Author: M. Noonan

Open Thread

M. NoonanLeave a comment

This is certainly interesting:

In Washington state, where his approval rating is 28 points underwater, Trump has still racked up far more donations, big and small, than any of the Democratic candidates — in fact more than the top six Democrats combined.

I’m not talking about total dollars raised — though on that front Trump is a juggernaut, too. But the total number of donations reflects how many people are inspired enough by a candidate to send any amount of money, sometimes repeatedly.

This is Blue Washington. Where you often have to think twice about the risk to your job and social standing if you support the wrong candidate or party. Does this mean Trump will win Washington. No. It’d take a miracle. But, it does show that Trump is not just gaining support, but gaining support which is willing to take a public stand. I’ve been thinking that public opinion polling for this cycle is off because the pollsters simply don’t know about the country they’re living in – that we’re actually very much a populist, center/right nation and that a large part of the populist, center/right people are (now former) Democrats. We’ll find out next year if my theory is correct…but unless the vote comes out that way, I refuse to believe that even a large minority of my fellow Americans are Antifa-loving, open borders trans rights activists.

The Ninth Circuit (yes, that Ninth Circuit) seems to have a struck a blow against the Left’s tactic of finding a judge in Hawaii to issue nationwide injunctions against Trump Administration policies. We’ll see how it plays out – but the higher Courts do have to gain a measure of control here if they don’t want to get crushed under politics. It is ridiculous that some obscure federal judge out there can stop the policy of the duly elected President on a whim. To me, it should be only the Supreme Court able to issue nationwide injunctions.

The New York Times is framing slavery as being central to our existence as a nation. And Beto was out there saying that our nation was founded on racism. Don’t look for any logic behind this view: there isn’t any. It is entirely stupid – but I’ve been pondering this and I recalled the first time I heard this theory. I had watched Farrakhan’s speech at his so-called “million man march” and that is exactly what he was on about: that white people are inherently racist and America is, thus, inherently racist. To call America a racist nation is to assert that everything which has happened in this nation up until just now was evil. I’m not quite sure what the Left’s thinking here is – it could be that hatred has just made them stupid. I don’t know how many people are going to rush out and vote a party which considers your nation evil.

Epstien’s attorneys are not entirely on board with the suicide ruling. I don’t think anyone – left or right – is. But, I also don’t think there’s any way to resolve this: the institutions of government have poisoned the well. Too often caught in flat out lies to be trusted: there’s no way to investigate something like Epstein’s death and remove all doubts.

Open Thread

M. Noonan7 Comments

I did a little checking with Expert Opinion and its still pretty set: Trump is doomed. And I mean in the “he hasn’t got a chance” sense. But then you see the crowd at Trump’s rally in New Hampshire last night. Honestly, I can’t see how the man loses – his opponents can’t draw flies. But, the polls say he’s done. I guess we’ll find out next year.

As if you didn’t already know this, there’s leaked audio of the New York Times deciding to switch from “Russia” to “Racism” against Trump. Long time readers might remember my very long series of “What Media Bias?” posts. I stopped doing it because it was so obvious that it really didn’t need further explanation. But, still, nice to get some absolute confirmation.

China is cracking down on Hong Kong – some people are officially upset with Trump as he’s not being forceful about it. But, what’s he really supposed to do? He’s already engaged in a trade war with China. He’s already trying to detach North Korea from China’s orbit. He’s already buddying up to India and Vietnam against China. He’s rebuilding our Navy. He’s sending our ships into waters claimed by China. Short of war, there’s nothing we can do for Hong Kong: and I don’t think anyone wants to fight China over Hong Kong. It is sad, but it was inevitable: a tyranny simply will not tolerate the slightest bit of freedom. China only kept hands off until disruption wouldn’t roil markets too badly…and rely on it that Hong Kong’s rich will cut whatever deals are necessary with Beijing.

SpaceX is talking up its mission to Mars. I think we should go visit Mars, but I’m doubtful about our ability to live off Earth for any length of time. The more we learn about the planets, the more incredible it is that Earth has life…things just have to be so incredibly perfect for life to exist that the chances of it existing elsewhere are getting vanishingly small…and we’re also learning that what Earth has is not at all easy to replicate, even on a small scale. Among the massive problems, I see radiation as the largest. Living things don’t like it: our atmosphere and magnetic field keep out lots of it…but once away from Earth, you lose that protection and have to make the means of keeping it off you.

The Trump Administration has been facilitating talks between Israel and various Arab States…this is because Trump is just smarter than anyone we’ve had in the White House since Reagan.

Open Thread

M. Noonan30 Comments

With Epstein’s death, a gigantic sigh of relief was heard throughout Manhattan, DC and Hollywood…but there are still a lot of lose ends, and the Ruling Class is diligently trying to tie things up:

On Friday, unsealed court documents named former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell and former Clinton cabinet official and ex-New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson as among those who allegedly had sex with an underage victim of Jeffrey Epstein. But while all three evening news broadcasts covered the case, one thing was missing: any hint that those two men are Democrats.

If you check anything about Epstein in the MSM or Wikipedia, you’ll see that Trump is mentioned all over the place – that is also a bit of lose-end-tying. Trump really never had much to do with the guy, and certainly not in the last dozen years or so. But, the MSM must protect their masters! And that means downplaying all the prominent Dems in Epstein’s orbit and overemphasizing any Republican involvement. And they wonder why we hold them in contempt? Aside from that, I don’t know where this goes – but you can rely on it, the full truth won’t come out for a long, long time unless Trump and Barr really press the matter. Side note: I’m pretty sure he offed himself, but there were so many “mistakes” the prison had to make to allow him time to do it that I can only assume his death was greatly desired…and I’m wondering if anyone got word to him that his timely exit would result in something he cared about being protected?

Germany provides free college – and you’ll find our domestic leftists all happy about that. But, free college leads to pretty much what you’d expect:

The problem is that every pupil who has passed the school-leaving exam, the Abitur, has the constitutional right to a place at university, even if he or she has to wait some semesters and has no real academic inclinations or talents. The result is a proliferation of abstruse and socially irrelevant courses, a drop-out rate of about 30% (a shocking waste of human and financial resources) and the lack of skilled workers you mentioned.

Free college isn’t to provide educated people – free college is to provide make-work jobs for people in education who will then have a vested interest in preserving the Ruling Class which provides their sinecures. A follow-on benefit is the ability to propagandize to youth for four additional years so they are really solidly in line with Ruling Class desires. The end result is an uneducated population of drones who do as they are told.

Looks like China is about to crush all resistance in Hong Kong. Lots of people are huffing and puffing with righteous indignation over it. It is times like these where I like to remind people that righteous indignation hurts nobody. There is a case to be made for intervening in Hong Kong…but the only meaningful intervention would mean war with China. By all means: China poses a gigantic threat to the United States and the sooner we have it out with them, the less costly it will be. But that is not what these people demanding we “do something” mean…what they mean is “I want to demand we ‘do something’ so I can say I stood with the people of Hong Kong, but if you think I’d risk my life – or, even worse, my investment portfolio – to defend the people of Hong Kong, you’re nuts.” Hong Kong only gets out of its jam if the revolt spreads to the rest of China; so far, there’s no indication of that happening. Side note: this is the long term result of our refusal to unleash the Nationalist Chinese during the Korean War. We were stupid and cowardly then, and now we get to watch while a free people is destroyed.

The new and increasingly non-racist South is becoming ever more Republican. It is a Democrat lie that the old, racist Democrats of yore switched to the GOP. The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1965. As late as 2002, Democrats had complete control of the Alabama government. It was only after the 2010 elections that the GOP gained control of the Alabama legislature for the first time since Reconstruction. That was 45 years after the Civil Rights Act which infuriated, particularly, racist Alabama Democrats…who were then supposed to go GOP because the GOP is racist, and yet somehow all these racists forgot to vote GOP until 2010. The reality: the racist Democrats remained Democrats and only with the rise of a new, non-racist white electorate in Alabama did the GOP gain control.

Where the Shooters Come From

M. Noonan53 Comments

RSM delved into the El Paso shooter’s background. Its pretty much exactly what you would expect. Parents are divorced. They taught him love and tolerance, but apparently neglected such basics as “right and wrong” and “how to use a GPS” (he got lost on his way to his massacre). His mom is a nurse and dad is a therapist…so, likely not poor people, but their son was on food stamps (how in heck a single man with no kids gets food stamps we’ll leave for another time).

Not too long ago I was in conversation with a 20 year old. A very bright person attending college. The product of a broken home, but still fairly well adjusted. Over the course of the conversation (several people were there) this youngster asserted to racist views. I was very surprised at this, at first. After the encounter, it stuck in my mind and I pondered it. How does a person brought up long after slavery and Jim Crow and put through an education system which relentlessly preaches against racism become a racist? It was simple once I hit on it: because this youngster was born after Jim Crow and was relentlessly taught not just that racism is bad, but that white people are inherently racist, and thus bad.

People, you see, don’t like to be taught they are bad. I’m sure it infuriated black people back in the day to have whole swaths of the system essentially preach their inferiority to whites. On balance, the petty racism a black person would encounter was probably less of an affront than his very government and society telling him that he was second rate. For a couple decades now, white kids in public schools have been taught precisely that: they are inferior. They are born racists; they have unearned privilege; on and on like that. None of it being remotely true; and some white kid gets an earful of that and becomes resentful. Couple that with being a failure (as all these shooters are), being entirely ignorant of actual history (and thus having no way to be proud of anything outside their miserable selves) and from backgrounds likely to remove all real moral instruction, and that’s where you get the mass murderers.

Open Thread

M. Noonan42 Comments

Lots of things are being proposed in the wake of the mass shootings, the most pernicious being the red flag laws. Imagine an America where liberals get to turn you in to the police with the accusation that you’re insane, and then you have to prove you’re not in order to keep your right to bear arms.

Democrats, sick people that they are, are fundraising off the shootings. Beto has been the most vile in this, directly accusing the President of racism.

The Dayton shooter seems to have been a far-left kook, while the El Paso shooter supposedly had some rightwing leanings. This works out to the MSM covering El Paso while downplaying Dayton.

The people of Hong Kong are rising up against their Communist overlords – but they will not be successful. The Chinese government would like to defuse the situation with little or no bloodshed, if possible, but make no mistake about it: Hong Kong will be brought fully under the heel of Beijing. The people of Hong Kong have no way to resist: they don’t have guns.

Meanwhile, China is developing a plan for a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere…and like the last one attempted by Japan, they aren’t asking Great East Asia if they want to be part of it.

Leftists forced the New York Times to memory hole a headline about Trump the left didn’t agree with. Paper of record, ya’ll…its just a record of how to surrender to Communist apparatchiks.

Conservatism Recovered

M. Noonan38 Comments

Excellent article by Julie Kelly about understanding what has really happened to Conservatism:

The realignment of the political Right has prompted a public confessional of sorts, a raw acknowledgement that millions of us were led astray by Republiican leaders we trusted, we voted for, and we defended during times of war. We only have ourselves to blame, of course, because we did it with our eyes wide open. But the Trump era is forcing many Republicans to reexamine what we once believed and reassess what actually is true.

In a fiery speech earlier this month at the National Conservatism conference in Washington, D.C., Fox News host Tucker Carlson talked about purging his “mental attic” to dust off the ideas that he had accepted as legitimate over past few decades.

“The Trump election was so shocking . . . that it did cause some significant percentage of people to say ‘wait a second, if that can happen, what else is true?’” Carlson said. “Just look around . . . who are the good guys and who are the bad guys? A lot of the people we’ve been told are good guys are not. Some of them are the worst guys. I’ll let you figure out who.”

One of the crucial things to understand about politics is that it draws layabouts like s*** draws flies. That is, it draws rent-seeking nincompoops who are determined to live well without having to actually produce anything. No political ideology is free from this. Heck, even the most productive companies in the world aren’t entirely free of it. There are always – always – people trying to get a free ride.

Modern Conservatism got its start in reaction to the changes in American governance introduced during the Roosevelt Administration in the 1930s. It was correctly understood that the ultimate result of Roosevelt policies would be the end of the America founded in 1776. It was a movement to roll back the government; stand firm for American defense and defend the family and our social institutions from the remorseless attack of the Left. This movement reached its peak in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980…and I think we all thought that we really had won. That is, we thought that our ideas had proven correct and that going forward it would just be the increasing implementation of the ideas of Conservatism. We now know that it didn’t work out that way…and it didn’t work out that way because in the wake of Reagan, we got a host of political barnacles who spoke the words of Conservatism, but didn’t really have an interest in carrying out Conservatism. We were consumed by rent-seekers when we needed committed fighters.

But for the longest time, most of us went along with them – they were our leaders, after all. They wrote for prestige magazines. They had best-selling books. TV shows. And they did, indeed, speak the words of Conservatism…but always with a caveat which we ignored or didn’t understand. Now was always not the exact, perfect time to really press for Conservatism. We always had to do something else first, and getting that done invariably meant not fighting a particular battle for a Conservative principle. We were kept on the hook by endless promises that the New Dawn would come, and we’d finally be in the right moment where we could fight the left tooth and nail. But, it never came. Of course, it was never meant to come. The grifters running the Conservative show didn’t want that – because they weren’t really Conservative. They liked their swank gigs and they knew that to keep them they needed to keep talking right, but they weren’t about to go to their liberal friends and explain that they had to actually fight to defend the family, or even to defend the concepts of “male” and “female”.

Those of you reading me here have known that I had my doubts for many years – even stretching back to the Bush the Younger years…and, truth be told, some doubts even in the Clinton years. A gnawing feeling that we were being sold down the river and that not everything we were taught to revere was worthy. But I did keep to being a loyal foot soldier. Partly, of course, because no matter how bad the GOPe squish being foisted upon me, he or she was still miles better than the Democrat. But that was still folly on my part, and I see that now with blinding clarity. It has always been better to suffer even crushing defeat while fighting for what we believe in than to “win” with someone who will merely slow down our defeat. Douglas MacArthur was once asked his formula for defensive war and he gave a one word answer: “defeat”. You can’t win unless you attack – and attacking requires a ruthless willingness to take and inflict pain.

Trump isn’t a Conservative; not remotely. Except in one, crucial aspect: Conservatism is really just common sense, and Trump has bags of that. He’s not someone, I think, who has delved deeply into Adam Smith, Edmund Burke and F.A. Hayek. He’s not, that is, an intellectual of the Right. But, then again, who is? Bill Kristol? Max Boot? David French? If these are our intellectuals, then we’re doomed. Trump isn’t advancing Conservatism in a conscious sense – but by doing what makes sense, he’s advancing it all the same. It is common sense that the judges merely enforce the laws; to do otherwise means there is no law, and thus no chance for justice or mercy or even sanity. The only judges out there who will simply enforce the laws are Conservative judges…and, so, common sense dictates the appointment only of Conservative judges. It’d be stupid to waste even a single life time appointment on a non-Conservative judge because that means you’re just giving the anti-law, insane Left side of the aisle an unearned win and making life harder for yourself going forward.

So it is with act after act. True, it’d be nice if Trump would take on the national debt, but that is something that only concerns a small number of people. Yes, the debt is a looming national catastrophe and if we don’t get a handle on it, we’re going to pay a high price for our profligacy. But Trump isn’t particularly concerned about it and never has been. Can’t ask a man to be what he isn’t. And at the end of the day, the pretend-Conservatives who ran our movement since Reagan also didn’t do a damn thing about the debt. Perhaps Trump’s successor can be made to do what is necessary (it won’t really be hard: at it takes is a good economy and a really very small reduction in overall government spending over a period of 10 years to get to balance and debt reduction). But the bottom line is that outside of the debt, Trump is moving the Conservative ball forward even more effectively than Reagan (who also didn’t tackle the debt). And by doing this – by actually implementing Conservatism – Trump is doing the best thing anyone has ever done for us: exposing the traitors in our ranks.

Remember, these are grifters who merely want to live well without doing anything. They are best friends with their Leftist counterparts, who are also grifting (but who also do advance Leftism…so while the liberal foot soldiers are getting robbed just as blind as we were, at least Leftism is being advanced; this makes the Leftwing grifters the moral superior of the Conservative grifters). It was all fine as long as nothing actually happened in a Conservative sense. Along comes Trump and he starts doing Conservative things and they all had a choice to make: some choose to actually join the side they said they were on…others have decided to join the Left, which they always in fact were part of. For us, it means we have been able to recover Conservatism. We’ve taken it out of the hands of the thieves who stole it in the aftermath of Ronald Reagan…and no longer bound to anything that happened in the past, we are able to jettison even the mistakes that Reagan made, most notably the 1986 Amnesty. But we’ve also given up on nation building and endless war. We no longer desire to defend large corporations. We no longer defend “free trade” which merely meant middle class jobs being sent to Chinese sweated labor. We are able to start counterattacking the advances of the Left.

In my view, it is time to forget 1989 to 2009. It was a wasted 20 years, as far as Conservatism was concerned. Anyone – even the most dyed in the wool Never Trump – is free to join or reject us; we don’t care what anyone chooses and no hard feelings against anyone who repents and gets on board. But we’re now going to fight. We still may lose, but we’re not going to roll over for the Left.

Open Thread

M. Noonan17 Comments

Ace went off on a bit of a rant about the fact that both US and Brit intel people were passing messages back and forth wondering if both Brexit and Trump were the result of Russian interference:

These people are literally insane, and were in the grips of a hysterical delusion — “without evidence,” as the hysterical leftwing media might say — and they run the f***ing world without our consent and in secrecy.

These “intelligence officials” are so completely out-of-touch they cannot fathom even the possibility that the wider public might deviate from the BBC/MSM line that defines their reality, and immediately suspect RUSSIAN AGENTS must be behind any deviation from the expected left-liberal upper middle class consensus that they believe is the only mode of thought or possibility in the world.

Ace goes on to note that they are “pig-ignorant and stupid”. I fact checked that assertion and found it to be completely true. The people who run the world are mostly behind the scenes and man the corporate and government bureaucracies around the world. The all went to the same sort of schools and learned the same sort of things and are completely convinced they simply know better than everyone who isn’t in their clique. Trump, Brexit, Hungary, Poland…all these people and movements which propose to give regular folks a say are a terror to these people. They really do fear that if we secure power, we’ll immediately launch global nuclear war…that is, if we don’t immediately start committing genocide. They think we’re too stupid to be trusted with power…and so it came naturally to them to think that we dimwits were being fooled by someone into wanting Britain to be free or America to be great again. And we simply must get rid of them – the survival of our nation and civilization requires it. They have to go, by any means necessary.

Democrats are pretty much all-in on Medicare for All…but I don’t think it’ll play well with suburban voters. We’ll see.

Yes, the polls are biased:

While looking into this phenomenon in 2016, I contacted a number of polling groups. I knew that they “weight” and adjust their samples to make them reflect certain demographics of the U.S. population. In simple terms, if their sample ends up with too many young people, they assign greater weight to responses from older people. The methods they use to do so vary and are arcane, to say the least. For example, ABC states that it “adopted iterative weighting, also known as raking or rim weighting, in which the sample is weighted sequentially to Census targets one variable at a time, continuing until the optimum distribution is achieved.”

But one of the most interesting things I learned had to do with one big factor for which they typically don’t “weight” or adjust. It’s one that I think is arguably among the most important when it comes to polls measuring political issues: political affiliation. In other words, the national pollsters I spoke with told me that if they end up interviewing significantly more Democrats than Republicans — which is often the case — they don’t necessarily adjust the results to try to make the sample reflective of the U.S. voting population.

I also bet that, on the flip side, if they are finding significant numbers of Democrats who are going towards the Republicans, they toss that data out. It is how they missed PA and MI in 2016…they probably had somewhere in their data the indication that Trump was doing well in both States, but as it didn’t fit their pre-determined polling outcome, they just ignored it. Right now, except for a few outliers, all polling indicates that Trump is doomed – that there isn’t the slightest chance of him winning. They even have polling showing the Democrats are taking Texas. Now, I can’t say for certain, because I don’t have certain knowledge: but I will say I highly doubt all this polling. I doubt that Trump could raise the money and draw the crowds if he was in such bad shape that he was about to lose Texas. I also doubt that somewhat more than 25% of his 2016 Texas voters have suddenly discovered a desire for far-left Progressive policies. But, we’ll see…and what we’ll see, I’m guessing, will be a repeat of 2016.