Way back in the olden thymes, conservatives during the Reagan years had a real fear that the Rockefeller Republicans would not only undermine the conservative agenda, but find a way to corrupt the Reagan administration. It was an unwarranted fear. Those Progressive Republicans were a dying force in politics. Reagan was a man of his age so his conservatism does not always make sense to the modern ear, but he stuck to his guns for the most part. He was a politician, so he compromised when he had to.
Then George H. W. Bush was ready to take the reigns of the movement and the party, despite being a Rockefeller Republican. Bush was a Progressive by any measure, but he supposedly got religion in the 1980’s, and to be fair, a lot of people went through that transformation. There were even old Jewish guys, who used to support communists, that were suddenly changing teams to join the new emerging majority. Bush spent a lot of time convincing the voters he was just like Reagan and they had nothing to fear.
The ’88 election was a landslide for Bush and a lot of sensible people thought that he would be the finishing touches to the new conservative majority. He would smooth out the rough patches and put a shine on other aspects to it. His famous pledge to never raise taxes was the cornerstone of his pitch. Wiser heads, the paleocons, saw what was coming, but most did not. That’s why when Bush broke his promise, a year into his presidency, his voters were crushed. Bush was a liar.
History is written by the victors and that means the Left, so we’re always told that Bush lost in ’92 because Clinton was sent by the void where God once existed, to bring joy and bliss to the blessed and smite the wicked. The truth is, Bush lost because the core of his voters rightly saw him as a liar and a fink. Many people I know, including myself, voted third party as a protest. Yeah, it meant a degenerate would win the election, but at least we knew what we were getting. Liars like Bush always find new ways to screw you.
[…]
This brings us back to Bush. He spent the remainder of his presidency trying to rebuild his standing with conservatives. He even scored what was pitched as a stunning victory in the First Gulf War. But, you only get one shot to piss away your integrity and Bush did not miss that opportunity. He entered the general election as a weak incumbent and Clinton used his broken pledge in commercials to remind everyone that Bush was an untrustworthy liar. Imagine that. Clinton beat Bush on the integrity issue.
“The Z Man”, “Donald Herbert Walker Trump”, The Z Blog, 2017-04-07.
April 1, 2019
QotD: George H.W. Bush
March 31, 2019
CSI: Robert Mueller won’t be renewed for a third season
In the latest Andrew Heaton newsletter, a brief ode to CSI: Robert Mueller, which didn’t get enough of a ratings boost from this season to get renewed for next year:
The biggest news of the week is, of course, that the Supreme Court ruled a guy in Alaska can continue moose hunting on his hovercraft. (Thank God — if we can’t blast away at megafauna from a floating disk, why did we even bother fighting the British to begin with?!) After that spectacular work of jurisprudence from the highest court in the land, the second biggest news item is probably the Mueller report.
[…]
Back to the Mueller report. I didn’t really follow CSI: Robert Mueller over these last two seasons. For one thing, it seemed very complicated. One character got indicted over rugs. Another character got indicted over porn hush money. These always struck me as convoluted plot devices.
Secondly, I suspected that the Mueller report would wind up being more smoke than fire, so I decided not to do daily play-by-play’s, and instead focused my prodigious analysis on things like hover board moose hunting. (For example, if you shoot a moose while levitating, does the activity fall under FAA jurisdiction, or is it still under the purview of the Federal Moose Department, like everywhere else?)
My friends who breathlessly and repeatedly stated that Trump was hours away from a Watergate-level scandal seemed very confident the walls were closing in, and very eager to accumulate any and all ammunition to fire at the White House. For them, the Mueller investigation did not exist to determine whether or not the president colluded with Russia. Its purpose was to broadly accumulate sufficient material to impeach Trump with, on any charge capable of pulling it off. But that was never the remit of Mr. Mueller — nobody ever said, “Hey throw some spaghetti at impeachment charges until something sticks.”
To be clear, I am not a fan of Mr. Trump, nor would I hesitate to support his impeachment if presented with good evidence that he broke the law or unlawfully shot a moose from an unregistered hovercraft outside of designated moose-killing zones (MKZ). But if we’re going to go down the impeachment route, there needs to be a smoking gun and a clearly outlined felony charge. Removing the head of state from office through political guile and vague technicalities wouldn’t alleviate the staggering divisiveness Mr. Trump has bequeathed us, it would bake it in for two generations.
Despicable man-child though he may be, overall it’s a win for our country that its leader turned out to not collaborate with our arch-rivals to undermine democracy. That’s a net positive. I’ve become more Burkean during the Trump years, and worry about the institutional damage his relentless tantrums are inflicting on constitutional restraints, the veracity of courts, and the role of the media. I don’t want to add the validity of American elections to his collateral damage.
You can subscribe to the Heaton newsletter here or you can visit his website here.
March 30, 2019
QotD: Organic spices are a racket
There’s a whole other piece to be written about organic spices, but the short version is that demanding organic spices is never going to be good for the farmers growing them. The U.S. standards for organic products amounts to ridiculously expensive and oftentimes unnecessary practices for small farmers who just don’t have the resources to do it. There are plenty of ways to arrive at ethical treatment of animals and land that are not part of our complicated organic laws. And that’s not to mention the people who demand organic products but will also freak out at the sight of a bug or won’t buy something that’s even a little bit misshapen or with a tiny brown spot on it. You can have pesticides or you can have pests.
Caitlin PenzeyMoog, “Salt grinders are bullshit, and other lessons from growing up in the spice trade”, The A.V. Club, 2017-04-06.
March 26, 2019
Matt Taibbi on “a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media”
A revised and updated chapter from his Hate, Inc.:
Note to readers: in light of news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation is complete, I’m releasing this chapter of Hate Inc. early, with a few new details added up top.
[…]
Over the weekend, the Times tried to soften the emotional blow for the millions of Americans trained in these years to place hopes for the overturn of the Trump presidency in Mueller. As with most press coverage, there was little pretense that the Mueller probe was supposed to be a neutral fact-finding mission, as apposed to religious allegory, with Mueller cast as the hero sent to slay the monster.
The Special Prosecutor literally became a religious figure during the last few years, with votive candles sold in his image and Saturday Night Live cast members singing “All I Want for Christmas is You” to him featuring the rhymey line: “Mueller please come through, because the only option is a coup.”
The Times story today tried to preserve Santa Mueller’s reputation, noting Trump’s Attorney General William Barr’s reaction was an “endorsement” of the fineness of Mueller’s work:
In an apparent endorsement of an investigation that Mr. Trump has relentlessly attacked as a “witch hunt,” Mr. Barr said Justice Department officials never had to intervene to keep Mr. Mueller from taking an inappropriate or unwarranted step.
Mueller, in other words, never stepped out of the bounds of his job description. But could the same be said for the news media?
For those anxious to keep the dream alive, the Times published its usual graphic of Trump-Russia “contacts,” inviting readers to keep making connections. But in a separate piece by Peter Baker, the paper noted the Mueller news had dire consequences for the press:
It will be a reckoning for President Trump, to be sure, but also for Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, for Congress, for Democrats, for Republicans, for the news media and, yes, for the system as a whole…
This is a damning page one admission by the Times. Despite the connect-the-dots graphic in its other story, and despite the astonishing, emotion-laden editorial the paper also ran suggesting “We don’t need to read the Mueller report” because we know Trump is guilty, Baker at least began the work of preparing Times readers for a hard question: “Have journalists connected too many dots that do not really add up?”
The paper was signaling it understood there would now be questions about whether or not news outlets like itself made galactic errors by betting heavily on a new, politicized approach, trying to be true to “history’s judgment” on top of the hard-enough job of just being true. Worse, in a brutal irony everyone should have seen coming, the press has now handed Trump the mother of campaign issues heading into 2020.
Nothing Trump is accused of from now on by the press will be believed by huge chunks of the population, a group that (perhaps thanks to this story) is now larger than his original base. As Baker notes, a full 50.3% of respondents in a poll conducted this month said they agree with Trump the Mueller probe is a “witch hunt.”
March 25, 2019
The Boston Massacre – Snow and Gunpowder – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published on 23 Mar 2019Boston, 1770. A frigid winter night. A British sentry strikes a local citizen. Civilians begins to gather. Reinforcements arrive to back up the young sentry. Insults and snowballs escalate. Then out of the darkness comes a shout: “FIRE!”
The Boston Massacre didn’t come out of nowhere — resentment between the early US colonies and the British army had been brewing for some time over the Stamp Act. A propaganda war ensued between the loyalists and the radicals. John Adams would get his revolutionary start as he worked to resolve this injustice…
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March 24, 2019
So this is why we all know about “Florida Man” and “Florida Woman”
Now that it’s been explained … nope, I still think Florida is the home of the crazy.
March 22, 2019
The rise of the neo-barbarians and modern tribalism
Sarah Hoyt isn’t a fan of civilization being replaced by the prehistoric landscape of tribe versus tribe, forever:
Tribalism seems to be the default setting of the human race.
Maybe it’s because we’re built on the frame of Great (or at least pretty good) Apes. Band seems to be the default unit of a Great Ape.
The people who do those cute and vapid studies on how your toddler is racist — by which they mean he prefers people who look like mommy and daddy, or their surrogates in his life — don’t seem to understand that. They don’t seem to understand that for most of human existence, (prehistory is much longer than history) for a toddler to stray outside his tribe meant at best he was raised as a slave, and at worst he became lunch.
I wonder if it’s this uncritical, sort of history-and-genetics free view of the world that causes the left to think that tribes are awesome.
Might just be their usual — and honestly, isn’t it tiresome by now? — view of the world which thinks everything “natural” by which they mean pre-civilized is better. This leads to nostalgie de la boue and therefore elevates primitive/non civilized cultures over western culture.
Or perhaps it is simply the fact that Marxism was “rescued” by Gramsci. Marxism was bad enough in its inability to see individuals, and ascribing everyone to economic tribes.
[…]
Anyway, back to our point: one of the great advances of humanity, possibly as momentous as the discovery of fire, was the overcoming of tribalism.
Forging tribe-like bonds based on “we share this land” and in fact, being able to tell ourselves stories about how “everyone in this land is one people” gave rise to the city state, the country, and eventually the “community of civilized men.”
Of course, yes, Christianity had a lot to do with this, but there was some of that going on already in the Roman Empire, where Persian and Greek could both declare (after the appropriate formalities and acculturation) “Civis Romanum sum.”
As bad as the super-states of the twentieth century got — because there’s nothing as a large nation with a good dose of crazy-making philosophical theory — it allowed commerce and industry, which are miles and miles better at creating and keeping wealth than hunting-gathering.
The problem is that the left, led by Gramsci, has re-invented tribalism. And no, I don’t just mean tribalism of place of origin or color — though they include that — I mean tribalism of EVERYTHING.
Being unable to see individuals (has anyone done studies of their brain? Maybe there’s something missing) they instead keep sorting people into increasingly smaller groups based on things that have bloody nothing to do with what the person IS capable of, or thinks or believes: Color, who people sleep with, what people have between their legs, who people like to sleep with, what people call their deity, etc. etc. ad very definitely nauseum.
[…]
The other side effect of this is that everyone who isn’t a member of the tribe is potentially the enemy. This is what leads to the internecine fights within the left, and why if they should win (forbid) we’ll be stuck in civil war after civil war forever. Adapting the Arab proverb: Me and my Marxist classmates against the world; Me and my black Marxist classmates against our white Marxist classmates; Me and my black Marxist female classmates against our black Marxist male classmates; Me and my black lesbian Marxist female classmates against our black straight Marxist female classmates… and so on ad infinitum, until the tribe of one is at war with everyone else, and worse stuck in a pit of anger and resentment because he/she isn’t given all the recognition and compensation he/she should have from the rest of the world at large.
At the same time anyone outside it is viewed as less than human. This is why they think they can tell everyone to shut up because “white privilege” or “male privilege” or whatever, and they honestly think there will be no resistance and no backlash.
Understanding the Great Depression
Marginal Revolution University
Published on 23 May 2017In this video, we examine the causes behind the Great Depression with the help of the aggregate demand-aggregate supply model.
In 1929, the stock market crashed and an air of pessimism swept across America — making bank depositors nervous. What would you do if you thought your money might not be safe with the bank? You’d probably want it back in your own hands. What happened next? A run on the banks.
Along with the Stock Market Crash of 1929, it’s one of the iconic moments of the early days of Great Depression. However, the Great Depression was an incredibly complex downturn in which the economy experienced a series of aggregate demand shocks. By the end of this video, you’ll walk away with a better understanding of the many factors behind the Great Depression and how to apply the AD-AS model to a real-world scenario.
March 21, 2019
Remy: “Affluenflammation”
ReasonTV
Published on 20 Mar 2019When quality of life improved, doctors discover a new affliction.
Reason is the planet’s leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won’t get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.
A parody of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Californication” written by Remy.
Music tracks, mastering, and background vocals by Ben Karlstrom
Video produced by Austin Bragg.LYRICS
There’s a non-foregone phenomenon in any prosperous nation
When primal fears all disappear the brain then gets a sensation
The medical name we gave this pain is affluenflammationOl’ Bill Tub is chugging a jug of cold bovine lactation
When his eyes then realize that carton side’s got information
And since his life contains no strife it’s affluenflammationFor the better part of history diseases all were raging
Measles, mumps up on your junk like they were Kevin Spacey
Then came Jonas Salk
Makes you wonder what all for…Cuz we’ve got affluenflammation
We’ve got affluenflammationOl’ Chip Black is cracking the back of twelve live-steamed crustaceans
For the perks and glee of living free he starts to lose appreciation
And if you probe his frontal lobe — yep — affluenflammationThrough the course of human history each day we faced starvation
Rats and pox and chamber pots, streets filled with defecation
Free markets changed the norm
Makes you wonder what all for…Cuz we’ve got affluenflammation
We’ve got affluenflammation
We’ve got affluenflammation
We’ve got affluenflammation
Tank Chats #44 T14 and A33 (Excelsior) Assault Tanks | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published on 13 Jan 2018The Second World War American T14 and British A33 (Excelsior) Assault tanks were made to the same specification as one another, neither ever went in to service and only one of each were made. They both survive at The Tank Museum.
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March 20, 2019
A Supreme Court case that created huge sales tax problems for online firms
Eric Boehm explains why an obscure US Supreme Court ruling is making life extremely complicated for thousands and thousands of online businesses:
… Until last year, that meant Heitman was responsible for collecting and paying sales taxes to exactly one place: the Wisconsin Department of Revenue. But thanks to an under-the-radar ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court in June, he’s now receiving letters, phone calls, and emails from revenue officials across the country, each wanting a piece of his business.
The source of Heitman’s frustrations is Wayfair v. South Dakota, which allowed states to collect sales taxes from online businesses located beyond their borders. Many states view the Wayfair ruling as a potential tax revenue windfall in which the taxes are paid by non-residents who can’t vote against them. That’s why businesses like Heitman’s are now facing the chilling prospect of owing taxes in dozens, and possibly hundreds, of different jurisdictions — while being hounded by out-of-state tax collectors.
Since the Supreme Court issued its ruling in June, Heitman has been scrambling to become compliant with tax commissions and revenue departments from coast to coast. He’s spent thousands of dollars on new software to help navigate the complexities of state sales tax law, but that’s only been so much help. “It almost seems like I have another full time job dumped on me with this sales tax thing,” he says. “It’s burning me out.”
As the 2019 tax season begins, states are ramping up efforts to squeeze extra revenue out of remote retailers like Heitman, putting an expensive new burden on businesses that have found broad customer bases online. The burden is particularly large in the five U.S. states that charge no sales tax, where entrepreneurs could now be charged with paying a tax they have never had to pay before, to a government over which they have no voice. And while Congress could clean up the Supreme Court’s mess, it’s far from certain that it will.
Warren Meyer points out that it’s not just the individual states who are taking advantage of this windfall opportunity to collect taxes from non-residents:
Like most writers, Mr. Boehm actually understates the problem. Because the potential exists not to have 50 new taxing authorities for every sales, but thousands. I have to deal with this every day. I wrote a while back:
Take Arizona, which seems from my experience to be roughly average. The sales tax rate table is 18 pages long in a small font. There are 29 separate rate categories which each have different rates in each of Arizona’s 15 counties. My business is in 6 counties and we have 3 rate categories that apply, or 4 if you consider items with no tax as another rate category. This is 24 different state/county sales tax rates we charge. But that is the easy part. Because then there are, in addition to county taxes, 92 different towns and cities that have their own rate tables with up to 29 different rate categories that add to the base state/county rate. Other states such as Washington (rule of thumb — if the state has no income tax then it has a LABYRINTHIAN sales and business tax systems) have additional overlay taxes such as for transit and stadium districts.
When my company opens a new location, we have to spend hours on the Internet and with maps trying to figure out what sales taxes to collect, and even with good due diligence we sometimes get it wrong and find in an audit we are actually just inside or outside some line where the rate changes (we once had a location 30 miles outside of Seattle on a long dirt road where we found we had to collect the Seattle Rapid Transit tax). Thatcher, AZ is a town of like 4000 people but has its own special sales tax rates — do you know where the town line is? Well neither do they, because last time I checked they did not have any sort of online lookup system to tell one automatically if the address is inside or outside the town and its sales tax district…
But even after registering in all 50 states, you are STILL not done, because many states don’t have a fully unified sales tax collection system. In Arizona, for example, the larger cities require their own registration and monthly reporting.
Meyer is operating a company that has physical assets and employees in each of the states and lesser jurisdictions to which taxes are due. Internet businesses generally only have physical assets in a single state, yet an expansive reading of the Wayfair ruling (the type of reading most jurisdictions will prefer) makes them liable for taxes almost everywhere.
QotD: The Progressive view of American history
The debunking mind is typical of the American Left, which feels itself compelled to rewrite every episode in history in such a way as to put black hats on the heads of any and all American heroes: Jefferson? Slave-owning rapist. Lincoln? Not really all that enlightened on race. Saving the world from the Nazis? Sure, but what about the internment of the Japanese? Etc. […]
In high school, I had a very left-wing American history teacher who was a teachers’-union activist (a very lonely position in Lubbock, Texas, where the existence of such unions was hardly acknowledged) for whom the entirety of the great American story was slavery, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, the Great Depression, and the momentary heroism of the New Deal (we were not far from New Deal, Texas), with the great arc of American history concluding on the steps of Central High School in Little Rock on September 23, 1957. It was, for reasons that remain mysterious to me, very important to her — plainly urgent to her — that the American story be one of disappointment, betrayal, and falling short of our founding ideals.
Kevin D. Williamson, “Bitter Laughter: Humor and the politics of hate”, National Review, 2016-08-11.
March 16, 2019
QotD: Teaching critical thinking
Traditionally, the “critical” part of the term “critical thinking” has referred not to the act of criticizing, or finding fault, but rather to the ability to be objective. “Critical,” in this context, means “open-minded,” seeking out, evaluating and weighing all the available evidence. It means being “analytical,” breaking an issue down into its component parts and examining each in relation to the whole.
Above all, it means “dispassionate,” recognizing when and how emotions influence judgment and having the mental discipline to distinguish between subjective feelings and objective reason — then prioritizing the latter over the former.
I wrote about all this in a recent post on The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Vitae website, mostly as background for a larger point I was trying to make. I assumed that virtually all the readers would agree with this definition of critical thinking—the definition I was taught as a student in the 1980s and which I continue to use with my own students.
To my surprise, that turned out not to be the case. Several readers took me to task for being “cold” and “emotionless,” suggesting that my understanding of critical thinking, which I had always taken to be almost universal, was mistaken.
I found that puzzling, until one helpful reader clued me in: “I share your view of what critical thinking should mean,” he wrote. “But a quite different operative definition has a strong hold in academia. In this view, the key characteristic of critical thinking is opposition to the existing ‘system,’ encompassing political, economic, and social orders, deemed to privilege some and penalize others. In essence, critical thinking is equated with political, economic, and social critique.”
Suddenly, it occurred to me that the disconnect between the way most people (including employers) define critical thinking and the way many of today’s academics define it can be traced back to the post-structuralist critical theories that invaded our English departments about the time I was leaving grad school, in the late 1980s. I’m referring to deconstruction and its poorer cousin, reader response criticism.
Both theories hold that texts have no inherent meaning; rather, meaning, to the extent it exists at all, is entirely subjective, based on the experiences and mindset of the reader.
Rob Jenkins, “Why College Graduates Still Can’t Think”, The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, 2017-03-23.
March 14, 2019
How Hollywood Helped Hitler | Between 2 Wars | 1926 Part 2 of 2
TimeGhost History
Published on 13 Mar 2019The rise of the media superstar and the rise of Naziism had a lot to do with each other. The early death of one of the first media superstars, Rudolph Valentino in 1926 shows us exactly how and why.
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Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Directed by: Astrid Deinhard
Written by: Spartacus Olsson
Produced by: Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Edited by: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Spartacus OlssonColorized Pictures by Olga Shirnina
https://klimbim2014.wordpress.comVideo Archive by Screenocean/Reuters http://www.screenocean.com
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
TimeGhost History
2 hours ago
After a week of radio silence, we’re back with another Between Two Wars episodes. We’re continuing in the spirit of where we left off, and enter the crazy and hyped-up world of superstars. We hope that you like our video! If you do, please consider supporting us on Patreon or via our website timeghost.tv. We are still only just managing to cover the minimum that is required to produce this content. Every dollar truly counts. -> https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
