Open Thread

Mark Noonan75 Comments

Starting to see the hedge posts from the Pundit class – “although the Democrats stand a good chance in November, there are indicators that things may go badly”. This is just so that when their poll models come up short on November 8th, they’ll be able to refer back to these posts to show, “see? I told you it wasn’t in the bag!”. The grift must go on! And for each post injecting a little reality into the debate, they’ve got a hundred from fantasy-land.

The bottom line is that the fundamentals still favor the GOP – if it is just a normal first mid-term, the Democrats will certainly lose the House and will likely lose the Senate (the sleeper elections here, for me, are New Hampshire and Colorado: outside chance we can win them). When you add into these fundamentals still high prices (including for gas! They want us to be grateful that it went from, here in Las Vegas, $5.25 a gallon to $4.45 – gee, thanks Joe!), the recession, the border crisis, rising crime and a general sense of incompetence and failure at the top, we could see some very strange results on November 8th. It is hold on to your hats: let’s see what happens. But Joe Biden’s term ends on November 8th…with the House, if nothing else, his legislative agenda is finished.

What we’re not seeing from the GOP leadership is a full understanding of what the Base is expecting supposing the GOP wins both houses – we’re not looking for ways to work with Democrats. We want unrelenting war. Hearings. Investigations. Government shut-downs. If necessary, bust the filibuster and just send popular bill after popular bill to Joe’s desk for him to veto. McConnell, as I’ve noted before, is just not the man for this hour – and I honestly don’t think he wants to be the leader of a MAGA GOP. Hopefully, he can be eased out. McCarthy is on a little firmer ground…but if he gives us “compromise” on things like guns and border security, there will be a revolt in the GOP Caucus which will be more MAGA than ever before come January.

It is time for lines to be drawn – we’re the party of freedom and we’re going to prove it.

Youngsters are finding that hooking up with people on Tinder isn’t working out too well. We could have told them that – but, kids don’t listen much on that score. What will be cool is that those who survive this will carefully instruct their sons and daughters on right conduct.

Turns out that it has been Federal law since 1960 that election records – every last scrap of paper related to them – are supposed to be preserved by the election officials. This will not surprise you: of the 100 largest counties, 94 did not keep such records. As most large counties are Democrat-run, there ya go. It has been my contention really since about 2003 that in the deepest Blue areas, nobody has the foggiest notion of how many votes are cast and for who. Given what I’ve seen since then, I’m more and more of the conviction that the votes are just made up – whatever is needed to produce the desired results, that is what is announced. We’ve got to think about this: in the deepest Blue areas illiteracy is common as is welfare dependency…illiterate welfare bums do not have a high propensity to turn out. Especially as on the local level, the result is pre-determined (like there is any chance a GOPer – or even an anti-Establishment Democrat – can win in places like Chicago and San Francisco…no matter how bad things get). The attempted recount of Michigan in 2016 was another eye-opener. It was quickly shut down as they started opening ballot boxes marked “500 ballots” only to find, say, 20 or so in there: that is something which didn’t get a lot of MSM airplay!

What keeps us afloat right now is that Democrats don’t have total control of the process – and the reason they are trying to impose federal law on all voting is because they want that control. What we have to do is ensure that where we do get power, we implement Florida-style rules to ensure Democrats can’t cheat. And when we have federal power, send federal agents into the deep Blue areas to monitor the elections…the first step being to simply count how many people show up and compare that to reported votes. The Democrats have always cheated – and they never, not even once, cheated just a little bit. They are always looking to alter the result in their favor. They just put the cheating into overdrive in 2020 to get Trump out. They will continue to cheat, on an ever grander scale, unless we stop them.

9/11 at 21

Mark Noonan6 Comments

I’ve been puzzled about what to write regarding 9/11. It has been a long while and a lot has happened.

The horror of it all still lives in the mind, but we must keep in mind that unless you’re over 30, you don’t have any real memory of it. A very large portion of the American population already views 9/11 as, say, I viewed Pearl Harbor…only through the eyes of older people.

However one views the event of 9/11, the basic result for the United States has been unmitigated disaster. We are weaker and far more divided than we were on that September morning.

First off, many of us complain about the Deep State and our complaints started to surface as Trump took office in 2017 – but now, with hindsight, we realize the Deep State has been screwing things up for a long while. We can’t escape the fact that the hijackers were let in by the Deep State. Allowed to train by the Deep State. Allowed to board the planes by the Deep State. All our military, intelligence and law enforcement, combined, couldn’t stop a few idiots with box cutters from killing 3,000 of us. And then not a single person in the Deep State paid for it.

In an honest, healthy society a lot of people would have been shot or imprisoned for that failure…as it is, I don’t recall anyone getting so much as a reprimand. We all had to come together, right? And we did – and we let them skate. Because we thought their failure was just bad luck. It wasn’t. No, I’m not saying they deliberately allowed it to happen – but I am saying they made the conscious choice to not see what was coming. Seeing what was coming meant having to take action to stop it…and it was much easier to just look the other way. And, so, they did.

Secondly, we went to war – and we expended thousands of lives and trillions of dollars…and killed untold numbers of foreigners. And, for what? For the Taliban being back in Kabul and the Mullahs in Iran now about to get massively rewarded by us for…for I really can’t tell why we’re rewarding them. But, mark it, we’re about to give the store away to them allegedly to stop a nuclear program but we all now it won’t…but the store will still be given even though, on balance, it would be better for us to just give them nothing and let them build their nuke because they won’t use it…not against us or Israel because in either case the retaliation will be far worse for them than any damage they do to us, if they can even successfully launch a nuke at Israel with her Iron Dome.

And now the Patriot Act created supposedly to fight the enemy is being turned on us – as our own government tells us that we’re worse than the perpetrators of 9/11 and that some white, Christian guy is worse than a child-trafficking Taliban terrorist.

So, what am I supposed to think? Am I supposed to get misty eyed. Raise high the flag?

I just don’t know – there’s a sickness in our nation and I’m coming around to thinking that curing it is more important than anything else.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan46 Comments

The assertion about the mid-terms is that the Dobbs decision is motivating female voters to turn out for Democrats. Is there any truth to this claim? Only in polling. But, as I’ve pointed out before, polling is the political metric most open to manipulation.

This also leaves out the fact that not all women back abortion. I know the the MSM will never cover such a thing, but the bottom line is that women have been leading the charge against Roe ever since the decision was handed down. Would not their victory against overwhelming odds and after so many years of struggle motivate them to cement their achievement into a pro-life Congress?

For me, I just don’t see abortion as being that great a motivator for the Democrats outside of the urban and suburban upper class white women who were going to vote for them anyway. Might get a few more of them to actually show up in November, but not in any numbers necessary to save Democrat bacon.

I stand by my prediction – made months ago – that the GOP is heading for a blowout win on November 8th. Could I be wrong? Of course I could. I’m human! But we’re in a recession. Food prices are high. Crime is rising. Foreign affairs are a mess. Its the first midterm for the Democrats since their victory. The GOP gained House seats in 2020. They only need a few to claim a majority. Voter registration and primary participation numbers (even after Dobbs) clearly favor the GOP all around the country (it won’t matter because the State is so Democrat, but in Hawaii the GOP primary turnout was up like 125% or some such).

And lets think about something – if you’re a Democrat you sure in heck don’t want to talk about the economy or crime or foreign affairs. But you have to talk about something. Sure, you’re talking Trump…but you can’t just talk about him, right? So, what? How about abortion? That’s the ticket – talk abortion. Maybe frame it to scare our halfwit female voters (something like 36% of college educated white women agree with the sentence “some men can get pregnant”; rely on it, the number of GOP women included in that 36% is next to zero)? Goose that turnout and maybe turn a few narrow, suburban losses into holds? And then, hey preseto, here comes a bunch of polls saying that women are talking 24/7 about abortion and, buddy let me tell you, they’re gonna make the GOP pay for it! Convenient how everything in the Establishment comes together just the way the Democrats would want, right?

Now, maybe women are fired up to save Roe? Could be. I guess. If so, then we on the right have a far larger problem than we suspected. We’ll find out for sure on November 8th…but I’m sticking with my prediction.

Over in Pennsylvania Dr Oz is doing all he can to win – he’s barnstorming the State while Fetterman apparently still has a long way to go on recovery from his recent stroke. As I’ve been saying for a while, Pennsylvania is the next Florida. Voter registration trends have been massive for the GOP year after year. It might seem like the State is still favorable to Democrats, but that is an illusion mostly brought about by habit and really, really bad polling. Remember, in 2018 4 of the last 5 polls in Florida showed a substantial lead in the governors race for Gillum…only to have DeSantis win. And it wasn’t like the polls were close – the day before the election Quinninpiac had Gillum up by 7. So, I take those polls showing Fetterman (who can barely speak) up by 10 over Oz with a truckload of salt. Same, too, with the governors race in PA. Some people got mad the other day when Oz said he would have voted to certify the 2020 results…but I didn’t. I pointed out early on that Oz will have to go off-MAGA on at least some issues to be electorally viable in a State trending Red but not quite there yet. Taking a contrary position on the 2020 election result is the most meaningless off-MAGA gesture he could make.

Latinos are trending GOP. Hard. And Democrats are starting to notice and it is really pissing them off. So, what do you think they’re doing about it? Reassessing how they approach the community? Reconsidering things like Latinx and telling school kids they can change gender? Maybe concentrate on policies which will provide the sort of well-paid, blue collar jobs which sustain most Latino families these days? Oh, heck no! What made you think they’d do anything like that?

What they’re doing in response to the GOP gains in the Latino community is figuring that the GOP is lying to them and that Latinos are too stupid to figure this out:

There is nobody quite so racist as a white liberal – they simply cannot believe that any POC would disagree with them and if they do, it is because they’re stupid…and so need white liberals to speak for them.

I do believe – and it is one of the reasons for my prediction of a GOP blowout win – that Latinos will show that they want something different in November. This vote will not necessarily be an endorsement of the GOP: it will be far more, in my view, a rejection of the Left than anything else. To secure the long term loyalty of Latino voters, the GOP will have to do the concrete things necessary to show them we’re serious – a strong economy; low crime; good schools. That sort of thing. As for the Democrats, their party strength is in upper class white women and black women in general. This is not enough to sustain them in power. If they lose Latinos (and they are) and if support among black males starts to crumble (there is some indication of this) then Democrats will be reduced to an urban rump incapable of winning national power.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan64 Comments

They’re burning candles for light and shutting down trains in Europe because they lack sufficient power supplies…last I read was some places were experiencing a 500% increase in power bills: this is unofficial rationing as most power companies in Europe are either government owned or functionally government controlled. And it is just amazing. Europe sits on vast coal supplies – British coal, especially, is high quality. They’ve got overflowing buckets of the stuff…now just sitting in the ground (read an article about how a French coal town, its mines long shut down, was building a coal mining museum…which was just pathetic). They also have nuclear capability – with French nuclear plant designs arguably the best and cleanest in the world, but they’re all shutting down their nuke plants. They’re now sitting in the dark because to be “green” they had to outsource their energy supplies to Russia…and then they decided to fight a proxy war with Russia, who has now said, “hey, turns out the gas pipeline doesn’t work. Don’t call us, we’ll call you when we’ve got it up and running again”.

Europe, by the way, is cold in winter. About half of Europe is north of the 49th parallel…which is our northern border (absent Alaska). We think of Juneau of being way the heck up there by the North Pole…for Europeans, that is just Stockholm and St Petersburg. The glorious weather of September is going to lead into the cold, dark and wet times of October to March. Unless Europe rapidly gets a grip on this, people are going to freeze to death this winter all over Europe.

This is the future the Ruling Class wants for us – remember, we’re the carbon they want to reduce.

A couple former Department of Homeland Security employees developed a way to use our cell phones to track our movements…and they then sell the resultant data to law enforcement. You can rely on it that if you’re trying to track a murder suspect, this is great…but it is also surveillance without a warrant, with law enforcement (so far) getting away with it by saying, “hey, we just bought the data”. This is totalitarian – this is a step towards applying China’s social credit system here in the USA. This practice, and anything like it, needs to be legislatively banned. The United States government must not be able to collect data on us without a warrant.

Gonna need some common sense knife control in Canada, I guess.

The Irish Times doesn’t like The Rings of Power, the Lord of the Rings spinoff on Amazon. Their complaint; the proto-hobbits are made out like low-rent Irish peasants. To me, as the descendant of low-rent Irish peasants, that is the least complaint. My gripe is that it is boring. I get that they had to make a lot of strong female characters because Girrlllll Power of modern times. I have no complaints about Middle Earth now becoming multi-ethnic (totes cool with black Hobbits and dwarves). But what I don’t get is how they couldn’t write an exciting story based on Tolkien’s works.

For those of you not fully versed in Tolkien, I’ll nutshell:

First Age: mostly revolved around the war between the Elves and Morgoth, who is a Satan-like fallen angel who wishes to rule the created world. He is finally defeated by other, non-fallen angels after centuries of war and defeat and the instrument of his defeat is a man who makes the perilous journey to seek aid against Morgoth.

Second Age: The men who aided the Elves are given a home removed from Middle Earth; they are granted long life and great power and over time build themselves up a magnificent civilization only slightly lower than that of the Elves. Meanwhile, in Middle Earth, Elves, men and dwarves live a much more perilous existence and over time come under attack from Sauron, the lieutenant of Morgoth who eventually forges the Ring of Power to exert control over all of Middle Earth. Over long years, Sauron is finally defeated but not destroyed.

Third Age: that is the bit with the Hobbits and finally getting rid of the Ring.

So, if you want to make some new stuff, you’re going to go with First or Second Age – Rings of Power goes with Second Age but it appears to take almost nothing from Tolkien save some character and place names. It is, as I said, dull – the action sequences are too dependent upon CGI, the acting is two dimensional and the writing just terrible. I’m going to give it a couple more episodes to see if there is an improvement – the Elrond character seems ok so far and the mysterious man Galadriel meets has some promise. So, we’ll see.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan154 Comments

So, Sarah Palin lost in the Alaska at-large special election. More importantly, the GOP lost – even though the GOP scored 60% of the total vote. This is because they use ranked-choice voting…a system designed to provide confusion and allow well organized minorities to dominate. It was put in place by the machinations of Alaska’s allegedly GOP Ruling Class because they didn’t want any more Palins. The election in November, however, even with ranked-choice voting will almost certainly produce a Republican House member.

The city of Jackson, MS is out of water: they have no water to drink. You might be surprised to hear such a thing. I mean, the city sits on the Pearl River and it isn’t like it has needed to increase water capacity as, bucking the trend in the South, it has been steadily losing population since 1980. But, out of water. It is also a majority black city, and this means that, also bucking the trend in the South, the government has been increasingly leftist over the past couple decades. So, who’s at fault for the lack of water?

You are, of course! You: white Republicans! You forced the liberal Democrat (and largely black) government of Jackson to neglect the water system! If you hadn’t been such racists, you’d have been looking closely at Jackson, MS and the minute you saw the water system starting to deteriorate, you would have parachuted the billion dollars they need to fix it. But you didn’t. Because you’re a bunch of white, racist, MAGA meanies.

Apparently at least from some power companies you can get what amounts to a smart thermostat…and they offer you some rebates if you’ll install one. Fine print: when they need to reduce power consumption, they take control of your thermostat. To me, the whole thing is kinda funny – it seems clear in the article that the victims of this are good, little liberals who wanted to do their part…until it got hot outside. One of the reasons I keep my 2004 Saturn in good repair is because it is a car which has absolutely no connection to the grid…you buy an EV, and I guarantee you outside parties can get into it and shut it off any time they want.

Reminder: the Left wants us to live in an impoverished future. The wealthy, American lifestyle is “unsustainable”, in their view. Now, I don’t think that the bosses really believe in climate change…but it is a useful tool of control, isn’t it? Sorry, guys, but we really gotta save the planet…so, no AC for you! No meat, either. Nope, you can’t have a car. Here’s your Life Pod. Eat the bug paste and shut up…

USCD has backed off plans to host a freshman orientation which excluded white people. They got some push back on it – but we are seeing more and more of this and it is happening not simply because of increased Leftism, but an increased sense that at least Pudding Brain’s DOJ won’t do anything about it. Rely on it, guys: any attempt to exclude anyone based on race – especially in any institution which receives taxpayer funds – is a massive violation of multiple federal laws. Huge criminal and civil penalties await anyone who would do such a thing…if anyone will enforce the law. Big if.

We don’t live under law any longer – haven’t, really, since Bill Clinton was allowed to skate on perjury simply because he’s a Democrat. What we live under is whatever the law-enforcers decide is the law…and if a written law doesn’t work to their favor, it is a dead letter. And if there isn’t a law you violated, they’ll make one up if they need to take you out. If we get back in 2024, we really have to send some people to jail – lots and lots of people – if we want even a chance of restoring the Rule of Law in the United States. Every officer of the law and the courts who refused their duty should be fired…and jailed if they violated even the least law while in office.

Democrats Delenda Est

Mark Noonan98 Comments

They had Joe Biden go up and, for the 20 minutes he’s capable of semi-coherent speech, say that MAGA Republicans are “semi-fascist”. The MSM and the social media bots – following orders as usual – picked up on this and are out there stoutly asserting either the truth of the accusation, or complaining that Pudding Brain is being too nice about it – that we GOPers are out-and-out fascists.

To be sure, your basic Democrat doesn’t even know what “fascist” means. It is shorthand for “bad guy” and they can’t even tell you what makes a fascist bad, except to claim they want to take away your rights…and pardon us while we impose this vaccine mandate on you and set 87,000 IRS agents to examine your finances. For them, fascists are bad and as they are anti-fascist, anyone who isn’t on their side is fascist, and so bad. It is a very kindergarten view of the world suitable for the most ignorant among us – college educated people in government, education and corporations who make up the backbone of the Democrat party these days.

But we cannot merely note the idiocy of these people and move on – by proclaiming us to be fascists they are asserting that we are the enemies of all that is decent. And just what do you do with such people? You kill, imprison or exile them. There is no limiting principle in stopping fascism. There can’t be. If fascists are allowed to live then they may take charge and they will destroy everyone who is not fascist. Any action taken to stop them is legitimate. What Pudding Brain said – immediately endorsed by the entire Democrat Establishment – is that 74 million Americans are fascists. They have declared war on us and announced that we are fair game for any effort which might destroy us. They are retroactively legitimizing both election fraud and the weaponization of government against us because, after all, to stop fascism, you must do whatever you can.

And, so, now what? That is: what do we do? How do we respond?

Pretend they didn’t say it? Pretend that it is merely political boilerplate designed to fire up the Democrat base? Dismiss it as mere rhetoric which will never result in government action?

Yeah, after the raid on Trump’s home and everything else they’ve done outside the law to get after him and us, I’m going to have to say that it is not mere rhetoric. That they view MAGA as an existential threat and will do everything they can to prevent it’s victory.

And in a certain sense, they are right to feel like this: our victory is their doom. Not, of course, a fascist doom. We’re not fascists. We’re committed to freedom under a Constitutional order. In practical terms, they’re the fascists (“All within the State, nothing outside the State” is vastly more descriptive of the modern Left than anything on the MAGA side). But, regardless of the truth of the matter here, if we win, they’re done for. Not in the sense of being killed or imprisoned but very much in the sense of no longer being in charge, nor being able to rake off vast wealth from the productive economy. Their worst nightmare will come true if we win: they’ll have a get a job where the boss demands results.

On the other hand, if we don’t win, then we’re done for. Our rights and our property will be stripped away from us. We’ll be variously imprisoned or locked up in asylums for our dissent. Massive pressure will be brought on us – including brute force – to compel us to proclaim their lies are truth. There will be nothing for the believer in God and the believer in freedom if the Left wins – we will either have to knuckle under and become Left, or get destroyed. But even if we knuckle under, we still get nothing…a life pod in a gigantic city where the services only sometimes work as the Ruling Class lives behind walls guarded by mercenaries with automatic weapons. It isn’t like they promise us a good life if we go along with them – they promise us poverty and bug paste.

If we lose, we lose all. And they have said, and demonstrated, that they will use whatever tactic comes to hand to defeat us – the law doesn’t matter. The truth doesn’t matter. Basic human decency doesn’t matter. After all, they are fighting fascists and you don’t fuss over the law when you’re doing that. And this means our only response can be tit for tat. We have to take off our restraints, as well.

Now, given that most of us are believers and those who aren’t are still decent people, this doesn’t mean we can – or should – be as dishonest and cruel as they are. In fact, we shouldn’t lie at all. Not even on the smallest matter. But unconstrained by any notion that the law is evenly enforced and discarding all elements of what can be called the norms and traditions of American political life, we must go after them.

I’ve said this before here and elsewhere, but now you’ve got no place to hide. You can’t ignore the fact that the person installed in the White House just called you a fascist – and then that assertion was affirmed and echoed within hours all around the American Establishment. They just told you what they think of you and they have shown you what they will do to you if they have the power to do so. It is time, way past time, to admit that I am right: the Democrats – the Establishment in all its manifestations – must be destroyed. Democrats deleda est.

It all has to go – because it is all one thing. There’s no part of it you can separate out and say, “this part is good, keep it.” Zuckerberg admitted the other day that when the FBI told him to suppress to Hunter Biden story, he didn’t ask why, he just asked “how high?”. And this FBI was run by a Trump appointee while Trump was President and with Trump’s man at the helm of the Department of Justice. Think about that – the people of the United States government, supposedly neutral defenders of America, used the power of government to help the Democrat candidate for President. And corporate America went right along with it. And all the MSM. And even a great deal of the GOP leadership helped suppress the story or did nothing to help get it out. What part of this morass of Establishment filth are you thinking is ok? That should be able to retain any of its ability to affect American policy? I’m genuinely curious – you tell me which billionaire, MSMer, bureaucrat or corporate boss you trust with power and why?

It all has to go. Democrats delenda est. Corporations delenda est. Bureaucracy delenda est. Billionaires delenda est. GOPe delenda est. Establishment delenda est.

They all must be removed from power and the means of obtaining power taken away from them. This means kicking them out of their official and corporate positions…but it also means taking away their money. You leave these people with any lever of power and they will rebuild whatever you took from them. It must be a complete wipe out. An overturning of the order. A revolution. We take what they have and give it to ourselves. We will control all the levers of power – we’ll decide what the rules are. How the law is to be applied. We have to because if we don’t, they’ll do so and their primary decree will be that we are evil and to be destroyed.

And, in the end, if we steel ourselves to this and win, then once we have taken away their power, we’ll find that hardly anyone is in favor of them. That they get by on stealing money from the productive and bribing people to go along with their rake offs. Nobody really wants what the Left wants. We don’t want open borders. Windmills. Puberty blockers for 12 year olds. Bug paste. It is all a scam – a con job by the Ruling Class to keep themselves in power and forever increasing their wealth. Once they are no longer there to defend their castle – and no longer have an MSM magaphone to make it seem like something other than greed – the castle will vanish like mist in the sun. People are normal and sane and only become otherwise when insanity is rewarded.

We can get our Republic back. We can have a future: our grandchildren and remoter descendants can live in the America our grandparents lived in…if we just take it all. Take everything our enemies have. Leave them with nothing. Force them to go out into the world and do something useful for a living. And then it is all over. The Marxist nightmare comes to an end.

I Forgive Your Debts Open Thread (All Praise to Our Magic Wand!)

Mark Noonan94 Comments

How well is Pudding Brain’s student loan scam going over? Well, three endangered Democrat Senators have already come out against it – including Cortez-Masto here in Nevada, who is already being roasted by GOP candidate Adam Laxalt about it.

I really can’t think of a more maladroit move in recent years – 10k is a pittance, most of it is going to go to the rich, the action is probably not legal and so may be reversed in court after a bunch of people think they’ve skated on debt. Nobody really likes this other than Social Media bot accounts paid to praise whatever it is that Democrats are doing (they’ve all gone silent on praising the raid on Trump’s home, if you want to know how that went over with the public). You might think that they should have gone through Congress but that 3 Democrat Senators have already condemned it shows how that would fare – especially as House Democrats likely wouldn’t vote for anything less than 100% cancellation. It is also so clearly and easily seen as a cynical, political ploy with the mid-terms in mind.

But, also, pay attention to what Cortez-Masto and other Democrats are doing. Remember – and you’ve heard some liberal commenters here say it – the Narrative is that Joe “Shades” Biden has masterfully turned things around. Pivoting from the GOP’s disastrous end of Roe, he’s now got “big legislative wins” which are building towards a remarkably strong Democrat showing in November. And NY-19 proved it! Don’t know if you followed the Social Media meltdown on that one last night…but it was where a Democrat district shifted 9 points to the GOP but the Democrat still won, so this means the GOP is doomed – DOOMED, I TELL YA!!!! – in November. But, meanwhile, there’s not a Democrat out there who wants Pudding Brain on the campaign trail with them (though in Florida the Democrats are in full Kamikaze Mode and may invite him down to seal the deal of a 15 point plus GOP win)…and out here in Nevada’s 4th District, the Democrat is running working class hero ads where he doesn’t mention that he’s a Democrat and, funny, isn’t touting Biden’s “big legislative wins” nor making any promise to restore Roe.

Two rules about politics in 2022:

  1. Whatever is in the MSM is a lie.
  2. Never look at what people say: watch what they do.

Meanwhile: actual harbinger – the GOP flipped school boards all over Florida yesterday. A lot of school boards. This is where the pushback actually starts. We’re winning school boards and county commissions. No longer will we allow hard Leftists to rule these incredibly powerful institutions under the guise of being “non-partisan”. They are partisan – and we’re taking them back.

California will ban new sales of gasoline powered cars by 2035. This is supposed to set the trend for the end of the internal combustion engine…but as California’s population is collapsing (some estimates are that they screwed with the Census numbers pretty badly and that CA should have lost 3 rather than 1 House seat) and this will merely accelerate that trend, I don’t think this will be a trendsetter. The bottom line is that the internal combustion engine works. It is vastly more efficient and durable than it has ever been and we can get even more miles for even less gasoline out of it. Until electric cars cost no more than 5% more than non-electric, can go 350 miles on a charge costing no more than a tank of gas and take no more than ten minutes to recharge, they simply can’t replace internal combustion and all efforts to force the pace will end in disaster.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan57 Comments

Note to self: when its 100 degrees in Vegas and 40% humidity, best not to trim the hedge out front.

We’ve had the wettest monsoon season in years here in Vegas…been muggy with lots of rain. Some very cool thunderstorms, which is always nice. But, also, a lot cooler than usual. We did have about a two week period in July where it was blazing at 110+, but we’ve had a lot of daytime highs in the 90s over the past two months and I’ve never seen that in my 25 years here. Wonder if we’re in for a cold, wet winter? Be nice – the drought in the southwest has gone on more than a decade and it is time for it to end.

From what I’ve been able to glean from votes, it looks like we might have a 10 point swing to the GOP in November from the 2020 result. This would be a rather catastrophic loss for the Democrats. Just take a look at all the House districts Democrats won by less than 10 and you can see their vulnerability. Of course, it won’t be uniform across the nation. Some Democrats will buck the trend but any Democrat who isn’t running 10 points ahead right now is in trouble.

This is why you’re seeing polls showing Democrats doing well in Red and Purple States. They have a two-fold purpose:

  1. Convince Democrat donors to pony up. Hard to get Blue money into Ohio if its a coming loss, right? No amount of money will actually cure what ails the Democrats but their calculation is that it will be less-bad. Meaning that if a lot of money is poured into Ohio it will shore up marginal Ohio Democrats and trigger GOP spending which could be spent elsewhere.
  2. To get GOPers depressed, worried and pouring resources into places that are in the bag. Like Ohio. Every dollar spent there is a dollar not spent on races which the GOP could win if a full court press was made. A GOP challenger in a D+6 State or district usually doesn’t see a red cent of RNC money because it is normally a waste of money…but in 2022, the payoff might be magnificent. The polls are designed to head fake the GOP away from such efforts. Naturally, the GOPe is falling for it. But some outside groups aren’t. We’ll see how it plays out.

I’ve been thinking about McConnell and the coming GOP Senate majority – and it seems to me that McConnell’s heart isn’t in it. To McConnell’s credit, when Trump was elected, he worked with Trump, especially on judges. But he didn’t really work a lot with Trump, now did he? A lot more could have been done in 2017 with the GOP trifecta had McConnell really pressed the issue. He didn’t. And McConnell likely didn’t because he didn’t like Trump. And when fraud clearly altered the 2020 result, McConnell (like the rest of the GOP leadership), dropped Trump like a bad habit. They did this because they thought that Trump and what he represented was done. That we, the base, would just roll over and accept the fraud and then nominate a Jeb! for 2024. I think that as McConnell sees the GOP becoming increasingly Trumpist, he just doesn’t like it. He also doesn’t know what to do about it. It is time, I believe, for a change – we might not be able to force McConnell out in 2023, but we should be able to get some of ours into senior leadership so that when McConnell rides into the sunset, a MAGA Senator is in charge.

Now, Devil’s advocate: can we end up losing? At least in the sense of not scoring as many victories are we should win in this environment? Of course we can – politics is screwy. All signs (other than polls) show a big GOP win coming, but you can never tell until the actual votes come in. But I see no reason to fret about it – we’re either going to score big or we’re not. And if we don’t score big, then our problem isn’t candidate selection or policy or what have you…failure to win big in 2022 simply means the USA is much further Left than we think. This is a whole different problem: it would mean we’d have to start all over again and figure out how to craft any sort of Right message which can win in a Left world.

Meanwhile, Democrats have got their finger on the pulse – today, in Miami, the Democrats showed up for their rally waving Communist flags. No, I’m not kidding: they really did. They’re waving the hammer and sickle in front of an electorate which fled precisely that. I don’t think this is going to work the way Democrats hope.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan139 Comments

Liz Cheney wasn’t defeated last night, she was humiliated. If it hadn’t been for Democrats crossing over to vote for her, I bet she wouldn’t have cracked 15%. As it was, with their votes, she inched up to 28%. This is a rejection not just of the Old Guard, but of the sort of Republican who will spend time attacking fellow GOPers based on the Democrat Narrative. That is important – there are reasons for intra-party battles. You can, under certain circumstances, speak ill of your fellow GOPer. But it has to be on our terms, not Democrat terms. The J6 Narrative that Cheney signed on for is based, ultimately, on the Steele Dossier…in other words, they’re still going with the underlying assumption that Trump is a Russian agent set upon the American people to turn us into a fascist dictatorship (how this helps Russia is left unexplained). The raid on Trump’s home was in furtherance of this (though I did read someone thinking that the raid was to recover Hillary documents that Trump had declassified: this rings a bit true). Brian Kemp in Georgia firmly rejected Trump’s contention that fraud caused the loss – I believe Kemp is wrong in this (and his actions in strengthening voter security indicate that even Kemp thinks he was a little wrong on this), but Kemp managed to do this while keeping the GOP base largely on his side. You can thread this needle – you can, that is, go against Trump (or any other competing GOPer) and still come out roses on the other end. But no longer can you do this if you betray the GOP Base.

And that is just the thing: we GOP voters were tired of being betrayed. We put up with Bushes and McCains and Romneys on the promise that while they’d trim their sails to the Left from time to time to retain electoral viability, when push came to shove they’d get done what we most cared about – and all these people ever did was betray us on what we think most crucial. So, we’re done with them – and, yes, we have now made Trump a litmus test. Some are very upset about this, but is has to be. We need a quick shorthand for whether or not someone will betray us – and joining Democrats to attack Trump is the bright red, flashing light that you’re a RINO Establishment creep.

There are tens of millions of people in the USA who don’t work – and I mean, like ever: they are permanently or semi-permanently on welfare. We also have a host of people who have office jobs which produce no value…HR people, diversity coordinators, extra layers of Administrative staff. Combined, I’ll bet these total about 50 million of our population. We can’t sustain this: these people will have to get real jobs. Any system we craft to replace the fiat money/debt/welfare/billionaire system we have now will have to address the economically useless – and make them useful. When we build a new economy (and we’ll have to as our old economy is completely wiped out: in many ways, we’ll be starting all over again from scratch), we must ensure that everyone physically capable of work does something useful. Nobody is allowed to skate – whether that skating be via welfare or working out a powerpoint on DEI. To bluntly speak it: we’ll have to compel them (at first) to work…and that might mean work projects like CCC from the Depression…at least get these people on to a job site and have them put some hours in. It is the best means of breaking the twin cycles of welfare dependency and bureaucratic empire building. I chipped paint in the Navy, guys. Did I like it? No. But I did it. Also washed dishes and cleaned bathrooms (bathrooms used by 30 men to get ready for the day, ya know?). It wasn’t humiliating: it was work. I did it and I did it well (those fricking sinks glowed when I was done with them). It taught me how to do physical work and to take pride in a job well done – any job well done. Everyone needs this as the basis of their work life no matter what else they do later.

They’re going after kids as young as two to start transition. This is frightening. The only two year old who is trans is the two y ear old with insane parents. I do believe that this push to transition kids, especially prepubescent kids, will one day be viewed with the same horror we view the Tuskegee Experiments and Eugenics.

Britain is still north of 80% white – and the RAF is pausing the hiring of white men in order to increase diversity. And think about this – allegedly, a Conservative party is in power in the UK right now. This is what is wrong with the world: it has gone full Marxist/Globalist/Moneybags and they all, regardless of stated beliefs, go one way on policy. This is why Trump is hated – it is also why Orban in Hungary is hated. Unpopular observation: it is why Putin is hated (they don’t hate Xi, even though for China he’s as much a patriot as any of these…but Xi provides a lot of money to the global elite, so he’s off limits). Don’t get me wrong: Putin is a bastard in his own right…but he’s also for Russia. As Orban is for Hungary and Trump is for the USA. We should never fear someone who is looking after their own people and trying to get them the most advantage…we just need leaders who will do that for us.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan28 Comments

Euthanasia is the 6th leading cause of death in Canada – and, as you and I knew would happen, people are being pressured to off themselves when they get seriously ill and/or old. As I’ve said for ages, the fundamental problem with nationalized health care is that there is no incentive to care for sick people. All that does is cost money and take time. For someone working in a nationalize health system, the whole incentive is to provide as little care as possible because you don’t get more money for providing more care…all you get for providing more care is more work. And the success of the “death with dignity” ghouls has played right into this…why spend the time and money taking care of the 80 year old with a chronic illness when you can guilt trip them into killing themselves?

Been watching the Netflix series Narcos: Mexico and it is quite good – minimal woke drivel (though there is some, of course) and a gripping story of how the Mexican drug cartels rose. Being familiar with a lot of the events I can easily tell when the story is adhering to fact and when it is altering it for dramatic and time purposes. As I’ve watched and went down memory lane on the War on Drugs, I find that I’m viewing it all through a bit of a different prism these days. The show, itself, does a very clever job of showing the flaws of the DEA and law enforcement in general while also highlighting just how cruel and wicked the drug lords are while still not making them entire monsters – leaving them just a shred of their humanity to make their (usually violent) ends pathetic. But it also got me thinking. One of the things presented in the first episode is a claim that half a million people have died in the drug war in Mexico. A shocking figure which at first glance is simply unbelievable.

But, then you think about it and check – between 2015 and 2021 211,000 people were murdered in Mexico. Officially. The real number is probably higher given the very large number of people who simply disappear. Nobody really knows how many of these people died as a result of the drug trade (who is going to really investigate that?): estimates range from just under half to more than two thirds. I think it the latter number – and in reality probably ninety percent are direct or indirect from the drug trade. Gun ownership is pretty much illegal in Mexico and that means only the police and the cartels have guns, after all. So, anyways, 211,000 in a seven year span is 30,000 per year. Call it half are drug and you get 15,000 (and probably a lot higher) and then you take that back to DEA Agent Camarena‘s murder (which is when we got serious about it) in 1985…and, yeah, low end you get half a million Mexicans dead in the drug war. Probably half of US murders are directly or indirectly related to the drug war, as well. Then you’ve got to add in Central and South America…and we’re probably into a couple million dead. Over cocaine. Just amazing. And its not like we’ve made a dent in it.

Nobody knows how big the global trade in drugs is, but its hundreds of billions of impossible to trace, tax-free, cash transactions (when you get away with it, of course!). And we’ve been told it can’t be stopped. I’m not buying that. I don’t think anyone wants it stopped. I mean, we know that the Mexican government via bribery and threats is pretty much owned by the cartels…but how much of ours is? How many Americans are on the payroll? Is this the real reason for resistance to border security? And its not like the US is a mere destination for cocaine – the price of cocaine doubles from New York City to Antwerp…and whoever is moving it from the Big Apple to Europe is taking their cut. And then you think of crack which is a way to make pricey cocaine available to people who are, lets face it, largely on welfare both in the USA and Europe; as if someone figured out how to get the taxpayers to subsidize drug addiction. As for laundering the money…you think China would refuse to launder drug lord money which provides a product which weakens their western adversaries? I believe it is time to rethink our views here – and understand that what is happening isn’t just something that happens. Some very powerful people are making sure it happens.

Interesting thing on education:

As a teacher in Oakland, Calif., Kareem Weaver helped struggling fourth- and fifth-grade kids learn to read by using a very structured, phonics-based reading curriculum called Open Court. It worked for the students, but not so much for the teachers. “For seven years in a row, Oakland was the fastest-gaining urban district in California for reading,” recalls Weaver. “And we hated it.”

The teachers felt like curriculum robots—and pushed back. “This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do,” says Weaver, describing their response to the approach. “So we fought tooth and nail as a teacher group to throw that out.” It was replaced in 2015 by a curriculum that emphasized rich literary experiences. “Those who wanted to fight for social justice, they figured that this new progressive way of teaching reading was the way,” he says.

Now Weaver is heading up a campaign to get his old school district to reinstate many of the methods that teachers resisted so strongly: specifically, systematic and consistent instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics. “In Oakland, when you have 19% of Black kids reading—that can’t be maintained in the society,” says Weaver…

Good for Weaver to see the light and I wish all success – but think about Weaver’s initial reaction to it: hated it. And now he has to fight to get it back in. And who will he be fighting? The teachers. Guarantee you the parents are probably on board. But this is how our Ruling Class views things: through Marxist ideology on race and class. That is how far it has penetrated into our society – that people will fight to defend a system which leaves 80 percent of black kids illiterate on the theory that at least they aren’t literate under Capitalism and White Supremacy.

Spot on about Trump and his opponents:

Trump isn’t just a MacGuffin, but he is a symbol, and more. Sarah Palin was a similar symbol before him, but because she never was elected VP that sort of faded. Trump would have faded from their ire, too, if he had lost the 2016 election. His winning was the outrage. They could not believe it, and he MUST BE STOPPED from ever winning again. Not just him, though; any Republican who isn’t part of the genteel NeverTrumper club. Any Republican who might really be serious about stopping them and especially about draining the so-called swamp. It is a deadly serious game and they are determined to win.

Trump himself said it, and he was correct: “They’re not after me, they’re after you – I’m just in the way.”

We’re living in a world where those who have the juice are living ever better while for everyone else it just gets worse. This is not sustainable but the Ruling Class is determined to sustain it anyway. Trump placed their game at risk.