Author: Mark Noonan

Open Thread

Mark Noonan82 Comments

Yet another school shooting – this one they are having a little trouble with as the school is Christian and the shooter is Trans – one line they’re tying out – and I think they’ll settle on – is that this was provoked by GOP efforts to “ban transgender people”. Which, of course, is nothing of the sort. We GOPers are the most overly-tolerant people in the world. Vastly more so than any of those Left of center. We’re just kinda hung up on that whole mutilate minors with surgery and hormones thing. Sticks in the craw a bit.

But that is the Left: sheer evil. In response to one of their own who went off on shooting spree based on lies about us, they’re going to demand that we give up our guns and allow 12 year olds to have permanent, life-altering surgery. Nothing doing: fortunately, I’ve seen a lot of backbones today of people not sitting still for this drivel. But I also perceive that we’re still not pushing back all the way.

We need to start really calling these people out – Congresswoman Jayapal yesterday was on the House floor to condemn “MAGA extremist” attacks on LGBTQ youth. I Tweeted on top of that the fact that we’re not attacking LGBTQ youth: we’re attacking Jayapal and her sick and disgusting desire to mutilate minors and have perverts twerk in front of them. To pat myself on the back, that is the sort of line we have to start taking. These people aren’t merely wrong. They aren’t making mistakes. They aren’t doing good with unintended consequences: they are evil. They are bad. They are doing wrong things because they like wrong things and they get off on ruining lives.

We’ve talked for decades now about school shootings and it all comes back to the same thing: we allow lunatics free range. But now we must take it the next step back: the reason we have so many lunatics is because we have allowed the Left to deliberately and maliciously create an insane society…and they created this insane society by destroying morality. As I’ve said many times before – 80 years ago you could buy a machine gun by mail. Also back then you couldn’t even form the concept of “drag queen story time”. Fast forward to today and you have to jump though hoops to buy a semi-automatic weapon but we have drag queen story time. There is a connection, folks. We’re getting what the Left wanted – increasing restrictions on liberty along with government-subsidized license.

To nutshell it: don’t call them mistaken. Call them evil. They are wicked people trying to destroy. We push back on it that way and every time one of these horrors emerge, they’ll eventually be placed on the defensive…and then we can destroy them.

Fox News cut away to Pudding Brain expecting to see some comment about the school shooting and got some bizarre, senile ramble about ice cream. Now, he did eventually get around to spending a few seconds talking about the shooting, but then was back to yucking it up. The man is flat out senile and they clearly didn’t get his meds right today. The destiny of our nation is the feeble hands of a man who has gone gaga.

DeSantis is taking advantage of the fact that he holds executive power and has signed universal school choice in Florida. This will be a problem for Trump in the primary…all Trump can do is talk about doing things. RDS can do them.

One of Rand Paul’s staffers was brutally attacked in DC – no word yet on whether it was political or just Democrat City Life. Horrible all the same.

Matt Taibbi – the center-left journalist Musk has been allowing to write up the Twitter Files – got a sudden visit by IRS agents when he testified in Congress about the government orchestrated censorship and propaganda under the old Twitter ownership. Pardon me, guys: have you ever heard of an IRS agent making a visit? Senator Jordan wants some answers about it: spoiler, he won’t get them. This is bizarre and extremely frightening…and shows that Democrats have polling which shows this is something which could be turned on them devastatingly during an election year.

The Population Bomb didn’t go off – even far Left environmentalist whackos are now admitting the population will peak around 8.8 billion at midcentury and then rapidly decline. My bet – it’ll peak lower than that and decline much more rapidly than expected. My guesstimate is that it peaks around 2040 at a little over 8.5 billion. Birth rates are dropping like rocks everywhere…with the exception being among Mormons, ultra-Orthodox Jews and a few traditionalist Christian groups (which can range from Catholic to Protestant). So the really funny thing will be a new civilization arising starting around 2100 when, turns out, the only people alive at the time are believers because their parents decided to have kids.

Death by Going Along With It

Mark Noonan34 Comments

I’ve determined that the road to hell is not so much paved with good intentions as paved with a desire to go along to get along.

Earlier today, I saw a headline where a transwoman is upset because at the airport TSA hit “her testicles”. Actually written just like that. In itself, just another ridiculous part of modern life, but it made clear in my mind that our problem is that we’ve decided that going along with things – no matter how bizarre – is superior to holding fast to truth.

We’ve been doing it a long time, after all. Close to 40 years ago after a day at work the staff at the company I worked at, under the leadership of the company owner, broke out a bottle of whiskey and we all started having drinks to decompress from what had been a very long day. After a little while, someone broke out a book entitled something like “1,001 Worst Ethnic Jokes”. We all took turns reading from it, while continuing to drink, and it still stands in my mind as one of the funniest evenings I’ve ever had. Who was there? White people. Black people. Latinos. Jews. In other words: a very mixed ethnicity group and we all howled with laughter at the jokes. Jokes like: What’s the difference between an Irish wedding and an Irish wake? One less drunk Also: what do you call a one legged woman? Ilene. What do you call a one legged Japanese woman? Irene.

You can’t do that these days. Can you imagine the outrage? And we got here not all at once, but by a series of surrenders. In my mind, it started with Elton John got all huffy at some award ceremony after Sam Kinison made a joke about homosexuality. Ol’ Elton – who was allegedly a rebel rock star – got all huffy over a joke…and just about right then and there, “PC” entered the cultural mainstream. And it did seem small, didn’t it? I mean, after all, the joke offended that guy…so, just don’t make the joke again. And then the next joke. And the next and the next and the next and here we were in 2023 where people risk social and economic ruin because 20 years previously they might have made an ethnic joke. This cowardice is simply killing civilization as, step by step, mere sanity is becoming socially unacceptable while the most lunatic are awarded the leadership role.

We’ve been so busy worrying about who we might offend that we’ve allowed bullies and liars to dictate our social actions. Whoever shouts gets deference. Whoever lie isn’t called out on them. All so we won’t cause offense. Even though we know they’re not really offended..but mostly just trying to get over on us. Secure some bit of unearned wealth or social credit by browbeating us. And it really has to stop: we have to stop being afraid. And then we have to start punishing them. It shouldn’t be the guy who told the off color joke or who chose his words poorly losing the job – it should be the person complaining about it. As soon as one of these bullies sticks their nose in and starts whining about it, whammo: you’re done. Out. Ridiculed and exiled from society.

It is necessary for two reasons. Firstly, for our own defense. We don’t want to lose our jobs over nothing. But the second reason is most crucial: by punishing the whiners, we’ll make whining unpopular. There will be an immediate increase in social courage if we start beating up the bullies rather than joining the bully in beating up the victim. It will get more people to speak what is really on their minds…and act upon their beliefs. A huge amount of leftwing success over the past 20 years, especially, has been simply because most people have been afraid to openly oppose it. Time to rebalance the books: to make them afraid to speak up while we say whatever we please.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan88 Comments

Senator Kennedy asked a Biden judicial nominee a pretty basic legal question (the sort you’d expect to be learned in pre-law) and the nominee had no idea what Kennedy was asking about. A lot of people are all, “what in heck are they teaching?” about it…but all with the assumption that law schools are still, well, law schools.

Now, to be fair, I have been set a little bit straight by a Twitter friend who stoutly asserts that in the law schools there are professors who vigorously teach law even if they, themselves, are far Left nutjobs. I trust the guy who told me this so I have to assume a blanket assertion I made on Twitter wasn’t true – that being that they don’t teach law, at all, in law school. So, I take my correction: they still do teach some law. That said, as we can see from this Biden nominee, they don’t teach much law…and I still vigorously assert that there is a negative selection in people brought into the government to ensure against any possibility of a real lawyer being appointed to a senior law enforcement or judicial position.

There are two factors as work here. The first is the need for “diversity”. The race hustlers are insisting that we have vast numbers of non-male, non-white lawyers. Whether or not there is a sufficiently large pool of such is irrelevant and I’m certain that its racist to even ask. They are going to get their diversity, folks: that is baked in. And not just diversity in admission, but diversity in result. No law school out there is going to have their graduating class be less than, say, 20 percent black…and if this means they have to graduate people who aren’t capable, they’ll do it. And, yes, I’m quite confident that when it comes to grading bar exams, the people doing so are also going to make certain that the “right” percentage of each diversity quota makes it (anyways, I understand from a lawyer friend that the bar has never been a straight up pass or fail: there has always been a little fudging in deciding just what constitutes passing and failing: easy, then, to rig the system to get the result you want). So, what we’ve got is a built in system which will ensure that a certain percentage of people will have no business at all being lawyers, but lawyers they shall be.

And that brings us to the second factor: the need for certainty. This is something which stems from Leninist legal practice – and it would amaze even many Conservatives to find out how much of Progressive legal and social policy is based on Leninism. It really has taken over the Left in the United States. Took decades to get it done, but it has been accomplished. In this instance, Leninist legal principle is that there is no “both sides” in the law – the law is to advance the cause or it isn’t law. In Lenin’s parlance it would be to advance the cause of the Working Class…but our modern Leninists don’t really like workers (Lenin didn’t either, of course) and so the cause now is the Victim…the racial, sexual, gender, what have you victim of the Racist, Sexist, Homophobic, Imperialist, Genocidal AmeriKKKa. The law is to advance the cause of the Victim or it isn’t law. Whatever happens, the designated victim must prevail in court – and as the victim is always pre-determined by the DNC Narrative of the moment, the Progressive lawyers and judges know how to rule. This is why law isn’t really taught, or at least isn’t taught to those being groomed for senior judicial positions: the Left needs certainty. The absolute assurance that when their legal cases are brought forth, everyone involved will follow the Party Line on who is the Victim. Can’t get that out of anyone who really knows the law or has an ounce of self respect: you can only get certainty out of mindless, Party hacks. And, so, that is what we get…and so Biden’s nominee who doesn’t know a basic aspect of law. But he’ll be confirmed and for decades he’ll be ruling however the Progressives tell him to.

As of this moment, nobody has a clue about Trump’s indictment. Which shows, if nothing else has, how flimsy it all is. As I said a long while ago: if Trump had really broken any law, they could have got him on it long ago. Say whatever you want about the man, but he keeps his legal affairs in order. And as I also observed, this makes sense: working the New York real estate market is a minefield of legal hazard and anyone who is successful at it gets first rate legal advice on just what can and can’t be done within the law. Trump’s been at this for decades…I’ll bet he’s one of the few rich people in the world who can stand up to legal scrutiny.

Uganda voted to ban homosexuality. The Left is still trying to figure out what to do about a bunch of black people who are victims of colonialism not going along with white Progressives. Of course the Left wants to hammer them over this – and the Left is also chock full of neo-imperialists trying to impose Western morals on Africa – but this was a democratic vote in the Ugandan parliament…they’re going to have a rough time with this one.

I’m just going to laugh about it, myself.

Mexico’s President condemns Biden and the USA on human rights grounds – including pointing out how wrong it is for the Democrats to seek the indictment of their political opponent. He’s right. And we look absurd. It is a moment of national humiliation that I’m not only lectured to by the President of Mexico, but I can’t punch back because I have no grounds.

DeSantis after a very good run has now backtracked on Ukraine and is taking a more neo-con line. To me, this is an unforced error for RDS – the base is pacifist and, also, this is the Democrat’s war and they are going to lose it. All GOPers should stay the heck away so that when this blows up, it blows up only in Democrat faces. The last thing we need is for the GOP to take ownership of this war…especially as the moment we do, the Democrats will go back to being anti-war, accusing us of war crimes and they’ll suddenly discover that their darling Zelensky is a corrupt thug. I hope that RDS backtracks on his backtrack.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan43 Comments

The Trump Indictment has turned into a horrible proxy fight between Trump and DeSantis supporters – which shows the real reason Trump is to be indicted. As I noted before, we do have to stop being suckers. Trump, in my view, is a bit more sinning in this than anyone else. I can sympathize as he’s the guy under the indictment gun…but he should be leading the way in making this a fight against the Democrats, as such, rather than taking swipes at DeSantis. We’ll just have to see how this plays out – but even with all the drama, I do believe this one will backfire on the Democrats as badly as their pushes to defund the cops and medically transition minors are starting to backfire on them.

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey is issuing an emergency regulation advising the medical profession that under Missouri law experimental medical procedures cannot be performed on children outside of very specific controls. This will almost entirely shut down medical transition of minors in Missouri. That’s the thing the Progressives don’t want anyone to notice: nobody has the first clue what these procedures will actually do to children long term – it only started a couple years ago base on “studies” which don’t rise to the level of junk science. We’re giving kids hormones and cutting off healthy parts not as a best practice medical procedure, but on a guess enforced by Progressive tyrants. The hope is that Missouri (and other States) will soon ban transitions for minors – as Bailey points out, plenty of European governments have already put a stop to the practice or severely restricted it. But until such time, Red State officials can and should use the laws on the books – and I’ll bet all 50 States have some species of law which hems in doing anything medical to a child outside of strict guidelines.

And this is how we do it – we should be using the power we have to the maximum extent possible. We can’t stop it in California and can only have limited effect on federal laws and regulations right now…but in the States we control, we can largely stop this savagery against defenseless children.

There is a horrific video out there which shows two people mercilessly beating a man in broad daylight – one armed with a bat, the other with a knife. Like all such videos it lacks full content: we don’t know what transpired before the video picks up with the lady holding the bat brutally swinging it at the victim’s head. But it doesn’t really matter: whatever the man may have done, he was down and surrendering and the thugs beating him could have just walked away (though I’ve heard the argument was over a parking spot). These people are savages – I do not consider them my social or political equals. Barbarians may never have the rights of civilized people. Barbarians are to be controlled by whatever means prove necessary. We will soon get to the point where all civilized people agree with me on this view; even quite liberal people. We simply can’t allow people to be mercilessly beaten without intervention.

But right now we are at the point where the civilized are simply too frightened to act. They still believe it will somehow get better on its own. Or that our increasingly incompetent and cowed police departments will get hold of the situation. It will not get better on its own: by the time you’ve got a bat-swinging maniac beating someone in broad daylight, you’re way past any easy cure. It will just get worse and worse and spread to any area where people are not armed and willing to shoot in self defense. The cure is to treat barbarians like barbarians – to understand that mercy requires that barbarians be compelled to good behavior even if by the whip and the branding iron. There’s a reason punishments a thousand years ago were brutal – they had to be in order to control a semi-barbaric population. That polite society you may remember from 50 years ago was the result of centuries of breaking people at the wheel, having them run the knout, hanging, drawing and quartering. Barbarians are not very good at calculating risks and rewards. They are driven entirely by appetite. They do whatever their impulses say and they keep doing it until stopped by superior force. Eventually, and I believe fairly soon, the people will have had enough.

How are the banks doing? Well, J P Morgan thought they had $1.3 million in nickel stored…turns out they have bags of rocks. Rocks. Like in your garden: rocks. These are the people in charge of our financial destiny. And its getting bad…kinda surprised at how low key everyone is being about Credit Suisse going under with $17 billion in their bonds just, poof!, declared to be worthless. This is a financial crisis which is already making 2008 look like nothing…but its all still being papered over with fiat money, unacknowledged defaults and banks moving money around to pretend there’s enough cash to cover everything (several major US banks have quietly started making big deposits in regional banks hoping that the word will get out just enough to prevent runs on those banks). Can they keep it up? Time will tell.

There’s this freaky dude out there who has pretended to be a woman for a year. A very creepy caricature of a woman…I won’t link to any of the videos but its like if you thought up the most insulting way to exaggerate some female mannerisms, that is what this guy has done. Naturally, the Vice President sent a letter congratulating this creep on being a woman for a year. Specifically, for “living authentically”. I know some women – trust me, I really do – none of them are happy with this sort of thing. The backlash on this is going to be astonishing…and may actually provide the leverage for a big GOP win as women make up such a crucially large segment of the Democrat vote.

Dear GOP: Stop Being Losers

Mark Noonan35 Comments

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

The primary reason we lose is because we’re losers. And we really need to stop being losers.

As the potential Trump indictment started to dominate the conversation did we see a fully unified GOP/Right condemning what would be an obvious act of merciless injustice? No: what we saw is Trumpsters and DeSantistans getting into a pissing match about who should be doing and saying what. For heaven’s sake, this was a golden opportunity to unite the party and fire up the base…and it so far is being wasted in internecine battles. And I do blame both sides.

To be sure, my bet is that the fight originated among people in the pay of the DNC – I am quite confident (because Democrats are really good at politics) that they have co-opted some of ours. People who might seem the most fervent Conservatives/GOPers who are nonetheless getting paid to sow division. To take any issue and make it a “you must back my guy or you’re a loser Commie” moment. From there, other voices just pick up the propaganda and run with it…before you know it, you’ve got people on the Right bitterly fighting it out on a matter of internal political purity while the Democrats are busily advancing their agenda. I would not at all be surprised to find out that the leak of a looming Trump indictment was done with just this sort of thing in mind…I’ll be certain of it if the indictment doesn’t happen (there are rumors that it won’t).

This isn’t about Trump. It isn’t about DeSantis. It isn’t about any particular policy prescription: it is about our ability to govern ourselves. The Democrats propose to take that away. Do you think they’ve dropped the idea of packing the Court and taking over State and local elections? They haven’t. Democrats never retreat from a position. They sometimes for tactical reasons put an issue on the backburner, but even there they still try to advance it. And they never forget it or give it up. If the Democrats secure enough power – and a divided GOP would hand it to them – they will pack the Courts, rule our liberties as unconstitutional and take over the election process to ensure we can never win again. They will do this. It isn’t a guess. It isn’t a worry. It is precisely what they’ll do because Democrats – and this has been true of them since Van Buren created the party – always believe that the survival of the United States requires Democrats to win all elections. Any election not won by Democrats was via evil machinations…all elections won by Democrats are forever. If we lose we lose forever; our choices will then be to submit, or break up the country.

What has happened to Trump since 2015 has been sheer evil. And none of it was his fault. Lots of anti-Trump GOPers like to say that if Trump wasn’t Trump then it would all have been different. No, it would not have. Trump has had 10,000 liars in government and the MSM out to get him since he came down the escalator. They never let any lies go and they always add new lies (most Democrats remain convinced that Trump is a Russian asset installed in 2016 via Putin switching votes from Hillary to Trump). The will do to anyone else what they did to Trump. They are already working up the lies to be used against DeSantis. So, when a partisan hack of a Democrat DA proposes to so much as investigate Trump, let alone charge him, the duty of all Conservatives/GOPers is to condemn the effort and stand shoulder to shoulder against it. The Democrats are the enemy.

But, we seem to prefer to fight each other. Perhaps because we’re too chicken to fight Democrats? They play dirty, GOPers don’t. But we must stop it. We must never punch right. Always punch left. Everyone needs to get on board. Sure, battle for your guy but once the guy is chosen, everyone gets on board. And while the battle to pick a guy is ongoing, any and all Democrat attacks against any of the candidates are to be met with ferocious scorn by all of us…not sotto-voiced agreed to in the hopes that that it’ll place our guy in a better position for the primaries.

The life of our nation is at risk. In the old saw: now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of their country. Now is most emphatically not the time to rip each other to shreds.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan29 Comments

With bank after bank failing and pretty clear proof of Biden Family profiteering in China, you know what is on the agenda: Distraction!

So, the rumor mill is now filled with predictions that Trump will be indicted next week. The more excited claiming that he’ll be arrested and frog marched into custody…not sure how the NYPD will manage that unless Trump happens to be in NYC next week, and his Secret Service detail will also have something to say along those lines.

I’m fairly confident, though, that they will indict Trump on some bogus charges. They pretty much have to at this point: if you listen to the Left, they have been screaming for it ever louder over the past year. They seem to think there’s 25 to life just waiting there for Trump…rather than, at most, a process crime which has a max sentence of six months. And a process crime without basis. Don’t get me wrong, Trump goes on trial in NYC and he will be found guilty – there’s no way a Manhattan jury would go the other way against Trump. Its why all hopes are pinned in NYC…they’d love to do it in DC and the jury pool there is just as hostile to Trump and obedient to Dems as Manhattan, but there is GOP House oversight in DC. In NYC, everyone is on the same team and no matter what laws the prosecutors break to get a conviction of Trump, none of them will ever be charged with a crime. But Trump has not broken the law – if he ever had, he would have been arrested ages ago. He’s legally clean as a whistle. So, whatever they charge will be drivel and it will be thrown out on appeal – but appeal is after conviction and it is the conviction the Dems want.

How does this affect 2024? Plenty of Dems seem to think that a conviction bars a person from office. This is because they’re stupid and ignorant. For the GOP base, there will be a huge upsurge of sympathy for Trump…but whether that carries on or is replaced with a “maybe he’d better bow out” feeling remains to be seen. And make no mistake about it: they don’t want Trump in 2024. They say they do, and that means you know they don’t. An indictment of Trump is proof positive that the Dems internal polling shows Pudding Brain coming up short in a rematch.

But the fun part comes later – eventually, we do get the White House back and the pressure to arrest the previous Democrat President will be unstoppable. This is Late Republic stuff, but it is what the Democrats want.

Elon Musk is claiming he’s got a nifty AI program which is going to detect and track social media manipulation. We’ll see! Not that I doubt Musk’s sincerity here, I’m just not sure a computer program can snoop it out. They just do what their biased programmers tell them to do, after all. I mean, I can snoop it out and I offer my services to Elon for no more than $1,983.943.56 per year. But my results also wouldn’t be accepted by the manipulators. Maybe that’s why Elon is trying AI…give it a sense of neutrality. Anyways, if it does work it will be very revealing not so much on the manipulation (I think we on the Right can sniff that out pretty fast these days), but on just who is pushing it – which will, I bet, turn out to include lots of people and institutions allegedly on our side.

This weirdo wrote a letter to his family saying that if they vote GOP, he’s done with them – he being gay and his assertion is that the GOP is trying to eliminate homosexuality. Specifically, he said he can’t be part of a family voting for people who want to murder him. Lots of people scorched the guy as the utter loon that he is, but I saw it for what it was: very effective propaganda. Even if not entirely conscious from the letter writer. You see, the Democrats lie. They lie about everything and all the time. They do this because lying works. Lying has always worked – from getting Eve to eat the apple to getting a bailout for SVB: lies always fall on fertile ground. What this loon was doing was reinforcing the Democrat propaganda that the GOP is filled with hate-filled, cruel people out to kill. Now, maybe this guy was paid to write his letter or maybe he’s just your basic Progressive moron who believes what he sees on TV. It doesn’t matter: what matters is that Democrat voters will hear about it and their “GOP Bad” beliefs will be reinforced. And Democrats must put this on steroids going into 2024: Joe is held in contempt. Nobody likes him. Not even his own family (if they liked him, they wouldn’t have let him run in 2020). The economy is in tatters and looks to get worse. A lot worse. So, what to do? Change policy? ROFL!!! No: just get your base fired up with fear and hatred so they’ll stick with you no matter what happens. I expect the main base-motivators for the Dems will be claims that the GOP wants to kill gay people and execute women for having an abortion…and do look for GOPers who feed into this propaganda. That supposedly far-right guy you think was ok? Well, just a few thousand bucks and he’s making a sound byte for the MSM which feeds the DNC Narrative.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan64 Comments

Pudding Brain saved us from Trump’s financial crisis. Hey, I’m just going on what the MSM is saying here!

What really happened is that a bunch of banks got caught in a squeeze on US Treasuries – because of Biden’s failed policies, those bonds lost a lot of value. Banks are required to have a certain amount of assets against liabilities, right? Well, the Treasuries were assets…which then cratered in value. This forced a lot of banks to try and dump the Treasuries (which nobody wanted because, of course, their value was on the downswing)…and this, in turn, led to a cash crunch: the banks didn’t have enough money to cover operations. Bye, Bye SVB and a couple other players. Fortunately, we’ve got Pudding Brain!

His people came up with this idea – and I’m not kidding here: the Federal Reserve will now loan failing banks money at low interest rates with the devalued Treasuries held as collateral at face value.

That’s it. That’s the plan. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, borrow half a million against your $250,000 house and let me know how that goes.

If you could. You can’t because you can’t borrow for greater value than your security. You know: laws of economics and all that stuff. The Banks can because they donate to the right people…and in the case of these particular failing banks, their depositors are also deeply connected to the Democrat ruling class (naturally with lots of Chinese connections, too; I’m pretty sure the boys in Shanghai gave Team Pudding Brain a call over the weekend). This is the merest papering over the cracks. It’ll likely keep things rolling for a bit. How long? Who the heck knows? Long enough for the connected to get their money back and into something besides a US bank. To loan this money the Fed will have to print which will put upward pressure on prices which will force the Fed to jack up rates some more which will punish Treasuries making their value drop even more (this is how they can claim it won’t cost taxpayers any money – because it will be Fed printing: but that devalues your assets in hand, and so it is a secret tax to bail out the Banksters. Again. Oh, what law are they using here? ROFL! Law! Like that matters. There isn’t any law which allows this – they’re just gonna do it).

Their hope is probably that it at least holds together until after Election Day, 2024.

The MSM is, naturally, asserting that the real problem is people noticing the problem. If we’d just please stick to the script, all will be well!

Tucker Carlson sent of a questionnaire to the major GOP candidates about Ukraine and got their answers back – Trump, DeSantis and Ramaswamy gave the best answers (and we’ll need Amazona for a ruling on him – he’s definitely born in the USA to people who were legally residing in the USA at the time of his birth…but I don’t know if they were citizens when Ramaswamy was born…but, anyways, he’s running: and the more I hear from him, the more I like). All three of them discounted our continuing effort in Ukraine – Trump and Ramaswamy more forcefully than DeSantis, but even RDS was noting how stupid it is to defend Ukraine’s border while ours is wide open. Pence and Christie gave the worst answers – essentially committing to the war with only small caveats about how we’ve done it. A lot of candidates didn’t respond, most notable Haley, who is probably trying to keep all her options open as her actual desire is the VP slot and so she’ll be wary of saying anything that would strike her off the eventual nominee’s list. I think that American popular support for Ukraine is very soft and entirely conditional – as long as Americans don’t feel any particular pinch, they’ll go along with it…but if push comes to shove, the people will reject the war. Better for the GOP candidates to be forthrightly anti-war on this issue.

Hey, Mark, why have you lost all faith in our institutions?

Well, skippy, I just found out that GlaxoSmithKlein hid the cancerous side effects of Zantac for 40 years. 40 years! Do you realize how many agencies in how many different nations had to be bribed to pull that off? The payoffs to bureaucrats, doctors and researchers must have reached astonishing levels – but I guess Zantac was such a money-maker that it was all worth it. To them. Not to anyone who got cancer because they wanted to cut down on heartburn. It staggers the mind when you really think about it – for 40 years a major drug company pushed poison on people and all the probably millions of people around the world who are paid to guard against precisely this…let it slide. And do note that I just heard of this – the report came out last month. When it suits the DNC/Ruling Class Narrative stories of a product causing cancer get 24/7 coverage…but for some reason this one seems to have slipped the MSM’s mind. Couldn’t be because right now Democrats are making bank on Big Pharma donations, could it?

HT: Ace of Spades

Civilization Requires Force

Mark Noonan11 Comments

Some years back, I wrote about Bill Buckley and National Review’s successful efforts to purge the Birchers from the Conservative movement. The problem Buckley and others perceived what the JBS’ penchant for conspiracy theories – the kooky idea that there was a genuine global Communist conspiracy to undermine America and that this conspiracy had agents all through the US government and other institutions. The breaking point came when Welch – the founder of JBS – implied that Eisenhower might be some sort of Communist agent. That was, of course, ridiculous and Welch, himself, later distanced himself from it. But the crucial thing was that the Communists, at the time entirely subservient to Moscow and now just operating on their own, really were trying to undermine the USA any way they could. There really were Communist agents all through the government and other American institutions. And the primary failure of Conservatism was in not rooting these elements out – which, in my mind, was really Welch’s primary complaint about Ike. Part of the reason Truman didn’t seek re-election in 1952 was because the penetration of the US Government by Communists had been exposed and it was a horrible scandal especially as American troops were fighting Communist forces in Korea.

Ike could have cleared out the infiltrators. He didn’t; for normal GOPe reasons, he let them go…some to retire, others to be transferred to some other agency. For all the Progressive talk of a anti-Communist witch hunt in the 1950’s, the reality is that there wasn’t a witch hunt. Had there been one, we’d be a lot better off today. Had we gone on a truly forceful anti-Communist crusade in the USA, purging them from all positions and jailing those who were de-facto Soviet agents (very many of the leaders were), think of all the societal decay which wouldn’t have occurred…a huge amount of our social and economic disintegration over the past 50-60 years was caused by people who hate us being left in positions of power and influence.

So, why bring this up? Water over the dam, right? Can’t undo the past. Nope; we can’t. But we can work on the future. And over at National Review they are informing us that we Conservatives had better not like Nayib Bukele.

I know: your first question is, who the heck is that?

I, too, had never heard of him before NRO told me he’s bad. Turns out, he’s the President of El Salvador and he’s gotten a bit infamous of late for his massive crackdown on the horrifically violent gang MS-13. It had gotten really bad in El Salvador, guys; with some sources claiming the murder rate a few years back was 40 for every 100,000 people (most recent stat for us is 7 per 100,000…which, BTW, is a huge spike from just a few years ago). The gangs pretty much did whatever they wanted in El Salvador (as they do in so many Latin American countries) and, remember, these gangs aren’t like the US Mafia or even things like the Crips and the Bloods…for whatever reasons, Latin American gangs are simply inhuman brutes in their violence. Not just killing (via unbelievably savage means) rivals and witnesses (the normal run of gangland killings) but seeming to go out of their way to cruelly kill people who pose little or no threat, just to keep people terrified of the gangs, as such. Bukele did mass arrests and the murder rate in El Salvador has dropped precipitously.

Naturally, the Ruling Class is upset with this. You know the real reason why: a lot of them are owned by the criminals via bribery. But they are officially upset that, to put it mildly, Bukele didn’t ensure that the legal i’s were dotted and t’s crossed on the arrests…and it looks like arrested gangsters who were defiant…didn’t end so well.

Cry me a river.

Bukele is fighting for his country. He’s a bit of an odd duck having risen out of the Marxist FLMN and then dumping them for a more populist/nationalist ideology (which is another likely reason the Ruling Class hates him: can’t abandon the Commies!). He’s also clearly an opportunist (as a young, ambitious pol often is); there are claims he made some side deals with elements of MS-13 from time to time (which is logical to do; hold off one band while dealing with another of more immediate concern). But the thing is you can’t have a civilized nation if crime is running rampant. Your right to free speech and to vote is worthless if at any time you can be robbed or murdered by criminals acting with near-impunity (especially while your Ruling Class is safe and dry behind well-guarded walls and secret deals with the criminals). Before anything else, we must be secure in our lives and property. It isn’t just the bedrock of civilization, it is the bedrock of any functioning society no matter how primitive or advanced. Bukele is simply reacting to reality – unless his people are safe, they can’t build anything.

In a civilization we have carefully constructed rules, written and unwritten, about how things work. And when everything is functioning, these rules are sufficient. Most of the time, we simply obey the unwritten rules: going to work, paying our bills, keeping our houses tidy, being polite to others. In those rare instances where something slipped, we then refer to the written rules and, being civilized people, we go to court and let lawyers, judges and the law figure out the best possible result. But at the back of it all, the thing which made it and ultimately must sustain it, is force. Brutal force. A force which can kill everyone who won’t obey the written and unwritten rules. Bukele is just demonstrating this – and it is causing some alarm among those who are continuing to live well as the current system globally collapses into lawlessness.

It is coming here, folks. When you see those videos of people looting stores and beating others and such, that shows you the problem – a complete rejection of the unwritten rules and utter contempt for the written. And that contempt is well-earned as those in charge of enforcing the written rules have simply allowed crime to slide almost entirely for ideological reasons. But people can’t live like that. We can’t live forever in a society where people can rob and kill with impunity. The robbers and killers must be stopped by any means necessary.

We may already be past the point where the normal system are capable of handling this – that is, our system may be so weak and corrupted that even if it tried to address the issue, it can’t. If we are past the time of working with the rules, then we will find that the people will turn to an American version of Bukele. Someone who says they’ll get rid of the criminals and then just does so – and law be damned. Just get rid of them will be the cry and nobody is going to care what a Court which couldn’t stop the cime is going to say.

Bukele is further accused of using the emergency to gather power to himself which Constitutionally the President doesn’t have. And that is likely true, at least to some degree. He pretty much feels he has to: his people want to be saved from crime and he’s going to save them from it. This does bear the risk of the end of freedom in El Salvador – strongmen who save nations have historically been unwilling to surrender power after the rescue is complete. They come to see themselves as indispensable. They are fearful if they surrender power, their successors will come after them. Ego! We’ll see how El Salvador works this out – but however it comes out, Bukele is saving civilization. And if we let crime get out of hand here – and we are – then the American people will also turn to someone like Bukele…some who will just bust heads until the criminal element is gone. And then we’ll see if that person gives up the power.

It all stems from the fact that civilization is thin: it is a veneer over the human savage. In just a generation or two it can be lost – and if lost, that is when you’ll start seeing a disintegration among the people. I think we can already see that disintegration. We wait now to see if those committed to civilization will step up and save it…or if they’ll weakly allow the collapse to accelerate until the people forth a Caesar.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan37 Comments

Latest word is McCarthy will release to the public all of the J6 video. If so, good for him. At 4,400 hours, crowd-sourcing is probably the best way to really get to the truth of what happened, as far as video can tell (even all 4,400 hours will still be partial…cameras aren’t everywhere nor do they pick up sound. This is in line with my view that there must be no government secrets – that video is the property of the people of the United States of America and we, the people, have a right to view it, at will, and draw our own conclusions.

To give you a flavor of how the Ruling Class is reacting – Geraldo Tweeted out that we should try to remember how we felt about J6 as the MSM was covering it live…in other words, we should ignore any new evidence and stick to the carefully crafted Narrative. These people are pathetic – but, also, that is how they are: I doubt any reporter in the last 50 years has had a truly independent thought. Maybe a couple here and there if we want to be generous, but most just read from the script. And this goes back to WWI when the US government started assiduously controlling the Narrative by means of access. If you didn’t toe the government line, you wouldn’t get access…and if they caught you unauthorized in a combat zone, they’d arrest you.

Huge contrast to the Civil War when reporters literally crawled all over the battlefield…and though the generals hated it and would try to inconvenience the reporters, they never dreamed of trying to control them. They knew that a hundred negative articles about them would be washed away with one victory…so go out and get a victory. Our modern generals – and politicians – figure its easier if the MSMers just write up defeat as victory. And the MSMers play along with it – oh, sure, they’ll turn on a military operation, but only when they’re told to, and invariably only when a GOPer is in office (just watch, if a GOPer wins in 2024, then starting January 21, 2025 the covering of Ukraine will go uniformly negative, if the war is still going by then). Why? Because it is easier, first and foremost. Cooperate and you get a nice billet and you’re protected and have good food – to report on a war would require going out to the battlefield and that’s risky, after all.

The MSM is upset that fewer kids are choosing to go to college – after all, how you gonna turn normal kids into non-binary Commies if they don’t go to college?

I’m pleased with this. College is supposed to be for the rare heights of intellect – in a real, sane system, not 10% of any high school graduating class would be able to even get into college, the entrance exam would be so demanding. Out of college we’re supposed to get our doctors, our lawyers, our highest level scientists and philosophers of exceptional knowledge…not barely literate “studies” majors who owe a hundred grand after they’re done.

In reality, for most people, 8 years of education is sufficient. Edison, who’s mother was a teacher, had only a few months of formal schooling. Lincoln only had about a year. Once you teach a kid to read, write and do sums, it is really up to the kid at that point – and the kid will either have the mind and will for it, or not. I remember those long, dreary hours 9th through 12th grade where I wasn’t learning anything I didn’t already know…and, indeed, massively advanced upon as I devoured my father’s library. The reason I didn’t go to college was because I couldn’t face four more years of that. And these days in addition to the lack of intellectual challenge, the kids are relentlessly propagandized…and for anyone with an ounce of liberty in their hearts, that has to be enervating. And to end it up massively in debt? A complete waste unless you need the credential to get into medical or law school.

So, kids: learn a trade. Even if you’re not mechanically inclined, there are trades to learn which can lead you to quite a nice life: I know of a man who is a few years older than me and he’s got buckets of money because he started, as it were, in the mail room and just learned the business backwards and forwards and so became invaluable…and, indeed, headhunted for ever more pay. Work. Learn. Save your money. By 50 if you’re at all responsible, you’ll be well off.

If you’ve never seen the 1964 movie Zulu, you should watch it because it is one of the very best war movies ever made – but now you should watch it because, apparently, it really irritates the Left. They are claiming it is a gateway drug to White Supremacy. To his credit, one of the stars of the movie, Michael Cain, is telling them to get bent (it was his first starring role). It isn’t hard to see why the Left hates it – British soldiers as good guys is enough to kill it for them, but what is worst about it is that it shows about 140 British soldiers holding off three or four thousand Zulu warriors in a pitched, two day battle. It also, for anyone who looks into it, will reveal that while the British might not have had full legal justification for breaking the Zulu kingdom, they certainly had the moral right – the Zulu kingdom was a hideous, inhuman tyranny where murder was the method of deciding who ruled. But, that’s not really in the movie – and rightly so: the movie, itself, is about soldiers…and it pays tribute to the Zulu warriors who obeyed their king and went to war, as soldiers should.

What the J6 Videos Tell Us

Mark Noonan53 Comments

To get the easy part out first: they tell us the DNC/MSM Narrative about J6 is false. But, we already knew that.

If you wish to put the worst possible spin on it, what you come away with is a riot. Certainly not something you want to happen and certainly something worth pursuing judicial action against the worst offenders. But it was not an insurrection. They were not trying to overthrow the government nor prevent the normal functions of government. They were just there to express their anger over a vote they felt was tainted and demand that Congress examine the vote before certifying the Presidential winner. Perhaps a forlorn hope. Perhaps even a silly hope. But it is what they wanted – not to end the American system of government, but to ensure that the American system of government functioned as designed.

That is what is really causing the fracture: the sense on the Right – and especially among normal, everyday people – that the system isn’t functioning as it is supposed to. Our Senators are supposed to represent our States. Our Congresspeople are supposed to represent us. The Executive Branch is supposed to see to it that the laws are faithfully enforced. The Judiciary is supposed to smack down with finality any attempt by government to act outside the Constitution. That’s all the protestors wanted – and maybe they did get far more rowdy than they should have, but the demand was for justice and transparency.

What they got was arrested and called domestic terrorists. People who are the very backbone of our nation – the people who do the actual work. Who serve in the military. Who pay their bills, pay their taxes, never steal…they were called domestic terrorists.

Not, it must be said, the people who looted the stores of small businesses. Not the people who burned down buildings. Not the people who set up “autonomous zones” where crime ran rampant. Not the people who attacked the White House. They aren’t the domestic terrorists. The people who live off the workers, who are mostly rich and privileged or welfare bums…they can commit horrific acts of violence and they are barely even arrested…but regular folks go to their government to demand redress of grievances…domestic terrorists.

So, even if you want to puff up J6 as a riot, there is still the massive disparity in treatment – one side gets the book thrown at them, the other side gets barely a slap on the wrist. The shaman guy was apparently escorted at least part of the way in by the police. Plenty of officers had opportunities to quietly arrest the loon, or at least escort him off the premises. They didn’t. And now this harmless kook gets four years…for nothing.

And that brings us to the more difficult aspect of this. Ever since the videos were released last night a growing chorus of voices on the Right have called for them to be ignored, to be denigrated. They demand we accept the Official Narrative (McConnell specifically urged this today) rather than what we can see with our own eyes. They are slandering Tucker Carlson every chance they get (you know I have no love for Carlson: to me, he’s just another MSMer…maybe better than most, but still not my ally). They are still insisting it was an insurrection and that the book needed to be thrown at the J6 protestors. I have never been more angry and disgusted in all my life. Rely on it, a part of me wants the Left to win now, just so I can see these cretins hauled before a tribunal they can’t defend themselves against.

And the GOP politicians and Conservative pundits did this on their own. It wasn’t Democrats or MSMers making their rote demands that the GOP condemn whatever the DNC has targeted for opprobrium…these people did it on their own. They volunteered to be water carriers for the Ruling Class. They are absolutely committed to the DNC Narrative.

And, so, the last fig leaf is off. We know. We can’t ignore it any longer: these people are not on our side. They weren’t fooled. They weren’t uncertain. They weren’t just misinterpreting the data: all along they were maliciously lying, just as the Democrats were. Oh, to be sure, they dressed it up a bit…making this or that complaint about the process and maybe making a barbed remark or two about this or that Democrat involved…but from the start they signed on for the cruise. The story agreed upon by the DNC after January 6th was that Trump incited an attempted coup: and plenty of our own GOPers and fellow Conservatives bought it and committed themselves to it. And they are sticking with it: and that can only mean they’re being paid to do it. No way anyone with a shred of decency sticks to the Narrative after the videos were released. Even if Carlson edited them to be as unfair as possible to the Narrative, the bottom line is that you can see, with your own eyes, that the cops didn’t act to stop people from coming in and, indeed, showed them around.

As of right now, I’m re-committed to Trump in 2024. I can’t vote for anyone else: he’s the only person who has demonstrated by word and deed that he’s on my side. Maybe DeSantis can still do it. We’ll see. But absent DeSantis or some other candidate conclusively proving that they are on my side, I have to stick with Trump. One thing is certain, we can’t go on like this – we must get a political party which is on our side. If we can’t force the GOP to do that, then we’ll have to start from scratch. We must bring an end to this corrupt, lying, murderous Ruling Class.