Category: US Politics. Trump

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Horse’s Ass

Yuval Noah Harari? Certainly. Klaus Schwab? Without a doubt. Bill Gates? Not yet certain but sure looks like it. Donald Trump? Yes, on several occasions, usually from the time he wakes up until his going to sleep. (And I like him after a certain fashion. Forgive me.)

But the guy who has got away with high-minded  folly for years is Sam Harris, until a revealing moment on Triggernometry this week. By folly I mean holding positions in a semblance of a rational way, in a calm voice, that substantially negate his claims to rationality. Indulging in  vice – which is what Trump Derangement Syndrome is – while holding oneself out to be an avatar of enlightenment. Pretending to virtue you don’t have. All the meditation in the world has had no effect on bringing Harris to enlightenment, or even practical wisdom.

Harris admitted the full extent of his folly this week on Triggernometry, by defending the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story before the election so that, in his view,  the greater good could be realized. When you espouse this kind of cynicism you evaporate whatever moral credibility you might have had. Another false god bites the dust.

See Harris at minute 33:37 for the Hunter Biden confessions -that he favoured the suppression of the Hunter Biden story. It is worth seeing all of it as a guru self destructs.  Checking all the boxes of a good liberal does not excuse the  espousal of anti-democratic views. To put it another way, Harris cannot escape with holding to the equivalent of the child Satanic panic of the 1980s, which is what Trump Derangement Syndrome is. The Triggernometry interviewers failed to point this out to Harris.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Conrad Black on Peggy Noonan

“In their irrational hatred of Trump, Noonan and her kindred spirits are complicit in covering up a rigged election that inflicted the most incompetent administration in American history on the country and the world. There’s no early way back into the Republicans for the Trump-haters, and the Democratic strategists who produced this sequence of disasters will be feeling the pain for a long time.”

This is the first time I have seen a commentator of Black’s gravitas express the notion that the Trump defeat was the result of a rigged election.

 

The graph that explains what has happened

 

This is the most important graph you are going to see in the next decade.

Whatever its cause – and historians and economists have much to explain – the gap between rises in productivity and hourly compensation that started in 1973 meant that an increasing proportion of national income has gone to the owners of assets, not the workers. Maybe capital needed to make more money; maybe the workers were making too much: I am unqualified to say. Certainly the Reagan regime did much to restore the profitability of capital.

Yet in that simple graph we can see why Trump found support to deal with a perceived problem. Perceived by whom, you ask? Perceived by the people who do not know or subscribe to the New York Times or the Atlantic magazine. Perceived by the people whose children don’t have jobs and who know people who have died from fentanyl overdoeses, people from towns where the mill has been shuttered for thirty years. Where they used to make things. Not perceived by people who work from desks and computers. No perceieved by people whose jobs have not been affected by COVID.

Nuxon went to China in 1972, thus splitting the Communist world and starting the process whereby jobs left the United States for China and places abroad. I am not asserting a directly causal relationship here between diplomatic recognition of China by the US and the off-shoring of US industry.

Nixon went off the gold standard in 1972, This meant we entered upon the world of fiat currencies, where government declares that money is worth something unrelated to the stock of gold. As many now understand, a consistent undervaluation of one’s currency can suck indistry towards the low cost producer. Is that the cause of US jobs bening leeched out of the United States?

Watch this video and see if you agree. 

Whatever the cause of the growing gap in the rates of productivity and hourly compensation – I wish I knew – its existence engenders a vast retinue of consequences

I have had it with Trump

We have all had election nights where it seemed as if one side was going to win and then it did not. I thought there had been election irregularities with mail-in votes. Was it the reality distortion field of Trumpism? Probably. So I have been down in that gravity well looking out from a distorted perspective. I thought Biden might well have won, but it was not clear. Fair enough. My bad. Biden won.

That is not what I am talking about today. From what I read, thanks to Douglas Murray, Trump incited an attack of a mob on the legislature buildings of the Congress. His words inflamed an already tense situation.

There are at last two ways of looking at his speech: a crime, or worse than a crime, a mistake. The moralists will call it a crime, and maybe they are right.  The cynics will call it a mistake. As Talleyrand said of some political murder committed by Napoleon, “worse than a crime, it was a mistake.” What was this man trying to do? Overturn constitutional authority? No conservative or constitutionalist can abide the chief magistrate inciting a mob to attack a duly constituted part of government, be it his legislature or his judiciary. This behaviour is to be condemned.

As a conservative I deplore Trump’s incitement.  But as a reader of Machiavelli, I observe that this is a disaster for conservatism of any meaningful sort. Now I never considered Trump to be a conservative or a free trade liberal. He was an economic nationalist and he did some good in relation to improving the conditions of the American working class through trade treaties heavily advantageous to the United States. He insulted, amused and bravado’ed his way to the top of the Republican ticket, and beat the worst establishment candidate (and to be the worst of this crowd takes some doing). He kept on pissing off people who I enjoyed seeing pissed off (an unworthy, ignoble but real-enough emotion). His very buffoonery and obnoxiousness was obviously an attraction for many people aggravated by endless political correctness and moral posturing.

I have always held Trump in a balance of judgment. The scales, until recently (in my view) weighed more in favour of The Donald than against him. He was more sinned against than sinning: the Russia gambit was totally hot air and shown to be so. Then it was Ukraine’s turn to be the de-legitimizing agent. In the meantime we were supposed to ignore a summer of riots by Antifa and BLM which were demonstrably egged on by Democratic politicians. The left was crying wolf for too long to be heeded.

There has been too much crossing of all previous lines of decency and self-restraint in recent years, by both sides. No one spent time figuring out why Trump won in 2016. And I hope the Republicans will spend some time figuring out why they have lost the House, the Senate, and the Presidency. All this is for the years to come. You must figure out why you lost before you can win again. I fear that both major parties in the States will learn nothing from their respective defeats in 2016 and 2020.

But for now, Trump has destroyed his brand, disgraced his party, embarrassed those of his supporters who are able to be reasoned with, confirmed every judgment against him, justified Trump Derangment Syndrome, and empowered people who will be quick to suppress public discussion and robust political debate. I am not happy with the state of the Union, and with myself for having indulged this buffoon. I reserve the right to change my mind later, but for now, I feel contrite.

 

 

 

 

 

Elite failure, and lots of it, with more coming

Now that the Swamp has won the US election, we are presented almost daily with evidence that technological, bureaucratic, political, judicial and media elites will run rampant for the next four years, unopposed by the man in the White House.  I call it failing upward. Everyone knows a person or two who rise from one position to the next, failing in every post (by any reasonable standard of success) and yet continually rising to greater and more respnsible positions. But an entire social class of experts rising through demonstrable failure?   This is new, to me at least.

 

Two articles today on the same theme, one from Unherd, the other from American Digest, citing the brave dissenter, David Warren.

 

Jacob Siegel in Unherd says it best:

“The first important lesson from the past year is that this revolt against the experts is not a fringe phenomenon driven by QAnon loons, hysterical anti-vaxxers and other untouchables. It is widespread and its consequences are already profound. On the surface, people are simply rejecting the authority of institutions such as the CDC, which now openly advocates for racial preferences and places political calculations before the public good. But beneath that rejection, there is a cultural shift at the level of animating beliefs.

“For millions of people, a disenchantment has broken the spell which upheld their faith in rational, scientific knowledge as the best means to tame the natural chaos of reality and administer the business of society. On top of all the other disenchantments undermining America’s founding myths, this one erodes the foundation on which the entire technocratic regime of modern society rests.

“Given the rather obvious importance of public health officials in the midst of a pandemic, why not seek to replace them with a better class of expert, instead of attacking the basis of expertise? The answer to that is in the second lesson of 2020: far from losing status after the repeated errors and deceptions of the past year, America’s institutional elite is more powerful than ever….

“If you are one of the people or organisations which repeatedly got the coronavirus wrong, abetted wanton political violence and destruction, or once again misread the American electorate, odds are very good that your funding streams, political influence, institutional power and leverage over your fellow Americans are going increase over the next four years of the Biden administration.”

 

Remember to follow the science. A BLM mobor a march against white racism is outdoors and poses no health risk, whereas a religious congregation is indoors and constitutes a grave health hazard. Funny that, eh? People are treating science as a set of papal encyclicals rather than a rude, rough and bumptious struggle of ideas in actual contest. The authority being exercised over people meeting and congregating is supposedly based in “science”, but which seems to work only in one direction.

 

Thus religion must be suppressed in the name of public safety. David Warren gets it right, as usual.

“That every conceivable human evil may be advanced by methods of social isolation, has been this year’s “breakthrough” rediscovery, and points to its ultimate authorship, Below.

“In Ontario, for instance, under a simpleton premier, almost all human interaction is banned, except that of mass-market retailing. Starting on the Feast of Stephen (December 26th), familiar visitors to our households will become liable to fines of up to 100,000 Canadian dollars, and up to one year in gaol.

“While such lockdowns have been shown to have no effect whatever on the transmission of viruses already widely disseminated, wherever they have been studied, they are imposed as if they were “science,” by petty, and very sleazy, politicians. In no civilized jurisdiction had they such personal authority. But they are thrilled to discover that they can get away with it; that a public systematically misinformed, and deprived of prompt, decisive legal recourse, will obey their edicts, and thereby submit to enslavement. Throughout history, those willing to be enslaved, have been enslaved.”

 

To Jacob Siegel of Unherd once more

“Regime loyalty is the herd immunity of the ruling class, a protection against the consequences of their own failures. This is why the loss in authority that manifests in the “crisis of experts”, while real, doesn’t diminish their power. But it’s also why the regime has to become more ideological and nakedly coercive — for a kingdom of experts without reliable expertise falls back on propaganda and state power.”

 

 

Biden won?

Rebel Yell capably sieves the gems from the slurry. I will not duplicate his work. But with many points of interest in the week ahead, I wanted to advance a thought or two.

There will be excitement. ‘President Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani on Sunday insisted that the presidential election would be “overturned,” claiming he had “evidence” that “corrupt machines” had deleted millions of votes for Trump — but couldn’t share it.’ NY Post

The rough and tumble aside, to believe Biden really won, one would have to think he ran a brilliant campaign, outpacing a damaged, unpopular opponent to capture the imaginations of millions. What I saw? Huge energy for Trump and low turnouts for the sad little events to which Biden’s team felt him equal. All right. Maybe he took the popular vote. Maybe. But I think Trump won the election and I think the Democrats are trying to steal it. I think that because vote counting stopped on election night in key jurisdictions when Trump was winning. I think that because so many people have signed affidavits saying they witnessed vote theft. I gather these documents carry severe penalties for prevarication, so they will be taken seriously. Fine. But will the Democrats get away with it? Yes, I think so. They have the media, and huge chunks of the bureaucracy and the justice system. The swamp should have been long drained and built over with Republicans by now but that didn’t happen. So. Trump must be allowed a triumph or two in court before conceding and the Democrats would be well advised to contrive a somewhat gracious departure. That said, anything can happen, hope springs eternal, and President Trump remains one of the greatest shows on earth.

Some Thoughts on the Crook Biden


“It’s not the votes that count, it’s who counts the votes” as Stalin said many years ago.

Trucks arriving at 4 am stuffed with ballots all for Biden; no-one allowed to supervise; Republican officials kept out. In Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin….all states that were trending to Trump well into election night, then suddenly, as if by magic, hundreds of thousand of ballots for Biden appear, all of which were only marked for Biden and no other state or local candidates.

“I smell a big fat commie rat” as General Turgidson might say. Fact is, we have seen the most blatant, in-your-face election fraud ever.

Of course, the presstitutes in the papers and their toadies in the Fake New media were quick to jump on the bandwagon to cheer their boy. They even had the gall to call for “healing” after their four years of lies, hoaxes, smears and sedition against Trump. Such rancid hypocrisy would gag a maggot.

In his excellent blog, Behind the Black, Rob Zimmerman has this to say:


Now we find that the Democratic Party candidate for president, Joe Biden, might have obtained the presidency through what increasingly appears to be outright election fraud. Unlike Trump, who won cleanly and legally, Biden’s possible victory involves numerous documented instances of voter manipulation and illegal votes. Here are just a few examples, which are only a small sampling of the numerous such stories in the past week:
 Wisconsin Election Clerks May Have Illegally Altered Thousands of Ballots [here]
 Software that incorrectly gave Biden thousands of Michigan votes used in 28 other states [here]
 Ballot Count Watcher Describes At Least 130,000 Ballots ALL FOR BIDEN Arriving in Three Vehicles in Detroit in Dead of Night [here]
 Michigan USPS Whistleblower: Late Mail-In-Ballots Are Being Stamped As Received on November 3rd [here]
 ‘Like Flipping a Coin and Getting Heads 100 Times’: Stats Boffs Scrutinize Biden ‘Victory’ Numbers [here]

And then there is the situation in Pennsylvania, where the state court allowed ballots received after election day to be counted, even though the state law expressly forbids it. Moreover, that state court also allowed the election board to accept ballots even if the signature on the ballot did not match the signature on file.
The result in Pennsylvania? Almost 100% of every single late ballot was for Joe Biden, a statistical impossibility.

The odds are high that the Democrats are about to reap what they have sown. It will not be pretty, but then, it is what these conniving, corrupt, and power-hungry thugs have been demanding. We should give it to them.

Read the whole thing.

 

So even if the crook Biden slithers into the White House, and if these fraudulent deeds are proven, then he will be a bastard president, an illegitimate crook whose criminal organization has dealt another blow to the American republic.

Rebel Yell

Let the healing begin

 

Now that  a Democrat has been elected, the healing can begin. Or so it would seem. Peace and reconciliation all around, except for those on the death or exclusion lists. The People have spoken!

One thing I shall remember for future guidance is the extent to which I felt the polls discouraged Trump supporters, like me. The polls were bullshit, as it turned out: active suppressants of voting enthusiasm. And now the pollsters themselves are allowing as how the polls were wildly off. According to the Daily Caller, citing Real Clear Politics:

“The polls were also off in several battleground states that ultimately defined this election. Biden held a lead of 6.7 points over Trump in Wisconsin before Election Day according to Real Clear Politics but he ended up winning the state by a razor-thin margin of 0.7 points.

“Biden also held a lead of 4.2 points over Trump in Michigan before Election Day according to Real Clear Politics but the current results estimate in the state show Biden leading by 2.7 points. Trump defended Florida with a 3.4-point lead even though the last Real Clear Politics polling average gave Biden a 0.9-point lead.

“But in both Wisconsin and across the country, the polls were wrong on Trump once again. “The polls were clearly off again and in a surprising fashion,” Burden said. “Many of us expected the polls to be more accurate this year than they were four years ago.”

“Marquette Poll director Charles Franklin found that national polls overestimated Biden even more than they did Hillary Clinton in 2016, the Wisconsin State Journal reported. Biden’s national lead was overstated by 5.8 points while Clinton’s was overstated by just one point.”

The most ready answer may be the right one, that the pollsters with Democratic leanings, which are most of them, do not form a group of dispassionate social scientists, but rather a group of campaigning Democratic activists. They have no incentives to be right. They have strong incentives to be on the wining side, or more accurately, perhaps,  to favour their party. They gainnothing by being right about a possible Republican victory

It is discouraging to see the extent to which media, Hollywood, big tech, Wall Street, sports, and opinion polling are united to portray the conservative half of the United States as benighted and in need of education, silencing, or shame. Peace and reconiliation indeed.

 

It is always high drama with Trump

Well well well: the race is tighter than anyone thought possible. We may confidently expect that Democrats will suddenly discover hundreds of thousands of votes that were mailed in but missing until needed, and not counted until today, or tomorrow or next Wednesday. The Democrats stole the election from Richard Nixon to elect John F. Kennedy back in 1960 by finding Chicago graveyards were full of Democratic voters who had been unfairly denied the right to vote. They may do something like this again.

 

It is never undramatic with Trump. In the meantime I suggest you spend a few hours watching the railroad run from Bergen to Oslo. It is very relaxing. The scenery is spectacular. It will calm your frazzled soul.

 

Trump is making things worse – Andrew Sullivan with Sam Harris

This is a full and complete explication of Trump Derangement Syndrome by two highly articulate men who are suffering from it.

According to Harris and Sullivan, Trump is guilty of the following:

 

  • He is worsening the leftism of BLM and the extreme Left, by everything he does and is
  • He worsens the faults of all his opponents
  • He is greedy and malevolent and unaware of this deficits
  • He has denounced white supremacy in insufficiently strong terms
  • He is charcterized by extraordinary and extreme pathological narcissism,
  • Which prevented him from making objective and useful judgments about COVID
  • It is almost supernatural how he manages to skate through situations that would have torpedoed the Presidencies of anyone else
  • It is as if he were an extra-terrestrial put down among us to upset all our ideas and values
  • He is the object of a cult
  • His self confidence and psychological tenacity force those around him to accept his reality
  • It is a warlord mentality, and the capacity to pull this off is a disability on his part
  • He has the virtue of energy, and only mental illness can explain it
  • He has never spent a moment in silence or self-reflection
  • There is no governing process in his mind
  • He would need more virtues to be a more dangerous man
  • He has not sought to persuade; that would have given the persuaded some deference to their independence of mind
  • He wants to be a talk show host sitting in the Oval Office
  • He considers the entire political constitutional system to be a reality entertainment show.
  • Our judgments are objective.

The two of them are frankly in awe of a person whom they hate, or cannot figure out. “I think he has gotten into my head”, said Sullivan. Sullivan likens him to a totalitarian despot whose poster is on the walls everywhere.

Sam Harris:

“There are people who just don’t see this about him… I don’t have a theory of mind for those who don’t feel this way.”

Go to minute 43:00 of the podcast for Sullivan’s understanding why people who don’t like what the Left are doing to the United States would vote for Trump. It is as close as they get to understanding the other side, which is not close at all.

Sullivan and Harris also decry the New York Times, the Steele dossier, CNN, and the obsession with Russia-Trump collusion. It is as if their Trump derangement syndrome is rational, but the lower orders of the media are not entitled to their biases. They are alike with Scott Adams in their denunciation  of the “fine people” hoax that Trump had not sufficiently denounced white supremacy after the Charlottesville riots. They denounce the racialization being practised by the left wing media. They denounce the suppression of news regarding Hunter Biden by major news outlets.

These are two rational people who are caught on the narrow ledge afforded by reasonable views about the Left, and what I consider irrational fear of Trump. I think a lot of people are on that ledge.

And “of course” says Sulivan we should not be examining too closely the revelations from Hunter Biden’s computer about influence peddling with China and Ukraine. They go back and forth between understanding the causes why Trump was voted into power, and not understanding what he is doing to answer the constituencies that elected him.