Making, Mining and Growing America Great Again

Mark Noonan6 Comments

Haven’t yammered on about this issue for a while – but it is time to revisit it.

As everyone knows, I assert that national wealth is only what we make, mine and grow. Tangible goods that allow human beings to live – the more you have, the richer you are. Its the difference between being in a besieged city and having a stack of treasury notes or a stack of pancakes; who, then, is the rich man? In and around our immigration debate – legal and illegal – what we’re not getting is any discussion of what we’re trying to accomplish.

The pro-immigration types are telling us that we must have immigrants to compete in a global market. And there is some logic in this – if India has A Brilliant Scientist then it would be nice if the USA could poach A Brilliant Scientist. You know, like all the physicists we picked up from Europe prior to WWII. This is a “no duh” situation. But are we really doing that? Who are we really getting? A lot of people have dug into the H1B database (which I’m confident they’ll try to make classified so we can’t read it any longer) and found stuff like this:

Fast and Friendly seems to need a lot of foreign employees…to manage convenience stores. Which is an important job – we Americans do depend on our convenience stores – but it doesn’t seem, you know?, crucial to the global success of the United States. And that is before we start thinking it over and realize that a lot of companies are clearly becoming visa mills…and I’ll bet a lot of these “employees” are paying for the privilege and using it as the merest means to skip the immigration line…you know, once in under any sort of legal status it gets hard for us to get them out again.

One thing I’m not seeing in these applications for H1B is things like “farmer”, “miner”, “welder”…you know, people who would actually contribute to increasing American wealth. I mean, we do still have mines and farms and right now they’re beating the bushes looking for welders. But not a lot of H1Bs for these. Why not? Why are our H1Bs for tech workers and, as we can see here, low-rent retail? The claim is that we only do this because out of 340 million Americans we couldn’t find a single person to fill the position and so we had no choice but to import someone.

Sorry, that is just a lie. I get it – there really are some first rate people out there that American corporations would like to hire but the H1B program, whatever it was intended for, has just become a means of importing cheap labor…and likely includes a series of scams designed to rip off the system. It is clearly time to massive reform the H1B system to ensure that there really is a search for American talent and only after that search proves fruitless do we bring in a foreigner…with a proviso that if a foreigner is a stand-out brilliant engineer or doctor or some other solid, scientific discipline we bring them in just because its smart to have as many such as you can get.

And it is also time for us to start getting back to making, mining and growing things. We need to reconfigure the American economy to make it welcoming of the hard worker…the person who is willing to get dirty to make things, mine things and grow things. And in that, maybe we will have to import some foreigners because, lets face it, some Americans are downright lazy (it is a disease of wealth). But however we manage it, we must get back to a productive America…an America that once again builds wealth from the ground up. And, side note on this: if we become a productive America again, then nobody is really going to fuss about foreigners moving in…its the difference between getting an additional factory worker rather than just a lower-wage replacement coder.

Making America Great Again: It Ain’t Easy

Mark Noonan8 Comments

Vivek Ramaswamy ignited a bit of a firestorm today on X.

Let’s start with the obvious: on November 5th we voted to secure the border and deport the illegals. Completely sealed: no more illegal entries. Total deportation: if you’re in illegally, you have to go back. But what we didn’t vote for was the termination of immigration. And so, Ramaswamy:

The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH:

Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.

I think most of the anger over this is twofold:

  1. nobody likes to be told that their country sucks. To say that our culture doesn’t promote excellence is to say that our culture is substandard.
  2. the American people, on the whole, are not keen to import workers – not even good workers. This is on the basic truth that American jobs should by and large be filled by American workers.

Ramaswamy does not go on to say that we should just keep importing workers – I think some people are misunderstanding what he said, and some are likely deliberately misunderstanding it because, remember!, there are lots of people who’s whole existence is based on disliking Trump…and this includes a lot of people on the Right. The rest of Ramaswamy’s post is a call to arms, as it were: that we can make excellence our focus as part of that whole Make America Great Again thing.

We do have to acknowledge our flaws. If we can’t, then we’re doomed. Do you know why South Africa is heading towards a Third World collapse? Because the majority doesn’t want to be told that they suck and if they want to get ahead they’re going to have to ask the Boers for instruction. They’d rather wallow in memories of Apartheid as the excuse for all ills with confiscating whitey’s farms as the cure. The only way a person, an organization or a country gets its act together is by acknowledging what’s wrong and then setting about fixing it.

Ramaswamy correctly states that we have been praising the second rate, the unimportant…and I’ll add that we also laud the downright self-destructive. Think about the number of movies and shows that hold up some psycho as the hero. We can’t deny that Anthony Hopkins played the psycho killer excellently in Silence of the Lambs…but the coda of the movie with him heading off to eat the pretentious psychiatrist is hideous. So, too, the end of No Country for Old Men with the bad guy getting away…possibly after murdering a completely innocent woman. Yes, of course, the bad guys sometimes get away with it…but sanity requires that in our story telling they don’t. Lambs should have ended with Starling arresting or killing Lecter…just as Bell should have killed Chigurh to finish up Old Men. This is not to take away the skill or artistry of those involved in those productions…but The Wild Bunch ended up with the bad guys all dead and quite uselessly over nothing. That was the fitting end to violent criminals…and the sort of story that is useful for society.

We need to start holding up the good, the true and the beautiful – popular culture is never a social mirror…it is what you’re aspiring to. And if we’re aspiring to bad guys winning and psychos being cooler than sane people, then we’re going to have some problems. Like, for instance, all the problems we have right now.

In order to Make America Great Again our first order of business is to fix our problems. Deporting all the illegals won’t resolve the fact that about 70 million Americans used illegal drugs last year. That is 20 percent of us. One in five! This does not include those who booze it up too much nor does it really cover marijuana as that is legal in a lot of places these days. We still must deport all the illegals…but the American drug addicts are a huge problem. So, too, things like people having sex before marriage, getting divorced, adultery…with our pop culture pushing these pathologies as positively healthy. That has to stop. No, you can’t say “first amendment!” and call it a day…do you want broken families and drug addicts or do you want sober people in healthy families? You can’t have it both ways – you’re going to get what you insist upon and if you don’t insist upon sobriety you’ll get drunks.

We can’t leave people lying around in the streets. We must do something with them. We must demand that people perform or punish them. Do you realize how tough this is going to be? Kicking out Jose and not letting Patel have a visa isn’t going to Make America Great Again. Its going to take a bit more than that. Do you have the iron in your veins to get it done?

So, yes, I firmly believe that American jobs should be filled by Americans…and that companies should pay wages that Americans want, not what some guy who doesn’t want to live next to an open sewer in Mumbai is willing to take. But this does mean we need Americans who are fit for the task. That means sober, stable, dedicated people who know that life isn’t a free ride. Hindu immigrants to America are doing very well – overall they make more money than white Americans. And its because they are stable, sober and work their butts off. Do you want that? Well, guess what…

Merry Christmas

Mark Noonan8 Comments

In my Mirrors series I have had a little help. I might have mentioned this before but early on in the process I explained the basic outline of the story to my granddaughter and after she heard it I was advised that the story had a fatal flaw: no dragons.

Well, I wasn’t about to just leave it at that so I asked her to tell me about the dragons the story should have. These eventually became the magic Icecrystal dragons – not fire-breathing, but ice-breathing. But, also, of themselves, fairly harmless. They are about the size of a large cat, they can fly and the male, especially, likes to dig into things and see how they work. I inserted the discovery of the Icecrystal dragon eggs into the story without much explanation of what they would be. But over subsequent books the dragons, themselves, started to appear in a small way and in the final book of the series, they will play a larger role…keeping in mind that they are magical and that Celeste’s daughter, Aleste, is a wizard (though still a teenager at the conclusion). Aleste started to be modeled on my granddaughter early on and after she had invented the Icecrystals she also felt that magic dragons would provide something for Aleste…and so the Icewand was created. In all of this, I took the story that the granddaughter created and helped her to write a children’s book based on the Mirrors story line and we’re working on a sequel to it.

So, why tell you all this?

Because my granddaughter got me these bookends for Christmas:

I did not cry! It just got a little dusty in here and maybe someone was slicing onions!

Anyways, thank God for our Savior, Jesus Christ and may your day and year be filled with blessings!

The World is Insane Because We Allow it to Be

Mark Noonan32 Comments

Good post on X – read the whole thing but here’s the crucial part of it:

The “civilized” world has insulated itself in rules and laws and higher-than-thou “morals” that the enemies of everybody simply do not share, don’t care for, and do not have holding them back.

I’ve often thought of writing in depth about the French war in Algeria because it keeps popping back up in my head as the world burns as the turning point…the time when the world decided to stop defending civilization. As I’ve noted before, the primary tactics of the anti-French FLN were the torture/rape/murder of Algerians who didn’t back them and the setting of bombs in French Pied Noir cafes. Faced with this, the French army got a bit vigorous in response…but never got close to the brutality of the FLN. The world took a close look at this (ie, put on a blindfold so they couldn’t actually see anything) and declared that the French were the bad guys…an assertion the French Ruling Class (under De Gaulle of all people!) went along with. Presto – it now became accepted in the world that if you want to beat the West, be absolute savages and they’ll eventually not only quit, but pretend that you’re not savages. They’ll give you money. Seats at the UN. You’ll be placed in charge of human rights commissions!

Do keep in mind that our “higher-than-thou” morals got a woman set afire on the NYC subway yesterday. You’d think that we’d eventually reach a limit that even our Ruling Class won’t go beyond but you’d be wrong – this morning Nate Silver was out with a post saying that, “hey, NYC actually has a relatively low crime rate so what’s the fuss if the odd lunatic thing happens?”. I’m paraphrasing but I’m not at all kidding. They’ve gone so far into “higher-than-thou” that they’re actually saying that a torching or two of a human being is just one of those things that happens…really, really think about that. They only say this, of course, because they are confident they will never be the person burned alive…never be the person who’s child is kidnapped, raped and murdered…never be the person who has to live in an apartment complex taken over by a criminal gang…

Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s intern commuted the death sentences of 37 of the 40 federal death row inmates. The 3 who are still to get whacked? It seems that their real crime – the unforgivable thing – is that their crimes including crimes against Diversity. Murdering two kids, not getting credit for it so you then go and try to murder more? That gets a commutation. The intern put it out that Joe, in good conscience, couldn’t allow Trump to sign the death warrants. Don’t try to make sense of it – there is no sense in it. Whether you’re opposed to the death penalty or not this action was just absurd. They could have been commuted last year if making sure death isn’t applied is right…and if you really thought that death wasn’t appropriate, then you’d commute all 40. Its just raw insanity…it is just what the Ruling Class is like. You know, like Governor Hochul lauding the security cameras for catching the torch-a-passenger guy without mentioning that he’s an illegal immigrant in a sanctuary city and State.

We are so very close to complete societal collapse – it might not seem like it, but keep in mind that these things are always “slowly, and then all at once”. Had we not elected Trump last month, I’m not sure we would have got through the next four years. It is still not certain we will…depends on how effective the new Team Trump is. But Trump is already injecting reality back into the mix. Lot of people made a lot of funny jokes about his statements on Panama, but Trump just entered the real world there…and is dragging us with him. We have pretended since we gave Panama our canal (Panama, as a nation, had nothing to do with the creation of the canal…heck, they didn’t even provide labor for it; all of that came from the USA and the Caribbean islanders) that everything is just hunky dory…but it hasn’t been. There has been massive trafficking across and through it. China has gained footholds. Trump claims that the Panamanians are screwing us on use rates…and while I don’t know this is true, it would surprise the heck out of me if it wasn’t because the USA is everyone’s patsy. Trump, by making his apparently off-the-cuff and outrageous statement regarding taking it back is simply resetting us back to reality…now the Panamanians will have to actually deal with a real United States that is insisting, not asking.

It is so crucial for us to live in reality – a reality where the Mexican government is a charade and everything that happens there regarding drugs and trafficking is Cartel controlled with no reference to Mexican law. A reality where we can’t choose between packs of Syrian savages so we’d better just get out. A reality where continued war in Ukraine helps nobody. A reality where we simply must deport the illegals. On and on and on like that. But four years will not be enough…and that’s is the pickle we find ourselves in. Some of the stuff Trump will have to do is going to be unpopular or at least not understood right off…and J D Vance (or whoever gets the 2028 nod) will have to commit to continuing Trump policies, with the attendant risk that frustration will cause a temporary rejection of same. 2024 was a must-win for us…but so, too, will 2028, 2032 and 2036 be. That is how long it will take just to make sure we don’t die. Let the Democrats back in before 2040 and they will resume the insanity…and place it on overdrive.

Just keep that in mind as we go forward – and make all criticisms of Trump policy with that in mind. Don’t feed the lunatics any easy meals. Make them earn their opposition by coming up with rational complaints…absent such, just dismiss and ridicule them. This is our part – being patriotic citizens. Each of us is small, all of us together are big. And Trump will need us.

War: it Really is Kinda Hell

Mark Noonan15 Comments

There is a video out there showing a Ukrainian drone slamming into a Russian high rise – and it does evoke memories of 9/11…and everyone is jumping on the Ukrainians for doing it, whether deliberately or accidentally. I am very much “meh” about it. Russia started this war without any justifiable cause. And this incident has been tossed into the War Crimes pile…that is where everyone involved in a conflict accuses the other of being war criminals.

And that is why I have dispensed with the whole concept of war crimes: there is just no point in it.

To this day, there is still argument going on about what the Germans did in Belgium during World War One – both in the immediate invasion of August, 1914 and throughout the war. That Germans did rape, murder and loot from Day One on is not in dispute…but there are still people trying to argue that this or that particular incident didn’t happen or was itself justified. It is all such a drivel argument – the war crime, if such exists, was the German invasion. The Germans had no cause to attack Belgium – a small, weak and entirely inoffensive nation which would never have dreamed of challenging German power. If not a single Belgian had been killed, it still would have been a crime. So, people trying to twist themselves into knots saying, “well, when this village was burned and inhabitants massacred, it might well have been in response to a Belgian taking a pot-shot with the farm’s shotgun”. As if that mattered – there wasn’t supposed to be a German to take a pot-shot at.

This is why I’m only interested in who fires the first shot or who sets conditions upon which firing must commence. That is, who started it? After that, all wrong is the fault of the person who started it – nothing the aggressor does can possibly make it better or worse, and nothing the victim does in response is wrong. You open fire, you take your chances…and as far as I’m concerned, if you’re the aggressor and end up losing, count yourself lucky if every last one of you isn’t killed by the victor. What any nation should do in war – and especially my nation – is based entirely upon expediency…what will bring us victory the quickest and at least cost? This is moral because the faster you end a war the less costly it is going to be – and the force used to end a war is always morally proportionate to need, proof being that it ended the war (lots of theological people try to tie themselves in knots over this as part of the Just War Doctrine…mostly so they can hate on the USA for using atomic bombs…but the bottom line is that as long as the force is proportionate to needs, it is legitimate…and that means whatever force you can bring is legitimate).

Sure, I’d prefer a world where there were fully established rules for war and everyone tried to adhere to them. But it isn’t going to happen. It can’t happen when, in modern times, the combatants don’t even agree on what is right and wrong. That’s the real failure of all the peace and arms-control treaties…they have words on them and the contracting parties don’t even agree on the meanings of words. Back when it was two deeply Christian powers in conflict you could make rules…because both sides were working off the same ultimate rule book. But between, say, Catholic me and Communist enemy, where is there any meeting of mind? When I say “justice” is means just about the opposite of what the Communist means. I can’t make a deal with him – can’t have agreed upon rules of conflict. I can only, when pressed to it, fight him with every available means lest he kill me and all I hold dear.

Just my two cents on that particular modern debate. Fight if you want. You’d better win if you decide to fight. If you decide to fight and lose, I don’t care what happens to you.

MAGA is Coming

Mark Noonan7 Comments

The Congressional GOP tried to pretend it was 2016 last night – trying to help the Democrats ram through a 1,500 page continuing resolution which was packed with Democrat spending priorities and various things to hamstring the incoming Trump Administration. For the moment, it appears to have been stopped – with Elon Musk and JD Vance leading the social media charge against it. It could, of course, come back! But it still was a least a victory for a day…and the first time we actually made a GOP-controlled chamber of Congress listen to us.

To listen to the RINOs, this was once again just one of those darned things we couldn’t change – if we wanted relief for hurricane victims, we had to go along with all the Democrat spending. This was never a convincing argument in the past but, also, there never was much we could do about it…but now we’ve got at least a significant number of MAGA representation and at least one friendly social media platform…we are both able to get our message out and there are enough MAGA representatives in Congress to make it so that any RINO going along with it would be heavily exposed come re-election time. Like this: if there are 220 GOPers in the House and 195 vote for it, that’s cover. If there’s 220 and 150 vote for it…that’s catastrophe…that’s clearly providing the votes for a Democrat bill. Rely on it: they will try to ram it all through…the Uniparty is still pretty strong and utterly hates us.

The strongest message I saw yesterday on Social Media – from accounts large and small – was to keep hammering back on it with “why can’t you just pass a hurricane relief bill?”. This, of course, was deadly for the Uniparty. Their argument was that we had to go along with the Dems because they control the Senate…our argument (and its unanswerable) is why don’t they have to go along with us as we control the House? The secondary argument (also effective) was to say, “put action off until the 6th for Trump’s signature on the 20th”. We all do feel for the hurricane victims but our bet is that most of them would back us on this…sometimes you do have to do the patriotic thing even if it hurts. To wrap it all up in a pretty bow, we also pointed out that whatever fallout there is will occur while Biden is President…not Trump. This isn’t even our mess – its the Democrats’ mess. Let them clean it up. Or not. We don’t care. By the time votes are cast again, the budget crunch of December 2024 will be ancient history…if there’s a time for such a fight, it is now.

The fact that there was a genuine pushback and that it was at least partially successful shows that the Trump victory is for real…it wasn’t just a vote against Biden, it was a vote against the Establishment…and the GOP part of that Establishment as much as any other part. People don’t want business as usual. If the Left had a lick of sense – or wasn’t motivated purely by hatred – they’d realize that now was the time to try to get things like universal health care or at least something like it. We don’t like the health care system. We don’t like Big Pharma. We’re also open to ideas, knowing that nothing is going to be perfect. They could bring their proposals to us and get a hearing…buuuut being hate filled and stupid, they are turning the CEO murderer into their sick and twisted version of a hero. Not really sure what we’re going to have to do with the overall Left…they are so amazingly ignorant and filled with hate that its going to be a problem just dealing with them. Of course, if we really do get the promised reforms, the Left will see a drastic reduction of taxpayer funded Leftist storm troopers and that will lower the overall temperature over time.

Like a lot of people, I’m feeling very positive about the future – understanding that the mess the Biden people made is real and will take some time to clean up (do note that they’ll stop putting out bogus economic data – no longer need to protect a Democrat so we’ll shortly be getting true inflation and unemployment data). But I feel like for the first time in a long time – maybe since Reagan – that we’re going to have policies designed to help America…and that gives me hope.

Knowing What You Know. And Don’t Know.

Mark Noonan33 Comments

The discussion in the past thread with Amazona about the JFK assassination brings up the real subject we need to delve into: what do we know for certain? This might seem like a small – and might even seem like an irrelevant – question but in my view, it is the crucial starting point.

First off, let’s dispense with the whole phrase “conspiracy theory”. Yes, we do know there are some clearly kooky ideas about a lot of things out there but when we tag something as a “conspiracy theory” what we’re doing is both dismissing it and warning everyone away from it. “Come on! That’s just a conspiracy theory! You don’t want to be one of those crazies. Right?”. It is very effective propaganda designed to shut off debate and inquiry. And the kicker on it is that it can be used both ways by grifters – some using the accusation to get people to stop asking but the mirror-image of it is used by the other grifters…those who want you to believe nonsense and so they package it up as “they call me a conspiracy theorist but I’ve just found the truth!”…this makes that grift bullet proof the other direction. The most notable recent example of this is Candace Owens who has gone off on anti-Semitic rants of late and she’s keeping her listeners on board (and clicking!) by saying those who disagree are trying to “silence the truth by calling me a conspiracy theorist!”. So, have a little care here – and dispense with “conspiracy theory”. What we have is people making assertions – test them against known facts and your own good sense; only reject an assertion if the facts and your sense indicate against them.

So, back to it: what do we know? That is the first and most important question. As it relates to the JFK assassination what we know is pretty limited. When you really grind it down, all we know for certain is that JFK was shot and killed. Everything else related to it has some questionable aspects. Even for someone like me who asserts that forensics indicates Oswald as the lone shooter I am forced to admit that a good defense attorney could have shot reasonable doubt into the assertion…not enough to have saved Oswald in a putative 1964 murder trial, but certainly enough for a dispassionate observer ten years later to go, “not proved beyond a reasonable doubt”.

The really important aspect here when you ask, “what do we know?” is that assertions by Experts and government agencies are now known to be questionable. There is no neutral arbiter whom we can rely on to speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Might there have been in 1963? Possibly – but the seeds of what has come after – complete institutional collapse – were already planted by then. We can’t necessarily impose today’s dishonesty on the people and agencies of 1963 but we also can’t assume that the people and agencies of 1963 who went on to a whole series of now-exposed lies weren’t also lying in 1963.

It is good to keep in mind that in any analysis of the past, we’ll never have the complete picture. For some things we have more data than others, but all historical documents still only amount to what someone thought important enough to write down. For the historian, it is really good if several major players in an event wrote down independent, contemporary accounts because the compare and contrast can provide some real insights…but, still, even that is just what the players decided to write down. It is still incomplete. In fact, it never can be complete. There will be facts not recorded – perhaps not even known at the time by the principle actors. So, you’re never going to look back and get the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. All you’re going to get is part of the story and it is going to be written by people who had their own prejudices even if they didn’t have a specific agenda in what they wrote.

Our saving grace here is that, as God told us, “for every tree is known by its own fruit” (Luke 6:43-45). We can’t know exactly what happened in the past…but we can see what happened and so get some very deep insights into the actual motivations of those who made the decisions. Did a conspiracy kill Kennedy? I don’t know – and I likely can’t know. But what I do know is that after JFK’s death a muscular anti-Communism and a full-throated exploitation American power dwindled to “our long, national nightmare is over” and lets cancel Apollo’s 18-20. Oh, and “ask not” morphed somehow into the Welfare State. Like JFK represented something that our overall Ruling Class didn’t like…and it didn’t like Nixon…and didn’t like Reagan….and now really doesn’t like Trump…all four men being ardent American patriots who view America as the best thing and worthy of building up. If JFK’s assassination wasn’t a conspiracy it certainly worked out to a disaster for the United States…and the primary beneficiaries of the event were contemptible, thieving cowards who have just about ruined the USA.

Just to give you an idea of how bad it is – how low we’ve fallen – I looked up the construction of the USS Enterprise (CVN-65). It was an approximately 95,000-ton nuclear powered aircraft carrier that was laid down on February 4th, 1958 and went into commission (that is, a combat-effective warship for the United States Navy) on November 25th, 1961. A little over two years, nine months from laying the keel to sailing off into the ocean blue ready to do battle for the United States. I then looked up the USS Enterprise (CVN-80). It is an approximately 100,000-ton nuclear powered aircraft carrier laid down on April 5th, 2022. Wanna guess when its going into commission? They hope to have it ready in 2029. Seven years! And do you want to bet on us meeting the 2029 date?

On May 25th, 1961 Kennedy laid out the aspiration of going to the Moon in the 1960s. It was an aspiration. We had no idea how to do it other than some theories on paper. As we went into it we found that we not only didn’t know how to do it, we didn’t even know what we had to learn before we could start figuring out how to do it. But everyone went to work and the project was done in a little over eight years. Sheppard only made his suborbital flight twenty days before Kennedy set the goal. We set up the Artemis program in 2017 to get us back to the Moon and the first manned flight of the program is set for 2026. Who has benefited from this? Who’s fruit? What tree?

Kennedy wanted us to do great things. Nixon wanted us to do great things. Reagan wanted us to do great things. Trump is asserting we will do great things. Johnson: here’s some welfare. Carter: the age of limits. Clinton: depends on what the meaning of is is. Getting the picture? Those who want America to be great and get greater are hammered back into the ground…those who go along with decline are rewarded and praised. Did a conspiracy kill Kennedy? It is irrelevant if it did or didn’t – what’s relevant is that everyone the Establishment hates gets raked over the coals. That tells us what has happened even though we don’t know fact for fact how it happened. And, in the end, it doesn’t matter if its a cabal of wicked people or just a pack of stupid crooks…its all worked out the same and very badly for us.

So, in the end, all we really know is if something worked out well or badly. That it was good, or bad. And while we can’t know if the bad things were caused by malevolence or folly, we should treat all bad things as if they were caused by malevolence. Whether a person is bad or stupid, only whacking them about the head and shoulders will get them to stop being bad or stupid. I don’t care if, say, Mayorkas is in the pay of the Cartels or if he’s just stupid – in either case, I want him jailed for twenty years. It doesn’t matter, in the end, why he left the borders open…it only matters that he left them open and I’ve got no time or energy to figure out his motivation. Whether his successor is stupid or wicked won’t matter as long as in his successor’s office is a picture of him in jail.

And in service of this goal of just punishing the heck out of those who do wrong and/or are stupid, we have to stop going along with the Establishment’s demand that certain subjects aren’t open to question. I don’t care if the guy telling me something is wearing a literal tinfoil hat…I want to hear his statement and assess it on my own. And if he’s telling me that lizard people are causing the decline of American farming I’m only interested in knowing if American farming is declining. If it is, that’s bad – and I don’t care if the guys in charge were wicked or stupid, I want them broken.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan13 Comments

Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) took dead aim at the infamous Filburn case – this was a Depression-era court case in which a man was fined for producing for his own consumption more wheat than the federal government allowed. Filburn’s argument – which is 100% correct – was that since his wheat was only for his own consumption it wasn’t commerce (interstate or otherwise) and so Congress had no right to regulate his production under the commerce clause. The Supreme Court – by 1938 controlled by FDR loyalists – simply ruled that the clearly written Constitution meant the opposite of what it said. This is the foundation for why the federal government is deeply involved in all aspects of American life (it was also the foundation of the absurd Roe and Obergefell decisions).

It is way past time we revisited these issues – in fact, Lee might have hit upon the most crucial: that is, the federal government’s assertion under the commerce clause that as anything might effect interstate commerce it is covered by federal law. This assertion makes a mockery of even having State and local government. Commerce is a word with meaning – so is interstate. For Uncle Sam to have a say there must be something for sale across State lines. If it isn’t for sale and/or doesn’t cross State lines, the federal government has no power over it under the 10th Amendment which holds that powers not granted to the federal government are reserved to the States or to the people.

Keep in mind that the federal government’s interference in agriculture was based upon the idea that we must keep food prices high. Think about that. America’s fertile farmland and hard working farmers had done so well that food prices were dropping. Now, this did adversely impact some farmers…no kidding; of course it would. This did result in the heartbreaking fact that a farmer who wasn’t making it was going to lose his farm…perhaps a farm several generations in his family and founded by a hard-bitten pioneer back in the Old West. That was tragic…and some aid should be rendered to any hard working person who is losing out. But to keep food prices high? Why in God’s name would anyone want high food prices?

I guarantee you that farming, as an industry, will never die. People gotta eat – three squares a day, every day. There are 335,893,238 Americans. That is more than a billion meals per day. Every day. We should be producing at maximum capacity to both ensure there’s always more than enough and that it is as inexpensive as possible…not working out ridiculous programs to restrict production and artificially keep prices high so that the least-efficient farms can keep going (spoiler: they didn’t keep going anyway – 100 years ago there were 14 million employed on farms in a much smaller US population, these days it is about 3 million). And don’t get me wrong here – I personally think more people should be in the food production business. I don’t like megacorporations owning vast farm and ranch acreage. I’m ok with tax and regulatory changes which would make it easier – and more profitable – for small, local farms to operate. But to restrict production? That’s just stupid.

Daniel Penny will be attending the Army-Navy game (Go Navy, BTW) as a guest of VP Vance (yes, I know that technically he’s not until 1/20 but its clear that neither Joe nor Kamala are working any longer so we default to Trump and Vance). This has caused some heartache among the Stupid-American Community. Their argument is that it is unsavory for Penny to be there…as if he did something wrong.

And you really need to roll that around in your head. Back in 1912 when the Titanic was sinking, by and large the men aboard swiftly figured out that they were going to have to die if the women and children were going to live. Sure, there were a few cowards but if you, say, roll through the First and Second Class passengers who died, you’ll be in almost all-male company. These were the men with easiest access to the lifeboats – and they were men of social and financial power. They could have mostly got away. They stayed, and died. Because that is what you do. So, too, with Penny. He could have just sat there and pretended he saw nothing…but he saw a threat and he saw innocent people who had no way to defend themselves…and so he placed himself – his life – between the threat and the others. You can never know what will happen once a physical altercation begins. Penny, as a Marine, obviously knows how to take care of himself in a fight but in a fight, the other guy always gets a say. For all Penny knew, he was going to his death…and yet he went anyway. That is just heroism, plain and simple.

And that is what the Left is really complaining about here – not the death, but the heroism. They can’t stand it; they hate it, in fact. They prefer that people sit quietly and accept their fate – no, not themselves. They want to be in privileged communities and transport where such risk will never confront them. But for you, serf, they just want you complacent as they run their little sociological experiments on you. The threat wasn’t a threat – he was a street dancer who needed help! That he was a drug addict who had refused lavish offers of help is simply not mentioned. Because to mention it blows up the whole program. So, Penny had to be brought down…and we all expected a conviction because it is NYC…but we all forgot that the jurors ride the subway, too.

If the Left keeps up with this sort of thing then the world will swiftly come to understand that the real purpose of the police isn’t to protect and serve the honest, but to save the lives of the guilty. We have police so that we, the citizens, don’t have to lynch criminals. A societal decision was made more than a century ago that we would surrender part of our right to self defense in the interests of order and justice (plus as we went along we became a lot more weak-stomached than we used to be). But this only works so long as, by and large, the police keep us safe…and not just safe from rape and murder, but from even being overly harassed as we go about our business. The Left likes to assert that someone ranting and raving on a subway is just something you can ignore…but you can’t. Especially if you’re a youth, or a woman, or an unfit man. That raving lunatic might end up harmless…but you can’t be sure. The whole time he’s there ranting and raving you are in terror. The police are supposed to come and take that man away…and do it so efficiently that only rarely is anyone confronted by someone raving on a subway.

If that deal is broken, then people will reclaim their right to self defense…and the raving nutter won’t be merely restrained by a passenger (this is all Penny did – the man was alive when the police arrived), but he’ll be killed. And nobody saw nothing. The Left doesn’t realize the fire they are playing with here.

UPDATE:

Just so we can all keep up to Social Media speed here, Sidney Sweeney was recently photographed at a pool and to the shock of some, she didn’t look like she does when she’s perfectly made up for the red carpet. They’re calling her mid! Well, we report, you decide (posting bikin-clad pics of Sweeney is NOT engagement farming. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.)

Open Thread

Mark Noonan51 Comments

The Democrats – still in the Senate majority – have been holding Orange Man Bad hearings to finish off their term. Yesterday, the Orange Man was Bad because of this illegal immigrant he’d like to deport – Foday Turay – who is a prosecutor.

A prosecutor. Prosecuting American citizens. Democrats thought it would be a good idea to highlight that they gave a job in law enforcement to an illegal immigrant.

This is a strong indicator that our Democrats haven’t learned a darned thing. Trump ran an 18 month campaign with one of his major issues – front and center all the time – being that he was doing to deport the illegals. After hearing this argument – and the Democrat counter-argument, forcefully stated with a billion dollars of campaign funds and overwhelming MSM support for the Dem position – the American people elected Trump. That’s it. We’re done here. There might be some room for compromise here and there (we’re not rat bastards with no feelings, after all) but the basic thrust is going to be deportations and border security. That is what the American people want. It is what they will get.

Democrats are saying how mean it will be if illegals lose their jobs.

I don’t know what to say about such people – that is, people who can’t absorb simple facts like, say, a lost election. There’s no mind for me to reach. If after 11/5 you’re shouting BLM slogans, condemning Israel and rising in defense of illegal immigration you’re not just wrong, you’re an idiot. These ideas were rejected by the electorate…the only path forward for those who back such views is to rethink them, make adjustments and try different tactics. Democrats are acting like 11/5 didn’t happen.

Maybe its because after their news outfits finished up lying to them on 11/5, our Democrats continue to trust them? This would make them even stupider…but one of the excuses the MSM/Dems are making is that Trump didn’t win a landslide. To be sure, it wasn’t a 1980 result, but it was a close as we’re going to get any time soon. Let’s look at it:

In 2016, Trump received 62,984,828 votes. In 2024, 77,237,942. Little bit of math – even a Liberal could do this – and we see that over an 8 year period while under constant attack and lawfare, Trump increased his vote total by 14,253,114. That’s a 22.6% increase over his 2016 vote. That’s a pretty popular guy. And we must always keep in mind that in all three elections, Democrats stuffed ballot boxes. It is what they do – they insert as many fake ballots into the system as they can…this is especially prevalent in the Blue States where Democrats have consistently removed any vote security systems. My guess is that in any given national election, Democrat vote totals are probably 10% fake though it would take a very thorough investigation to get to an exact figure – it might be more (don’t get me wrong, even without fake votes, we were losing CA and NY…but we’d lose them by smaller margins in an honest system and we wouldn’t have the sheer magic of every late-decided House race in CA falling to the Dems weeks after the election).

And in this election, Trump’s coattails were sufficient to secure a Congressional majority. The Supreme Court is majority in favor of law. The Administrative State (Deep State) is going to be brought under control. We won, Democrats. You lost. You have no real power to alter the course for the next two years. Prepare for the mid-terms: they are traditionally favorable to the Party which lost the previous election. But, my goodness, you’re going to get wiped in 2026 if over the next two years you just keep going Resist drivel. There’s nothing to resist. The people have chosen. You have been rejected. The chances that in two years the people will be going, “wow, sorry I voted Trump: what I want is a return to the border invasion and more medical mutilation of kids!” is nil. If you want to win in 2026 and thus gain some actual leverage, you’re going to have to come up with something different.

Or don’t. I don’t care. The stupider you are, the better for us.

It looks increasingly like Hegseth and the rest of Trump’s picks will sail through. Joni Ernst was leading a charge against Hegseth – in cooperation with the MSM/DNC who worked up a series of increasingly stupid lies about Hegseth – but she’s cooling her jets now…there have been rumors of a primary challenge. There still might be one: her choice to make an issue out of Hegseth angered a lot of people (me, inlcuded). There was just no sense in it. Even if you dislike Trump, the place to fight him is not in cabinet picks…by and large, the American people accept that a President should get the cabinet of the President’s choice. To expend political capital fighting the guy chosen to clean up an obviously dysfunctional military was just stupid…and to lend credence to the Democrats’ serial slanders of the man was disgusting.

I’m sitting here getting ready to release Book IX of the Mirrors series (Home World) and I’m about 65% done with Book X (this will wrap up the series with possible different story lines available for later works – but I want to start working on my post-apocalyptic series Of the 15 as well as a sort of Hallmark movie story about a sailor and a princess) and here comes Hollywood with….Meet the Parents 4. Look, I get it: Meet the Parents was hilarious. The second installment was a credible sequel. The third installment dragged out a premise which was exhausted. What they heck are they going to do in a fourth movie? And, hey, its not just me putting out stuff that is new entertainment content…there are a host of indy writers out there, including some on the Left, who are putting out new stuff which has different takes on things. But our Entertainment Industry is a sick joke…just recycling the same old stuff over and over again. The reason? They figure an established franchise is at least sold money-maker…but they aren’t solid money-makers. Disney has just about killed the Star Wars franchise. The Narnia franchise is about to be destroyed in a woke version. The Tolkien universe is almost completely destroyed (this destruction starting, actually, with the total ruination of Faramir’s character in the third movie). Its not just that they are out of ideas: they are destroying what was once good ideas.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan21 Comments

This will be a bit for Amazona to chew on!

Team Trump is asserting that they will be working to end “birthright citizenship”. This is the concept that if you are born in American territory, you are American. The argument in favor of this is the wording of the 14th Amendment which goes: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside”. This is held to mean that in 1868, an Amendment to ensure that black Americans who had been cruelly denied their rights as citizens applies to Juanita in Chiapas who boards a bus for Juarez, crosses illegally into El Paso and has a kid.

Yeah, no. Don’t think so. The Constitution isn’t a suicide pact. I’m a strict constructionist…original intent and all that. There was no intent to make “anchor babies” a thing. It wasn’t even in mind as the Amendment was proposed, passed and ratified. There was no court case on it – we don’t have, for instance, a court case from 1880 where a person illegally in the USA is arguing their American-born child is American. It wasn’t even a concept until about 40 years ago. This is mostly because travel used to be far more difficult and pregnant women wouldn’t often travel as their condition wasn’t conducive to arduous travel. But when you can now fly cheaply many thousands of miles in a few hours…here we go.

To hold that the 14th means we must allow “anchor babies” is as stupid as saying that a law legalizing interracial marriage means two boys can get married. Sure, this is basically what Obergefell held…but that was one of the most monumentally stupid decisions the Court has ever rendered. This has nothing to do with the merits of same sex marriage – maybe it is something we should do? But to apply laws written without the subject in mind is just asinine. Anchor babies and SSM were new subjects that no law, prior to them being brought up, covered. In the case of SSM, the Court should have ruled: sort it out via the political process. Because no law of the USA prior to the concept of SSM covered SSM – and this includes, of course, the Constitution of the USA which, being silent on the matter, leaves its resolution to the States, or the people. So, too, “anchor babies” – no law of the USA covers it, so any laws about it will have to be made on the fly and if you really want “anchor babies” to be American citizens because of the plot of dirt they were born on, amend the Constitution…don’t try to bootstrap it on to something never intended for it.

Assad’s regime in Syria has collapsed and the usual collection of Neo-Con warmongers and Liberal idiots is cheering. We pray for the people there and hope that we get a miracle…but what we’re likely to get is a massacre.

Good to keep in mind that Syria isn’t a country. It is a geographic expression. The people who reside in the borders of Syria are very different groups, some of whom hate each other with a passion. Assad is Alawite and his faction has dominated Syria since the early 1970s…as a sort of 3 million person Alawite Empire lording it over the other 22 million people there…though the Christians and Druze of Syria have tended to favor Alawite rule as it is far less oppressive than other Muslim rule (Alawites are a bit of a bizarre Muslim sect held by many Muslims to be heretical…some even consider them idolators). The Alawites were long heavily suppressed by other Muslims (especially the Turks during the Ottoman Empire) but when the French took over Syria in 1918, they tended to favor the Alawites and so, post-French rule, the Alawites were best positioned to take over.

As you can see just in that short paragraph, this isn’t going to be a cut and dried thing. The rebels are not fighting for a free Syria where are all afforded equal rights – they just want to be in charge. The only possible saving grace here is that the rebels are a coalition and maybe none of them are strong enough to totally dominate…that might provide some wiggle room to avoid disaster. But there is a massive danger that this is going to degenerate into tribal score-settling and that means Alawites, Christians and Druze are in for a very bad time.

I talked about this a few days ago – about how we live in the land of make-believe. And a price will now be extracted for the world pretending that Syria was a country…rather than several countries that want nothing to do with each other and so, upon independence, what should have done was to break it up into its ethnic components, including population transfers to avoid having oppressed minorities. Had the real world been lived in then what we call Syria today would be at least 5 nations including 1 Christian and 1 Druze and nobody would have been dying all this time. Side note: there is an even money chance that American intel people fostered this Assad collapse just to toss a problem for Trump to deal with.