Amerika

• I’ll Be Voting for President Trump and Vice President Pence in 2020

  I’m thinking a lot of #NeverTrump had their Road to Damascus moment on Election Night 2016. The part of The Bible where the scales fall from their eyes has been considerably delayed. And yet, as it happened in The Book of Acts, that moment of wisdom has occurred. Here’s how it worked for Erick Erickson. It’s just not fun because I can’t call his website the Cucksurgent anymore. Shucks!

  Some of my concerns about President Trump remain. I still struggle on the character issue and I understand Christian friends who would rather sit it out than get involved. But I also recognize that we cannot have the Trump Administration policies without President Trump and there is much to like. President Trump delivered on tax reform. He delivered on regulatory rollbacks. He delivered on undermining Obamacare. He delivered on moving the embassy in Israel. He delivered on withdrawal from the Paris Accord. He delivered on withdrawal from the Iranian agreement. He delivered on shifting American foreign policy focus to the Western Hemisphere to deal with Venezuela, Cuba, and other hotspots. He delivered on solid executive appointments, including to the judiciary. I have ongoing concerns on tariffs, the national direction on North Korea, and other issues, but even with George W. Bush I had issues. No President is perfect. Some are badly flawed. In 2020, we’ll be asked to choose between a set of sinners and must decide which direction we want to go as a nation.
  

  It’s tough seeing reality through your ego. Mr. Erickson is to be commended from climbing down out of that tree. He’ll be called a hypocrite, a quitter, a double-crosser and every other nasty Cuck pejorative the (((Jonah Goldbricks))) of the world can toss in his direction. That happens when reality smacks you across the face with a dead, slimy fish. Kudos for seeing the world as it really is.

• Warren: Lock him up?

  Is there anything that Senator Lieawatha won’t appropriate? Is there anything that any Socialist won’t appropriate? She who is 1/1024 Person of The Southwind is now attempting to rhetorically appropriate Donald Trump’s tagline. It should be disqualifying, but it won’t be. I think if Warren can thread the needle by being “Feisty” rather than Beeyotch, she could be a legitimate contender for The White Supremacy Lane in the Democratic Party’s Presidential Primary.

• Amy Klobuchar Launches Bid For The Presidency

  If 1023/1024 isn’t white enough, The Dems have an app for that. Amy Klobuchar *demands* your vote. At least that’s the reputation she has amongst her former staffers. She benefits from the freakshow she runs against and could emerge as at least a VP candidate by just not wearing a clown nose.

• Plummeting insect numbers ‘threaten collapse of nature’

  Bugs! You hate them. Roaches. Maggots. Flies. Grubs. Yech! They give you the creepy-crawlies because they pretty much are the creepy-crawlies. Wouldn’t it be better without them? Not.So.Fast.

  The 2.5% rate of annual loss over the last 25-30 years is “shocking”, Sánchez-Bayo told the Guardian: “It is very rapid. In 10 years you will have a quarter less, in 50 years only half left and in 100 years you will have none.” One of the biggest impacts of insect loss is on the many birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish that eat insects. “If this food source is taken away, all these animals starve to death,” he said. Such cascading effects have already been seen in Puerto Rico, where a recent study revealed a 98% fall in ground insects over 35 years.
  

  Ecocide grinds on. The Green New Deal, the IPCC, Earth First and the rest of them all ignore the real environmental threats. You see most environmentalists pursue pretend environmentalism for the same reason Puritans pursue pretend ascetism. They want to gain power. The problem with real environmentalism is that you lose power to things like creepy-crawlies. If you don’t have a good plan for how to get rid of the poop, maybe you don’t want to get rid of all the pesky flies. Food webs are complicated and inter-connected. Blither on about Manatees and Polar Bears while the Dung Beatle dies out. Then, when there’s another significant viral plague; you’d better pray socialized medicine will actually care enough to save you. Or if you don’t like your doctor, maybe you should keep that ugly-looking Banana Slug.

• Northam Calls Slaves ‘Indentured Servants from Africa’

  Perhaps insects would do better in life if they looked and acted less like VA governor Ralph Northam. He’s put his foot in his mouth and his head up his butt at the same time. At least he must have an awesome yoga instructor…

  “Well, it has been a difficult week, and you know if you look at Virginia’s history, we’re now at the 400-year anniversary. Just 90 miles from here in 1619, the first indentured servants from Africa landed on our shores in Ole Point Comfort, what we call now Fort Monroe,” Northam said. “Also known as slavery,” King interjected.

  “Yes, and you know, while we’ve made a lot of progress in Virginia, slavery has ended, schools have been desegregated, we have ended the Jim Crow laws, easier access to voting, it is abundantly clear that we have a lot of work to do,” Northam said.
  

  Who’s we? Just keep your eyes on the prize, Ralphie. Assuming you can see through all that “Dark Make-up.” He is technically correct that the first blacks at Jamestown were indentured servants. But still, it isn’t hard to figure out why this man is such an idiot.

• More violence in Paris as ‘yellow vests’ keep marching

  Thirteen weeks and counting…

  The Yellow Vests continue to fight on and fight back.

  The Interior Ministry put the total number of protesters around France at 12,000, including 4,000 in Paris. The police source, however, said numbers were higher, with 21,000 demonstrators taking part in rallies outside Paris. “We’re not children, we’re adults,” said Hugues Salone, a computer engineer from Paris, among the chanting and placard-waving protesters. “We really want to assert our choices, and not the choices of the politicians who do not live up to them.” Leaders of the “yellow vest” movement have denounced the police for injuring protesters, but have also struggled to contain violence from their own lines.
  

  Over time, the movement gains legitimacy simply for the reason that still continues to move. People will get used to Yellow Vests. They will consider them increasingly mainstream. They will have a voice by simply persisting in voicing their demands. The paid off media isn’t the only one capable of joining the argument. The Deep State may not be able to continue unattenuated under this much sustained pressure.

• Chartalism

  The term “chartalism” comes from the Latin word charta, which means ticket or token – items that may be accepted as payment, but which do not have intrinsic value. Today proponents of chartalism are most likely to adhere to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). In his time, governments of developed countries were on the gold standard (metalists) and that was what gave currency its value. One could go to a Federal Reserve Bank, at least in theory, and demand gold for paper currency. Today the gold standard is long gone and all currency is in esssence fiat money — it has value because the goverment issues it and decrees that it is legal tender for all debts public and private.
  

  Transubstantiation has been a fool’s dream ever since the first fool and his money were sadly parted. Just get that Philosopher’s Stone and big pile of lead. Chartalism is what happens when this theory of money got extended without loss of generality to the entire economy of a nation. The country no longer has to back it’s currency. It just issues and says it’s worth something. The Modern Progressives have stuck the moldy leftovers of Chartalism into the microwave and renamed this gourmet delicacy MMT.

  Even under Fiat currency regimes, the state held obligations to it’s citizens. They had to act and govern in a manner that encouraged the value of the currency or watch inflation eat their people alive. Debt had to be monitored and fought against at least in principle because the nation had to maintain a credit rating. MMT gets rid of all that boring old economic chivalry. It worked so well for Zimbabwe we need to rush out and try it!

• Mistaken Futures

  The self-proclaimed socialists are actually seeing the world through a rear-view mirror. What they are really talking about is divvying up the previously-accumulated wealth, soon to be bygone. Entropy is having its wicked way with that wealth, first by transmogrifying it into ever more abstract forms, and then by dissipating it as waste all over the planet. In short, the next time socialism is enlisted as a tool for redistributing wealth, we will make the unhappy discovery that most of that wealth is gone. The process will be uncomfortably sharp and disorientating. The West especially will not know what hit it as it emergently self-reorganizes back into something that resembles the old-time feudalism. We have a new kind of mass squalor in America: a great many people who have nothing to do, no means of support, and the flimsiest notions of purpose in life. The socialists have no answers for them. They will not be “retrained” in some imagined federal crusade to turn meth freaks into code-writers for Google.
  

  Democracy, as much as it claims to be more progressive than Neo-Reaction, is a backward-looking heuristic. Since FDR perfected the modern Amerikan political machine, the professionals are winning elections by examining what worked the last time “our side” smashed “their side” the way England’s rugby team turned France’s into Le Trail Mix in last Sunday’s Le Crunch. So Modern Democracy is a backward-looking huersistic that deliberately discounts new data. You can’t see the future looking backwards.

  Neo-Reaction first looks at the present. They then envision a future state that is superior to the present. Then, they examine great leaders and superior systems from earlier eras. At that point, the Neo-Reactionary analytically selects the superior parts of these systems that could solve our present problems and bring us towards a better future outcome. Democracy instead mines the past for sick burns or campaign slogans to turn off ratiocination and stifle debate. Small wonder that democracy is led by pushy, small minds with too small a time preference to see the future which they approach with the feckless, blind stupidity of a drunkard doing 80 on an icy stretch of thuroughfare.

• NJ Voters Furious As Governor Murphy Prepares To Sign ‘Rain Tax’ Into Law

  A rain tax. Perfect. In Jersey it not only rains, but it pees on your leg. Jersey has become the first US State to tax its citizens on rainy days. I imagine people will consider this the last straw and leave. We could call this outflow of population Rain Tax Run-off. It could eventually erode the tax base. In the meantime, Governor Murphy is now worthy of his very own new theme song.

• New Oil Discovery? Get in Line

  Why the Green Leap Forward? Because those who would limit us through enforced scarcity are being routed from the field by scientific progress.

  To the vast annoyance of oil hedgers and peak oil doomers, large new oil fields are being discovered from Guyana to South Africa to Iran to Scotland to Texas to the Gulf of Mexico to Brasil. The only places where they are not finding new oil is the places where they are not looking — because for many traders there is already too much oil on the markets.
  

  If this is Russian collusion, it’s about as useful to Moscow as were The Mongols and The Tartars. Vast quantities of natural resources remove a major chokepoint from ingenuity. They give individuals affordable freedom which, by definition demotes the power of the central state. Cheap energy is like a pay raise to the struggling, blue-collar worker. Cheap energy is like another round of IPO funding to the technological innovator.

  Why isn’t nuclear power in The Green Leap Forward? It’s the only alternative to fossil fuels that can stand a prayer of competing against coal or oil in terms of $/Kilowatt Hour. The point of modern environmentalism isn’t to free you from ecocide. Modern environmentalism exists to imprison you in poverty whjile stealing all of your property and rights. With peak oil failing to do its damn job as far as the statists are all concerned, this Green New Deal is a predictable Hail Mary Pass.

• Pro-Trump Fashion at 2019 Grammys: From Border Wall Dress to ‘Keep America Great’ Jacket

  Donald Trump infuriates the Left because he has co-opted their methods of subversive cultural warfare. This year’s Grammy Awards featured a Border Wall Dress and a Keep Amerika Great Jacket. Having people like Joy Villa and Ricky Rebel sport his brand may be helping stifle the deluge of pop-culture Leftism. When is the last time this century a Republican politician had a 52% approval rating? He gets this because he gets right back in the faces of those who seek to derail him. This is what all Rightists need to start doing. They have their heroin chic, we can have the fresh and clean.

• Contraceptive Pills Have Mental Side-Effects Too, Study Finds

  Crowdists just want what they want – when they want it. !NOW! Long term consequences be damned. Contraceptive pills are now possibly making women stupid. I’m not sure. There could be selection bias involved. Maybe only somewhat barmy women pump chemicals into their system that haven’t been adequately examined for side-effects so that they can be sexually used by disingenuous PUA types. “Hitting the wall” is probably bad. It’s probably worse if you are stupid.

  Dr. Alexander Lischke of the University of Greifswald, Germany, notes how “remarkably little” is known about the effects of birth control pills on emotion, cognition, and behavior. As part of a new study, published in Frontiers in Neuroscience, Lischke and his research team recruited 95 healthy women — 42 of whom were on the pill and 53 who were not — for an emotion recognition task. The aim was to find out if using the pill could have any sort of impairment on their ability to recognize emotions.
  

  It could be that some of the worst things that Modern Amerika does to women is giving them the “freedoms” they supposedly ask for. For some individuals freedom truly is its own best punishment. Nobody much cared what would happen later when they were all out “getting the good thang.” They never do. That’s democracy, Baby.

• Five Reasons the Green New Deal Is Worse Than You Thought

  Take off all the glamour and reveal the stupidity that lies beneath. This how we deal with The Green New Deal. We tell people what will probably happen based upon logic and reason. Make the logical case against it. Steven Hayward gets us started very nicely.

  (1) It’s tempting to dismiss the Green New Deal by suggesting that it would probably work no better than the original New Deal.

  (2) The unseriousness of the Green New Deal stems not just from its economic illiteracy but also because of its environmental illiteracy.

  (3) AOC’s Green New Deal wants to reduce carbon emissions while phasing out the largest source of non-carbon energy we currently have—nuclear power.

  (4) In addition to the economically ruinous cost of attempting the Green New Deal, it might force a consideration of the environmental calculus that is deliberately avoided today: Are the tradeoffs from our civilization’s use of fossil fuels overwhelmingly positive, even with the potential damages from climate change in the future?

  (5) But there is still a hazard for Republicans. It is fine to hoot about the extravagance of the Green New Deal, but given that it is not acceptable in polite society to contest the doomsday scenario of climate change (this is a subject for another day), the Green New Dealers will be able to say, “Fine—what have you got?…”
  

  All of this is vital. We are stuck with stupid, politically-driven environmentalism because we don’t have any intelligent, solution-driven environmentalism. There has to be a solution from the Right, or we are going to get more problems from the Left. I remember a local ambitious politician in Northern Alabama going in hard on this. We have an old TVA reactor at Widow’s Creek that will never afford the compliance costs to get put on line. It sits there like 3 Mile Island doing nobody much good at all.

  This lady running for office in Huntsville, AL, Mary Scott Hunter; suggested turning it into a rod-recycling facility so that we could run our nuclear industry like France and significantly reduce the costs and radioactive pollution risks of nuclear power. She was brilliant. The GOP screwed her in the primaries. AOC still gets to write the environmental policy. Our environmental policy will still resemble what you can expect from a brain-addled cocktail waitress of likes to steal all the tips. Cucking congratulations.

  Also, how many of us drank a bottled water yesterday? I did. If you did also, then congratulations — you are one step further away from getting rid of petroleum pollution completely. Perhaps the most evil movie scene from the 1960’s was that part of The Graduate where the older man told the young man. “Plastics.” They solve a whole lot of hard, short-term engineering products so that we are hooked on them like Black Tar Heroin. But now that we see the long-term adverse effects, will this be analogous to what refrigerants almost did to the Stratospheric Ozone Layer? We all need to get some real answers. These would sound vastly better than anything that the so-called Democratic Party has on offer with The Green New Deal. Seriously, fix these issues or get stuck with this…

• EL TRAPO

  It seems we’ve given up on outsmarting El Chapo. Getting him ten yards of space and fresh-air in the prison yard is like giving Kevin Mitnick a cell phone near functional Wi-Fi. So we’re going to put him behind the most secure set of walls we have available. We’re slamming his butt in the “Alcatraz of The Rockies.” Adios MotherTrucker. Break out of this one!

  Hmmm…, wouldn’t it just be easier to build a wall between him and us? That’s been mentioned lately as a possible solution. What he does in his old stomping grounds is between he and those who he steps on. Why do we get stuck fanning him and feeding him? It’s not like anyone wants to collect him and trade him with their friends.

• What about Mexico’s border wall with the US?

  If you go to where Mexico meets the US at the Pacific Ocean you will see a curious thing. There appear to be two fences. One appears to be on each side of the border.
  This arrangement is normal and benign. Both countries have their own security needs.
  

  Would it be !RACIST! to call their wall immoral? It seems a lot of people in Mexico have figured out that Hadrian had a point. Not just because he was dealing with The Scots, either. Good walls make good neighbors. They are a sign of benign and intelligent property management.

• Nobody deserves to be this rich – Bill Gates

  Bill Gates on Tuesday claimed he had paid too little tax and did not deserve to be so rich. The 63-year-old, who is worth around £73 billion ($96.5 billion), said he and other business barons should have to contribute more. In an interview with the Mail, he said: ‘I have paid more than $10billion (£7.75billion) in taxes but I should have paid more. I more than followed the law but I think things should be more progressive.’ The father of three made his fortune after founding Microsoft in 1975. It is now one of the world’s most valuable companies.
  

  Nausea ensues. Nobody limits how much Bill Gates can willingly pay in taxes. This shouldn’t be like nuclear deterrence. If I had over $50B in swag sitting around the garage and felt patriotic, the IRS wouldn’t balk exactly if I cut them a check for an extra $1B. It doesn’t even have to be an act of totally altruistic charity. If you’ve ever studied how corporations allocate investment capital, they typically require that the predicted ROI of the project beat a MARR (Minimum Acceptable Rate of Return). That MARR represents what the corporation would get from a totally safe allocation of the funds required to execute a potentially risky project.

  Why not peg your MARR to the US Treasury’s 10-Year Long Bond? In a given year where Microsuck continues to effectively operate like Microsuck, let’s just actually allocate whatever capital investment resurces that nobody on campus can decently use towards a potfolio of 10-Year USTs. The deficit-spenders limbering up for the Green New Misdeal secretly thank you.

• Big-name immigration hawk trying to shut down border deal gets called out for pimping VDARE on C-SPAN

  The Cucksurgent still remains the Cucksurgent. Do I really care if someone pimps a website I don’t read or even like? No. I’ve posted links to frikken’ Slate when I thought that good logic made it past their journalistic standards. The point here is that I don’t blacklist (!RACIST!). VDARE could be fundamentally right about immigration whether you believe they are fair to natural born, all-Amerikan Knee-Grows or not. It has nothing to do with whether they speak intelligently about immigration.

  What the Cucksurgent screws up here is that VDARE’s immigration pieces cited by Mark Krikorian have nothing to do with what John Derbyshire personnally feels or believes with respect to Knee-Grows. Unless, of course, this is about as morally legitimate as Da-Nang Dick Blumenthal arguing “Falsus in unum, falsus in omnis.” In this case, The Cucksurgent is deliberately using dishonest argumantation to avoid discussing the actual merits of the points Mark Krikorian took from VDARE. Having Neal Stevens do a sleeze-job on Mark Krikorian is way easier than out-arguing Mark Krikorian. So The Cucksurgent just attempts to prevent people from learning inadvertant facts instead.

• A Better School?

  Do want Johnnie to read instead of weed? Want him hooked on phonics; not on Kronik? The last thing you want to do is blame it on his A.D.D.!

  Maybe, instead we should learn from an innovator. Michael Strong of Austin, Texas may have just hit on something better than just writing them off with Ritalin.

  “Teens need responsibility. Ben Franklin, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison started their careers at the age of 12 or 13,” he says. I pointed out that today people would call that “abusive child labor.” Strong answered: “I worked as a teen. I loved it. Teens very often want to work.” At his school, students get Fridays off to work on their own projects. There are no lectures. Instead students read things and then discuss them.
  

  Give a person the gift of skin in the game. Give them the pride of ownership – and all the butt-punishing responsibility that comes with it. People know you value them. They know it when you trust them. That which you expect of them, you also believe they are capable of performing.

• The True Purpose of Public Schools

  Maybe *this* is why your public school does hateful things to your child. They are designed to do hateful things to your child. You want your children believing they are fearfully made and a wonder of God’s creation. You look in their eyes and see your own soul. The children of your youth are arrows in the hand of a warrior. Do not permit them to be blunted by some goddamn diversity matron. Get them out of The Cathedral and they can one day go to the stars.

• Gold Prices In Pounds and Euros Gain More as Economic Growth Falters in the UK and EU

  Wanna know why MMT freaks and Fiat currency fans hate Gold? It holds value even when they trash their own currencies through sloth, iniquity or ferret-brained incompetence.

  Barbarous relic indeed! It enforces a certain economic chivalry. By that, it doesn’t let a state with control over money play with it. Just as Eleanor of Acquitaine attempted to establish some basic protections from barbarities such as Droit du seigneur, a strong market in full-bodied monies or refined specie limits the depredations that a government entity which reneges on caring about the economic commonweal in favor socialist New Deals and Great Leaps Forward can inflict on the wise and prepared economic citizen. Maybe the central planners who fear the safety valve that precious metals offer the intelligently paranoid are true barbarians.

• Subprime Arrives: Auto-Loan Delinquencies Spike to Great Recession Levels

  The Tragedy of The Commons is exactly that. It is tragic and it is all too common. If economics is an ecosystem, subprime auto lenders are down there at the bottom of the food pyramid eating that which you’ve already eaten and recycled. Some consider them the moral equivalent of drug pushers. They are accussed of preying on the weak. Perhaps they are and perhaps they do. But El Chapo never made you an offer on an auto loan that either you couldn’t understand or that you couldn’t refuse. At least the Repo Man appreciates all the new Keynesian Aggregate Demand. Stimulus, man.

  Serious auto-loan delinquencies – loans that are 90 days or more past due – surged to 4.47% of total auto loan balances in Q4 2018, according to New York Fed data this morning. This put the auto-loan delinquency rate at the highest level since Q1 2012 and just 0.6 percentage points below the peak during the Great Recession in Q1 2011.
  

  So if you drive wheels that are beyond your means, you have a problem. If you are a loan originator for Morgan Stanley, and about 50 of your bestest preferred customers no longer mail those checks in on time; you have a very serious problem. When your boss calls you into the office to discuss this regretable situation, you may want to open a wee bit stronger than “should I not have done that?” It’s not like most of the rest of us will be feeling too much sympathy.

• Tamika Mallory: The criticism of Rep. Omar is racist

  Even if you think Ilhan Omar had a point back when she wrote columns for The Final Call, and that (((foreigners))) control US foreign policy; this defense of her recent commentary should make you cringe. This is how certain people can get away with public concern that Guam is tipping over. Or they can ask where on Mars those whities put the US flag. You can’t hold a person of color to impossible standards. Or, for that matter, possible ones – like basic civility.

  There is old Voltaire chestnut that you are ruled by those who you are not allowed to criticize. I’ll have to scratch my head rather hard before I’ll accept the rule of somebody who voluntarily married her own brother to cheat an immigration law and get here. These sorts of arguments are always what you hear when some radical wants to intimidate you rather than having to intelligently defend the indefensible.

I close on sad note. The medical news isn’t the best for Ozzy Osbourne. Keep the prayers coming for Rock and Roll’s very own Prince of Darkness. If he doesn’t pull through, as a writer on site that loves hard rock and metal music; I can always pull for this…

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