Open Thread

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.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan31 Comments

So, Trump called out Representative Cummings about how his District is lousy. Democrats, MSMers and Never Trump (bit I repeat myself) all jumped on it as racist – which shows how incredibly stupid they all are. Cummings has been in Congress for 23 years, “fighting for his constituents”…which means he’s the most incompetent fighter the world has ever seen.

What Trump did was a flash of strategic brilliance – he’s forcing Democrats to defend the indefensible (ie, the places they’ve run into the ground) while also, just perhaps, opening a few eyes. The inner city – entirely Democrat run – is a festering sore on the nation. Places with no jobs (except for the political connected), no hope; fatherless families; high crime; drug addiction; abuse of various types. They are havens for gangsters. Their infrastructure is crumbling. Disease is common. Garbage goes uncollected. They are getting infested with rats. But we’ve all pretty much pretended that none of it was happening – for fear of being called racist as a huge number of the politicians directly in charge are black. Well, Trump has the guts – and now the Democrats have to defend what they’ve done. It will end badly for them. They made these areas what they are – and they are horrible.

A Christian heretic becomes an apostate – some geebo who wrote a while back ago that if you do A and B and C, then God will surely give you D, in this case in relation to sex. It doesn’t work like that: God isn’t a vending machine. People are always trying to fit Christ’s message into their own desires…they manage this trick by ignoring such crucial things as the command to take up your cross and follow Him. God doesn’t promise you joy and wealth on Earth…He promises you eternal life, which is vastly more important, and next to which any sufferings here are nothing. You may get joy and wealth, but rely on it you didn’t get them because you’re special. And you may get suffering – in which case, you rely on God and do your best.

Don Surber has more faith in PM Boris Johnson than I do – but that is because I think Britain is already dead. I’ll be pleased to be proven wrong.

Anti-Semitism will get you fired from CNN…but only if someone NOT from CNN uncovers it. If only CNN had people who were trained to investigate things and report the facts…

Open Thread

Mark Noonan44 Comments

Interesting article about the Trump/Bolton dynamic. You may have been wondering – many have – how an Establishment guy like Bolton manages to work with Trump? Well, the bottom line is that Bolton is a patriot, first and foremost. Bolton knows that his job is to provide the President with the best advice possible…and then let the President decide the course of action. Bolton is, apparently, abrasive and pushy (and this does some times rankle Trump), but at the end of the day, when the President decides, Bolton backs the President. This isn’t the first time a leader had someone like that on his team – and the best leaders have two or three like that. You have to, if you want to win…you need people who aren’t afraid of you, who can shake you up, but who will also do as they’re told.

Omar’s family is keeping to Omerta about her marriage issues – to the point where even reporters trying to figure it all out just can’t do it. To me this means that there is something in there hideously embarrassing.

NR article about how the Left is convinced they’ve already won in 2020. I’ve seen this for about a year – especially after the mid-terms. the Left isn’t convinced they will win: they are convinced that they already have won; with a subtext that if Trump did somehow manage to win, it could only be via fraud. The Left looks at the vision of future America and the 2044 Presidential election wherein a majority of Americans will be non-white and so their future is assured, no matter what. No one seems to have told them that Texas is only 45.35% white. But, be that as it may, they are certain – and that is why they are pushing themselves ever further Left. They’ve already won, you see? And that means the Left has won…so by insisting upon open borders and Medicare for all, they are just doing what they were elected to do (next year, but don’t confuse the poor dears).

Meanwhile, some polls have Trump garnering support of 45% of Latino voters.

Boris Johnson will be the next British PM…and he’s pledged to get Brexit done, but I doubt he will. Certainly not the full break with the EU that the Brexit vote ordered. Britain is done. They lay supine under Iranian threats because they don’t have a fleet large enough to fight. They get arrested for saying The Bad Words. There’s nothing left.

Cory Booker says he’d like to beat Trump up. I doubt that Trump is worried.

We have to discuss nutsack waxing because our Tru-Con Expert Betters spent the last 50 years making sure Big Corporation was taken care of while civilization died.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan32 Comments

Team Trump and the GOP are building a rather large ground game for 2020:

The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee (RNC) are mobilizing thousands of volunteers in more than a dozen battleground states, including a handful that President Trump lost in 2016, as they seek to expand the electoral map ahead of 2020.

Trump Victory, a joint operation comprised of the Trump campaign, the RNC and state Republican parties, kicked off a “National Week of Training” on Friday in a bid to train more than 6,000 volunteers and register voters in 14 states that Republicans have set their sights on for 2020.

At the same time, the committee is adding to its roster of state directors overseeing its organizing efforts, hiring staffers in Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Virginia, Republican officials told The Hill.

I’ve been wondering if Minnesota will correct its horrendous error of 1984, and 2020 might be the year it happens. We GOPers have looked and looked and looked at Minnesota and just haven’t been able to crack it. But, that’s how we thought about Wisconsin for the longest time, as well. In my view, the untold story of 2020 – though it will be told afterwards – is that the swing States are no longer Florida and Ohio, but Pennsylvania and Minnesota. Yes, I’ve heard the stories of Democrats surging in Texas…but, for 2020, that’s drivel. Trump will win Texas, easily. But, it can’t be taken for granted. Fortunately, the GOP is strong and well lead in Texas. Expanding the map is important, in and of itself, but I see something else at work here: Trump wants to win the popular vote, and he wants the House back. He’s got second term plans (most Presidents really don’t – which is why second terms are usually hideous and end up with the other party winning the next time around…Trump, I think, will change that).

Related: Democrats on the campaign trail are bedeviled by Trump’s strong economy.

Also Related, and enormously funny: factions of the Democrat party prepare to primary each other. Another untold story of 2020: the white, upper class, far left base of the Democrat party is going further and further left…so far left that Indys are being turned off and, just perhaps, a slice of Latino and African-American voters are being turned off, as well. Seriously: imagine yourself a middle or working class black guy…does anything these weirdos talk about resonate with you? Green New Deal? Open borders? Meanwhile, over there is Trump… and he’s at least a hell of a lot more fun than the Doofuses of Intersectionality.

The New York Times decides that the Soviets are the people to celebrate on the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11. This surprises none of you.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan33 Comments

America: love it or leave it. That is all Trump’s tweets really amounted to. He didn’t mention race: all he said was, “if you really hate it here that much, leave”. And that is the truth of the matter.

You can’t fix what you don’t love – you must love something before it is lovable. People like Omar and AOC clearly do not love this country. Not the country founded in 1776. To them, that country is racist, slave-owning, genocidal, sexist, homophobic, rapacious, war criminal. They hate it and want it gone, to be replaced by an America they will love…a country which has torn down the Washington Monument and will consider its founding moment to be MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech (not that they believe a word of what King said that day). They want an America which despises the Pilgrims; the Founders, the Westward Expansion. That rejects the Constitution and the idea that the individual matters. It is not an America I will ever be part of – first off, because they’ll jail or kill me, and those like me; but mostly because I’ll die fighting such a thing.

Democrat says that skin color is the only thing which matters. This is racist.

They’ve decided to kill the James Bond franchise by making the next 007 a woman. This is just stupid. Bond is a male fantasy: we kill the bad guys while dressed well and looking sharp and get all the hot women. No man will want to go see Super Chick do that…nor will women, I suspect.

Don’t know why any parents let their kids have their own internet accounts: 17 year old girl murdered by loser she met on line.

The Ninth Circuit gave a win to pro-lifers. Yes, that Ninth Circuit. Trump is remaking the Courts. That, alone, is enough to re-elect him next year.

I’ve stared the sequel to Mirrors, to be called Secrets. Don’t want you guys to have to binge-read, so you’d better pick up a copy of Mirrors, today!

Open Thread

Mark Noonan65 Comments

Well, I’ve got the first bit of feedback on Mirrors which isn’t from a close friend or family member and it is remarkably positive. I’m very pleased with this. Seems that my character Celeste is proving very popular. No spoilers: go read the book and see why. Don’t fret if the genre isn’t one you normally buy: its a story, and I think quite a fun one.

I did a radio interview about it today on The Barrett Brief and Richard Barrett asked me if I was trying to be original. Most emphatically, I was not. I was trying to tell a story of good guys (and gals) placed in strange and dangerous circumstances and trying, by their wits and courage, to emerge triumphant. RSM takes a look at the upcoming and sure-to-be-dreary Terminator sequel and notes:

Oh, wait, guess what the original Terminator had going for it? Yep, a Nordic blonde playing the damsel in distress, functionally analogous to Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. It might seem farfetched to compare a schlocky science-fiction thriller to Casablanca, and you might object that Linda Hamilton is no Ingrid Bergman, but from the audience perspective, the theme of the beautiful young woman in peril, with the hero coming to rescue her from danger, is a winning formula. It’s transcendent, the stuff of classics. Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind, Han Solo and Princess Leia in Star Wars — all variations on this same timeless theme.

My hero is not a Rick Blaine – the cynical but good man. My male heroes are, if anything, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. But the basic formula is still there: St George must defeat the dragon and save the Princess. This is the timeless reality and the basic element of Christian literature. And I wrote it for two reasons. First off, because I’ve wanted to tell a story for a very long time. Secondly, because we’ve gone completely wrong in story telling. Too much Marxist and psychological claptrap. Trying to be edgy by making the hero nearly as much a rat as the villain. Mirrors is my small contribution towards returning popular culture back to sanity – and a bit of fun, for crying out loud.

AOC is accusing Pelosi of racism – you and I should go long on popcorn futures.

Epstein may not be all that rich – this is not surprising. As I’ve said before: my theory is that he’s a pimp and a blackmailer. He’s been deep in with some of the richest and most powerful people in the world for decades but there is nothing in his past which says he’s done something which would result in him being a billionaire. We’ll see what, if anything, comes out. The smart people bailed out on him in 2010 after his first conviction, but plenty of people stayed in. And my bet is because they had to: Epstein had the goods on them.

Millennials are turning to pagan sorcery for their spiritual needs. They just can’t believe that God would become incarnate because that’s so silly…so they believe a fricking crystal will heal them. This will not end well. Paganism can be healthy, but only for a while…if you are worshiping the gods of the field that can be ok…but always, every last time, pagan worship degenerates into either worship of sex or a desire to kill. Or a really twisted combination of both.