Amerika

• Doctor tells patient he doesn’t have long to live through hospital robot’s video screen

  Voters are consummate morons. If you were not a moron before, you become one as soon as you join the group and start betting on which answers will please the crowd. Voters thought that expanding healthcare for everyone was a good idea, and now they see the future: inept and brusque doctors, hired from the third world because they are cheap and we have standardized every diagnosis so that a schnauzer could do it, telling you that you are dying through a computer screen. The conservative way is better: deregulate, let the market solve this one, and move insurance back to being what you buy to hedge against catastrophes and disability.

• Finland’s cabinet quits over failure to deliver healthcare reform

  The government had aimed to dramatically slow the increase in healthcare spending over the next decade, reducing the budget to 18.3 billion euros in 2029 against an estimate of 21.3 billion.

  No one can afford entitlements programs. Demand expands to fit all resources; in other words, when not owned by someone, resources become a tragedy of the commons, or something that everyone exploits until it is destroyed. This applies to natural resources, but also to any socialized wealth of human societies, and even those civilizations themselves. If things are not owned, the crowd eats them up. Even cultures.

• Philadelphia Bans ‘Cashless’ Stores Amid Growing Backlash (non-paywall)

  The Left specializes in finding exceptions and claiming that they are the rule. The real object of this bill is to prevent stores from keeping the homeless away, since the homeless tend to use grubby cash. Very few people are inconvenienced:

  Critics of cashless stores say they are exclusionary by nature, as low-income people may not have bank accounts because of fees and minimum balance requirements. (A report by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in 2017 estimated that 6.5 percent of American households were “unbanked.”)

  For the 6.5%, we will sacrifice the well-being of the rest.

• Debate over anti-Semitism charges exposes divide in U.S. Democratic Party

  Senator Bernie Sanders said in a statement that “we must not … equate anti-Semitism with legitimate criticism of the right-wing, Netanyahu government.”

  The Left — including Leftist Jews — has been attacking Israel for the past couple decades under the justification that Israel is an apartheid, nationalist state which is oppressing Palestinians. In reality, nationalism just works, and Jews have vindicated it by seeing how its absence would lead to their complete absorption by surrounding Arab tribes. The same is true of Europe and the USA.

• Michigan: 5-in-10 Voters Favor Replacing Trump as GM Continues Layoffs

  The voters are always their own worst enemy. When something is going wrong, and someone steps in to fix it, there will be in adjustment period. During this adjustment period, the voters panic and lash out, running to the other party. The other party then un-does the changes, and there is a new adjustment period, and then a worse result, so the voters run back to the other party again. In the end, everything gets worse. GM was killed by unions in the 1980s and has been steadily outsourcing since; in the meantime, the auto market has gotten a lot more crowded, and American cars cost a lot more to produce than those in most other areas. The voters will do anything but admit that their high wages, regulations, unions, lawsuits, affirmative action, and taxes have driven away their jobs. Oh no, much easier to blame Trump. This just demonstrates why democracy is failing across the West: it cannot fix any problems, only make worse ones that take decades to manifest, at which point everyone is bickering, squabbling, kvetching, whining, wailing, dancing for the rain gods, and so on instead of doing something useful. Humans really are just monkeys that can talk.

• Far-right parties seen nearly doubling seats in EU vote

  The Right spent years staying away from Right-wing views, trying to chase Left-wing voters, during the postwar period. Now that they have stopped doing this, they actually offer an alternative to what the Left does other than lower taxes and more patriotism, and so people are paying attention. In the meantime, Leftist policies are collapsing all around us, leaving everything ruined as usual, but will the voters hang on long enough to replace the system with something sane, or just wait until the Right fixes enough problems before the voters go running back to the Free Stuff Army? Most likely, unless there is a war, voters just want a few band-aids and then to go back to comfortable bourgeois individualist sleep.

• Grand jury returns 16 felony counts against Jussie Smollett

  This is political/media theater: they will indict him on many charges, and give him a plea deal for a few years of probation, if even that. He will have to pay a fine, of course, but it will go to the police department on top of its regular budget, through which the taxpayers have already paid for the extra hours expended by personnel on this sloppy hoax. Everyone wins except the taxpayers, but those have long ago given up because their government is bankrupt and larcenous.

• US households see biggest decline in net worth since the financial crisis

  People can handle linearity — x mallet strikes y ball which goes z distance — but they are blind to the other three dimensions: breadth, height, and most importantly, time. Any action takes years to play out, and it is going to have a jagged curve of results over time. Right now, they are panicked because stocks have fallen as investors bet against the Fed raising interest rates, but this shows us how damaging speculation can be. The real story goes deeper: the trade deficit has increased mainly because the trade war has devastated China but also simply because the global economy has bottomed out because the good easy years have ended. Remember that whole “service economy” thing? We took goods made in the third world and sold them at high prices because everyone wanted a new computer, website, smartphone, tablet, or server room. The market is now saturated and so the values of those things are in free-fall; no one wants to spend that much money anymore and they do not upgrade as quickly, in part because the newer chips do not do much more than older chips. The first warning sign was the plunge in smartphone sales. As a result, Chinese exports fell and the chill spread to Asia at the same time the West began to push back against Chinese IP theft and government spying through private companies like Huawei. That wave of failure has reached Europe, and now the US, where the great Ponzi scheme of driving up housing prices through speculation finally looks like a popped bubble as people abandon stores for online buying in part because of how unpleasant diversity makes shopping in public. The new American consumer lives in a smaller dwelling, watches Netflix, owns very little, and buys most of what they do own online. They no longer need stereos, televisions, computers, and other consumer goods; they buy what they need from Ikea, Costco, Amazon, Walmart, and a few other big monopolies and interact with the world through their phones. The consumer bubble itself is over, and as predicted here some time ago, the popping of the “service economy” bubble is going to make a really big boom. This is why Democrats are running crazy people for office in 2020: they realize that everyone is about to get really poor really fast, and they want a Republican in office for when that collapse happens.

• Maine mayor resigns after his racist text message is leaked

  We should consider a better suggestion: do not resign. Say that these were private messages involving private jokes, and that the person who leaked them may have faked or misconstrued certain messages. Every group tells ethnic jokes about every other group. Only white people get all self-righteous and weird about it.

• Up To 400 Firefighters, 100 Municipal Workers Face Layoffs Over Proposition B

  Corrupt black mayor of minority-majority Houston claims that the city does not have $197m to cover raises for firefighters that the voters approved of last year, mainly because HFD has not had raises for a long time since it has refused to be under the mayor’s control. Mayor Sylvester Turner engineered this crisis while spending money recklessly on other things and bleeding its assets at the same time that its mayor paid out $400m to mysterious recipients without City Council approval. This is your future under diversity, with Turner joining other minority-majority success stories like Kwame Kilpatrick and Marion Barry in the infamy of total failure.

• ‘Silent Sam’ protests wearing out Chapel Hill police officers, budgets

  The politicians became accustomed to the Obama-Clinton style of government: do whatever is popular right then and then pass the costs on to someone else and get out of town. The “Teflon presidency” became the Teflon way of life for American government because it worked so well for Bill Clinton and then Barack Obama, and seemed poised to work for Hillary Clinton as well. Everyone passed the buck right on down the line. No one was really accountable, and because costs were passed on, there was more money to enjoy in the moment, a metaphorical eating of the seed corn. As a result, Chapel Hill officials thought that this would be a slam-dunk: let the crowd destroy Silent Sam, then talk about deplorables, shut the matter and leave it to someone else to resolve. Instead, the Right has adopted a sensible strategy. Every time we show up, the other side shows up, and the police and politicians panic about optics and send out more expensive police squads. The media has even ignored these for the most part, but still they are bleeding the city and the university. This is good. The Left succeeded by bankrupting Right-wing organizations with lawsuits; we can bleed the Left with protests and cause them to leave office and be replaced by more neutral or even Right-wing parties.

• Teaching gender equality encourages domestic violence: Brazil minister

  She basically says the obvious, which is that if you make girls think that they serve equal roles to men, men are going to hit back like they would with a man. Instead, women need to be “loved and respected as women,” she says, which is essentially the natural rights view: birth is the only equality you get. After that, you are what you are, and you make the best of it that you can, and if we reward the good, everyone gets the best outcome possible. This contrasts with the lottery-playing Left, who say that they will make everyone equal so that each can be a king and some will end up getting rich when they have no ability to make use of that money in a constructive way.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3p4djwW72Q

• Tax collectors chase rich New Yorkers moving to low-tax states. Auditors inspect cell records, even your dog’s vet bills

  Remember that Leftism never arises on its own, only out of conservative states, and that it depends on having people who live in a conservative manner in order to tax these people to fund all the Leftist projects. In biological terms, we would call Leftism a “parasite,” and the West seems to be waking up to this as the federal government, states, and localities spend more of their time acquiring new tax revenues than figuring out why their existing spending has failed to fix the problems it was claimed to fix and simultaneously has made everything worse to the point where people are bailing out not just because of the high taxes and the high cost of living that those cause, but the endless violence, pollution, ugliness, vandalism, racial antagonism, crime, and drama of the city. Everywhere humans go, they bring their problems with them and destroy new places before moving on to yet another “new hope.” We are voracious yeast, and the Left are parasites upon us.

• Morrison government backs down on banning Milo Yiannopoulos in face of backlash

  Governments ran out of credit on this one. Their sleight-of-hand: “every time there are Right-wing protests, violence happens.” The deception: the violence was caused by the Leftist counter-protestors. The realization: people no longer worry about keeping the Right-wing speakers out, but about keeping the Left-wing protestors away. Soon this will culminate in the general idea that Right and Left need different spaces because we desire different civilizations and have entirely different values, standards, beliefs, and most importantly, ways of life and “normal” behaviors.

• Atlanta court upholds University System ban on unauthorized immigrants

  The great education free-for-all — where the government dumped money on students, who went and signed up for absurd courses and got degrees that would not pay off, mostly because when you send everyone to college the value of each degree falls — ended some time ago, and universities are looking to curb costs. They are also looking to escape controversy and drama. As a result, this university turned down some DACA Dreamers, and for a change, a judge looked at their suit and saw it was without merit because there is no Constitutional right to do everything just because you are here as a non-citizens. Then you get this stunner:

  “We continue to believe this is an illegal policy, and it just doesn’t make sense to turn away some of your best and brightest,” said Burth Lopez of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

  If you were our best and brightest, you would not be suing, but applying as international students. You are scholarship cases for a university that realizes that it does not need you.

• Shamima Begum: Home Secretary criticised as baby dies

  Terrorist gives birth to baby, UK denies citizenship to terrorist, then baby dies. Cue predictable wailing from the cheap seats and the navel-gazing intellectuals. When do people point out that whatever you tolerate, you get more of, and so it makes no sense to tolerate terrorists and other people who hate us?

• Woman Attacks 7 People With Pepper Spray in Manhattan in What Police Say May Be a Hate Crime (non-paywall)

  Random black woman wanders around pepper-spraying white people in the face. While the police think it may be a hate crime, they have not found her, either.

• Exhibit on US Latina ‘cholas’ opens in Albuquerque

  Diversity is a variant of pluralism which itself a variant of egalitarianism. Egalitarianism says that all people are equal; pluralism says that all viewpoints can be simultaneously tolerated, because people are attached to viewpoints, of course. Diversity means that we have no culture, only a set of rules to hold together many different cultures, and that all are equally tolerated, which gets you museum exhibits about “the working class, Mexican-American urban female often associated with gangs.” Welcome to your future. Apparently you voted for it.

• PM Scott Morrison reacts to criticism after his women comments went global

  Scott Morrison points out the obvious:

  “We’re not about setting Australians against each other, trying to push some down to lift others up,” he said. “We want to see women rise. But we don’t want to see women rise only on the basis of others doing worse.”

  Power is a zero-sum game. So are markets, in that a nation only has a certain amount of productivity, and claiming that selling stuff to ourselves constitutes added wealth is simply the “broken window” theory re-stated. In our quest for equality to the present time, people have insisted on giving subsidies to those who were formerly unsuccessful, not realizing that this meant taking from those who were successful and therefore generally more competent and therefore a benefit to all of us when they are in power and we can all thus benefit from their generally better competence. This subsidy system has resulted in incompetence across the board.

• Man sues abortion clinic after teenage girlfriend terminates pregnancy

  He is suing on behalf of the fetus under the theory that its abortion was a wrongful death. If he wins, men might get something for the way the state extorts alimony from them to pay for their pregnant ex-wives. In addition, abortion clinics might find themselves less likely to randomly hand out pills and D&Cs like candy. While abortion has eugenic properties, and in fact most of current humanity should have been aborted, it is ugly because it trivializes life and killing, sort of like wasting food or executing an innocent man. It would be nice to see it go away and be replaced with a family-centered lifestyle. Getting rid of divorce would be glorious as well.

• Finland’s cabinet quits over failure to deliver healthcare reform

  Just a slice of our future in the West:

  Healthcare systems across much of the developed world have come under increasing stress in recent years as treatment costs soar and people live longer, meaning fewer workers are supporting more pensioners.

  The government had aimed to dramatically slow the increase in healthcare spending over the next decade, reducing the budget to 18.3 billion euros in 2029 against an estimate of 21.3 billion.

  We cannot afford our entitlement states, and never could. It seemed like we could when we rode the wealth boom of the internal combustion engine back in the 1930s, and later when the Boomers created massive wealth surges through their consumption in the 1960s, and maybe even further in the 1990s when we reaped the profits and lower cost products of cheap Chinese labor. Now, however, the party is over. Our two biggest inventions — the internal combustion engine and the digital computer — have been integrated and optimized, and now we have absorbed that efficiency boost and there is no more to come. European governments are looking at the ugly reality of having to cut benefits, knowing that the voters will scream, but also knowing that the voters will scream louder at massive debt and default. Voters seem to be a series of tantrums that are oblivious to any context or historical arc.

• Trump’s border emergency becomes more real by the day as migrants stack up along the Rio Grande (non-paywall)

  Trump has his border crisis and even Leftist media is grudgingly admitting it. We are busting tens of thousands of people flooding across the border, inundated in unaccompanied children, watching immigrants die, seeing organized groups storm the border in large groups, all for a group of which 63% are on welfare that is costing us billions in medical care. We already have too many people in the workforce; many people who should be in the field are instead in office jobs, posing around and causing problems for people who actually do something useful. If all of the people we have added since 1965 were to go back, we would be healthier as a country and as an economy; in the bigger picture, diversity does not work, and so we are simply digging our grave by importing anyone other than people who are genetically like our founding group of heritage Americans.

• A Muslim as German chancellor? CDU leader slammed for saying ‘why not’

  Conservatives love to make this argument:

  Asked by media outlet Idea if a Muslim could lead the party and become chancellor in 2030, Ralph Brinkhaus said: “Why not, if they’re a good politician, and they represent our values and our political views?”

  Here you see muh values in its winter plumage. Democracy encourages people to think of my team versus the other team, but this is on the basis of political choices, not inherent and natural ones like who they are. As a result, people care only about their team winning, and they will recruit anyone they can to make that happen with no thought of what the aftermath will look like. Are we ready to bring the kings back, yet?

• Border agents are told to target Spanish speakers, records show

  Who the heck else are they going to target, given that they are mostly stopping Central American Spanish-speakers? Our fetish for equality goes too far here.

Tags: linkpost, periscope