Amerika

• Alternate History: What If America Stayed Great?

  People don’t know what we lost when Crowdism took over and we became a civilization rather than a culture. People don’t understand how deliberately our entertainment industry went about wrecking the basis of our national identity. Our nation doesn’t understand what rapid immigration has done to us in the last 30 years. We blew it all.

  My concern is that Donald J. Trump will be similar to Senator Joseph McCarthy. He will try to do the right thing but end up a failed hero. This is because Leftism cannot prevail without destroying the hero in every man.

  Alternate Histories, while not “news” per se, can teach us a lot. Thought simulations allow us to think about how it all could have been different. If you are not thinking about how it could be different and better, then you will not be able to help a good man like President Trump genuinely change things for the better. In the end, Alternate History could be an antidote to dishonest propaganda journalism.

• Why does the White House care about what’s going on in Venezuela?

  Three reasons:

  1) The Monroe Doctrine defines Central and South America as key American spheres of influence. Some would argue that we won the Cold War because of an absence of anything like NATO on a US border. We’ve always eventually held a firm line on this sort of thing. See The Cuban Missile Crisis.

  2) The Venezuelans control a veritable lake of oil. They currently can’t even produce enough gasoline with that to support a decent rush hour. If United Fruit really owns the USG, this is not something that will be allowed to continue.

  3) It’s a humanitarian tragedy. A typical dick stand-up comedian would joke that Jenny Craig is bothered by the competition. An immigration restrictionist might scratch the noggin and wonder where all these migrant caravan people came from. Other countries in the region like Brazil and Columbia may well be pressuring us to “help” Venezuela get its defecation back in sequence. Humanitarian tragedies lead to more practical, hard-headed issues.

  Either The Pinochet Helicopters will fly again, or we will be back in ten years cleaning up after the same idiots crapping the same bed. Solomon The Wise once said something about there being nothing new under the sun.

• Medicare (Bills) for All: 56% want it. 26% want to pay for it.

  You could get similar results if you rolled out a keg of microbrew special.

  If we didn’t have to worry about bills, I could think of lots of stuff I’d like. I’d like to drive a Ferrari California and get hair implants, too. (Yes, the latter would take years to accomplish, I know, I know.) Unfortunately, someone has to pay for those things — otherwise, they don’t exist in the first place. Policies like this always sounds awesome until the bill comes, and then suddenly it looks a whole lot less attractive. As Robert Heinlein wrote, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
  

  Guys! If you like your doctor, you can keep him!

• Joy Behar: We jumped to conclusions about the Covington Catholic kids because we desperately want Trump out of office

  Michael Kinsley didn’t let being a Leftist completely prevent him from an occasional moment of insight. He coined the term Kinsley Gaffe. A Kinsley Gaffe occurs when a politician accidentally drops a Red Pill Truth instead lying in accordance with the script of the day. An unpopular, opinionated, loud-mouth journalist who has about as much credibility as Venezuelan currency note should probably not be announcing that she got sucked into lying about a recent political event because she wants to help depose an elected president more than she wants to report the truth.

  Whoopi Goldberg on the media smearing the Covington Catholic boys: “So many people admitted they made snap judgments before all these other facts came in. … Why is that? Why do we keep making the same mistake?”

  Joy Behar: “Because we’re desperate to get Trump out of office.”
  

  It’s kind of hard to trust anything a journalist reports on other than the sports scores and the weather when they openly say something like that. The real question left hanging here is just how long has this sort of advocacy over fact reporting been the rule of the day in a typical newsroom? We all have guesses and time frames vary. But Joy Behar just casually says this because 90% of the people already know and have known for a long, long time.

• IQ paranoia* on the interweb

  IQ means “Intelligence Quota.” It’s become the new metric for people who like to hold measuring contests. The good news is that even if you personally come out with the short straw, the ruler for a sample where n=1 isn’t very precise.

  The fact is that IQ test measurements are only modestly precise, modestly predictive, and thus only modestly valid, at the level of individual people. But IQ scores are highly valid and reliably predictive when used to compare group averages. (H/T to Steve Sailor for making this clear to me.)
  

  OK, so why really care about IQ? From a solipsistic viewpoint, IQ could be just about useless as a measured personal attribute. From a more nuanced perspective?

  So, when outcomes are measured in terms of educational success, job status, social class, income, health, life expectancy – a group of 200 people with average IQ of 130 will (pretty much) always significantly outperform a group of 200 with with 115 average IQ; but the same certainly does not apply to individuals.
  

  So what happens if groups with certain heritable characteristics tend to map almost 1-to-1 and Onto to certain stochastic IQ score distributions? Therefore, you get a probabilistic mathematical function that can be effectively manipulated according to principles of Baysian Analysis. Thus, P(IQ<95|Given certain heritable characteristics) can be calculated with a high degree of accuracy. Well then, that Bayesian Analysis can be run the other way. P(Getting that Awesome Job and the Schmoking Hot Babe|Certain heritable characteristics that regularly correlate with IQ<95) <<< than what I would like it to be. Therefore, if I were cursed with walking around with certain heritable characteristics I'd want to punch people in their kissers for making a big deal about IQ scores. This gives you IQ paranoia. Yet this is unfortunate. It has been demonstrably shown that countries with low collective IQs tend to have a greater probability of experiencing the varied and unpleasant outcomes that typically accrue to failed nations and civilizations. Allowing blindness to the necessary (but not sufficient) IQ attributes that our society needs to remain viable could well render us literally too stupid to survive, much less get made great again.

• The Covington Students Might as Well Have Just Spit on the Cross

  The detestable Cucks at National Review magazine deleted this post about 24 hours after Nicholas Frankovich chose to hit the send button. The Internet, however, can be forever. If you don’t like the Pope in office now, imagine how much more cucked the church could be if run by someone witht he “Conservative” views of Nicholas Frankovich.

  For some of us, the gospel stories of Jesus’s passion and death are so familiar we no longer hear them. The evangelists are terse in their descriptions of the humiliations heaped on Jesus in the final hours before his crucifixion, the consummate humiliation. Read the accounts again or, if you’d rather not, watch the video. The human capacity for sadism is too great. The man the crowd ridiculed is Nathan Phillips, an elder of the Omaha tribe. He was in Washington for the Indigenous Peoples March, on Friday. It coincided with the March for Life, which Covington Catholic High School organized a contingent of students to attend.
  

  Jesus is compared equivalently with a man who lied about his military career and who deliberately smears and demeans people for personal attention. This is the level Conservatism Inc. has sunken in order tob e cool like the kids at The Atlantic or Salon. Nicholas Frankovich is a deputy managing editor of National Review. Keep that in mind when someone tells you these guys are in any way a positive additionto the American Right.

• An Apology

  Early Sunday morning, I posted a “strongly worded” (Rich Lowry’s description) condemnation of the conduct, seen far and wide on video, of a group of high-school students at the conclusion of the March for Life on Friday afternoon. I was preachy and rhetorically excessive, and I regret it. The overheated post I wrote has been taken down. Let this apology stand in its stead, both here on the Corner and in the memory of readers who justifiably objected to my high-handedness.
  

  Guys, everything is totally OK. Nicholas Frankovich is sorry. That makes all the death threats and wood chipper tweets and famous people who called the Covington Catholic School students racists totally go away. Mike Nifong eventually apologized as well. That worked wonders for the kids on that Duke Lacrosse Team. Nicholas Frankovich remains a deputy managing editor of National Review. John Derbyshire and Mark Steyn were shown no such latitude or forbearance.

• Facecrime

  A few years back a Dear Leader of North Korea assumed room temperature and had the pennies stuck on his eyeballs so that The Ferryman would port him on over. Soon after that Night Train ran its course to The Big Adios, the North Koreans had a state ceremony. Every North Korean that didn’t safely hide first was invited to the ensuing missile parade. Their caring and generous government was thoughtful enough to advise as to how much remorse was compulsary for them to express.

  There, in the heart of Marxian pergatory, a market was made. Smart guys cut up onions and sold pieces to funeral-goers who had trouble mustering the minimal acceptable grief-quota for affirmative citizenship. So the next time you attend any public event in The Imperial Capital of Amerika, bring a little plastic bag with a couple of onion slices. That way you can get rid of any sort of an inappropriate smirk when confronted by deep and serious people like The Black Hebrew Isrealites or Nathan “Freon Ranger” Phillips.

  It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself – anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called. – George Orwell, 1984
  

• Ilhan Omar Endorsed Somalia’s New President. Four Days Later, Omar’s Brother-in-Law Had a Powerful Job in His Administration

  These coincidences amaze us all. Or not. A lot in life gets done with bribery. If you don’t have a gun, you get more with a kind word and a fat envelope. And who wouldn’t help an old buddy like “Cheese”…

  Omar likely met at least one other Somali presidential candidate on her trip. According to a speech by her soon-to-be husband Ahmed Hirsi, Ilhan had just flown from Nairobi to Mogadishu on a plane with former Somali Prime Minister Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, known as “Farmaajo” (“Cheese”). Farmaajo — a U.S. citizen who, inconceivably, had boarded that plane as a Buffalo, NY, cubicle employee of the New York Department of Transportation — was the eventual surprise winner of Somalia’s presidency on February 8, 2017.
  

  And four days later, her brother-in-law just happens to pop up in a new job. With opportunity like that back home in Somalia, why did Ilhan Omar ever bother coming here? It must have been to spread her malignancy on Twitter.

• Black Male Nurse Charged With Impregnating Incapacitated Woman; Instead Of “Man Arrested”, It’s “Nurse Arrested”

  You really do need to investigate the home you put your elderly or incapacitated female relatives in. This isn’t the only time this has happened. Certain guys who apply to work in these places want easy prey to sexually molest. VDARE has another article that documents two other cases of some sick and demented guy “parking it in the handicapped zone.” It’s always the lower echelon of the diversity that does this. They hate and resent the woman they are hired to care for. They take out their frustrations. Offspring are born who will never have a mommy or daddy. It’s a good thing that diversity is our strength, or else I’d wonder about this sort of thing.

• Facebook Slides After Report Claims 50% Of Its Users Are Fake

  In a report published Thursday by PlainSite, an independent research shop led by Aaron Greenspan, analysts calculated that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been regularly lying to investors and the public about the company’s user metrics, and that the company could be overestimating the number of users by as much as 50%.
  

  I’m surprised that 50% of them are legit. How many of the legit accounts actually post or read with frequency? This model doesn’t work unless people check their FB daily like they do their email. So just asking how many users have FB pages is meaningless. You need a certain volume of user activity per page. Facebook’s problem isn’t just fake accounts. The people with the real ones are walking off and leaving them dormant.

• Record Defaults by Chinese Companies: Fake “Cash” & Fake Accounting

  Remember how China was supposed to just buy up the entire planet? Perhaps they don’t either. Fitch Ratings tells us that they are not providing any accurate accounting information and that Chinese companies are defaulting on bond interest payments. So they tell you something about the company that might be accurate. Based on that, they would be happy to sell you their bonds. Then, out of the goodness of their hearts; they will consider paying the intrest upon the agreed upon coupon date.

  Defaults by Chinese companies on bonds they issued in China (“onshore” bonds, as opposed to “offshore” bonds) soared to a record in 2018, according to a report by Fitch Ratings: 45 companies defaulted on 117 bonds, with a total principal amount of 110.5 billion yuan ($16.3 billion). 39 of the issuers were non-state-owned enterprises, accounting for 90% of the principal amount in default. 6 of the issuers were state-owned enterprises (SOEs), accounting for 10% of the principal amount.
  

In the US, things can get skewed when corporations no longer feel constrained to honor contracts. But firms and investment banks nailed by people like Jim Chanos and Michael Burry learned the hard way that US markets are stalked. People hunt for these companies the way lion prides seek out arthritic gazelles. Are people allowed to do this in China? Do they have a short market? Can they generate synthetic securities when an economic situation calls for innovation?

Short sellers are a pressure relief valve when things begin to turn ugly. They deflate bubbles so that they don’t explode.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhTDbVecHSM

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