There are days when you wonder whether the New York Times editorial staff is working overtime to amuse us, or whether it comes naturally. They’re keeping alive the stale old sixties cliche, “Any country that can land a man on the moon can solve. . .” Of course, it is the perfect cliche for a president who hails from liberalism’s mesozoic era.
Like this story from their gnomish jester Ezra Klein:
. . . All we need to do is replace the animals, or at least a lot of them. Technologically, we’re closer to that than you might think. What we need is for government to put money and muscle behind the project — just as it’s doing for electric cars and weatherized homes and renewable energy — so that the future happens fast enough to save the present. This is the hole in the American Jobs Plan, and it wouldn’t take much money, just a bit of vision, to fill. . .
At its heart, the American Jobs Plan is a climate bill. But there isn’t a dollar for alternative proteins, despite animal agriculture’s huge contributions to both climate and pandemic risk. That’s worse than a mistake. It’s a failure of policy design. Luckily, it’s easily fixed.
And this may be my favorite sentence in the whole story:
I keep asking alternative protein experts what they wish was in the bill, and the answers I get back are almost laughably small compared with the sums Congress is otherwise considering.
“Alternative protein experts”? Is there someone with that designation on their business card or CV? This story really does appear a literal example of “fake news.”
In any case, this article will stand as a museum piece (and there are lots more howlers in the story to be enjoyed, but keep your coffee away from your keyboard) as a model of the kind of “money will cure everything” liberalism that expired in a gust in the 1960s.
In the meantime, my favorite version of that old cliche is, “Any country that can land a man on the moon can abolish the income tax.”
Also: can we land a man on the moon right now? Or even in five years? How long has is been since we last landed a man on the moon? And why not? The more you think about this, the dumber the cliche becomes. About the only thing missing here is the claim that moving to “alternative proteins” will solve systemic racism. Maybe because fake “white meat” would only perpetuate the problem.
Chaser:
Does Biden’s Climate Agenda Mean ‘Red Meat Passports’ Are Coming?
In Biden’s version of America, you might have to cut your consumption of red meat by a whopping 90 percent. According to a study from Michigan University’s Center for Sustainable Systems, to meet the changes proposed by Joe Biden, Americans would only be allowed to consume four pounds of red meat annually.
To put that in perspective, your red meat consumption would be limited to one typical hamburger per month.
Who doubts that the left would impose this by coercion if they could get away with it?
Also:
UPDATE—Okay, this is no longer a joking matter:
Epicurious is dead to me.
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.