Gary Blues
Somebody must have told Gary Johnson that I actually wrote faintly nice things about the Libertarian Party, because he wasted absolutely no time making me regret them. Here he goes making disjointed, rambling remarks to the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney, in which he states that the federal government should have unlimited power to force people to associate with one another, with, evidently, the single exception that he personally shouldn’t be forced to be a social conservative. You think I’m just trying to make him sound like a fool, but, no, that is pretty much exactly what he says. When Carney asked if the government of New Mexico — Gary’s own home state — should have the power to punish photographers for refusing to cover gay weddings, Gary sputtered out this crazy thing:
Look. Here’s the issue. You’ve narrowly defined this. But if we allow for discrimination — if we pass a law that allows for discrimination on the basis of religion — literally, we’re gonna open up a can of worms when it come stop discrimination of all forms, starting with Muslims… who knows. You’re narrowly looking at a situation where if you broaden that, I just tell you — on the basis of religious freedom, being able to discriminate — something that is currently not allowed — discrimination will exist in places we never dreamed of…
It’s the right message, and I’m sideways with the Libertarian Party on this. My crystal ball is that you are going to get discriminated against by somebody because it’s against their religion. Somehow you have offended their religion because you’ve walked in and you’re denied service. You. (Emphasis original)
I can’t say I’m precisely terrified by the prospect of literally opening up a can of worms, myself. It’s kind of gross, maybe, but you can just throw it out, right? Much more frightening than worms is the prospect of the Libertarian Party presidential candidate going on record in front of God and everybody and calling for the government to have unlimited power to police "discrimination." If you think he’s just not quite saying what I make it sound like he’s saying, he later clarifies, explicitly saying that he believes it is the job of the federal government to prevent discrimination "in all cases." Bear in mind that this is the guy who called for burqas to be outlawed, saying that the government has the power to ban Sharia (and, randomly, the Ku Klux Klan), and now he’s so afraid that Muslims will be discriminated against that he wants even more government power to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Maybe it’s time for the Libertarian Party to start discriminating against this guy.
Bern Out
The Democratic National Convention was this past week. Did you watch it? Neither did I. It turns out your humble narrator had a prior engagement with doing absolutely anything else. Scads of gullible college kids did, though, whereupon they were scandalized to find their idol, Bernard Sanders, endorsing the Icon of Sin itself. Why, it’s almost enough to make one believe that Sanders isn’t really a principled anti-establishment crusader after all!
Sen. Bernie Sanders supporters love their former presidential candidate… until he endorses party nominee Hillary Clinton. Despite running a campaign to counter Clinton and the establishment interests that she represents, Sanders threw his support behind the Democratic presidential nominee in an effort to stop Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump from winning the election this November.
Sanders supporters did not take kindly to his decision, even booing the senator after he suggested they unite behind Clinton.
Whoops missus! Following the convention, Sanders announced that he is leaving the Democratic Party and returning to being an "independent" who just coincidentally votes in utter lockstep with the Democratic Party.
The fact that millions of people were somehow sold the idea that this washed-up old establishment crony is an "outsider" dedicated to fighting the system makes me sad. As a quick rule of thumb: people who actually have principles don’t sell them out for TV time.
Why did the Torchic cross the road?
It wouldn’t be Last Week in Weird without a bit about Pokémon Go, now would it? This week’s snippet takes us across the globe to the Netherlands, where an enterprising Trio called Geraldo, Jard, and Tom have taken it upon themselves to create, and begin selling, road signs warning motorists to watch out for aspiring Pokémon masters, inspired by a humorous campaign put on by the International Four Days Marches:
"Jard and I saw a girl walking with one of these signs, probably taken off of a pole during the Four Days [Marches], and I said right away we’d have to start selling those signs," Geraldo says.
Gerlado said he was only kidding, but Jard was excited about it: "the next day we called our friend Tom, who owns an advertising agency. He thought it was a great idea, so we got to work."
As a special bonus, this is the first time I’ve translated a block of text for Last Week in Weird; if you think my English stinks, try my Dutch!
I freely admit that this is only very distantly connected to libertarianism. Entrepreneurial spirit is terrific, and it’s awesome to see that the free market can take something as atrocious as the government’s endless sea of road signs and make it fun and desirable, but, yeah, this is all just excuse-making because those Pokémon road signs are adorable and I wanted to feature them somehow.
Semper Carus
The United States Navy is a giant make-work program for terrible engineers. I’ve been reporting on this for about as long as this column’s been around, and it hasn’t stopped being the case; this time out, we’ve discovered that the latest and greatest aircraft carrier, the perfectly-named USS Gerald R. Ford, is presently two years past due, nearly three billion dollars over budget, and doesn’t work. When I say it "doesn’t work," I mean it really doesn’t work:
It is the most expensive warship ever built, coming in at $12.9 billion (so far). But it can’t launch and recover aircraft, can’t mount a defense, and can’t transport bombs around the ship. In other words, the core functions of an aircraft carrier cannot be met by this particular, gold-plated monstrosity.
At least it hasn’t fallen down the stairs exiting Air Force One. Yet.
Your humble narrator has yet to discover which protracted naval battles all these monstrously-expensive warships are intended for, but perhaps that’s a saving grace: the fact that none of them actually work won’t cause anybody a mischief, since they don’t serve a purpose anyhow. And who knows: if they’re broken, maybe that will restrain the creeps in Washington from actually using them!
Twits
Last time we got together, it was Milo Yiannopoulos discovering, good and hard, just how Twitter doesn’t censor its users. This time around it’s Donald Trump, whose campaign messages are mysteriously disappearing from his profile and from his followers’ feeds:
You can check for yourself. Here is the tweet sent out by Trump yesterday and here is his main profile page — which doesn’t show the tweet. The tweet has been buried as if it never existed.
This is yet another example of Twitter shadow banning – where people on a designated ‘blacklist’ have their tweets relegated on search results and hidden from users’ timelines, while leftist politicians and commentators on a ‘whitelist’ have their tweets promoted.
I can confirm the burial of Trump’s fundraising tweet; it does not appear on his full timeline, though the direct link still works. I can’t wait to hear Jack Dorsey try to wriggle out of this one — bonus points will be awarded if his excuse contains the words "corporate speech" or "Citizens United."
Last Week in What an Amazing Coincidence
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