Russian ambassador told Moscow that Kushner wanted secret communications channel with Kremlin

[Clevfan4life]

Wait, obf u treat the story of jonah not as an allegory but as an actual event?

[OldBrownsFan]

I do. Jesus used the illustration of Jonah as an example of his death and resurrection. I don't believe he would have used a fable to illustrate this.

[Clevfan4life]

@oldbrownsfan said:

I do. Jesus used the illustration of Jonah as an example of his death and resurrection. I don't believe he would have used a fable to illustrate this.

i havent read the bible in some time so im not entirely fsmiliar with the story anymore, but i vaguely recall this from childhood.....and it was in the allegorical context. I went to catholic school and they didn't even treat it as literal

[MLD Woody]

@oldbrownsfan said:

As for climate change I rarely post on it because I don't follow it enough. I hear some of these strange ideas coming from the liberal side that scare me such as pretty much having the masses go back to the stone age with no air conditioning or washing machines while the wealthy can pay some kind of carbon tax and plant a few trees and still fly around on their private jets and not have to sacrifice at all.

Wait... What?

[Clevfan4life]

obf's been walking around too many wall st ptotests

[Clevfan4life]

Nobody of any real pertinence is suggesting we go back to the flintstones

[calfoxwc]

#woodylovesdick

[OldBrownsFan]

@mld-woody said:

Wait... What?

One example of what I am talking about.

What progressives want to do is bring back sumptuary laws. Such laws govern how and what people can spend their money on.

The Menace of Air Conditioning

In their quest to ban ‘harmful’ luxuries, progressives want to solve something that has not been considered a problem for 250 years. Something strange has happened to air conditioning of late. It has become one of America’s chief sources of hot air. For the last decade, each summer as temperatures rise, so does a tempest of dismay at Americans’ affection for artificially cooled air. The latest gust of disapproval was vented by the Washington Post’s Karen Heller, the title of whose rambling, incoherent column against Willis Carrier’s gift captured well the attitude of a small but vociferous cabal: “I don’t need air conditioning, and neither do you.”

Air conditioning isn’t the only thing people are being urged to give up for a better life. An array of commentators, predominantly on the left, have been imploring their compatriots to forswear not only air conditioning but cars, meat, soda, and even children. While air conditioning and its “accomplices” are usually charged separately, it’s not difficult to discern a common reasoning behind the indictments. I don’t mean environmentalism, either, though that’s part of it. Rather, all are driven by the conviction that the items in question are luxuries, things people don’t need — and, because they aren’t needed, it is proper to beseech (and ultimately compel?) others to surrender them.

There are two ways to get people to give up goods society doesn’t want them to have: making them more expensive and banning them. The records of both can charitably be described as mixed. Nevertheless, the Left has been clear that it is open to both approaches to reduce the presence of these “bads.” The Left does have historical precedent on its side. For most of history, luxury items were subject not only to moral and social but also legal sanction. For most. But not all, and there’s the rub. For the Left’s solution to the perceived ills of air conditioning etc. is to revive sumptuary laws — a solution that, to be viable, requires turning the consumption of luxury goods back into a social problem, something it hasn’t been considered for 250 years.

The moral stigma that once attached to the idea of luxury has been effaced from the West’s cultural memory. (Look at some advertising if you don’t believe me.) Yet until recently, most societies regulated the purchase of luxury goods. They did so via sumptuary laws, as laws restricting personal expenditure are known. Sumptuary laws don’t outlaw the sale of certain goods; rather, they outlaw their purchase by certain people. The goods that can’t be purchased are “luxuries,” and the people who aren’t allowed to buy them are the poor. Sumptuary laws, write the scholars Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger, “confine the consumption of specific commodities to the elites,” thus “enforc[ing] rigid status structures.” Different societies defined luxury differently, but whatever it was, they all thought it was something the poor shouldn’t have.

Luxury for Me, but Not for Thee

Throughout history, one generation’s luxury has been the next generation’s necessity. What is novel about the goods discussed in this essay is that in their case, some advocates hope to reverse the process and turn this generation’s necessities into the next one’s luxuries. (Nor are the more ambitious likely to rest content restricting only these.) Some find that a laudable goal. Personally, I can’t help but think that a world without children and road trips would be a poorer world than the one it succeeded. Even today, few of humanity’s greatest advances would meet Mandeville’s definition. Are antibiotics a luxury? Humanity survived for eons without them. But who now would give them up because they are not strictly necessary? What about broadband Internet? The federal government certainly thinks it’s a necessity, as it is subsidizing access for the poor, thus sparing them from suffering the same deprivation all mankind did until 20 years ago. Examples could be adduced indefinitely. By now it should be clear that there are no definitions of luxury or necessity that can definitively describe even a single commodity, for even a single commodity will meet both definitions depending on who is applying them. And who is most likely not to have air conditioning, or to bear the brunt of consumption taxes? The poor. If an affluent, middle-aged white woman telling someone he doesn’t need air conditioning isn’t white privilege, there’s no such thing.

The rich have complained about how the poor spend money for as long as there has been money. For most of history, this was an illiberal posture. Now it seems to be gaining currency on the left. Sumptuary laws are oppressive. They exist solely to reinforce social hierarchies; that is, to keep the haves up and the have-nots down. They were already reactionary in the 18th century. They would be even more so today.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439581/air-conditioning-ban-puritan-reasoning-work

Varad Mehta‏ @varadmehta 3 Sep 2016

Love air conditioning, meat, sugar, cars, and children? Watch out, the left is coming for them. My first for @NRO.

What progressives want to do is bring back sumptuary laws. Such laws govern how and what people can spend their money on.

What sumptuary laws do is, in effect, tell the poor they can't buy things rich people can. They're designed to keep the poor in their place.

The rich are telling the poor what they can and can't have. And they can't have AC, cars, sugary drinks, meat, and children.

What else do you call it when you tell people they don't need air conditioning? It's always some affluent bien-pensant lefty saying it.

"Oh, someone wants to ban X, Y, or Z for the environment? That's just a sumptuary law in a new bottle."

[OldBrownsFan]

Another article on same lines:

Steyer Panelist Wants Massive Tax Hikes, Smaller TVs Experts: Panelist at NextGen event betrays environmental radicalism

The political activist group run by billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer featured a Canadian speaker at a Monday event who has called for significant tax hikes and for people to give up their televisions to combat global warming.

Steyer’s group, NextGen Climate Action, hosted Dr. Danny Harvey at a Monday event in Washington, D.C., titled "Can Keystone Pass the President's Climate Test?" Harvey has previously called for massive amounts of government spending and significant levels of personal privation to stem "climate change."

Harvey, a geography professor at the University of Toronto, said in a

that he believes that climate change is a "moral" issue, and that consumers must give up numerous modern luxuries in an effort to stem the rise of global temperatures, which have not actually increased since the 1990s.

"At the individual level, we need to adopt frugality and simplicity as a part of our moral compass," he told Dr. Mishka Lysack, a professor of social work at the University of Calgary, who conducted the interview. "You don’t need that large 52-inch plasma screen TV. It’s an electricity pig. Be happy with something smaller and more modest."

"I think our taxes are going to have to go up because some of the things that need to be done are going to be collective expenditures and it’s going to have to be paid for," Harvey added. He called for massive increases in government expenditures, on the order of a trillion dollars per year, to combat what he sees as the existential threat of global climate change.

http://freebeacon.com/issues/steyer-panelist-wants-massive-hikes-in-taxes-government-spending/

[MLD Woody]

I only read through some of that, but I think I get the vibe.

Those on the far left without any scienific clout ranting against air conditioning do not discredit the very real, scientific consensus on man made climate change. That is the first thing you need to realize. There's no point in you bringing up how "ridiculous" these "solutions" are if you can't even admit what is happening in the first place. That is a lot like Cal jumping all over the lace from "we're not warming" to "the sun is causing the natural warming" to "well co2 and warming is good anyway".

Second, there is a habit of many climate deniers to take a report that says something along the lines of us consuming large amounts of meat contributes to climate change and regurgitate it back up as "The left says we can't eat meat anymore!" No, that isn't what it says at all.

[OldBrownsFan]

The solutions are what I don't like. I see the masses of people being told to do without and sacrifice while the wealthy will buy their way out of it with so called carbon offsets.

[Westside Steve]

Uh.......

So?

WSS

[MLD Woody]

@oldbrownsfan said:

The solutions are what I don't like. I see the masses of people being told to do without and sacrifice while the wealthy will buy their way out of it with so called carbon offsets.

Well I would argue the first step is getting on the same page about the realities of the situation. Agreeing with what the science is telling us. Then we can accurately work toward solutions.

[OldBrownsFan]

@westside-steve said:

Uh.......

So?

WSS

If that is for what I posted the "so" would be shared sacrifice. If the wealthy can buy their way out of any sacrifices while the poor are the ones who give up their televisions, air conditioners and other appliances that have made our lives easier and better that smacks of the kind of class system I personally hate such as in the Civil War you were drafted unless you could pay $300 and then you were exempt and you could buy your way out of being drafted with the peons. In this case the wealthy would pay a carbon offset and plant a few trees and live in air conditioned comfort and fly around in private jets while the masses would do without. No thanks, I don't want any part of a system like that.

[Westside Steve]

@oldbrownsfan said:

If that is for what I posted the "so" would be shared sacrifice. If the wealthy can buy their way out of any sacrifices while the poor are the ones who give up their televisions, air conditioners and other appliances that have made our lives easier and better that smacks of the kind of class system I personally hate such as in the Civil War you were drafted unless you could pay $300 and then you were exempt and you could buy your way out of being drafted with the peons. In this case the wealthy would pay a carbon offset and plant a few trees and live in air conditioned comfort and fly around in private jets while the masses would do without. No thanks, I don't want any part of a system like that.

Didn't even see your post. A direct-response to the OP.

But you know the old saying, life is like a shit sandwich. The more bread you have the less shit you have to eat.

WSS

[MLD Woody]

@westside-steve said:

Didn't even see your post. A direct-response to the OP.

But you know the old saying, life is like a shit sandwich. The more bread you have the less shit you have to eat.

WSS

Well, that's not true. You're still eating the same amount of shit.

[calfoxwc]

#woodylovesdick

[Clevfan4life]

#CalOpensAssToShowEveryone

[MLD Woody]

Yeah, he's getting back to the stage where he's creeping me out.

#woodylovesdick... I'm afraid that's more of a wish than an insult...

[Clevfan4life]

He's "getting back" to creeping you out? U have caught him talking about licking mens feet and toes right? He does that about once a week so he's never stopped creeping me out.....he shouldnt be allowed around children