Friday, August 18, 2017

Trump may or may not be building the military, but he sure as hell isn't building The Wall


Bannon is out

NYT, here.

Laugh of the Day: Daily Stormer found a workaround and is back up on the internet

https://dailystormer.lol

Pat Buchanan: Gov. McAwful goes full scalawag

Here at TakiMag:

Two years ago, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe called the giant statues of Lee and “Stonewall” Jackson on Richmond’s Monument Avenue “parts of our heritage.” After Charlottesville, New York-born-and-bred McAuliffe, entertaining higher ambitions, went full scalawag, demanding the statues be pulled down as “flashpoints for hatred, division, and violence.” Who hates the statues, Terry? Who’s going to cause the violence? Answer: The Democratic left whom Terry must now appease. McAuliffe is echoed by Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, the Democratic candidate in November to succeed McAuliffe. GOP nominee Ed Gillespie wants Monument Avenue left alone. The election is the place to decide this, but the left will not wait. ... Like ISIS ... the new barbarism has come to America. This is going to become a blazing issue, not only between but within the parties.

Kevin Williamson isn't just tone deaf to the political violence going on, he's oblivious to it


Just as he is oblivious to the rape of the South not just in that damned war but in Reconstruction, and counsels unemployed whites without college degrees today to just die already.

Republican refusals to denounce political violence on all sides proves once and for all that there isn't a dime's worth of difference between the two political parties.

Thursday, August 17, 2017

Everyone named Jefferson or Washington better change your name quick

You could be next.

Antifa thugs beat up an old guy on the streets of Charlottesville VA

Laugh of the Day: Only one is descended from the apes


Fascism is a genocide occurring underneath your noses but you're OK with that


If you deny freedom of speech to a fascist "by all means necessary" then you've become one


Not my father's America: 44% now reject . . . freedom of speech, which means tyranny isn't simply theoretical anymore


Charles Mackay: Men think in herds, go mad in herds, but recover only one by one

"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."

Great minds: Just yesterday I was thinking the Charlottesville aftermath should be in Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds


Vote the Will's Informed Electorate scam is (now?) owned by a Utah Republican named Brett Payne

A recent commenter noted that there has been a change in the registry information for vote the will dot org, from Arizona to Utah. Whereas previously the Registrant Name was private, now it is Brett Payne of Utah.

There could have been a sale involved, or it could be the same people with a new face and legal identity. The website looks retooled, too. Hard to say which. In any event . . .

A search of public records on Al Gore's amazing internet shows that Brett Payne is indeed a registered Utah Republican, as the commenter stated.

I'm sure this guy is doing nothing illegal.

It's just a slick operation, you know, slick like a snake. Millions of idiots will open their wallets for this guy just for the fleeting experience that someone out there cares about their opinion . . . for twenty bucks.

Do robots have feelings?

This guy must be laughing all the way to the bank!

  

Domain Name: VOTETHEWILL.ORG
Registry Domain ID: D187341325-LROR
Registrar WHOIS Server:
Registrar URL: http://www.godaddy.com
Updated Date: 2017-03-26T02:55:49Z
Creation Date: 2016-04-04T15:17:46Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2020-04-04T15:17:46Z
Registrar Registration Expiration Date:
Registrar: GoDaddy.com, LLC
Registrar IANA ID: 146
Registrar Abuse Contact Email:
Registrar Abuse Contact Phone:
Reseller:
Domain Status: clientDeleteProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientDeleteProhibited
Domain Status: clientRenewProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientRenewProhibited
Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited
Domain Status: clientUpdateProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientUpdateProhibited
Registry Registrant ID: C190960501-LROR
Registrant Name: Brett Payne
Registrant Organization:
Registrant Street: 871 Milestone Drive
Registrant City: Smithfield
Registrant State/Province: UT
Registrant Postal Code: 84335
Registrant Country: US
Registrant Phone: +1.8019107441
Registrant Phone Ext:
Registrant Fax:
Registrant Fax Ext:
Registrant Email: brettgp@hotmail.com
Registry Admin ID: C190960503-LROR
Admin Name: Brett Payne
Admin Organization:
Admin Street: 871 Milestone Drive
Admin City: Smithfield
Admin State/Province: UT
Admin Postal Code: 84335
Admin Country: US
Admin Phone: +1.8019107441
Admin Phone Ext:
Admin Fax:
Admin Fax Ext:
Admin Email: brettgp@hotmail.com
Registry Tech ID: C190960502-LROR
Tech Name: Brett Payne
Tech Organization:
Tech Street: 871 Milestone Drive
Tech City: Smithfield
Tech State/Province: UT
Tech Postal Code: 84335
Tech Country: US
Tech Phone: +1.8019107441
Tech Phone Ext:
Tech Fax:
Tech Fax Ext:
Tech Email: brettgp@hotmail.com
Name Server: NS71.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
Name Server: NS72.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
DNSSEC: unsigned
URL of the ICANN Whois Inaccuracy Complaint Form: https://www.icann.org/wicf/
>>> Last update of WHOIS database: 2017-08-17T12:40:41Z <<<

For more information on Whois status codes, please visit https://icann.org/epp

Access to Public Interest Registry WHOIS information is provided to assist persons in determining the contents of a domain name registration record in the Public Interest Registry registry database. The data in this record is provided by Public Interest Registry for informational purposes only, and Public Interest Registry does not guarantee its accuracy. This service is intended only for query-based access. You agree that you will use this data only for lawful purposes and that, under no circumstances will you use this data to: (a) allow, enable, or otherwise support the transmission by e-mail, telephone, or facsimile of mass unsolicited, commercial advertising or solicitations to entities other than the data recipient's own existing customers; or (b) enable high volume, automated, electronic processes that send queries or data to the systems of Registry Operator, a Registrar, or Afilias except as reasonably necessary to register domain names or modify existing registrations. All rights reserved. Public Interest Registry reserves the right to modify these terms at any time. By submitting this query, you agree to abide by this policy.

"No free speech for fascists" is incoherent and Orwellian

Charles C. W. Cooke, here:

“No free speech for fascists” is an incoherent, almost Orwellian, position. Happily – and on a routinely “bipartisan” basis – the Supreme Court concurs.

Fascism is when companies get rich because the government made you buy their health insurance

"It's not fascism when we do it!"


Tuesday, August 15, 2017

Chuck Todd: "I'm a bit shaken"

Trump gives pugilistic press conference, finally blames alt-left for Charlottesville violence and media for lying about it


"I do think there's blame on both sides," Trump said. "You look at both sides -- I think there's blame on both sides and I have no doubt about it and you don't have any doubt about it either. And if you reported it accurately, you would say."

Young lily white communists march for "full racial equality" in LA after Charlottesville

Democratic Socialists of America
These young skulls full of mush will be the first victims of the hammer and sickle

Enjoy it before the Taliban antifa deface it


Football 20 years ago


Obama took 5 days to comment on Ferguson riots and never condemned them, Trump actually condemned Charlottesville immediately


Methodist pastor, dead ringer for election thief Al Franken, admits to plagiarizing parts of book containing devotions he shared with Hillary Clinton

Story here.

Kleptocrat, rhymes with Democrat.

stole words
stole an election

Big fat anti-Trump lunatic arrested for murdering GOP precinct committeeman, crickets from antifa enablers in media

Story here.

Antifa and Black Lives Matter are no different than the Taliban expunging the Buddhas of Afghanistan


Democrats are nuttier than Republicans by 2 to 1, and independents by nearly as much

Democrats believe in reincarnation, yoga, astrology, spiritual energy and the evil eye 176 to 87 for Republicans in a Pew Research study from 2009, a ratio of 2:1. So-called independents aren't far behind at 163 to 87, for a ratio of 1.87:1.

And when it comes to being in touch with the dead, ghosts and fortune tellers, the story is similar. Democrats buy this stuff over Republicans 163 to 81, also a ratio of 2:1. Independents beat Republicans 143 to 81, for a ratio of 1.76:1.

Apart from the greater prevalence of wacky beliefs among Democrats and independents generally, the results indicate that the much-vaunted independents are much more like the Democrats than they care to admit (nutty).

If someone really wanted to understand what accounts for America's turn toward the insane, go there.
I compiled the data above from the Pew findings, found here.

Monday, August 14, 2017

The country's become more liberal as "moderates" decline 21% since 1992

Gallup reported in January here that the country's moderates have declined from 43% in 1992 to 34% in 2016, a decline of nearly 21%.

At the same time the country's liberals have risen in number from 17% in 1992 to 25% in 2016, an increase of 47%.

Meanwhile conservatives are still stuck at 36%.

This means the country has become more polarized along the conservative-liberal axis as a huge part of the squishy middle has converted to the left.

My hunch is that the real story is that as the older generations have died off, what has been exposed is the more liberal elements of the Baby Boom generation and especially of their children and grandchildren, who were all indoctrinated in liberalism by the public schools, which were gradually taken over by the left after the 1960s.

I experienced this first hand in my high school in the early 1970s. I remember how two new young teachers freshly minted from college stuck out like sore thumbs compared with the old guard of my teachers. They wasted no time and immediately introduced us to the work of such luminaries as the Marxist Bertolt Brecht and the gay counterculture revolutionist Charles A. Reich, a teacher of both Bill and Hillary Clinton at Yale. Meanwhile I learned useful things from my lunkhead economics teacher, like how to do my taxes, but the textbook for the other parts of the class was the socialist Robert Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers. Fortunately for me, my American History teacher loved America and the US Constitution. His name was Walt Anderson. I think now he saved me.

I survived to become a conservative, but obviously, most of you didn't.    

McCain favorability is up because everyone knows he's going to die soon, not because they like him

Gallup, here, reports him at 58% in August 2017, up from 53% two years ago.

Pure sympathy bump of 9.4%, but that's it. Reminds me of all those protester kids in Charlottesville swarming the car crash victims, hovering around taking picture after picture.

Alive John McCain sucks. And dead he still will.

United States of Cuckistan: Not even "GOP" will condemn antifa (she means Trump)

Yes, girls can be cucks, too. Unnaturally! See Johnson's definition of woman preacher.

Sunday, August 13, 2017

Laugh of the Day: Frank Bruni claims to be a white man

In The New York Times.

Charlottesville cops called-off Unite the Right's rally and forcibly dispersed it from the park into the streets, into antifa

Video here.

NYT quotes antifa member saying there was no police presence on the streets in Charlottesville


Brittany Caine-Conley, a minister in training at Sojourners United Church of Christ, who had come with other faith leaders to protest against the white nationalists, said she was horrified to see officers ins the park watching the violence take place outside in the street.

“There was no police presence,’’ she said. “We were watching people punch each other; people were bleeding all the while police were inside of barricades at the park watching. It was essentially just brawling on the street and community members trying to protect each other.”

Asked about the brawling and why police did not do more to control it, Brian Moran, Virginia’s secretary of public safety, said in an interview on Sunday that “it was a volatile situation and its unfortunate people resorted to violence.’’ But, he said, “From our plan, to insure the safety of our citizens and property, it went extremely well.’’

One ticket in Illinois won the $393 million Megamillions jackpot on Friday . . .

That's 2.6% of Illinois' unpaid bills totaling $15 billion.

Good luck collecting, buddy.

We're not in Skokie anymore, Toto: Another local police department sides with the violent left

But I repeat myself.

Saturday, August 12, 2017

Was Seth Rich, murdered five days later, the DNC leaker after all?

From the DNC inside job story in The Nation, here:

Forensicator’s first decisive findings, made public in the paper dated July 9, concerned the volume of the supposedly hacked material and what is called the transfer rate—the time a remote hack would require. The metadata established several facts in this regard with granular precision: On the evening of July 5, 2016, 1,976 megabytes of data were downloaded from the DNC’s server. The operation took 87 seconds. This yields a transfer rate of 22.7 megabytes per second. ... 

Time stamps in the metadata provide further evidence of what happened on [Tuesday] July 5. The stamps recording the download indicate that it occurred in the Eastern Daylight Time Zone at approximately 6:45 pm. This confirms that the person entering the DNC system was working somewhere on the East Coast of the United States. In theory the operation could have been conducted from Bangor or Miami or anywhere in between—but not Russia, Romania, or anywhere else outside the EDT zone. Combined with Forensicator’s findings on the transfer rate, the time stamps constitute more evidence that the download was conducted locally, since delivery overheads—conversion of data into packets, addressing, sequencing times, error checks, and the like—degrade all data transfers conducted via the Internet, more or less according to the distance involved.

Pat Lawrence in The Nation concludes the so-called Russia hack of the DNC was instead a leak, an inside job


There was no hack of the Democratic National Committee’s system on July 5 last year—not by the Russians, not by anyone else. Hard science now demonstrates it was a leak—a download executed locally with a memory key or a similarly portable data-storage device. In short, it was an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system. This casts serious doubt on the initial “hack,” as alleged, that led to the very consequential publication of a large store of documents on WikiLeaks last summer.

It's a red letter day when the left complains about the indefensible corrupt manipulations of language

Affordable care, comrades.

Here in The Nation:

All this was set in motion when the DNC’s mail server was first violated in the spring of 2016 and by subsequent assertions that Russians were behind that “hack” and another such operation, also described as a Russian hack, on July 5. These are the foundation stones of the edifice just outlined. The evolution of public discourse in the year since is worthy of scholarly study: Possibilities became allegations, and these became probabilities. Then the probabilities turned into certainties, and these evolved into what are now taken to be established truths. By my reckoning, it required a few days to a few weeks to advance from each of these stages to the next. This was accomplished via the indefensibly corrupt manipulations of language repeated incessantly in our leading media.

Gotta love Alabama: Judge Roy "10 Commandments" Moore widens lead to +12 in latest poll


The Judge has been endorsed by Phil Robertson and Chuck Norris, but notably not by President Trump.

h/t Real Clear Politics

Friday, August 11, 2017

National Review notices that "North Korea just commits some random, unprovoked act of aggression every once in a while"

Here, but doesn't get that it's North Koreans' quintessential view of themselves.

I wonder how many artillery rounds of nerve agent, which Fat Boy used to kill his half-brother, are stockpiled for the much feared "conventional" attack on Seoul.

Laugh of the Day: Hillary's newest cause

Seen here.

You say Korans, I say Koreans . . .


Newt Gingrich is full of crap: Mitch McConnell promised immediate repeal in January 2017 in December 2016

This morning on The Laura Ingraham Show, hosted by Raymond Arroyo, Gingrich criticized Trump for making this too personal.




Thursday, August 10, 2017

Laugh of the Day 3.0: Norwegian feminist feels guilty his Somali rapist was deported after serving his sentence

“I am afraid that no girls want me and that other men laugh at me. Afraid that I'll be perceived as anti-feminist when I say that young men who are struggling should get more attention."

Ha ha ha ha ha!

Stockholm obviously exports its syndrome. I wonder how much they make off that? Good thing they're not in NATO or they'd enervate the entire alliance, not just Norway.

Laugh of the Day 2.0: G&%lag, exporting censorship one search at a time


Laugh of the Day 1.0: G&%gle Diversity


Rush features Dinesh D'Souza blaming Democrats for DIRECTLY inspiring Hitler

Here, discussing points from his forthcoming book:

Hitler got the idea [of German expansion in Europe] from the Jacksonian Democrats of the 19th century [who violated the treaties with the American Indians and drove them west]. ...

[O]ne of the Nazis ... who happened to have studied in America, basically told the Nazis ... you can’t start the world’s first racist state because the Democrats in the American south have already done it. ... [A]ll the things we’re talking about — outlawing intermarriage, segregation, discrimination — they already have these laws; they exist. So what we have to do, he said, is take the Democratic laws, cross out the word ‘black’ and write in the word ‘Jew’ and we’re home free. So the Nazis then began a detailed examination of the Democratic Party laws. ...

The Nazis, in the 1930s, based both their forced-sterilization laws as well as their euthanasia laws on the models that had been created by Margaret Sanger. As Margaret Sanger said, “More children from the fit and less from the unfit,” and that’s how she viewed birth control. And not as a matter of giving every woman a choice, but as a matter of convincing the sort of, the successful and the fit, to have more kids and the unsuccessful — the sick, the “imbeciles” and what she considered to be the disposable people — essentially to prevent them from “breeding” altogether.

The other idea that a California eugenicist named Paul Popenoe had proposed ... “We have all these useless people who are already born, and so it’s not enough to have sterilization. We have to have euthanasia. We have to kill these people off. The first people that they killed were not the Jews. They were the sick, the disabled, the group that was called “imbeciles.” And later, the Nazi euthanasia program was expanded into Hitler’s Final Solution.

Those footnotes better be good.

Trump is fabulous right now answering questions . . .

. . . ripping into McConnell and Republicans on repeal of Obamacare and into Bill Clinton and Obama for enabling North Korea.

He's fightin' mad.

I love it when Rush Limbaugh compares Bill Clinton to the Rosenberg spies

It's a crystal clear example of the success of Fabian socialism.

Big Dallas GOP donor closes his checkbook until Republicans pass Obamacare repeal and tax reform

Story here.

The US State Department never searched its own system for requested Benghazi e-mails

'[State] has not, however, searched the one records system over which it has always had control and that is almost certain to contain some responsive records: the state.gov e-mail server,' [Judge] Mehta wrote.

Read the whole thing, here.

To get compliance and transparency from the Obama administration, you had to spell it out for them every time, otherwise you'd get bupkis. 

That was the MO of the Obama administration: slow-walking, foot-dragging, infinite parsing and obstruction.

Obama's Defense Intelligence Agency knew about North Korean nukes in 2013, Obama tried to suppress it, and WaPo reported neither

So forgive us, Kurt Andersen, for believing in conspiracies.

His side no doubt will respond with one of their own: Trump is leaking lies in order to start a war.

From the story here:

During an April 11, 2013, House Armed Services Committee hearing, Congressman Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., inadvertently revealed several unclassified sentences from a DIA report that said DIA had determined with “moderate confidence” that North Korea has the capability to make a nuclear weapon small enough to be launched with a ballistic missile.

The Director of National Intelligence and Obama officials subsequently tried to dismiss Lamborn’s disclosure by claiming the DIA assessment was an outlier that did not reflect the views of the rest of the U.S. Intelligence Community.

It was clear what Obama officials were doing in 2013.  The DIA report represented inconvenient facts that threatened President Obama’s North Korea “strategic patience” policy -- a policy to do nothing about North Korea and kick this problem down the road to the next president.  Obama officials tried to downplay the DIA assessment to prevent it from being used to force the president to employ a more assertive North Korea policy.

It’s worth noting that the Trump White House has not condemned the Washington Post story as a leak.  That’s probably because it was an authorized disclosure of classified information to advance President Trump’s North Korea strategy.

Kurt Andersen in The Atlantic projects his now-rejected experience of libertarianism onto all of the GOP and conservatism

Unfortunately for Kurt, he thinks recovery means doing some cherry-picking of his own, exchanging one insanity for another. It never occurs to him that while Paul Ryan found his life's inspiration in a novel, millions of young Americans today derive theirs from film. If forced to choose, I'll take active insanity anyday over passive. Kinda makes you miss the "Jesus is my favorite philosopher" president, doesn't it? And how could anyone still seriously speak of an anti-psychiatry "craze"? I must have missed that in my "Man from U.N.C.L.E." years.

In other words, it takes a kook to know a kook. In his own words Andersen expresses the affinity which exists between the insane, the left and libertarianism.



Relativist professors enabled science-denying Christians, and the antipsychiatry craze in the ’60s appealed simultaneously to left-wingers and libertarians (as well as to Scientologists) ... Another way the GOP got loopy was by overdoing libertarianism. I have some libertarian tendencies, but at full-strength purity it’s an ideology most boys grow out of. On the American right since the ’80s, however, they have not. Republicans are very selective, cherry-picking libertarians: Let business do whatever it wants and don’t spoil poor people with government handouts; let individuals have gun arsenals but not abortions or recreational drugs or marriage with whomever they wish; and don’t mention Ayn Rand’s atheism. Libertarianism, remember, is an ideology whose most widely read and influential texts are explicitly fiction. “I grew up reading Ayn Rand,” Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has said, “and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are, and what my beliefs are.” It was that fiction that allowed him and so many other higher-IQ Americans to see modern America as a dystopia in which selfishness is righteous and they are the last heroes. “I think a lot of people,” Ryan said in 2009, “would observe that we are right now living in an Ayn Rand novel.” I’m assuming he meant Atlas Shrugged, the novel that Trump’s secretary of state (and former CEO of ExxonMobil) has said is his favorite book. It’s the story of a heroic cabal of men’s-men industrialists who cause the U.S. government to collapse so they can take over, start again, and make everything right.

The North Korea problem in a nutshell

George W. Bush cried wolf in Iraq, and now when faced with a genuine threat, Democrats and Republicans alike think Trump is evil for crying like a wolf. They are in denial, shrinking from reality, and incapable of anything save appeasement. There is incontrovertible evidence of a pattern of North Korean use of force, not just threats of it. Do they really want to be responsible for the deaths of many innocents before we are forced to take out North Korea's nuclear capability?

They both agree on abortion, so I guess the answer is yes.

Wednesday, August 9, 2017

Cost-effective warfare using the B61-12

The B61-12, here:

The B61-12 atomic bombs, for instance, are to undergo a life-extension program that will cost roughly $9.5 billion. There are 400 to 500 of these bombs, says Gronlund, which means refurbishing one will cost about $20 million.

Flashback to 12/6/2016 to Mitch McConnell: "The ObamaCare repeal resolution will be the first item up in the New Year"

Here at The Hill.

No hurry, mate.


h/t Rush

Has anyone connected Otto Warmbier's death with the North Korean novel by Han Sorya?

The North Korean novel "Jackals" from 1951 by Han Sorya provides an MO for what might have happened to Otto Warmbier.

In the novel an American missionary is showcased injecting germs into a Korean boy to kill him. You can read about it here.

I don't think it's a coincidence an American visits North Korea and suffers a similar fate at their hands. I'm guessing the North Koreans actively gave something to Otto Warmbier which they knew would kill him eventually.

Rush is absolutely right: Trump is purposely not acting "presidential" toward North Korea to keep them off balance

It's actually a North Korean value to commit spontaneous outbursts of violence. The North Koreans have never encountered the same from an American president, until now.

Smoking pot increases blood pressure and risk of death from hypertension

Story here.

Alabama US Senate race to replace Sessions shows how divided is "conservatism"

Trump has endorsed Luther Strange (all those promises to pick the very best people should have been a warning).

Mo Brooks is endorsed by Hannity, Ingraham and the Tea Party Patriots.

Judge Roy "10 Commandments" Moore, endorsed by Chuck Norris, has a 10-point lead.

Story here.

Tuesday, August 8, 2017

Multiple jobholding in July peaked in 1997, the go-go decade for jobs, at 8.05 million

In July 2017 it's only 7.3 million, not seasonally adjusted.

Complain that it's not more, not that it's too many.

Some people just don't get it. 

The Wall, a concrete policy which can't be reversed instantly by the next president

Levin: Republican Congress can't agree to repeal Obamacare, now we're supposed to give them war power?

Now you're talkin'.

Mark Levin is at his best to start the show this evening

He's ripping every president back to G. H. W. Bush as appeasers of North Korea, our feckless Congress, our fifth column media, and even the libertarians, observing that the president is almost alone in facing this problem.

One of Trump's biggest enemies on the radio is tonight one of his biggest supporters.

You'd better pray I don't win Megamillions tonight

With my luck I'll win and a nuclear war will start with North Korea.

Sunday, August 6, 2017

Hiroshima survivor admits school girls were being trained as decoders for the Japanese army

So they were legitimate targets.

From the story here:

On the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, Setsuko Nakamura sat with her Grade 8 classmates on the floor of her private girls school, listening to a lecture about duty to the emperor. Setsuko and some of her classmates had been training as decoding assistants for the Japanese army, in preparation for the final invasion by Allied forces.

Like most libertarians, Ben Domenech is a progressive who imagines America began as a tabula rasa on which we wrote "manifest destiny"

I'll bet he's memorized Emma Lazarus' poem, too. Ben is deeply confused about the American founding.

Here, where you might be forgiven for thinking he's talking about Australia:

Once there was a country born without an inheritance. It was a civilization carved by the rejected refuse of the old world, by the religious freaks, criminals, bastards, and orphans. They were the type of men and women willing to risk all to cross the wine-dark sea in search of their fortune. They came from all the corners of the world, and in this land they worked the good earth and made their way. In time they built marketplaces and cities and governments, and threw off the shackles of their far-off, old-world rulers to make their own law. Where other revolutions had been crushed, they prevailed. They risked it all, and won.

Saturday, August 5, 2017

The individual insurance market has shrunk by 13% in one year, led by those unsubsidized

From the story here:

As of March 2017, the individual insurance market totaled 17.6 [million-doh!] people. That is down from 20.2 million one year prior. This is a decrease of 2.6 million people, a 13 percent drop in the size of the overall individual-health-insurance market. 12.2 million bought their health insurance on the state- and federally run Obamacare exchanges [vs. 12.7 million the previous year]. 5.4 million people bought their insurance off of the Obamacare exchanges [vs. 7.5 million the previous year]. ... In other words, enrollment is steady among those who receive subsidies but declining dramatically among those who do not. ... In fact, in 2015, 7.5 million people paid the fine, while 6.5 million paid the fine in 2016, according to the IRS. ... After four years of attempts by the Obama administration, no more than 40 percent of those eligible for subsidies availed themselves of the program.

Liberalism has become illiberalism, insisting that bombing is the only way forward

Usefully discussed here.

"We have to destroy the village in order to save it."

Three easy steps to joining the middle class

1. Get a job
2. Marry someone who also has a job
3. Pool your resources and buy a house

Three salvos this morning in the libertarian war against homeownership: Fortunately human nature is stronger




Friday, August 4, 2017

There's something you don't see everyday: Grossly UNDERESTIMATING "not in the labor force"

It's actually 94.6 million in July 2017, not 50 million.

Among all those millions, just 5.4 million "want a job now". The rest are old and retired, young and in school, unable to work because of disability, homemakers, etc.

You people out there just don't get it.

If employers could fire 30 million of your asses in 2009 and get along just fine without you, they still can.

If anyone's lying about GDP, it's Rush Limbaugh

Rush Limbaugh just said Obama's never had real GDP above 1.5%, which is just silly. The man doesn't have a clue what he's talking about.


Full-time job growth under Trump so far beats Obama and Bush, but that's about it

Note that employers panicked under Obama and fired people like crazy after his election, so there was a steep decline in full-time.

So far the growth of full-time shows a tentative thumbs-up to Trump, but still nothing like the vote of confidence typical after previous changes at the helm of state.

The puny 2.5% growth under George W. Bush, keep in mind, was still all pre-911 and post-Reagan bull market, which ended in August 2000. Trump is doing better than Bush, but not by much.




Thursday, August 3, 2017

Robert Mueller contributed money to anti-marriage, pro-Obama crackpot William Weld in 1996

Reported here:

Mr. Mueller made two contributions in 1996 to Republican William Weld, then a candidate for a U.S. senate seat in Massachusetts, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks money in politics.

From my lips to God's ears: Death Wish is back, starring Bruce Willis

Trailer here.

White House renovations August 4-21, so Trump's headed to New Jersey

Not Martha's Vineyard.

Insane libertarian fixation on mortgage interest deduction, edition 4716

You would think a libertarian would acknowledge that shielding YOUR money from taxation is a good thing, but you would be wrong. There are at least seven tax loss expenditures more costly to the tax man than the mortgage interest deduction, but their crazy war on it continues nonetheless. What it masks is the underlying hatred of conservatism homeownership represents. Homeowners settle down and raise kids instead of sacrificing themselves to the needs of global capitalists. That's their real problem with it.




Tuesday, August 1, 2017

Grand Rapids, Michigan, climate update for July 2017

Mean average temperature was 72.5 degrees F in July 2017 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The mean is 72.2. The average to date is 50.0. The mean to date is 46.7.

The lowest minimum temperature was 53. The mean is 49.

The highest maximum temperature was 90. The mean is 94. July is the warmest month of the year by average temperature (above), so it's not going to be a very hot summer since it's all downhill from here.

Precipitation was 1.12 inches. The mean is 3.13.

Cooling degree days came to 240, which is the mean. The total to date is 432. The mean to date is 422.

I have corrected my climate update for June 2017. Either I or NWS reported incorrect figures for lowest minimum temperatures and for cooling degree days, not sure which. I noticed the discrepancy today and fixed it. May 2017 checks out OK.

The three month Oceanic Nino Index value has averaged -0.32 over the last eleven months, climbing to +0.5 in the last measurement period in April-May-June after a weak cooling event in the Pacific lasting five months.  

America is a country full of addictive drug users: 92 million opioid users in 2015, 2 million abusers

From the story here:

"A very large proportion and large number of adults use these medications in a given year," said study author Dr. Wilson Compton, deputy director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Bethesda, Maryland. "I was still a bit surprised that 38 percent or about 92 million people used prescription opioids in 2015."

Stupid Donald Trump decides to own the stock market, and when it crashes he will


Whence the "credulity baked into the culture to make room for a Bernie Madoff"?

Pondered here rather lazily.

May I suggest:


What's the difference between Australia and The United States?

The crooks went to Australia against their will.

Most Obamacare mandate fines last year came from far more low to moderate income people than CBO estimated

In other words, Obamacare penalizes people who can least afford it.

Obamacare is just another case of liberals raising taxes on the have-nots and screwing up their healthcare in the process.

From Jed Graham, here:

What is striking about the data is that the average payment is barely higher than the minimum payment of $695. Since people were required to pay the greater of $695 or 2.5% of taxable income above the filing threshold ($10,350 in 2017), one takeaway is that most of the $2.8 billion in fines paid through April appear to have come from people with modest to moderate incomes. As a frame of reference, CBO's 2014 analysis implied that the average mandate payment for this tax season would be roughly $1,075 and that the total amount paid by people earning up to three times the poverty level would barely exceed $1 billion. ... Based on mandate collections that streamed in after April in prior years, the full-year total is likely to rise to roughly 5 million tax forms with mandated payments totaling closer to $4 billion [an average Obamacare individual mandate fine of $800].