Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
My Government, My Election System, and My Kitchen
Charles C.W. Cooke, writing in today’s National Review about the Biden Administration’s plan to ban gas stoves, quoted the apparatchik in charge of the relevant agency as making the following, remarkably stupid, statement:
Justifying the administration’s proposed move, CPSC commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. explained that “products that can’t be made safe can be banned.” What, I wonder, would be excluded from that definition?
Very good question, Charles. A few years ago one of my elderly patients was parking her car at a grocery store and bonked into something. She said she was barely moving, but her airbag deployed, breaking her arm. So airbags are dangerous, right? Well, yes they are, but they can also save your life. But since they “can’t be made safe” we should ban them, right, Comrade Trumka Jr?
Richard Trumka Jr. was appointed Commissioner of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission by President Biden. You might think that Mr. Trumka Jr. might be uncomfortable with tyrannical power structures, controlling people through the threat of force. You would be mistaken. His father, Richard Trumka Sr., was the president of The United Mine Workers, and later he was president of the AFL-CIO. So it runs in the family, I guess.
Which means that a Democrat president owed a favor to a union thug who helped him get elected, so now I have to change how I cook supper.
Our government is simply out of control.
Just imagine what our founders would think of this. Heck, imagine what FDR would think of this. This is bonkers.
Our government is so insane that it’s hard to envision what it was before, or how we got here.
This is absolutely bonkers.
Published in General
I wouldn’t call it glee. And those who voted for it deserve to suffer. Perhaps those who voted otherwise need a wake-up call that the other side is really not your friend, even if you go out for dinner and drinks with them and have them to your home and you go to theirs etc, and they WOULD take glee from your resentment etc.
Libertarians need to stop trying to grab power above state legislature. Nothing good comes from it. I’m not highly informed on this, but I think that’s what they have largely done in Minnesota.
Not one person on the planet should take direction from this masturbatory ditz.
I know I take all my sciencing direction from bartenders. But that’s just me, I’m edgy.
AOC could screw up an order for “whiskey, neat.”
I grew up in VT, living in NC now. If you’re in a city or town in VT, that’s one thing – but if I was off the beaten path a bit you can bet there would be a wood stove in the house, for just these reasons.
But VT isn’t friendly, from a politics perspective, on anything related to fossil fuels, or energy generation, in particular. The left fought for decades to shut down Vermont Yankee, the only nuclear station in VT, because China Syndrome or something. It’s shuttered now. The bulk of its energy is imported from outside Vermont, in particular Hydro Quebec – it’s a renewable, but outside the US.
I recall reading that there are environmentalists in Minnesota who want to stop using electricity from dams in Canada (as well as nuclear and all fossil fuels power plants, of course). Because somehow building a dam is tampering with nature in a way that building and installing windmills and solar panels is not.
I wish I could tell if that’s supposed to be serious or not. That it’s not obvious is an additional problem.
What should be done?
True. Cooking leads to independence, self-control, making choices, and thinking about what goes into what you consume. Radical indeed.
My hunch is that that the Progressives would prefer that we all eat in a community dining hall. The menu and portions would be determined by the latest science. However, due to the critical role they play in our society, folks like Mayor Pete and Gov Newsom will be exempt from this policy.
When you’re eating bugs, you don’t need a stove.
Talk radio was reporting on that yesterday. There was a blue check mark that was talking about how many resources could be saved if everybody ate communally and did laundry communally.
You think people waste energy driving to the gym to work out, just wait and see how much energy is wasted by people driving to the communal cafeteria and the communal laundromat!
If Mayor Pete had his way you’d be riding a LimeBike.
This is the best ricochet comment of January. My hat is off to you sir.
Heh. But the leftist loonies that I have known were thinking of very local communal facilities that you could walk to. Surely you can carry your laundry one block, comrade? And walk two blocks to a dining hall? If you don’t complain we might increase your monthly chocolate ration from 30 grams to 20 grams.
The root of all this is the idea that government is filled with the milk of human kindness. In reality, humans are in the government so the government can be corrupt as a Church or a corporation. Sometimes more corrupt.
Leftism can’t view the government as being just as corrupt as everything else that humans do so it is always wrong.
Those who can’t drive themselves because of not having their own vehicle, will expect a taxi, or Uber.
Or even better, why can’t they get the communal food delivered via Uber Communal Eats?
I did a little poking around @graceisforyou’s twitter stream. She appears to be trolling.
No, no, no. We’d all be living in communal dormitories with the communal dining and laundry facilities in the same or an adjacent building. Communal eating allows each person to be supplied with the proper balance of nutrients as determined by the nutrition experts. Climate control is supplied by a central delivery pipeline as determined by the planning authority. Haven’t you seen the Soviet housing programs of the 1950s and 1960s?
The bad part is how many people would agree with her facetious arguments as being serious.
Yes, gargantuan apartment blocks. But it will take a while, comrade, to replace all the old housing stock with something more progressive.
Some of these leftists are obsessed with eliminating the “waste” of multiple restaurants within walking distance of each other, ignoring the fact that they serve different tastes. Others are obsessed with eliminating the “waste” of single family homes and small apartment buildings. Still others are obsessed with the “mediocrity” of fast food, railing against “McDonald’s toad-burgers” while forgetting that food quality in socialist utopias is notoriously bad with widespread food purity and food safety problems. A nightmarish quest to stamp out all human individuality, variation, and freedom. Have you ever read R. A. Lafferty’s short story “The World as Will and Wallpaper”?
It took me a while to figure out Titiana McGrath.
“driving”? You think you’ll be allowed to have a car?
You had to poke around to figure that out? You could have ignored the text and seen just the “Thread 1 of 247” for a tip-off.
Well…we won’t *all* be living. They’ll need to cut the surplus population down quite a bit first.
One million, trillion “likes”.
Especially since the cold war is over, and we have huge deflation from automation and trade, there is absolutely nothing functional about more centralization and more centralized power. Negative value added for the reasons stated.
We have some parody challenged members at ricochet, I see.