Author: Mark Noonan

Immigration in a Dying World

Mark Noonan11 Comments

Robert Stacy McCain points out an interesting speech given by the Prime Minister of Hungary:

The situation, my dear friends, is: They want to take away our country! . . . They want us to hand it over willingly to others. To strangers from another continent, who do not speak our language, who do not respect our culture, our laws and our way of life. Who want to replace our way of life with theirs. From now on they do not want us and our descendants to live here, but someone else. . . .

There is no exaggeration in this! We can see it day by day, as great European peoples and nations, step by step, area by area, from city to city, lose their homeland. The situation is such that those who do not stop the migration at their borders will be lost. Slowly but surely they will be consumed. All of this by external forces, international powers that are trying to force it upon us, with the help of their local allies, and they see the upcoming election as a great opportunity for this.

Viktor Orban, the Prime Minister, has come under fire not just for his opposition to Muslim immigration but, also, because he does flirt around the edges of anti-Semitism. It is, perhaps, a great pity that Soros is of Jewish ancestry…because genuine anti-Semites (I don’t think Orban is such) do latch on to that fact and use it to feed their anti-Jewish conspiracy theories. Be better if Soros was cracker through and through, as far as that goes. But, he’s Jewish…and so we have to put up with neo-Nazi dimwits using that fact…and Progressives using the neo-Nazis as a an excuse to paint anyone who opposes Soros’ vision as being anti-Semitic (and we’ll leave aside the growing and rather nasty anti-Semitism rising on the left these days).

I don’t believe that the elites of our civilization planned things to come out this way, but I do believe that they are pleased with how it has come out. After all, those Germans and French and British were so, so tiresome! All their noisy patriotism and insistence upon being, well, German, French and British! Simply deplorable! Much better if they simply shift into the hereafter and allow the Ruling Class to Rule without having to trouble with them.

But the bottom line is that Europe’s population is dying off and it is being replaced by immigrants. They are largely Muslim immigrants simply because of proximity – the Muslims are closer to Europe than anyone else who might want to live in an increasingly roomy Europe. But the real problem isn’t that the elites are allowing immigration but that the immigration has become possible due to Europe’s sterility. Orban makes a strong case, but I don’t see him hitting at the problem: Hungarians aren’t having kids.

Hungary’s population peaked at 10.7 million in 1980 – it is now about 9.8 million. A nine hundred thousand person decrease in less than forty years; and it happened without war, famine or plague. It was just that Hungarians stopped having kids. In 2017, the population suffered at net decrease of about 40,000. 9.4 people were born per 1,000 while 13.5 per 1,000 were dying. If you want to do the math, you can probably figure out to within a decade or two when the last Hungarian will die, if trends continue. If Orban wants Hungarians to be living in Hungary in the future, his task is to convince his people to start having children. No point, really, in keeping the Muslims out when a day will come when there’s no one there to stop them from coming in.

And so it goes not just around Europe, but around the world. Most of the countries of the world which still have a fertility rate above replacement (ie, higher than 2.1 children per woman) are in Africa, and even there birth rates are dropping very rapidly. And that, I think, was deliberately planned. Remember? The “population explosion”? How we were going to breed ourselves into utter destruction? Well, we sure as heck stopped that! We birth controlled and aborted ourselves into a situation where we’re not having enough kids and for ever more countries, the number of people dying is starting to exceed those being born. Europe did it so well that the Ruling Class, desperate for someone to pick up the tax burden of the Welfare State, started to import any warm bodies they could find…as if people plucked willy-nilly from a totally different society could actually fit into the welfare-soaked, pagan carnival that is Europe! But, the Ruling Class doesn’t mind that problem…they, personally, are well-guarded and as long as it doesn’t cost them political power or wealth in the short run, they simply don’t give a damn if their actual nations die.

What is amazing to me is how everyone welcomed this – people might have vigorously rejected this, that or the other thing of the Progressive ideology, but no one seems to have rejected the idea of sterility. Everyone wants to get in on that gig of not having kids, or at least not having enough of them to matter. I’m guilty, too! I have no kids. Of my parent’s six kids, there have been six children born. Only fifty percent of what we needed to produce just to break even! And we’re Catholics! You think Muslim nations didn’t buy this idea? They did. Their fertility rate is cratering…with Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran already breeding below the replacement rate and the rest of the Muslim world racing to catch up.

Ultimately, I think modern immigration is happening for the same reason it happened towards the end of the Roman Empire – the outsiders saw the great wealth and social stability of the Roman world and wanted to be part of it…and as the Romans were dying off for lack of children, might as well move in, right? But at least those barbarians were fertile! We’re being replaced by people who are only slightly less sterile than we are, and who are eagerly trying to become as sterile as we.

You know what is going to happen? The Haredi are going to happen. These ultra-orthodox Jews are going to make the running because they are the people bothering to have kids. They have 6.2 children per woman – and while their numbers are small, they will be the people sticking around for the future. I think this sort of thing will be duplicated in small groups…Christians, Muslims, what have you…but they’ll be groups of people who decide to get off the culture of death cycle and start having kids. They’ll pick up whatever pieces we leave behind…and I do wonder what sort of world it will be like? It won’t be like this one, that is for sure…

Russia’s Attack on Britain

Mark Noonan14 Comments

You might have heard that Russians used a nerve agent to try to kill a guy in Britain:

British counterterrorism police say a former Russian double agent, whom Russian President Vladimir Putin had vowed to kill, was poisoned by a nerve agent.

The comments came after the British government’s high-level emergency committee known as COBRA was updated Wednesday on a probe into the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his 33-year-old daughter.

“This is being treated as a major incident of involving attempted murder by the administration of a nerve agent,” assistant police commissioner Mark Rowley said. He said father and daughter remain critically ill. Rowley would not identify the exact substance used or how it was delivered.

Police also confirmed Wednesday that one officer who was part of the initial response to the incident was hospitalized in serious condition…

Much heart-ache and hand-wringing is going on over this – people making furious statements about Russia, others pledging support for Britain. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Color me unimpressed.

You see, this, if true (and it looks like it is) is an act of war. This is the kind of thing that you simply don’t let people do in your country – and if they are done by agents of foreign powers, you demand that foreign power surrender the miscreants or you go to war.

War? Yes, war. There’s a reason you go to war – one of the more traditional reasons is that someone has launched an attack on your soil. Using a nerve agent is a rather serious attack. If you are British, you want to make certain that such a thing is never repeated. That anyone contemplating doing such a thing will know it means war with Britain. Thing is, I don’t think there are any British any more. I think they’ve all died off and all we’ve got in Britain is a bunch of people who just happen to be living there. Oh, fine: yell at me about that. Let’s say there still are some – but they probably aren’t north of 20% of the population. I’m sticking with what I said, though, because I’ve yet to see anyone in Britain call for war with Russia over this.

And, yes, the Brits could fight Russia. In fact, Russia is in a seriously bad strategic situation right now. First off, they’ve really got no effective way to strike directly at Britain in a war. Their fleet is a bad joke. Britain could, of course, immediately go into alliance with Ukraine and aid their efforts to recapture the Crimea and the Donbass. Poland would likely lend a hand as they’d be relieved to get the Russians out of the Kaliningrad Oblast. The Baltic States, Finland and Sweden would likely start out strictly neutral, but if things started going bad for Russia, they’d all likely jump in for the kill. Also, Russia’s economy is in poor shape. This wouldn’t be a march on Moscow, but, instead, a campaign to defeat Russia in the periphery and force them to a peace which results in a drop in Russian prestige and an object lesson about not causing offense (think of it as Crimean War Two, as it were). No, the Russians would not use nukes because Britain has nukes, too.

But, nothing…just outrageously outraged words over the outrage. Complete fantasy-land stuff. The stuff of people who just want to live (often on the dole) and never make a sacrifice for anyone or anything. Sure, I’d like the United States to back Britain…but only if there is a Britain to back. Right now, it doesn’t look like there is.

The Never-Ending Trump-Russia Conspiracy Theory

Mark Noonan6 Comments

The House Intel committee came to it’s conclusion:

The House Intelligence Committee has released findings from its upcoming report on the Trump-Russia affair — and its main conclusion is that it has discovered no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election.

“We have found no evidence of collusion, coordination, or conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians,” the committee said in a one-page summary of its findings released Monday afternoon.

In addition, the committee took issue with the intelligence community assessment of Russian motivations in the 2016 election. The committee agrees with the assessment that the Russians did, in fact, try to interfere — the findings cite “Russian cyberattacks on U.S. political institutions in 2015-2016 and their use of social media to sow discord.” But the committee disagrees with the intelligence community judgment that Russian President Vladimir Putin specifically tried to help President Trump win the election.

Of course, we all knew this, already. These findings, though resulting from an exhaustive investigation, won’t convince our Progressives nor the Never Trumpers that there’s nothing to see here. They are all too invested in it, and they are invested in it because all of them were deeply invested in Hillary winning. Not just in the sense of her, personally, winning but in her winning proving conclusive that everyone who backed Trump was a complete idiot. Make no mistake about it: there is a lot of ego involved here.

You might recall that I predicted the 2006 mid-term elections not just wrong – but so incredibly, stupidly wrong that, in hindsight, I had to be a complete fool not to have seen it coming. I had, in that time, let the wish become the father of the thought. I didn’t want the Democrats to win, and so I went about for months finding reasons to justify my pre-conceived notion. Everyone can fall prey to this. But, for me, it was an excellent learning experience. I mostly learned that things can always go very different from what you expect. From that day to this, you might have noticed that I don’t make hard and fast political predictions. I always hedge my statements – “may”, “might”, “could be”, and so on. I made my mistake, took my lumps and moved on – because I’m not an egoist. The Progressives and the Never Trumpers very much are. And they are hanging on to Trump-Russia because as long as it exists, it explains away their mistake. They weren’t wrong, you see? Russia colluded with Trump! That’s how Trump won!

Now, to be sure, you can’t nail these guys down. As Ace points out, they are like the “soft” 9/11 Truthers…they won’t specifically state what they believe, but they’ll glide around hinting at this or that statement which backs up the main part of the theory (in 9/11 Trutherism, that Bush knew about and/or planned the 9/11 attacks). If you ask Trump-Russia theorists to fill in the blanks: “Putin did (blank) to help Trump win in return for (blank)”, you’ll never get them to fill them in. They can’t – they don’t dare because anything put into those blanks is going to be so clearly absurd as to be laughable. There was nothing Putin could do to alter the election and there was nothing Trump could do that would help Putin. Period. But the true believers keep at it – because it is their security blanket. Their assurance that they didn’t just get it wrong.

Getting it wrong is about the worst feeling you can have, after all. When you’ve done something bone-headed, you just feel the worst. You’d rather have been caught robbing a bank or something. Nothing is worse than looking like a fool – at least, for most of us. A few saints have risen above such things, but most of us are slaves to our dignity…to our pride. Not seeing the obvious in 2016 – that Trump was running a campaign tailor-made to pull in disaffected Democrats and thus would likely get him over 270 – is a bitter pill to swallow. Only one Never Trumper I know has really swallowed it – he freely admitted after the election that he simply refused to see the proof that Trump at least had a solid shot (what he missed, most egregiously, was the massive shift in voter registration to the GOP in Pennsylvania).

The longer anyone keeps with a mistake, the more invested they get in defending the mistake. So we can rely on it that the people who still believe in Trump-Russia will keep on believing it. Twenty years from now they’ll still bring it up from time to time. Just as we still have people mumbling about 9/11, so we’ll hear mumbles about Trump-Russia forever. Fortunately, most of us can ignore it, if we haven’t already. There’s nothing to find because there’s no possibility it can be true. And the really good news is that people who are lashed themselves to the mast of stupidity will keep on being stupid, thus making it more likely we’ll win in years to come.

Battleships

Mark Noonan19 Comments

From the “see, it isn’t just me” files:

Stealth is one way to keep from getting hit, and the United States leads the way in the development of stealthy destroyers. But stealth defeats the purpose of a FONOP (Freedom of Navigation Operation), which is to be seen. An old-fashioned battleship is a ship to be seen—and in a big way. But there’s no need for the Navy to build an old-fashioned battleship in the twenty-first century when it can build a new-fashioned battleship instead.

A contemporary battleship would combine advanced armor materials with automated damage control to produce a ship that is virtually unsinkable. Its offensive armaments might be mission-specific, but its key attribute would be survivability. It would be a ship that could be put in harm’s way in the reasonable expectation of coming home in one piece.

This “battleship of the future” could solve the challenge posed by China’s emerging anti-access / area denial (A2/AD) strategy for excluding the United States from the western Pacific.

I think we made a bit of a mistake by disposing of the battleship – and, in a real sense, also disposing of what was once called a “heavy cruiser”.

It is completely understandable why we went with a carrier Navy – carriers won the naval war of World War Two. Well, carriers and submarines (little noticed in the American mind is how our submarines successfully carried out the massacre of sea-borne trade in the Pacific that the Germans failed to do in the Atlantic). Battleships in WWII were only really useful for shore bombardment and while the Marines still grumble about the Navy not having a solid short-bombardment weapon, it was decided that the Navy money we spend will be spent on carriers and their attendant ships and equipment. And, to be sure, this is a wise investment – and, in fact, I think we should have 15 active carrier battle groups rather than the 10 or so we have now. But I also think we need very big, massively armed and very survivable ships in addition to carriers. We need battleships.

A modern battleship will not be a mere duplicate of the Iowa class ships – the last battleships we built. In dimensions, they might be similar, or even larger – but I doubt we’ll need 12 inches of armor plate given modern materials. Nor would we need 16 inch guns; eventually we’ll have a railgun or something similar, but meanwhile advances in technology probably would allow us to have an 8 or 10 inch gun and be able to simply clobber whatever needed clobbering with guns. But the main armament of such a ship would be missiles. Anti-ship missiles. Anti-air missiles. Anti-sub missiles. Lots and lots of them. It should be nuclear powered. Capable of well more than 35 knots speed. It should be built with a maximum of automation to keep crew numbers as low as possible. And it should be able to take a punch as well as throw one.

A ship like that, added to a carrier battle group or operating as a battleship force would be a distinct deterrent to anyone wanting to challenge us on the seas. Short of a suicidal nuclear attack, sinking such a force would require so much effort as to be not worth the cost. The bottom line for me is that the United States Navy is the first and last line of defense of the United States. All the other armed forces are important, but only the Navy secures us against invasion and ensures our ability to project power around the globe. A US fleet cruising off the Chinese coast is something to give even the most aggressive pause…and as long as our fleet is supreme, no one really dares engage in cross-ocean military actions.

Let’s build some battleships.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan30 Comments

The ratings for the Oscars crashed to a new low – which makes us laugh, but it also gives me another clue that things aren’t as our MSM presents. You see, if people were really as anti-Trump and ready to punish GOPers as the MSM says, then people would have gladly tuned in to the Oscars to get their dose of Trump-trashing. That they didn’t and, indeed, stayed away by the millions, tells me that under the sound and fury, a quite implacable level of support is building for Trump and the GOP.

While the Democrats keep shouting about immigration and DACA, Trump continues to actually enforce the law. It is things like this which keep Trump’s supporters on board, in spite of an occasional verbal gaffe.

Don Surber talks up a proposed West Virginia law protecting the right to life, but it was something Surber brought up which really stood out:

West Virginia has a low abortion rate of 6 per 1,000 women (15-44) per year. The states that are lowest in the nation at 4 per 1,000 are Kentucky, Mississippi, and South Dakota.

The highest in the nation is New York at 24, but the list by Kaiser Family Foundation does not include California.

That is astonishing – on two levels: the amount of children being killed in New York, but also the amazing fact that in a world where birth control is cheap and readily available, that many yet get pregnant and then go on to have a much more expensive abortion. I leave aside the overall morality of it – of course they should just refrain from sex if they don’t want to have kids, but on a sheer level of practicality, if you are going to have the sex, why not exercise a very slight level of judgement?

Senator Flake takes time off from warning us about creeping tyranny to propose a law which would creep that tyranny right up in our grill.

Iran’s Mullah-in-Chief opines on gun control and comes to the exact same conclusion as our Progressive friends. This surprises absolutely no one.

Robert Stacy McCain points out the latest Progressive attack on free speech – in this case, intimidating the kids of a Conservative. This is wicked, but also clever…the left is telling everyone that if you cross them, they will go after those near and dear to you. This is why, by the way, we shan’t surrender the Second Amendment.

Korean girls try American barbecue…

Secession: it is the answer.

Tariffs

Mark Noonan41 Comments

They are bad! Evil! No good! Or, so we’re told – they are at tax on consumers to benefit corporations! They stifle competition! They caused the Great Depression! Yadda, yadda, yadda. I used to believe all that. Seriously. Bought it hook, line and sinker. But over the past 10-15 years, my views have modified.

Britain was the first nation to really go for free trade. They enacted it in the mid-19th century in service to the Liberal view that the freer the market, the better for everyone. There is, of course, much to be said for this: certainly the “Corn Laws” which the British Liberals got rid of were a horrible anachronism which kept food prices for the poor high just to provide a higher profit for rich landowners. But the dogmatic idea that free trade is always good is, in my view, flawed. And I think the experience of Britain proves it.

Right about the time that Britain went for free trade, it was the economic powerhouse of the world. No one could compete with British manufacturing. If you wanted something, you pretty much had to buy it from Britain. In comparison, the manufacturing capacity of the United States and Germany at the time was negligible…while nations like Russia, Japan and France didn’t even really count in the global marketplace. The introduction of free trade did seem to work. Food prices dropped like a rock as cheap, American grain flooded into the British market and Britain’s economic dominance continued for some time. Until, that is, right around the mid-1870s. At that point, the Germans and especially we Americans started to rapidly overtake Britain economically. This shifting of economic dominance was temporarily obscured by the fact that Britain remained until after World War One the financial center of the world – with vast investments, especially, in the United States, Britain’s financial dominance continued unchecked…but in things like coal and steel production, Britain was rapidly feeling the pinch of growing American and German competition. And it was competition from German and American manufacturers who were still protected by tariffs.

The United States kept high import tariffs in place from the Civil War until after World War Two. There were fluctuations, but they were vastly higher than anything we impose today. In some periods of time, ten times higher than they are today. During the time of high tariffs, the United States went from an economic backwater to the economic master of the world. Trouble is, tariffs went into bad repute in the United States because a high tariff enacted at the start of the Great Depression was blamed for deepening and lengthening that economic blight. And, truth be told, it might not have been helpful to impose that tariff at that time. But, really, I don’t think the tariff made the Depression any worse. What I honestly think people miss when discussing the Great Depression is that a combination of war and disease had knocked out of the global economy about 20-30 million young people who would have been both highly productive and who would have also greatly increased demand…no just in themselves, but in the children they would have had. That sort of hole in the economy was going to cause a major problem eventually. In 1929 it did – but years before then, Britain was already mired in Depression and Germany was only kept afloat by loans from the United States (loans made possible by the massive amount sold by the US to the Europeans during World War One).

In the end, I think it is a mixed bag, as is usual in human affairs. Dogma is for theology and not much else…and Free Trade is a dogma who’s time has come and gone, in my view. In general, you do want a free flow of goods, ideas and people. The nations who trade the most tend to do the best because of the cross-fertilization of ideas and methods which results from that trade. What our Progressive friends call “cultural appropriation” is, in reality, how people develope and expand. The more streams of ideas which flow into your nation, the better off you’re likely to be in the long run. That said, there is also the other side of it: the absolute requirement that a nation, as far as possible, remain master of it’s own destiny. It is simply asinine to think that the United States is better off if a majority of, say, our steel making capacity is outside the United States. At the end of the day, we can’t rely on anyone but ourselves…and so we must have the capacity to take care of ourselves in an emergency. And that means we have to retain sufficient productive capacity to do so – and if that means we have to ensure that some level of American production remains via Protection, then that is what we must do.

You see, the economy is not just a number…it isn’t just how much money is flowing through the land. This is especially true now that we use fake money rather than gold and silver backed currency. The economy is what we do to make a living – what we eat, wear, drive, live in. We are 317 million people and in the final analysis we must retain the ability to survive without importing a single thing if necessary. It won’t do us any good to have a bank account fat with fake money if, when a war comes, we can’t produce enough steel to build the ships and tanks we’ll need to fight and win.

We have to strike a balance between the good of having trade and the good of having the ability to take care of ourselves. There is no “right” answer here. What works may change from time to time and we have to remain flexible. To just Protect a dying business is stupid…but to Free Trade ourselves to the point where our business is dying is equally stupid. I think we need to adjust how we measure our economy – throw out the GDP measure. Let’s measure what we make, mine and grow at home. That will tell us how we’re doing. If in Year X we’re producing 10 million tons of Good A, but we find that in Year Y it has declined to 5 million tons, we should look into why. Is it happening because we’re using less of it? Or is it because we’re now importing 5 million tons of it? And then we have to ask ourselves: in any emergency, how much of this stuff do we need to produce? On the flip side, if we find we’re producing 10 million tons but consuming 20 million, we should look into whether or not our tax and regulatory policies are harming our production or whether its a matter of we’re doing all we can and just can’t meet demand via domestic production. That sort of thing will tell us what needs Protection and what needs Free Trade.

The main thing is to not lock ourselves into a Dogmatic view of these things. We need to look at this in the largest sense of what is overall best for us – not for the world; not for the bankers and the mega-corporations…but what is best for us; the people who have to make a living off the economy.

Thinking About South Africa

Mark Noonan10 Comments

We noted this in the comments earlier:

White South African farmers will be removed from their land after a landslide vote in parliament.

The country’s constitution is now likely to be amended to allow for the confiscation of white-owned land without compensation, following a motion brought by radical Marxist opposition leader Julius Malema.

It passed by 241 votes for to 83 against after a vote on Tuesday, and the policy was a key factor in new president Cyril Ramaphosa’s platform after he took over from Jacob Zuma in February.

Mr Malema said the time for ‘reconciliation is over’. ‘Now is the time for justice,’ News24 reported.

The worst thing Europe did to Africa wasn’t colonialism – it was providing them Marx. It is amazing the applicability of Marxism – the work of a 19th century European Jew who never worked a day in his life is being used by 21 century black African to justify an act of idiocy. Basically, if you’ve got a dumb idea, just filter it through Marx and it will seem like you actually thought of something.

This will end badly – the land will be taken and mostly handed off to various cronies of those in power who won’t have the foggiest notion of how to make the land pay. The poor of South Africa won’t just remain poor, but will actually become poorer. And once you set down the path of injustice, you’re really not going to get out of it easy.

To be sure, this path of injustice was first pioneered by the white South Africans…remember, the Boers moved into the Transvaal, etc because they wanted to keep the slavery which the British Empire had abolished. Later, after gaining independence from Britain, the white South Africans erected Apartheid…which wasn’t really Apartheid because it wasn’t a set up where whites would live with whites and blacks with blacks but, rather, a mechanism where the whites could keep their cheap, black labor while denying said labor any political rights. It was pretty much a duplicate – carried to a further extreme – of the Jim Crow laws in the American South. Now there are those in South Africa who are looking for some payback…and they are suckering the poor by telling them that if the whites are expropriated, they’ll all be well off.

It is a rather sad end to it all – when Mandela was freed and Apartheid came down, I had my doubts…but then Mandela rather rose to the occasion and I hoped that a genuine, pluralist Republic would emerge in South Africa. But even early there were warning signs…those who didn’t want to forgive and forget and who were willing to stir the pot of resentment for political gain. Over time, especially since Mandela’s death, these forces have grown stronger and now appear to be firmly in the saddle in South Africa…where a corrupt ANC government is desperately looking for an expedient to justify it’s continued rule. Well, here it is: bash whitey! Whitey might, indeed, deserve some bashing and it is absurd that the white minority still owns quite so much land…but this way of race-hatred and uncompensated expropriation is the evil way to go about things. And the curious thing about evil acts is that they don’t actually work.

The thing is, it would take at least 100 years for the black population of South Africa to reach the economic level of the white population of South Africa. The cultural capital of the two groups was vastly different when Apartheid came down – for a variety of reasons, not least of which was direct, white suppression of the formation of cultural capital among South Africa’s black population. But however it got to be that way, that is the way it was…and only a great deal of time and hard work was ever going to erase the difference.

The ultimate mistake of it all – the gigantic error – was Apartheid; a system of racial oppression and exploitation. That most white South Africans today had nothing to do with erecting or maintaining that system is irrelevant. It was still the error – and errors always have to be paid for, one way or another. It would have been better paid for at the end of Apartheid by the surrender of a great deal of wealth…now it will be paid for by the seizure of that wealth. And, worse, the seizure won’t make anyone happy. It will impoverish the white population, but won’t enrich the black population. It will impel ever more extreme demands, of course…once it doesn’t work, we’ll start to see more and more racist conspiracy theories floated to explain why expropriation didn’t work…and thus more and more violence directed at the now-despised minority.

There isn’t much we, as Americans, can do about this. I can only advise white South Africans to consider moving – at least to Cape Province, but even that will probably only be a temporary expedient. Probably leaving South Africa will be the only way to be safe. It is a shame that the sins of the grandfathers will be visited upon the grandsons, but that is how the world can work, at times, when wicked people get rolling.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan81 Comments

Turns out, we now have a Secretary of Defense who is concerned about our war fighting capability:

Defense Secretary James Mattis said the new Pentagon policy that will remove service members who have not been deployable for a year or more is about fairly sharing the burden within the forces.

The deploy-or-leave policy includes exceptions for pregnancy and wounded warriors. Robert Wilkie, the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, told a Senate Armed Services subcommittee last week that “on any given day, about 13 to 14 percent of the force is medically unable to deploy.”

The United States has a population of around 317 million. Our active duty armed forces are just under 1.3 million. This works out to 0.54% of our population being in the military. If we nearly doubled our active forces (which we probably should, given the challenges we face), then we’d be getting to 1% in the military…this ratio of military to population means we should very easily be able to select only the very best physical and mental recruits for our armed forces. There should be no one in there other than those injured in the line of duty who isn’t in peak condition. We have the population to allow us a force of superb soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines…and that is precisely what we should have.

Democrats may be Resisting themselves into a permanent minority:

Finally there’s Mr. Trump. Even with his recent bump in the polls, he remains divisive. But he’s not the only divisive politician who will figure in this election. The most recent Politico/Morning Consult poll suggests that Nancy Pelosi has pulled off a largely unheralded achievement: In the Age of Trump, she is arguably the most unpopular politician in America.

What does that mean for impeachment? Well, in 69 House districts surveyed by the Congressional Leadership Fund (a super PAC devoted to maintaining the GOP majority), Mrs. Pelosi is underwater in every one. She is also toxic among independents.

Take California’s 10th District, held by Republican Jeff Denham. Hillary Clinton carried this district in 2016, and Mr. Trump’s approval rating is at minus four. But again, Democrats are split among eight primary contenders. And the CLF survey showed that voters in Mr. Denham’s district prefer Paul Ryan as speaker to Mrs. Pelosi by 13 points.

I’ve been saying all along that I have grave doubts that dislike of Trump would translate into a desire to have Pelosi return to the Speaker’s chair. It could happen – but only if Pelosi and the Democrats came up with an agenda that speaks to the American people. Hating Trump and wanting impeachment wasn’t going to do it…choosing illegals over Americans and demanding gun control will be millstones around the Democrats’ necks come November. I don’t know how November will come out – but in my view, it is more likely that Republicans will make gains than Democrats will take back the House.

John Kasich is, in my view, laying the groundwork for a run for President as a Democrat:

If all the sudden you couldn’t buy an AR-15, what would you lose? Would you feel your second amendment rights would be eroded? These are the things that have to be looked at and action has to happen.

Next up will be a more “nuanced” position on abortion. Thing is, he’d actually be the strongest candidate Democrats could find to run against Trump…blue collar background; successful governor; from Ohio which could make that State back into a real battleground. He’d pull all the remaining NeverTrump over to the Democrats while at the same time having huge appeal in the suburbs of the Blue cities. But, the Democrat base will reject him – the whole old, white guy thing just won’t work. If he did get the Democrat nomination, the far left would run a Third Party candidate against him.

The Israeli solution to school shootings:

When terrorists attacked a school in Maalot in 1974, Israel did not declare every school a gun-free zone. It passed a law mandating armed security in schools, provided weapons training to teachers and today runs frequent active shooter drills. There have been only two school shootings since then, and both have ended with teachers killing the terrorists.

It is an approach that the Americans should take to end the constant slaughter of innocents.

San Francisco, the Progressive paradise:

As the Investigative Unit photographed nearly a dozen hypodermic needles scattered across one block, a group of preschool students happened to walk by on their way to an afternoon field trip to citiy hall.

“We see poop, we see pee, we see needles, and we see trash,” said teacher Adelita Orellana. “Sometimes they ask what is it, and that’s a conversation that’s a little difficult to have with a 2-year old, but we just let them know that those things are full of germs, that they are dangerous, and they should never be touched.”

In light of the dangerous conditions, part of Orellana’s responsibilities now include teaching young children how to avoid the contamination.

This is what the left wants to bring to the whole country. They simply don’t care about the lives of the people…all they care about is their social agenda of tearing down Western Civilization. If we have to live in a world where filth-borne disease becomes once again a regular occurrence, that is a price they are willing you should pay.

An Observation About Men in Society

Mark Noonan12 Comments

V the K notes what might actually help to prevent school massacres:

The best approach to ending mass murder incidents at public school seems pretty straightforward; make schools more secure. At the high school my son went to, there was only one to get into the school during school hours. You had to enter into a secure vestibule, then be buzzed into the main office by a staffer. This simple expedient, coupled with an alert staff, would have prevented what happened in Florida. It also would have worked at Sandy Hook.

This is true – but, also, a little sad. The thing about breaking the big rules is that you don’t end up with no rules, but with a lot of little rules, instead. We broke the big rules about what it means to be a man ’round about 50 years ago…and now we’re forced to enact a whole series of little rules to ensure that when the males who don’t know how to be men go nuts, fewer people will be killed and injured.

Men need to feel valued as providers and protectors. If men are not valued as such, then they will tend towards a nihilistic destructiveness. As no one was writing things down way back when, we don’t know if it was a man who cut the deal with the woman or the woman who cut the deal with the man, but the deal was struck: woman sticks loyally to the man and the man, in turn, sticks loyally with the woman…providing sustenance for their children and protection against other men. And when that deal was struck, however it was struck, for the first time a male became a man.

Yes, this does presuppose that the man, in return for doing his part, will gain a bit of authority – in Roman times, they called it pater familias. The concept was, ultimately, that if a man was to tie himself to one woman and make certain that she and all children were cared for, he was to exercise a level of authority over the family. Fair? Fair has nothing to do with it: it was what it was. It turned brutish males into civilized men who would throw their lives away in defense of wife, children and home. If you wonder at the return of the brutish male, look no further than our destruction of the idea of the man as protector and provider.

Build your security gates. Continue to drug males who won’t fit in. Jail them in ever greater numbers. Propagandize against “toxic masculinity” all you want. But unless men feel themselves to be part of a larger whole and have distinct duties and privileges attached to that, then we’ll continue to get madmen wading into our schools to kill.

Post Superbowl Open Thread

Mark Noonan67 Comments

I did watch the Superbowl – it was quite good. Still a bit too much SJW in the commercials, but the game, itself, was great as a game. I’d like to think the NFL has learned its lesson…but it probably hasn’t. The ratings for the Superbowl were at an 8 year low…and if the NFL wants to turn that around, they’d better drop the SJW drivel.

Of course, Philly then went on to behave rather badly. That is something I just don’t get – rioting after a game. But it seems a thing in the deep, blue cities. I’ll leave it to you to speculate why.

Always remember that the Trump/Russia thing started with the paranoid conspiracy theory that Putin had altered votes in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan to throw the election to Trump. This did not happen. We know it didn’t happen because you can’t do that – it isn’t physically possible…and, of course, Stein’s recounts confirmed that the vote was valid. But that didn’t stop the Democrats from running with it. They just can’t get over the fact that Hillary lost – and so, here we are, 14 months later, still wallowing in their psychological stew. But do keep in mind where it came from – it is like starting a math equation with 1+1=3: no matter what you do after that, it will be wrong. Those who are trying to claim that this or that aspect of the Trump/Russia investigation is valid are being quite silly about the whole thing…the underlying basis of it is false; all that follows from that underlying basis is also false. It can’t be otherwise…no amount of addition to a lie will ever make a lie true. This is why I’m quite confident that Trump will never be tripped up over Trump/Russia…there’s nothing to trip him up over. Its also why I think that Trump should just shut it down: yeah, it would cause shrieks, but that will be rapidly drowned out by rising wages and increased employment.

Steele apparently had a second dossier about Trump…and it was peddled back and forth between State and Team Hillary. This is the real scandal: that Obama’s Administration placed itself at Hillary’s disposal for the 2016 campaign. That is what we need to investigate.

A Colt’s linebacker was killed by a drunk driver…this tragedy apparently caused by an illegal immigrant. There’s a reason to enforce the laws, folks.

The MSM is getting filled with heart-wrenching stories of poor, sweet Dreamers being deported by that cruel, racist Trump…and Don Surber digs into one and finds, surprise!, that the MSM isn’t really giving the whole story. Of course they aren’t. Bottom line, folks, is that getting deported from the United States isn’t easy. You’ve really got to work at it, especially if you’ve been here any length of time. The subject of the linked story did work at it – getting convicted on drug offenses. Obama let him skate, Trump is enforcing the law.

We have been working on a thing called a “railgun” for a while…and haven’t done a very good job at it. Now, China is picking up the idea. This is bad news – we daren’t let China get ahead of us on this. This is revolutionary stuff – it could be as decisive a change to naval warfare as was the introduction of the aircraft carrier. The railgun will fire a projectile at about Mach 7 and will have a range of about 100 miles…though I’ve read that this could be extended to 200 miles. There is no explosive…it is just a piece of metal fired so fast that it completely destroys whatever it hits (think about it: we’re basically reviving the cannon ball…and this might revive the Battleship: we were about to build the USS Montana BB-67 when we dropped the Battleship concept, so I say we go with that when we start again). Nothing in anyone’s inventory at present can withstand it (though, I’ve also read of some new metals being developed which might provide protection against it…in the battle between offense and defense, there’s never a final answer). The main thing is that if such a weapon is practical (and it looks like it is, though more R&D is necessary), then we want them…and we want them before anyone else has them. Imagine a ship carrying, say, four such weapons parked 20 miles off an enemy coast…anything up to 80 miles inland from it is doomed. Time for Trump to get busy on this – and I think he is: you might recall he wants an end to the Defense budget sequestration and it has been, partially, lack of money which has held us back here.