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Friday, January 29, 2016

The Fox Butterfield Effect

Trump's support in opinion polls, much of it from blue-collar men, has not wavered for months despite him insulting Mexican immigrants and Muslims and clashing with Republican establishment figures like Senator John McCain.
For those not in the know:



It's what happens when someone on the Left makes a statement that is laughably ludicrous on its face, yet it reveals what the speaker truly believes — no matter how dumb.


"The Butterfield Effect" is named in honor of ace New York Times crime reporter Fox Butterfield, the intrepid analyst responsible for such brilliantly headlined stories as "More Inmates, Despite Drop In Crime," and "Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction," not to mention the poetic 1997 header, "Crime Keeps on Falling, but Prisons Keep on Filling."


Mr. Butterfield is truly perplexed at what he calls the "paradox" of more criminals in prison coinciding with less crime in neighborhoods. An observation that might appear obvious to an 8th grader (crooks + jail = fewer crimes) is simply beyond his grasp. Butterfield of the Times is the poster boy for the greatest conundrum facing the American Left today: How do you explain to people who just don't get it that the problem is they just don't get it?

Thursday, January 28, 2016

"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." -- Voltaire

True

Mizzou professor who called for ‘muscle’ suspended.


Glenn Reynolds
A University of Missouri assistant professor who has faced an avalanche of criticism after she was caught on video calling for “some muscle” to help her eject a student journalist at a protest site on campus has been suspended from her duties, the University of Missouri System Board of Curators announced Wednesday.

The Politics of Radical Feminism

So while liars like Julie Zeilinger solicit media assistance in an attempt to resuscitate the mythical “campus rape epidemic,” they continue ignoring a real plague of sexual violence committed by Muslims, and the American feminist movement is dedicated to electing Hillary Clinton, who by abandoning Americans at Benghazi demonstrated that it is her policy to surrender to the encroaching menace of Islamic violence.

Wesleyan defines the range of genders

Per Wesleyan College - a private school, mind you - the official new Newspeak for this crap is now “LGBTTQQFAGPBDSM”*

* Apparently stands for “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, queer, questioning, flexual, asexual, genderf**k, polyamorous, bondage/discipline, dominance/submission, sadism/masochism.”

New genders I never knew existed

Circgender– A gender that feels so magical and grand as to be indescribable.
Daimogender– A gender closely related to demons and the supernatural.
Felisgender– A small, catlike gender.
Medeigender– A magical, whimsical gender.

COMPLETE LIST OF TUMBLR GENDERS (SO FAR)

Doomsday's Past and I Feel Fine

The rapture was supposed to happen on September 13, 1988.

A few fringe pastors were screaming that the end was nigh, that the righteous would soon disappear into the air while the rest of humanity was doomed to suffer a quite literal hell on earth. Forget the biblical admonition that no man knows the day nor hour of Christ’s return, these men had figured it out. It was time to prepare yourself. I was a sophomore at a Christian college in Nashville, and it was the talk of the campus. No one likes to make fun of crazy Christian preachers more than irreverent Christian college students, and we couldn’t stop dividing the student body between the saved and the damned.

When the alarm clock rang the morning after the scheduled rapture, I hit snooze, and said, triumphantly, to my roommate, “We’re still here!” There was no response. “Hello?” Still no response. I looked down at his bed, and no one was there. For about nine seconds I was gripped by sheer panic. I’d been left behind. The lake of fire awaits! Then my roommate walked in from the shower, and the crisis passed.

I thought of this story as I watched Rush Limbaugh’s Al Gore “armageddon” clock expire. In January, 2006 — when promoting his Oscar-winning (yes, Oscar-winning) documentary, An Inconvenient Truth — Gore declared that unless we took “drastic measures” to reduce greenhouse gasses, the world would reach a “point of no return” in a mere ten years. He called it a “true planetary emergency.”

Well, the ten years passed today, we’re still here, and the climate activists have postponed the apocalypse. Again.

There’s a veritable online cottage industry cataloguing hysterical, failed predictions of environmentalist catastrophe. Gore’s prediction fits right in with the rest of his comrades in the wild-eyed environmentalist movement.

Over at the American Enterprise Institute, Mark Perry keeps his list of “18 spectacularly wrong apocalyptic predictions” made around the original Earth Day in 1970. Robert Tracinski at The Federalist has a nice list of “Seven big failed environmentalist predictions.” The Daily Caller’s “25 years of predicting the global warming ‘tipping point’” makes for amusing reading, including one declaration that we had mere “hours to act” to “avert a slow-motion tsunami.”

... climate activists all too often are the close cousins of politically correct campus race hucksters — they cloak their raw will to power in the self-righteous cloak of the great and glorious cause. We’ve taken them seriously for far too long. Now, it’s time to laugh.


Can we laugh now?  Read the whole thing.

Wednesday, January 27, 2016

The New Sexual World Order Is So Confusing

I find myself confused about how it is possible that high-heeled shoes, dresses, and lipstick are all tools of the patriarchy to oppress women and transform them into mere objects of male desire, yet it is considered necessary that men who transition to become women must wear high heels, dresses, and lipstick in order to “express themselves as women,” which would suggest that there is something innately feminine about these objects.

But that cannot be the case if they are tools of masculinist oppression, unless femininity itself were an invention of the patriarchy with no basis in reality, which would mean it would be impossible to have a biological necessity to transition to being a woman, since femininity is not biological in nature at all, but political. If a dress, then, is oppressive by nature, should it not be discouraged among transitioned females just as much as among born females? Such would seem to be the case unless born females and transitioned females are different, but I am then reminded they are not!

....I realize now that marriage is an institution invented to enslave women and keep them from actualizing their career potential. Yet if marriage is an evil to straight women, why is it a right for gay men? Or, for that matter, for lesbians, who are, from what I am told, actually women, too?

I’m OK. You’re a rage-a-holic.

But in recent years, another phenomenon has emerged. Some forms of anger are now considered more culturally legitimate than others. As a result, we spend less time examining the sources of people’s anger and more time arguing over which people have the “right” to be angry.

This is especially true with controversial issues. Announcing his recent executive actions on gun control, President Obama wiped away angry tears as he said of the victims of gun violence, “Every time I think about those kids, it gets me mad.” The media swooned; Matt Lauer, of the Today show, praised the president’s “rare display of emotion” and columnist Nicholas Kristof tweeted, “We should all be crying about 32,000 American gun deaths a year.” Obama’s angry tears supposedly placed the president above politics, in the realm of the spirit—and elevated those who admired his display of feeling. “I think any of us who sort of covered that story, any time I think about Sandy Hook, you feel that as well,” said Today’s Willie Geist, thus suggesting that professionals who “covered” the shootings at the school in Connecticut simply felt more deeply about it than the rest of us hoi polloi. “It doesn’t mean his policies are going to fix the gun problem, it doesn’t even mean they’re the right thing, I’m just talking about that emotion right there.”

But when people on the other side of the aisle express anger, it’s not emotionally inspiring. It’s scary. “Anger and alienation have been simmering in Republican ranks since the end of the George W. Bush administration,” the New York Times noted recently (and ominously), while failing to note the similar rise in Democratic anger. A recent editorial indulged in a standard bit of outrage-peddling by blaming “years of overheated antigovernment statements by right-wing politicians and media figures” for “outbursts” such as the current standoff between local ranchers and law-enforcement agents at a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon. Meanwhile, these same observers describe expressions of anger from the left (bullying campus activists, Occupy Wall Street) as righteous manifestations of the fight for justice and treat their excesses like the overenthusiasm of an excitable puppy.

In other words: I’m OK. You’re a rage-a-holic.

It’s an emotional version of what behavioral economists call the “licensing effect.” The term describes a curious human trait: When we do something good, we then give ourselves license to do something bad. One Canadian study found that people who bought environmentally conscious products were more likely later to lie, cheat, and steal, for example. “Purchasing green products may produce the counterintuitive effect of licensing asocial and unethical behaviors by establishing moral credentials,” researchers told CBC News.

Similarly, by pointing out the supposedly irrational and dangerous anger of their political opponents (and thus establishing their “moral credentials”), cultural mandarins of the left can then readily indulge in their own vitriol without ever having to figure out what might be stirring these other people....

There is something both brilliantly instrumental and stunningly condescending about the efforts of the self-appointed cultural and media elite to disqualify the emotions of the majority of Americans. In doing so they suggest not only that their opponents are wrong on the facts, but also that they are irrational, immature, and possibly dangerous, like a child having a tantrum. This makes serious conversation—and useful political debate—impossible. And it makes people very, very angry.

Tuesday, January 26, 2016

The Flint Water Crisis Is the Result of a Stimulus Project Gone Wrong



Interesting anaysis:


Liberals are wrongly blaming Flint's lead poisoning crisis on austerity measures imposed on the city by a fiscallyconservative Republican Governor Rick Snyder, as I wrote last week. (Snyder had appointed an emergency manager in 2011 to help the city balance its books and avoid bankruptcy.) However, I didn't quite realize just how wrong they were. As it turns out, the debacle is the result of Snyder's efforts to stimulate the local economy—the exact opposite of the liberal line.

The whole mess occurred because Flint decided against renewing its 30-year contract with the Detroit Water and Sewage Department (DWSD) and switched instead to Karengondi Water Authority (KWA). KWA was planning to build its own hugely expensive pipeline, parallel to DWSD's, to harness water from Lake Huron and service the Genesee County area where Flint is located. This left the city in the lurch for a few years when its contract with DWSD ended but the new facility had not yet gone online, prompting it to reopen a local mothballed facility that relied on the toxic Flint River as its source (more on the rank stupidity of this decision later).

The rationale for the original decision to switch Flint's water providers was that, in the long run, KWA would generate substantial savings for the cash-strapped city. Not only was this false but Snyder had very good reasons at that time to believe that this was false.

Read the whole thing.

How stupid and vicious do elites think 'we' are?

How stupid and vicious do they think we are? That's a question that I think explains a lot of things about politics and society today — and about this year's unpredictable presidential race.

The "we" in that question are ordinary citizens and the "they" are political and media elites who hold them in contempt. Which they do over and over again by trying to obfuscate and cover up the source and motives of terrorist attacks.

Barack Obama, who refuses to use phrases akin to "Islamist terrorism," is a prime offender, but far from the only one. His predecessor George W. Bush, after the attacks of September 11, made a point of visiting mosques and calling Islam a religion of peace.

Undoubtedly he then feared that many Americans would attack and assault Muslims, real or perceived, and a very few such attacks occurred. But government statistics count far fewer "hate crimes" against Muslims than against Jews.

Nonetheless Obama still behaves as if any suggestion that terrorists shouting "Allahu akbar!" has something to do with Islam will spark massacres and persecution across the country. The American people are seen as a great beast, incapable of reason or cool judgment. Stupid and vicious.

So they must be reminded that they are not morally superior to terrorists. At a national prayer breakfast, Obama felt obliged to remind Americans that Christians attacked Muslims — in the Crusades, 800 years ago.

Others have followed his example. In a press conference earlier this month Philadelphia police officials described how a Muslim dressed in a white religious robe fired multiple rounds at a police officer, "in the name of Islam," as he said after his arrest. You could see it on videotape.

At which point Philadelphia Mayor James Kenney proclaimed, "In no way, shape or form does anyone in this room believe that Islam or the teaching of Islam has anything to do with what you've seen on the screen."

How stupid and vicious does he think we are?

Actually, it's not that hard for ordinary people to keep in mind two different ideas that the elites think they'll find confusing — that most terrorists these days are Muslims, and that most Muslims are not terrorists. We keep similar things in mind every day. For example, we notice that most dangerously aggressive drivers are men, but also that most men are not dangerously aggressive drivers.

Still, dangerous drivers are dangerous. Americans are tired of hearing "Islam is a religion of peace" when for an uncomfortably large minority of Muslims these days it's the opposite. So they have been flocking to Donald Trump when he calls for barring all Muslims from entering the U.S. And conservatives who in another year would upbraid Trump for flunking multiple litmus tests are defending him because he dares to utter forbidden truths.

Americans may be noticing as well how far political correctness has gone in Europe, especially Germany. European and American elites praised Chancellor Angela Merkel for promising to take in 1 million mostly Muslim, mostly male refugees. Why can't America be so generous?

But ordinary people, there and here, have seen how police, municipal and national officials have covered up migrants' behavior on New Year's. Even mass assaults on women in Cologne and other cities, and how print and broadcast media eagerly cooperated. Cellphone cameras told the story which elite media wanted to ignore.

It's a story, as even some Americans notice, that shows the underside of a European multiculturalism that insists that all cultures are morally equal, except ours, which is worse. The result is that authorities don't demand that Muslims respect the rights of women and gays, as in Rotherham, England, where they allowed immigrants to degrade 1,400 women for a decade, lest they be called racist.

Ordinary people can see, when elites allow them to see, that this gets things upside down. Human rights, toleration of those who are different, safety for those who exercise freedom of expression — these are products of the West, not the rest.

The hard question is how far tolerant societies should tolerate the intolerant. Societies value freedom of expression, but not when those include freedom to assault and kill. Societies are ready to welcome others, but not those whose values are discordant with the freedoms they strive to uphold.

Ordinary Americans, I think, have a better sense of how to get these questions right, without dissolving into irrational hatred, than the elites who look down on them as stupid and vicious.

Monday, January 25, 2016

Mark Steyn on "The World They Made"


Worth reading the whole thing (who's looking out for you?):

In contrast to the ebb and flow of eternally shifting multiparty systems, America has a rigid, inflexible two-party choice:

One party is supposed to be the party of big government, the other the party of small government. When the Big Government Party is in power, the government gets bigger, and, when the Small Government Party is in power, the government gets bigger.

One party is supposed to be the party of social liberalism, the other the party of social conservatism. When the Socially Liberal Party is in power, the country gets more liberal, and, when the Socially Conservative Party is in power, the country gets more liberal.

One party is supposed to be the party of foreign-policy doves, the other the party of foreign-policy hawks. When the doves are in power, America loses wars, and, when the hawks are in power, America loses wars.

So much for American conservatism's three-legged stool. "Mainstream" Republican candidates are essentially reduced to the argument: This time it'll be different, I promise.

Democrats' principal appeal isn't to philosophical coherence: They tell their coalition that they'll take care of their own - the gays, the blacks, the feminists, the transitioning, the environmentalists, the Hispanics, the educators... This time round, a big chunk of the Republican base has figured it'd like someone who's looking out for them, too.....

All the Chumpy McDonorpants had to do was sit on their hands and not give 100 million bucks to another hereditary-class rich-boy stiff with no flair for retail politics who thinks that illegal immigration is "an act of love". But they couldn't help themselves. The Donor Class decided it would take its contempt for the rubes to the next level ...and now they're surprised that the rubes have decided to take it to the next level, too. They don't care when the insiders say that Trump isn't a "real Republican". To them, that's not a bug, it's a feature. But Rush posits that disenchantment with the only electoral alternative to the Democrats is now so great that they don't even care that Trump isn't a "real conservative". ...

That's true. But he's not campaigning like one, is he? Cruz is running proudly under the conservative banner. Trump is running like a guy who got Frank Luntz to do one of his "words that work" focus groups and "conservative" came back with net unfavorables.

Mark Steyn Disses National Review



Since the NR issue opposing Donald Trump came out, there has been a sharpening of the lines within the Republican party.  Steyn chooses his sides and NR doesn't come out well.

~National Review's initial reaction to Donald Trump's entry into the presidential race appeared a few hours after he launched his campaign under the headline "Witless Ape Rides Escalator". Their condescension has got a little subtler since then, and it's now gone long-form with an entire issue dedicated to the singular proposition: "Against Trump".

I've received a ton of emails today asking me what I make of the National Review hit. I used to contribute to NR, and I generally make it a rule not to comment on publications for which I once wrote. Just move on with your life, that's my advice. In this case, we parted on not terribly pleasant terms, and we remain co-defendants on the unending Mann vs Steyn et al law suit, which means I have to get on well enough with Rich Lowry so that he doesn't want to punch my lights out when we're sitting in the dock together - or, if things go really badly, sharing a cell.

Nevertheless, notwithstanding some contributors I admire, the whole feels like a rather obvious trolling exercise. As I explained yesterday, I don't think Trump supporters care that he's not a fully paid-up member in good standing of "the conservative movement" - in part because, as they see it, the conservative movement barely moves anything. If you want the gist of NR's argument, here it is:

I think we can say that this is a Republican campaign that would have appalled Buckley, Goldwater, and Reagan...

A real conservative walks with us. Ronald Reagan read National Review and Human Events for intellectual sustenance...

My old boss, Ronald Reagan, once said...

Ronald Reagan was famous for...

When Reagan first ran for governor of California...

Reagan showed respect for...

Reagan kept the Eleventh Commandment...

Far cry from Ronald Reagan's "I am paying for this microphone" line...
Trump is Dan Quayle, and everyone and his auntie are Lloyd Bentsen: "I knew Ronald Reagan, I worked for Ronald Reagan, I filled in Ronald Reagan's subscription-renewal form for National Review. And you, sir, are no Ronald Reagan."

You have to be over 50 to have voted for Reagan, and a supposed "movement" can't dine out on one guy forever, can it? What else you got?

Well, there are two references to Bush, both of them following the words "Reagan and". But no mention of Dole, one psephological citation of Romney, and one passing sneer at McCain as a "cynical charlatan" - and that's it for the last three decades of presidential candidates approved by National Review, at least to the extent that they never ran entire issues trashing them.

Will the more or less official disdain of "the conservative movement" make any difference to Trump's supporters? Matt Welch in Reason:

Many or even most of the people who make a living working in politics and political commentary—even those who think of themselves as outsiders, such as nonpartisan libertarians—inevitably begin to view their field as one dedicated primarily to ideas, ideology, philosophy, policy, and so forth, and NOT to the emotional, ideologically unmoored cultural passions of a given (and perhaps fleeting) moment.

I'd put that contrast slightly differently. The movement conservatives at National Review make a pretty nice living out of "ideas, ideology, philosophy, policy, and so forth". The voters can't afford that luxury: They live in a world where, in large part due to the incompetence of the national Republican Party post-Reagan, Democrat ideas are in the ascendant. And they feel that this is maybe the last chance to change that.

Go back to that line "When Reagan first ran for governor of California..." Gosh, those were the days, weren't they? But Reagan couldn't get elected Governor of California now, could he? Because the Golden State has been demographically transformed. From my book The [Un]documented Mark Steyn:

According to the Census, in 1970 the 'Non-Hispanic White' population of California was 78 per cent. By the 2010 Census, it was 40 per cent. Over the same period, the 10-per cent Hispanic population quadrupled and caught up with whites.

That doesn't sound terribly 'natural', does it? If one were informed that, say, the population of Nigeria had gone from 80 per cent black in 1970 to 40 per cent black today, one would suspect something rather odd and profoundly unnatural had been going on.

The past is another country, and the Chamber of Commerce Republicans gave it away. Reagan's California no longer exists. And, if America as a whole takes on the demographics of California, then "the conservative movement" will no longer exist. That's why, for many voters, re-asserting America's borders is the first, necessary condition for anything else - and it took Trump to put that on the table.

Sunday, January 24, 2016

The Myth that 99.9% of Muslims Reject Extremism

A number of well-intentioned people, including President Barack Obama, have claimed that the Islamic State and other militant radical groups have practically no support among Muslims. Indeed, in a televised interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, in response to a question of why his administration avoided using the phrase, “Islamic terrorists,” the president responded the vast overwhelming majority of Muslims reject radical interpretations of Islam, distinguishing between radical extremists and the remaining “99.9 percent of Muslims.”

I understand the desire to believe this and the optimism expressed in such a claim, but what is the evidence for it?

Polls?

Polls, as imperfect as they may be, certainly do not show this to be the case. A majority of Muslims do reject radical extremism, but the numbers that do support extremism, as found in polling, are nowhere near the tiny minority claimed by President Obama and others. This is significant because when we are considering even small percentages of the Muslim world, then we are discussing tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people.

Consider the efforts of the respected Pew Research Center, a non-partisan polling organization that carries out highly regarded surveys of religion in a number of Muslim majority countries. In their 2013 poll of Muslims in eleven countries, they found only 57% had an unfavorable view of Al- Qaeda and only 51% had an unfavorable view of the Taliban.

This is nowhere near the 99.9% claim of Muslims who supposedly reject extremism as argued by President Obama and others. Instead, it is only a little bit over half of the Muslim populations surveyed, which include populations in the nations of Turkey, Malaysia, Egypt, Senegal, Pakistan, Indonesia, Nigeria, Jordan, Tunisia, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Territories. Indeed, 13% of respondents declared outright support or favorability for Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, while others claimed they “didn’t know” how they felt about the groups or refused to answer.

The Pew numbers showed remarkable consistency when they came out with their 2015 poll that focused on Muslim responses to the “Islamic State” (e.g. ISIS, ISIL, Daesh). In an average of ten primarily Muslim nations sampled in that poll, Pew demonstrated alarmingly high percentages of either outright support for IS or many respondents who “didn’t know” how they felt about the terrorist organization. In heavily populated countries, the Islamic State had the highest levels of support. In Pakistan, for example, 9% expressed outright support for IS, while 62% claimed they didn’t know how they felt about the group, this despite widespread awareness of the Islamic State in Pakistani madrassas, media, and in popular culture. Consequently, 72% of those surveyed in Pakistan either supported or did not know how they felt about the Islamic State while only 28% outright condemned the group. Again, this is a far cry from the 99.9% of Muslims that we are otherwise told reject extremism. Support for extremism in Pakistan may be even higher than these numbers suggest, as the Taliban, with deep roots in Pakistan, and Islamic State are enemies, so it is possible that some of those condemning the Islamic State are doing so because they are supporters of the Taliban.

Read the whole thing.

Right Wing Extremism vs. Islamic Extremism in the United States: A Look at the Numbers



There's a lie being perpetrated that Right Wing Extremism is more deadly than Islamic exremism.  Here's the reason it's a statistical lie.

Again, as I noted in the introduction, this is not to dismiss the threat of right wing terrorism and its very deadly consequences for some, but only to add perspective to the claims being made. Right wing terrorism is more deadly for Americans only if you add a number of very limiting parameters (e.g. excluding the victims of 9/11, ignoring “lone wolf” attacks without solid connections to groups like al-Qaeda and their affiliates, etc…). But if you lift those limitations, and apply equal standards, then the raw and unfiltered numbers of deaths of Americans due to Islamic extremism in the United States over the last fifteen years dwarf the numbers attributable to right wing extremism by a ratio of over 62 to 1. Even if you leave out 9/11 victims and just focus on the ideological statements and goals of the attackers, then the deaths of Americans due to Islamic extremism still outnumber the deaths attributable to right wingers (which reveals an even greater disparity when compared with population groups). If we move beyond America’s borders, then the disparity becomes far greater, with somewhere around 90% of the world’s terrorism related deaths attributable to Islamic extremism, and only a fraction of 1% attributable to right wing extremism.

Read the whole thing.

Saluting a Hat

Deforming the language has long been a cornerstone of leftist politics. If you can find a way to couch odious polices in pleasant sounding language, there’s some chance you can convince the public to slit its own throat. Similarly, they often mangle the language in order to prevent a reasoned debate. All around us we have euphemisms that blur the definitions for commonly understood things.

Take a look at this strange story from Britain. Here’s some of the text as published:
This morning, I stood in front of hundreds of Brighton College pupils in assembly and spoke about the experience of being a trans woman. In the past few days, they’ve found their school suddenly the focus of press interest, after headteacher Richard Cairns scrapped traditional male and female uniforms to accommodate the needs of transgender children.

He made the decision to offer all pupils the option of trousers or a skirt, so that children with gender dysphoria can dress as the gender they feel they really are, rather than the one they were born into. Mr Cairns explained to me that his decision had been prompted by a female pupil, whose family had asked the school if she could dress as she did beyond the school gates – as a boy.

Now, here’s the same paragraphs in normal English:
This morning, I stood in front of hundreds of Brighton College pupils in assembly and spoke about the experience of being a man wearing women’s clothes. In the past few days, they’ve found their school suddenly the focus of press interest, after headmaster Richard Cairns scrapped normal uniforms to accommodate the demands of parents who think their boys should wear dresses.

He made the decision to offer all pupils the option of trousers or a skirt, so that children with psychological problems can draw attention to themselves by wearing clothes for the opposite sex. Mr Cairns explained to me that his decision had been prompted by a female pupil, whose family had asked the school if they could use their child as a prop in their morality play.


When we say things as they are, it’s hard to not laugh at most of this stuff. The rest is so creepy and weird no sensible person would tolerate it. If an adult man wants to wear a sundress, that’s his choice. It is a harmless deviancy that society can tolerate to a point. Teaching children that sex is a human construct is no different than telling them [they] are bullet proof. Letting parents turn their kids into acts of public piety is monstrous and not something a sane people should tolerate.

When you lose control of the language, you quickly go from pleas for tolerance of a public nuisance to intolerance of observable reality. There is no such thing as gender dysphoria. Humans come in one of two sexes, This is ground floor biology. Substituting the word “gender” for “sex” brings with it the implication that the sex of humans is open to debate in the same way the rules of grammar are debatable.

It is possible that some people think they are of the other sex, just as there are people who think they are invisible. I once knew a woman who thought she was the Virgin Mary. These sorts of mental health problems are sad. These people should be pitied and given what medical care we can. Their maladies should not be forced onto the rest of us.

Of course, the reason our betters insist we pretend that a dude in a sundress is a person of a third sex is they know it is nonsense. It is humiliating to be made to go along with such nonsense. Having to sit and listen to this horse’s ass deliver a speech in drag is about as degrading as being made to hop around on one foot while sucking your thumb. That’s the whole point of this. If you force people to accept this, you can get away with anything.

Trannies are the modern incarnation of Albrecht Gessler’s hat. Instead of bowing to a hat in front of the town, we now have to sit and applaud as a man in drag spits gibberish. In the bizarre formulation of our rulers, normal people are labeled deviant if they don’t pretend the deviant is normal.

This will not end well.

The Naked and the Right

One of the interesting aspects of the Trump Effect is how the members of Red Team, who used to lecture us about solidarity in the face of the Obama onslaught, are now stabbing their teammates in the back. Trump people are “trumpkins” and in a cult of personality. They declare that Trump is not a conservative as if that makes him a pagan who likes human sacrifice.

Read the comments of any Trump story and you inevitably see a group of mouth breathers railing about Trump not being a conservative. The word “conservative” has meant whatever the party bosses want for so long, most people can’t remember what it used to mean. It has become an abracadabra word that means “good” or “bad” depending upon the person using it.

[referring to a blogger who denounces Trump for wanting Apple to produce it's products in this country]

I’m unfamiliar with the blogger and I’m sure he is a peach of a fellow, but like many people, he seems to confuse libertarian with conservative. He’s also confused about what conservatism says about capitalism and markets. That’s a common failing among the politically active. It turns his comments about tribalism into a bit of self-parody, but maybe it is intentional in order to generate comments.

The confusion over free markets versus capitalism should be blamed on libertarians, who find it comforting to confuse the two. Free markets are an academic concept. They have never existed on earth. There are always external forces at work on the market participants. It turns out that humans have this thing called culture and culture shapes the market place by placing rules on the participants, either formally or informally.

Capitalism simply means private ownership of the means of production for the purpose of producing private profit. Put another way, it is the appropriation of capital (property, money, labor, etc.) by some to the exclusion of others. Just as there are no completely free market economies, no modern state is purely capitalist. There is always some degree of public ownership.

The point here is that you can have capitalism with all sorts of government interventions and you can have a market economy with loads of state regulation. What defines the Right is not whether there is a debate over these issues. The Right is defined by who decides and how. It is libertarians who argue that issues like trade and regulation are beyond the pale and can never be debated.

...

To some degree it is understandable that people like that blogger would think it is all about economics. Again, this is the libertarian poison that has oozed into the bloodstream of the Right. Since the Republicans are afraid to discuss culture, they have retreated into synthetic debates over free markets and free trade. You never have to worry about the Left calling you names if you are on the side of Apple, even if Apple is using slaves to make their products.

That I suspect is why so many are so vexed by Donald Trump. His campaign is forcing a debate about what it means to be a conservative. This is bad for the technocrats and the libertarians. Both camps operate from the assumption that culture is meaningless and can be plowed under in the quest for power, material goods or economic efficiency. It’s also a handy way of steering clear of the social justice warriors.

... We’re suddenly finding out who is and who is not on the Right. The libertarians are swimming back to their island and the technocrats are waddling back over to the Left.

SORE LOSERS

Sam Francis called the American conservative movement a collection of “beautiful losers”. To look at them now, a more apt descriptor would be “sore losers”. The meltdown of the mandarins of Conservatism Inc. over at National Review about Donald Trump can only be seen as the last gasp of an increasingly irrelevant “movement”.

The heirs of Buckley would love nothing more than to exercise his inquisitorial powers over Donald Trump and the growing “Alt-Right” movement. Over twenty “movement Conservatives” penned diatribes against the Donald in the latest issue of National Review. For the most part, these barely rise above the level of “democrats r real racists guyz!” to denunciations of “nativism”, and faux patrician concerns about “vulgarity” as defined by Leo Strauss (I’m looking at you Kristol). What we are seeing is no more than the death throes of Conservatism Inc. in a wild temper tantrum.

...

The truth is, publications like National Review and the entire “Conservative” movement are nothing more than sinecures for a b-squad managerial elite on the Potomac. Like the collapse of the Soviet Union, the collapse of Conservatism has been swift and unexpected. They’ve even lost the RNC (Ha!) But with the destruction of this false opposition to our reigning liberal hegemony, a new opposition can take hold.

That’s where we come in. Donald Trump has been a great beginning towards restructuring politics in the United States. All in the last year we have seen moves towards nationalism, and even a nascent whiff of a white “identity politics”. Seizing the mantle of opposition brings new possibilities and new dangers. Of course, this is the only way forward.

It's Still the Demography, Stupid

Somewhere, deep down, the European political class understands that the Great Migrations have accelerated the future I outlined way back when:

Can these trends continue for another 30 years without having consequences? Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: The grand buildings will still be standing, but the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a remarkable period: the self-extinction of the races who, for good or ill, shaped the modern world.

It's the biggest story of our time, and, ten years on, Europe's leaders still can't talk about it, not to their own peoples, not honestly. For all the "human rights" complaints, and death threats from halfwits, and subtler rejections from old friends who feel I'm no longer quite respectable, I'm glad I brought it up. And it's well past time for others to speak out.

Read the whole thing.

Trump says he could "shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose" support

Saturday, January 23, 2016

Trump's not a Conservative, big whoop!

Trump’s bona fides as a Republican are almost beside the point.

Trump satisfies the anger of the high school graduate in flyover country who reads about the goings-on in academia supported by his taxes.  He’s loving the way Trump brought up the Clinton sex scandals which Jeb! is too polite to mention.




The reason that nothing seems to stick to Trump is because this isn’t about Trump, it’s about the Democrats who are nothing but Left Wing fringe with no center, and the Republicans who are afraid to stick up for the middle class white guy because they’ll be called racists.

Here's a called to Rush Limbaugh - who fits the demographic that both parties are fighting for:
CALLER: Hey, Rush. Longtime listener, first-time caller. I'm in my twenties, and I am a Trump supporter, and I guess I'm also a member of what people are calling the alt right. And I just wanted to, like, explain for maybe a lot of your listeners why Donald Trump is so popular, despite the consternation of many in the conservative movement and the Republican Party. And just really simply, the Democrat Party for the past half century has been openly the party of the fringes, right? The party of disaffected minority voters, black, Mexican immigrants, single women, feminists, all these things, homosexuals in the past, you know, ten years. And the Republican Party, whether it wants to admit this or not, has become the de facto party of white men. The only meaningful difference, though, is that the Republican Party is not allowed to appeal to its own constituency, while the Democrat Party obviously does nothing but appeal to its own constituents. So when you look at the political scene in America like this, Donald Trump not only becomes understandable, but he kind of becomes inevitable.

And that's it.  The Democrats have the black vote, the illegal immigrant vote, the La Raza vote,  the Marxist professor vote, the Mattress Girl vote, the crazed Feminazi vote, the LGBTQLSMFT vote, the newspaper editorial writer vote, the network anchor vote, the George Soros vote, the Muslim Jihadist vote, the Hollywood vote, while dissing white Christian males and the women who love them.  

And the Republican political class want to be just like them.  At National Review they think outsourcing factory jobs to China and Mexico is good because of "comparative advantage"  will appeal to the guy whose factory was just closed.

Is it any wonder that Trump is winning?


Caller to Rush Limbaugh Explains the Trump Phenomenon




... the Democrat Party [is] openly the party of the fringes ... And the Republican Party...has become the de facto party of white men.  The only meaningful difference, though, is that the Republican Party is not allowed to appeal to its own constituency... 

RUSH: Here is Edward in New York, 28 years old, great to have you on the program, Edward. Hi.

CALLER: Hey, Rush. Longtime listener, first-time caller. I'm in my twenties, and I am a Trump supporter, and I guess I'm also a member of what people are calling the alt right. And I just wanted to, like, explain for maybe a lot of your listeners why Donald Trump is so popular, despite the consternation of many in the conservative movement and the Republican Party. And just really simply, the Democrat Party for the past half century has been openly the party of the fringes, right? The party of disaffected minority voters, black, Mexican immigrants, single women, feminists, all these things, homosexuals in the past, you know, ten years. And the Republican Party, whether it wants to admit this or not, has become the de facto party of white men. The only meaningful difference, though, is that the Republican Party is not allowed to appeal to its own constituency, while the Democrat Party obviously does nothing but appeal to its own constituents. So when you look at the political scene in America like this, Donald Trump not only becomes understandable, but he kind of becomes inevitable.

RUSH: So you think people your age view Trump as something much needed, brand-new, breaking from the constraint formula that both parties find themselves in?

CALLER: Yes. And when people, you mentioned Charles Krauthammer earlier, you know, being so puzzled as to why Trump seems impervious to dropping poll numbers when he does things like insult Megyn Kelly. It's because, as weird as it sounds, it's not really about Trump. Donald Trump can kind of do whatever he wants because in a lot of ways he's the only person that seems serious. I know that sounds weird to the ears of someone like Jeb --

RUSH: I totally get it. No, no, no, no. My burden as a host is I totally understand you. And the fact that I understand you is making me an enemy in some of my own sectors, the fact that I understand where you're coming from. When you say it's not really about Trump, it's the opportunity Trump presents, it's the newness, it's the what-have-you, it's the breaking out of whatever it is that's got us shackled, I totally get what you're saying. I like the way you expressed it, too. But I gotta run. I'm really out of time. Edward, thanks very much.

Some Republican operatives believe the future is where the Democrats are; Democrats who have driven white men away and gathered every America-hating loony-toon to its bosom.   It doesn't take a political genius to figure out that this huge demographic - that neither side wants - is happy to find a leader who's not ashamed of them and is willing to step up and be their champion.  

Thanks National Review

  • Donald Trump40.6%
  • Ted Cruz10.5%
  • Ben Carson9.7%
  • Jeb Bush9.2%
  • Marco Rubio7.2%
  • Wouldn’t vote5.8%
  • Chris Christie4.6%
  • Rand Paul3.4%
  • John Kasich3.0%
  • Carly Fiorina2.8%
  • Mike Huckabee2.2%
  • Rick Santorum0.5%
  • Jim Gilmore0.4%

Because, as Rush Limbaugh pointed out:


IT'S NOT ABOUT TRUMP. IT'S BECAUSE WHAT WE HAVE NOW IS NOT WORKING FOR THE MIDDLE CLASS.
















CALLER: Hey, Rush. Thanks for having me. I just want to say, we need to effect change, and the only way to do it is to get Trump in office. He is the only person who has a pair that's willing to talk about the issues. And, you know, I've always been a lifelong conservative. I'm a W fan. I know a lot of people are. The last Bush president, I loved him. His brother's a nice guy, but he doesn't have a pair. We need someone to speak out. I'm 34, and I agree with that 28-year-old caller, the Millennial. We need change.

RUSH: And that's what Trump... Well, now, let me ask something else he said. He said -- and I thought this was key. He said, "Everybody and their uncle..." I saw it discussed today that the establishment types, the political professionals, can't believe that Trump survived his opening comments about Mexicans when he announced his candidacy. They can't believe he survived what he said about Megyn Kelly, and they can't believe that he survived what he said about John McCain. This 28-year-old guy told me yesterday, "Rush, to understand this you have to understand it isn't about Trump. He happens to be the vessel. He happens to be the opening, whatever. But we're not interested in destroying Trump because we don't want to destroy what Trump represents." Is that pretty much true for you, too?

CALLER: That's exactly it. We need... It's obviously not working. Things aren't working. Something needs to change, and it's not... I mean, there are things where I kind of look at Trump and I say, "Boy, really? Should he have said that?" But he's the only person to drive us to making change, and I'm a results-driven guy. You know, I work logistics, and we need to effect change. We need to see results. So the fact that he says off-the-cuff things, though it's not right, I think your average voter... You know, we're all imperfect, right? We all have our things. He's gonna do stupid stuff, but he's gonna drive us to those results.

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: That's the only way to effect change.

RUSH: You talk about... Thanks for the call. You talk about things are not working. I disagree. I think the Obama machine is well-oiled. I think the Obama administration is clicking on all cylinders. I think there's nothing stopping 'em. I don't think they're leaking oil. I don't think they got any carburetor problems. I think their jet engines are on afterburner and there's nobody stopping 'em. It's working better than they ever dreamed it would, and now Obama's so energized he's gonna go the executive action route because he's been told effectively that there's no attempt to stop him here. Things are working for Obama, and that just adds to the frustration and the fear and the anger of people who don't want it.

Friday, January 22, 2016

National Review Hoists White Flag, Defiantly Rows To Outcast Island


Don Surber responds to NR and George Will

George Will was all gloom and doom on the Hugh Hewitt radio show this week: "If the election is Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump, this will be the first election since God knows when, there was no real conservative candidate. And I don't both of us who have started our political careers, and I cast my vote for Barry Goldwater."

Meanwhile, the National Review went all in against Trump in its latest edition, drawing praise from Washington insiders. The magazine lined up 22 writers to rail against Trump in a stream of essays that repeat the same arguments they have made the last six months, arguments which have hurt The Donald about as much as Whoopi Goldberg's threat to leave the USA. Chris Christie will help you pack....

All summer and fall and winter, everyone at The Weekly Standard and the National Review screamed to conservatives that Donald Trump is not a conservative.

Guess what? That's fine. This year many conservative voters don't care. Certainly moderates and liberals don't.
...
Many conservative voters no longer care to play by the rules set down by George Will, who derided Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell for drawing the wrath and ridicule of the cast of "Saturday Night Live."

Oh dear. Oh my.

This time, many conservatives just want the wall built. Trump has not always been pro-life and pro-guns, but he is now and that is what counts. He also is unapologetically politically incorrect, to the point of being rude, but being polite has not gotten conservatives a damned thing. Trump is bringing Democrats, independents and unregistered people into the party. Losing just to meet some conservative purity test is a luxury Republicans no longer can afford.

Washington conservatives -- Cable News Conservatives -- overlook the fundamental principle of conservativism, ...

But this year's election is not about conservativism or liberalism. The survival of the nation is. It's not about entitlements or foreign policy or balancing the budget. It is about protecting the borders. We are reduced to that basic an issue because Washington has failed to protect the nation from two simultaneous invasions. Trump's response to Muslim terrorism in San Bernardino led to a chorus of clucked tongues on cable TV, but the people watching at home cheered.

American Lives Matter.

Trump is forming a third party. It is called the Republican Party. His plan is to have his coalition of conservatives, moderates and liberals take over the party. If he wins and Will and the National Review don't like it, too damned bad. They had their chance for 28 years after Reagan departed. They blew it.

This Is What Multi-Cultural Diversity Looks Like

Three North African men attempted to stone two male to female transsexuals to death in Dortmund, according to local Police.

“The two victims were walking together in the early hours of Monday morning when they were approached by three North African men while walking down the Leopoldstrasse. The men attempted sexual advances, but upon realising the victims were transsexuals began attacking them.

“Elisa, 37, and Jasmin, 50, reported to police that the men initially hurled insults in Arabic toward them and spoke of their need to stone (to death) ‘such persons.’ Presseportal has published the police report which says the victims responded with insults which escalated the situation to violence. The trio of men then began to throw rocks at the victims.”


Because nothing secures fundamental human rights of the LGBTQ&c. crowd than importing people who come from countries are areas where LGBTQ&c. individuals are routinely executed...

#OscarsSoWhite: Charlotte Rampling Says Boycott is 'Racist to White People'



I see the hidden hand of Trump here. He's making the things that people were afraid to say, sayable.
Oscar nominee Charlotte Rampling says the uproar over the lack of diversity in this year's nominees is "racist to white people."

"We can never know whether it's truly the case, but maybe the black actors didn't deserve to make it to the final list," Rampling, 69, told the French radio station Europe 1.

Hillary Clinton angers Iowa fans who waited hours for five-minute speech

Has she given up?

Allah Allows Muslim Men to Rape and Humiliate Non-Muslim Women: Woman Islamic Professor




From the New Indian Times


Suad Saleh, a woman Islamic professor claimed that god had allowed Muslim men to rape Non-muslim women to ‘humiliate’ them.

Saleh, works in the reputed Al-Azhar University in Egypt and made the radical statement during an interview with Al-Hayat TV.

“The female prisoners of wars are ‘those whom you own.’ In order to humiliate them, they become the property of the army commander, or of a Muslim, and he can have sex with them just like he has sex with his wives,” Saleh was quoted according to reports. She even said that enslaving and raping Israeli women is ‘acceptable’ and ‘encouraged’.

Well, there you have it. Rape is practically a Muslim obligation.  This is not some illiterate loony- toon from Arab street.  This is Muslim academia.

The Liberal answer: let's import a whole lot more.

Bud Norman recalls that canonization seven long years ago.

Our memory of that first inauguration, which entailed such unforgettably nauseating coverage by the adoring press and such a rapturous reception by the public at large that it seemed more of a coronation or canonization or even a messianic anointment, remains so vivid that it seems just yesterday. We still recall sitting in a car dealership waiting for some annoying automotive repair with nothing to read but a Time Magazine with Obama as Frank Delano Roosevelt on the cover, and pulling into an ice-covered parking lot on some chore while listening to a radio report about some school district someplace that voted to make Obama’s first inauguration a National Holiday when the kids didn’t have to go to school, and all the good-looking celebrities pledging their allegiance to the new leader and the choirs of cute children singing the new leader’s praises,and all our liberal friends swooning, and how even some more or less Republican types were writing they liked the cut of this Obama fellow’s jibe and the crease in in his trousers. Ah, it truly does seem only yesterday.

Yet how far we seem have travelled in time, given what we find in the news and hear from our varied friends these days. By now the big issue was supposed to have been the hasty repeal of that nasty Republican-inspired 22nd Amendment so that Obama will be allowed to serve a third term, and how the upcoming Chicago Olympics will allow the world to celebrate his new era of global peace and prosperity and hip-hop coolness, but we can no longer find any of that among even our craziest friends or the most fervid reaches of the internet. Instead we awake to the current date’s news and rub our eyes and look about and we note that Obama seems but a minor player these days, albeit an annoying one, and that along with brief mention of the dour economic and foreign affairs news most of the talk is about the strange stew of politics that is lately brewing in the red-hot metaphorical pots of both parties. The past seven years of hope and change have both parties in an anti-establishmentarian mood, with wildly divergent ideas about what to do, even if the moderate moderate wings of both parties somehow survive the revolutionary zeal, and that glorious inauguration-coronation-cannonization-annointment and moment of more or less national faith in the new leader seems so very long ago.

Thursday, January 21, 2016

How the German Press lies to its readers


From Politico:
More thoughtful observers see a problem deeper than political bias behind the coverage of Cologne and the broader refugee crisis: a press corps that has shifted from dispassionate observer to political actor. Instead of just reporting and analyzing events, some influential journalists, especially those who work for the public broadcasting networks, consider it their professional duty to serve as a counterweight to the populist rhetoric fueling the country’s right-wing revival, critics say.

“Cologne has helped blow the top off,” said Roland Tichy, a veteran German editor who now runs an eponymous opinion site of conservative commentary.

...

Even before Cologne, many Germans worried the media weren’t telling them everything. In a poll conducted by the respected Allensbach institute in December, 53 percent of respondents said they didn’t believe the media presented an accurate picture of the refugees’ qualifications for employment or other details.

A majority of Germans still trust the media, but more than 40 percent described the reporting on refugees as “one-sided.”

“There’s suspicion that they believe they don’t have to report on such assaults, especially involving migrants and foreigners, for fear of unsettling the public” — Hans-Peter Friedrich.
The most virulent strain of that distrust can be seen on Germany’s streets, during the regular marches by the anti-foreigner Pegida group. Even before the recent wave of refugees began arriving, right-wing marchers revived a slur popular during the Nazi-era – Lügenpresse, or lying press. A number of journalists have even been assaulted at the rallies.

While Germany’s printed press offers a multitude of opinions and views, the public broadcasting sector, once similarly diverse, has veered left in recent years, critics say.

“The public stations have evolved into Social Democratic/Green mainstream broadcasters,” Tichy said. “There’s no denying it.”

Hans-Peter Friedrich, a former interior minister under Angela Merkel, accused the public broadcasters of operating a “cartel of silence.”

“There’s suspicion that they believe they don’t have to report on such assaults, especially involving migrants and foreigners, for fear of unsettling the public,” he said.

Following Friedrich’s critique, a freelance reporter for German public broadcaster WDR told a Dutch radio program that she and her colleagues were obliged to toe the government’s line on the refugee crisis. “We’re a public broadcaster and are therefore expected to approach the problem in a more positive way,” Claudia Zimmermann, the reporter, said.

WDR, the local broadcaster in the Cologne region, vigorously denied Zimmermann’s characterization. The station said it “follows the highest journalistic standards,” including on the refugees.

Zimmermann has since retracted, saying she was nervous during the interview and had spoken “nonsense.”

The cautious approach to news, what one commentator recently called “nanny journalism,” is a vestige of the effort to reprogram Germans after World War II from Nazi sympathizers into peace-loving democrats.

This is how they view their job; they'll tell you what to think and how to think it.
“The public broadcasting contract remains and remains intact: to impart values, promote opinion- and decision-making in society and to ensure the functioning of democracy,” she said.

For the broadcasters’ detractors, Cologne represents the latest example of months of tendentious coverage. One common complaint is news reports on the refugees often picture families and women, even though single young men make up the vast majority of those arriving.

Another is that the broadcasters downplay or conceal events that might rouse the public’s emotions. The alleged gang rape of two teenage girls in southwest Germany on New Year’s Eve by four Syrian refugees was not reported by any of the main news programs, for example, despite the parallels to the attacks in Cologne and other cities.

SWR, the regional public channel, reported on the rapes but was quick to add: “The nationality of the suspects played an ‘insignificant role’ in the crime, investigators and prosecutors said.”

Such reporting has fueled criticism that the broadcasters soft pedal any hint of criminal behavior among refugees. It also earned them a new moniker: “Willkommens Broadcaster” — a play on the so-called “Willkommenskultur,” or culture of welcome that swept Germany in the early days of the refugee crisis.

This kind of censorship and propaganda will not work well in an era when news gets disseminated by the Internet. They are exposed as liars. But the "lying press" is aided by an educational establishment that indoctrinates children so that the press and the schools reinforce each other. It's the primary reason that so many people still believe the propaganda put out by the media.

Glenn Reynolds remarks (sarcastically):  
Good thing we never see anything like that from our own press.