of State George Shultz wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion article posted online late Tuesday. “A sensibly priced, gradually rising tax would send a powerful market signal to businesses that want certainty when planning for the future.”
The proponents are set to formally announce their proposal Wednesday at the National Press Club, lending their stature to an approach for addressing climate change that mirrors an idea already advanced by Exxon Mobil Corp. The self-dubbed Climate Leadership Council pushing the framework says a carbon tax is necessary to respond to “mounting evidence of climate change” that is “growing too strong to ignore.”…”
As we said, this is crony capitalism at its finest. And does anyone else find it passing strange it’s only when the likes of…
…come out on the side of the junk science of anthropogenic global warming they’re hailed as senior statesmen of the GOP?!?
Which brings us to The Lighter Side…
Magoo
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