Liberal social engineers adore both electric vehicles and public transportation. Meanwhile, as we have seen before, an electric bus just burst into flames:

An electric CTtransit bus caught on fire at the bus depot in Hamden [Connecticut] on Saturday morning.

Although it is not known for sure what caused the fire…

…fire officials said it’s typically difficult to put out fires caused by lithium-ion batteries “due to the thermal chemical process that produces great heat and continually reignites.”

One day earlier,

Governor Ned Lamont (CT-D) announced a new State Law that requires Connecticut to transfer all State vehicles to electrical power.

On Friday, Governor Lamont joined state agency officials, legislators, and environmental stakeholders on the New Haven Green to highlight the enactment of Public Act 22-25.

Lamont’s office quacks that this will improve “health outcomes for Connecticut residents, and help to mitigate impacts from the climate crisis.” Tell that to the firefighter and two bus workers were taken to the hospital after the electric bus burst into flames in Hamden.

As for the “climate crisis,” it comes around every year and is cured by autumn, not government.

Let’s hope that Connecticut’s pricey and environmentally harmful electric buses are not paid for with federal funds, as in nearby Massachusetts.

On tips from Wiggins and Chris Neilson.

In a country run by moonbats, there can be no safe haven for children’s innocence anywhere. Even Crayola is pushing LGBTism on tikes:

Crayola – which reportedly has a target market of ages 2-10 – shared images of a transgender model on its social media accounts. Crayola promoted Julian Gavino AKA The Disabled Hippie, on the crayon company’s Facebook and Instagram pages to celebrate “Disability Pride Month.”

“Julian Gavino, (he/him) is a fashion model, writer, and activist who identifies as a transgender man,” Crayola wrote. …

Crayola posted three images of Gavino, including one where he is wearing a leopard-print jumpsuit and another with a lime green jacket with a chain bra as well as latex pants and high-heeled boots.

At least there is still pushback. Commented normal person Kristi Van,

“Usually I buy a ton of supplies to donate, this year we will be leaving Crayola out of the donation. Kids don’t need to be taught about sexual preference or changing genders while trying to color.”

Pushback works. The Facebook and Instagram links above are not currently accessible. Looks like Crayola might be in retreat for now.

On a tip from Franco.

“Bidonville” is French for shantytown. We now have a similar word in English — “Bidenville”:

In America under President Joe Biden, the word “Bidenville” is beginning to gain traction as a term for a waste-filled, insalubrious tent city inhabited by what the left calls “people experiencing homelessness,” who often suffer from an unfortunate combination of drug addiction and mental illness.

Bidenvilles are different from the Hoovervilles of the Great Depression.

Hoovervilles comprised able-bodied people who were out of work due to the worst economic crisis and highest unemployment in U.S. history. Now, unemployment is low and entry-level jobs go begging. The Bidenvilles of today are filled more by ideology and incompetence than economic duress.

This will change if Biden et al. are allowed to destroy the economy through excessive taxation, spending, and malicious regulation.

Bidenvilles are exploding because cities are run by liberals, who not only refuse to clean up homeless encampments but facilitate the drug use that characterizes them. Also contributing to the swelling numbers is Biden’s literally treasonous policy of refusing to defend the border.

[W]ith illegal crossings topping 200,000 a month, and half or more of these migrants being released and moved into the interior, the numbers of newly arrived and needy illegal aliens are rising all over the country. Some end up on the streets, compounding already dire problems of homelessness.

No problem created by government is so bad that government cannot make it worse still:

D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat, introduced an emergency appropriations bill July 19 that would provide additional funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Emergency Food and Shelter Program. …

If Norton’s measure passes, taxpayers not only would be on the hook for illegal immigrants’ shelter, food, and medical care after crossing the border, followed by transportation to their favored U.S. destination. Taxpayers also would be shelling out for housing and feeding the migrants once they arrived. This would be the ultimate (socialist) red carpet.

In case the inevitable effect of throwing other people’s money at homelessness is not intuitively obvious, we have the example of San Francisco, which spends an estimated $106,000 per derelict and is consequently so infested with them that the sidewalks are ankle-deep in human waste.

The core objective of Democrat policy is to reduce all of America to a Bidenville. Then the party’s power over us will be absolute.

On a tip from Blackjack.

As previously mentioned the gay disease monkeypox is a threat to children. Already, kids are getting infected with monkeypox in the USA. Reports top CDC technocrat Rochelle Walensky:

‘We have seen now two cases that have occurred in children.

‘Both of these are traced back to individuals who come from the men-who-have-sex-with-men community, the gay men’s community.’

She added that these cases have been on the whole ‘adjacent to the community most at risk’.

Or rather, the community that most puts itself and others at risk.

An estimated 3%–10% of children infected with monkeypox will die.

Until now monkeypox infections have been almost exclusively among gay or bisexual men.

It is open season on children’s innocence these days. That’s why monkeypox is more of a threat to them than Covid ever was, despite the pointless mask mandates.

On a tip from Chris Neilson.

A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth, or when a bureauweenie says the quiet part out loud by stating what all of us know — for example, that gas prices are high because our Democrat rulers want them that way:

Alan Eyre, a longtime State Department staffer and senior foreign service officer, tweeted, “I prefer high gas prices = less driving, less CO2.”

Those who do not worship in the Church of Global Warming are less thrilled by the effect Biden’s War on Oil has had on gasoline prices:

California GOP congressional candidate Ron Bassilian called Eyre a “ghoul” over the comment before noting that gas prices are “inelastic” to drivers.

“Perhaps,” Eyre replied to Bassilian, “But I don’t think it is inelastic and I remember in the 1970s the oil embargo led to a massive increase in renewables.”

To Democrats, the 1970s and all that went with them — gas lines, stagflation, Jimmy Carter, possibly even bell bottoms — were good.

Then Eyre tried to make Bassilian barf with the cloying, condescending, sanctimonious niceness that characterizes liberal elitists:

He included the hashtag #BeKind at the end of his tweet.

These are the people who implement US foreign policy, at the direction of fellow moonbats like Joe Biden and Antony Blinken. Seen in that light, the Afghanistan debacle makes sense.

On a tip from Blackjack.

The Newspeak Dictionary is revised constantly so as to control our thoughts by controlling our vocabulary. Usually this is applied to cultural issues, because politics is downstream of culture. But this method of manipulation can be applied to any topic, including economics. The word “recession” has not been abolished yet — but it has now been redefined:

For a sensible definition of “recession” and related terms, we can paraphrase Ronald Reagan. Recession is when your neighbor loses his job; depression is when you lose yours; recovery is when Democrats have been pried loose from power.

On a tip from Occam’s Stubble.

Kalamazoo, Michigan is helping to advance what Barack Obama called America’s “fundamental transformation” by officially decriminalizing, littering, public urination, and even public defecation.

Local business owners are not happy:

Becky Bil, co-owner of Pop City Popcorn in downtown Kalamazoo, said there are aggressive and unstable panhandlers in the area and she is concerned about people avoiding downtown because of these issues.

“People have to clean up where they have defecated right in front of your door of your business,” Bil said.

Yet the city commission approved the decriminalization unanimously. Under liberal rule, monster corporations like Amazon and Walmart have a prominent seat at the table. Local businesses are not even allowed in the room, as we learned during the campaign to eradicate them during the Covid lockdowns.

Cherri Emery, owner of Cherri’s Chocol’art, said there is a major problem downtown. …

Business owners are dealing with urinating and defecating around their businesses on a daily basis, she said.

“I don’t understand why we would make it easier for them,” Emery said.

Kalamazoo Mayor David Anderson explains why. Because equity.

Anderson said he hopes the change will allow police to better use their time related to these issues, and that the effort is part of changing ordinances for equity.

He is of course a Democrat.

As Andrea Widburg observes,

In the name of equity … it’s clear that wokesters in city governments across America are determined to return us to a time of stench, diseases (dysentery, typhoid, plague, etc.), and parasites (you don’t want to know) that many of us foolishly believed had gone forever. In Portland, which was once a sparkling, clean Northwestern city, the homeless have spread across whole neighborhoods…

It isn’t only businessowners who have a problem with public defecation in Portland:

In utopia, every city will smell like San Francisco.

That’s what you vote for when you vote for Democrats. That’s what you tolerate when you tolerate moonbattery.

On tips from R F, Chris Neilson, and Mr. Freemarket.

Looks like a state of emergency is the new normal. The World Health Organization’s communist Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has declared a global health emergency over monkeypox — despite only five people having died worldwide and despite his own expert committee voting against the declaration.

Here’s why it qualifies as an emergency:

“Although I am declaring a public health emergency of international concern, for the moment this is an outbreak that is concentrated among men who have sex with men, especially those with multiple sexual partners,” Tedros told a media briefing in Geneva.

A disease is more serious if it is spread primarily among homosexuals, because according to the value system of the Liberal World Order, members of the LGBT community are worth more than normal people. That’s why so much of our money is spent on AIDS relative to more prevalent lethal diseases:

[The National Institutes of Health] spends about $2,583 each year per person with HIV/AIDS, $418 each year per person with cancer, and only $38 each year per person with diabetes.

Confirming that this is about Cultural Marxism, not public health, Tedros yelps that “Stigma and discrimination can be as dangerous as any virus.”

At least, since it is primarily a disease of homosexuals, we don’t have to worry much about children. But I’m forgetting — there is now such a thing as LGBT youth, enabled and empowered by the groomers who dominate public schools. Consequently, at least 181 K-12 educators have been arrested for sex crimes involving children in the USA so far this year. This could make monkeypox an issue for kids.

On tips from Blackjack, ABC of the ANC, Dragon’s Lair, and Mr. Freemarket.

Even as students pass through public schools without learning to read and write, taxpayers are bled white by the looting spree that is public education:

Thousands of former Black and Latino teachers in New York City stand to collect an astonishing $1.8 billion in damages after the city stopped fighting a decades-long discrimination lawsuit which alleged that a licensing test that teachers were formerly required to pass was biased.

When leftists sue a government run by leftists, jackpot justice is a foregone conclusion.

Between 1990 and 2014, New York State required all public school teachers to pass a Liberal Arts and Sciences Test in order to maintain their teaching license. In 1996, a group of minority teachers and prospective educators filed a lawsuit to abolish the testing requirement, citing a disparity in passage rates between white and minority test-takers.

According to liberal ideology, if whites do better on a test, then the test is racist. To suggest that those who score poorly are less qualified would be — you guessed it — racist.

Those blessed with the good fortune to be oppressed by racism get to loot the rest of us via the government.

Under the settlement just reached, the city has already given payouts totaling $835 million, with up to another billion potentially in play.

That’s how much you get for flunking a test. There is no cash reward for passing the test. Liberalism rewards failure, not success — unless you count this as success:

Sylvia Alvarez … will receive $1.1 million after failing the test ten times and ultimately losing her job. Another former teacher, Theodore Regis, who lost his teaching job after failing the test five times, “earned” himself a payout of $1.2 million.

It’s no wonder that students can’t pass meaningful tests, if the teachers themselves are not expected to pass them.

As far back as the 2018-19 academic year, per-pupil spending in the city was $28,004, by far the highest among the nation’s 100 largest school systems. By 2022, according to the New York Post, it had risen to $34,900 per pupil, a growth rate of more than twice the inflation figure from 2000-2021.

Yet no matter how much money is wasted, NYC public schools are a failure, due to the liberal ideology that suffuses them.

The few who can, escape to charter schools:

Eighth graders in New York’s largest charter-school network, Success Academy, recently excelled in four of the five Regent exams that are required for graduation from high school. The students’ overall pass rates on all the exams were a stunning 93% or higher.

However, in a country run by moonbats, failing tests is more advantageous than passing them.

On a tip from Blackjack.

On a tip from Jester.

As we have seen repeatedly, our moonbat rulers really do intend for us to eat insects instead of food. They have begun to apply social pressure to nudge the weak-minded into accepting the idea by implying that if you won’t choke down creepy-crawlies while Gavin Newsom et al. savor haute cuisine at the French Laundry, you are a bad person who hates the climate. You may even be a bigot.

Britain’s state media issues the order to like the idea of eating bugs through an African named Pascal Kwesiga:

The air in my family home in Uganda was filled with a distinct aroma, not dissimilar to the smell of beef being grilled. It was December 2000 and my sister, Maggie, was frying grasshoppers. The more she stirred the green, crispy locust-like insects, the stronger and richer the aroma became. As they sizzled and steam rose from the pan, my taste buds tingled – I couldn’t wait to eat this delicious snack.

You wouldn’t prefer your own culture’s idea of food to Africa’s, would you? That would be ethnocentric — or worse.

Kwesiga assures us that he ate grasshoppers regularly throughout his childhood, and that they taste better than meat. You can even fry them without cooking oil thanks to the slime that oozes out of them. More importantly, grasshoppers lower the carbon footprint of those who consume them by a factor of 10, according to an Expert.

The Experts have plenty of theoretical facts to prove we should eat bugs:

Replacing half of the meat eaten worldwide with mealworms and crickets could reduce farmland use by a third, freeing up 1,680 million hectares…

Think of all the asylum seeker registration centers that could be built on that land.

Cultivating insects produces significantly fewer greenhouse gases than livestock production… Crickets, for example, produce up to 80% less methane than cows and 8-12 times less ammonia than pigs…

We can’t have people eating cows and pigs instead of bugs during a climate emergency, can we?

Kwesiga is a good person. Are you? When not everyone chooses to be a good person, Big Government has no choice but to resort to coercion.

The New York Times is already ready to move on to what’s next after eating bugs.

On tips from Occam’s Stubble and Steve T.

Excellent news: a hideous, mostly useless, doubtlessly taxpayer-subsidized wind turbine in Crowell, Texas will not be slicing wings off of any more eagles, now that it has been struck by lightning.

We might need to crank up the AC today. That black smoke looks like it could cause global warming.

On tips from Wiggins and Chris Neilson.