Slate takes The Atlantic to task for not taking the 1% seriously enough

Here in "Actually, the 1 Percent Are Still The Problem".

Actually, the Reagan 1986 tax reform was the problem, but Jordan Weissmann never mentions it.

This despite his wonderful graph of the top 10% over time showing the 1% take-off after the reform. When it becomes easier for the already rich to take high incomes the ordinary way, like everyone else, because of low top marginal rates, less money ends up getting plowed back into productive purposes like it used to before 1986.

We keep believing the myth that "the rich are different than you and me", but they're not. They're as indolent, undisciplined and blinkered as any middle class family leveraged to the hilt which believes it deserves a house a little larger than it can afford, two car payments, the weekly fine dinner out and the expensive annual winter vacation.

The 1% aren't the problem. You will have them always with you, by definition. The problem is human nature, and government's failure to correct for it.

Say what you will about "Christian" belief, previously it at least curbed the 1%'s enthusiasm, with the stick of high marginal income tax rates and the carrot of low long term capital gains taxes.

The American Spectator singles out Michigan for its $16 billion in corporate welfare, but the cronyism trend is up 39% just in the top 10 states since 2015

The story is here, and is more than correct to state:

Unfortunately, crony capitalism is something both parties are willing to get behind. Part of the problem is that voters often approve of these subsidies when the phrase “bringing jobs to the state” is uttered.

We're more like China than we'd like to admit, where state-owned enterprise is the rule. We simply practice state-capitalism-lite.

The data is tracked comprehensively here, updated it appears through 2015. The last time I reported on this in 2015 the top ten crony states alone were up to $96 billion in corporate welfare handouts. Three years later the top 10's cronyism has grown to $133 billion, an increase of nearly 39%.

Free market capitalism this is not.

You ask me why I refuse to fly?

Here's why:

A jobs recovery to the trend line suggests we have a jobs gap of about 5 million in April 2018

The chart shows the trend line for the percent of the population employed in Aprils since 1948. Recovery to this trend line in April 2018 would mean about 62.3% employed instead of 60.3%, implying a jobs gap of about 5.1 million.

Miles to go before he sleeps, and promises to keep . . ..

Seventeen months since his election, Trump ranks fourth since 1948 for putting people back to work

The passionate are mislead

All the art of rhetorick, besides order and perspicuity, only moves the passions, and thereby misleads the judgment.

-- John Locke (1632-1704)

Hired for his "passion for literacy", Caledonia, Michigan high school principal uses "me" when he means "I"

The outgoing interim principal was quoted here about the new hire in 2015:

"Brady [Lake] has created a reputation for being a strong instruction [sic] leader that challenges students and staff alike to reach their full potential. He has a passion for literacy and has worked very hard to implement new instructional [!] models that benefit students," Kingsbury said.

The Sun and News for Saturday, May 19, 2018, however, quotes Lake recently thusly:

"I do not want the board, or anybody, to think that me as an administrator am not 100 percent behind Dr. Martin."

They like to say that they pursue excellence in the school district, it's just that they haven't quite caught up to it yet. 

China intends to go to war to defend its claim to the South China Sea, ready to base its version of B-52 in Spratly Islands

It's like the Japs in WWII all over again.

China air force releases statement, reported here:

“A division of the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) recently organised multiple bombers such as the H-6K to conduct take-off and landing training on islands and reefs in the South China Sea in order to improve our ability to ‘reach all territory, conduct strikes at any time and strike in all directions’,” it said in the statement issued on Friday.

It said the pilot of the H-6K bomber conducted assault training on a designated sea target and then carried out take-offs and landings at an airport in the area, describing the exercise as preparation for “the West Pacific and the battle for the South China Sea”.

Mass projection syndrome: The Swamp is violating all the norms it claims it's defending

Ben Weingarten, here:

The political establishment that wishes to bring down the Trump presidency daily shows itself willing to eviscerate all norms, from corrupting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court and violating Department of Justice procedures, to perhaps even planting FBI informants inside the Trump campaign. It has exhibited a willingness to undermine national security in the form of gross intelligence and law enforcement politicization, game-playing with redactions, and endless leaks. The establishment has taken such actions under the guise of defending “norms” and protecting “national security.”

James claptrap Clapper is glad the FBI abused its power

Here.

No wonder, since he's abused power himself by lying to Congress.

Hooah: Michigan Republicans tell MSU to use $1 billion rainy day fund to pay off sex abuse claims

Reported here:

State Sen. Rick Jones of Grand Ledge and State Rep. Tom Leonard of DeWitt both said any proposals to ask the Michigan Legislature for funding will be dead on arrival. ... Michigan State has a $1 billion unrestricted that could be tapped for the settlement, along with a $59 million insurance fund. "They have a larger rainy day fund than the state does and it's been storming over there for well over a year and they need to pay for this," Leonard said.

Just a reminder of what a real jobs recovery would look like: Multiple months and years with job increases at or above 313,000 a month

Time article joins The Atlantic attacking the new aristocracy's moats, styling it the Baby Boom even though the author doesn't mention it even once

Here in "How Baby Boomers Broke America", which never once mentions the role of the Baby Boom and is really about how lawyers did it.

Steven Brill should sue.

The only human thing which guarantees liberty, equality and fraternity

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.

Laugh of the Day: Breitbart's John Binder thinks Diana DeGette is a Republican

Bebola be back, bro

23 deaths in the so-called Democratic Republic of Congo.

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.

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.   

In canceling talks with South Korea over US military drills, Norths demonstrate the wider objective: Removal of US forces from the peninsula

North Korea cancels meeting with South Korea, threatens to ditch summit with US over military drills

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.

The libertarians over at The American Spectator are defending Trump's flip-flop on ZTE

Here.

It was an enjoyable read back in the 1980s, before it moved . . . East. 

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. 

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.

Why is Trump helping China's ZTE? The answer is obvious.

China instructed Kim Jong Fat Boy to denuclearize. Trump reciprocates. That's all.

Damon Linker: Liberals will struggle foolishly for an emerging Democrat majority through anti-White identity politics

Foolish because, well, because it is.

Here.

They're still chosen, you see, and you're not

This is actually good news: Robots will be cheaper, more reliable, and less likely to try and kill us

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.

The secular Reagan stock market was 3.6 times better than this one (through April 2018)

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).

Dear John McCain, just one thing before you go, courtesy of The Whores (aka Village)

Piss off.

Right Wing Laugh of the Day: SNL's audience is more like some kind of liberal Klan meeting

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:

“from rice paddy to rice paddy in three generations.”

16 to 19

20 to 24

25 to 54

55 and over

65 and over (subset)

Hillary tries to mask the suspected back brace with a scarf

Now you see it . . .

Now you don't

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.

Tanana River Alaska "Ice-outs" have been trending earlier, moving from the end of the first week of May on average to the last day of April

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.

Acceding to the invincibility of the left makes Richard Spencer the ultimate cuck

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."