When I came home from work last night I saw this post at Instapundit concerning goodyear tires.
A photo seen circulating on social media shows a slide that was presented during a diversity training showing what’s acceptable and what isn’t acceptable as part of Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company’s zero-tolerance policy.
Under acceptable: Black Lives Matter (BLM), Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Pride.
Listed as unacceptable: Blue Lives Matter, All Lives Matter, MAGA Attire, Political Affiliated Slogans or Material.
Don’t buy GOODYEAR TIRES – They announced a BAN ON MAGA HATS. Get better tires for far less! (This is what the Radical Left Democrats do. Two can play the same game, and we have to start playing it now!).
To say this is bad for the company is an understatement. This is not a niche product like some beer in Seattle that can just restrict it’s customer base., This is a product that are used across the political spectrum, and if you automatically exclude half of the voting population from your customer and offend police departments who buy tires in bulk base you are likely going to have trouble as a national brand.
Even worse now if they back away now you have the twitter mob (which while smaller is louder) on your ass.
Capt Jake Cutter:Monsewer, you haven’t got the sense of a jack rabbit. Letting hot horses drink. Keep ’em away from the water till they’ve cooled out. Don’t you know anything about horses?
Paul Regret: I know enough about horses. When I want one I call a groom. When I’m done, I call a groom to take him and the groom says “Yes, sir, Mr Regret.” That’s all I wanna know about horses.
The Comancheros 1961
Wednesday I was reading an excerpt of William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech when he was the Democrat nominee for President in 1896 when my grandfather (Dad’s Dad) was a 16 year teen in Sicily. The speech concerned the big issue of the daysound, money a Gold standard vs Bi-metalism that is a gold AND silver standard.
The speech is of course famous for his big finish:
If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we shall fight them to the uttermost, having behind us the producing masses of the nation and the world. Having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and all the toiling masses, we shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.
Now in an age unlike today where everyone knew basic scripture this was a big deal, but today a good half of the country wouldn’t have any idea what he was talking about and the whole issue of “sound money” in a age when we print it on whims (something that would have shocked both parties in his age) is even more comical. Of course given today’s educational system the very idea that an American High School Student let alone a college student who have even heard of Bryan, a man who any student pre-1962 would have known, is an iffy proposition at best.
But there is an earlier line from that speech that jumped out at me that gets almost no play today that I want to touch on. (emphasis mine)
You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard. I tell you that the great cities rest upon these broad and fertile prairies.Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic. But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.
“There was no reason to leave before,” said a born-and-bred Upper West Side mom, who asked for anonymity. “Now, I’m done. I can leave tomorrow and never look back. If I never came back to this block, that would be fine.”
The six-months-pregnant mother of a toddler daughter just put her apartment of a decade near the Lucerne up for sale.
“I have definitely seen more crime, drugs and harassment in one week than in my whole experience growing up here,” she said. “I don’t want to see a child get hurt or raped, before they realize maybe it was a mistake to put [hundreds of] drug addicts and sex offenders near schools in the most dense residential population in the city.”
They’ve literally killed the cities. This is going to be the most transformative shift in 100 years.
This means we get to see if Bryan prediction of cities springing up again is right. In fact NYC is in many ways a shadow of its former self as suggested by this amazing video of a fellow touring the now comparatively empty sites:
There is no doubt that either NYC will correct this situation or other cites will rise because these people are going to live somewhere but Stacy McCain asks the key question concerning all these folks now fleeing for the safety of their families :
Thousands of families are now fleeing New York City, but the question must be asked: Who elected Bill De Blasio as mayor?
Probably a lot of those Upper West Side moms voted for De Blasio, because it was the trendy “progressive” thing to do at the time. Didn’t it occur to any of them to wonder what the consequences might be?
Nope they’ve been raised in Evan Sayet’s safe Kindergarten of Eden and they have no more idea how the real world works then Paul Regret knew how to water a horse. Their live has been so safe and comfortable that they had no idea how to deal when the reality of their voting record came knocking at their door.
So now they are fleeing and at least one Governor of a nearby state says come on down but does not include the required warning that I’ll helpfully add
but just remind them that if they vote in the way that turned their states into pits NH will become one.
So come on in but don’t bring your voting record with you
The other thing that might happen is that the migrants from high tax states might bring their political attitudes with them, moving to new, low-tax states for the economic opportunity but then supporting the same policies that ruined the states they left. This seems quite plausible, alas, and I’ve heard Coloradans lament that the flow of Californians to their state involved a lot of people doing just that. (I suppose that migrants from lower-benefits states to higher-benefits states might support change the other way, but people who live on the dole seem to have pretty similar voting patterns regardless of location, which is why the dole is so popular with certain politicians).
Surprise surprise Colorado went from purple to practically blue & Denver is becoming a pit.
If I were one of those conservative billionaires (hello, Koch brothers! hi, Sheldon Adelson!) who are always donating tens of millions to support Republican candidates, I think I might try spending some of the money on something more useful: A sort of welcome wagon for blue state migrants to red states. Something that would explain to them why the place they’re moving to is doing better than the place they left, and suggesting that they might not want to vote for the same policies that are driving their old home states into bankruptcy.
Of course that will be their kids problem to figure out where to flee to if their parents turn their new homes into a pit. Let’s hope those parents love their kids enough to keep this from happening.
fyi I’ll be talking about this piece at 3 PM EST on the DaTechguy off DaRadio Livestream podcast
“It’s shocking,” says Alan Woodward, a security expert based at the University of Surrey. “This is the Balkanisation of the internet happening in front of our eyes.
“The US government has for a long time criticised other countries for controlling access to the internet… and now we see the Americans doing the same thing.”
The article does backtrack a bit and brings up legitimate security concerns posed by China. It sparked my curiosity in Pompeo’s speech, which hasn’t really made the news. So I found the transcript, and Pompeo had outlined five lines of effort for a Clean Internet:
First, Clean Carrier. We are working to ensure that untrusted Chinese telecom companies don’t provide international telecommunications services between the United States and foreign destinations.
Second, we call Clean Store. We want to see untrusted Chinese apps removed from U.S. app stores.
Third, Clean Apps. We’re working to prevent Huawei and other untrusted vendors from pre-installing or making available for download the most popular U.S. apps. We don’t want companies to be complicit in Huawei’s human rights abuses or the CCP’s surveillance apparatus.
Fourth, Clean Cloud. We’re protecting Americans’ most sensitive personal information and our businesses’ most valuable intellectual property – including COVID vaccine research – from being accessed on cloud-based systems run by companies such as Alibaba, Baidu, China Mobile, China Telecom, and Tencent.
Fifth and finally, Clean Cable. We’re working to ensure that the CCP can’t compromise information carried by the undersea cables that connect our country and others to the global internet.
Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State, in a speech on August 5, 2020.
This list doesn’t resemble censorship. Nowhere in the list does the U.S. censor information from other countries, prevent people from being critical of the United States, or otherwise interfere with other countries operations. It narrowly targets tech Chinese companies with known issues while leaving an open door to every other nation. It highlights some significant problems like stealing of COVID vaccine research that not enough people are tracking.
There is this libertarian view that a free and open internet means government’s should have no role whatsoever in the internet. There are plenty of flaws with this idea. The largest flaw is that this view fails to act when an entity like the Chinese Communist Party seeks to dismantle the Internet and subvert it for its own good. The BBC would perhaps brush this off as “market forces,” and to be sure, the UK has stood on the sidelines while China filters Hong Kong’s internet and even the internet at UK universities.
Perhaps better said in the movie Team America: World Police: “Freedom isn’t free.”
You can, and should, limit government involvement and allow the market to drive innovation, but when an obviously dark force threatens to break the freedom of information on the internet, you must act to stop it.
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.
There is a lot of talk about if and when schools reopen but there is a factor that is not being considered.
We have reached the logical conclusion from the removal of prayer in school. Three generations later we have a highly medicated student body that intimidates their teachers, requires police to keep them in line and is taught that America is the source of all the evil in the world despite all the evidence being to the contrary.
And I haven’t even touched on professional teachers claiming that saying 2+2=4 is a sign of white supremacy and colonialism.
Why on earth would you want to send your children back to that kind of mess? I wouldn’t.
But as the schools are closed and their reopening is iffy, we have an opportunity. NOW is the time to examine the curriculum that exist and compel a change.
Toss Howard Zinn into the dustbin of history that his ahistorical history belongs in and bring back actual history, actual science, actual math, actual reading focusing on developing and informing. Teach the basics you actually need. Get rid of excess administration and keep the focus on education rather than indoctrination.
If that isn’t possible push a voucher system and remove public schooling all together. Allow a free market loose on primary and secondary education and watch schools fight to provide the quality to attract those voucher dollars. Watch black education rates and grades soar, watch the trades come back. Watch the need for school police drop and yes, if a market exists for liberal indoctrination for kids even that will be available for the few parents who want it.
There will likely not be a better chance in my lifetime to get this done. Let’s do it!
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