Brazil

Open Thread

Mark Noonan25 Comments

While everything in our history has been disparaged, the fight against Nazism has been, so far, spared by the left. This is now being “corrected”, with the Washington Post noting that while the Allied leaders were anti-Nazi, they weren’t anti-racist. The left will erase every last bit of our history if we give them the chance.

Related: Professor says that whiteness is terrorism.

A radicalized Methodist plotted a terrorist attack in California. Oh wait: scratch that – it was a radicalized Muslim.

On this day in history, Saigon fell to the Communists. Never has any nation betrayed another as badly as we betrayed the Republic of Vietnam.

Interesting article on the Christian origins of Islam. Of course, people who know have always seen Islam as a Christian heresy. Mohammed apparently spent a lot of time in then-Christian Syria and he would have been surrounded there by a Christian society which hotly disputed just about every aspect of Christianity. No surprise that he picked up a version of it which allowed him to place himself at the head of the enterprise – he just had to deny the divinity of Christ and he was off to the races.

Hoaxers falsely accused Peter Buttigieg of sexual assault. Thing is, there was as much evidence against Buttigieg as there was against Kavanaugh. Now, note the difference: Kavanaugh was slandered by the national media in an orgy of hatred, none of which has been retracted or apologized for (indeed, they are giving Kavanaugh’s lying accuser awards), while it took just a few hours for the same national media to debunk the accusations against Buttigieg.

Brazil moves decidedly away from the left. This is a good thing. Brazil (population 208 million, 3.2 million square miles of territory) should be a Great Power nearly on par with the United States. If Brazil really can navigate away from the authortarian leftism which has plauged Latin America for a century, it would be great for Brazil and the world.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan60 Comments

Our liberals are going nuts over Trump sending troops to the border…apparently working under the weird assumption that our army isn’t supposed to protect our borders. I guess that concept has gotten lost after 70 years of sending our troops into foreign shooting galleries under strict orders not to win.

President Trump is asking for $341,559.50 in legal fees from Team Stormy. No, I don’t know why they didn’t just round it up.

Its a small and very, very weird world:

In a really strange turn of events, it has been discovered that bombing suspect Cesar Sayoc worked at Ultra Gentleman’s Club in West Palm Beach, FL, the same strip club that Stormy Daniels performed at back in April, WPTV reported.

Jair Bolsonaro won the Presidency of Brazil with 56% of the vote and this is being described as a major blow against Democracy…because the people voted the wrong way, you see? The global elite is deathly afraid of that. Now, plenty of people on the right in the USA did laud the victory…but I’d hold off. Let’s see if he’s really the Tropical Trump he’s called, or if he’s a nut before we embrace him.

Victor Davis Hanson has an excellent article on the paradoxes of the immigrants – specifically, the caravan. Mostly centering around the oddity that they want to come here, but they don’t seem to particularly want to be American. I liken it to the barbarians outside Rome in the 5th century…they very much wanted to enjoy the good things of Rome, but they weren’t at all interested in preserving the social structures which produced the good things of Rome. The collapse of Western civilization (which was quite epic) from the 5th to the 10th centuries was simply because of this – and had the barbarians come in and humbly asked to be taught, it would have been a lot different. I’ve come around to the view that all immigration to the United States must cease for a period of at least 20 years. We need to kick out those who won’t assimilate and assimilate those who are willing. And only after that is accomplished can we afford to open the door again.

I didn’t know this – Don Surber notes that in order to get a poll response pool of 737 people, a total of 38,000 calls had to be made. That is a 1.94% response rate. Now, the pollsters tell you this doesn’t matter because those who hang up likely have the same overall opinions as those who don’t. Really? Seriously? I just can’t hold that to be credible – you might be missing some major trends out there. You know, like PA, MI and WI all breaking for Trump…

UPDATE: Trump secures Amazona’s vote for 2020:

President Donald Trump said in an interview that he plans to sign an executive order ending “birthright citizenship” for the children of non-American citizens who are born on U.S. soil, a move that would likely be challenged immediately in the courts over its constitutionality.

The first thing you think is that Democrats will challenge this in court…but, if they do, they have no assurance that the Supreme Court will back them. All they may end up doing is cementing Trump Administration policy. Also: my bet is that most Americans didn’t realize until just now that you can get citizenship merely by being born in the United States, even if of illegal immigrant parents. Democrats should be wary of fighting on this hill.

They won’t be, of course. Because they’re stupid.

Brazilians Smarter Than Americans

Mark Noonan16 Comments

From Bloomberg:

Brazil will provide $16 billion in tax breaks and toughen trade barriers to protect manufacturers hurt by a currency rally that’s fueling a surge in imports from China.

The targeted tax breaks and incentives, which amount to 25 billion reais over two years, were announced today by President Dilma Rousseff after a report showed industrial production plunged 1.6 percent in June, the second biggest drop since 2008.

The plan, called “A Bigger Brazil,” will eliminate a 20 percent payroll tax for industries such as shoemakers and software firms hurt by the real’s 48 percent rally since the end of 2008, which has reduced the cost of imports and strengthened decades-old complaints by business about excessive costs…

A bit protectionist, to be sure, but the basic thing is to reduce the cost of creating wealth within Brazil in order to ensure that the free labor of Brazil is not undercut by the slave labor of China.  This is just rational policy.  Free trade is all well and good – but only between people who are mutually free.  Free trade with a tyrannical nation is a contradiction…there will be trade, but it won’t be free:  it will come at a high cost to the free labor of the one and even of the slave labor of the other, as their chains are more securely fastened.

I’ve been saying it for years, and it is another thing I’ll keep saying until everyone agrees with me, because I’m right:  we must ditch “free trade” and turn to “freedom trade”.  The American worker can and will out-compete every other workforce in the world…but he can’t compete with a government which deliberately keeps wages low, allows sub-standard products to be shipped to the United States and connives as the theft of American intellectual property.  As long as China is playing with loaded economic dice, it is asinine for us to allow them to enter our market place.  Let them institute free and fair multi-party elections and then we can trade with them…until that time, keep them out.

Go ahead and try and argue me out of this position, but be warned that you would ultimately be defending a position where US wealth is transferred to a China which is building up a military force for the purpose of challenging us.  Good luck with that.