No free lunch under capitalism, no lunch under communism 79

Some Democratic Party candidates are speaking of providing all Americans with free health care, free college education, and free housing when they are voted into power.

Evil capitalists, who are only out to make a profit (wash your mouth out when you say that word aloud), laugh the idea to scorn. Nothing, they say, can be free. And if the government hands you goodies without asking you to pay for them, then you are not free. The government can withdraw the goodies. What then? You can’t go to wicked capitalists and order things in exchange for money, even if you have a stack of contraband dollars hidden somewhere. Because your great Lenins and your heroic Che Guevaras  have had all those “economic saboteurs”  shot.

So if the worst were to happen in November 2018 …

American enthusiasts for Socialism need to be informed what to expect when they have voted Bernie Sanders into the White House, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is Secretary of the Interior.

Be prepared to go hungry.

(Wymyn – a major constituency of both dear old commie Bernie and ingénue Alexandria – can look on the bright side of this and expect to lose weight and enjoy slender bodies without effort.)

Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh writes at Canada Free Press:

People used to ask me what we ate when I was growing up in communist Eastern Europe. Women were quite thin and beautiful, on the “Ceausescu diet”.  We were not just told how much to eat by decree but food was quite scarce and highly rationed. If a person dared to stash more food than the Communist Party deemed necessary, that person paid dearly in fines and eventually jail. Of course the elite class, in the classless utopia of a socialist country on its way to communism, had its own stores and food supply at low prices, never having to suffer the indignity of a rumbling empty stomach. …

When the dear leader wanted to visit a grocery, dairy, or bread store to see how “his people” lived, fresh bread loaves and milk bottles were trucked in and then taken away as soon as he left. Staples like cooking oil, sugar, flour, and butter were also brought in from the communist apparatchiks’ stores and then whisked away before anyone had a chance to purchase anything.

The bread, milk, butter, oil, flour, and sugar lines were part of daily life and the socialist milieu. Walking around money was not to bribe politicians but to purchase food or scratchy and splintery toilet paper in case one encountered a long line where something needful would be sold that day.

In addition to fines and possible jail time, food hoarders were publicly shamed in the local and national newspapers which were run by the Communist Party.  Since their address was also provided, the readers were expected to ostracize them and sometimes beat them for their greed.

Having experienced the indignity of standing in endless lines in cold and hot weather to buy rationed food with rationing cards, food that often ran out before everyone in line had a chance to buy something, it is economically ludicrous to believe the Communist Party lies that one man’s hoarding disrupted delivery of enough food to the starving proletariat.

It was the inadequate supply of everything that caused severe shortages of many items that Westerners take for granted in economies based on supply and demand. It was the centralized planning of economically ignorant community organizers who formed the Communist Party rank and file who made ill-advised production, supply, and distribution decisions.

Nobody knew if they would find anything to eat the next day, when people fought in lines over bones stripped clean of any meat. … People used those bones to make soup. Extras in the pantry insured survival for many days without having to stand in those awful lines every day.

Bernie and Alexandria won’t be going hungry, of course. They will have special stores, always fully stocked, and pay less than we ordinary people will.

And they’ll have much more money.

That is the nature of an Egalitarian Society.

Posted under communism, United States by Jillian Becker on Sunday, October 7, 2018

Tagged with , , ,

This post has 79 comments.

Permalink

Women warm to warmism in an alliance for clean cookstoves 168

This is by Ileana Johnson Paugh and comes from Canada Free Press:

I bet you did not know that we had an Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues. I did not realize that global women existed. I did not know that we had a czarina to represent third world female population’s interests in our administration. The post was created by President Obama on April 6, 2009.

Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues, Melanne Verveer, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, traveled to Durban, South Africa to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in order “to highlight the critical and largely untapped potential of women to combat climate change.” Who knew that women were so powerful that they could affect climate change!

As I read this brief report, I envisioned billions of dollars washing down the proverbial drain with the blessing of an eager administration to re-distribute our “socially unjust” and “unfairly earned, evil capitalist” wealth.

Ambassador-at-Large Melanne Verveer mentioned studies that have shown that women “are on the frontline of, and suffer disproportionately from, the impacts of climate change.” As I googled women’s suffering from the impact of climate change, I found no such studies.

Ambassador-at-Large Verveer states that women are a “powerful force for finding solutions to climate change across the board, including areas of agriculture, sustainable forest management, and energy access.” Because “a small minority of women farmers have access to land tenure (Food and Agriculture Organization report and we know how reliable UN reports are),” women’s potential to combat climate change is limited.”

Who knew that the simple act of owning land could combat climate change?

Using a generic statement, “studies have shown,” without mentioning any studies, Ambassador-at-Large Verveer states, “women with right to property are significantly more capable of investing in climate-smart agricultural productivity.” I had no idea that such a practice existed in agriculture, “climate-smart productivity.” It seems that there is no end to the leftist push to justify UN schemes to milk more funds from the United States in order to enrich the coffers of third world dictatorships.

Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) defines “climate-smart productivity” as “conservation agriculture, integrated pest management, agroforestry, and sustainable diets.”

This type of agriculture promoted by FAO “sustainably increases productivity, resilience (adaptation), reduces/removes greenhouse gases (mitigation) while enhancing the achievement of national food security development goals.” …

Ponderous jargon characterizes left-wing official-speak. A special torment of our time, all too “sustainable”.

According to Ambassador-at-Large Verveer’s report, “women have untapped potential for increasing energy access, which directly relates to climate change.” In case you are confused, the report continues, “3 billion people globally still rely on traditional cookstoves and open fires to prepare food for their families.” Since women are responsible for cooking and collecting fuel, the resulting smoke exposure causes an “estimated two million premature deaths annually, with women and children being most affected.” She follows that it “puts women at risk of gender based violence.”

What does climate change have to do with gender based violence? Would less gender based violence decrease climate change? If we were to cook less and eat raw food, would that alter climate change? …

I am trying to understand this climate change contorted logic. Humans use stoves to cook and that causes climate change; females collect wood to burn in the stoves to prepare food and they contribute to climate change; smoke exposure causes premature deaths but women and children are most affected. I still cannot figure out how it causes gender-based violence; I am still scratching my head.

But as Whatsisname said: Arguing with a woman is like trying to crack an egg on a pillow.

Ambassador-at-Large Vermeer suggests that we have to “build a global market for clean cookstoves” because they impact the climate through “greenhouse gases and short-lived particles such as black carbon.” In her opinion, if women were integrated into the supply chain of clean cookstoves, new economic development opportunities would be created for women. She follows with a quote by Secretary Clinton that “women create a multiplier effect in local communities because they disproportionately spend more of their earned income on food, healthcare, home improvement, and schooling.”

Now I am totally lost. The Ambassador-at-Large Verveer introduces more variables to the role of women in combating climate change: food, healthcare, home improvement, and schooling, without really explaining how it all ties in with her flawed hypothesis. Since she references two more UN organizations, Feed the Future and the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, it is important to note that the Global Alliance is a “private-public UN initiative to save lives, improve livelihoods, empower women, and combat climate change by creating a thriving global market for clean and efficient household cooking solutions.”

The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, which was launched on September 21, 2010 in Washington, D.C., has 240 partners and the following founders: German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, Government of Norway, Peru, Morgan Stanley, Shell, Shell Foundation, the Netherlands, U.S. Agency for International Development, U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. Department of State., Environmental Protection Agency, and the United Nations Foundation.

The United States is in the platinum donor category with $5 million dollars, Department of Energy, EPA, Department of State are in the gold donor category with $1-5 million each, along with socialist European nations such as bankrupt Spain and Ireland, the World Bank, and other UN affiliates.

The Department of Energy is awarding “Clean Biomass Cookstove Technologies” grants of $100,000 and $750,000 at a time when our country is broke, unemployment is at an all time high, taxpayers are unhappy, and the administration is demanding that we reduce our consumption of energy.

The “science” provided under the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves consists of two articles, one published in Le Monde by Bertrand d’Armagnac on November 13, 2011 and another published in Bloomberg by Jonathan Alter on November 24, 2011. Both cross-reference World Health Organization data that 2 million people die annually from smoke inhalation, more than malaria, TB, and AIDS combined. Apparently the fuel, wood, dung, makeshift charcoal, and agricultural waste, are directly responsible for 2 million deaths, particularly in women and children. These third world dictatorships are incapable of running their countries, feeding, sheltering, and caring for their people properly. It is mind boggling and highly suspicious that they can keep such accurate disease and death rate data.

I am not disputing the fact that people have died throughout history from unsanitary and unhealthy living conditions. We have waged education wars to improve living conditions and spent trillions of dollars to alleviate poverty around the world, yet we do not seem to be any closer today than we were in the beginning. The corrupt governments have stolen the money and personally enriched themselves instead of improving their citizens’ living conditions. To continue this pattern is absolute madness.

Ambassador-at-Large Verveer is very proud of “our efforts to build on the gender equality and women empowerment language in the Cancun agreements.” It seems that lip service is quite an accomplishment as long as the “language on gender balance related to the composition of the board of the new Green Climate Fund, the Standing Committee, and the Adaptation Committee” are in line with the UN Agenda. …

*

We have quoted Dr Ileana Johnson Paugh a number of times with appreciation.

We compliment her on not being a woman like Melanne Verveer. (See our post Of adults and women, September 4, 2010)

We’d bet that she – as Margaret Thatcher once said of herself – owes nothing to feminism.*

Or “women’s studies”. Pseudo disciplines like  “women’s studies” are exercises in self-inflicted-wound-licking. If Isaac Newton had concentrated on “scientist studies” instead of science, we might never have had the Enlightenment.

 

*Feminism: a fake cause; a division of Victimology; a sustained gripe by Western women belonging to the most privileged class in human history.