It's Party Time

Dimitri Orlov does a takedown of the European political parties, but most of what he says is fully applicable to the political parties in this country. Unfortunately, it is behind a paywall, but a few highlights…

First he reminds us of the difference between the kind of party where everyone drinks, dances, has a good time and then goes home, sometimes alone, sometimes not, and the kind where serious people gather for periods of four years or more to decide the fates of nations.

He says that “these two meanings are becoming conflated” and I’m inclined to agree with him. In fact, I would say that in this country the second kind of party has now become indistinguishable from the first.

He goes on to say of European political parties that there is “only one thing that unites all of them, and that’s opposition to rational thought”  which is certainly true of political parties, and of political discussion in general, in the US.

He goes on to discuss the various factions, saying, for instance that, “The Greens (Democrats) are in favor of solar panels and wind turbines. These are, of course, great. Solar panels are fantastic because they provide illumination when the sun is shining. Wind turbines are wonderful because although they don’t provide enough juice to run air conditioners they can power fans—but only on windy days.”

That might be a bit hyperbolic, but it does make something of a point. “A free college education for everyone,” for instance, is hardly the kind of solution that makes any sense, and that may be the least nutty proposal being made by either side in this campaign.

Taxes, of course, are off the table, because this is party time.

"Not Innocent"

The Mueller press conference today discards utterly the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” and, in fact, turns that principle on it’s head, declaring that his commission was unable to prove the president innocent. His view of the role of the Justice Department appears to be that it assumes guilt and investigates to determine the possibility of innocence.

His report on television boils down to, “We were unable to prove the president innocent of these crimes and, while we found plenty of evidence of his guilt, we were prevented from declaring him guilty due to some unwritten law.”

He went on to suggest that Congress could do what he was somehow prevented from doing, which is use the evidence which he could not use and find the president guilty of some crime, which he did not name, which would permit his removal from office.

This is the reverse of James Comey, who declared that while Hillary Clinton committed several illegal acts with respect to her private server, she did not do so on purpose and therefor should not be charged with any crime.

And we keep claiming to be "a nation of laws."

Memorial Day

"They go to war, these young men, not to die for their country, but to place themselves, their precious lives, between their home and the forces which would destroy it."
                                                          Kenneth Roberts, in "A Rabble In Arms"

This Is Awesome

NBC News ran a piece last evening on Russian plans to “stoke unrest and even violence inside the US” even after they “meddled in the election” of 2016. They told us that these efforts have been ongoing as recently as last year, “according to documents reviewed by NBC News.”

They even showed us the documents, printed in Cyrillic characters and presumably in the Russian language, which no doubt were translated with perfect accuracy. (Yes, that may have been a little bit snide.)

According to these documents there were plans to recruit African Americans in the US, transport them to “camps in Africa” where they would be trained in combat and sabotage, and then returned to the US. Once back home these folks would “foment violence” and work to “establish a pan-African state in the South.” This plan, NBC claims, shows “the mindset around Russian efforts to sow discord” in this country.

I am not making this shit up; you can go and read it for yourself.

NBC was provided these documents by an organization called “the Dossier Center,” which is hilarious. It is not, apparently, the same outfit that provided the infamous “Trump dossier” which was created by Christopher Steele and paid for by the Clinton campaign, but anyone who still uses the word “dossier” has something wrong with them.

Of course, there are some who think that the Steele “dossier” was real, so there is that. Somebody’s elevator doesn’t quite go to the top floor.

The most astonishing part of the story is when NBC says that, “NBC News has not independently verified the materials, but forensic analysis by the Dossier Center appeared to substantiate the communications.” Somebody's elevator may not even go above the ground floor.

Note the “appeared to substantiate. So NBC News cannot themselves speak to the authenticity of this stuff, and a firm which may or may not be legitimate can only suggest that it might be real, but NBC News is going to go ahead and report on it anyway because it’s dramatic as hell and it fits in with the current meme of Russia as an evil empire.

The Rest Of The Story

The tariffs on Chinese goods are the big “Trump outrage” in the news today, along with the “trade war with China,” and talk about how American consumers are being forced to pay these tariffs.

What the media fails to mention is that tariffs are designed to reduce trade with country against whom they are levied, and to persuade Americans to buy goods made by American workers, in which case nobody pays the tariffs.

Are you upset that the price of a washing machine made in China increased due to this tariff? Then buy a washing machine made in the US, whose price is not affected by the tariff on Chinese goods. It's not rocket science.

I’m not all that big fan of Pat Buchanan, but he spells all this out very cogently in a recent column. He points out that tariffs protect American manufacturers and manufacturing jobs, and that the second law passed under our constitution was a law regarding tariffs.

"The Tariff Act of 1789 was enacted with the declared purpose, 'the encouragement and protection of manufactures.' It was the second act passed by the first Congress led by Speaker James Madison. It was crafted by Alexander Hamilton and signed by President Washington."

And now, as Paul Harvey used to say, you know the rest of the story. The side of the story that the media doesn’t want you to know, because it doesn’t paint Trump as evil.

Freedom of Speech

I see no problem with bias in the media. In fact, there should be bias in the media. The whole purpose of freedom of speech is to assure that there can be bias in the media. Bias in the media is the exercise of freedom of speech.

The problem with today’s media is the pretense that there is an unbiased media. If the media was, as it claims to be, unbiased, then freedom of speech would serve no useful purpose – would be a meaningless term.

When I was growing up, every town had two newspapers. Towns which were too small to support two publications had papers delivered from larger cities nearby. One paper was openly liberal, the other openly conservative, and virtually everyone read both of them. There existed, back then, a willingness to arrive at one’s own point of view after having been exposed to argument from both sides of an issue.

Today, while there are several networks on television, all of them speak in concert, and cities have but a single news publication of consequence. As a result, all of this media has to pretend to be unbiased, but none of it is, and the public is presented with a single viewpoint. Freedom of speech has become meaningless.

To the extent that freedom of speech is exercised today, we see it on “publications” with minor exposure, such as blogs and fringe publications. One such outlet claims to be among the very largest, with “more than 100,000” readers. The claim is dubious, but even if true it would be a minor portion of the 238 million voters in the nation. Even the cable news commentary sites cannot claim to attract as much as a tenth of 1% of the voting public.

And even so, today’s voters only view or read that which confirms their existing opinions, as can be seen by college students demanding that certain speakers be banned from their campuses. Most blog discussions will openly require than discussion adhere to rules that boil down to “dissent is not welcome here.”

Freedom of speech has not been banned by law. It has been rendered an empty shell by a population too intellectually lazy to even know what it is, much less keep it alive.

End Of The Journey

After seventeen years of being a happy, lively beautiful cat and a loving friend, despite more than five years of serious medical issues and daily medication insults, which she accepted with grace and dignity, Molly suffered a stroke a few days ago. She stayed with us, weakened but in no apparent distress for several days, but last night began showing signs of breathing distress while curled up in my lap, and passed away peacefully at 8:45pm last evening. We will miss her every day.      (Click image for larger version.)

Movie Review: "Dirty"

Why would anyone watch a movie with that title? Well, in my case because it starred Cuba Gooding Jr, who is one of my favorite actors. He could not, unfortunately, overcome a dismally inept script, an even worse director, and cinematographers who barely knew which direction to point their cameras.

The latter undoubtedly call themselves “cameramen” because they don’t know how to spell cinematographer, and “cameraman” is the politically correct term because no woman would ever so completely botch a task as these clowns did.

It was not one of those movies where the viewer cannot figure out what is going on. The script was completely transparent and hardly original or innovative, with Cuba Gooding Jr as a dirty cop in Los Angeles, but the parts which were not stupid were just disgusting. At least it was free on Amazon, but even at that it was overpriced. They should have paid me to watch it.

I did watch it all the way through, but only because I wanted to be sure that Gooding came to a bad end, which he did. A young girl had vowed to kill him, and had purchased a gun with which to do so. She was stalking him at the end, but chickened out at the last minute and tossed the gun, which was a bit disappointing.

It worked out okay, though, because a couple minutes later a gangster blew him away with a shotgun, which splattered him far more satisfyingly than the girl’s six shooter would have done.

What happened to the “good guy?” There were no good guys. The girl was, at best, in the “least bad” category. She spit in Gooding’s face, for instance, which I actually applauded. She did not, however, know that he was a dirty cop and just hated all cops, so don’t shed any tears for her.

My wife is out of town for the week. I really need for her to come home and rescue me from watching all these really bad movies on Amazon.

Ineptitude Abounds

NBC News has a headline reading, "Navy officer sentenced to 9 years in California bridge crash that killed 4." The first sentence of the article contradicts the headline by saying that, "A U.S. Navy petty officer whose truck plunged off a bridge..." An officer and a petty officer are not the same thing.

Even worse, in a picture on television the guy is shown in uniform, with three diagonal green stripes on his upper left sleeve. That denotes a rate of Airman (E-3) which is not even a petty officer. Who writes these stories? And does NBC not have editors?

Failure of Critical Thinking

A recent response to criticism of Elizabeth Warren’s plan to pay off student loans as being a “slap in the face to all those who struggled to pay off their loans” is to say that it is the same as saying that “Antibiotics are a slap in the face to all the people who died of the plague.” This argument is widely applauded by those who support Elizabeth Warren.

Without discussing the underlying student loan payoff plan, either approving or disapproving of the plan itself, consider the argument of comparing the burden of student loan payments to the issue of suffering from Bubonic Plague.

This is another demonstration of the modern inability to engage in logical thinking. Let’s start with the fact that people who died of the plague did not make a choice to get the plague, while people who have student loans did make the choice to take out that loan.

There are other fallacies embedded in this false analogy, several of them, but this one alone is sufficient to point out that critical thinking is a skill no longer engaged in as part of our political dialog, and that is an issue that makes democracy guaranteed to fail as a form of government. People who are invincibly ignorant and who are incapable of logical thinking simply cannot govern themselves.

Politics of the Absurd

Senator Elizabeth Warren is going to use the proceeds of her “wealth tax” to eliminate all outstanding student debt, provide free college tuition for everybody, subsidize lodging costs while in college, and expand Pell grants. Other things too, but those are the big ones. It sounds lovely, if you’re a complete idiot.

The wealth tax is scheduled to bring in $2.75 trillion, but that’s in ten years (assuming that the tax is constitutional), so it’s actually $275 billion per year. What can actually be done with that?

Well, you can’t cancel all student debt very quickly, because it currently stands at $1.5 trillion. You would have to devote the entirety of the wealth tax revenue to that purpose for 5.45 years to pay off today’s outstanding student debt, during which time you could do nothing else with it.

Free college tuition for everybody? In-state tuition at state college averages $9970 per year, and there are roughly 20 million people in college at any one time. So providing college tuition, and only tuition, comes to $200 billion per year, or about 73% of the wealth tax revenue. Doesn’t leave room for much help with college housing costs, or the addition of a whole lot of Pell grants, does it?

Let’s see, $75 billion left, divided by 20 million college students… That comes to about $3750 annually per student for food and housing. Certainly not eating steak. Sorry, no additional Pell grants.

Not to mention that you can’t start doing it for more than five years because you’ve been paying off student loans all that time. Or, after those five years plus, are you still paying off more loans that were incurred while you were not providing free tuition because you were paying off outstanding loans instead?

There’s a few other problems with her program. She’s proposing to use a federal tax to pay for tuition at state universities and colleges. In addition to the items mentioned above, she has a long laundry list of programs she plans to fund with this wealth tax, including universal child care.

Probably $3 trillion per year worth of programs that she plans to fund with a tax that is something of a long shot to even be enacted, and that at best will bring in $2.75 trillion in ten years. This is politics of the absurd.

Bypassing the Constitution

Kamela Harris promises dictatorship, and Democrats cheer wildly.

“If Congress does not pass the gun control laws that I want within 100 days,” she promises, “then I will create those laws by executive order.”

We don’t need no steenkin constitution.

New One Just Like the Old One

Our 35-year-old garage door opener finally bit the dust, so we have a nice shiny new one now, which is an improvement on the old one in only one feature, other than that the new one works.

The new door opener is connected to the Internet so that if I am having lunch at a nice restaurant in Old Town I can look at my iPhone and verify that my garage door is closed or, if it is not, close it from wherever I am.

I am unconvinced that this feature is of any conceivable use whatever. In some fifty years of having a garage, not one time have I ever been having a nice lunch in Old Town (or anywhere else, for that matter) and suddenly wondered about the status of my garage door. I am extraordinarily unlikely to have that experience any time soon.

I downloaded the “app” and made the connection simply to see if I could, and to see if it actually worked. It does. Big whoop. Does that make me a Luddite?

Why They Are So Angry

I don’t know who PJ Media is, and don’t really care. I don’t read it, but saw this quoted today regarding why Democrats and the media are so hot about the press conference held by Attorney General Barr this morning. “They are upset,” PJ Media tells us, “because, as with Barr’s four-page letter, they don’t want Barr ‘setting the narrative.’ They have explicitly stated as much.”

What that boils down to is that today’s voting public does not examine things and decide for themselves what to think. Democrats know that the voting public has the attention span of a gnat and is not going to read a 400-page report, but is going to think whatever they it is told about the report. They are really pissed off that AG Barr beat them to the punch.

The point is proven by the fact that Democrats and the media are calling Barr a liar, and worse, within minutes receiving their copies of the report, after claiming last week that 48 hours was too soon for him to have produced a summary of it.

PJ Media also illustrated the intelligence of the media by citing an exchange from the press conference, when a “reporter” asked Mr. Barr why her referred to the intense scrutiny and investigation of Trump’s presidency, family and associates as “unprecedented.”

“Has it happened before?” Barr asked the “reporter."

When the "reporter" acknowledged that it had not, Barr explained, “Then it is unprecedented.”

Convention Center Update

Not only is it still ugly, it’s even uglier than previous iterations. This dog has failed three times, and it keeps coming back. It was not on the 2018 November ballot because the petition did not have enough signatures and Hizzoner the mayor was unable to browbeat the City Council into putting it on the ballot after the citizens of the city said they didn’t want it to be there.

So this year Hizzoner didn’t even bother with a public petition, but went to the City Council and not only got them to put it in the ballot, but managed to browbeat them into putting it onto the primary election ballot in March despite a city rule put in place in 2016 as a result of citizens initiative Measure L.

Measure L passed with a 66% affirmative vote and requires that all initiatives be placed on the general election ballot rather than the primary, an election in which far fewer people vote. The purpose is, obviously, to be sure that such initiatives better reflect the will of the people.

Hizzoner obviously does not care about the will of the people, something which has become clear al all levels of government today. Not only is he getting this dead dog placed on the ballot without getting input from the citizenry in the form of a petition drive, which he knows would fail, but he is getting it placed into the primary election, a process which he knows the citizenry opposes, and which he dreams improves the chance of him getting it to pass.

It's Back, and It Still Stinks

The “Hotel Tax Initiative” is back, with supporters so hot to trot that they don’t want to wait for the November 2020 election but want it to be placed on a March election ballot. The earlier election, a primary, has far fewer voters, making it a bit more likely that the measure would pass.

The measure funds three “important” needs for our city; three things that we desperately need, cannot do without, but that we certainly do not want to pay for ourselves. This is America, after all, and we never want to pay for benefits.

The first need, and the one cited in the name of the proposition, is expansion of the city’s convention center. On the face of it, this makes a certain amount of sense, in that visitors are paying the cost of having better facilities for their conventions. But what about visitors who are coming here specifically and only for the weather and beaches? Why should they be paying for a convention center that in no way benefits them?

One person countered that by arguing that as a childless person, why should I pay school taxes? I imitated a duck falling from the ceiling. (You don’t remember Groucho Marx?) As part of this city, I am responsible for contributing to the city’s accomplishment of its responsibility to educate its children.

Expansion of the convention center benefits the city, in fact, by attracting larger conventions and increasing revenue from tourism. Since we benefit from that investment, we should be willing to bear the cost of it.

The second need is to provide housing for the homeless. Typical of modern liberalism. We want to do good work, but we want someone else to pay for it. Put your money where your mouth is. If you don't want to pay for it, you are not doing good work. You are advocating for someone else to do good work.

The third need is road repairs, which us utterly ridiculous. Why should someone visiting here from Phoenix pay to repair our roads? Are we going to return the favor by paying to repair the roads in Phoenix? If we want better roads then we need to cough up the money and pay for our own roads.

This damned initiative is like an infestation of rats. It stinks and every time you think you’ve gotten rid of it, it comes back.

Embracing Stupidity

Democratic members of the Senate have introduced a bill to amend the constitution, proposing to determine the election of the president by means of the national popular vote. Dianne Feinstein is among that crowd, saying that the Electoral College “does not reflect the will of the people.”

I don’t think there’s any reason to panic, because there is no chance in hell that this idiocy will ever pass in Congress, and not to mention surviving a presidential veto. There is even less chance that it would be ratified by 38 states, but that members of the Senate would submit it is cause for concern.

I might expect this kind of idiocy from members of Generation X or Millennials who have been enstupidated by attending schools which give out “participation trophies,” but that a person who has been a federal legislator for more than fifty twenty five years would say something like that represents a rather frightening level of demagoguery.

Dianne Feinstein should know that this nation is not governed by “the will of the people” nationally or directly. In all aspects of governance, as is very clearly spelled out in the constitution, this nation is governed by the will of the states, and the Electoral College very rationally represents the will of the states.

This nation is a democracy “at one remove,” since each state is governed by the will of the people, but the national popular vote is entirely meaningless and Dianne Feinstein knows that very well.

Modern Military

NBC News did a segment about our response to increased “Russian aggression in Europe” the other night, which was to send a flight of B-52s to Poland.   BUFFs. “Big Ugly Fat Fuckers.”

Probably had the Russians crapping in their pants.

Don’t get me wrong, the B-52 is an awesome airplane, but this is the same bomber that the Russians were shooting down over Vietnam fifty years ago. Is it likely that Russia has improved its anti-aircraft weaponry in the last half century? I suspect it has.

The youngest B-52 is 57 years old. These airplanes are being flown by pilots whose grandfathers flew the same airplanes. Not the same type of airplanes, the same airplanes. The B-1 is supersonic, and the B-2 is invisible to radar, but when we want to scare the Russians what do we send? Half century old BUFFs, which are subsonic and about as stealthy as turds in a punchbowl.

There’s really something wrong with us.

NFL Rules

The NFL has now decided that pass interference calls will be reviewable, as will the non-call of pass interference, in the upcoming season.

Terrific. NFL football games will now take an average of 4 hours and 34 minutes to complete, unless there is overtime. A game starting at 5:00pm will not end until the following day.

I would propose that every play be reviewed by officials, using all available camera angles, to assure that no infraction of any rule goes undetected and unpunished. This will result in at least one penalty on every play, rendering player skill irrelevant and making the most frequent scoring play the 2-point safety. Negative bonus points would be applied to the team which commits the most penalties on a single play. Las Vegas could take bets on which team would earn those negative bonus points.

Football games would enter the realm of cricket games, which frequently take two or three days to play.

On a (slightly) more serious note, pass defense used to be defined as attempting to prevent a pass receiver from catching a pass. That's now called "pass interference." Pass defense now consists of letting the receiver catch the pass and hoping you can put him on his ass, gently, before he scores.

Putting the pass receiver on his ass in a less than gentle manner, such as hitting him, is known as "unnecessary roughness" and invokes a 15-yard penalty.

Impeach Him Anyway

When an army gets demolished in battle, it falls back to regroup, rearm, tend the wounded, replace the dead and rebuild morale. Not so Democrats. When they get utterly routed in one attack they simply pretend the attack never happened and move into the next one without even pausing to draw breath.

After almost two years of running premature victory laps about the devastation which would be visited upon Donald Trump by the report from Saint Robert the King Slayer, their reaction to “there is no evidence that the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government” is breathtaking in the speed with which it discards that mode of attack and seamlessly moves on to the next.

I would add to that metaphor that they left the ground behind them littered with the dead and dying from the battle lost, except that they don’t accept that any battle was lost or that anyone died or was wounded fighting it. They simply forget that the battle ever took place, and are already engaged in the next one.

“Aha,” they say, “but Saint Robert the King Slayer neither confirms not denies that Trump obstructed justice.” Which to them, of course, is certain evidence the Mueller found that he did and, for some reason, simply doesn’t want to say so. Why he would not want to say so is unclear, given that finding Trump guilty of something was his whole purpose in life for almost two full years.

In any case, considering that the underlying crime did not occur, obstruction of the pursuit of justice for a crime that was not committed seems rather moot, but Democrats are not going to let that stop them. Logic and reason has never been their strong suit.

There are some stalwarts who want to impeach Trump anyway, apparently for something that it has now been proven that he didn’t do, which would certainly be novel. Or they want to impeach him for something the Russians did, which is even more creative, but Saint Robert the King Slayer did, after all, indict a certain number of Russians for something.

The Russian indictment is turning out to be something of an embarrassment, though and the Democrats might not want to embrace it, because Saint Robert the King Slayer never thought the Russians would be stupid enough to show up in an American court to defend themselves.

They did, though, and Saint Robert the King Slayer tried to keep them out by telling the court that he had not been able to serve them with a subpoena. The judge was nonplussed by this and retorted that the subpoena was simply a notice to appear and, “Served or not, they’re here, so what’s your problem?”

The Russians then asked for “discovery,” which requires that the prosecution deliver the evidence against them, and Saint Robert the King Slayer told the judge that he wasn’t ready yet. The judge was nonplussed again and a little pissed off and asked, “If you don’t have your evidence together, why are you here?” The reality is, Saint Robert the King Slayer has no evidence, never dreamed he would need any, and the case is in imminent danger of being thrown out of court.

Which may have something to do with why his report “neither denies nor confirms” any obstruction of justice against Trump. He really wanted to charge it, but if he did and the case came before that same judge, he’d be screwed when Trump’s lawyer asked for discovery and Saint Robert the King Slayer “wasn’t ready.”