Friday, May 18, 2018
Thursday, May 17, 2018
Michigan's two main universities are now so toxic only a fool would send his kid to either one
UM feels a lot like the USSR for its severe restrictions on freedom of speech and its deliberate encouragement of rat finks.
In wake of Nassar settlement, MSU proposes budget cut as only $39 million of $500 million sex abuse settlement is covered by liability insurance.
The taxpayers ought to demand that their assets be sold and both be burned to the ground.
Mark Levin is right: The real interference in the US 2016 presidential election came from the Obama cabal
Helped by the media.
Right now in the opener.
Andy McCarthy: NYTimes storyline is bunk, Obama FBI abused its foreign spy powers against its domestic political adversary Trump
As usual, McCarthy sums up the matter better than anyone else can, here, from which this excerpt:
But opening up a counterintelligence investigation against Russia is not the same thing as opening up a counterintelligence investigation against the Trump campaign.
The media-Democrat complex has tried from the start to conflate these two things. That explains the desperation to convince the public that Putin wanted Trump to win. It explains the stress on contacts, no matter how slight, between Trump campaign figures and Russians. They are trying to fill a gaping void they hope you don’t notice: Even if Putin did want Trump to win, and even if Trump-campaign advisers did have contacts with Kremlin-tied figures, there is no evidence of participation by the Trump campaign in Russia’s espionage. ... At the height of the 2016 presidential race, the FBI collaborated with the CIA to probe an American political campaign. They used foreign-intelligence surveillance and informants.
Just a reminder: North Korea wants US troops out of South Korea
A bad idea shared by many, not the least of whom is Pat Buchanan.
Reuters reports, here:
The North has long said it is open to eventually giving up its nuclear arsenal if the United States withdraws its troops from South Korea and ends its “nuclear umbrella” alliance with Seoul.
Already yesterday's news in 2013, "Hitlerwein" gets Austrian man thrown behind bars
We reported on the story in 2013 here, about how "despot" wines at least gave villains a face, unlike today's multinational corporations, whose scope for international fascism the likes of Adolf and Benito only dreamed of.
Now a hapless Austrian gets thrown in the slammer for six months just for owning a bottle or two.
The story, 'Austrian man jailed up for glorifying Nazism after cops found "joke" Hitler-branded wine in his home', is here.
Americans' problem with Hillary is her naked quest for power, and she just demonstrated why they were right to reject her
In the good old days office seekers framed themselves as servants of the people, but not Hillary.
To her, it's all about women qua women achieving power qua power. Hard to imagine anyone but a feminist ideologue talking like that.
Quoted here in Australia:
"There is this fear, there is this anger, even rage about women seeking power, women exercising power and people fall back on these attacks like you're a witch or you should go to prison. It's not a majority, thank goodness. It's not. But it's a very vocal minority at least in my country and sometimes these tropes are very much part of the press coverage," Clinton also said.
A Massachusetts liberal for The Atlantic vaguely realizes that the wealthy have withdrawn their money from productive purposes
In other words, they've behaved like ordinary people behave, as in badly.
This was first made possible in America broadly by the Kennedy and then the Reagan tax cuts (Irish anyone?), which took away the high-taxation-goad that prodded income into productive investments which in turn benefited more people, but this never occurs to the author, here:
[A]round the world and throughout history, the wealthy have advanced the crystallization process in a straightforward way. They have taken their money out of productive activities and put it into walls.
The whole point of conservatism has been that human nature is mixed, so that "class" is mostly irrelevant. The author, however, is preoccupied with it, especially the "New American Aristocracy", which means he's a liberal who is (mostly) convinced some people are more equal than others for various reasons, which he goes to great, and sometimes convincing, lengths to demonstrate, and criticize.
That's a start.
Conservatives answer that good people and bad people populate the whole at every level, and that everyone has a little bit of each in them at the same time. Conservatives also believe that good government is government which encourages the good in everyone and discourages the evil. Bad government denies that this is government's responsibility at all, or it denies that one of these two irreducible facts of life is a fact so that you get liberal government which lets people run amok or tyrannical government which is too restrictive.
The author's answer is more equality when understanding how we all already are equally good and evil would be better. It's the peculiar blind spot of liberalism, the analogue of which in conservatism is failing to see the good in people:
But we do have a blind spot, and it is located right in the center of the mirror: We seem to be the last to notice just how rapidly we’ve morphed, or what we’ve morphed into. The meritocratic class has mastered the old trick of consolidating wealth and passing privilege along at the expense of other people’s children.
New York Times story emphasizes Hillary was victimized by the FBI in a way that Trump was not, Comey to blame
From the story here:
WASHINGTON — Within hours of opening an investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia in the summer of 2016, the F.B.I. dispatched a pair of agents to London on a mission so secretive that all but a handful of officials were kept in the dark. ...
Not only did agents in that case fall back to their typical policy of silence, but interviews with a dozen current and former government officials and a review of documents show that the F.B.I. was even more circumspect in that case than has been previously known. Many of the officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly.
But those who saw the investigation up close, and many of those who have reviewed case files in the past year, say that far from gunning for Mr. Trump, the F.B.I. could actually have done more in the final months of 2016 to scrutinize his campaign’s Russia ties. ...
Mr. Comey, after all, broke with policy and twice publicly discussed the Clinton investigation. Yet he refused repeated requests to discuss the Trump investigation.
Wednesday, May 16, 2018
Good Lord, Jeeves, The Atlantic fired Williamson but keeps nitwit writers who can't write
For example, this boob, who are clearly a college graduate, for whom mines excavate and unearth miraculously all by themselves:
But for all those years, the source material for the arguments have [sic] remained largely the same. ...
A team of archaeologists, historians, and climate scientists have [sic] constructed a history of Rome’s lead pollution, which allows them [sic] to approximate Mediterranean economic activity from 1,100 b.c. to 800 a.d. They [sic] found it hiding thousands of miles from the Roman Forum: deep in the Greenland Ice Sheet, the enormous, miles-thick plate of ice that entombs the North Atlantic island. In short, they [sic] have reconstructed year-by-year economic data documenting the rise and fall of the Roman Republic and Empire. ...
But these mines didn’t excavate [sic] pure silver: Instead, they unearthed [sic] an ore of silver, lead, and copper that had to be smelted into silver. ...
Once in the air, these lead emissions did not stay in one place. Instead, it [sic] wafted with the winds, eventually blowing into squalls and storms over Greenland. ...
The Crisis of the Roman Republic—the series of civil wars and political strife, spanning 134 b.c. to 27 b.c., that brought the Roman Republic to an end— were [sic] associated with a broad period of economic stagnation and disintegration, the study finds. And the early Roman Empire—especially the Pax Romana, the 206 years of mostly uninterrupted peace throughout the Mediterranean—were [sic] accompanied by an economic boom. ...
These simulations allow scientists to estimate how air from the Iberian peninsula—air that, in Roman times, would have been full of lead pollution—wafted up to the Greenland ice sheet. It [sic] also allowed them to distinguish between air from the Iberian peninsula specifically and ambient air from farther east in Europe.
Tuesday, May 15, 2018
Tom Wolfe, the Black Panthers' (and Leonard Bernstein's) great deflator, is dead
From the obituary, here:
“Do Panthers like little Roquefort cheese morsels rolled on crushed nuts this way, and asparagus tips in mayonnaise dabs, and meatballs petites au Coq Hardi, all of which are at the very moment being offered to them on gadrooned silver platters by maids in black uniforms with hand-ironed white aprons?,” Mr. Wolfe wrote, outraging liberals and Panthers alike.
When a Time reporter asked a minister for the Black Panthers to comment on the accuracy of Mr. Wolfe’s account, he said, “You mean that dirty, blatant, lying, racist dog who wrote that fascist disgusting thing in New York magazine?”
I'm sure that's included in the obit for a reason.
Democrats: Happy to outsource average Americans' jobs while finger-wagging them for failure to evolve on social codes
An MBA student from MIT writes for The New Republic, here, that B-schools are full-up with such Democrat voters:
Electorally, MBA students have become something of a voting bloc. In the 2016 presidential election, Harvard Business School polled students on their choice of candidate. A full 85 percent supported Hillary Clinton while 3 percent backed Donald Trump (for reference: 32 percent of voters went for Trump across deep-deep-blue Massachusetts). Up the street at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management, I’d wager that the Clinton-Trump gap was just as wide, if the funereal atmosphere at our election night watch party was any indication.
Arizona's Martha McSally could be a man from the look of her
After all, she's supposed to be the first female U.S. fighter pilot to fly a combat mission.
Cut her hair, give her some testosterone, and you've got Top Gun Mark McSally right there, folks!
In AZ "Martha" McSally flips against DACA to try to beat Arpaio and Ward for US Senate
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Just another liar like McCain and Flake!
McSally's strategy is to divide the right and win.
From the story here:
Arpaio's presence in the contest might divide far right support and thus provide a path for McSally to win the nomination. ... In fending off a primary challenge in 2010, Sen. John McCain released a now infamous ad in which he promised to "compete the danged fence." [sic] But McCain and Flake both co-sponsored the so-called Gang of Eight immigration bill that passed the Senate but was anathema among conservatives, particularly those in the House.
Trump is a FOOL to be worried about jobs in China: China still has 11 million of OUR good American jobs since 1Q2000!
The employment-population ratio peaked in 1Q2000 at 64.6%. There were 136.6 million employed to population of 211.6 million.
In 1Q2018 the ratio is still only 60.3% (154.9 million working to 256.9 million population), and there's President Donald Trump saying "Too many jobs in China lost".
We easily could be working at the level of 64.6%, but we aren't, mostly because greedy American businesses don't want to pay Americans higher wages when they can get cheaper labor abroad. THEY'RE NOT VERY PATRIOTIC. And the politicians keep arranging things that way in exchange for campaign contributions. There's your SWAMP, right there. It's a lot bigger than just Washington DC. The whole damn country is organized against us.
At 64.6%, we could have 11 million more jobs in 1Q2018 than we actually do.
At 64.6%, we could have 11 million more jobs in 1Q2018 than we actually do.
Trump led us to believe he was our champion and was going to fix this, but now he's worried about Chinese jobs! What a fool! And you're a fool if you still think he's on your side.
Our fearless leader has become the tool of Chinese state capitalism: "Too many jobs in China lost"
Obviously the real Donald Trump who in the past might have said "Not enough jobs in China lost!" has disappeared. Sad!
More proof that his body has been snatched.
Monday, May 14, 2018
Why is Trump helping China's ZTE? The answer is obvious.
China instructed Kim Jong Fat Boy to denuclearize. Trump reciprocates. That's all.
Saturday, May 12, 2018
George Will, ineffectual against Trump, engages in ugly attack on Mike Pence, grouping him in with the lynch mob of old
The hatred. The hatred.
Here in WaPo, thrusting:
Be that as it may, on Jan. 27, 1838, Lincoln, then 28, delivered his first great speech, to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield. Less than three months earlier, Elijah Lovejoy, an abolitionist newspaper editor in Alton, Ill., 67 miles from Springfield, was murdered by a pro-slavery mob. Without mentioning Lovejoy — it would have been unnecessary — Lincoln lamented that throughout America, “so lately famed for love of law and order,” there was a “mobocratic spirit” among “the vicious portion of [the] population.” So, “let reverence for the laws . . . become the political religion of the nation.” Pence, one of evangelical Christians’ favorite pin-ups, genuflects at various altars, as the mobocratic spirit and the vicious portion require.
William J. Bennett parries smartly but wholly inadequately, here, avoiding this egregious, baseless affront.
George Will. Dead to me.
John McCain dumped his first wife for a newer model, so dumping Palin as he's dying is completely in keeping with his dirty rotten character
The story of Carol McCain was recounted here.
The HuffPo story about Palin is here.
John McCain uses women, no different than Trump, or Weinstein or the rest of them.
Being a faithful man ought not be a ticket guaranteeing one the presidency, but it ought to be a prerequisite for the office, just like being born here (used to be).
Friday, May 11, 2018
Baylor University lecturer imagines materialism isn't an ideology
And, by cracky, what we need is ideology, here:
Abraham Lincoln watched [democracy] dissolve in the early years of his presidency, but he understood that the real foundation of the U.S. was an ideological enterprise, not a material nuts-and-bolts one. For him, the Declaration of Independence was a more important founding document than the Constitution, even though that's what the inconclusive political fights leading up to the Civil War had all been about.
To these people just as to Lincoln, the Constitution is the problem.
Reminds me of no one so much as Obama. Definitely a Yankee that guy is.
Mommas don't let your babies grow up to go to Baylor.
Arbeit macht GDP: At root America's basic economic problems lie at every level in not working enough
There is no age tranche working up to its potential, especially not teenagers, but also not the college-aged, not the core 25 to 54 years, and now not even the over 55 crowd. The latter in fact has only been held up more or less by those over 65 ramping up their participation in the wake of The Great Recession.
It all starts with the phenomenon of "failure to launch" in the teenage years. Baby Boomers didn't simply have fewer children and work less. They had fewer children who also lacked a vigorous work ethic. And that now appears institutionalized in the children of the children as well. This has now rippled through the system, as can be seen in the increasingly later dates for peak average annual participation in the age tranche charts below (1979, 1987, 1997, 2012, and 2016-2017?). GDP will not improve without a cultural reestimation of work. And a return to work will not occur without a need to return, which can only mean one thing:
 |
| 16 to 19 |
 |
| 20 to 24 |
 |
| 25 to 54 |
 |
| 55 and over |
 |
| 65 and over (subset) |
Wednesday, May 9, 2018
So John McCain announces he opposes Trump's CIA nominee
All I can say is he'd better hurry up with the rest of the items on his bucket list.
I don't know what I'll do if I don't find out about the breakfast cereals he forbids before he dies.
Tuesday, May 8, 2018
The money line of the day comes from Niall Ferguson
Here in The Boston Globe:
A state that requires dictatorship to be stable is not as strong as it looks — just as one based on individual liberty is not as weak as it looks.
Monday, May 7, 2018
Sunday, May 6, 2018
Hooah: 2nd Fleet, deactivated in 2011, to resume operations to protect East Coast and North Atlantic
Read all about it, here.
The article from WaPo is confused about the US Fleet. The 7th Fleet is Japan-based. The Italy-based Fleet is the 6th, not the 7th.
"Navy officials had previously recommended reactivating the fleet as part of broader force structure reviews following last year's deadly row of collisions among ships at the Japan-based 7th Fleet. In a separate statement, Richardson invoked Defense Secretary Jim Mattis' national defense strategy as key guidance to reestablish the fleet, which will extend halfway across the Atlantic until it meets the area of responsibility for Italy-based 7th Fleet."
The Limbaugh Theorem again, in a headline: Republicans run like they're not in charge of anything
Rush will never admit that this is the same thing that Obama did, but it is.
It's especially true of Trump, who as president could run an operation to secure the southern border (without congressional support, approval or even funding) just like Eisenhower, but won't. Instead he pretends there's some nefarious impediment keeping him from doing his job, which he isn't going to have after 2020 if he doesn't get down to business.
Trump has no jobs achievement, let alone an historic one
The idea that Trump has an historic jobs achievement is based on the increasingly meaningless unemployment rate, which notoriously doesn't count many people who are not working. The idea that "essentially every American who wants a job could find one" is rubbish. For the anecdotal evidence, I suggest you ask any of the millions of unemployed and underemployed non-management people over the age of 50, most of whom got their walking papers in the Great Recession because they made too much money in the opinion of management. If you are looking for the hidden, nefarious, recalcitrant forces of deflation in the American economy, look there.
The federal government actually tracks everyone who wants a job but still doesn't have one. They presently number 5.1 million, well above the average low for the data series in 2000 at 4.4 million. But even this number fails to capture the real scope of current labor slack.
If we had a real jobs recovery going on, we'd have employment at pre-Great Recession levels. We don't. Total employed as a percentage of the population in April 2018 is at not quite 60.4%. Before the recession it averaged 63.2% over the previous twelve years. That latter rate would yield 162.6 million working in April 2018 instead of the 155.3 million we actually have.
It's that simple. We have the people. What we're missing is 7.3 million of them working.
Them's the facts, no matter what the cheerleaders for Trump keep shouting.
Robin Williams unknowingly suffered from diffuse Lewy body dementia, the second most common form after Alzheimer’s
From the story here:
Three months later, the autopsy results came in. His brain had left its own suicide note.
Saturday, May 5, 2018
Grand Rapids, Michigan, Climate Update for April 2018
Grand Rapids, Michigan, Climate Update for April 2018
Max temp 74, Mean Max temp 79
Min temp 16, Mean Min temp 22
Av temp 40.1, Mean Av temp 46.5
Precip 2.85, Mean precip 3.30
Snowfall 6.0, Mean snowfall 2.4
Heating Degree Days 740, Mean HDD 553
Using HDD, the cold season to date has been just 1% warmer than the mean. Season to date HDD were 6339 vs. season to date mean of 6403.
Friday, May 4, 2018
John Boltneck Kerry, private citizen, has been conducting foreign policy secretly with Iran
A commenter to the story here has it about right:
The liberal media was quick to label possible foreign contact by the Trump campaign as a Logan Act violation. Kerry pursuing his own foreign policy out of office ... no problem. Hypocrite, thy name is liberal democrat.
Maybe dropouts from the labor force were a cause of the Great Recession rather than a result
The high rate of dropping out of the labor force we've become accustomed to since the Great Recession actually predates it by a decade, suggesting that dropping out may be a cause of the Great Recession rather than a result of it. Continued slow growth of GDP since the Great Recession can also be explained by the absence of these inputs.
The crisis in growth of personal income since 2007 shows why it feels like a depression
The 13.9% growth of personal income between 2007 and 2017 is the worst since the Great Depression and is 60% off the average growth rate of 35%.
Somebody should elect somebody to do something about this!
Jeffrey Snider: Fix the suffering in the labor force or next time you might actually get socialism
Here:
The American labor force is suffering like it hasn’t since the 1930’s, but nobody seems willing to challenge Economists’ easily disproved claims.
Into that vacuum had swept Mr. Trump himself, but also Mr. Sanders. The mere election of the former didn’t immediately fix the problem; rather, things have gotten worse since the campaign ended (to be clear, it had nothing to do with Trump . . .). May Day is still only trending toward becoming an official holiday.
Thursday, May 3, 2018
Bill Cosby's lasting contribution to America: Finally SOMEONE gets child rapist Roman Polanski booted from The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
There was NO WAY the black guy was going to get expelled while the white guy got to remain.
Way to go Brownie!
Story here.
Failure of nerve: America has basically ceded control of the South China Sea to China since the 1950s
China has been playing a long game while America has dithered year after year with changeable, irresolute leadership. This is one important reason China laughs at America's political system. It knows it can get away with this stuff as long as it waits us out. Right now it is howling with laughter as everyone is consumed with Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels while it installs offensive missiles with impunity. We are a joke! And one day this joke may mean many dead Americans and the loss of freedom for countless others.
From the story here:
While the installation of missile platforms are [sic] new to the Spratlys, China has already deployed similar systems in the nearby Paracel Islands. Satellite images of Woody Island, Beijing's military headquarters in the South China Sea, show deployments of Y-8 transport aircraft as well as J-10 and J-11 fighter jets. China first took possession of Woody Island in 1955 and has since outfitted it with ports, aircraft hangars, communication facilities, helipads and a runway. [Gregory] Poling notes that this particular outpost serves as a blueprint for China's future developments on Fiery Cross Reef, Subi Reef and Mischief Reef in the Spratly Islands.
Laugh of the Day: If paying off a hooker means Trump has to leave office, Washington DC will be empty by tomorrow
A caller just now to the Rush Limbaugh show.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)