Tuesday, September 17, 2024
Tuesday, July 16, 2024
NeverTrump J. D. Vance in 2016 was a small sea of confusion whose options were his dog, Hillary, and Evan McMuffinhead lol
VANCE: My current plan is to vote either third party or, as I joked to my wife, I might write in my dog because that's about as good as it seems. But, you know, I think there's a chance, if I feel like Trump has a really good chance of winning, that I might have to hold my nose and vote for Hillary Clinton. But at the end of the day, I just feel like she is so culturally disconnected from the people that I grew up around that it would be very, very hard for me to cast my ballot for her. So ultimately I think I'll probably vote third party. I might vote for this new guy who I really like, Evan McMullin, who I actually met the other day. But I think that I'm going to vote third party because I can't stomach Trump. I think that he's noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place. And ultimately I just don't share Hillary Clinton's politics.
NPR.
I would like the name of his dog NOW.
J. D. Vance is the kinder, gentler version of National Review's Kevin Williamson about the hopelessness of his own people
And it's interesting that all of the people that I talk about in my book that grew up in this chaos that ended up having successful home lives and successful marriages - they married an outsider.
They married someone like I did who didn't grow up with these lessons, who didn't grow up with these experiences, and because of that, knew how to manage the people that they were married to and knew how to not respond in kind. As I write in the book, you put two of me in the same marriage, and I don't think it works.
But you put one of me, who's maybe a little self-reflective, in a marriage with somebody who hasn't faced that trauma - then I think you have a good chance. And that's one of the lessons of my life.
-- J. D. Vance, from the NPR interview, August 2016, here
Thursday, June 13, 2024
Monday, October 2, 2023
Congressional Black Caucasians most hurt
Friday, May 5, 2023
World Health Organization declares global public health emergency over today, a week ahead of the US
WHO declares end to Covid-19 global public health emergency
The spread of Covid-19 is no longer a global public health emergency, the World Health Organization declared Friday.
“For more than a year, the pandemic has been on a downward trend with population immunity increasing from vaccination and infection, mortality decreasing, and the pressure on health systems easing,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a news conference in Geneva.
“This trend has allowed most countries to return to life as we knew it before Covid-19,” Tedros said. “It’s therefore with great hope that I declared Covid-19 over as a global health emergency.”
Nearly 7 million people have died from the virus worldwide since the WHO first declared the emergency on Jan. 30, 2020, according to the U.N. organization’s official data. Tedros said the true death toll is at least 20 million.
The WHO’s decision comes as the U.S. is set to end its national public health emergency on Thursday.
Tedros said there is still a risk that new variant could emerge and cause another surge in cases. He warned national governments against dismantling the systems they have built to fight the virus.
“This virus is here to stay. It’s still killing and it’s still changing,” he said.
But the WHO chief said the time has come for countries to transition from an emergency response to managing Covid like other infectious diseases. ...
“Covid-19 has been so much more than health crisis,” Tedros said. “It has caused severe economic upheaval, erasing trillions from GDP, disrupting travel and trade, shattering businesses and plunging millions into poverty,” he said.
“It has caused severe social upheaval with borders closed, movement restricted, schools shut and millions of people experiencing loneliness, isolation, anxiety and depression,” Tedros said.
More.
Sunday, March 5, 2023
WaPo ignores that it was Obama's war on coal which impoverished the Ohio River Valley and is now going hungry after the end of COVID-19 food assistance
A mile-long line for free food offers a warning as covid benefits end
Sunday, January 8, 2023
The Eugenics movement, victorious with abortion, aims now for widespread euthanasia to cull the herd of the poor, homeless, and mentally ill
In 2021, only 486 people died using California's assisted suicide program, but that same year in Canada, 10,064 died used MAID to die that year. MAID has now grown so popular that Canada has both anti-suicide hotlines to try and stop people killing themselves, as well as pro-suicide hotlines for people wanting to end their lives. ... MAID has fallen into further scrutiny over claims that people are now seeking assisted suicide due to poverty and homelessness or mental anguish, as opposed to the traditional method of the terminally-ill seeking a painless death.
Saturday, April 2, 2022
Adam Tooze's maternal grandparents were both commies, and the grandfather Arthur Wynn wasn't exposed as a Soviet spy until 2009, eight years after his death
Assiduously avoided here in "The Cult of Adam Tooze":
Another model Tooze said he looks to in his role as public intellectual is that of his maternal grandparents. “Leading synthesizers of global data on childhood nutrition,” Peggy and Arthur Wynn published research on poverty and family policy and together wrote a pseudonymous book attacking Tory business connections called England’s Money Lords. (Arthur was also, for a time, a Soviet-spy recruiter at Oxford.) They continued their work into their 90s. Arthur died over his word processor one night after Peggy had gone to bed; he was making a list of things to do.
Monday, July 5, 2021
Joel Kotkin has come around, now calls it what it is: Global fascism
In 2018, Kotkin was still tip-toeing around the obvious, but not anymore:
Mussolini’s notion of fascism has become increasingly dominant in much of the world . . .
Mussolini, a one-time radical socialist, viewed himself as a “revolutionary” transforming society by turning the state into “the moving centre of economic life”. In Italy and, to a greater extent, Germany, fascism also brought with it, at least initially, an expanded highly populist welfare state much as we see today.
Mussolini’s idea of a an economy controlled from above, with generous benefits but dominated by large business interests, is gradually supplanting the old liberal capitalist model. ...
fascism — in its corporate sense — relies on concentrated economic power to achieve its essential and ideological goals. ...
China, in many aspects the model fascist state of our times, follows Il Duce’s model of cementing the corporate elite into the power structure. ...
But in the battle between the two emergent fascist systems, China possesses powerful advantages. Communist Party cadres at least offer more than a moralising agenda; they can point to the country’s massive reduction of extreme poverty and a huge growth in monthly wages, up almost five-fold since 2006. At a time when the middle class is shrinking in the West, China’s middle class increased enormously from 1980 to 2000, although its growth appears to have slowed in recent years.
Like Mussolini, who linked his regime to that of Ancient Rome, China’s rulers look to Han supremacy and the glories of China’s Imperial past. “The very purpose of the [Chinese Communist] Party in leading the people in revolution and development,” Xi Jinping told party cadres a decade ago, “is to make the people prosperous, the country strong, and [to] rejuvenate the Chinese nation.”
Kotkin recognizes at least that American right-wing libertarianism is part of the problem, not part of the solution:
the consolidation of oligarchic power is supported by massive lobbying operations and dispersals of cash, including to some Right-wing libertarians, who doggedly justify censorship and oligopoly on private property grounds.
Regrettably, however, Kotkin still does not connect this failure of the old liberal order in the West with the failure of the old moral order which gave it birth and on which it depended. This is because Kotkin still sees things in primarily materialistic terms.
Kotkin is oddly politically correct when he denounces possible recourse to nativism, which blinds him to the nativism which is at the heart of Chinese state capitalism and gives it much of its appeal and strength. He calls for "a re-awakening of the spirit of resistance to authority" in the West, not realizing that it was Protestantism which made that even possible in the first place.
The problem of the West is spiritual, and Catholicism will never be able to rise to the occasion of refounding it as long as globo-homo defines Rome. The whole idea is inimical to the notion of founding a nation "for our posterity".
Wednesday, June 24, 2020
If it isn't obvious by now that you're an idiot, Johnny Reb tried to tell you
"with the realist political outlook, hopes through its followers to destroy society, either from envy or revenge, because of the low place assigned in it to their personality and talents, or, alternatively, to carry away the masses by some program or other for the satisfaction of his own will-to-power".
No good deed is going unpunished, but fools like Ann Coulter will still argue that blacks deserve and should be paid reparations: Those who have done no wrong should pay those who have suffered none, we are told.
140,414 dead Yankees are just chopped liver to these ingrates and fools.
They now think they have the upper hand and are out to replace you. "Diversity is our strength" means "their" strength, not yours. Diversity means your weakness, and the unchecked riots and looting are proof of it.
Christians 244 years ago took up arms against "tyrants" like these and called it "obedience to God".
I can't imagine finding one such person among us today. And you certainly won't find one among the paid mercenaries, the cops. They're just trying to make it to full retirement like everybody else.
Instead, most Christians have become Spengler's "credulous" type of communist, who:
"obsessed by doctrine or feminine sentimentality, remote from and hostile to the world, condemns the wealth of the wicked who prosper and also, at times, the poverty of the good who do not prosper. This lands him either in vague Utopias or throws him back upon asceticism, the monastic life, Bohemia, or vagabondism, which proclaims the futility of all economic effort".
On obsession with doctrine think First Things Magazine, think Sojourners, Christianity Today, and the Patheos crowd for the feminine sentimentalists and wealth condemners, think the Prosperity Gospel movement and the charismatic Dominionists for the critics of the Christianity which is content with little, think Rod Dreher's Benedict Option or the survivalists for the separatists, and also the libertarians who "go Galt", accountable to no one but themselves. Representative all.