Quotulatiousness

October 27, 2018

The Progressive case for Americans to pay higher drug prices than the rest of the world

Filed under: Business, Economics, Health, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tim Worstall carefully explains — in full compliance with Progressive philosophy and pointing out that Trump is wrong (which is extra bonus Progressive points) — why Americans should continue to pay more for drugs that are cheaper in other countries:

Working out which drugs work and how is expensive. There’s then another expensive in actually proving this well enough to gain a licence. All in costs are in the $1 to $2 billion range dependent upon who you want to listen to. Unfortunately, once you’ve done all that and paid all that anyone could just come along and copy your drug. Which means you don’t make your $2 billion back – that in turn meaning that no one does spend $2 billion, we don’t get new drugs and we all die in ditches.

This is a classic public goods problem and the solution we use – not the only one, not even the only viable one – is patents. You get about 10 years, the time between approval and patent expiry, to make your $2 billion back. Then anyone can copy it and we all get cheap copy drugs.

For this system to work it is not necessary that everyone pay these high patent protected prices. There’s no point in trying to charge some farm worker in S Africa $10,000 a year for HIV retrovirals anyway, they don’t have the cash and demanding it will gain nothing except their death. We just need some group to pay the high prices so that drug development still happens. Everyone else can get drugs at some margin above their manufacturing, not development, costs.

So, who is it who should be carrying this cost of producing this public good? Good progressive principles tell us that it should be the rich folk. Imagine that we used some other system of drug development, maybe taxpayers cough up for it all. It’ll still be the rich doing the paying, right? So, patents, where the rich pay full freight for drugs, the poor don’t, this meets our equity criterion.

And who are the rich in this global sense, for we’re talking about a global public good here? That would be the citizens of the richest large nation, the largest rich nation, the United States of America. So, yes, Americans should be paying high prices for drugs and the rest of us shouldn’t.

Do note that we’ve used impeccable redistributionist logic to reach this conclusion. It’s only if you think the rich shouldn’t be paying to benefit the poor that this is a bad idea. Which might be why Trump is agin it but it still puzzles as to why the progressives would be.

October 26, 2018

An old-fashioned Fisking

Filed under: Humour, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The always-entertaining David Thompson harks back to the early days of blogging by indulging in what used to be called “a Fisking“:

In the pages of the New York Times, a philosophy professor named George Yancy is gushing his little heart out:

    It is hard to admit we are sexist. I, for instance, would like to think that I possess genuine feminist bona fides, but who am I kidding? I am a failed and broken feminist.

Upon which revelation, I suppose we could all just stop and go home. But no, let’s press on.

    More pointedly, I am sexist. There are times when I fear for the loss of my own entitlement as a male. Toxic masculinity takes many forms. All forms continue to hurt and to violate women.

The word toxic, by the way, is deployed no fewer than nine times, excluding various synonyms, as if it were an incantation. Now brace yourselves for some full-on testosterone-jacked beastliness.

    For example, before I got married, I insisted that my wife take my last name… While this was not sexual assault, my insistence was a violation of her independence.

To reiterate. Asking a fiancée if she’ll change her surname upon marriage, as is still the custom, perhaps to avoid confusing people as to whether you’re actually married or not, and possibly to avoid imposing on any children lengthy hyphenated surnames… this is not sexual assault. I’m glad we’ve cleared that up.

[…]

Or, as our educator puts it, tearfully, his face reddened with shame,

    When I was about 15 years old, I said to a friend of mine, “Why must you always look at a girl’s butt?” He promptly responded: “Are you gay or something? What else should I look at, a guy’s butt?” He was already wearing the mask. He had already learned the lessons of patriarchal masculinity.

Yes, adolescent butt-watching. Oh calamitous woe. And which, apparently, girls never indulge in. Presumably, we should only be sexually attracted to personalities, and never the fleshy packaging.

    There was no wiggle room for me to be both antisexist and antimisogynistic and yet a heterosexual young boy. You see, other males had rewarded his gaze by joining in the objectifying practice: “Look at that butt!” It was a collective act of devaluation.

Or possibly the reverse.

    The acts of soul murder had already begun.

I’ll just leave that one there, I think.

October 23, 2018

California (secessionist) dreaming

Filed under: Economics, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith suggests that the kindest thing to do to California is to allow it to secede from the Union:

… some Californians bleat that they want to secede from a United States that threatens to make them straighten up and fly right. Superficially, that might be a workable idea: on paper, California has one of the largest, most powerful economies in the world — bigger than that of many independent nations. It has a long, wonderful coastline and a couple of really good natural ports. Its agricultural sector is second to none. There is oil and gas within easy reach. It has no real military defenses, but I’m sure they’d be more than willing to leech off America’s defenses, our Navy, our Air Force, and our nuclear umbrella, like the deadbeat pajama boys they resemble, living in their mothers’ basements.

But wait. On the reasonable assumption that the California secession movement is limited to people in the counties that voted for Hillary Clinton, and that people in the counties who voted for Donald Trump do not want to secede, I consulted a California county-by-county election map for 2016. Blue counties dominate all but a tiny spot on the northern coast, which is too bad; most of the interior — the most productive part of the state — is bright red.

So here’s my brilliant idea. Instead of fighting another bloody, stupid, senseless War of Secession like the one we had in 1865, let’s grandly and magnanimously permit the state of California to secede — even insist on it — one county at a time. Those counties that vote to secede may do so and create the People’s Republic of Californistan, or whatever.

In exchange for defending this dog’s breakfast of a polity, we will keep all of our military bases and installations, somewhat like Guantanamo Bay Naval Air Station in Cuba. I believe the legal term is “adverse possession”. Those counties that do not vote to secede — we wouldn’t want them to become like the captive peoples and nations of Europe during the Cold War — may remain in the Union, joining the adjacent state (mostly Nevada) or forming their own. To paraphrase the Borg, “We will add their productiveness to our own.”

However the trouble (for California, anyway), if you look at the map, is that county-by-county secession leaves the people’s Republic without visible means of support, a vagrant state, as it were, full of pencil-neck politicos and other worthless parasites, guilty of loitering on our Left Coast. They’re already bankrupt, after decades of Leninist-Stalinist policies. Now they will never recover with their productive counties gone — and we get their avocados!

Let them eat software.

October 22, 2018

The Last German E-Boat

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Mark Felton Productions
Published on 24 Sep 2018

S-130 is the very last of Germany’s sleek S-Boats, the fast motor torpedo boats known to the British as E-boats, that ravaged shipping around the shores of the UK. Now being restored in Britain, this boat is a rare wartime survivor with an equally fascinating postwar story to match.

Photo credits: British Power Boat Trust, Exercise Tiger Memorial, Barry Lewis, Jim Linwood.

October 15, 2018

QotD: Bureaucracies

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Humour, Quotations, USA — Nicholas @ 01:00

… bureaucracies have lives and characters of their own, irrespective of the sort of men they employ. The public schools are made up mostly of good people, but they don’t work very well. One imagines that most IRS agents are scrupulous and dedicated. (The DMV people just hate us.)

Kevin D. Williamson, “Agents and Agencies: Donald Trump should push for intelligence reform”, National Review, 2017-01-06.

October 12, 2018

The Hindenburg Line Breaks – The Lost Battalion Returns I THE GREAT WAR Week 220

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 11 Oct 2018

The Hindenburg Line or Siegfriedstellung is the backbone of the German defenses on the Western Front and this week 100 years ago, the Allies break through during the Battle of St. Quentin Canal. At the same time, the political fallout within Germany continues and the Allied Army of the Orient continues its offensive on the Macedonian Front.

October 11, 2018

It’s all in the spin – “Another ‘human trafficking operation’ that wasn’t”

Filed under: Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Elizabeth Nolan Brown on how to pitch a “human trafficking” police sweep that doesn’t actually uncover any human trafficking at all:

One hundred and twenty-three missing Michigan minors were found during a one-day “sex trafficking operation,” the New York Post reported yesterday. Similar statements showed up in other news headlines across national and international news. What the associated articles fail to mention for multiple paragraphs is that only three of the minors are even suspected of having been involved in prostitution.

Officials said the operation — a joint effort of the U.S. Marshals Service, the FBI, Michigan State Police, and multiple local Michigan police departments — identified three “possible sex-trafficking cases” among the 123 minors that were located on September 26, according to a press release.

What’s more, all but four of the “missing children” were not actually missing. In the remaining cases, minors were listed in a police database as missing but had since been found or returned home on their own. “Many were (homeschooled),” Lt. Michael Shaw told The Detroit News. “Some were runaways as well.”

The one-day “rescue” sweep was a long-time in the making, with police beforehand “investigating their whereabouts by visiting last known addresses, friend’s homes and schools.”

Nothing in the U.S. Marshals report on the operation makes mention of any arrested kidnappers, “traffickers,” or other adults involved in endangering or exploiting any of the missing minors that were identified. Which makes sense — very few missing children are actually abducted. And when runaway teens do engage in sex for money, the vast majority do not have “pimps.”

QotD: The radical, right wing US Supreme Court

Filed under: Law, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

We don’t have a “radical right-wing Supreme Court,” despite lots of mewing on the left to the contrary. Here are some things that would be at the top of the list for a radical right-wing Court: (1) ban abortion nationwide as a violation of the right to life protected by the due process clause; (2) rule that publicly-provided (but not funded) education is unconstitutional because it inherently involves viewpoint discrimination by the government, or at least require vouchers for those who object to the public school curriculum; (3) overrule an 1898 precedent and completely abolish birthright citizenship; (4) Use the First Amendment as a sword to require “fairness” in the left-dominated media. Not only is the Supreme Court not about to do any of things, I don’t think any of these things would even get one vote on the current Court. Moreover, merely bringing the scope of Congress’s constitutional back to where it was, say, in 1935, which was already much broader than the original meaning of the Commerce power, probably wouldn’t get more than one or two votes. What you are looking at right now is a conservative Court that will only affect society on the margins, not a “radical right-wing” Court.

David Bernstein, “WE DON’T HAVE A ‘RADICAL RIGHT-WING SUPREME COURT'”, Instapundit, 2018-10-09.

October 8, 2018

Enzo Ferrari – Tank Sounds – French-American Animosity I OUT OF THE TRENCHES

Filed under: History, Italy, Military, Technology, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 6 Oct 2018

Chair of Wisdom Time!

Debunking state education rankings

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest issue of Reason, Stan Liebowitz and Matthew L. Kelly explain why you should ignore those “authoritative” rankings published by U.S. News and World Report and others:

You probably think you know which states have the best and worst education systems in the country. If you regularly dip into rankings such as those published by U.S. News and World Report, you likely believe schools in the Northeast and Upper Midwest are thriving while schools in the Deep South lag. It’s an understandable conclusion to draw from those ubiquitous “Best Schools!” lists. It’s also wrong.

The general consensus on education, retold every few news cycles, is that fiscally conservative states are populated by cheapskates. In those necks of the woods, people are too ignorant to vote in favor of helping their illiterate and innumerate children. Intelligent people understand that high taxes and generous pensions for public school teachers are the recipe for an efficient and smoothly functioning education system. If skinflint voters would just lighten up, the story goes, they too could become erudite and sophisticated.

Paul Krugman rehashes this narrative regularly in his New York Times column, frequently bemoaning the country’s purportedly miserly education budgets. Increasingly, he perceives libertarian barbarians at the gates of state governments, brandishing axes for dreaded spending cuts. In April, he wrote that “we’re left with a nation in which teachers, the people we count on to prepare our children for the future, are starting to feel like members of the working poor.… One way to think about what’s currently happening in a number of states is that the anti-Obama backlash, combined with the growing tribalism of American politics, delivered a number of state governments into the hands of extreme right-wing ideologues. These ideologues really believed that they could usher in a low-tax, small-government, libertarian utopia.”

In Krugman’s view, which reflects the education establishment’s view as well, those attempting to keep the size of government in check are a danger to your child. To support this claim, education wonks and activists point to state rankings in U.S. News, Education Week, or WalletHub — outlets that grade states according to a few key measures, such as graduation rates, education spending, and test scores. When education is discussed in the news, these rankings are often cited to illustrate the havoc that restrained budget growth and right-to-work laws can wreak.

Indeed, such rankings do seem to show that the highest-quality state educational systems tend to be in big-spending states in the Northeast or Upper Midwest. These places apparently honor and respect teachers, while Southern states inexplicably abhor them. But the cheapskates in cheap states get their just deserts: Sophisticated northern jurisdictions grow ever smarter, while stingy conservative backwaters sink into ever-lower depths of ignorance. The solution is obvious: Pay up or your kids will suffer.

There’s just one problem with this narrative: Traditional rankings are riddled with methodological flaws.

October 5, 2018

QotD: Thomas Jefferson, Epicurean

Filed under: History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

As you say of yourself, I too am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us. Epictetus indeed, has given us what was good of the stoics; all beyond, of their dogmas, being hypocrisy and grimace. Their great crime was in their calumnies of Epicurus and misrepresentations of his doctrines; in which we lament to see the candid character of Cicero engaging as an accomplice. Diffuse, vapid, rhetorical, but enchanting. His prototype Plato, eloquent as himself, dealing out mysticisms incomprehensible to the human mind, has been deified by certain sects usurping the name of Christians; because, in his foggy conceptions, they found a basis of impenetrable darkness whereon to rear fabrications as delirious, of their own invention. These they fathered blasphemously on him who they claimed as their founder, but who would disclaim them with the indignation which their caricatures of his religion so justly excite. Of Socrates we have nothing genuine but in the Memorabilia of Xenophon; for Plato makes him one of his Collocutors merely to cover his own whimsies under the mantle of his name; a liberty of which we are told Socrates himself complained. Seneca is indeed a fine moralist, disguising his work at times with some Stoicisms, and affecting too much of antithesis and point, yet giving us on the whole a great deal of sound and practical morality. But the greatest of all the reformers of the depraved religion of his own country, was Jesus of Nazareth. Abstracting what is really his from the rubbish in which it is buried, easily distinguished by its lustre from the dross of his biographers, and as separable from that as the diamond from the dunghill, we have the outlines of a system of the most sublime morality which has ever fallen from the lips of man; outlines which it is lamentable he did not live to fill up. Epictetus and Epicurus give laws for governing ourselves, Jesus a supplement of the duties and charities we owe to others. The establishment of the innocent and genuine character of this benevolent moralist, and the rescuing it form the imputation of imposture, which has resulted from artificial systems, **** invented by ultra-Christian sects, and unauthorized by a single word ever uttered by him, is a most desirable object, and one to which Priestley has successfully devoted his labors and learning. It would in time, it is to be hoped, effect a quiet euthanasia of the heresies of bigotry and fanaticism which have so long triumphed over human reason, and so generally and deeply afflicted mankind; but this work is to be begun by winnowing the grain form the chaff of the historians of his life. I have sometimes thought of translating Epictetus (for he has never been tolerably translated into English) by adding the genuine doctrines of Epicurus from the Syntagma of Gassendi, and an abstract from the Evangelists of whatever has the stamp of the eloquence and fine imagination of Jesus. The last I attempted too hastily some twelve or fifteen years ago. It was the work of two or three nights only, at Washington, after getting through the evening task of reading the letters and papers of the day. But with one foot in the grave, these are now idle projects for me. My business is to beguile the wearisomeness of declining life, as I endeavor to do, by the delights of classical reading and of mathematical truths, and by the consolations of a sound philosophy, equally indifferent to hope and fear.

I take the liberty of observing that you are not a true disciple of our master Epicurus, in indulging the indolence to which you say you are yielding. One of his canons, you know, was that “that indulgence which prevents a greater pleasure, or produces a greater pain, is to be avoided.” Your love of repose will lead, in its progress, to a suspension of healthy exercise, a relaxation of mind, an indifference to everything around you, and finally to a debility of body, and hebetude of mind, the farthest of all things from the happiness which the well-regulated indulgences of Epicurus ensure; fortitude, you know is one of his four cardinal virtues. That teaches us to meet and surmount difficulties; not to fly from them, like cowards; and to fly, too, in vain, for they will meet and arrest us at every turn of our road. Weigh this matter well; brace yourself up; take a seat with Correa, and come and see the finest portion of your country, which, if you have not forgotten, you still do not know, because it is no longer the same as when you knew it. It will add much to the happiness of my recovery to be able to receive Correa and yourself, and prove the estimation in which I hold you both. Come, too, sand see your incipient University, which has advanced with great activity this year. By the end of the next, we shall have elegant accommodations for seven professors, and the year following the professors themselves. No secondary character will be received among them. Either the ablest which America or Europe can furnish, or none at all. They will give us the selected society of a great city separated from the dissipations and levities of its ephemeral insects.

I am glad the bust of Condorcet has been saved and so well placed. His genius should be before us; while the lamentable, but singular act of ingratitude which tarnished his latter days, may be thrown behind us.

I will place under this a syllabus of the doctrines of Epicurus, somewhat in the lapidary style, which I wrote some twenty years ago; a like one of the philosophy of Jesus of nearly the same age, is too long to be copied. Vale, et tibi persuade carissimum te esse mihi.

**** e. g. The immaculate conception of Jesus, his deification, the creation of the world by him, his miraculous powers, his resurrection and visible ascension, his corporeal presence in the Eucharist, the Trinity; original sin, atonement, regeneration, election, orders of Hierarchy, &c.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Short, 1819-10-31.

Syllabus of the doctrines of Epicurus

Physical

The Universe eternal.

    Its parts, great and small, interchangeable

Matter and Void alone.

    Motion inherent in matter, which is weighty & declining

    eternal circulation of the elements of bodies.

Gods, an order of beings next superior to man.

    enjoying in their sphere their own felicities,

    but not meddling with the concerns of the scale of beings below them

Moral

Happiness the aim of life

    Virtue the foundation of happiness

    Utility the test of virtue.

Pleasure active and in-dolent.

    In-dolence is the absence of pain, the true felicity

    Active, consists in agreeable motion

    it is not happiness, but the means to produce it.

    thus the absence of hunger is an article of felicity; eating the means to produce it.

The summum bonum is to be not pained in body, nor troubled in mind

    i.e. In-dolence of body, tranquility of mind.

    to procure tranquility of mind we must avoid desire & fear, the two

    principal diseases of the mind.

Man is a free agent.

Virtue consists in:     1. Prudence     2. Temperance     3. Fortitude     4. Justice
to which are opposed:     1. Folly     2. Desire     3. Fear     4. Deceit

October 3, 2018

USMCA (aka son-of-NAFTA) – what’s the damage after all?

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Economics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The most common sentiment from Canadian comments appears to be “meh, it could have been much worse”. That doesn’t mean it’s particularly good, either:

All that cross-border yelling, a solid year of bluster and petulance, dire rhetoric about “stabs in the back” and “special places in hell,” fake deadlines and all-night negotiations, and we end up with pretty much the agreement we started with? All that was required to fix NAFTA, that destroyer of American jobs and pox on its prosperity, the deal Donald Trump memorably complained was “the worst agreement in history,” was to change its name — from North American Free Trade Agreement to US-Mexico-Canada Agreement? Seriously?

Not quite. The result is certainly a far heave from some of the more apocalyptic scenarios we had been entertaining ourselves with. But neither is it the largely unaltered “NAFTA 2.0” of much initial comment. There are substantive changes in there, most of them bad, and not all of them imposed by an overbearing U.S. on an unwilling Canada.

Still, it’s not quite the conflagration we’d been banking on, is it? Trump is the bully in middle school who threatens to take your lunch money, only to settle for a half a slice of your pizza. Or, in this case, 3.6 per cent of it.

That’s the share of the Canadian dairy market to which the U.S. will now have tariff-free access, a slight advance on the 3.25 per cent market share the U.S. had negotiated under the Trans Pacific Partnership — before Trump withdrew from it. (Oh, and “milk price classes 6 and 7” are eliminated, for fans of that dispute. It involves skim milk solids.) There are also some minor increases in tariff-free imports in the other supply-managed sectors: eggs, chicken, cheese and so on. Everything else will face the same triple-digit tariffs, as before.

That’s unfortunate. Supply management is a blight on the Canadian political and economic landscape we could well do without. The NAFTA re-negotiations were an ideal opportunity to bargain it away, as it should have been in the original NAFTA. That it remains more or less intact — even the dairy lobby could manage only a half-hearted jeremiad of imminent lacto-doom in response — is one of the chief disappointments in this agreement.

Still, what did you expect? There was never any chance of these negotiations resulting in a deepening and broadening of NAFTA — not with protectionists on both sides of the table. The only question was whether the status quo protectionists on this side — who wished to preserve all of NAFTA’s existing exemptions — could hold out against the expansionist protectionists on the other, who wished to cut NAFTA into little mercantilist pieces. As it turns out the answer is: surprisingly well.

A quick summary of the winners and losers in this agreement:

Is this a free trade agreement?

No. Unlike NAFTA, this latest agreement makes no pretense to be about free trade (or even freer trade). It’s a protectionist agreement imposed by the U.S. on the other two countries.

Who benefits from the agreement?

The primary beneficiaries of the agreement are labor unions, U.S. dairy farmers, U.S. drug manufacturers, and companies that provide automation for manufacturers (e.g., robot makers).

The agreement will require at least 30 percent of cars (rising to 40 percent by 2023) to be made by workers earning $16 an hour. This will force more cars to be produced in the U.S. and Canada since the typical manufacturing wage in Mexico is only about $5 per hour. The agreement also requires Mexico to make it easier for workers to form unions, which will make them less competitive against more productive unionized workers in the U.S. and Canada.

U.S. dairy farmers will also gain greater access to the Canadian market. Because of new restrictions on how much dairy Canada can export, there is the potential for U.S. dairy to gain a greater market share in foreign countries.

U.S. drug companies will also be able to sell pharmaceuticals in Canada for 10 years (rather than eight) before facing generic competition.

Because the agreement makes human labor in the three countries somewhat more costly, companies that create robots and other automation will likely be the long-term beneficiaries.

Who are the biggest losers in this agreement?

As with almost all protectionist trade agreements, consumers are the ones who will be hurt the most.

As the Washington Post notes, economists and auto experts think USMCA is going to cause car prices in the U.S. to “rise and the selection to go down, especially on small cars that used to be produced in Mexico but may not be able to be brought across the border duty-free anymore.”

Because the restrictions on Canadian steel and aluminum also remain in place, businesses that use those materials in manufacturing will pay inflated prices, and their products will be less competitive on the global market.

QotD: The state of American journalism

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Back in the day, reporters (they didn’t insist on being called “journalists” back then) were told that the way to frame their stories was to answer a series of questions which boiled down to:

  • who
  • what
  • when
  • where
  • why
  • how

The emphasis was on actual facts and objectivity. But now, with “advocacy journalism” having completely taken over the J-schools and pretty much every newsroom, the emphasis is on changing the world rather than reporting a story fairly and accurately. Especially now, when no less a paper than the New York Times announced before the election that Trump is so bad that objectivity should be thrown out. So the who, what, when, where, why, and how questions were changed into:

  • who (can we quote to damage Trump)
  • what (can we publish to damage Trump)
  • when (should we run it maximize damage to Trump)
  • where (do we get more material to damage Trump)
  • why (Donald Trump’s presidency is an existential threat to America and to the world)
  • how (can we write our stories so as to cause maximum damage to Trump)

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the state of journalism, 2018.

OregonMuse, “The Morning Rant”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2018-09-12.

September 30, 2018

Contempt for the voters (even their own voters)

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Steve Kates has been watching the confirmation hearings and associated circus acts in the US senate:

Let me start by explaining the basic framework. This is all politics. No one among the Democrat senators believes a word of Ford’s testimony. Not one of them would say a word were Kavanaugh a Democrat nominee. It is all show for the morons who vote for them. The disdain the Democrats have for their own voters is gigantic. They see them in the same way as I do: as low information, dumb beyond belief fools without a shred of common sense. They can see perfectly well that all of this has no other purpose but to make it harder for a government from the other party to govern. They want to pack the court with judges who will vote to do those things that cannot be done via a democratic legislative process. They understand perfectly well that they are trivialising accusations of rape. They comprehend without a shred of doubt that they are making the United States less governable. They can see without any hesitation that Ford is a stooge that has been put forward because the saps in their electorates across America eat all this up and hunger for more. They therefore do it because they enjoy the power this provides to them. They do it because they believe it will attract more voters than it will repel. They are making it as plain as day that they think their own constituency is ignorant and repulsive. But this is their line of work and if they are to keep their jobs, this is what they must do.

The Republicans think exactly the same – that Democrat voters are fools. And they know just as well as the Democrats that there is a proportion of the voting population that will make their vote depend on this and this alone. They understand rape is a terrible event in anyone’s life and would not nominate anyone if there were any genuine evidence that any of the accusations made against Kavanaugh are true. Aside from those members of their Senate caucus who prevented a majority vote from succeeding, they would have nevertheless taken the risk of the bad press that will follow when and if they confirm Kavanaugh’s nomination. They have a razor-thin majority in the Senate that can only survive a near-unanimous vote from their side of the aisle. They are counting on there being enough common sense and sound judgment left with the voting public to be able to succeed and retain the House and Senate majorities in November. They see the Democrat tactics for what they are.

As for the notion of sexual assault, to really believe that is the issue makes you so stupid that it is painful to see what nitwits politicians have to deal with routinely.

September 28, 2018

The Meuse-Argonne Offensive – Bulgarian Collapse I THE GREAT WAR Week 218

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Germany, History, Middle East, Military, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

The Great War
Published on 27 Sep 2018

This week, the biggest American military operation in history kicks off with 1.2 million American soldiers trying to take the Krimhilde Stellung. At the same time the Army of the Orient advances into Bulgaria and the Ottoman 7th and 8th armies collapse in Palestine.

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