Mike Enoch tells Richard Spencer: "Donald Trump hits liberals with a visceral fear... His appearance. He's tall, blonde, Aryan-looking. I'm in control. These Fuhrer-esque characteristics... There's this gut fear amongst liberal and Jews. Here's this goy-looking powerful guy saying all this nationalist stuff. That's bad for us."
Mike: "The neo-con movement has no interest in the preservation of a white Gentile majority in the United States. You could say that they should because without the white gentile majority they are finished. With all the Mexicans, Muslims, Africans coming in, these people will sympathize with the Palestinians. Latin Americans big time sympathize with the Palestinians. They are not going to have any religious feelings about the Holocaust. They are not subject to this guilt trip that white people are."
"Michael Savage says that if we lose this white Christian Protestant majority, Israel is done. Israel is done without the United States."
Richard: "Jewish power has functioned on a basis of white Protestants and it can't without them."
Mike: "They consistently attack the white Protestant majority and that is what they need to sustain themselves."
Richard: "It's the parasite destroying the host."
"A higher percentage of white Protestants believe that Jews are the Chosen People than Jews believe Jews are the Chosen People."
Chris Cillizza writes: Donald Trump cruised to a double-digit win over the Republican field on Saturday in South Carolina. It was his second straight easy win — coming 11 days after he swept the New Hampshire primary by nearly 17 points.
Those back-to-back victories coupled with Trump’s second-place finish in Iowa’s caucuses — in which he took the second-most votes of any Republican candidate ever — affirm a very simple yet still not fully grasped fact: Donald Trump is the heavy favorite to be the Republican presidential nominee this fall...
Why isn’t Trump getting the credit and coverage he deserves? Because, at root, there is still a belief within the party establishment and the ranks of the media that he will somehow implode or that voters will “wise up” or “get real” — or something. The problem with that theory is that Trump has done lots and lots of things that (a) can be described as “gaffes” and (b) would have ended or severely compromised other campaigns. Yet none of it has touched him.
In fact, his willingness to say anything, no matter the underlying facts, seems to affirm to his supporters just how “independent” of the political system he really is.
One example: Trump spent the week before the South Carolina primary savaging George W. Bush and insisting that the 43rd president didn’t keep the country safe because the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, happened on his watch. Not only is that sort of rhetoric verboten within the Republican Party, but it was widely considered especially noxious in a state where the Bush family remains very popular.Yet, of the 1 in 5 South Carolina Republican voters who were either veterans or had a military veteran in their house, Trump crushed the competition.
Ask yourself: What could Trump possibly do or say that would somehow be seen as a large enough mistake to cost him large amounts of support?
Given the steadiness of his numbers, the idea that Trump will either derail himself or be derailed seems like the most wishful of thinking by establishment Republicans. Ditto the idea, which I still hear nearly every day in Washington, that the establishment will “figure out” a way to stop Trump. Trust me: If they could have stopped Trump, they would have done it a long time ago.
Even after former Florida governor Jeb Bush bowed out of the race after his disappointing South Carolina finish, the establishment vote remains split between Rubio and Ohio Gov. John Kasich. And even if Kasich gets out sometime soon — my guess is he won’t — I remain unconvinced that the establishment vote, even when totally unified, is enough to beat Trump.
From American Thinker: In one of National Review’s hit pieces against Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump (“What Trump Doesn’t Understand – It’s a lot about our Trade with China”), correspondent Kevin D. Williamson called Trump a “dangerous buffoon” because he would threaten tariffs upon China’s products and thus risk a trade war with China. But it’s not Trump who is the buffoon on trade; it is National Review!
Trump plans to take on the huge U.S. trade deficit with the world, and especially with China. He threatens to place upon Chinese products a tariff like the 45% tariff that China recently placed upon some U.S. cars. Such a threat could lead to negotiations between the U.S. and China about balancing trade, and Trump wrote the book on negotiations.
When an article tears into a candidate for having his facts wrong, the magazine that prints it probably should check to make sure that the candidate is actually wrong. But; National Reviewfailed to fact-check this piece. Its correspondent, Kevin D. Williamson, wrote:
"China did put a punitive retaliatory tariff on some cars made by GM and Chrysler…. That was a 12.9 percent tariff, incidentally, nothing like the 45 percent that Trump imagines, and it is being withdrawn. Chinese buyers in fact love American cars — a Buick is a much bigger status symbol in China than in New Jersey."
Comment: Surprise!“Conservative” “American” – don’t you love how he had the American flag flying in the background of his cover photo – compares Trump to … wait for it…. Hitler. https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2016/01/25/the-resistible-rise-of-donald-trump/
This was a tribal conservatism, one that had very little to do with ideas, and everything to do with nationalism and a sense of us-versus-them.
To put it mildly, Goldman celebrates the nationalism and tribal conservatism of the people and country he actually cares about. Hint: it's not Americans.
We’re a long way from Germany in the late 1920s, to be sure, but the parallels are disturbing. The Republican Establishment shouts from the rooftops that it prefers Hitl–, er, Trump to the horrible Ted Cruz. As Bob Dole put it, Trump could “probably work with Congress, because he’s, you know, he’s got the right personality and he’s kind of a deal-maker.” Robert Costa at the Washington Post, David French at National Review, Paul Mirengoff at Powerline, and other commentators too numerous to mention have weighed in on the same theme.
A real whos-who of American First Conservatives. I'll definitely listen to them. Thanks for the “tip”, Dave.
Without a return to entrepreneurship, America’s economy will stagnate and America’s middle class will continue to lose ground. Donald Trump represents the triumph of resentment over hope. I don’t know what American voters will do. But I’m frightened.
Oh no, Heaven forbid, Dave is "frightened"! What about the actual Americans who’ve suffered 50 years of open borders and open anti-white animosity from their “leaders” and your fellow “experts”? Do they have the right to feel frightened, knowing there is nowhere to run – unlike you? As with other “Respectable Conservatives” like Ben Shapiro, Fox New, National Review, etc. the mask has come off.The comments section is the best part. Some pile on, openly celebrating the demise of gentiles. Others point out how stupid his article is and how slimy his motives are.
* This author lost his aura of "one of the smartest political commentators" by talking at the end of this piece as unhinged hack at the service of this or that wing of RINO political machine, calling itself Republican Party. Same thing happened of late with articles by editorial board of Commentary and "smartest" authors, who supposedly know better than us. All these smart people spent too much time in respected circles, got too much vested into their "smart" status, that it shows in any smart hit piece that they can write. Usually in the last couple of paragraphs.
His smartness is of the artificial kind that lacks integrity. This article is sum of its parts; it doesn't compute.
This is the same kind of smartness that causes Likud establishment to promote Peace Racket that rules Israel since mid-1990s, no matter which party wins in elections. It must be made irrelevant together with destruction of organized political racket that it obediently serves.
What is happening now is Great Middle Class revolution. We should be grateful to Donald Trump and Ted Cruz for giving it a voice. And to people like Mark Levin. In spite of Mr. Goldman.
* Donald Trump VS the Davos Man
The pundit and activist class can’t seem to figure Donald Trump out, but as I have attempted to argue elsewhere, Trump’s politics are not really as inscrutable as all that. Trump is that guy at the barbershop who says "We need to run the US more like a business. What America needs is a CEO, not another President." Trump just happens to have a lot of money and the credentials to be that CEO himself. The theme that the US is getting out negotiated on the international stage and we should start acting more in our own economic best interests have been there since Trump first became a public figure in the 1980's. Trump, for example, opposed NAFTA before opposing trade deals was the cool thing to do on the right. The consistency of this message suggests that it is sincere, regardless of whatever one might think about the Trump phenomenon that has erupted since he announced his campaign. This economic nationalist message is the key to understanding Trump’s politics.
Trump’s opposition to “free trade” deals and open borders and unabashed advocacy of economic nationalism directly challenges the Establishment consensus in a way that no other candidate dose. All the major candidates in both parties with the possible exception of Bernie Sanders actually take Establishment neoliberal presumptions for granted.
I wince a little when I hear Trump says that America’s leaders are “stupid” and are being out negotiated by the more clever leaders of Mexico, Japan, China, etc. This is grating and potentially unhelpful. What is really the issue here is not smarts but priorities. The leaders of these other nations negotiate with the economic interests of their own countries in mind, while the US negotiates on the basis of fidelity to some imagined set of international rules of fair play, which just so happen to perpetuate the current system that enriches the global elite at the expense of national integrity. But regardless of Trump’s less than ideal formulation, who else is saying this?
Trump is ultimately a patriot who loves his country and wants to restore it to its former glory, as suggested by his campaign slogan “Make America Great Again.” Imagine that. But this chauvinistic attitude is contrary to the rootless cosmopolitanism of the global elite. If you’re still struggling with Trump’s place in relation to the Establishment, ask yourself this: “Would Trump fit in at the World Economic Forum?” Trump is not Davos Man described in the introductory quote. He is the antithesis of Davos Man. He is a red-blooded American patriot from Queens, New York who just happens to have a really big bank account. Criticize Trump’s policies and ways if you must, but let’s not have any more of this nonsense that he is just another member of the Establishment. If you don’t see the fallacy of this claim, you don’t get why Trump’s rise represents such a fundamental challenge to the ruling order.
* We've been through three election cycles now where constitutionalists have done their damnedest to get people to wake the h3ll up, only to have their candidates sabotaged or, with but a couple of exceptions - Cruz being one, co-opted by TPTB.
The wrecking ball known as Donald Trump will finally put paid to the constitutionalists this cycle, and helped by the very people angry at the system he helped to create and has no intention of reforming.
The very enemy Trump's backers say they are rebelling against are laughing their a$$es off.
Thank-you, sirs! May we have another?
* I love the power of the media. It must be intoxicating and exhilarating to make baseless allegations about the rich and powerful especially when they happen to be men who have achieved more and lived more in one life than media hacks will in nine.
So, I'll try my hand at it, though I am attacking a man who is obviously of perverse and unsatisfied sexual needs who is in the pay of a foreign power. I would also like to add that this very same person is responsible for material omissions regarding the eligibility of his favorite presidential candidate - candidate no doubt in the pay of the author's foreign masters.
How does that feel? I thought Spengler was a dignified deep-thinker. Comparing Trump to Hitler is beyond infantile. First of all, Hitler was monomaniacally fixated on Jews - Trump shows no such obsession with Mexicans or any group or issue.
Could it be that Spengler - like his coreligionists - favors a dull and virtually impotent White, Western world with such aggression as is permitted to be devoted either to fighting Russians or Muslims in far away nations that cannot hurt us as long as we keep them there.
It is manifestly obvious that Spengler and his ilk fear the slightest awareness of racial and ethnic interests on the part of whites whereas his ilk form private and public policy based on the first test of ethane-centrism: "is it good for the Spenglers, Cohen, Goldberg, etc. of the world?"
Please take your football and go home. Not to America, but to the city where the bank your checks are written on is based.
I ask again - how does that feel? Cuz I gotta tell you, I love this! I haven't done a thing but hack away and somehow I feel like I achieved something!
* Your comments are way out of bounds- I am no fan of Trump (I tell people I already lost this election). This country used to produce people of genuine substance as our leaders. Do you see George Washington running around, I don't? The Dems have completely lost touch with the people and the Republicans have become equally out of touch. Every thinking Jew knows that the survival of the Jewish people requires a strong robust United States led by people of ability and character. Lastly, America is deeply divided politically but you better wake up to the idea that an effective sustainable modern society needs healthy debate and no one has a monopoly on wisdom.
* This is a bit shallow. The author tries to paint the white working class as a bunch of whining bigots. In point of fact, Sam Francis, Pat Buchanan, and others, tried to warn Americans 20 years ago that the American plutocracy was about to betray them. You might want to read this and learn something, instead of writing the usual Jewish tripe about all those Nazis waiting around in Middle America to throw you out...
* When Middle Class people are tired of being kicked around, that's an "ugly mood." Only to the elites who continue to benefit from how things are. When Trump speaks to these concerns, he's Hitler. He's not. He is not espousing a view of mystical racial superiority - only speaking some truths that media can't handle, because they are the poodle of a system that is getting rich from these facts, and they don't want anyone upsetting the gravy train.
* Where I do object to your essay is invoking Hitler in your unashamed attempt in deconstructing Donald Trump while enthusiastically waving your Ted Cruz inspired pom-poms. Your support for Cuz is your business but it becomes my business when the horrors of Nazism and Adolph Hitler are so cavalierly and dishonorably used to malign someone, anyone in fact. It goes to sensationalism, intellectual dishonesty, and a mitigating of the unspeakable crimes of that era. Mike Goodwin would be proud.
* It's not clear whether you are trying to attack Trump or not but even without Ivanka's marriage, one does not make it in the New York business world if he is anti-Semitic.
* I wonder if the author has any qualms with Israel's immigration policy?
* And here we see illustrated yet again an age old observation: that no matter what superficial form or ideology they adopt (capitalist/socialist, liberal/conservative, atheist/religious, etc.), at the end of the day, JEWS ARE JEWS, and will always circle the wagons to propagandize against any leader who demonstrates an ability to unite the goyim and who doesn't submit to the Judaic will. And this is precisely why Amerika so desperately needs a leader like Trump: to BREAK this REAL CONSPIRACY and FIGHT for OUR PEOPLE!
Study who is propagandizing against Trump (and Putin) most militantly -- see any patterns? Trump has the potential to be an American Putin: strong, popular, Christian, and most importantly, SOVEREIGN. The last thing the West needs is more WEAK TRAITORS AND SHILLS like the ZOG/NWO tool MERKEL! European peoples everywhere are UNDER ASSAULT and need STRONG NEW LEADERSHIP, because our societies have been subverted by people who FEAR and DESPISE us!
* David P. Goldman: "Ivanka Trump converted to Judaism with her father's blessing (my rabbi instructed her). It was a serious conversion; Ivanka knows Jewish law in great detail and is very observant. Trump--as I said in the first line--likes Jews. He is pro-Israel. As president he would be a strong supporter of Israel."
* Trump is not Hitler. There is a large space between Hitler and what I said, believe it or not. It's called normal nationalist/racial leadership, before the West was subverted by globalist shills and cultural marxists. My kind are in a dark mood because we haven't had any strong leaders advocating for us in decades; just an endless parade of hostile shills, tools and non-useful idiots. White people literally have no homeland, and no strong leaders willing to defend us, under the post-1945 Pax Amerikana regime. Clearly, this situation is going to change one way or another, because there is something very big stirring throughout the West. My advice to hostiles: get the fuck out of the way!
* America was smarter in 1980 than it is now. In fact, it's not even remotely close. That is what diversity and multi-culturalism have brought America - abject stupidity and the rise of Progressive politic. The Republican Party has followed suit.
I think what people are failing to recognize about the Trump mantra, is when it's all said and done, little or nothing will really change unless we elect Trump as dictator. I don't trust the man enough to do that.
When the election is over, Trump should he win, will swing the art of the deal.
That's no more than a continuation of what's been transpiring for 25 years. Trump is the continuation of Hope & Change with promises of a wall and harsh talk of Islam.
* David Goldman: The Weimar government printed money to buy foreign currency to pay reparations when it had no money to do so. The Versailles Treaty was at fault. Hitler "told the truth" about Versailles when a lot of German politicians temporized. In fact, he was a lot more accurate concerning the facts of Germany's economic problems than Trump is about the US.
* Until recently, Spengler has displayed a Spengler-esque pessimism about the decline of the West in general, but he has tended to make an exception for the exceptional US, on the Bismarkian grounds that "God has a special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States of America."
Readers of Spengler know that he links this "special providence," and the American exceptionalism which it at once reflected and furthered--to the Protestant roots of America's founding political theology. Those roots have now withered, and their fruit of a unique blend of individual initiative and a communal spirit quite distinct from tribalism (but classically evinced in the "civil society" that Tocqueville found so characteristically America) has consequently shriveled on the vine.
Americans are isolated, atomized, linked perhaps by Internet smarm and Kardashian gossip, but sharing neither the "mystic chords of memory" of a collective past nor the spiritual bonds enjoyed by those who regard themselves as part of a pilgrim body whose defining essence is found not in the blood and soil of the here and now, but in a transcendent eschatological destination. In short, constitutional patriotism is dead, and orthodox Protestantism has declined--perhaps fatally. Indeed, part of our "Weimar moment" is reflected in the cultural decadence and spiritual vacuum that have accompanied this decline. In Germany, the same vacuum that birthed cabaret culture also helped called forth You Know Who, who obligingly filled the spiritual emptiness with demonic brio.
What to do? We can seek provisional unity in a tribalism that pits in-groups against out-groups: This is the way of progressive multiculturalism and identity politics. Or we can seek unity in a Leader who seems to embody the now-absent spirit of the people, of the Volk, such that when they behold him on the stage, they seem to behold themselves--healed, united, restored--in a magic mirror. How can mere reason and the graphic presentation of employment statistics avail against such a "vision"?
We have, then, a party already committed to Balkanization, and another one heading down the path towards mystical authoritarianism. This won't end happily.
Welcome to the Pessimists Club, Mr. Goldman.
* David Goldman: I'm worried. Our predicament reminds me of the conversation between the optimist and the pessimist. The pessimist says, "Things are so bad they can't possibly get worse." Says the optimist: "Don't worry. They will."
* Adolf was a one-off, a singular response to the unique situation and distinctive cultural history of Germany. My point was that nature abhors a spiritual vacuum just as much as a physical one, and thus such vacuums will be filled--generally, by a malevolent force.
There is a segment of the American public that is responding to that vacuum by hungering for a nationalistic strong man to respond to the mess created by the progressive, internationalistic messiah-figure that the left sold its soul to in 2008. This hunger is evident in the authoritarian character of their attacks on those who dare to disagree with them. Trump didn't create this hunger, but his entry into the race brought it to the surface and gave it focus.
I believe that Trump is a mildly demagogic narcissist who bumptiousness in office could deeply harm American national interests . . . but I don't think he has the right stuff--either in inclination or capacity--to be an American version of You Know Who (just as Obama lacked the right stuff to be an American Lenin or Stalin). What scares me more is After Trump: Obama the thesis, Trump the antithesis . . . and then something or someone very, very bad as the "synthesis" to clean up the mess. I think a similar pattern is afoot in Europe.
* Comparing Trump to Hitler or any other tinpot dictator is the last refuge of second rate, derivative intellectuals. Before taking over Germany Hitler, the bitter corporal, the failed artist, had no real accomplishments. He had no real family beyond a mistress. He was an angry, dysfunctional neurotic, a borderline psychopath who passed deep into the hinterland as he began loosing his war. Trump is a largely self made billionaire and media celebrity, neither feats are highly admirable, nor are they common or easy achievements. As for stability, Trump is by all accounts an excellent father of four exemplary children, apparently liked by all his successive wives and has few complaints from his many well paid employees. Such cannot be said of Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Mussolini, Peron, Castro or even American wannabees like Huey Long or George Wallace. Spengler, awaken from your ideological slumbers! The key to Trump's appeal is the courage to take a stand for the long ignored and always bypassed and snubbed desires of the majority on Americans on the crucial subject of immigration.
Americans rightly feel they have been tricked, lied to and disrespected on immigration. But to turn those angry feelings into reasons, here is why we are turning to Trump: 1) Our current immigration policies discriminate de facto in favor of those who can readily violate our southern border and against nearly everyone else across the planet. 2) Most Americans feel there are only two legitimate reasons for allowing new immigrants in: they should either provide skills and talents our economy can use or present a strong case for compassion, and our compassion should never favor one ethnicity over others. 3) Most people in the top 10% financially are seldom affected by immigrant crime, school and safety net strain, and neighborhood deterioration, many benefit by the access to cheap labor—all of this is even more true for the top 1%. 4) It is the bottom 90% who must bear the negative impact of uncontrolled illegal immigration. 5) In the last 45 years voters have been ignored on how many immigrants they want admitted and from where—you can bet that at no time would the majority favor immigration policies that allowed 60+% of all new immigrants to be underskilled and undereducated laborers from Mexico and the northern triangle countries. 6) Most suspect that US immigration policies and practices are crafted to benefit the wishes of special interests, especially those seeking cheap labor or bloc voters. 7) Few Americans want the USA to become a bilingual country like Canada or worse Belgium, yet they are increasingly confronted by Spanish everywhere, when it was almost nowhere 50 years ago. 8) Most Americans favor assimilation and the melting pot of which most are products. 9) Americans increasingly resent the intellectual arrogance and presumption of moral superiority displayed by those who try to dictate what we all should be allowed to say and and dare to think about immigration. A viable democracy requires that all citizens be entitled to respect as individuals, and neither the government nor self serving elites should be allowed to manipulate thought and suppress dissent. Americans see in Trump a leader who can bring us democratic, rather than elitist and oligarchic, immigration policies.
* David Goldman: I would vote for Trump against Hillary. Trump to my knowledge is not a criminal. The Clintons are a criminal enterprise.
Comment: Automation will reduce the demand for low IQ workers.
Genetic engineering will increase the supply of high IQ men.
Therefore, the wages of low IQ men will continue to decline.
Low IQ men will be drawn to crime and extremism.
But the population of low IQ men is growing.
This population growth will lead to wars and famines, resulting in a tidal wave of refugees.
What is the most effective way to halt the population growth of the unemployable?
Pay a billion women to get on birth control.
The payment will appeal most to poor women, who on average have low intelligence and high birth rates.
* A lot of cybercrime is committed by Asians and Middle Easterners with the collusion of co-ethnic employees within the targeted companies. No great intelligence needed, just the exploitation of a high-trust work environment.
"The Red Sox nutritionist at the time, Tara Mardigan, introduced Melancon to a company called InsideTracker, a blood analytics company based in Cambridge, Mass. which uses blood testing to screen for 30 different biomarkers — including vitamins, hormones and other metabolic markers — and determine optimal zones for each level based on a highly personalized questionnaire which looks at a person’s age, weight, activity level, ethnicity, personal goals and more."
Comment: I found this on Baseball Think Factory and it seems to have triggered a few people. “Quackery”, “Pseudoscience”, and “Ignorance” are all used in the first 5 comments. Sabermetrics is always looking for the next set of data to analyze, PitchFx and FieldFx (I think defensive analysis is really the diminishing returns phase of baseball analytics) being the latest craze, but let’s not dig TOO deep.
Steve has talked in the past that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all diet, and what better one to find out what works for you than drilling down to your individual biology?
From the BBC:
India’s constitution, adopted in 1950, inaugurated the world’s oldest and farthest-reaching affirmative action programme, guaranteeing scheduled castes and tribes – the most disadvantaged groups in Hinduism’s hierarchy – not only equality of opportunity but guaranteed outcomes, with reserved places in educational institutions, government jobs and even seats in parliament and the state assemblies.
The logic was simple: they were justified as a means of making up for millennia of discrimination based on birth.
In 1989, the government decided to extend their benefits to Other Backward Classes (OBCs) – those hailing from the lower and intermediate castes who were deemed backward because they lacked “upper caste” status.
As more and more people sought fewer available government and university positions, we witnessed the unedifying spectacle of castes fighting with each other to be declared backward.
What if Israel were destroyed? What if the USA turned hostile to Jews? What if Western Europe turned hostile to Jews? Jews could move to Russia and China. They might be a good fit. Russia and China don't have western notions of human rights. They wouldn't put up with any subversion of their national goals and national cultures. They would limit and channel Jewish energies in ways that are productive for their host countries. Jews won't take over the media in Russia and China and turned it against the natives. Jews might forswear revolution because Russia and Chinese would have few compunctions about killing revolutionaries. Jews might forswear ridiculing the traditional Russian and Chinese identity in exchange for their own safety. Jews would like see advantages in behaving in ways that are productive for their host. Russians and Chinese have a strong sense of their own identity and will respect Jews for their strong sense of a Jewish identity. On the other hand, Jews are more likely to have respect for hosts who have a strong sense of identity and are unwilling to put up with any subversion. I've found that Jews have more respect for fellow ethnics, particularly East Asians, who put their own people first than Jews feel for naive white people who only subscribe to "universal values." Israelis, for example, tend to have contempt for American naivety and generosity. Israelis regard Americans are easy to manipulate. By contrast, Koreans, Japanese and Chinese won't put up with that.
Comments to Steve Sailer:
* The words “Muslim” and “Islam” appear nowhere in that article. The New York Lies. That’s what that is, a lie. When the story has been for weeks that “Trump’s an Islamophobe who he wants to throw the Muslims out and ban them,” omitting the historical Muslim connection here is simply a lie.
The funny part is the common perception that MSM outlets sensationalize everything to increase revenue. On the contrary, the MSM frequently de-sensationalizes stories to make less money while shaping The Narrative.
Sort of like how there’s lots of dollars Hollywood doesn’t want, like the money from The Passion of the Christ, or from following the trail blazed by 300.
Trump has also been blessed with some useful enemies.
That’s the beauty of Trump’s candidacy; we get to show that we’ll gladly choose the Carney Barker with halfway decent political positions over the hostile Republican elite. This is kind of the point.
the pope was right.there is little evidence that Donald is a practising Christian.
The pope’s a heretic.
Like Sellar and Yeatman, sometimes Steve writes to console his readers. Getting in a front-page fight with the Pope is monumentally stupid. If Trump were a stock, even the dullest brokerage on Wall Street would be dumping it by now.
No, the pope clearly did Trump a favor. Even NPR agreed (NPR!). Yesterday they had several bites of how this will actually help Trump. One was from Carol Swain, which had me gobsmacked. She managed to properly encapsulate Trump’s appeal in about 30 seconds, in her usual astoundingly unbiased style.
I am surprised at how many people I know who didn’t realize the long occupations of Spain or Eastern Europe, or the millions of Europeans taken into slavery.
You’ve got to be uninterested in history to miss Al-Andalus and the Reconquista. We’re talking the better part of a millennium of European history here.
I’m waiting for “Rehmat” to charge in and tell us it was the Pope’s army who attacked the peaceful Muslims vacationing in Rome that year.
Rehmat doesn’t get many (any?) posts in Steve’s bailiwick.
So, are you [Corvinus] simple or disingenuous?
He’s a bit of both, I think, but heavy on the latter.
Yeah, ’cause he’ll turn off Hispanic voters, who, as every Republican knows, are the key to electoral victory…
If memory serves, Trump has gotten way more hispanic votes than Cruz or Rubio.
[Sound of "Family Feud" buzzer]. Wrong. Trump did make a guarantee. He himself said such an event would not have happened. It’s in the King’s English, Fiddler.
Trump–”I can promise you that the Pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been President because this would not have happened.”
You heard it here first: Trump’s going to lose the ‘sperg vote.
Do you understand the notion of political rhetoric, or are you too befuddled by your Aspie literalness to understand anything at all?
His neuro-atypicality seems genuine. Otherwise he’d know his ‘sperg style isn’t persuasive.
“How do you feel about being hated by the leader of the world’s largest religion?”
He should have taken her to school for saying the pope “hates.”
* It seems clear that it is in the best interest of American citizens to close the southern border, although many people disagree with that (I do not know if you are one of those who disagree). Likewise it seems to be in the best interests of a certain class of Hispanic/Latino people to come to America, legally or illegally. If you grant that these two interests are at loggerheads, why wouldn’t you say that it is appropriate for Americans (or whomever you think should fill the thought experiment) to prioritize their self-interest over that of another? Unless you are a troll, which I cannot tell, do you admit that there isn’t a Kantian-style solution for political problems, wherein everybody obeys an a priori, universal rule? Or do you think that everyone, everywhere, should act with perfect logical consistency, as if no natural groupings of people were possible? This crowd, myself included, take a principled stance against the idea that people are only distinct according to number: we believe that there are many natural groupings to be made within the larger group of humanity, and I think we have good arguments to prove that that is more than a belief. I am not trying to be patronizing, but the nature of the commenting system is that a person can only have the appearance of being reactive. What are your beliefs?
* Interesting how this Islamic Sack of Rome has been ignored by PC scholars and academics who fall over one another in their op stampede to blame modern Muslim aggression on the Crusades. Of course these proponents of Doublethink fail to mention that the first crusade was launched three centuries after the Saracens invaded and occupied southern Italy and Iberia. And it was from their base in Sicily that the warriors of Allah attacked Rome and began devastating towns and villages all over the Mediterranean murdering and enslaving the luckless inhabitants. Fortunately for Europe the Normans defeated the Moorish Sicilians in the 11th century.
* A couple of comments about setting expectations for “Casablanca:”
- The quality of dialog varies more than in just about any other movie. The best lines are maybe the best ever, but other lines are really corny.
- The emotional intensity is not high for about the first 45 minutes, until the song kicks in. “Casablanca” owes more to “As Time Goes By” than perhaps any other movie owes to any other theme song.
In general, “Casablanca” is a bit of a hodge-podge that happened to come together as a great movie at the last moment.
It was popular and respected on its first release (winning Best Picture for 1942), but its modern reputation derives in part from it becoming a cult film for Harvard students in the late 1950s when the Brattle Theater started playing Bogart films during finals week.
In general, everybody involved in “Casablanca” was kind of winging it.
* I’d never heard of the Islamic sack of Rome in 846 until 24 hours ago. I could give you the exact dates of two others: 410 AD and 1527, and approximate one other 390 BC. But the Arabs looting Rome, at least the parts outside the walls, in 846 AD was news to me, and I’m relatively well informed.
Granted, that was during the Dark Ages. But then Pirenne argued that the Dark Ages were dark in Europe because the Muslims transformed the Mediterranean from a highway into a danger zone for Europeans.
The Romans could travel by land because they had the organization to keep up the roads. When the Germans took over Europe, they didn’t have the societal competence to keep up the roads. Still, they could use the Mediterranean, which is amazingly useful. But then Muslim pirates took over the sea.
* Viktor Lazlo was apparently based on Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, a Eurasian aristocrat involved with various international agencies, who advocated for race-mixing to occur between White and dark gentiles. He wanted the goyish races to mix in order to produce a common mulatto race which could be ruled over by a pure-blood Jewish elite (Coudenhove-Kalergi was not himself Jewish).
* Japan has very strict immigration policies. As a result, Muslims are not admitted and the last major terrorist attack inside that country occurred about a fifth of a century ago in the Tokyo subway – committed by some crazy, and very rare, native cult. Japan has gotten perfect safety and cultural homogeneity all for the price of missing out on a little virtue signaling. Works for them. In the mean-time, the West has suffered riots, assassinations (Theo Van Gogh), numerous shootings and terrorist attacks using explosives and automatic/semiautomatic rifles, large numbers of rapes and sexual assaults, crime...
* The dark-haired woman in ABBA, had a Norwegian mother (non-Lebensborn, I think though) and a German-soldier father. After the war, her mother fled with her to Sweden where opinions were less polarized and there was less social rejection. At one point, ABBA was supposed to be second only to Volvo, in terms of Swedish export earnings. So this was at least one case where Sweden overwhelmingly benefited from its policy of open-mindedness and acceptance of immigrants.
* Since we’re observing the one hundred year anniversary of World War I, I’ve often asked myself similar questions. How would the United States have been adversely affected by a German victory in World War I. Without U.S. intervention, that seems quite likely. By the spring of 1918 Russia was out of the war, the French Army was in various stages of mutiny and almost incapable of offensive action. The British were still in it, but the losses at Third Ypres had been almost catastrophic. The Germans came very close to winning in the 1918 Kaiserschlacht.
But how would a Europe dominated by Germany have posed a threat to North America; hard now for me to see!
* Or would WWI have dragged on into 1919 without American intervention? The German offensive to take Paris in the spring of 1918 before the Americans really arrived in large numbers seems to have petered out about 70 miles outside of Paris. The defense had the upper hand at that point in history, so it’s not clear that anybody would have won if the U.S. stayed out.
Perhaps without U.S. intervention the war would have dragged on into 1919 or 1920 and ended with Communists overthrowing the governments in Berlin and Paris, and perhaps London?
Comment: David Brooks is misusing statistics to attack Trump and downplay the fact that hispanic crime rates are higher than non-hispanic whites, whether you are talking about hispanics as a whole, or just the three big groups, Mexican-Americans, Central Americans, and Caribbean Hispanics.
He makes some of the same errors of Unz in this regard. Specifically, Unz argues that incarceration rates, with his own adjustments to the rates, are a good method to compare crime rates. The flaw of this is that (1) hispanic career criminals are often deported so do not stay in US prisons long compared to career white and black criminals (2) hispanics have shorter tenure in the USA even within each age group.
Unz next looks at the overall crime rate in cities compared to their hispanic population. He finds that quite often heavy hispanic cities have very low crime rates, such as majority hispanic Santa Ana and El Paso, and large minority hispanic San Diego.
This is an important finding since some on the alt right do overstate the hispanic/white crime gap, which is just a fraction of the black white crime gap.
However, the problem is that this method cannot, by definition, work if hispanics are more likely to move to areas with low-crime white populations versus high-crime white populations. And indeed, hispanics are much more likely to move to areas with highly educated and low-crime white populations, like California and Colorado’s, than to areas with poorer and more criminal white populations, like West Virginia.
The other problem is that, while certain hispanic cities have very low crime rates, other have very high rates, higher than any extremely white cities. And likewise, even these low crime hispanic cities have high crime rates compared to the most exceptional white and white/asian cities. Yes, El Paso and Santa Ana are pretty low crime, but they are much more criminal than Simi Valley, Laguna Beach, Del Mar, Marin County, or the many upper middle class exurban areas around most large American cities.
City-Data Crime Index / Hispanic%/White%/Asian%
Santa Ana 200.6 77.6/10.7/10.1
El Paso 211.1 80.0/14.4/1.1
Bell Gardens 194.5 95.7/2.7/0.5
And other majority hispanic cities do not look so hot.
Merced 362.9 53.2/27.8/13.5
South Gate 322.7 94.8/3.4/0.7
Some California cities with low hispanic populations:
Irvine 89.6 11.8/44.3/38.6
Simi Valley 104.9 25.8/63.0/8.6
Palo Alto 117.5 27.8/57.7/27.8
Sunnyvale 125 13.7/36.7/42.1
Going outside of CA, here are the cities with populations between 60K and 100K with the lowest violent crime rates, the their hispanic share:
Carmel, IN 2.5%
Fishers, IN 3.4%
Flower Mound, TX 8.4%
Greenwich, CT 13.8%
Palatine, IL 18%
Orem, UT 14.8%
Johns Creek, GA 5.2%
Arlington Heights, IL 4.5%
Now the lowest violent crime rates in the 100 to 250K city range:
Irvine, CA 11.8%
Murrieta, CA 25.9%
Amherst, NY 2.3%
Frisco, TX 12.4%
Colonie, NY 1.9%
Cary, NC 7.7%
Naperville, IL 4.2%
Temecula, CA 24.7%
On average, the safest cities are far less hispanic than the state or region they are in is.
Here’s Brooks in his latest column:
Trump plays up the alleged threat of crime committed by immigrants. But the overall evidence is clear. Immigrants make American streets safer.
This is not true, but even the fake open boarders statistics has to lump our chaotic, unregulated illegal illegal immigrant population and Third World chain migration immigrants in with our imperfect but functioning skill based and First World immigration to come up with “immigrants make America safer.” But restrictions like Trump don’t think we need to keep out highly skilled scientists and the like, and we know Trump personally favors immigration from Europe.
Among native-born men without a high school diploma, about 11 percent are incarcerated. Among similarly educated Mexican, Guatemalan and Salvadoran men here, only 2 or 3 percent get incarcerated.
The problem here is that not too many Mexican, Guatemalan, and Salvadorian immigrants have 12 years of primary education. Comparing the incarceration of the dumbest/most impulsive 10% of native born Americans (who themselves are heavily black) with roughly the average Salvadorian is not really Apples to Apples, is it?
Numerous studies have shown that a big share of the drop in crime rates in the 1990s is a result of the surge in immigration.
This is not true, and unlike a lot of the claims, no citation to support it.
Trump plays up the threat of terrorism. But the real threat is that our border agencies spend so much time tracking down people who want to be gardeners that they don’t have the resources to track down the people who want to be suicide bombers.
Trump’s “shut down Muslim immigration” would have stopped 100% of the mass terrorist attacks committed by immigrants in the USA. I agree it would be nice if we did not have to support a massive, liberty-destorying, very expensive and wasteful internal security state to protect us from ISIS. But that is the unavoidable price of having a Muslim immigrant population. I agree we should not have to pay that price.
The bulk of the evidence shows that immigrants have a hugely positive effect on total American G.D.P
Annexing Yemen, Bangladesh, Iraq, and Somalia would also increase “total GDP.” Hmm, maybe that is not such a good statistic to evaluate policy.
Second, by 2044, America will be a majority-minority country. This is a very different America than the one people who grew up in the 1960s were used to. It’s a historical transformation that is bound to raise very legitimate concerns.
Stopping what Brooks calls the “browning of America” is not one of the legitimate concerns. We are only allowed to make sure that the browning-bringers are “properly vetted.”
Donald Trump’s G.O.P. is a rear-window party pining for a white America that is never coming back.
So let’s enact policies that speed its demise!
The increase in low level and unreported crime with hispanic immigration is absolutely real.
1. Is Unz/Brooks going to say with a straight face that hispanic immigrant areas don't have higher rates of graffiti and littering? How about DUI and driving without a license and insurance?
2. The people to justify sanctuary cities and amnesty always tell us that illegals are afraid to report crimes to the police. This is no doubt true to some extent.
So, isn't it the case that the more illegals there are, the more crime will be under-reported? Even legal hispanic immigrants may have illegals in the household, or not speak enough English to want to call the police. So the underreporting goes beyond just illegals.
Your point about the MSM having to tell us our own eyes are lying is absolutely right, Here is just another boring, typical article from San Diego that did not get an ounce of national coverage: a 69 year old white woman cleaning graffiti off a wall was killed by a 23 year old hispanic with "road rage" doing some sort of drunk street racing in a residential neighborhood.
A community activist was painting over graffiti in a San Diego neighborhood when she was struck by a suspected drunk driver who police say was involved in a road rage altercation.
Police said 69-year-old Maruta Gardner died after being hit in the Mission Beach area Friday when the driver of a Toyota Corolla passed a Ford Mustang and went onto the shoulder. After striking Gardner, the driver sped away but was arrested a short distance away.
Police said the hit-and-run was the result of a road-rage altercation. The Toyota driver - 23-year-old Jonathan Domingo Garcia - was booked for investigation of vehicular manslaughter, DUI and hit and run.
Jonathan Domingo Garcia, 23, accused of killing a 68-year-old community activist removing graffiti in Mission Beach pleaded not guilty Thursday to eight charges, including gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated and felony hit-and-run.
Deputy District Attorney Steve Schott told Judge Jay Bloom that at about 3 p.m. Friday — three hours before the crash — Garcia and a friend were seen slashing tires on cars.
About three hours later, the car Garcia was driving rear-ended a Ford Mustang, and he failed to stop, the prosecutor said.
The driver of the Mustang pulled in front of Garcia’s Toyota Corolla, authorities said. Garcia then made an illegal right turn in a 15-mph zone, and struck the victim, who was on the road’s shoulder, Schott said. Gardner died the next day.
“The defendant didn’t stop. He actually drove down and parked, exited his vehicle and checked for damage on his car. He spent 5 minutes doing that,” said Schott. “He then returned to the area and an officer tried to flag him down. Once again he did not stop. And instead continued to drive, actually struck another vehicle. Did not stop. Before the officer finally made contact with him.”
“Instead of asking about the person he just struck on the roadway, he asked when he could get his car back,” said Schott.
Three hours after the accident, Garcia’s blood-alcohol level was measured at .06 percent, Schott said. Alcohol, marijuana and depressants were found in the defendant’s system
“I think the defendant is an extreme danger to the community by his callousness by the act itself plus he’s a flight risk,” the judge said. “If he’s going to do hit and runs there’s no guarantees he’ll come back. So bail is set at $550,000 and waiving bail review.”
Garcia faces 15 years in prison if he’s convicted. His next court appearance will be March 10.
Gardner, a former principal at Mission Bay High School, was honored by the San Diego City Council last year, which declared Nov 3 “Maruta Gardner Day.” Gardner would have celebrated her birthday this Saturday.
Does David Brooks’s “immigrants are good for the economy” account for the violent death of Mrs. Gardner and others like her? For the $400,000 in taxes we will pay to house the man who killed her in prison? For the tires he slashed and the two vehicles he hit and ran that same day?
Economics can be complicated, but you don’t need to engage in complicated research to know that importing random poorly educated people from poor, violent countries will make America dumber, poorer, and a worse place to live for the natives.
* And the drugs. The drugs. Open borders; the industrial production of illicit drugs; and a large segment of the population susceptible to addiction. Good grief.
• The university’s 2007 settlement agreement with the NCAA requires the school to protect trademarks of the controversial logo. This is so the school can keep exclusive rights to license it. The NCAA required that so UND would have control over the logo, thereby blocking others from using it willy-nilly and allowing it to proliferate freely in a hockey jersey shop near you.
• To maintain the trademark, however, UND must produce and sell merchandise bearing the logo. Sort of a use-it-or-lose-it angle to trademark law. Failure to do so could cause the school to lose the trademark, allowing others to swoop in and cause the unfettered proliferation of Fighting Sioux hockey jerseys.
• So although UND is now known by its new Fighting Hawks nickname, the school must continue to produce and sell Fighting Sioux merchandise to satisfy the NCAA’s demand that it get rid of the nickname and logo.
Stuart Schneiderman writes: In a 2006 lecture he delivered at the National Endowment for the Humanities, Tom Wolfe offered some remarks about Freud. I report them without commentary.
First:
In medical terms, Freud is now considered a quack. But his notion of sex as an energy like the steam in a boiler, which must be released in an orderly fashion or the boiler will blow up, remains with us, too. At this very moment ... you can be sure that there are literally millions of loin spasms and hip-joint convulsions that are taking place ... throughout the world that would not be occurring were it not for the power of the words of Sigmund Freud.
Second:
I turned to the literature of the physiology of the brain for the answer, only to discover that Sigmund Freud had stopped the physical study of the brain cold for 40 years. Freud had been so persuasive, had so convinced the scientific community and the academic community in general that he had found the final answers to mental disturbance in his theories of the id, the ego, the superego, and the Oedipal drama within the family, that it was rather pointless to go through the tedious, laborious business of determining what synapses, what dendrites, what circuits in the brain accounted for what one already knew anyway.
* Besides the staggering building costs, the problem here is density. California lacks it. We are not Japan.
Therefore, high speed rain in California is a nice idea only; since once you reach your destination (unless it’s SF or downtown LA) you still need a ‘personal transport vehicle’ (car) to get around.
Even in the crowded northeast (between NY and Washington) Amtrak (rail service) loses millions each and every year. Personal vehicles are essential in vast, spread-out, non-urban areas; which describes most of California.
Then there’s price of completing this green project. Each leg of this Democrat jobs program will consume tens of billions of dollars just to build. Maintenance costs are extra. These immense costs will never be recovered via paying customers.
Why not simply add dozens of (subsidized) buses (providing a real cost incentive) to all our major highways so that people can roll along in collective comfort while they play with their smart phones and computers? With fracking and emerging hybrid technologies on the rise, fossil fuel-powered vehicles could remain a affordable transportation option for decades to come.
Ramped-up (and super-cheap cheap) bus service (using the ‘car pool lane’ in existing highways) could save California one hundred billion dollars going forward. With that in mind, let’s put high speed rail back on the shelf where it belongs–at least for now.
* If you don’t support High Speed Rail, you’re a racist and hate gays.
* We are not maximizing wealth creation when a venture capitalist is sitting in traffic congestion next to a maid.
We should charge a congestion fee on every road, and raise the fee in real time until the road is not congested.
Therefore, no road would ever be congested.
High-income people would always be able to drive fast, even at rush hour.
Low-income people could cluster into buses.
* In truth, there is no plan to build what was presented to the voters. It is all another big lie of Jerry Brown and the Democrat legislature. It will never be completed within 200% of its proposed budget and, if completed at all, will take decades. Even then, it will not be close to reaching it promoted goal of time to distance. What it is is a another financial boondoggle, a way for the politicians to repay their donor class. And nothing more.
It is faster, door to door, to drive from LA to SFO than to fly or to take this dumb train plus you have a car to use when at your destination, leave on your schedule and just chuck stuff into your car.
Hurry up Donald! And encourage some acolyte to run in California. There are no Republicans here anyway.
* As Stuff White People Like pointed out, white people see buses as socially tainted compared to rail. But there’s a way to combat that: marketing.
Spend a half-billion dollars on marketing a luxury bus service between, say, the San Jose and Burbank airports as what all the cool people are taking.
* As the Silicon Valley workforce ages into the family years, there could be a lot of pressure on living costs near the tech firms. High speed rail might allow for the development of commuter suburbs far out into the Central Valley, even if the rail itself never makes it into SF or LA per se.
I suspect that the benefits will never cover the costs, but given our negative interest rate environment there are a lot less worthwhile things the govt could be doing.
* The AMTRAK NE Corridor breaks even. The rest of the routes lose money.
If Amtrak were run more like a commuter rail system rather than an airline for business types, it would do even better.
The new trendier Mega and Bolt intercity busses have hurt the intercity rails in the NE (young college types seem to like them, and they don’t have the stigma of Greyhound or Trailways), but they may be paving the way for a revival of rail.
* I’m not all that familiar with California demographics; but isn’t Bakersfield to San Jose a train ride from one place where White folks don’t want to be to another place where White folks don’t want to be?
* Actually, it’s a ride from a place the wrong sort of White folks like (wary of Diversity because of its proximity) to a place that the correct sort of White folks like (limpwristed SWPLs sheltered from Diversity). The White demographic overlap of Bakersfield and San Jose is zilch.
* I don’t think the problem is “status” or socially tainted, the problem is that Greyhound buses really, really suck.
Uncomfortable, ugly, smelly, always delayed, only minorities or broke students take them.
AMTRAK and Via Rail (in Canada) are OK, a relatively comfortable trip, but slow. The AMTRAK train service from NY to Montreal is nice, but only during the day and takes 10-12 hours (!). Couldn’t they improve on that?
As for me, I’d love to see a renaissance of the giant airships/zeppelins cruising the skies between LA and SF at, er, 85 mph? Not much speed, but think of the view.
* Ann Coulter says that she’s not an immigrant but a settler. I heard this kind of argument before, but only from one guy, Samuel p Huntingdon. That’s the first time I’ve ever head someone make this argument in the mainstream. Apparently no one at the view could respond to her.
Prices range from $50 to $90. The regular buses, which are perfectly comfortable coach buses, are from $20 to $30. Note that these luxury lines are cheaper than what Greyhound was charging when it had its near monopoly into the early 2000s. I took Greyhound a few times back then between cities in the northeast, and it was terrible, with bad service and seedy terminals filled with ghetto types and crack and meth heads. It was so bad that I would spend extra to take Amtrak. Then the Chinatown buses came in and crashed the intercity ticket price to $20. And then the corporate bus lines offering comparably low prices with better and more professional service like MegaBus came in, and now we have cheap, high quality intercity bus transport in the northeast.
* The big problem with new rail projects in the US is actually buried in Steve’s post, in an off hand comment about well heeled people potentially objecting to trains running at 220 MPH through their suburbs.
People keep thinking that the US is not particularly densely populated or even underpopulated, which probably also drives the enthusiasm for more and more immigration. Yes, if you take the 320 or so million people in the US (which I suspect is an undercount to hide the amount of illegal immigration) and divide it by the total number of square miles, you get a lower person to square mile ratio than in Europe, China, and India. But these three places are the most densely populated places on Earth. And the US is the third or fourth largest country by land area.
But a good part of the area of the US are places where either people don’t want to live or where it would be absurdly expensive to maintain (and bring water to) dense populations, either mountains or deserts or featureless plains with really bad weather. The vast majority of people live in metropolitan areas, generally the suburban parts. The whole advantage of intercity passenger rail is that it can get you from downtown to downtown, no need to make the trek to/ from the airport way out in the burbs. But the only way to do that is to put tracks through the suburbs where people don’t want it. And enough rail tracks were removed when people thought that everyone would drive everywhere, no problems with traffic (with rails to trails being a particularly egregious bit of stupidity that this is a real problem).
I’m familiar enough with these projects to know that the San Jose to Bakersfield link is being done first just to get something built, hopefully in time for the politicians currently in office to open it, to show people some tangible result for their tax dollars quickly. Then people will pony up to get the line through the coast mountains to LA. I actually doubt the line will reach downtown San Francisco, given that Amtrak’s normal trains don’t go there, but there are at least CalTrains and eventually BART links to SF.
I also agree with the earlier commentator that the focus of any passenger rail development in the US should be on commuter rail. High speed intercity rail is a huge distraction that at best should be at the bottom of the list of planned improvements in the area. It you really have to build high speed passenger rail, LA-SF is probably the second place where it should be implemented after NY-DC, though there is a case for prioritizing connecting Chicago with any northeast corridor line instead.
* China has never been able to produce cars beyond low quality copies of out-of-date Western and Japanese design. The high rate of corner cutting just does not work for something as complex as the design and production of new automobiles.
Part of the reason is also that in this respect China is more capitalistic than the major automakers’ home country. Korea, Japan, the USA, Canada and Western Europe all provide very big subsidies to their local auto industry, making it impossible for China to break into the market despite trying for decades. And it is open to Chinese cars if they were any good. Look how fast Korean companies grew. But that was with the fanatic.al support of the Korean government every step of the way.
There are some specific auto parts where China has a decent market share. This is typically by cutting corners to underprice the OEM parts by 50% or more, and western non-OEM by 25% or more. Now not all of these parts are bad, but it is scary to think of a whole car made from them.
* Most of Amtrak’s routes between the coasts are little more than subsidized nostalgia. That is vastly preferable to subsidized dispossession, but let’s be honest about it and put it where such things belong: the National Park Service.
* Buses are a good idea. The roads are already there so they don’t have to build rights of way for new railroads.
Bus routes can easily be changed if demand shifts, whether it’s different times of day or weekend routes, not to mention future demand changes years down the road. A rail line is of course stuck where it is.
Imagine LA freeways if say 30% of the cars were taken off the road and those people were on a bus. The problem with freeways is rush hour traffic that causes bottlenecks. Buses would eliminate that, while still allowing people who drive for various reasons to drive on less crowded roads. Of course, non-freeways would also have less traffic.
Car congestion is bad for buses because the bus gets stuck in traffic. Remove a lot of the cars from the road and buses can really be efficient and versatile.
Buses can be very comfortable too. Google has private buses that take workers from San Francisco to the Google complex.
Even non- private buses can be comfortable and pleasant to ride in. I’ve ridden in coaches in England and Switzerland and they are very nice.
In England coaches go from town to town and buses operate in the town. I took a inter-city coach into London and it was very fast and comfortable, The problem came when we got into London and the car traffic slowed the bus down . Get rid of those cars and it would be super efficient. Or have certain roads that are bus only that the city.
* As Stuff White People Like pointed out, white people see buses as socially tainted compared to rail.
Paul Weyrich, a rare right-wing rail advocate, made this point explicitly at times. I’m sure he embarrassed the more conventional transit-boosting crowd.
I once heard a veteran urban planner from Savannah give a talk to our local preservation society. He said bluntly, if only in passing, that keeping up your handsome buildings and residences keeps and attracts white people.
You can get away with a line like that once in a talk, especially if it comes across as a joke. But people take notes.
* The primary, which is to say only, advantage to light rail is that people know where the rail line is located because they see it all the time, so everyone has it drilled into their memory where they can go on it. That’s cool, but we now live in an era where even the poorest among us carry around a device that makes it quite easy to know what time it is, and to find a bus route that can take us from A to B, which effectively kills even that advantage.
So we have technologies – smart phones and airplanes – that make it possible to pretty much abolish some insanely expensive, dedicated infrastructure needed for one form of public transit, and yet we still want to blow hundreds of billions on said infrastructure.
Mind-boggling.
* The California High Speed Rail Plan is rather infuriating. The traffic bottleneck in California is not the highway from the Tejon Pass to San Jose. In fact, this is the one stretch of road where the freeways basically work as a high speed means of transit.
What Southern California really needs is high speed rail from San Bernardino to Downtown LA, Mid-City Wilshire, Century City and Santa Monica. There needs to be a corresponding high speed rail connecting Newport Beach, Orange, Anaheim and Long Beach to Downtown LA. There should also be a high speed network in the San Fernando Valley up through Palmdale. A means of daily commuting from far flung suburbs to the centralized job centers is what is critical for the long term economic future of Los Angeles. Due to the decentralized nature of LA, the Google Smart Cars should not be for connecting Bakersfield to San Jose, but for the daily commuter from San Bernardino to get to her job in Beverly Hills from the high speed rail station in Century City.
* People have been talking for years about a Los Angeles-Las Vegas train so that Vegas visitors could start getting drunk on the train instead of driving. The mountain pass between Los Angeles and Las Vegas is less severe than the mountain pass between Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay. And Las Vegas is incredibly concentrated for visitors, while the San Francisco Bay area is highly diffuse due to having a bay in the middle of it, which makes having a car much more useful.
But nothing has happened regarding a Vegas train.
* Chinese marketing: “Real cheap! You buy now!”
* Commuter rail in Chicago is a very nice amenity. I can remember taking the train to the north shore and thinking that this is much more civilized than either driving the Kennedy expressway or taking the El. (On the other hand, commuting down Lake Shore Drive isn’t bad either.) You can estimate how valuable commuter rail is by looking at the price premium for homes close to commuter rail stations.
But it’s real hard to retrofit commuter rail into a city. Los Angeles, for example, is full of missed opportunities that could have been done a century ago for a reasonable price if anybody had anticipated how valuable the real estate would someday be. But the market didn’t anticipate that so it didn’t seem worth doing.
* Every politician in the legislature will want the train to stop in his town, or some big, unneeded infrastructure payoff. This will cost far more than anyone will admit. I really had thought that Gov. Jerry Brown had more sense than this. A high speed train to nowhere.
* Brooks and company have to tell us how good things are because it sure isn’t evident from our personal experience.
Another trick here is to not use federal incarceration data; since most illegal aliens get shunted into the federal system, that allows a lot of illegal immigrants to not be included in the data. Something like 25% of federal incarcerations are of illegal immigrants.
From my anecdotal experience, the data here doesn’t capture the increase in petty property crime that drags down civic life: think Victor Davis Hanson’s chain saw getting stolen. When our area loaded up with gardeners from Mexico, the low level thefts that fell under the radar of prosecution went way up. Sure, the newcomers aren’t going to kill you, but they’ll help themselves to anything not tied down that they can get away with. Thus an increase in locks and fences; and the aggravated residents needing to be told by Brooks et al that they should just lie back and enjoy a massive increase in GDP.
* I spent a week in Miami, then went back to visit a girlfriend for 3 weeks.
During the first week, I used buses until a drunk black guy got on one and just vomited onto the floor in front of himself casually like you or I would cough. Everyone acted like it was normal. When I went back later to visit my girlfriend, I didn’t use buses.
* I just drove LA to LV a couple months ago. Leaving LA on a Friday night, it took me about 3 hours bumper-to-bumper stop-and-go traffic just to get out of LA. We reached LV way late strung out on coffee. The whole interstate between LA and LV on Friday night was packed. I was amazed.
If I lived in LA and there were a train to LV, I would go maybe once every 3-4 months I think. I’ve heard some people go more like once every 2 weeks.
* When SF’s Leap bus service debuted, I remember it was promoted on SWPL websites.
I took a luxury bus in Burma from Rangoon to Mandalay. A new, straight, smooth highway was built to shuttle the elites from Rangoon to their new super-secret capital, and all the buses to Mandalay used it (or mine did). Since I was relatively rich, I took the highest-cost VIP liner. I was shocked. It had airline service with stewardesses and food carts, huge reclining seats with headphones, etc. Fantastic. I slept and woke up totally refreshed. There’s no reason for people not to take buses like this.
On the other hand, Japan’s rail services have not really resulted in an improvement in quality of life as far as I can tell. If you compare a single rail line to a single highway, the rail line is much more invasive for the landscape. The promise of rail travel is not that it’s better than highways, but that it will replace/prevent highways, but that doesn’t really seem to be the case here. As long as construction is make-work government hand-outs, rails and highways are just built on top of each other.
Speaking as someone who just a couple months ago drove SF to LA on US 1 and who lives in Japan, I would hate to see the California landscape despoiled by all the overhead lines, raised concrete platforms, crossing signs, new separate stations (yes!), and numerous paraphernalia needed to maintain Japan’s shinkansen.
Furthermore, last year, flying from Osaka to Tokyo was cheaper as well as slightly faster than taking the shinkansen, so there were a lot of people switching over to the flights. Who actually commutes from LA to SF and can’t afford to fly?
* I used to take Greyhound to travel in university. Greyhound is horrible. I used to huddle up next to Amish people to avoid wretched-smelling bag ladies. Recently a relative died, and my mother had to take a Greyhound cross-country. She got off to use the bathroom at one stop, and the driver (guess what gender and color!) left her there. She lost all her luggage and only avoided walking for miles because the state police picked her up. She’s in her late 60s.
Amtrak on the other hand, you have to love. The key is, when traveling in NY, to buy the ticket to Montreal, which gets you onto the special car with extra-large seats. Amtrak has wi-fi now and craft beers, too, which means you can work on your laptop and look out the window at the Hudson or Adirondack mountains while drinking Dogfish Head 90-minute IPA. What’s not to love?
Also, for anyone who’s got the time, I advise doing this…
I haven’t been able to yet, but I took a sleeper from London to Fort William when I was younger and loved it. I remember waking up, opening my curtains, and seeing a stone wall extending out into the distance. Whether I actually woke up to see the Antonine Wall out my window, I’m not sure, but I will always remember the thrill of thinking so.
* Germans speak English in the presence of 1 non-German-speaker because they are today the kind of people who will let a flood of Syrians into their country… and because the non-German-speaker cannot speak German…
Gays got a lot of power in this country not just because they wouldn’t shut up, but because the nice Christians didn’t torture, beat, and murder them when they wouldn’t shut up… and because if they did get beaten, they were living in big cities around other gays whose shoulder they could cry on.
In converse, iSteve is full of intolerant readers, but we aren’t having much impact, are we? I live in Japan and all the expats I know think Trump is Hitler. If I let out that they’re crazy, I have nowhere to go…
So it’s more complicated than intolerant minorities.
* A White America that is never coming back. Hmmm …
Didn’t various Albanian nationalists and Muslim triumphalists say the same thing around 1989 in Yugoslavia? How did that one work out again?
Diversity status signaling among upper class Whites has diminishing returns. Brooks may be secure, but places like Github are purging White males (and females):
———
In February 2015, Sanchez wrote an article for USA Today entitled “More white women does not equal tech diversity,” and during a diversity training talk Sanchez even stated that technology was “not work for white folks to lead” and that “some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women.”
…
“Don’t think we’ll succeed teaching white, male middle managers empathy and compassion anytime soon. So let’s limit their scope of damage,” wrote Campos in one tweet.
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A cynic, OK me, would say that Github believes they have reached a monopoly, all competitors seen off, and wishes to milk the company as a cash cow with no investments, thus dumping high cost White male engineers who know what they are doing and replacing them with low skill H1-Bs at a fraction of the cost to maintain an aging, never updated again codebase.
This is the reason behind the driving force of adoption of Diversity for Corporate entities.
Dumping high cost White men for low cost H1-Bs, and wrapping it up in the religious dogma of Diversity.
ABC has just appointed a Black female head of programming. The first such (Black and Female) ever appointed. The ratings are down 13%. As cord cutting accelerates due to spiraling costs of cable/satellite — ratings are going to be even more important as carriage fees from just being carried on say Direct TV go down as fewer people subscribe.
Worse, Advertisers love Diversity. In commercials. But they don’t want an audience made up Moesha and Home Boys in Outer Space fans. The Pew Hispanic Trust estimated that media household net assets in 2010 was 135K, 5K, and 6K for White, Black, and Hispanic households respectively. MEDIAN. That means half are below that number. Big Ticket items won’t be bought by Black households in any appreciable numbers, given that Blacks are 12.5% of the population and half have less per household than 6K in net assets, let alone liquid free cash/income.
The religious assumptions of diversity have been riding on the free margin of built up White wealth from the post War era, including but not limited to Ike’s interstate freeway system, the military derived satellite communications system, etc.
That margin is being eroded rapidly due not only to burning up wealth by religious idiotic assumptions, but by foreign (Chinese) competition.
Brooks is reliably wrong — Trump’s message is likely even heard among the SWPL fired for being White so some incompetent Latino/Latina can be Upper Middle Management and some incompetent H1-B is hired to do the actual work.
I’ve never heard it explained how Whites don’t rebel, in various nasty ways, when they are shut out of nearly all opportunities save those connected and already powerful.
* Here is something that a lot of people miss: no form of public transportation pays its own way. Not buses, not airplanes, not trains. All involve some degree of public subsidy whether it’s highways, public airports, or Amtrak. Back when private railroads ran their own trains, they were paying high union wages, maintaining their own infrastructure and paying property taxes on it, and were told by regulatory agencies what they could charge for fares. A typical overnight train required a crew of 20 or more to run it (engineer, fireman, conductor, brakeman, car attendants, dining car staff). It was basically a hotel on wheels. What surprises me is that they did not lose more money offering that service.
* You are forgetting that Trump has avoided attacking Rubio thus far in the election. Trump has gone after Jeb and Cruz instead. I think Trump will change tactic and go after Rubio realizing he is now the biggest threat.
Plus with Kasich planning to stay around till March 15 Ohio primary, Trump will have plenty of time to work on Rubio.
* If Rubio drops out soon, Trump is going to have a harder time of it because the GOP establishment is going to rally behind Cruz to stop Trump. If you look at South Carolina results, Rubio and Cruz each got 22%. If Rubio hadn’t been running and his portion of the vote went to Cruz, Cruz would have won South Carolina instead of Trump. Rubio staying in the race is preventing Cruz from winning.
* Of course Fox and others are playing the optimist hand for Rubio and the pessimist one for Trump. But the reality is this. As of now Trump is winning.
I am awaiting Trump going after Rubio and reminding the base continually about Chuck Schumer’s side kick on the gang of 8. I don’t think Rubio has the chops to stand up to withering attacks. Christie showed us that. Rubio has benefited from the media helping him along by not focusing on amnesty, and by Trump bashing Bush and lately Cruz. Conventional wisdom says that Rubio is helped by Bush leaving. But by Bush leaving Trump can stop attacking him and focus on Rubio. Let’s see how Rubio holds up when Trump focuses on him.
* True, but the NRA is totally AWOL on immigration issues, all of which have a profound effect on the future of our common law gun rights.
About 40% of the people in this country belong to peoples that the Founding Fathers did not believe had a right to bear arms. And that number is growing with each generation.
The Second Amendment is irrelevant– and worse, if it requires the Fourteenth. It’s a common law right, and “common law” means English.
* You’re right that Rubio is extraordinarily lame. Shocking that he’s the best the establishment can come up with. His record in public life is as weak as Obama’s was 2008, and he’s not nearly as smart or tough as Obama. Whatever else anybody can say about Obama, he ran a brilliant campaign 8 years ago. He devised the strategy, he wrote all of the speeches, and he made every important decision. Rubio doesn’t seem to be running anything. He’s just a mouthpiece, reading lines written by others and passively awaiting instructions from his handlers about what to do next.
* Since the units they need to conduct war rely on white southerners, there’s probably a naturally self-limiting nature to their support. If one of your neighbor’s kids gets maimed, he’s a hero in a heroic struggle. A bunch get maimed, nobody’s a hero, and everything is a tragedy.
* The GOP establishment is going nuts over at RedState – total meltdown. In fact, their lead story the night that Donald Trump won South Carolina by a large margin is:
Wait a minute. Didn’t Rubio lose by 10 points? And didn’t Trump win almost all the delegates? Shouldn’t victory speeches be reserved for the victorious, not guys who lose 100% of the states they run in?
“Watch Cruz Supporters React To Jeb Bush Dropping Out”
‘Cheers for the narrowing of the race, but also for Bush’s statement about policy mattering, a direct swipe at the superficial and childish campaign of the blowhard who won tonight.’
* Considering how Rubio nearly imploded in New Hampshire and Trump is a walking time bomb, Cruz would be nuts to give up right now. I want Trump to win, but it’s a long way from over.
* I’m concerned because Trump’s on a learning curve right now, and the experience he’s learning from in a 3,4,5,15-way race might not apply to the general election. It would be a better lab for him if he had to go head-to-head with a single candidate at this point.
* Nevada matters about as much as Iowa, which is not a lot. Caucuses are stupid. Last I checked, it looked like perhaps only 12 or 13 thousand people in Nevada even bothered to go through the process today.
Nevertheless, the outcome resembles what I think will happen for the Democrats all the way to their convention: The grifter will win more delegates, while the communist will gather enough stupid people to be an inconvenience.
The grifter will then lose to Donald Trump, but she will avoid a trial, thanks to the quid pro quo of the anti-American president whose ass she will continue to kiss.
* I think the Republicans should start beating the war drums against Obama and his possible grant of clemency to Hillary in that three-month window after the election and before he leaves office. They should try to create a firestorm around the email scandal and see if they can get the press to start asking whether he will swear to the American public that he will not consider granting a last minute clemency to Hillary after the election. Any such pledge would be legally unenforceable but it would bring the email scandal front and center during the campaign and cause embarrassment to Hillary. That’s one area where the Constitution needs to be amended. Either make all clemency decisions subject to the approval of Congress or limit clemencies to the first three years of a President’s term so they all have the potential of being considered by the voters in the upcoming Presidential election. I don’t think Clinton would have granted clemency to Marc Rich if he knew his scandalous decision might have affected the race of 2000 to succeed him in office.
* I would think that Republican-leaning government employees would be more likely to lean Trump than Rubio. Rubio sides with the Paul Ryan/Scott Walker crowd and will likely follow their track record of cutting government employee benefits and enriching contractors. At least Trump won’t enrich the contractors to the same extent. And since Trump is the least likely Republican to cut Social Security, it’s a safe bet he’s the least likely to cut government employee pensions as well.
* Apparently what forced ¡Jeb¡’s withdrawl was a combination of having burned through 100-120 million in funds and rumors that a number of top consultants were jumping ship for Rubio.
I actually see this as a disaster for Rubio.
First of all like others have said Trump can now focus on Rubio being Schumer’s cabana boy on the Gang of Eight Amnesty deal.
Second and I believe far worse is that Rubio will now be responsible for keeping all the money grubbing loyal Bushie campaign consultants happy. It is impossible to keep all the Karl Rove’s, Mike Murphy’s and their wannabees happy and flush with filet mignon, cigars and single malt. Does Rent Boy Rubio really inspire enough confidence in his donor base to lavishly fund his campaign?
Some of these consultant crapweasels are going to be left with out a musical chair to land on. There will be hard feelings and because they may realize that three decades long Conservative Inc gravy train may be ending with the rise of Trump and Populist/Nationalist politics, some of them may spill the dirt on Rubio for spite. Also remember ¡Jeb¡’s professional Hispanics are Mexicans, Rubio’s are Cuban, so no love lost there.
Last, with the death of Scalia, the Neocon mega donors have a chance to pour tens of millions into bribing the Republican Senate into helping Obama nominate a SCOTUS justice who will give them what they really secretly desire, hate speech laws and internet censorship that will block any criticism of Israel, shutdown the BDS movement and continued Open Borders. In Europe we see the Jewish Neocons and Marxist left working in concert to promote hate speech laws and Anarcho-Tyranny repression of the historical nationalist population.
Rubio is no longer necessary for this to happen. The Jewish mega donor focus for the next several months will be on locking down the SCOTUS for the next several decades. Remember the Notorious RBG is also likely to announce her retirement by summer.
Finally, Kaisich is a nothing burger who always was on the Jack Kemp track. A long shot at being a VP nomination and then cushy life attending country club Republican functions and golf tournaments.
* “The focus of the article is on the danger of the government convicting somebody who isn’t much of a threat to commit terrorism. There’s another side of the coin, of course, but that goes unmentioned: the possibility of the government prodding somebody into actually committing terrorism.”
I wonder if the Bomb-Brothers were not an instance of this. Perhaps the FBI tried to recruit them for a fake bomb-plot, but did not realize that they were smart enough to initiate a real one. They (the Tsarnaev’s, I mean) might have also realized they were being played and thought it would be an amusing joke to play on the Feds. That scenario might explain what seemed to be a bunch of Craft security personnel hanging around that day, as well as the suspicious death of Ibrahim Todashev.
Regarding the federal fake terror-plot campaign, one should also not discount simple careerism. I would assume that both in the FBI and in the DoJ (so-called) making successful cases is a metric for promotion. GS-14s for everyone!
* A policy of bombing fewer Muslim countries and letting fewer Muslim potential bombers in to live in America would allow America to safely employ fewer of these agents provocateur.
That’s common sense and it’s not allowed!
* It’s a small step from this to agents deliberately cultivating losers into fanatics and then sending them on their way like missiles to their targets…or airplanes into buildings…
But that’s conspiracy, and we know that doesn’t happen.
* FOX News viewers aren’t SWPLs; they’re old people. The median age of Bill O’Reilly’s show is about 70 (hence all the ads for Cialis, reverse mortgages, and catheters). Those people aren’t the next generation of the traditional Republican party. They are the last generation of it.
* Idea: Graphic analysis showing media truthfulness by ownership and editor/reporter/anchor ethnicity.
That could cover US, UK, Canada, Scandinavia, Germany, Australia, etc.
Truthfulness quantification might reflect some fact check/retraction or similar measures.
The a priori view is that media bias is present, determinable, and a damn nuisance. There may be a strong R-squared in there, as the daily onslaught on the truth provides ample data.
* I must admit, as bad as things are for our republic, the total humiliation of Jeb Bush has given me a totally thrilling bit of Schadenfreude (joy in the pain of others. Gotta love those big German words). At least the universe is not entirely without a sense of justice, or humor.
* Rubio is the “genteel” candidate in this race. There are lots of Republicans around who above all else are turned off by harsh-sounding rhetoric, and would sooner take an empty suit than a guy like Trump or Cruz.
* Yeah, the country club vote. Immigration, legal or otherwise, doesn’t hurt those characters. Neither does globalization. Hence, their concern with the capital gains tax, being respectable, and maintaining the status quo.
BTW, you saw the same thing in Iowa where Cruz got his lowest votes in the county with the state capital and biggest city.
* That’s true. But while immigration might not hurt them, it will hurt their grandchildren. They ought to realize that. Sadly, most of them don’t.
* You hit the nail on the head. This group is “embarrassed” by Trump due to their concern over their own “respectability”. Prime example being the jacketed gentleman at the CNN “Town Hall” on Thursday who asked abt Donald’s saying Bush lied any WMDs, and the real estate lady who went right before him. (Anderson Cooper followed up with both of these particular contestants then next evening during “regular” Breaking News and they both had decided they could not be associated with Donald Trump.)
* To be fair, nobody really predicted Trump’s campaign, which is what destroyed Jeb. Without Trump, Jeb would probably have a decent shot right now.
* Until now, Trump has been benefiting from the vote splitting. But with ¡Jeb! outta here, he’s going to be hurt by it, until and unless Cruz drops out.
How many ¡Yeb! supporters are going to Trump? I’d guess it’s close to zero – most will go to Rubio. (Cucks!).
But when Cruz throws in the towel, his supporters will rally behind Trump. If Cruz were a true patriot he’d announce his campaign suspension tonight and endorse Trump. ‘Course it won’t happen, though what about a secret backroom deal for Cruz to withdraw and join the Trump campaign as the VP? The two of them would then spend the rest of the primary season hanging the Schumio bill around Rubio’s neck and cruise to the nom.
* Just watching Trump’s victory speech, I am rooting for him because of his stance on immigration, but also his other planks are good.
I do wonder if he’s making some statements he is going to regret. When he states that the US is ranked #30 in education in the world, if only the white population was looked at, it would bat a lot better but it has 12% blacks and however many mestizos dragging down the average. If some were deported however, it would definitely bump the average.
Overall though, Trump is the image of a strong leader. He resonates strength, this is someone you can get behind. And very quick on his feet. He’s the guy you want on your side negotiating with Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, not to mention historical dwarfs and own-goalists like David Cameron and Angela Merkel.
* Of the 3 Bushes only W. had the common touch. Both Jeb and Bush I were terrible politicians. Bush I got lucky. Reagan picked him as VP and did nothing to ensure that a true conservative succeeded him. This allowed Bush-I to lie and falsely run as a “Reagan Conservative”. He then governed as a “Ford Conservative” and lost big time in 1992.
Jeb decided to be honest and run on what he truly was. Sad.
* Trump still has not broken 35%. When Christie and Fiorina quit their percentage seems not to have gone to Trump but to Cruz and Rubio. In France Le Pen with 40% lost to two 30%s.
* If Cruz and Carson both left, Trump could be hitting 50+%. Unfortunately, I doubt Cruz drops anytime soon. But I wish Carson would get out – that’s 5-10% that probably all goes to Trump.
* So even after Nimrata’ Nikki’ Haley endorsed Rubio, Trump still won handily. Haley was looking for a VP slot under Rubio.
* God bless Trump for speaking against the Iraq war – even saying the obvious, that we lied to, that the nuke intel was cherrypicked. What a pair on that guy! He just thought it up and did it.
* A business decision may result in a positive-sum outcome. All participants can benefit.
In a two-party system political decisions almost always have a zero-sum outcome. 1 party will benefit at the expense of another. It is ridiculous when the liberal pundits tells the GOP that they will benefit from more immigrants.
* Jeb has always struck me as a tragic figure. It’s always been very clear that politics just isn’t where his heart is. His brother was the same way, but he was better at faking it. Jeb is not very good at faking it.
* Two downward-pointing exclamation marks seem appropriate for a candidate who could never get it up.
It’s interesting to try and imagine where he would have ended up if he hadn’t been born a Bush. I’m thinking he would have been some kind of teacher or clergyman — a line of work where he would have been much happier.
* Jeb probably would have won or at least would have had a good chance to win if Trump hadn’t run. It wasn’t absurd for him to run. He just ran into the Trump train, which is sort of an unprecedented phenomenon. In fact, Trump went after him so hard so early because Jeb was arguably the frontrunner early on, and he never recovered.
* Maybe George P should get a clue and run for office as an anti-immigration American patriot. He can argue he is not a racist as his mother is a Mexican immigrant.
His argument should be that immigration was good for America in the past but after 50 years of mass immigration we need to pause it. This way he doesn’t look like a self-hating Mexican.
* I don’t know if George P. has charisma, integrity, smarts, or good political instincts, but he sure has this: crazy eyes. Not cross eyes, exactly, but something ain’t right. Like watching a Stanley Kubrick movie, something is “off” about what we see and people will pick up on this. George P is an otherwise handsome young man.
Who, besides the Bushes, advocate for the Bush dynasty anymore? They are done. In Texas, Bushes may still win for a while, but nationally no one cares.
* I was just thinking how odd it feels to ALMOST be the political mainstream…I was reading through some of my books on the two Bush Presidencies the other day (looking for mentions of Jeb), and it’s now quaint how over the top the denunciation of the Willie Horton ad is in every tome. Here we are with a leading candidate that is pretty much the Alt-right personified…like a mix of Roissy/Mystery/Ross Jeffries game tactics, MPC/Right Stuff nasty trolling, the Sailer electoral Strategy, Pat Buchannan’s economic nationalism, Derb’s Muslim moratorium…getting along with Russia, stopping nation building etc etc….Neo-conservatism is dead and Jeb’s goofy face is on the tombstone.
* Channeling Heartiste: exit cucklord. I think lowbrow agitprop is quite effective, grinning shitlord Donald knows that well. Let’s make Rubio the next cucklord. A Spanish news site translated cuckservative as cornuservador (cornudo), so Rubio would be the next cornuservador supremo.
* "I wonder if Jeb’s 2016 run has permanently wrecked his son’s chances?"
Unless there is a big sea-change in our culture- and I mean like a bunch of smart, charismatic, junior sh!tlords storming the liberal bastions of academia, media, and prestige professions real soon, I think Yeb Jr’s chances are unaffected. Bush Sr. was near-loathed by conservatives at the time of his departure from office (not just a liar- “read my lips, no new taxes”- but also a loser) yet that did not stop conservatives from rallying to Dubya a short 8 years later. Plus the media love turning wonky politics into engaging soap opera, and there is nothing more engaging than a story like “son rises to avenge humiliated father”. Plus unless there is that sea-change in culture I just mentioned I cannot see the media NOT pushing their line about the GOP being doomed unless they pander more to Hispanics.
"I must admit, as bad as things are for our republic, the total humiliation of Jeb Bush has given me a totally thrilling bit of Schadenfreude."
I honestly felt really bad for George P. There is nothing worse in life for a youngish man than to see one’s father abjectly humiliated like that. And the fact that it was at the primordial level of schoolyard bullying, where so many traumas and fixations are forever implanted (witness Steve’s comments on Mathew “I was a teenage Nazi-hunter” Weiner). That moment where Yeb blurted out how he looked up after sliding out between Barbara’s thighs and instantly realized he’d “won the lotto”! Even the anti-Trump CNN analyst instantly picked up on the ick factor of that. It was like:
LITTLE DONNY TRUMP: Your mother’s a whore! And her c**t smells like a Brooklyn fish market.
Little Jebby Bush: My mother is not a whore! And I know personally she in fact smells wonderful- like fresh-baked bread- down there!
* Sometimes it makes me sad though– Jeb! being gone. I have to remind myself that some birds aren’t meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright. And when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up does rejoice. But still, the place you live in is that much more gray and empty that they’re gone. I guess I just miss my friend.
* Thanks to Mr. Trump, Miss USA has finally left the past behind, caught up with the times, and shaved off her Bush.
* Trump just won a greater percentage of Evangelicals than total voters. He won their vote. Who can say the whys or whens of these things? But I suspect James Dobson will be sounding a Trumpet just as soon as he knows he will. Time is relative ya know.
Speaking of low information, for all the crass ways Trump embodies this age, perhaps the people who can see into him something ancient are the most lively folks enjoying his show. You might educate yourself about about an ancient whore, a blood red moon, other stuff they said you must have ears to hear and codes to break.
I do think the most interesting thing Trump has said so far was his moral inventory from that SC Townhall on CNN. He said my great fault is I let people I know deceived me get away with their deception without ever letting myself forget the count. Struck me cause I was reminded that Trump said something early on about one thing that happened to him when he initially spoke out about the Iraq War. Most interesting of all maybe is that he has not said another word about that since. And I have to suppose that means we never will again.
My educated bet would be that Trump has no idea that he has already won, and that that will open up a fault line somewhere loud indeed.
* Similarly, a lot of commentators in liberal sites are exclaiming how they don’t know any Trump voters. Well, news flash, when you can lose your job and end up a pariah for going against the PC multicult group think, people tend to keep their opinions to themselves.
Nevertheless, they have their opinions and when you say something (clutching pearls) like “If that Trump wins, I’m going to quit my job and move to Canada!” and the other person just says nothing, or a non-committal “Oh really?”, well, you were probably talking to a Trump supporter and just didn’t know it.
* Trump’s wife has been married to Trump for about 10 years and has been in the US for around 20 years. Bush’s wife has been married to Bush, and in the USA, for around 40 years. So let Melania have another 20 years in the US before you compare her command of the language to Columba’s.
* Cruz’s acceptance speech tonight was proof for me that he’s the Frank Underwood of thr Republican establishment. After being spurned by the Bush’s and not getting the job he wanted, he decided to advance his career using the anti establishment mood in the country instead of following the traditional career path. He’s a globalist like the rest of the establishment shills, who’s loyalties are to the Israel lobby, the big banks, and the MiC. He’s just smart enough to use the country’s mood to advance his own career at the expense of some of the other establishment types. The way he sucked up to Jeb! And attacked Trump tonight means I bet he’s more likely to endorse Rubio than Trump once he realizes his path is gone. Let’s just hope the Cruz true believers are smart enough to avoid Marcobot. Marco might be even more easily manipulated by the major interests than W was.
* Here is Melania Trump in 2010 speaking quickly in good coherent English in a non-political setting where she is more comfortable. Sure she has an accent but she is better at English than Jeb’s wife.
* Yeah, that makes me look forward to a Trump/Clinton debate in which Trump goes after Clinton for voting for the Iraq war like an idiot.
What will my liberal friends and family members say when they see Trump dumping on Clinton from the left?
*
*
* Thank heavens Jeb Bush ended it–the humiliation was becoming painful even to watch. But will the GOP Establishment try to push the almost-as-bad Marco Rubio, or will it hold its nose and support Ted Cruz in an all-out effort to stop Donald Trump?
I do note that Jeb Bush only suspended his campaign. Doesn’t that leave open the possibility that he could try to become the nominee at a brokered convention? Unlikely, but I don’t put anything past GOP cuckservatives at this point.
* Trump has just telegraphed to Hill and (pathetic, ghostly, debilitated) Bill that this is exactly what he will be doing once he gets the Republican nomination. Trump will be talking so much smack he might induce a nervous breakdown in her. Hillary knows she has never done anything useful in her political career. Devoid of any accomplishment except for the negative one of abandoning Americans to die Benghazi. Trump will also slam her non stop on Benghazi. Can you imagine ultra-lib Jimmy Carter leaving Americans to die there the way Hussein O and Hillary did?
Trump is 100% clean as a far as the Middle East tar baby goes while Hillary was the main promoter of the disastrous Arab Spring, helped along by our gay and feminist dominated leftist State Department. Europe can blame their current Muslim immigration invasion on dim bulb Hillary.
* The contrast between Melania Trump and Columba Bush is actually an interesting example of assimilation or its lack. I believe Melania Trump grew up in Slovenia. But hardly anyone outside Slovenia speaks Slovenian–why would anyone take the trouble to learn such an obscure language unless one planned to live in Slovenia? (Sorry if I’ve outraged all the lovers of Slovenian literature and poetry.) Donald Trump has no time or probably inclination to learn Slovenian and if there is a Slovenian community in the U.S. it’s got to be very small.
Columba Bush, on the other hand, can get by very comfortably in Spanish. Jeb learned it, her children speak it, there’s a large Spanish-speaking community in the U.S. She never had any incentive to really master English.
Moral: small community–assimilate or go back; large community–no need for assimilation.
* Ben Shapiro finally exposes himself. Like the National Review, he markets himself as “anti-establishment” while actually supporting the GOP elite agenda.
Shapiro has called for Cruz to endorse Rubio in an attempt to stop Trump.
Rubio is antithetical to anything Shapiro claimed to stand for,besides defending “our greatest ally”, but the establishment is crumbling and even needs its double-agents to lose their cover.
* Trump has Jeb’s testicles in a mason jar. Floating in brine.
And he often gazes upon them whilst sitting in his jet flying to his various campaign rallies.
So, there’s that….
* What is it with female political strategists? First Hillary’s ’08 disaster. Then Perry’s ’12 disaster and now Sally Bradshaw.
* I’d toss in ‘corporate’ Republicans too after seeing Trump barely carried Greenville County which is home to Lockheed Martin, GE, Caterpillar, 3M and Honeywell plants. OTOH Trump got almost 50% of the vote in Horry County ( Myrtle Beach etc.)
* Bush’s drop out will leave Cruz in a distant third place, but it also leaves him sort of in the middle between Trump and Rubio. His best bet is to go jujitsu on Marco Rubio over the immigration issue. Hit Rubio hard on betraying his voters on amnesty: one commercial after another, one stump speech after another. Don’t let voters ever forget that Rubio is a liar. There is almost zero chance that Rubio will be the Republican nominee, so it’s nothing Cruz will have to apologize for later, and it’s the only shot Cruz has at peeling off support from the other candidates.
