Open Thread

Open Thread

Mark Noonan38 Comments

The Democrats really do seem to want to go all-in on leftist insanity – what was just a couple years ago the fringe is now the center for the Democrats. One excellent example is the way Democrats are treating the 2018 Georgia governors race:

While Beto is not the only Democratic candidate for president who has kissed the Abrams ring by indulging in the fantasy that she would be governor had Brian Kemp not allegedly committed election fraud, he has perhaps embraced the myth more than the rest.

All of us are old enough to remember when Democrats said questioning the election results was a horrible thing – but what really makes this sick and twisted is that the Democrats routinely engage in voter fraud. Now they are claiming to be victims of it, without the slightest bit of evidence…and only to pander to a far left base. My theory going into 2020 is that there is a line – which none of us can see – which if crossed will result in a Trump landslide. There is a point so far left that the Democrats will alienate 60% of the electorate. They may have already crossed it – once again, the line can’t be seen because you can never fully appreciate how things work out in the public mind over the course of time. But if the Democrats keep pushing this way, they will cross it.

Vegans got their butts kicked when they stormed a Spanish rabbit farm. Yeah, I laughed.

Brit MP’s checked with their masters in Brussels about delaying Brexit – because that is what this is all about: the British Ruling Class wants to turn all power over to the EU while retaining all the perks of power in the UK for themselves. It is really nothing more than that – just a Ruling Class wanting to abdicate and stay in office.

China is working against Trump’s re-election – which is a big no-brainer. China wants and needs an American President who will kowtow to China’s wishes. Every US President from Nixon to Obama did…which was amazingly stupid. Only a madman would want to help build up the power of a nation which has 314 million men fit for military duty. A couple centuries ago Napoleon was asked what to do about China and his words were, “let China sleep”. He knew what you could do with manpower…all it takes is intelligent leadership and they’d be off to the races. China now has intelligent leadership. Our job is to contain China, not help her out. But China is still 20-30 years away from having the technical ability to successfully fight us – they could definitely stop a US invasion of China, but they can’t project their power far outside China. Yet. Our job is to make sure “yet” never arrives.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan50 Comments

I got into a gun control argument with a Brit on Twitter the other day – very unusual in that it wasn’t nasty. But, it also didn’t really have a conclusion…the guy simply stopped responding. This was after I pointed out something which most don’t think about these days:

To love someone is to do what is best for them – if I am to show love for my fellows then certain things are required of me. One is that I never permit someone to be unjustly attacked. Another is that I restrain the wrongdoer from carrying out his plans. The former is far more easily understood than the latter, but neither are really thought of these days.

What my interlocutor was on about is that my Christian faith – which he claims to share – is about mercy and turning the other cheek and so forth; so, it isn’t really right for me to have a gun to shoot the burglar. But the reality is that it is almost a moral requirement that I be armed – as I’m physically capable of bearing arms – because if I am unarmed I can neither defend my neighbor nor attempt to prevent the burglar from doing his evil deed. I can only sit helplessly by…while my neighbor is robbed and maybe killed and the burglar risks his immortal soul in the commission of his crime. How can I be said to be showing love to either of them by doing nothing? There is much we’ve lost: most importantly our sense that justice and mercy go together. Its not one or the other – and, in fact, if you try to do either in isolation, you’ll get neither.

Germany’s Populist-Conservative AfD did well in regional elections – so well, in fact, that Germany’s other major parties (CDU, SPD and Greens) are thinking of a partnership with the German Communist Party (now called Linke, because “Communist” sounds bad). This is the mask fully dropping: all the parties were simply about who gets to slice the pie, not about what the pie shall be. And the Ruling Class in Germany – and around the West – wants the pie to be about open borders and only the Elite getting to decide what happens. We’re all in this together, folks: as goes AfD goes Brexit goes Trump. Either we all win, or we’ll all be destroyed.

John Hindraker is probably like most of us these days – watching what’s happening and figuring the Democrats are completely out of touch with reality. Of course, he also notes that he could be the guy out to lunch. We’ll all find out next November – but, I’m betting it is the Democrats who are busily alienating 60% of the electorate.

France’s Macron is offering a $15 billion bribe to Iran to keep it in the nuke deal – which we’re out of and Iran never had the faintest idea of abiding by. I don’t really understand this: is Macron that stupid, or does Iran just have so much dirt on Europe’s Ruling Class that they have to play ball?

South Dakota Democrat Party closes its last two offices for lack of funds. One down, forty nine to go…

Open Thread

Mark Noonan18 Comments

Looks like Hurricane Dorian may miss the USA…this after liberals went all gleeful at the prospect of it hitting Trump properties. Seems that MAGA has been granted a special dispensation.

Greece is seeing a new surge of migrants from the Muslim world – a lot from Afghanistan. By land from Kabul to Athens is 3,591 miles. That is quite a trip. It took Alexander the Great years to make it…and somehow I don’t think most Afghans own an SUV to make that trip go faster. Someone is organizing and supplying this migration. And government must be involved as before they get to Greece, they’ve crossed at least two international borders.

And here’s the sort of upstanding citizens Greece and Europe are getting:

A … asylum-seeker was arrested in Villeurbanne, a suburb of Lyon, France, on Saturday after he allegedly killed a 19-year-old and wounded nine others at a subway stop.

The suspect, armed with a knife and a “skewer” of some sort, was arrested at the scene. He is reportedly a 33-year-old Afghan citizen who was hoping to gain asylum in France.

The bad news: I bet his attack will probably not be held against him at his asylum hearing.

Mickey Kaus talks Epstein:

We’re in the middle of a global populist surge. There’s a sense that elites are not playing by the same rules as everyone else. They might not even be playing the same game. It’s pretty clear that Epstein was running some kind of a sex ring for the rich and well connected. How big a ring? We don’t know until we try to find out. But there are reports out there [click if you dare] that it’s bigger than we might think — bigger than old, familiar Prince Andrew, involving a non-trivial cross-section of business and entertainment leaders, plus some prominent Anglo-American families and maybe a handful of nation states.

Read the whole thing – there are circles within circles going on here. I started out figuring someone handed him the hemlock (as it were) to protect some other interest of his…but I’m starting to wonder if he was killed? We don’t really know what he was doing all those years when the very top of the global elite were at his beck and call; even after his conviction. And sure in heck the global elite doesn’t want us to find out. But, we must: we have to know. We need to know how Epstein got his money; how he got his connections; who protected him; who was involved on all levels. Chips fall where they may – we need to find out every last detail…and then start arresting everyone who committed even the least crime related to it all.

Still lots of talk about the Hong Kong protests – but, in the end, the people of Hong Kong have no weapons. They are doomed, unless the rest of China rises…and from all accounts, the people of China don’t want to rise.

There was some renewed talk of the way the CIA backed modern art stuff in the middle of the 20th century. The official word is that the CIA felt we needed to have some cool, new art to show the world that we were hip and with it…what I think actually happened is that the CIA was penetrated from the beginning and the USSR used the CIA to push cultural garbage (like modern art) as a means of tearing down the West.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan106 Comments

Been hearing – and not just from Never Trumpers – that people are simply growing tired of Trump and all the drama and will opt for Biden simply because they want someone dull. I don’t buy it – I mean, I can understand that the whole circus around Trump is abnormal and people can get frustrated with it, but I don’t feel like it makes we want to vote for Biden, nor anyone I know. What do you think?

PM Johnson has got the Queen to prorogue Parliament: ie, put it on ice for a period of time; in this case, until such time as the PM finishes extricating Britain from the EU. This is something Americans don’t know much about as it is outside our political experience. But in a Monarchy, sovereignty doesn’t reside with the people, but with the Monarch. That’s why they call it “Her Majesty’s Government”. It has been nearly two centuries since a British Monarch exercised any authority outside the advice of the Prime Minister, but the authority is still there under the British constitution and Boris advised the Queen to exercise it – to forestall Remain efforts to prevent the PM from carrying out the will of the people…and because we live in insane times, the PM is being criticized on grounds of being undemocratic in his insistence that the results of a democratic vote be implemented. I still doubt Johnson will pull it off – too much of the British Ruling Class is dead set against it; they really, really want faceless bureaucrats in Brussels who take their orders from Berlin to run things. But, he’s clearly got the brass to give it a try.

Laurence “Stop the Hammering” O’Donnell tried to revive the Trump-Russia debacle with a “scoop” claiming that Russian oligarch’s close to Putin co-signed some Trump loans. I didn’t pay much attention to it because, well, the Trump-Russia thing is drivel and I just don’t care about it…but this is interesting:

According to Harder’s demand letter, “The Program and Tweet make the false and defamatory statements that ‘Russian oligarchs’ co-signed loans provided to Mr. Trump by Deutsche Bank, and described these ‘co-signers’ as ‘Russian billionaires close to Vladimir Putin.’”

Harder is also warning others against republishing the allegedly false statement. (The Hollywood Reporter is doing so because it believes such republication is necessary to convey what is a matter of utmost public concern and protected by the First Amendment in connection with anticipated litigation.)

In a tweet following Harder’s letter, O’Donnell wrote, “Last night I made an error in judgment by reporting an item about the president’s finances that didn’t go through our rigorous verification and standards process. I shouldn’t have reported it and I was wrong to discuss it on the air. I will address the issue on my show tonight.”

Trump likely wouldn’t win any case – the judges would all rule that he’s the President and the MSM can say pretty much whatever it wants. But, the vigorous pushback shows that Team Trump feels, at least, that the facts are on their side.

More and more Democrats are latching on to the Wealth Tax, under various forms. Now, our Democrats are doing this simply because they want the money to shovel to their cronies…but it will be popular, boys and girls; and even if not particular popular, very hard to fight against. Who wants to stand up and defend a billionaire’s horde? We should be stealing a march on the Democrats…and making sure that any wealth tax hits heavily at constituencies favored by Democrats…tax free foundations; private college endowments (Harvard sits on $37 billion – the college is more of a tax dodge as far as the money goes); Soros-type Progressive moneybags. Like getting out in front of student loan debt, it will allow us to push Conservative policy while taking issues away from the Democrats.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan180 Comments

The RNC continues to set fundraising records and has buckets more money than the DNC. Now, don’t get too cocky about this – the Democrats have a vast network of non-party funding sources (the “dark money” they complain about when it isn’t them doing it), so it doesn’t mean the Democrats will be low on cash for 2020. But the fact that the RNC – under Trump – is breaking fundraising records does show that the new GOP is appealing to a large number of people. Keep in mind that every last thing the MSM does vis a vis politics from now until election day is to help Democrats and/or hinder Republicans. And they won’t shy away from just making things up, is that is required. From the MSM you simply will not get the true state of affairs…you’ll have to dig around a bit; because the truth is freely available. It just won’t be headlined or lead the nightly broadcasts. But if you look around you’ll find things like fundraising totals, crowd size, voter registration stats and such which will give you an idea of how things are going. Almost nothing is ever an actual surprise in politics – remember that Hillary cancelled her fireworks display a few days before the election. She knew – she knew – that she already lost the election about a week out from the vote. So did everyone else who was juiced in – they just didn’t tell us. Team Trump because they didn’t want anyone overconfident (and they’ll be like that again in 2020), Team Hillary because they were still hoping for a miracle…and the MSM because they were ordered by the Democrats to keep their traps shut about it.

Moonbats prepare to descend on Area 51. It is a bit of a joke, but from what I’ve heard about 50,000 people are going to a county with 5,000 residents, and that is going to put a huge burden on that county (as well as providing a bonanza of business: so, a bit of plus to the minus). Things like this are silly, but they can also get out of hand. I hope everyone just behaves themselves and has a good time. As for Area 51 – my Dad was out there frequently in the 80’s and early 90’s and assured me there are no Aliens there…but, that’s what They would want him to say, isn’t it?

China’s one child policy lead to a gigantic disparity in the number of boys and girls being born…and that, in turn, has lead to the price of a bride skyrocketing in China. A bride can set a family back 200,000 Yuan, that’s about $28,000 – and I don’t think that includes the cost of the wedding, etc. The more Progressives try to “fix” things, the worse they make them – and I find it enormously funny (mixed in with the overall tragedy) that this attempt at social engineering has simply allowed women to charge even more than they used to for the whole marriage and family thing. Hate to break it to ya, guys, but a woman – well, a wise woman – always looks for the guy who she believes can best take care of her. She might want the good looking, studly guy but she wants more the kind, strong man who looks like he can hold down a job and won’t go wandering off at the next pretty face. And in China, she’s getting that…because she’s so rare, now, that she’s commanding the whole country to bow before her.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan24 Comments

This is certainly interesting:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Open Thread

Mark Noonan7 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

Open Thread

Mark Noonan31 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Open Thread

Mark Noonan42 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

Open Thread

Mark Noonan17 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, the polls are biased:

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

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

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