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    Tuesday, December 20, 2016

    In Case of Climate Change, Break Glass

    If you care about "Climate change" please  ensure you follow these simple instructions




    Dear liberals:


    Sunday, December 18, 2016

    Why Trump Won

    Selena Zito gets it, and has for a while.

    Her article in the Washington Examiner lays it out there for the media and the Left

    Wednesday, December 14, 2016

    Russians, Meddling

    The latest whine from the Left is a rehash of one they peddled during the campaign, that the Russians had a preferred candidate in 2016, and that Trump was that candidate.

    Now they are using the report, referenced in the Washington Post, and attributed to anonymous sources, that the Intelligence Community has determined that the Russians put a finger on the election to elect Trump. 

    Reality check: The only effort we're talking about here is the hacking of the DNC emails and John  Podesta's emails, most likely by Russian hackers.  Despite John Bolton's protestations, it is likely that some Russian hackers were involved in these hacks. What is unlikely is what the Post and their anonymous sources want you to believe, that the Russians somehow favored Trump and their lack of releasing RNC emails proves that.

    Let's be clear here.  That's it.  There is no attempted hacking of voting machines, of tabulation counters, or of any outright manipulation of voting.  The question comes down to: Do you believe that the WikiLeaks revelations were enough to tip the balance from Hillary to Trump, across the 4 swing states (NC, FL, OH, IA) and the 3 "Blue Wall" states (PA, WI, MI)? 

    I said repeatedly during this cycle that this boiled down to how mad were people, and how many of them were there.  Trump did that same calculus, and guess what, it turns out, pretty mad.  And a lot of them

    The typical Liberal forces are rallying around this nonsense, from the WaPo, to the New York Times, to the Economist, to the usual players in Congress, to their media lackeys at CNN, MSNBC, and the big three networks.

    Their fantasies take two forms:
    1. Trump is diminished and his electoral victory questioned and his legitimacy reduced
    2. Electors hear the siren call and somehow decide that Trump is truly a puppet of Putin and decide to deny him 270 EVs and send this election into the House.
    Like they were with the Jill Stein recount (for which she paid ~$28k per additional Trump vote margin), they will not be satisfied with the results.

    The people who even care about these machinations are Washington insiders and political cognoscenti.  The rest of the country, and that means 95% of the people, were neither influenced by these revelations initially, and do not give a rat's patootie about them now.

    These people, who elected Trump (except for you, California) are going to be very upset should these attempts lead to any change in the electoral process in which they participated.

    Trump knows that the country doesn't care, and he is the ONE person in Washington who matters who does.  He is right to brush these off as the partisan attacks that they are.

    As usual in the Season of Trump, he is running circles around our dishonest and partisan media.

    Friday, December 9, 2016

    John Glenn & the Future of NASA

     John Glenn is dead, and Mark Steyn has a few things to say about it. You should always heed Steyn.

    I grew up in the '70s and loved everything about the space race.  For those generations who weren't alive when we were walking on the moon, they have missed what was the pinnacle of human achievement.  

    Today, NASA is more concerned with Muslim outreach and helping screw the poorest people in the world by playing politics with "climate change."  Some of us remember when NASA was about challenging us to dream big and explore the universe, when space exploration was actually their mission.

    I hope the Trump administration will return NASA to that goal, restore its former glory, and our sense of national pride and technological achievement.  An entire generation of engineers could be dissuaded from developing smart phone apps and losing money on inane internet adventures, and could instead reach for the stars.

    I hope Mark Steyn is wrong when he laments:


    'Today, when we talk about Americans boldly going where no man has gone before, we mean the ladies' bathroom. Progress."

    Biden, the Class Idiot

    Seriously, there are people who actually believe we can "stop" the climate from changing.

    This is what is wrong with you idiots.




    Thursday, December 8, 2016

    The Abortion Death Cult

    From this week's National Review:

    The French State Council recently ruled that a video featuring children with Down syndrome will not be permitted to air on French television because the children’s smiles would “disturb the conscience of women who had lawfully made different personal life choices”—in other words, seeing these children happy would upset women who had aborted children suspected of having the syndrome. The award-winning “Dear Future Mom” video shows young people with Down syndrome from around the world speaking in a variety of languages about being able to learn to write and to ride a bike, hug their mothers and go to school, earn money and live on their own. In France, 86 percent of babies who receive a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome are aborted. Why should anyone’s conscience be at risk of being disturbed over this?
    Why, indeed, in a culture of death, should we disturb anyone for their "choices."

    Thursday, November 17, 2016

    Steve Bannon Speaks

    Buzzfeed provides a transcript of a discussion where Steve Bannon laid out his global nationalist vision in unusually in-depth remarks delivered by Skype to a conference held inside the Vatican in the summer of 2014.

    Some highlights I pulled out, but you who are concerned over Bannon should read the whole thing to get some insight into his thinking.

    on Capitalism:

    But there’s a strand of capitalism today — two strands of it, that are very disturbing.

    One is state-sponsored capitalism. And that’s the capitalism you see in China and Russia. I believe it’s what Holy Father [Pope Francis] has seen for most of his life in places like Argentina, where you have this kind of crony capitalism of people that are involved with these military powers-that-be in the government, and it forms a brutal form of capitalism that is really about creating wealth and creating value for a very small subset of people. And it doesn’t spread the tremendous value creation throughout broader distribution patterns that were seen really in the 20th century.

    The second form of capitalism that I feel is almost as disturbing, is what I call the Ayn Rand or the Objectivist School of libertarian capitalism. And, look, I’m a big believer in a lot of libertarianism. I have many many friends that’s a very big part of the conservative movement — whether it’s the UKIP movement in England, it’s many of the underpinnings of the populist movement in Europe, and particularly in the United States.

    However, that form of capitalism is quite different when you really look at it to what I call the “enlightened capitalism” of the Judeo-Christian West. It is a capitalism that really looks to make people commodities, and to objectify people, and to use them almost — as many of the precepts of Marx — and that is a form of capitalism, particularly to a younger generation [that] they’re really finding quite attractive. And if they don’t see another alternative, it’s going to be an alternative that they gravitate to under this kind of rubric of “personal freedom.”

    On Breitbart:

    The central thing that binds that all together is a center-right populist movement of really the middle class, the working men and women in the world who are just tired of being dictated to by what we call the party of Davos. A group of kind of — we’re not conspiracy-theory guys, but there’s certainly — and I could see this when I worked at Goldman Sachs — there are people in New York that feel closer to people in London and in Berlin than they do to people in Kansas and in Colorado, and they have more of this elite mentality that they’re going to dictate to everybody how the world’s going to be run.

    I will tell you that the working men and women of Europe and Asia and the United States and Latin America don’t believe that. They believe they know what’s best for how they will comport their lives. They think they know best about how to raise their families and how to educate their families. So I think you’re seeing a global reaction to centralized government, whether that government is in Beijing or that government is in Washington, DC, or that government is in Brussels. So we are the platform for the voice of that.

    On Bankers and the 2008 collapse:

    The 2008 crisis, I think the financial crisis — which, by the way, I don’t think we’ve come through — is really driven I believe by the greed, much of it driven by the greed of the investment banks. My old firm, Goldman Sachs — traditionally the best banks are leveraged 8:1. When we had the financial crisis in 2008, the investment banks were leveraged 35:1. Those rules had specifically been changed by a guy named Hank Paulson. He was secretary of Treasury. As chairman of Goldman Sachs, he had gone to Washington years before and asked for those changes. That made the banks not really investment banks, but made them hedge funds — and highly susceptible to changes in liquidity.

    In addition, I think you really need to go back and make banks do what they do: Commercial banks lend money, and investment banks invest in entrepreneurs and to get away from this trading — you know, the hedge fund securitization, which they’ve all become basically trading operations and securitizations and not put capital back and really grow businesses and to grow the economy.

    When you have this kind of crony capitalism, you have a different set of rules for the people that make the rules. It’s this partnership of big government and corporatists. I think it starts to fuel, particularly as you start to see negative job creation. If you go back, in fact, and look at the United States’ GDP, you look at a bunch of Europe. If you take out government spending, you know, we’ve had negative growth on a real basis for over a decade.

    And that all trickles down to the man in the street. If you look at people’s lives, and particularly millennials, look at people under 30 — people under 30, there’s 50% really under employment of people in the United States, which is probably the most advanced economy in the West, and it gets worse in Europe.

    On Islamism

    But I strongly believe that whatever the causes of the current drive to the caliphate was — and we can debate them, and people can try to deconstruct them — we have to face a very unpleasant fact: And that unpleasant fact is that there is a major war brewing, a war that’s already global. It’s going global in scale, and today’s technology, today’s media, today’s access to weapons of mass destruction, it’s going to lead to a global conflict that I believe has to be confronted today.

    On Putin

    I’m not justifying Vladimir Putin and the kleptocracy that he represents, because he eventually is the state capitalist of kleptocracy. However, we the Judeo-Christian West really have to look at what he’s talking about as far as traditionalism goes — particularly the sense of where it supports the underpinnings of nationalism — and I happen to think that the individual sovereignty of a country is a good thing and a strong thing. I think strong countries and strong nationalist movements in countries make strong neighbors, and that is really the building blocks that built Western Europe and the United States, and I think it’s what can see us forward.

    You know, Putin’s been quite an interesting character. He’s also very, very, very intelligent. I can see this in the United States where he’s playing very strongly to social conservatives about his message about more traditional values, so I think it’s something that we have to be very much on guard of. Because at the end of the day, I think that Putin and his cronies are really a kleptocracy, that are really an imperialist power that want to expand. However, I really believe that in this current environment, where you’re facing a potential new caliphate that is very aggressive that is really a situation — I’m not saying we can put it on a back burner — but I think we have to deal with first things first.




    Saturday, November 12, 2016

    The Real Problem with White America - Smug Liberals

    There is a class of white people, they're in the top 5%. They've really no conception of what it's like to make a living with your hands. To farm, or to learn a trade, or to toil as a welder or a plumber.

    For them, they've been comfortable their entire life. They've attended college, the nation's finest in many cases. That's fine, that's the American dream, and the value of the work they do with their brains is fantastic. It's important and it's valuable.

    This isn't quite the top 1%, but it's the top 5%.

    95% of Americans live in a quite different world. They strive to be in the top 5%, or to get their kids in it. They work hard, with their hands, or with multiple jobs, and they've been left behind by this awesome economy that has favored the 5%. This is not an 8 year phenomena, it's been going on for 25 years. There's plenty of people who have forgotten them, across both parties.

    These people are not racists, sexists, homophobes. They voted for Obama - twice, and they have received few of the bounties of the last 8 years.

    They're angry, and they vote, too, and they voted for Trump this time.

    I am sick and tired of rich, white, suburbanites who have never known the indignity of an unemployment check whining about their racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia.

    Get out of your safe spaces and learn something about America.

    My Agenda For Trump

    Some things I am looking forward to with Trump and a GOP Congress:

    Immediately:
    1. A return to regular order in the House and Senate
    2. Cancelling all of Obama's executive overreaches
    3. Supreme Court Judge Ted Cruz
    4. More Ships! Especially submarines
    5. Fracking expanded in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York.
    6. Tearing up the Iran "deal"
    7. Release of drilling on government owned land
    8. Opting out of the Climate "Deals" with China, and the Paris agreement
    9. Shifting $500M of PPfA money to real womens health organizations or eliminating it altogether
    Longer Term:
    1. Ending Obamacare and actually getting affordable health care (like Trump, the 26 year olds on parents plans can stay, or maybe lower it to 24, and the pre-existing conditions clause needs to be worked out so that it's fair to people without driving costs through the roof - another debate, perhaps)
    2. Securing the border (with a physical wall, where appropriate), ending Visa Overstays, reforming the H1B scam program; then reforming the LEGAL immigration system, and return to a quota system, vice chain migration
    3. A defense build up that signals the Chinese, Russians, and Iranians that we're serious about ending their attempts at global/regional hegemony. Reaffirming our support for the one true western democracy in the Middle East and supporting reform efforts in egypt and Iraq and any other ME country that wants to secularize
    4. Mark Cuban going away
    5. Chelsea Clinton in the House (seriously, don't we always need a Clinton around to remind us of what real corruption looks like)

    Tuesday, November 8, 2016

    Dems to Their Angry Voters - Take This Establishment Hack and Like It

    It's election day.

    Voters are angry, and how angry they are will determine what happens today.

    I would like my liberal friends (and enemies) to consider how each party treated their angry element.

    The GOP listened (of a fashion) and allowed the angry partisans to coalesce behind the candidate who best diagnosed their problem, Donald Trump.

    He's imperfect, but he has voiced the concerns of many in the GOP's orbit.  The beast within the GOP is being fed.

    In contrast, the Dems had Bernie Sanders with a very energized based, voicing many of the same concerns as the GOP's disaffected voters.

    What did the Dems do?

    As we've seen from Wikileaks, the Clinton machine put their finger on the scales and rigged (yes, rigged) the Dem primaries to ensure a Bernie loss.  This time, Hillary would not be denied the nomination.

    Then, they told those Bernie voters to get in line, and take this Establishment Hag and like it.

    Basically, they gave them the finger.

    The angry GOP voters are going to go for Trump.

    Will they be enough.

    Sunday, October 30, 2016

    Today's Anti-Hillary Roundup

    Here are a few interesting anti-Hillary posts from this week:

    First, from InfoWars:

    Hillary Clinton is clearly trying to get her pal George Soros to rig this election.  Via InfoWars:

    The U.K.-based company Smartmatic has sent voting machines to important battleground states across the US including Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

    “Other jurisdictions affected are California, District of Columbia, Illinois, Louisiana, Missouri, New Jersey, Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin,” noted the Daily Caller.

    “Smartmatic Chairman Mark Malloch-Brown is a former U.N. official and sits on the board of Soros’ Open Society Foundations.”

    The discovery has caused concern among the US voting populace given Soros’ deep ties with Clinton.


    =============

    Next Up:

    This week, Trump's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was defaced by members of the Party of Tolerance™, then replaced.  Then, the replacement was being "guarded" by a homeless black woman and Trump supporter, who was promptly attacked by more members of the Party of Tolerance™.  All caught on You Tube.


    I wonder what tolerant "moderates" and Hillary activists like Ralf Gomez think of this kind of activism?  Pretty effective, eh?  And I am sure so totally not coordinated by Bob Creamer or anyone like him...

    ================

    Speaking of Bob Creamer, 

    While us bitter, partisan hacks are busy convincing Jim Comey to come join us and bring down the Hillary campaign by getting her emails onto a computer shared by serial sexter and overall creep Anthony Weiner and Hillary girl Friday Huma Abedin, Wikileaks has confirmed the ties shown in the Project Veritas videos between Clinton fixer, agitator, and convicted felon Bob Creamer and Clinton CAMPAIGN MANAGER Robby Mook ("Bob Creamer...is close to Robby Mook").

    It is demonstrated that the Clinton campaign coordinated with the PAC being run by Creamer to stir up trouble at Trump rallies, and if you don't believe that, then YOU are a bitter, partisan hack, and not the disinterested moderate you purport to be.

    Looks like Lux got his desire to get the netroots more involved.



    ===================

    While the Clintonistas were attacking Jim Comey for partisanship and attacking anyone who pointed out that there may be something actually here as Bitter Partisans, the Washington Examiner dug up the Clinton's reaction to the 1992 revelation that Cap Weinberger would be indicted in the Iran-Contra scandal. Nothing like a little good old Liberal Hypocrisy

    ================
    Via Twitter, I found this Guardian (not typically a right-wing British newspaper) article on the rape allegations against Trump.  Again, the Party of Morality sometimes throws these allegations out to counter the real allegations that Bill Clinton is a serial rapist.

    Doing the work American reporters won't do, The Guardian  provides some insight and actual investigating into the people behind the trump rape allegations.  This reads like a parody, but it is really what is going on.

    As I suspected, these are completely fabricated.

    Anyone who pushes this nonsense to you, just say, "yeah, right."

    Saturday, October 29, 2016

    The Trouble With Huma

    The FBI Director dropped a bombshell yesterday that he was reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails based on new information from an "unrelated" investigation.

    Later on Friday, we learned that "unrelated" investigation was the Anthony Weiner sexting scandal, in which Mr. Weiner was sexting an underage girl.

    During the course of that investigation, the FBI took possession of several computers used in the Weiner household, among them one shared by Mr Weiner and his (now estranged) wife, Huma Abedin.

    Herein the relation.

    Huma happens to be Hillary's long term Girl Friday and potential Chief of Staff in a Hillary administration, so, it's kind of a big fvcking deal, as Joe Biden might say.

    So, what happened here and what is the likely outcome?

    We know the Clintonistas spent a lot of time traveling. That's Hillary's number one accomplishment as Secretary of State, so they were on mobile devices alot.  So much so, that we know Hillary ran through 17 of these things (all of which have been destroyed, sadly), and we also know that Hillary was prone to ask her minions to "pls prt" when she wanted to read a particularly interesting email.

    Huma testified that she would frequently send these to her personal email accounts for later printing, ostensibly when she was somewhere with a convenient printer hooked up.  This is where she may find herself in some personal legal hot water with the investigators.  I don't know the details of her "pls prt" testimony, but, we may find out that she misled the FBI over the depth and breadth of her emailing to private accounts.  She may have even lied about the accounts.

    Personally, I think Huma is in big trouble.

    But, is Hillary in trouble, too?

    That really depends on the nature of the emails and the trail back to Hillary.  If it turns out that in this trove of emails there are emails that were work related and not turned over to the FBI, she can make the case that she turned over all known recoverable emails and that she had no knowledge of this Huma cache.  I think both those are lies, but they probably couldn't lead to perjury charges against Hillary.

    If it turns out there are classified emails, and that they passed through Hillary's hands, then she may not be in legal trouble due to Comey's previously established "intent" standard, but she would certainly be in deep political trouble.

    If the emails contain evidence that the private server that Hillary maintained was clearly established to prevent future disclosure and harbored clearly classified email at some point, then she is guilty on the "intent" standard and on several other laws, including perjury.

    What will the Hillary gang do about Huma?

    She's problem number one, and she has a long history of, err, service, to Hillary.  Will she fall on her sword for Hillary, or will they throw her overboard?  And will all this happen before November 8th?

    I feel sorry for Huma.  She has had to work for an odious woman for many years, and maybe she and Hillary have the kind of special relationship that only they can share.  She was forced into a sham marriage with an equally (ok, more) odious man, in Anthony Weiner.

    If anyone has suffered for this, it is Huma.

    I think her suffering may be in prison for a while.

    Saturday, October 22, 2016

    Trump loves him some Russians!

    The Left is trying to push it as Gospel Truth that Donald Trump is in the pockets of the Russians, and that he's really just a Russian proxy.

    He has admittedly issued some friendly statements about Vlad Putin and the Russians, so it's worth considering.

    Many of them cite Donald J Trump Jr's 2008 comments as quoted in this Washington Post article as some sort of proof:

    "Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
    Personally, if that were backed up by some actual reporting that would shed light on it, I would find it much more damning. As it is, it sounds like so much of Trumpland, bluster, probably for the specific audience.

    Instead of following up on the potentially most damaging piece, the Post delves into some pretty insignificant areas:

    1. The Miss Universe Pageant being held in Moscow in 2013, where the Post alleges he "made millions." This would seem something they could actually prove, with an actual number
    2. Trump's team also attempted to sell condos in a Panama project to Russians. The horror! An international project looking for international investors!
    3. Trump sold a Palm Beach mansion he bought at auction for $41M for a tidy $54M profit to a Russian investor.  Trump bought the home at auction 4 years earlier and he sold it before the 2008 crash, so it probably had achieved maximum value. I don't know what this is evidence of.  But, whatever, the Post provides no additional info or context.
    4. While Trump has never built a hotel in Russia, the Post is quick to inform us it's "not for lack of trying."  
    So, this is it.  

    Like so many attacks on Trump, it's flimsy and held together by very thin threads.  

    It's just so much, nothingness.



    I Voted Today

    On the whole, the election comes down to two pretty despicable people. I know that Hillary Clinton, by her deeds is not qualified to be president.  Do I really need to list them?
    Her demeanor, as has been revealed in numerous books and articles over the years, and confirmed in the Wikileaks emails, confirms that she is entirely unsuited to be YOUR president, let alone mine.
    She is ruled out.
    The choice becomes Trump, or a protest of some kind, and while I have toyed with the protest, ultimately, this is a binary system, and you hold your nose and take the lesser of two evils, from a "person" perspective.

    I am helped along in this decision by a couple of things:
    1. I know that The Left, after settling on a candidate, through thick and thin, would do whatever is necessary to win the election.  If they couldn't outright replace the candidate, they would obfuscate, lie, use the media, go on the attack against their opponent, make up stories out of whole cloth, just to win.  They do not play fair.  The people who could turn Mitt Romney into a man who literally gives people cancer, just don't give a crap about "the rules."

      It's time we did the same thing, and a vote for Trump serves to tell The Left - "Go Screw Yourselves, we're done being your patsies."
    2. The GOP and particularly, the #nevertrump crowd needs to hear a message that some on the right are sick and tired of The Left playing by their set of rules, while we try to play by rules of fairness.  We're talking about the future of the country, which albeit will survive either one, but actual progress for our causes (at the national level, I agree) will be set back a generation by a Hillary victory.
    3. Enough of Trumpism intersects with my conservative/libertarian leanings to recognize that he is much closer to me than Hillary.  My agenda has a far better chance of moving forward under President Trump, than President Hillary.
    4. With Trump, I am not assured of conservative judges, but I am assured of Liberal ones with Hillary.  Another 4 years packing the federal bench with ideologue leftists will seriously set us back years.  I won't live to see the correction.

    I respect #nevertrumpers and their desire to retain some sense of moral clarity, but, let's not kid ourselves, politics is a dirty business, and that means it attracts people we might not consider pure of heart, or pure of ideology.
    You may choose, and in choosing, consider the stakes and I think Victor Davis Hanson sums this up in his article for NR. I have listened to both sides, and ultimately, logic requires that I side with VDH and Peter Robinson and Larry Kudlow, not with Jonah Goldberg, Erick Erickson, and Bill Kristol, though I respect their choices to remain above Trumpism.
    For me, the choice is really between Trump and Hillary, and that makes the choice for Trump the only logical one.

    Monday, October 10, 2016

    Hillary's Magic Court - F The Constitution

    If you watched Debate #2, the most important question occurred near the end.

    In response to what kind of justices would you appoint to the Supreme Court, Hillary Clinton had these wonderful insights for us:

    "I want to appoint Supreme Court justices who understand the way the world really works, who have real-life experience, who have not just been in a big law firm and maybe clerked for a judge and then gotten on the bench, but, you know, maybe they tried some more cases, they actually understand what people are up against."
    In other words, the judges will use as their basis for examining law "the way the world works."  Or, more accurately the way Hillary Clinton and her friends on the Progressive Left think the world works.
    "Because I think the current court has gone in the wrong direction. And so I would want to see the Supreme Court reverse Citizens United and get dark, unaccountable money out of our politics. Donald doesn’t agree with that."
    She wants to remove the right of people to freely assemble and gut the First Amendment.  Citizens United was correctly decided and some may recall it was a case about a film that was about HILLARY CLINTON.  Basically, this bitch wants to throw out the First Amendment due to spite.
    "I would like the Supreme Court to understand that voting rights are still a big problem in many parts of our country, that we don’t always do everything we can to make it possible for people of color and older people and young people to be able to exercise their franchise."
    Voting Rights are NOT a big problem.  States that have tough ID laws for voting have little fraud, and they all provide state-issued IDs for free, and in many cases, allow provisional ballots to be cast even to those without IDs.  Fair elections without fraud are fundamental to the integrity of our system.  Requiring voters to produce an ID that proves who they are is not too much to ask.  But, it prevents voter fraud that Democrats like to practice, so it must be cast as racist and enshrined into law by Jurists in Robes, since no state legislature will allow such shenanigans.
    "I want a Supreme Court that will stick with Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to choose, and I want a Supreme Court that will stick with marriage equality."
    It's ok for a Liberal to have an abortion litmus test, but God forbid a conservative have one.  If you get Hillary Clinton, you get abortion on demand.  Forever.  You'll also get further erosion in religious liberty.  Liberals dream of the only day you get the chance to practice your religion as being Sunday between 9:30-11.  They'll further gut the First Amendment to get it.  

    We also know she'd love to get the 2nd Amendment reinterpreted to remove the individual right enshrined by Heller.  Getting that 5th Liberal Justice and a case suitable enough, will get that done.

    Trump is a crap shoot on the Court, and he's a horrible person.  I get that.

    Choose wisely.


    Sunday, October 9, 2016

    I Really Hate This Guy, I Still Hate Herself More.

    It is a conundrum.

    I don't hate him, per se.

    I hate his campaign and I hate his past transgressions, and, since I find it highly unlikely the GOP will have the guts to remove him from the ticket, I pray that there are no recent ones to screw him up.

    I hate the GOP for not recognizing that he was a potential train wreck of a man, with this exact kind of stuff very likely.

    But, I actually think there is lemonade in these lemons.

    So much of these things, is as I  suggested in this post, about how you handle it.

    Here's his official response.

    It's not unlike what I wrote in that post.

    I may have written here that if the election is really about change, then Trump can march down 5th Avenue with a gun randomly shooting people.  If you want change, your only chance is to take Trump.

    His message from here on out has to be that.  

    Hillary represents the corruption and two-facedness that is official Washington.  The latest WikiLeaks emails show this in all too stark contrast.  In her paid speeches to Goldman Sachs and in her email exchanges with longtime confidante and fixer, John Podesta, we get an insider's look at what Hillary Clinton is all about.

    She's a one-world Globalist, just like Barack Obama and the rest of the Progressives.  She wants open borders (bad), open trade (that's not so bad), and the dissolution of the things that make the United States the United States.

    She's willing to let global bankers, like Goldman Sachs, do their bidding, as long as it serves her globalist intentions.

    This folks is crony-capitalism writ large, and Fascism by another name.

    Just know what you're getting into.


    Saturday, October 8, 2016

    Trump Needs to Ask Forgiveness From the American People

    By now, Trump's misogynist conversation with Billy Bush 11 years ago is locked in the public lore.

    He's going to get asked this on Sunday and he needs to address it early and fundamentally.  KellyAnne Conway, if you're listening, this you are getting for free.

    My suggestion is that the American people have proven a forgiving lot.  They want change this season and they only have Trump to do that.  He needs to reassure them he is not the misogynistic, narcisstic, selfish lout that he is portrayed to be (or that he may actually be).

    So, answer the question, answer it head on and show some self-awareness.

    Something like this:
    I have traveled around this country the last year or so, and I have met and gotten to know so many wonderful people.  It has offered me the opportunity to do a lot of soul searching and self-reflection, and you know, there are a lot of things I did in my life that were not proud moments for me.  They reflected my great love of my self, and as I have aged, I have realized that this country is so much more important than me.  That's why I am subjecting myself to this, because I want to change things.
    What you heard this week was one of those awful, locker-room type conversations that many men have.  I've these conversations with Bill Clinton and others, who I won't reveal because they didn't sign up for this. 
    But that doesn't make them right and I understand that my personal behavior in the past was just terrible, and terribly disrespectful to women.  
    You can see that my children, despite my failings, of which there are many, have turned out pretty well.  I hope you know I feel about this country as I feel about them.  I love every American just like these kids. (if he can choke back a tear here, that would be good)
    For my personal past behavior, I confess I have not been a paragon of virtue and the opposition probably has more to slam me with.  They want to make this election about me, and not about the change we so desperately need.  I can't stop them from trying to divert attention from there failed agenda.
    All I can so is there are many wonderful people who I know pray for me every day to improve, and I thank them.  
    To you, the American people, I apologize and I simply ask for your forgiveness. 
     

    Monday, October 3, 2016

    Jay Goes for Hillary!?!?

    My friends, and the impeccable logic of the left have finally subdued me.

    I have seen the light and am casting my lot with the Hillary! administration.  

    This is not in a craven attempt to ensure the zombies sure to be unleashed when Herself takes the reins of power do not devour me (first), but is a heartfelt admission that the logic is clear and that I should join the Tolerance of the Left TM team.

    This weekend I learned much about myself and Donald Trump.

    I learned that people on the Left have some good points, and they make them in interesting and fun ways.

    For example, people who use this as their Facebook profile picture really speak to me:


    By cracky, I don't want to unfriend anyone.  Why that would be just awful and mean.  I'd never do that!

    Some really important people (ok, movie stars) also told me I must vote for Trump.  So, they can't be wrong, can they?  These people also think it's important to vote....


    SAVE THE DAY Response from BrabenderCox on Vimeo.

    This article helped me fully understand what was wrong with my brain, and I only needed the gentle prodding of the kind and caring liberals on Facebook to help me fully understand that my failure to accede to Hillary was likely a mental disorder.

    Finally, this insightful and compassionate analysis made it clear to me.  I am not a classless, racist, misogynistic person of low integrity with bad business instincts.  I am a Christian who believes in the Constitution, therefore, I must not be a Trump voter, I must be...something else.

    I am not sure what that something else is, but it sure can't be Trump.  I can't have the members of polite society who brought us this thinking I am some kind of narcisstic loony-toon.  So, it's probably Hillary.

    By the way, if you want a much more fun, and insightful analysis of the typical Trump voter in flyover country, read this post.


    Friday, September 30, 2016

    Donald J Trump - Pissing Me Off Again - Updated!

    Note: Significant edit to this post.

    Gawd, Donald Trump is a frickin' idiot.

    What is Kellyanne Conway doing letting this dumb SOB have his twitter account back?

    The reason he's tweeting at 3am is because that's when he could get online without his handlers watching him.

    I am going to reconsider remaining in the #reluctantTrump camp.  I'm committed.  As soon as early voting opens here in Georgia, I am going to go vote for the Orange Idiot so nothing he does can change that.

    Good Lord, this moron has simply got to stop making Hillary Clinton look like an idiot savant.

    I implore his campaign team to explain to this fool that the response to these attacks is a quick one line reply then shift the attention to the opponent.

    He can't resist defending himself, and that will be the end of him, I think.

    Donald - you were on a glide path to victory.  Although I though the 45 minutes of the debate I watched was tedious, boring, and you both sucked, the consensus was you won the first part, so, that was probably a net win, since I expect most people, like me, got tired of it and turned it off.

    Nooooooooooooooooooo, you are so stupid, you took her bait on the last question about the fat beauty queen (and yes, she got fat, so what) and had to defend yourself.

    The answer, Donald, is something along the lines of:

    "I may have said intemperate things about a disgruntled employee who didn't maintain the brand image, but I have never, and would never, defend a rapist or turn on his victims."
    Period.  Done.  Your last word.

    Let Hillary defend that.

    When Hillary comes out with her news minions and their stories, yours is, "She's a disgruntled employee with an axe to grind and that was 20 years ago.  20 years ago Hillary Clinton was dragging rape victims names through the mud to ensure her access to power.  There's a difference."

    Let your supporters and others handle the dirty stuff.  The dredging up her past indiscretions.  You then STFU.  There is nothing to be gained by you tweeting at 3am.  Nothing.

    Don't do it.

    Idiot.

    Monday, September 26, 2016

    Dear Donald, When She Says You Lie, Keep it Simple

    Donald,

    Hillary Clinton is telegraphing that she intends to portray you as a big fat liar.

    When you're principally known as a liar, as Hillary is, I suppose the path to beating your opponent is to paint them as an EVEN.BIGGER.LIAR.

    So, tonight she's going to call you a liar, and she's trying to use an appeal to authority (the moderator) to get them to pile on.

    The reply is simple, simple, simple.

    "Hillary Clinton wants to paint me as a liar.  Her campaign has even berated the moderator tonight to get him to 'fact check' (use the scare quotes) me tonight.

    Folks, you know that I embarked on this campaign not to get rich (I already am), but because I am very concerned about the future of our great country.  That has meant telling some hard truths about the way things are, and the way things will be, and the things Hillary Clinton and President Obama have done to make your lives more difficult.

    You have responded by coming to my rallies and listening politely, but with great energy, because you know these things to be true and you know I am the only person you hear speaking to you truthfully. YOU know these things to be true, and that's why I have 10,000, 20,000 people at my events and Hillary has 50.  People don't come to hear more of the same lies, they come to hear the truth, because it's so refreshing to them.  That's why this movement is so powerful.

    Hillary and her media friends don't want you to know the truth.  They go so far as to claim things that Bernie Sanders said were true, and when I say the exact same thing, they say it is false.  They are the liars.

    Hillary Clinton has a 30 year history of lying to the American people.  It is all she does.  You know it, she lied about what happened in Whitewater, she lied about the White House travel office, she lied about cattle futures, she lied about Benghazi, she lied about her emails, she lies about the Clinton Foundation.  Of course, she is lying about me, too.

    But, I am not with Her, I am with YOU, the American people, and you know, I will NOT lie to you for political gain, and in my administration, we will tell you the truth, even when it is not convenient for us.  On that, you have my solemn pledge.

    Thursday, September 22, 2016

    VDH Lays Out the Trump Case, or Why #nevertrump needs to give it up


    You should read Victor Davis Hanson’s latest piece on why the GOP should support Trump, but I’ll help with some tidbits.

    Hanson riffs on how the media treats all GOP candidates:

    “When the media got through with a good man like McCain, he was left an adulterous, confused septuagenarian, unsure of how many mansions he owned, and a likely closeted bigot. Another gentleman like Romney was reduced to a comic-book Ri¢hie Ri¢h, who owned an elevator, never talked to his garbage man, hazed innocents in prep school, and tortured his dog on the roof of his car.”

    He similarly laments how the media (and this includes our side as well) now sees the way Trump is succeeding as a bad thing, when before…

    “Trump’s ball-and-chain flail, such as it can be fathomed, is in large part overdue.  In the old days, any candidates who met with the press, held news conferences, were easily cross-examined, gave out their blood tests and EKG results (did Obama or Hillary?), had small staffs and few TV ads, raised little outside money, spoke extemporaneously, and were not prepped by legions of handlers were considered ‘different’ in the sense that they were welcomed mavericks to an otherwise scripted campaign season.”

    Does Trumo say stupid stuff?  Yes, but, so does his opponent, and HER stupid stuff brought me right back to Trump:

    “Replying in kind to a Gold Star Muslim family or attacking a Mexican-American judge who is a member of a La Raza legal group is, of course, stupid and crass, but perhaps not as stupid as Hillary, before a Manhattan crowd of millionaires, writing off a quarter of America as deplorable, not American, and reprobate racists and bigots.”

    It’s a long essay, and if you’re TrumpCurious, or a #nevertrumper who’s willing to self-reflect, do read the entire essay.

    Sunday, September 18, 2016

    Donald J Trump's Statement on The President's Birth (as proposed by me)

    President Barack Obama was born in the United States and is an American.  Period.

    As we learned this week, the rumors of President Obama’s birth in Kenya were begun in 2008 by key Hillary Clinton Senior Advisor, Sid Blumenthal and shopped to various news organizations in 2008.  As a high-level Clinton lieutenant and long-time friend of Hillary, Blumenthal was considered such a credible source that the McClatchy News Service sent a reporter to Kenya to look into the allegations.

    However, the press, as Democratic party lapdogs and dishonest arbiters of their own “truth” failed to fully investigate and put this issue to rest, so it was left to fester for 3 more years.

    In 2011, as I became much more concerned about the direction of our country, which was then, and continues to be the wrong direction, I decided to take this issue head-on.  The lack of transparency from the current administration - regarding the Fast and Furious scandal at the time, and as we saw with the IRS scandal later, and the Benghazi coverup in 2012, bothered me greatly.

    My fear was something was being hidden from the American people.

    The Constitution only has 2 requirements for a President - to be 35 years old and a “natural-born” citizen, I felt it was important that we get complete disclosure on this issue, so I pushed to have the original documents that confirmed the President’s birth released.  This is something a media seeking the truth could have easily accomplished in 2008, but it took a citizen with some means and a platform to make it happen.  That says more about the media than it does Donald J Trump.

    This issue is behind us, and it should remain so.  It is, as those on the Left are so want to say, “settled science” at this point.

    That Hillary Clinton and her campaign would start such a rumor, based on no actual facts, is a sad testimony to the kind of “say anything” campaigns Hillary Clinton runs. It is the way she will govern, if elected, because that is how Clinton’s always govern.

    That the media would do nothing to fully close these rumors indicates how in the tank they are for Democrat candidates and can not be trusted to provide you the truth.  Fortunately, today, you have choices other than the mainstream media outlets who seek to only provide one side of the story.

    This will be the last time I speak of this.

    Thank you,
    Donald J Trump

    Friday, September 16, 2016

    Islam - Not a Race

    Hillary Clinton recently included in the things she finds deplorable, "Islamophobia."

    Despite this not being an actual, thing, it also is not a serious charge.  And by not "serious," I mean the person leveling it is not serious.

    As Robert Spencer (Jihad Watch), Andrew McCarthy, Pamela Geller (Atlas Shrugged) or Mark Steyn (SteynOnline) will attest, it also is not a phobia if the fear is rational.

    I'll take on anyone who wants to debate that we should not have a rational fear of Islam and especially it's most fervent adherents, who I will refer to as Islamists, or Islamofascists to more precisely target it to those who push the teachings of Mohammad and the tenets of political Islam, including Sharia, to achieve their goal of a Global Caliphate.

    All one has to do is look around and see the havoc being wreaked across the globe, including here in America, by these murderous thugs, operating under the banner of Islam.  Are there others committing acts of terror in the name of their God?  Well, yes, there are, and people love to point to Christian terrorists like Eric Rudolph, but, let's please be honest, nearly 100% of Christians denounce these people, and the vast, vast, vast majority of acts of terror committed now are committed in the name of Allah.  Sure the SPLC likes to catalog "hate crimes" committed against innocent Muslims, and these exist to be sure, but none approach in the remotest way possible, the acts carried out in this country at Fort Hood, San Bernardino, Orlando, Chattanooga, Fort Dix, or Washington DC and New York City.  

    There simply is no comparison.

    Alayna Hirsi Ali can tell you what practitioners of Sharia do to women.  I encourage you to read her work.  Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller catalog the works of Islamofascists.  

    The Charlie Hebdo writers should have had a greater Islamophobia.  Many more of them might be alive today had they taken the threats more seriously and protected themselves better.

    The fact is that in a world of 1.2 billion Muslims, where polls show 20-40% do not disavow these extreme elements amongst their co-religionists, that means you have at a minimum 240 million people who are A-OK with what these murderers are doing.  If only 0.1% of Muslims are part of the death cult that wants to establish the caliphate and do it by murdering the infidels, that means there are 120,000 people willing to meet Allah and get their 72 virgins.  So, is it irrational to be concerned about 120,000 potential terrorists?  What if it's .01%?  Is it still irrational if the number is only 12,000?  When does it become irrational?

    The other thing Clinton's and the Left's approach to this is to lump Islamophobics in with racists and homophobes.

    Little different, in that you can't change your race, and pretty much everyone agrees sexual preference is baked in.  Does the Left think that Islam is a race?  Newsflash - Islam is a religion that also includes a political element, with sharia as the law.  People do have a choice when it comes to religions, and this one has proved all-too-willing to spread itself by the sword.  In fact, there are teachings in the Quran that preach just this.  

    Do I want to rid the world of Islam? Not unless this minority of Islamofascists decide they want to rid the world of me and my co-religionists (and Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Wiccans, and yes, even you atheists out there).  If that's the battle they want, I am more than willing to enjoin them.  However, I fear few leaders in the West are as well.

    And they're preaching to their minions to just keep their heads down.  Treat this as a phobia.  This ugly people who recognize the threat will just go away or be marginalized.  They think there is no threat, or maybe they can negotiate it away when it reaches our shores and becomes truly a daily threat.  They're wrong.

    There are moderate Muslims who understand the problem Islam faces.  Egypt's president al Sisi is one of them.  Jordan's king another.  There are others, but for now, their voices are really kept from us.  How many of you even knew that one of our allies in the Middle East, Egypt's current president, is a voice of reason in this crowd of lunatics?  You don't because the Western media don't want to cover a Muslim who admits and is willing to take on islam's problems directly.  That would be giving cover to those who they prefer to call Islamophobes, and we can't have that, can we?

    Thursday, September 15, 2016

    What a Difference a Month Makes - Trump (reluctantly)

    My last post here was all about why I opposed Trump and how I thought he wouldn't be much worse than Hillary.

    I still think that's a possibility, but, a month closer to the election, I have decided to side with the Ace's of the world,vice the Jonah Goldberg's (look it up yourself).

    After a month that included the wretched DNC, the loss of Debbie Wasserman-Schultzas DNC Chair (sad), more Hillary email and DNC revelations, the elevation of Kellyanne Conway to Trump campaign manager, Hillary's failing health, and Trump behaving like...well, an actual presidential candidate, I have decided that I can't stand by and accept a Hillary win by going third party.

    Plus, Gary Johnson made it clear he was not after disaffected conservatives, he was getting to 15% on the backs of Bernie supporters, and Evan McMullin's campaign is a vanity butt-hurt affair run by #nevertrumpers.

    Finally, the a-holes who are Liberals, decided they were winning so big they could start telling the truth.  Hillary went out and made her "deplorables" comment and promptly got served a cup of karma that her sycophantic media toe lickers couldn't cover up because of citizen journalists. NFL football players decided to give the flag a big "FU" and the ACC and NCAA decided men and women should use the same toilet and check out each other's privates.  I can't wait for dudes who identify as women to start using Title IX to kill women's college athletics.  Karma.

    More than anything else, it is the attitude of the Left that has brought me into the Trump camp.  Hillary Clinton is an historically corrupt individual who doesn't deserve to be near the levers of power.  People bash Trump for his multiple positions (and yes, he has them), and the unknown factor of Trump, but, guess what folks, we absolutely know what Hillary will do, and it will be horrible.  She will run the Clinton administration as her personal power center, and it will be 4 years of enriching Clintons.

    There's still a chance Trump will manage to shoot off his big fat, stupid mouth, and turn this thing back to Hillary, but for now, less than 60 days out, the wind is at his back.  

    Donald J Trump is no Ronald Reagan, but this election is starting to have a feel much like 1980 in the sense of momentum.  Republican senate candidates are polling very strongly and they are usually trailing indicators.  I don't believe that Trump trails these candidates by as much as the polls indicate.  I think that there are actually people who won't say they are voting for him in polls, and I know that Hillary Clinton may get the same percentage of black and latino voters as Obama, but she won't get the same raw number, and Trump is going to increase his white percentage and white turnout.

    I still consider Trump a huge risk, but, of the  candidates who can win, he is by far the most conservative option, and in keeping with the Buckley rule, I am compelled to support him.


    Thursday, August 11, 2016

    Bad Times for Trump

    It's been a month since I posted here, and a lot has changed.

    Last month, Trump was leading in the polls, and since then, we've had the joke of an RNC, where the winner is working out to have been Ted Cruz for his prescient non-endorsement of Trump (the gall! Asking people to vote their conscience) and John Kasich, for staying away and withholding his endorsement of Trump.

    Now, Hillary has opened a wide lead nationally and in several of the important swing states.  She's even competitive here in Georgia and in Utah.

    I've been back and forth over and over on Trump, but I am getting more firmly in the #nevertrump camp.  I refuse to be as strident as some, but, the week he spent on the Khan's and now his stupid off-the-cuff remarks about "Second Amendment People" have convinced me that the #nevertrump crowd has a seriously solid argument.

    I've said somewhere that Trump is a caricature of a conservative, and Ben Shapiro captures this in this article this week.

    As a committed conservative, I have to ask myself - is conservatism, and as such, the country, better off with 4 years of Hillary, in opposition, or 4 years of Trump, having to explain and defend what this idiot does to our ideology, which is what is right for America.

    On these points, I am with those who oppose Trump.  We can draw stark contrasts with Hillary, and we can use her unpopularity to consolidate gains in the senate and house during what is going to be a corruption filled Hillary administration.

    But, you might say, the Supreme Court.

    Here's the problem with that.  Even if Trump wins, the GOP is unlikely to get a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.  That means the Dems will oppose any of the nominees on "the list."

    Trump is likely to fold at the first threat of a filibuster, and yes, seek a stealth candidate who will likely end up like Souter or Kennedy.  The end result, folks, will be the same.

    So, while there may be some hope that Trump would nominate some better SCOTUS picks than Hillary, it's a moonshot and one which I am not prepared to give away conservatism for .

    Friday, July 15, 2016

    Trump Takes the Lead

    A flurry of polls this week have Trump taking a national lead, and larger leads in key swing states, even the GOP's unicorn state, Pennsylvania, as our pal, Ace, reports (http://acecomments.mu.nu/?post=364751).

    It's been a bad couple of weeks for Hillary Clinton.

    First, her husband puts some very questionable optics on her upcoming email investigation and lobbies the AG for...well, something.

    Next, the FBI Director offers up the most scathing non-indictment recommendation ever, describing Granma as everything from being too stupid (er... not sophisticated enough) to understand classified markings to being oblivious to national security concerns (reckless, anyone?).

    Then, she blunders her way through the #BLM and Dallas shootings, and to top it off, Bernie Sanders spends 28 minutes explaining why he's awesome, but, vote for Hillary anyway.

    Now we have all these very unfavorable poll numbers for Herself, then, the French terrorism massacre does nothing but highlight Dem's weakness on the security issue.

    Maybe she's at her low water mark.  Larry Kudlow on the recent flagship Ricochet podcast thinks, she's a stock still seeking a bottom.  Could he be right?

    This is an opportunity to see if Trump will do as I think he will, to turn this into all about his winning, and winning, and winning some more. That was the strategy in the GOP primary and now that he's turned this thing around (ok, she's in free fall, but doesn't matter)... 

    The entire thing is about the inevitability of Trump winning and the bandwagon effect.

    Saturday, July 9, 2016

    Free College!

    Hillary Clinton continued her pandering to Bernie Sanders voters this week, unveiling a plan to make college tuition free to families (important note there) making less than $85k/year, eventually upping that to $125k/year.

    If you don't yet have children in college, this probably sounds like an awesome idea and a real money saver.  Let me un-Voxsplain to you.


    • The plan only covers tuition.  As anyone who looks hard at college bills knows, tuition is about 1/2 of the money it takes to take classes, as fees and services usually cover the other half of the non-room and board college costs.  
    • The plan does not cover room and board.  At most colleges and universities, unless you live with your parents, this is going to be about 50% to 100% of tuition.  
    • So, Hillary's plan would cover about 1/4 of the total cost of college.  You would still need parents or loans to cover the rest.
    • It sounds great, but it's not going to eliminate the need for loans or sugar daddy's (i.e. "parents").
    Continuing the economics lesson here, what is likely to happen when college is subsidized by the American taxpayer as it will have to be?  Well, as it has the last 30 or so years as more and more of college is paid for by someone else (in the form of guaranteed student loans, at remarkably low interest rates), it will become even more expensive.  And while those families making up to $125k may benefit from the taxpayers covering tuition, they'll still have those fees and room and board to cover.

    Additionally, someone, besides the taxpayers, will have to make up the cost for those students having their tuition subsidized.  And that someone will be - families making over $125k/year.

    Now, I don't need to tell you if you file a tax return, but a 2 earner household doesn't have to have 2 awesome jobs to get over that threshold.  So, before you crow about how fantastic this is, recognize that it is the middle class who is going to be footing the bill for this, in the form of higher tuition and fees, so that states can meet the requirement to offer "free" tuition to those others.

    Ultimately, you need to consider who is the beneficiary of government mandates such as this?  Is it really students, or is it tenured professors and university administrators who gain from higher attendance figures, and for whom graduation rates are usually not important.

    The academy is a linchpin of Democrat politics.  

    Proposals such as this are corporate welfare for universities, not attempts to make college more affordable (at which they have failed miserably over time) or more available (it is private, online universities that offer the best chance to do this).

    Saturday, July 2, 2016

    Daniel Hannan gets badgered by Christian Imapoorreporter, and fires back.

    H/T to Andrew Klavan.

    Christian Amanpour demonstrates why the Left, and the leftish media, is so disengaged from what is going on in the world, in this post-Brexit interview with British MEP Daniel Hannan.

    To Amanpour and her friends on the Left, Brexit is, as is EVERYTHING with these people, about xenophobia and racism, and the Brits desire to keep the other (primarily Muslims) out of Britain.  It's all that they are able to comprehend.

    Little concepts like national sovereignty, the desire for true self-rule mean little to the leftists.  They don't really care about democracy, after fighting for years to ensure everyone has the right to vote, they are angry when they don't vote as the elites desire.  We acknowledge that some who voted for leave were doing so on xenophobic and perhaps even racist grounds.  So what?  Last I checked, xenophobes and racists still had the right to vote in most western countries, and it's the one point I wish Hannan had made to Ms. Amanpour.  He might also have pointed out that with the remain camp drilling that home everyday in opposition, she shouldn't be surprised that so many people came out who might have felt this way.

    Hannan, being badgered by Amanpour with her ridiculous, facile questions, and her snide facial expressions, still manages to take her to school to explain that Brexit is about much more than racism and xenophobia.

    Neil Degrasse Tyson - Rationalia? More like Stupidia

    Neil Degrasse Tyson, who fancies himself a reboot of Carl Sagan, and who really wants you to understand that he's really, really smart, tweeted the other day:



    He was rightly mocked on Twitter by all sorts of people who could see the errors in his wishful thinking, and many pointed out a little thing called the Reign of Terror that followed a particular revolution that embodied some of these ideas he's thinking of.  An example:



    Alas, History and understanding the actual, um, human condition, are things lost on Tyson, who is the most insufferable of scientists - those who eschew Philosophy, but instead think governing our world (Rationalia?) under the guise of the primacy of science and the supreme intelligence of it's key practitioners (led, of course, by Mr Degrasse Tyson himself) is some kind of new, untried, and even smart, idea.

    Kevin Williamson, writing in National Review, was quick to pick up on Tyson's stupidity and jot down a few thoughts in an essay, the bottom line of which comes in the closing (but do read the whole thing):


    As men like him have done for ages, Tyson dreams of a world of self-evident choices, overseen by men of reason such as himself who occupy a position that we cannot help but notice is godlike. It’s nice to imagine ruling from an Olympus of Reason, with men and nations arrayed before one as on a chessboard. Down here on Earth, the view is rather different, and the lines of sight inside the epistemic horizon are not nearly so long as our would-be rulers imagine.

    Wednesday, June 29, 2016

    Leftist Loonyism This Week

    The left has been on a rampage this week...

    First, we have the Turkey terror attacks.  Despite the monsters using guns for this, I have yet to see those who find this such a scourge here in the US call for President Erdogan to use his considerable powers as supreme ruler of Turkey to stem the tide of gun violence that is gripping Turkey.

    Next, thanks to Iliana Johnson and the watchdog group, Cause to Action, we found out that former IRS executive Lois Lerner likely broke the law when she shared over 1 million pages of tax return information with the Department of Justice.  But, this is the Obama administration, so instead of mainstream media coverage of the political weaponization of the IRS against conservative political enemies of this administration, we'll get...crickets.

    Loretta Lynch met privately will Bill Clinton, ahead of the release of the Benghazi report.  Maybe it was a chance encounter, but, the nation's chief law enforcement officer, who may be called on to offer up an indictment of Hillary Clinton, should not be having private discussions with her husband in the run up to either of these events.  This is outrageous and a serious ethical issue.  But, for the most transparent administration in History, what else did you expect.

    The Supreme Court gave us a glimpse of life under a 5-4 liberal majority.  Religious freedom will be destroyed, abortion on demand will be the law of the land.  Democrats don't care about women's health.  As Mary Eberstadt in NR put it:

    Once upon a time, liberals portrayed the procedure of abortion as a thing regrettable but sometimes necessary. This was the cottony, “safe, legal, and rare” piety of yesteryear. That old rhetorical dressing has been ripped off for good. Today, The Daily Show is taking a tut-tutting in the media for having tweeted to its 4.25 million followers a comment that some find tasteless: “Celebrate the #SCOTUS ruling! Go knock someone up in Texas!” The indignation is faux. Under the logic of secularist progressivism today, the only thing regrettable about abortion is that there isn’t more of it.


    These people don't care if Kermit Gosnell type abortion mills dot the country.  They only care that abortions are performed.  If they have to be by sadists like Gosnell using the most unsafe procedures, so be it.  The "right" of a woman to kill that clump of tissue shall not have any undue burden placed on it.  I would not be surprised to see an abortionist who offers coat hangar only abortions have these people defend him, because, you know, abortion.  It used to be that Bill Clinton wanted to see abortion be safe, legal, and rare, but really we know that the true believers only care about the legal part of that triad.

    Trust me, the future holds a time when these people not only celebrate abortion as the unfettered legal right of women, but will require every woman to get pregnant and have one.  For the shared experience, of course.

    Finally, we have the House Select Committee's final report on Benghazi.  The administration and their willing dupes in the media want you to think that there is nothing new here, and that there is no proof that Hillary Clinton did anything illegal.  Well, no one really was looking to find out if she did anything in illegal with respect to Benghazi.  We were looking to find out how 4 Americans, including an Ambassador had to lose their lives defending themselves in a Libyan hellhole.  Indeed, a gay ambassador.  Funny how the gays seem to be doing very poorly at the hands of Democrats in the age of Obama (except for that marriage thing).

    They'll tell you, "nothing new here," "time to move on," and, Hillary had nothing to do with it.  Well, you can read the report linked herein.  While 4 men died, the Department of State dithered on whether we should send in a rescue mission in uniform or not.

    Read the report.

    Sunday, June 12, 2016

    The End of Islam

    Until the West comes to grip with Islam and makes a decision about how we're going to face down this scourge, events like this morning in Orlando are only going to continue, and get worse.
    This is NOT about gun control.  You are incredibly naive if you think today's events, or Islamists will stop murdering Westerners if they don't have the ability to buy an AR over the counter. One need only look at Paris to know this is a lie. You are also fooling yourself if you believe that there is not a damn good reason to practice some Islamophobia. These people want to kill us all, but trust me, they'll start with the gays, the apostates, the unbelievers, and then they'll move on to those of us who refuse to pay the jizya.
    This is about a political ideology that is tied to a "religion" that over a billion people practice that has a dangerously murderous element. I don't say radical, because today's events are all too normal within Islam, they are all too accepted by its practitioners, and they are not going to end without the West ending it.
    The time is running short for the people who actually want to practice a religion of "peace" to prove it by expunging these elements themselves.
    I call on the leaders of the West to do what is necessary and and put an end to this. If that means we have to occupy the middle east for the next 2000 years, then so be it. If Islam can not join us in the 21st century, then Islam can become a relic of it.

    Mexican Judges Love Trump

    I was, at first, appalled by Trump's "attack" on the judge in the Trump University case, Gonzalo Curiel.  As you must have heard by now, Trump accused the judge of a bias against him because he was "Mexican." You can see video and a transcript of Trump's remarks here.

    Over the last week, I have decided to stop just taking for granted the media's depiction of Trump on this, and to try to look at it subjectively.  I think too many of the "right" people got their knickers all in a  twist over something that is unworthy of such gnashing and wailing of teeth.

    I expect this kind of nonsense from the Left.  They want to win, they have no guiding principle other than the constant expansion of government power (with them at the helm) and winning.  Therefore, consistency in logic and equality of treatment is not something I expect from The Left.

    I expect a little more from my friends on the right.  In some ways, they are being more consistent in their approach.  In other ways, they are employing the tactics of The Left against Trump, and in the quest to defeat Progressivism, this will have adverse affects for the country.  It's also why, although I am drawn to their arguments like a moth to flame, I am at times annoyed with the stridency of the #neverTrump crowd.

    But, I digress.

    Over on Ricochet (membership required) I read Richard Epstein's take down of Trump and I (and you) can enjoy Professor Epstein's discussion of Trump on his "The Libertarian" podcast.  I recommend you subscribe.  I have just decided I don't agree and I find the reasoning of many,
    people like Epstein, Mona Charen, Jay Nordlinger, Professor Tom Nichols, Rick Wilson flawed.

    For many who are firmly #neverTrump, much of it is based, as Epstein discusses ad nauseum, on the Trump "temperament."  Many of these people claim to have some inner window to Trump's soul.  Mona Charen accuses him of having Narcissistic Personality Disorder ("McFly, have you seen Barack Obama?? ").  Nichols, a "National Security Conservative" doesn't trust Trump with the nuclear button, unlike Marco Rubio, who doesn't trust him with the button, but figures, what the hell.  Wilson is as anti-Trump as they come. Need I go on?  Most of these people dismiss Trump because of things like his temperament.  They use words like "unqualified, unfit" to describe his readiness for the Office of the President.

    That's an opinion, and none of these people are qualified to make medical diagnoses.

    It was while listening to the Need to Know Podcast (hosted by Charen and Nordlinger) that I realized why many of these people move to "temperament" when they have reservations about Trump.  In an innocuous aside where Mona and Jay discussed home invasions and the usefulness of guns to deterring them, Charen remarked to Jay that they have things that will turn your lights off and on so you don't just have to leave a light on.  It struck me as so out of touch.  They've only had light timers for about 50 years at least, I'd guess.  Today, Mona, did you know you can do this from the Internet?

    I imagine in the circles these people run around in, they don't find a lot of guys like Trump.  They read about them in the newspaper, they have friends who are friends with them, and they imagine them in their wildest dreams.  But they've rarely come in contact with them, and when they do, they do consider them boorish and vulgar, and rude and nasty, and nouveau and they're just a tad bit disgusted by them.

    In their circles they just don't talk like this.  And thus, when Trump links the word "Mexican" with "biased" in that word jumble way that Trump speaks, they instantly, like their analogs on the Left, connect the dots and it becomes "Trump is a racist" and cue the right's outrage industry, because just as when the Left doesn't want to argue a point, they resort to racism, these guys so detest Trump that they've chosen the same tactics.

    And that, my friends, is what is going on here.

    Trump is incredibly flawed.  He could use this case to demonstrate that people are biased, and that The Left celebrates their bias.  Instead of a cheap personal attack (and it was a cheap personal attack, it just wasn't racist), Trump could have said,
    "In a time where we have Leftist Supreme Court justices claiming being a 'wise Latina' is a qualification for a judge, is it any wonder that I can't get a fair shake from a Latino judge?  After all, the Left has been telling Hispanics for years that the only way forward for them is to be treated as special snowflakes who can't do it on their own, they need the benevolent hand of their Leftists benefactors.  Well, I KNOW they can do it on their own.  I see Hispanics who have immigrated here legally working hard every day and they can make it without Hillary Clinton swooping down with some special government goodies stolen from someone else, they can live the American dream and own businesses and employ others and share that dream.  But they can't do it while the Left is holding them down and making them losers, who only win when the Left decides they can share in the ill gotten spoils from the crooks who stole it.  They can't.  Believe me, when Trump is president, they will."

    Or something like that.

    Guy needs to think first.  He could really turn these lemons into lemonade.

    Sunday, June 5, 2016

    Trump and Protection

    I promise some anti-Hillary posts this season. Honest.

    But first, some more fodder for the #nevertrump crowd and a quick education in the post World War era.

    Donald J Trump has gotten a lot of applause from his followers and it's a popular stump line that NATO is obsolete and our allies should be paying us for their "protection."

    Once you get past the irony of a New York tough guy asking Koreans and Japanese to pony up protection money, doesn't Trump have a good point?

    I'll grant him this much - our allies do benefit greatly from US protection in the post WW2 world.  In Europe, because of the presence of the US military and the Article 5 provisions in the NATO Charter, all NATO members are bound together, but the primary provider of military power is clearly the United States.  It's basically been that way since the war ended, with Britain providing some additional credible capability.

    And have the Europeans benefitted?  Greatly.  It has enabled them to build those vaunted social democracies that Bernie Sanders and American liberals are so enamored of.  If these guys had to pay for their own military, they could not afford the generous welfare states they have built.  No doubt on that one.

    The same is also true in the Far East with Japan and Korea, so when we consider this protection racket, they're in on it.

    But, isn't there something in this game for us?

    We could have pulled out of these arrangements at any time in the last 60 to 70 years.  None of these countries are holding a gun to our head, demanding that we play this role.  We played this role willingly, in fact, we found being the leader of the free world, being the protector of the order after WW2 to be in our national interest.  It was in our interest, immediately after WW2 to ensure neither Germany nor Japan returned to militarism, and particularly that Germany's desire to conquer Europe was quenched, as that quickly turned to the Soviets and containment of them.  Surely for the 50 years that the Cold War raged, it was in our national interest to remain engaged in the protection of Europe to keep the Soviets at bay.  And it was.

    Of course, Trump argues that those times have passed, and since 1992, our troop levels have massively declined across Europe and in Japan and South Korea.  We have largely pulled back as the Russian threat diminished, and at times, NATO has pushed for more European involvement in Europe's defense needs, and at times, they have responded.

    The US's portion of NATO's military spending is relatively small, compared to our overall defense spending, at less than $500 million dollars.

    The US spends less than $7B (this is US defense money) on defense of Japan and South Korea, so we're looking at a relatively small percentage of the overall defense budget going toward direct costs for these countries, and this money doesn't even mean it's totally for their defense.  These countries provide forward operating bases so that we can more quickly respond to global powers, like China and Russia, so these aren't just costs in defense of the host countries.

    This is a complicated subject, and Trump tries to boil it down to simplicity, because it's a good sound bite.  We get something that enhances our overall security from these arrangements.  We're not there to engage in a protection racket, we're in these countries because it enhances our national security, because it gives us control over the command and control structure, and because it's the right thing to do for the global hegemon.

    Just imagine a world where we are not in control in these places, where we had to work with multiple armies, multiple large navies, multiple air forces of sizes suitable for their defense.  It would be a difficult world indeed for our military, so this arrangement has practical value as well.

    Things are never as simple as Donald Trump wishes they were, and the questions are hard and the answers complex.  I wish he'd engage in a little more intellectual curiosity rather than always taking the politically easy way out.