A point made by a black caller to The Chris Plante Show in the last half hour.
Friday, July 13, 2018
Ann Coulter: The point isn't being made enough that the Russia investigation began because of Peter Strzok
Here.
It was the hubris and political animus of a single high-level FBI functionary, Peter Strzok, which sought to stymie the political will of the American people who elected Trump by presenting a phony dossier as credible evidence to a FISA court in order to surveil a presidential candidate.
The whole thing is reminiscent of nothing so much as the Lois Lerner affair, when one person in The Swamp used her position to curtail the free-speech rights of The Tea Party during the 2010 revolt against Obamacare and government bailouts of all and sundry except the taxpayers.
For 80% of workers, inflation-adjusted average hourly earnings are down 0.22% from a year ago in June 2018
If it were a real jobs boom, we'd see rising real earnings pressure. We don't. The measure has been comparatively flat for two and a half years.
Thursday, July 12, 2018
Political reality in Michigan summer 2018
The left is still here, waiting to be roused.
Barack Obama 2008: 2,872,579
Barack Obama 2012: 2,564,569
Donald Trump 2016: 2,279,543
Hillary Clinton 2016: 2,268,839
While Hillary's deficit to Trump was just 10,704 votes, to Obama it was between 295,730 and 603,740 votes.
Somebody here in Michigan really disliked Hillary.
Who could it be?
Bernie Sanders 2016 Democrat primary: 598,943
Hillary Clinton 2016 Democrat primary: 581,775
Donald Trump 2016 Republican primary: 483,753
all other Republicans 2016 primary: 842,836
Trump admitted in December 2016 in remarks in Grand Rapids that "a bunch of people didn't show up" in November, which is the real reason he won here. Obviously a mix of Bernie supporters/black people couldn't bring themselves to vote for Hillary in the general.
But they didn't just go away.
But they didn't just go away.
Trump approval in Michigan in June 2018 is at 44%, disapproval at 52%. He was at 48/40 in January 2017. That growth of disapproval combined with erosion of approval looks problematic for Michigan Republicans in November.
Michigan's employment level, though much improved, still hasn't recovered to pre-Great Recession levels, and is flat to slightly declining in early 2018. GDP on the other hand is better than the pre-Great Recession period, but is flat in the mid-threes. These things argue for continued Republican governance, but cheerleaders for a Trump boom will encounter a disconnect with the actual experience of people. They are advised to cool it.
Michigan's employment level, though much improved, still hasn't recovered to pre-Great Recession levels, and is flat to slightly declining in early 2018. GDP on the other hand is better than the pre-Great Recession period, but is flat in the mid-threes. These things argue for continued Republican governance, but cheerleaders for a Trump boom will encounter a disconnect with the actual experience of people. They are advised to cool it.
Wednesday, July 11, 2018
Looks like NeverTrumpers went fishing with multiple dossiers at the FBI until NeverTrumper Peter Strzok bit
Hey, we got a live one here!
John Solomon reports in "Did FBI get bamboozled by multiple versions of Trump dossier?":
Now, memos the FBI is turning over to Congress show the bureau possessed at least three versions of the dossier and its mostly unverified allegations of collusion.
Each arrived from a different messenger: McCain, Mother Jones reporter David Corn, Fusion GPS founder (and Steele boss) Glenn Simpson. ...
[T]he generally same information kept walking through the FBI’s door for months — recycled each time by a new character with ties to Hillary Clinton or hatred for Trump — until someone decided they had to act.
That someone was Strzok, whose own anti-Trump bias was laid bare by his personal text messages.
Child separations are a feature, not a bug: Illegals are abandoning their children to the US so they get green cards and become anchors
From the story here quoting Matthew Albence of ICE:
"I will say that for the vast majority of the individuals [who leave their children]… it is because they completed the smuggling act. Their goal when they paid their smuggler, the criminal organizations, these cartels, $5,000 or $6,000 to smuggle themselves into the country, their goal was to get their child here. They’ve accomplished that goal. So if they return on their own [to their home country], they are willing to do so and leave the child here because that was the intended goal of their illegal entry in the first place." ...
DHS officials also cannot force parents who are released from detention in the United States to pick up their claimed children from the shelters operated by the Department of Health and Human Services, said Albence. “If individuals choose not to do that, there is nothing we can do to force them to claim their child,” he said during a telephone interview arranged by DHS.
Foreign children and youths who are left in the United States by their parents are allowed to file for green cards on the grounds that their parents abandoned them. The migrant children are also eligible for various welfare and aid programs, and are allowed to attend taxpayer-funded schools and universities. Once adopted by the United States, then legalized and naturalized, the new Americans will be allowed to bring in their foreign parents and siblings via unreformed chain-migration laws.
Tuesday, July 10, 2018
Laura Ingraham lies, says the voters knew Kavanaugh was on Trump's list when they elected him
Just now on the radio show.
Kavanaugh was added to the list in late 2017, according to rumor at the behest of Justice Kennedy himself, who had been angling to retire:
Two others — Brett Kavanaugh, another former Kennedy clerk now on the powerful D.C. Circuit, and Amy Coney Barrett, a University of Notre Dame law professor nominated by Trump last year to the Chicago-based 7th Circuit — were added to the list last November.
Rick "Tin Ear" Santorum: Trump's base will be "turned off" by Brett Kavanaugh
Quoted here.
No one in the base who watched Kavanaugh's remarks was turned off in the least.
In fact, Kavanaugh impressed as a person with a common, ordinary touch, who is deeply committed to his family and to the law. And he endeared himself to his listeners because the emotion welling-up underneath his remarks went far to prove his sincerity.
Methinks Santorum, exasperated that he didn't get more support from Catholics in 2012, is a little jealous of his fellow Catholic, whose credentials and experience already stand out from those currently serving on the Supreme Court, not to mention from Santorum's.
Monday, July 9, 2018
Chinese Communist hypocrite Xi Jinping has jailed political opponents Sun Zhengcai and 1.3 million others
Gordon Chang, here:
At the 19th Communist Party National Congress held last October, however, Xi broke convention by preventing the designation of a successor. No one who might follow him was named to the Politburo Standing Committee, the apex of Chinese power. Also, ahead of the 19th Congress Xi targeted an up-and-coming figure, Sun Zhengcai from Chongqing, by having him investigated for “serious discipline violations,” party code for corruption. Sun has been given a life sentence in circumstances indicating his crime was political—in other words, being in a faction not controlled by Xi Jinping. ...
Xi is upping the consequences for those coming out on the short end of political struggles. In what he has styled a new “anti-corruption” campaign but which looks more like an old-fashioned political purge, Xi has jailed more than 1.3 million officials. He has removed the venal, but it’s noteworthy that almost none of them were his supporters. They were, for the most part, either political opponents or potential rivals, like Sun from Chongqing. Moreover, Xi has betrayed the real nature of the campaign by jailing anti-corruption campaigners and leaving alone his own family members, some of whom, under the most suspicious of circumstances, have become extraordinarily wealthy since he was identified as Hu’s successor.
The headline writer at The Hill gets it wrong, but the article author gets it right
People returning to labor force in droves — a key step for the economy, says the headline, but the article says no such thing.
The story author makes many astute points, which the headline writer obviously doesn't understand.
The labor force is growing, but gradually, as is the percentage of the population actually working. We ought to have north of 62% working as was true before the Great Recession instead of 60% now, but the direction is up, if gradual.
This means we are NOT at full employment. People who dropped out are dropping back in, looking for work, and finding it, gradually.
This is dispelling the myth that the decline in the labor force was structural, and permanent. It isn't.
This also explains why wages aren't rising dramatically. Employers still have bodies to choose from as people who formerly sat on the sidelines get back in the game. Employers still do not have to pay dramatically higher wages to keep the employees they have. They still have employees to choose from.
In a nutshell, it's not a boom, but it is overall a return to the right direction.
Fewer than 600 acres of opium production in Afghanistan keep the Taliban insurgency alive
There should be a relatively simple solution to that, but Politico has a story here about what we've been doing instead.
The United States is not a serious country.
Bill Kristol doesn't much like Kavanaugh for Supreme Court, so Trump ought to nominate him
After all, Bill Kristol knows whereof he speaks.
Sunday, July 8, 2018
Theresa May's Brexit Secretary resigns, a vote of no confidence in the Prime Minister's no-Brexit Brexit
Donald Trump take note. You promised a wall, an immediate end to DACA, an end to Obamacare, an end to our senseless wars, jobs jobs jobs.
We're still waiting.
Laugh of the Day 3.0: The thing is, this Google employee PROVIDED the picture
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| This little piggy stayed home |
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| This little piggy went to Google |
Laugh of the Day 2.0: Liberal blogger breaks the rules, reveals source to FBI because it advanced her politics
Liberals always view rules as impediments to their political ends, and break them at will.
Wheeler, who has written blog posts about national security for almost 15 years, is clear that she wasn't motivated to talk to the FBI because she is out to get Trump. She certainly doesn't like him, but she is also not at all a Hillary Clinton fan. But what motivated her recent revelation that she went to the FBI has plenty to do with politics: She is disgusted by the way House Republicans are, in her view, weaponizing their oversight responsibilities and making it all too likely that FBI informants will have their names revealed - and their safety threatened. "It infuriates me," she wrote, to observe the "months-long charade by the House GOP to demand more and more details about those who have shared information with the government . . . all in an attempt to discredit the Mueller investigation."
Marcy Wheeler (a.k.a. "emptywheel") is an American independent journalist specializing in national security and civil liberties. Wheeler publishes on her own site, Emptywheel, established in July 2011. She makes occasional contributions to the commentary and analysis section of The Guardian, progressive news site Daily Kos, The Huffington Post, and Michigan Liberal. Between early December 2007 and July 2011 Wheeler published primarily on Jane Hamsher's FireDogLake (FDL) and prior to that on The Next Hurrah. ... She campaigned for Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean in 2004, and is a former vice chairwoman of the Washtenaw County Democratic Party.
Just great, Thomas Hardiman worked for Ayuda, funded by George Soros' Open Society Foundation, and Trump's got him on his Supreme Court list
An administration is all about personnel, and 19 months in Trump still doesn't know what the hell he's doing.
For some reason Thomas Hardiman can't bring himself to call them illegal aliens but he's a leading contender for Supreme Court
On a Bush list, maybe, but why on a Trump list?
This is insane.
The Detroit News is pushing Kethledge for Supreme Court, the guy who reversed a deportation order of a criminal alien
The Detroit News, here, suffering as it does from a mental disorder known as libertarianism.
Kethledge is being pushed by the Republican Establishment as easier to confirm, in other words by the open borders crowd. For a reason.
The nitwits out there are getting into the weeds of "aggravated" in order to explain this away, some ignorantly equating "aggravated" in the law with "violent", which is hardly controlling. All sorts of things which aren't inherently violent are defined as aggravated by the law, including things which are obviously violent. For example, illicit trafficking in controlled substances and firearms are aggravated, as are money laundering, receipt of stolen property, disclosing classified information (Hillary), fraud (Obama), forgery, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Kethledge ignored the meaning of aggravated in the law in the case described, which suggests he might well dismiss the law in other circumstances when it is attractive to do so, for whatever reason.
There are better candidates than Kethledge who would enforce immigration law instead of try to find an excuse to get around it, which is also what Obama tried to do with the DACA executive order.
Friday, July 6, 2018
Grand Rapids, Michigan, Climate Update for June 2018
Grand Rapids, Michigan, Climate Update for June 2018
Max temp 94, Mean Max temp 94
Min temp 48, Mean Min temp 43
Av temp 69.9, Mean Av temp 67.7
Precip 2.50, Mean precip 3.54
Snowfall 0, Mean snowfall T, Season final 77.7, Mean Season 66.7
Heating Degree Days 12, Mean HDD 54, Season final 6456, Mean Season 6705
Cooling Degree Days 168, Mean CDD 139, Season to date 276, Mean Season to date 184
The heating season has finished 3.7% warmer than the mean using HDD as a measure. It ranked 32nd warmest since 1904.
The cooling season to date as measured by CDD has moderated to 50% warmer than the mean after a hot early start to the summer season.
Gasoline on the Fourth of July 2018 averaged $2.87/gallon nationally
But a year ago gasoline averaged $2.25/gallon nationally.
What happened to $2.50/gal gas, Mr. President?
Thursday, July 5, 2018
In 2011 a judge told us to forgo something is acting, in 2018 a judge insists refusing to help is not the same as impeding
Judge Kessler in 2011, here, a liberal Clinton appointee, in re Obamacare.
Judge Mendez in 2018, here, a liberal Bush 43 appointee, in re immigration enforcement.
Liberals always rule to advance liberal objectives, even if it means that not acting is acting once upon a time but later on in a different situation it is not.
The manifest politicization of the judiciary ought to mean that they all must resign when the guy who appointed them finishes his term. It would be a more honest acknowledgement of the truth that the law is an ass, and that elections have consequences.
Why it feels like a jobs boom when it isn't
Initial claims for unemployment in the first half of 2018, as of today, are running at an annual rate of 11.8 million.
In the first half of 2017 the annual rate had been 12.7 million.
The difference is an extra 17,307 people NOT losing their jobs every week compared with a year ago.
The employment to population ratio is still way down at 60.4%, last exampled in late 1985. We did a lot better than that for a long time, before the freakout in the second half of 2008.
Tuesday, July 3, 2018
America is for ourselves and for our posterity, not for the whole world
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Monday, July 2, 2018
WaPo: Obama's Timmy TurboTax Geithner has a new life as a predatory lender
From the story here:
Mass-mailing checks to strangers might seem like risky business, but Mariner Finance occupies a fertile niche in the U.S. economy. The company enables some of the nation’s wealthiest investors and investment funds to make money offering high-interest loans to cash-strapped Americans.
Mariner Finance is owned and managed by a $11.2 billion private equity fund controlled by Warburg Pincus, a storied New York firm. The president of Warburg Pincus is Timothy F. Geithner, who, as treasury secretary in the Obama administration, condemned predatory lenders. The firm’s co-chief executives, Charles R. Kaye and Joseph P. Landy, are established figures in New York’s financial world. The minimum investment in the fund is $20 million.
Dozens of other investment firms bought Mariner bonds last year, allowing the company to raise an additional $550 million. That allowed the lender to make more loans to people like Huggins [at 33 percent].
Whoops, looks like the story of 412 healthcare fraudsters is yesterday's news: The newest action is even bigger!
From the DOJ here:
Last July the Department of Justice announced a record-breaking enforcement action against health care fraud. We coordinated the efforts of more than 1,000 state and federal law enforcement agents to charge more than 400 defendants—including 56 doctors—with more than $1.3 billion in fraud.
Today I am announcing that we are breaking records again.
The Department of Justice, in conjunction with the Department of Health and Human Services, is announcing the largest health care fraud takedown operation in American history.
This year we are charging 601 people, including 76 doctors, 23 pharmacists, 19 nurses, and other medical personnel with more than $2 billion in medical fraud.
Largest healthcare fraud action in DOJ history nets 412 individuals, many with funny names
"For the Strike Force locations, in the Southern District of Florida, a total of 77 defendants were charged with offenses relating to their participation in various fraud schemes involving over $141 million in false billings for services including home health care, mental health services and pharmacy fraud. In one case, the owner and operator of a purported addiction treatment center and home for recovering addicts and one other individual were charged in a scheme involving the submission of over $58 million in fraudulent medical insurance claims for purported drug treatment services. The allegations include actively recruiting addicted patients to move to South Florida so that the co-conspirators could bill insurance companies for fraudulent treatment and testing, in return for which, the co-conspirators offered kickbacks to patients in the form of gift cards, free airline travel, trips to casinos and strip clubs, and drugs."
Slasher of refugee children in Boise is inconveniently black
Don't expect to hear too much about this one since it doesn't fit the anti-white narrative.
Story here.
Sunday, July 1, 2018
FDR: Public employee unions shouldn't exist at all because they can paralyze government and its operation
Here, August 16, 1937:
All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters.
Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees. Upon employees in the Federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people, whose interests and welfare require orderliness and continuity in the conduct of Government activities. This obligation is paramount. Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable. It is, therefore, with a feeling of gratification that I have noted in the constitution of the National Federation of Federal Employees the provision that "under no circumstances shall this Federation engage in or support strikes against the United States Government."
Nothing sank NeverTrump lower in the estimation of the voters than its "blithe indifference to the Clintons' gangsterism"
"Trump’s base was fighting a war; these guys were sipping tea."
The article insists much of NeverTrump is Jewish, agnostic and libertarian, which is true, while failing to mention its many Christian, especially Catholic, representatives, the very same crowd which mercilessly destroyed conservative Presbyterian minister Todd Akin of Missouri. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
The narrowness of Trump's 2016 victory continues unexamined in the cold light of reason. Though badly outnumbered, Protestant America proved it isn't dead yet. Trump's partisans naturally would rather talk about why their winner won than why the loser lost. But Hillary lost primarily because 5 million former Obama voters failed to show up, a fact Trump himself acknowledged in the immediate aftermath. They were as disgusted with her as the rest of us were. Had just some of them shown up in the right places, we'd be in year ten of the biggest political disaster this country has faced since FDR.
Trump proves the dictum that one man can change history when all the rest cannot. And for this they hate him. He might as well be Martin Luther.
Saturday, June 30, 2018
Laugh of the Day: Good Lord, Jeeves, that QAnon thingy where people think a top government agent is speaking to them through 4chan has made it to one of my own family
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| Aunt Agatha, sir? Say it isn't so. |
Story here.
"Wisdom in discourse with her loses discountenanc'd, and like folly shews." -- John Milton
"Wisdom in discourse with her loses discountenanc'd, and like folly shews." -- John Milton
Trump has 2,000 (illegal alien) separated kids, Obama had 20,000 American kids separated in 2016
Reported here:
As Peter Kirsanow, a commissioner on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, points out, a report from the Department of Health and Human Services shows that more than 20,000 children were placed in foster care in 2016 because of “Parent Incarceration.”
None of those protesting against the Trump administration seem concerned that 10 times more American children than the 2,000 alien children cited in the Associated Press report were separated from their parents in 2016 because of violations of the law by their parents.
As Kirsanow says, it is “regrettable” children are separated from their parents. But “people who cross the border illegally have committed a crime, and one of the consequences of being arrested and detained is, unfortunately, that their children cannot stay with them.”
Child separations are the fault of Bill Clinton and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals
As explained here:
In 1997, the Clinton administration entered into a settlement agreement in Flores v. Reno, a lawsuit filed in federal court in California by pro-illegal immigration advocacy groups challenging the detention of juvenile aliens taken into custody by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
The Clinton administration agreed to settle this litigation despite the fact the Supreme Court had upheld the Immigration and Naturalization Service regulation that provided for the release of minors only to their parents, close relatives, or legal guardians.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, the Flores agreement allows the agency to detain unaccompanied minors for only “20 days before releasing them to the Department of Health and Human Services which places the minors in foster or shelter situations until they locate a sponsor.”
But in a controversial decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, the most liberal in the country, has interpreted the settlement agreement to apply to “both minors who are accompanied and unaccompanied by their parents.”
In other words,it is the 9th Circuit’s misinterpretation of the Clinton administration’s settlement agreement that doesn’t allow juvenile aliens to stay with their parents who have been detained for unlawful entry into the country.
Of course, if those parents would simply agree to return to their home countries, they would be immediately reunited with their children. So those who come here illegally are themselves to blame for their children being assigned to foster care or to another family member or sponsor who may be in the country.
The executive order signed by President Donald Trump directs the attorney general to file a request with the federal court in the Flores case to modify the settlement agreement to allow the government “to detain alien families together throughout the pendency of criminal proceedings for improper entry or any removal or other immigration proceedings.”
Of course, the administration’s critics know about this settlement and know it limits the ability of the administration to keep alien families together.
Chicago Tribune: Voters can fairly conclude Illinois Governor Rauner defeated alliance between unions and Democrats
Here:
Voters can fairly conclude that, with Wednesday’s Supreme Court verdict, Rauner defeated the long invincible alliance of public employee unions and Illinois Democrats. Voters may well give Rauner new respect as the Republican who dared to fight the twin Goliaths of Illinois politics and governance. He really did risk his political future when he picked this fight early in 2015. ... “Government union bargaining and government union political activity are inextricably linked,” he said one month after being sworn in early in 2015. “As a result, an employee who is forced to pay unfair share dues is being forced to fund political activity with which they disagree. That is a clear violation of First Amendment rights and something that, as governor, I am duty-bound to correct.”
Enoch Powell 1968: Britain is insane, busily heaping up its own funeral pyre, making Britons strangers in their own country through immigration
Here:
This is the full text of Enoch Powell's so-called 'Rivers of Blood' speech, which was delivered to a Conservative Association meeting in Birmingham on April 20 1968:
The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature.
One is that by the very order of things such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred: at each stage in their onset there is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing: whence the besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future.
Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles: "If only," they love to think, "if only people wouldn't talk about it, it probably wouldn't happen."
Perhaps this habit goes back to the primitive belief that the word and the thing, the name and the object, are identical.
At all events, the discussion of future grave but, with effort now, avoidable evils is the most unpopular and at the same time the most necessary occupation for the politician. Those who knowingly shirk it deserve, and not infrequently receive, the curses of those who come after.
A week or two ago I fell into conversation with a constituent, a middle-aged, quite ordinary working man employed in one of our nationalised industries.
After a sentence or two about the weather, he suddenly said: "If I had the money to go, I wouldn't stay in this country." I made some deprecatory reply to the effect that even this government wouldn't last for ever; but he took no notice, and continued: "I have three children, all of them been through grammar school and two of them married now, with family. I shan't be satisfied till I have seen them all settled overseas. In this country in 15 or 20 years' time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man."
I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation?
The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so. Here is a decent, ordinary fellow Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that his country will not be worth living in for his children.
I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking - not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history.
In 15 or 20 years, on present trends, there will be in this country three and a half million Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants. That is not my figure. That is the official figure given to parliament by the spokesman of the Registrar General's Office.
There is no comparable official figure for the year 2000, but it must be in the region of five to seven million, approximately one-tenth of the whole population, and approaching that of Greater London. Of course, it will not be evenly distributed from Margate to Aberystwyth and from Penzance to Aberdeen. Whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population.
As time goes on, the proportion of this total who are immigrant descendants, those born in England, who arrived here by exactly the same route as the rest of us, will rapidly increase. Already by 1985 the native-born would constitute the majority. It is this fact which creates the extreme urgency of action now, of just that kind of action which is hardest for politicians to take, action where the difficulties lie in the present but the evils to be prevented or minimised lie several parliaments ahead.
The natural and rational first question with a nation confronted by such a prospect is to ask: "How can its dimensions be reduced?" Granted it be not wholly preventable, can it be limited, bearing in mind that numbers are of the essence: the significance and consequences of an alien element introduced into a country or population are profoundly different according to whether that element is 1 per cent or 10 per cent.
The answers to the simple and rational question are equally simple and rational: by stopping, or virtually stopping, further inflow, and by promoting the maximum outflow. Both answers are part of the official policy of the Conservative Party.
It almost passes belief that at this moment 20 or 30 additional immigrant children are arriving from overseas in Wolverhampton alone every week - and that means 15 or 20 additional families a decade or two hence. Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancés whom they have never seen.
Let no one suppose that the flow of dependants will automatically tail off. On the contrary, even at the present admission rate of only 5,000 a year by voucher, there is sufficient for a further 25,000 dependants per annum ad infinitum, without taking into account the huge reservoir of existing relations in this country - and I am making no allowance at all for fraudulent entry. In these circumstances nothing will suffice but that the total inflow for settlement should be reduced at once to negligible proportions, and that the necessary legislative and administrative measures be taken without delay.
I stress the words "for settlement." This has nothing to do with the entry of Commonwealth citizens, any more than of aliens, into this country, for the purposes of study or of improving their qualifications, like (for instance) the Commonwealth doctors who, to the advantage of their own countries, have enabled our hospital service to be expanded faster than would otherwise have been possible. They are not, and never have been, immigrants.
I turn to re-emigration. If all immigration ended tomorrow, the rate of growth of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population would be substantially reduced, but the prospective size of this element in the population would still leave the basic character of the national danger unaffected. This can only be tackled while a considerable proportion of the total still comprises persons who entered this country during the last ten years or so.
Hence the urgency of implementing now the second element of the Conservative Party's policy: the encouragement of re-emigration.
Nobody can make an estimate of the numbers which, with generous assistance, would choose either to return to their countries of origin or to go to other countries anxious to receive the manpower and the skills they represent.
Nobody knows, because no such policy has yet been attempted. I can only say that, even at present, immigrants in my own constituency from time to time come to me, asking if I can find them assistance to return home. If such a policy were adopted and pursued with the determination which the gravity of the alternative justifies, the resultant outflow could appreciably alter the prospects.
The third element of the Conservative Party's policy is that all who are in this country as citizens should be equal before the law and that there shall be no discrimination or difference made between them by public authority. As Mr Heath has put it we will have no "first-class citizens" and "second-class citizens." This does not mean that the immigrant and his descendent should be elevated into a privileged or special class or that the citizen should be denied his right to discriminate in the management of his own affairs between one fellow-citizen and another or that he should be subjected to imposition as to his reasons and motive for behaving in one lawful manner rather than another.
There could be no grosser misconception of the realities than is entertained by those who vociferously demand legislation as they call it "against discrimination", whether they be leader-writers of the same kidney and sometimes on the same newspapers which year after year in the 1930s tried to blind this country to the rising peril which confronted it, or archbishops who live in palaces, faring delicately with the bedclothes pulled right up over their heads. They have got it exactly and diametrically wrong.
The discrimination and the deprivation, the sense of alarm and of resentment, lies not with the immigrant population but with those among whom they have come and are still coming.
This is why to enact legislation of the kind before parliament at this moment is to risk throwing a match on to gunpowder. The kindest thing that can be said about those who propose and support it is that they know not what they do.
Nothing is more misleading than comparison between the Commonwealth immigrant in Britain and the American Negro. The Negro population of the United States, which was already in existence before the United States became a nation, started literally as slaves and were later given the franchise and other rights of citizenship, to the exercise of which they have only gradually and still incompletely come. The Commonwealth immigrant came to Britain as a full citizen, to a country which knew no discrimination between one citizen and another, and he entered instantly into the possession of the rights of every citizen, from the vote to free treatment under the National Health Service.
Whatever drawbacks attended the immigrants arose not from the law or from public policy or from administration, but from those personal circumstances and accidents which cause, and always will cause, the fortunes and experience of one man to be different from another's.
But while, to the immigrant, entry to this country was admission to privileges and opportunities eagerly sought, the impact upon the existing population was very different. For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country.
They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated; at work they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of the native-born worker; they began to hear, as time went by, more and more voices which told them that they were now the unwanted. They now learn that a one-way privilege is to be established by act of parliament; a law which cannot, and is not intended to, operate to protect them or redress their grievances is to be enacted to give the stranger, the disgruntled and the agent-provocateur the power to pillory them for their private actions.
In the hundreds upon hundreds of letters I received when I last spoke on this subject two or three months ago, there was one striking feature which was largely new and which I find ominous. All Members of Parliament are used to the typical anonymous correspondent; but what surprised and alarmed me was the high proportion of ordinary, decent, sensible people, writing a rational and often well-educated letter, who believed that they had to omit their address because it was dangerous to have committed themselves to paper to a Member of Parliament agreeing with the views I had expressed, and that they would risk penalties or reprisals if they were known to have done so. The sense of being a persecuted minority which is growing among ordinary English people in the areas of the country which are affected is something that those without direct experience can hardly imagine.
I am going to allow just one of those hundreds of people to speak for me:
“Eight years ago in a respectable street in Wolverhampton a house was sold to a Negro. Now only one white (a woman old-age pensioner) lives there. This is her story. She lost her husband and both her sons in the war. So she turned her seven-roomed house, her only asset, into a boarding house. She worked hard and did well, paid off her mortgage and began to put something by for her old age. Then the immigrants moved in. With growing fear, she saw one house after another taken over. The quiet street became a place of noise and confusion. Regretfully, her white tenants moved out.
“The day after the last one left, she was awakened at 7am by two Negroes who wanted to use her 'phone to contact their employer. When she refused, as she would have refused any stranger at such an hour, she was abused and feared she would have been attacked but for the chain on her door. Immigrant families have tried to rent rooms in her house, but she always refused. Her little store of money went, and after paying rates, she has less than £2 per week. “She went to apply for a rate reduction and was seen by a young girl, who on hearing she had a seven-roomed house, suggested she should let part of it. When she said the only people she could get were Negroes, the girl said, "Racial prejudice won't get you anywhere in this country." So she went home.
“The telephone is her lifeline. Her family pay the bill, and help her out as best they can. Immigrants have offered to buy her house - at a price which the prospective landlord would be able to recover from his tenants in weeks, or at most a few months. She is becoming afraid to go out. Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letter box. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they know. "Racialist," they chant. When the new Race Relations Bill is passed, this woman is convinced she will go to prison. And is she so wrong? I begin to wonder.”
The other dangerous delusion from which those who are wilfully or otherwise blind to realities suffer, is summed up in the word "integration." To be integrated into a population means to become for all practical purposes indistinguishable from its other members.
Now, at all times, where there are marked physical differences, especially of colour, integration is difficult though, over a period, not impossible. There are among the Commonwealth immigrants who have come to live here in the last fifteen years or so, many thousands whose wish and purpose is to be integrated and whose every thought and endeavour is bent in that direction.
But to imagine that such a thing enters the heads of a great and growing majority of immigrants and their descendants is a ludicrous misconception, and a dangerous one.
We are on the verge here of a change. Hitherto it has been force of circumstance and of background which has rendered the very idea of integration inaccessible to the greater part of the immigrant population - that they never conceived or intended such a thing, and that their numbers and physical concentration meant the pressures towards integration which normally bear upon any small minority did not operate.
Now we are seeing the growth of positive forces acting against integration, of vested interests in the preservation and sharpening of racial and religious differences, with a view to the exercise of actual domination, first over fellow-immigrants and then over the rest of the population. The cloud no bigger than a man's hand, that can so rapidly overcast the sky, has been visible recently in Wolverhampton and has shown signs of spreading quickly. The words I am about to use, verbatim as they appeared in the local press on 17 February, are not mine, but those of a Labour Member of Parliament who is a minister in the present government:
'The Sikh communities' campaign to maintain customs inappropriate in Britain is much to be regretted. Working in Britain, particularly in the public services, they should be prepared to accept the terms and conditions of their employment. To claim special communal rights (or should one say rites?) leads to a dangerous fragmentation within society. This communalism is a canker; whether practised by one colour or another it is to be strongly condemned.'
All credit to John Stonehouse for having had the insight to perceive that, and the courage to say it.
For these dangerous and divisive elements the legislation proposed in the Race Relations Bill is the very pabulum they need to flourish. Here is the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organise to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood."
That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century.
Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.
Friday, June 29, 2018
People who advocate shunning Trumpsters are nothing more than latter-day Puritan theocrats, sans the theo
Just when you think the religious Right had been expunged from the public square, the irreligious Left swoops in to fill the vacuum, inspired with all the same self-righteous zeal of the hypocritical Pharisee, but for lesser lights, and minus the deity:
"The solution is not to be Pelosi standing down, or Waters screaming in someone’s face, but to quietly shun those like the Golden Couple who could say something or do something but don’t. ... A nod or a stiff arm extended for a handshake to avoid the air kiss. No polite small talk and stay stuck to your chair when the music plays. Make it clear to them, in some quiet dignified way, that the border crisis is a bridge too far."
-- Margaret Carlson, who probably doesn't even know she's a Paulinist
But now I have written unto you not to keep company, if any man that is called a brother be a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolater, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner; with such an one no not to eat. -- I Cor.5:11
Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? ... Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you, -- II Cor. 6:14ff.
Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? ... Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you, -- II Cor. 6:14ff.
Thursday, June 28, 2018
Wednesday, June 27, 2018
USS Fitzgerald collision a year ago: Officer of the Deck, Tactical Action Officer, Damage Control Officer were all women
Three women in charge kill seven sailors and nearly sink the destroyer in a collision with a Philippine container ship.
Story here with links.
The lesson about Reagan appointee to high court, Anthony Kennedy, who calls it quits July 31
Never appoint anyone from the Ninth Circuit Court of Schlemiels to anything, especially not to the Supreme Court.
Immigration bill fails in the US House 301-121
Good.
Call the Hungarians and start running the razor wire.
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