Three Stories of Foolishness (posted 1/16/23)

Let’s open with that timeless and always relevant question: Will the current surfeit of lefty idiocy that provides me with constant fodder for one mocking column after another continue indefinitely? 

If you’ll allow me a moment to consult the Magic 8-Ball that I usually only use for picking stocks and sports betting…

The answer is, “Signs point to yes.”

In support of the 8-ball, I offer you three stories ripped from the last few days’ headlines.

First, the latest contretemps over the Biden administration’s trial balloon suggesting they might force Americans to get rid of gas stoves, following by a storm of backlash from all directions, followed by bumbling retreats, “corrections,” and obfuscation.

The pattern is familiar by now:  The left claims that something that everyone has been familiar with for decades, or centuries, or sometimes millennia – regular toilets, national borders, the internal combustion engine, the two genders that actually exist – is destroying our country, or the planet, or life itself. Plus it’s racist, or sexist, or homophobic, or “not who we are.” 

So we must ban it, and pursue anyone who resists with the obsessive creepiness of the late Joe Biden cornering a young woman with freshly washed hair.

Enter the humble gas stove, which works better than the alternative, and has never hurt anyone.  (Before any of you literary types bring up Sylvia Plath to me, that’s beneath both of us.)

But contrary to all common sense, several federal agencies have now come forth with the dire news that the gas stove that you’ve used all your life with no adverse consequences actually causes everything from cardiovascular problems to cancer to respiratory problems. 

Also housemaid’s knee, the heartbreak of psoriasis, and restless leg syndrome.  Plus ennui and existential despair, as far as you know.    

Fortunately for the Dems, you don’t need a gas stove to gaslight people, which is a skill they’ve perfected through long practice.  Unfortunately for them, people who know anything about cooking know that electric stoves are far inferior, as suggested by all of the electric stoves that cannot be found in any good restaurants anywhere. 

Also, I’ve done my research, and found that electric stoves are powered by electricity.  (Cue the NBC “The More you Know” theme song.)  And the majority of electricity is generated by coal, nuclear power, and… wait for it… natural gas.

Got that?  We all need to waste the GDP of several first-world nations getting rid of our gas stoves and replacing them with electric stoves.  Which are powered by gas. 

Also coal.  Or else the kind of nuke that scared the pants off of the young (and stupid) commie-enthusiast Jane Fonda in The China Syndrome.    

But no dumb political story would be complete without the input of our favorite incompetent ex-bartenderess, AOC.  She took to Twitter (Pay Elon $8, wench!) to claim that gas stoves “have been linked to reduced cognitive performance.” 

Seventeen seconds later, many people pointed out that in AOC’s past posts she has recorded herself cooking on a… no need to wait for it because you already saw this coming… gas stove!

All of which prompted me to ask the obvious scientific question:  Has a causal link been found between using a gas stove and developing a “juicy booty” (her words, not mine)? 

Because if you put together “cognitively damaged” and “juicy booty,” I feel like I may be able to dramatically reveal the mysterious “Patient Zero” for the dangers of gas stoves.   

Speaking of cognitively damaged, poor old Andrea Mitchell is still alive and on tv (if MSNBC counts as “on tv”), and I’m as surprised about that as you are.

During a story on abortion battles this past week, Mitchell interrupted her own colleague when he accurately said that a female GOP politician “described herself as ‘pro-life.’”

Mitchell couldn’t let that stand, and said, “Garrett, let me just interrupt and say that ‘pro-life’ is a term that they — an entire group wants to use. But that’s not an accurate description.”  That caught the reporter flat-footed, and he finally said, “I’m using it because it’s the term she used to describe herself, Andrea.”

In a sane world with reasonable journalistic standards, Mitchell’s blatant partisan bias would shock all 7 of her viewers, and mark her as someone not to be trusted to do any objective reporting.  But this isn’t that kind of world, and her comments are par for the MSM course.

Before my recent retirement, I taught persuasive writing for many years, and one of the baseline principles I taught was as old as Aristotle (and thus almost as old as Imhotep Pelosi): grant both sides of any debate the respect of using their own chosen terms, unless and until your own argument addresses the accuracy of those terms.

If you know that people most call “Mormons” prefer the label “LDS,” you use the latter.  If you know that “Indians” now prefer “Native Americans,” you grit your teeth and compromise, calling them “Lizzie Warrens.”  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)  

No righty trying to persuade any uncommitted persuade-ables would initially frame an abortion debate by referring to the “pro-life and pro-death,” positions, just as no reasonably lefty would refer to “pro-choice and anti-choice.”  (I know: many of them do just that.  Those are not the reasonable ones, and they are tuned out by anyone not in their camp.)

Mitchell has been a “journalist” since Hadrian built his wall, and has to know better.  But she can’t help herself.  In the short run-up to insulting the guy who called the pro-life politician “pro-life,” she introduced the story with typical bias.  She described the debate as “passing two anti-abortion bills, despite a majority of Americans saying abortion should be legal.” 

Leave aside the option of calling the bills “pro-life bills” or even just “abortion bills,” and look at her spinning/editorializing.  While it’s technically true that a majority of Americans say that abortions in some situations should be legal, it’s equally true that only a tiny minority say that it should be legal until the moment of birth, which is the de facto national Democratic position now.

I know you all know this, but the dishonesty of our MSM is so persuasive and blatant that it can be hard to take, even for those with the strength of ten men, such as your humble Roving Correspondent. 

How many times can we listen to them describing fighting voting fraud as “voter suppression,” or treating all races equally as “racism,” or denying biological reality through mutilating surgery as “gender affirmation?”

The old cliché is true: every word out of their mouths is a lie, including “and” and “the.”

But perhaps the most perfectly emblematic of leftist knuckleheads in the news this week was environmentalist doomsayer Paul Ehrlich, a “scientist” who is now 90.  Unfortunately for him, his long life has meant that he has been around long enough to see all of his attention-getting predictions proven to be mortifyingly wrong.

His most famous book, The Population Bomb (1968) made very bold predictions, and every one of them blew up in his face.  He said that by 1980 “all important animal life in the sea will be extinct,” and the “stench of dead fish” would force the evacuation of large areas of coastline.

He predicted massive, world-wide famines and die-offs in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and said that England would no longer exist by the year 2000.  His unerringly wrong Malthusian prognostications arose from his inability to account for human adaptability and ingenuity, and his leftist politics melded perfectly with his preference for big government coercion rather than allowing people the freedom to make their own choices.

Like many progressive alarmists, he waxed eloquent about the virtues of sterilizing millions of people and “reducing the surplus population,” to quote his ideological soulmate, Ebeneezer Scrooge. 

Also like many of those who call for such actions, he hypocritically did not go first.  He’s been here for 90 years, consuming precious resources, annoying and scaring gullible people, and selfishly refusing to die. 

My favorite part of his life story is when free-market economist Julian Simon famously put Ehrlich’s predictions to the test.  Ehrlich was confident that upcoming shortages would drive up the price of key resources, so Simon challenged him to pick any 5 commodities he liked (he chose tin, tungsten, nickel, chromium and copper), and bet $1000 that their prices in 10 years (1990) would be higher. 

Of course Ehrlich was wrong, and all five were cheaper when the bet ended.

Again, in a sane world, Ehrlich’s long record of error and failure would mark him as a derided and discredited quack.

So naturally, he was interviewed by Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes, and treated as if he were a wise elder statesman who should be listened to.   Only a leftist could turn a 70-year career of being wrong about everything into fame, fortune and an academic sinecure (in his case, at Stanford). 

But none of that makes him the archetypal academic leftist.  That dishonor arises from his pristinely delusional insistence that reality counts for nothing, compared to the approval garnered from leftist group-think.    

Here is his latest tweet, which I swear I am not making up: “60 Minutes extinction story has brought the usual right-wing out in force.  If I’m always wrong so is science, since my work is always peer-reviewed, including the POPULATION BOMB and I’ve gotten virtually every scientific honor. Sure I’ve made some mistakes, but no basic ones.”

Is that not perfect? It’s got everything:

• Anyone who notices that there are still fish in the oceans, humanity hasn’t died of starvation, and England still exists is a right-wing nut.
• He is THE SCIENCE (™ Tony Fauci, 2021)
• His work is peer-reviewed and honored by his political co-religionists, which obviously trumps the fact that reality didn’t cooperate.
• He predicted half a dozen apocalypses and the opposite happened each time, but those mistakes are not “basic” ones.

A tweeter may have summed it up best: 

Okay, Doomer. 

Fetterman/ Paul “The Sky is Falling!” Ehrlich 2024!