Quotulatiousness

October 21, 2023

Paul Krugman lives in a fantasy world where “The war on inflation is over. We won, at very little cost”

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

Inflation continues to roar, despite calming words from government officials and legacy media pundits, as anyone who buys groceries could tell you. We long ago gave up going out for dinner, and now we’re very much living week-to-week and hoping the money lasts the whole month. Until my wife’s pension comes in late in the month, we’re utterly skint and trying to avoid spending any money at all. At Ace of Spades H.Q., Buck Throckmorton refutes the pro-government propaganda of, among others, Paul Krugman:

Monty used to use this image at Ace of Spades H.Q., and I certainly think it’s appropriate to include it here.

My household’s monthly grocery bill continues to steadily increase, despite the grocery list containing a pretty consistent basket of goods. We are spending more but not bringing home any more groceries. I am blessed that inflation has not forced us to cut back what we buy, but that hardly seems like an “expectation smashing” spending spree.

This article points out that several categories of retailers are not seeing any revenue growth at all, including clothing stores, electronics and appliance retailers, and sporting goods stores. In other words, these dry goods retailers are seeing declining unit sales as consumers are forced to redirect their decreasing purchasing power toward food, housing, and utilities.

    Sales excluding auto and gas increased 0.6%, above estimates for a 0.1% increase compiled by Bloomberg.

That 0.6% monthly increase in spending annualizes to a 7.2% increase in spending over one year. As we’ve discussed often, the government’s published inflation figures are completely fraudulent, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting that as of September the annual inflation rate is just 3.7%, down from 4.0% in May 2023.

John Williams’ website (shadowstats.com) tracks inflation using the same measurements used in the Carter era. The chart below is updated through May 2023, showing the official 4% inflation as reported by the US government (red line) versus inflation if calculated the same way it was calculated in 1980 (blue line.) Actual inflation is more than 12%, which is 3 times the official bogus government figure.

Therefore, the “expectation smashing” consumer spending that the media is reporting is not even keeping up with actual inflation, which means that consumers are bringing home less in the way of retail goods, despite the increased dollar amount they are spending.

This tweet below is not a parody. Nobel Prize winning propagandist economist Paul Krugman actually stated that excluding food, energy and shelter, “The war on inflation is over. We won, at very little cost.”

Thanks, Mr. Krugman, that’s very helpful. While inflation may be out of control on food, energy, and shelter, those are unnecessary discretionary expenditures. If people will just forego extravagances such as feeding their families and putting a roof over their children’s heads, they’ll do just fine in Biden’s economy.

July 15, 2023

One heartbeat away

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

Joe Biden is old and his age is clearly a factor in his declining ability to carry out his duties as President. If he dies or is forced to leave office before his term is up, Kamala Harris would succeed him. If that isn’t a scary thought, you haven’t been paying attention:

When it comes to preferences based on identity of one kind or another, it is difficult to know where to start with this insufferable and corrupt woman who may be the next President of the United States of America. First, she is a woman, or at least identifies as one. Second, she is a woman of colour. Third, she is black. Fourth, she is an Indian American woman. And last, but definitely not least, she is a woman of Afro-Caribbean heritage. In other words, she is highly qualified to achieve success in Biden’s America.

The daughter of two college professors, Kamala Harris is poised to become the first female president of the United States for one reason alone: her demographics. She is a very visible poster child for all that is wrong with the system of preferences and favoritism based on identity and immutable characteristics which has replaced the ideals of meritocracy and colour blindness.

Sadly, Vice President Harris is not alone. Those willing to trade their identity for professional advantage are growing in number by the day. Indeed, such individuals are being encouraged and are found aplenty throughout state and federal government, public schools and academia, corporations, and increasingly in law enforcement and the military.
Recently, Harris attended the Essence Festival of Culture, organised by Essence, a magazine aimed at black women. Asked to explain the role of culture in enhancing and securing the achievements of African-Americans, she treated her audience to one of her delectable word salads that have become the hallmark of her vice presidency.

“Culture is …” she informs us after a slight pause, “it is a reflection of our moment and our time. Right?” she asks, seeking reassurance from her interlocutors. “And present culture is the way we express how we’re feeling about the moment and we should always find times to express how we feel about the moment. That is a reflection of joy. Because,” she adds, in an inexplicable allusion to Psalm 30, “[joy] comes in the morning,” before bursting into that cackling laughter which can engender suicidal thoughts in vulnerable people, including the current author.

She goes on: “We have to find ways to also express the way we feel about the moment in terms of just having language and a connection to how people are experiencing life. And I think about it in that way too.”

My goodness! Are those the words of a woman who could have access to the nuclear codes in just under two years? I am afraid they are. They are the words of someone whose rise to legislative and executive power has been determined entirely by the immutable characteristics of sex and race and the calculus of political advantage.

Only a nation which has abandoned the meritocratic values that made it great could produce such a paragon of ineffable mediocrity as Kamala Harris. Only a nation which has lost its aspirations to greatness will continue to elevate men and women to positions of high rank on the basis not of talent, ingenuity, and character, but demographic attributes that check the right boxes and ignore merit, privileging cosmetics over competence. If this madness continues (and it will take a lot more than the recent SCOTUS ruling to make it go away) such a policy will eventually spell doom for America, maybe sooner than you think.

July 12, 2023

“Folksy” Joe Biden has always been a nasty piece of work

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

One of the most puzzling things about how Joe Biden has been represented in the legacy media is that — despite mountains of evidence that he’s a hot-tempered bully who has always been eager to belittle and demean other people — he still gets fawning coverage of his supposed kindly personality:

Joe Biden likes to present himself as a folksy type, the kind you’d think of as a kindly old uncle or something. He tells stories about Corn Pop and virtually anything else and the press eats it up.

But it’s a veneer, a mask Biden wears so the public will like him.

We’ve seen it slip a time or two, but Axios has a story that hints that what we’ve seen is just the tip of the iceberg.

    In public, President Biden likes to whisper to make a point. In private, he’s prone to yelling.

    Behind closed doors, Biden has such a quick-trigger temper that some aides try to avoid meeting alone with him. Some take a colleague, almost as a shield against a solo blast.

    The president’s admonitions include: “God dammit, how the f**k don’t you know this?!,” “Don’t f**king bullsh*t me!” and “Get the f**k out of here!” — according to current and former Biden aides who have witnessed and been on the receiving end of such outbursts.

    …

    “There’s no question that the Biden temper is for real. It may not be as volcanic as Bill Clinton’s, but it’s definitely there,” said Chris Whipple, author of The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House.

    Whipple’s book quotes former White House press secretary Jen Psaki as saying: “I said to [Biden] multiple times, ‘I’ll know we have a really good, trusting relationship when you yell at me the first time.'”

    Whipple notes: “Psaki wouldn’t have to wait long.”

    Zoom out: Biden’s temper comes in the form of angry interrogations rather than erratic tantrums.

    He’ll grill aides on topics until it’s clear they don’t know the answer to a question — a routine that some see as meticulous and others call “stump the chump” or “stump the dummy”.

    Being yelled at by the president has become an internal initiation ceremony in this White House, aides say — if Biden doesn’t yell at you, it could be a sign he doesn’t respect you.

Go and read the whole thing, because this is troubling, and not just because I dislike Biden.

While Axios goes out of its way to paint this as just an impassioned politician who demands much of his staff, that’s not what I’m seeing here.

Instead, I’m seeing an abusive man who is taking advantage of his powerful position to bully his subordinates.

I won’t pretend I’ve never lost my temper before. Doing so would be a lie. However, my yelling at someone has never been a sign of respect. It’s been a sign that I lost control.

And if Biden is doing it this often, there’s not much chance the man has any control over much of anything.

Of course, this is a report from Axios. Maybe it’s not really a thing. Maybe I’m just reading too much into it because I can’t stand Biden.

July 6, 2023

Ursula von der Leyen touted as NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s successor

Filed under: Europe, Germany, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Spiked, Fraser Myers is amazed at Ursula von der Leyen’s ability to rise above her own failures time after time:

Ursula von der Leyen with German soldiers during a visit to the Field Marshal Rommel Barracks, Augustdorf, 17 July 2014.
Photo by Dirk Vorderstraße via Wikimedia Commons.

The political career of Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, has been defined by bungling and incompetence. She is deeply unpopular with voters, distrusted by colleagues and has regularly been mired in scandals. And yet, somehow, she manages to keep rising up the ranks of international politics.

Now von der Leyen has been tipped for another plum job on the global stage. According to reports in the Telegraph this week, US president Joe Biden is pushing for her to be named as secretary-general of NATO. He thinks she is best placed to replace Jens Stoltenberg when he steps down in 2024.

This ought to set off alarm bells. Whatever one thinks of NATO, there could hardly be a worse candidate to lead it than von der Leyen – especially right now, while war wages in Ukraine and NATO faces one of its most serious challenges in its 73-year existence.

Just look at her time leading the EU. She was parachuted into the role in 2019, unelected, over the heads of European citizens. She was a singularly unimpressive candidate. In fact, some argue that this was why she was selected. “When EU leaders picked von der Leyen … they deliberately eschewed candidates with greater experience, charisma or cunning”, according to a Bloomberg report. The European Council apparently wanted a Commission leader that it could easily push around. In the end, despite being the only candidate, she managed to persuade just nine MEPs to back her in the job.

MEPs were right to be sceptical. Her incompetence became all too clear when she faced her first major challenge as president – the Covid pandemic in 2020 and 2021. While von der Leyen boasted of taking “personal charge” of the EU’s vaccination programme, the rollout was infamously slow, lagging behind the rest of the world. At the time, fellow commissioners, civil servants and other officials were openly venting their distress with her leadership.

May 5, 2023

The kinder, gentler US Naval War College

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

CDR Salamander on a recent symposium at the U.S. Naval War College, showing just how much the American military has adapted itself to the Current Year:

Let’s take a look around the planet with a maritime national security lens, shall we?

  • The largest land war in Europe since WWII is raging on the north shore of the Black Sea.
  • The People’s Republic of China surpassed the United States of America as the world’s largest navy.
  • The Iranians are hijacking oil tankers willy-nilly.
  • The Western economy relies on undersea cables & pipelines we have allowed to go undefended and are now the subject of attention by mal-actors on the world stage.
  • The Navy is experiencing readiness and recruiting problems not seen since the 1970s.

There’s my top-5 off the top of my head this AM, yours may differ.

It sure seems to differ in Newport.

So, in the last week of April there was a 2-day symposium at the U.S. Naval War College, an opportune time to examine the most critically important challenges in 2023 — hopefully from a maritime perspective — wouldn’t you think?

Any conference, especially a 2-day affair with both on and off campus event locations, sure cost a lot of money and even more stacked manhours to plan, attend, participate, and manage.

We sure want to make sure the juice is worth the squeeze, right?

If you’re a regular here, you know where this is going. I warned everyone about this back in 2017. If you’re a new reader not fully up to speed on the broader portfolio we manage here at CDRSalamander, well, take a red pill and a seat.

Our war colleges are not what you think they are.

With each passing year there is less focus on war, and more on college. At the Naval War College, just getting additional time, money, faculty, and leadership focus on the “naval” portion has become a challenge with all the other ancillary agendas trying to keep pace with the cool kids cross-town at Salve Regina University.

Here’s a perfect example.

    The Naval War College (NWC) will host its 9th annual Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Symposium, 26-28 April 2023, in Newport, Rhode Island. This year’s theme is “Women, Peace, and Security in a Fragile World: Perspectives on Warfighting, Crisis Management, and Post-Conflict Transitions“.

Well, let’s go in with an open mind. Perhaps there’s something here. Hope isn’t a plan, but when the Party demands things of you, hope is often all you have.

If you voluntarily attended (I am reliably told that Party cadre informed the proles that attendance was required for staff, at least online), what kind of panel discussions would you be able to listen to? Let’s browse over the agenda.

In totally unrelated news, Brent Ramsey updates the odds on who will be promoted to be the US Navy’s next Chief of Naval Operations:

Admiral Lisa Franchetti, Vice-Chief of Naval Operations, US Navy.

Last September, the Navy promoted and installed a new Vice Chief of Naval Operations. Then Vice Admiral Lisa Franchetti got her 4th star and was appointed to the second-highest position in the Navy. Now after a scant seven months, the betting line going around D.C. is that she will likely be the next CNO based on the identity politics track record of President Biden. When President Biden had an opportunity to appoint to the Supreme Court, before assessing anyone’s qualifications, he announced that a black woman would get that seat, and he followed up on that promise. Would an identity-based selection for the Navy’s top leader be in the best interest of the Navy and the Nation? No, the nation needs and deserves the very best warrior to lead the Navy into our threatened future.

Admiral Franchetti is a journalism graduate of Northwestern University NROTC, a non-STEM degree which itself is unusual, as the Navy strongly favors STEM degrees for officers. She has a Master’s Degree in organizational management from the University of Phoenix, an online university. Her biography does not mention any war college credential. In contrast, her predecessor Admiral William Lescher had multiple commands in combat zones, was a test pilot, had multiple advanced degrees in naval technical fields and his commands won multiple combat zone merit awards. To naval professionals, for someone to have been promoted to the Navy’s highest rank and second highest position based on a NROTC commissioning source with a liberal arts degree, an online masters, no war college or combat zone credentials, would be considered inconceivable. Perhaps her success is based on a particularly spectacular service record?

Admiral Franchetti’s career path reveals sea tours on a tender, oiler, and three destroyers including command of the USS Ross (DDG-71) and command of a destroyer squadron. Her biography does not mention any of her commands received awards while she was in command.

I’m not a betting man, but if I was, I think I’d be putting down a few jellybeans on Admiral Franchetti’s next posting …

May 1, 2023

The Presidential re-match nobody wants

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At Oxford Sour, Christopher Gage contemplates the potential re-match of Joe Biden and Donald Trump in the 2024 election … and shudders:

Perhaps for good reason, any American with their eyes on the White House must be at least 35 years of age when assuming office. Mercifully, this rule prevents anyone with a TikTok account from being taken too seriously.

Apparently, Americans apply this rule to its very extreme.

This week, President Joe Biden announced his bid for re-election, promising in a video announcement to “finish the job”. Quite what job he refers to is anyone’s guess. Though in better shape than Great Britain (a bar so low it’s a carpet) America is not having the best of days, weeks, months, years, decades, or twenty-first centuries.

Biden wasted no time. His sales pitch? He’s not Donald Trump. Evidently, the Biden team assumes Trump will steamroller over Ron DeSantis en route to the Republican party nomination. It’s 2020 again.

I don’t know about you, dear reader, but every time I see “2020” written down, or the mere words “twenty-twenty” seep into my eardrums, my heart flutters, my brain jangles, and a panic attack seizes control of my body with all the charm and consideration of a central African coup d’état.

Americans seem to agree. Seventy percent of Americans don’t think the 80-year-old Biden should run for re-election. Even 51 percent of Democrats nod their heads. Meanwhile, sixty percent, including one-third of Republicans say Trump, 76, should not run for president.

President Biden is not the most spring of chickens. Half of those who think he should sit this one out say Biden’s age is a “major” reason behind their thinking.

To put it mildly, this decade hasn’t quite gone the way of the “Roaring Twenties”. In 2019, I told anyone with ears that this decade would be the decade of decades. Reader, the jury is out. By “out” I don’t mean they’re busy making their considerations. By “out” I mean the jury is riddled with hollow-point bullets.

Perhaps that’s why a 38 percent plurality told pollsters they felt “exhausted” over the very idea of a Biden versus Trump rematch. Twenty-nine percent said they felt “fear” whilst just under a quarter felt both “sadness and fear”.

Which brings me to vice president Kamala Harris. This week, we learned of Biden’s intention to rehabilitate Harris’ image. Harris hasn’t had the most illustrious of tenures. Why? Well, let’s just say VP Harris is suited to other modes of employment. Ideally, Harris would find her feet in jobs which don’t require speaking in coherent, plain sentences and jobs which place a premium upon one’s ability to laugh at the most inappropriate of times. Reader, I’m about as socially attuned as a headbutt. Unlike Harris, I’m not literally one stopped heart away from the presidency.

It cannot be that a country of 330 million people, one which correctly claims to be the greatest country on earth, must limit itself to re-running the worst year in recent history.

And yet, there’s quite some time to go before the serious business of campaigning kicks into gear. If this horrendous decade has taught me anything, it’s that conventional wisdom isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.

April 29, 2023

Justin can’t let Joe steal his thunder on this critical issue!

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

Justin Trudeau’s love of the vastly expensive and utterly useless virtue signal is almost unmatched among western leaders, but as Bruce Gudmundsson relates here, some of Joe Biden’s lower-echelon cronies in the Pentagram Pentagon have put up a virtue signal that will be very hard for Justin to top:

In the United States, the president enjoys the privilege of appointing 4,000 of his supporters to positions within the Executive Branch. When the president is a Democrat, the best connected of these invariably prefer perches in the vast social service bureaucracy, there to reign (but rarely rule) over like-minded civil servants.* Those with the fewest friends, alas, end up in the Pentagon.

I’m honestly surprised that the number of direct appointees is so low … I’d have guessed at least ten times that number. I was vaguely aware that the formal “spoils” system was broken up late in the 19th century, but the US federal government and its various arms-length agencies are several orders of magnitude larger than they were back then.

The appointees who suffer the latter fate know nothing of the work they supposedly supervise. Indeed, having been raised in homes in which there were “no war toys for Christmas”, they cannot distinguish a sailor from an airman, let alone explain the difference between a soldier and a Marine. What is worse, like impoverished Regency belles, obliged to spend the Season wearing last year’s frocks, Defense Department Democrats live in constant fear of losing caste.

With this in mind, it is not surprising that the aforementioned appointees embrace, with great enthusiasm, projects of the sort they can discuss at Georgetown cocktail parties. During the Obama years (2009-2017), many of these bore the brand of “green energy”. (No doubt, the appointees in question made much of the double entendre.) As might be expected, many of these programs went into hibernation during the presidency of Donald Trump (2017-2021), only to spring back to life after the inauguration (in 2021) of Joseph Biden.

In a recent post on his Substack, the indispensable Igor Chudov lays bare the folly of one of these initiatives. Part of the Climate Strategy unveiled by the US Army in 2022, this plan calls for the progressive replacement, over the course of twenty-eight years, of petroleum dependent cars, trucks, and tanks with their battery-powered counterparts.

I mean, on the plus side, it would mean that wars could only take place on sunny days (for solar-powered tanks) or windy days (for wind-powered tanks). The sheer stupidity of the notion would be laughable, except they really seem to be serious about military combat vehicles running on batteries recharged with solar cells, windmills, or unicorn farts. I’d call it peak Clown World, but it’s a safe bet that they can get even crazier without working up a sweat.

Searching for an appropriate graphic to go with this article, I found this gem at Iowa Climate Change from back in 2021:

    * Lest you think, Gentle Reader, that this post serves a partisan political purpose, I will mention that am convinced that the one Republican political appointee with whom I am well-acquainted is a knucklehead of the first order. Indeed, if I ever manage to locate the proper forms, I intend to nominate him for a place of particular honor in the Knucklehead Hall of Fame.

Bad advice for Robert Kennedy Jr.

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

C.J. Hopkins proffers advice to the declared candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination:

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. speaking in Urbana, Illinois on October 14, 2007.
Photo by Daniel Schwen via Wikimedia Commons.

Robert Kennedy, Jr. is running for president. I could not possibly be more excited. So, I’m going to give Bobby some unsolicited advice, which, if he knows what’s good for him, he will not take.

I feel OK about doing this because, even if Bobby, in the wee hours of the night, when the mind is vulnerable to dangerous ideas, were to seriously consider taking my advice, I am sure he has people — i.e., PR people, campaign strategists, pollsters, and so on — that would not hesitate to take him aside and disabuse him of any inclination to do that.

OK, before I give Bobby this terrible advice, I have to do the “full disclosure” thing. I’m a pretty big fan of RFK, Jr. I don’t generally get involved in electoral politics, but, if I were a Democrat, I would definitely vote for him. Also, he was kind enough to blurb my book (which isn’t going to make his PR people happy) and invite me onto his podcast, RFK, Jr. The Defender, to talk about “New Normal” totalitarianism. So, I am fairly biased in favor of Bobby Kennedy. I think he is an admirable, honorable human being. I would love to see him in the Oval Office.

That isn’t going to happen, of course. The global-capitalist ruling classes are never going to let him near the Oval Office. They learned their lesson back in 2016. There are not going to be any more unauthorized presidents. The folks at GloboCap are done playing grab-ass, and they want us to know that they are done playing grab-ass. That’s what the last six years have been about.

As I put it in a column in January, 2021 …

    … This, basically, is what we’ve just experienced. The global capitalist ruling classes have just reminded us who is really in charge, who the US military answers to, and how quickly they can strip away the facade of democracy and the rule of law. They have reminded us of this for the last ten months, by putting us under house arrest, beating and arresting us for not following orders, for not wearing masks, for taking walks without permission, for having the audacity to protest their decrees, for challenging their official propaganda, about the virus, the election results, etc. They are reminding us currently by censoring dissent, and deplatforming anyone they deem a threat to their official narratives and ideology … GloboCap is teaching us a lesson. I don’t know how much clearer they could make it. They just installed a new puppet president, who can’t even simulate mental acuity, in a locked-down, military-guarded ceremony which no one was allowed to attend, except a few members of the ruling classes. They got some epigone of Albert Speer to convert the Mall (where the public normally gathers) into a “field of flags” symbolizing “unity”. They even did the Nazi “Lichtdom” thing. To hammer the point home, they got Lady Gaga to dress up as a Hunger Games character with a “Mockingjay” brooch and sing the National Anthem. They broadcast this spectacle to the entire world.

Does that sound like the behavior of an unaccountable, supranational power apparatus that is prepared to stand by and let Bobby Kennedy, Jr., or Donald Trump, or any other unauthorized person, become the next president of the United States?

So, here’s my bad advice for Bobby.

Fuck them. They’re not going to let you win, anyway. They are going to smear you, slime you, demonize you, distort every other thing you say, and just generally lie about who you are and what you believe in and what you stand for. They are going to paint you as a bull-goose-loony, formerly smack-addled, conspiracy-theorizing, anti-vax fanatic no matter what you do. If you tone down your act and try to “heal the divide” and “end the division,” they are going to have you for lunch, and then sit around picking their teeth with your bones. You know, and I know, and the American people know, that the things you say you want to do as president — which I know you sincerely want to do as president and are crazy enough to actually try to do, i.e., “to end the corrupt merger of state and corporate power that is threatening now to impose a new kind of corporate feudalism in our country” — are things … well, as Michael Corleone once put it, that they would “use all their power to keep from happening”.

So, fuck it, and fuck them. Tell the truth.

Not the ready-for-prime-time truth. Not the toned-down-for-mainstream-consumption truth. The truth. The ugly, unvarnished truth. The scary, crazy-sounding truth. The angry, divisive, uncensored truth.

Yes, there is a “divide”. A great divide. A chasm. A schism. A gulf. An abyss. A gaping, yawning, unbridgeable fissure. A Grand Canyon-sized fault in the foundation of society. A rupture in the very fabric of reality.

H/T to Robert Swanson for the link.

Of course, not everyone is as fond of RFK, Jr. — and for good reason, as Matt Welch points out:

Ever since the 69-year-old conspiratorial activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination last week, a curious new category has appeared among the commentariat—libertarians and/or right-of-center journalists expressing strange new respect for a Hugo Chavez–admiring scion of the Establishment who has serially fantasized about throwing his political opponents in jail.

“I’m quite certain that I’ve never heard a more erudite speech in any political context,” enthused Brownstone Institute President Jeffrey Tucker after attending Kennedy’s announcement rally. “As [a] Democrat he must be bad on all sorts of things,” tweeted Antiwar.com’s Scott Horton, “But not the ones that matter the most.” The Libertarian Party of Colorado tweeted (and then deleted) “Bravo and godspeed hero.” Tablet, a publication not usually known for boosting overheated analogies to murderous 20th-century totalitarians, gave RFK Jr. an 18,000-word valentine with such soft-toss “questions” about his previous controversial statements (like terming the impact from childhood vaccines “a holocaust”) as: “You activated an automated outrage machine that was looking for a gotcha.”

The newly Kennedy-curious are intrigued by the rabble-rouser’s potential to disrupt an otherwise rubber-stamped Democratic primary, sure, but also by him having the right enemies — the media, the military-industrial complex, and, most of all, a political class that backed COVID-19 lockdowns and mandates.

“Just as Donald Trump … retrieved political themes from the deep past of the Republican Party,” National Review‘s Michael Brendan Dougherty mused, “so it must be that a Democrat should come along and try to revive left-leaning skepticism of government and corporate power, to denounce crony capitalism, censorship, and the CIA to boot.”

Recasting RFK Jr. as a foe of censorship and potential tamer of government requires ignoring what he has been and imagining things he’ll never be. Among a lifetime of eyebrow-raising public activities, Bobby Kennedy’s son has repeatedly egged on government to punish those who disagree with his idiosyncratic understandings of science.

[…]

Yet in 2023, Kennedy can plausibly claim (to those with short memories) the mantle of anti-censorship, for having been on the receiving end of Big Social Media’s often government-pressured pandemic speech-policing. He was banned from Instagram in February 2021 “for repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines”, and his anti-vaccine-mandate nonprofit Children’s Health Defense was similarly booted by both Instagram and Facebook in August 2022. He published a book last year called A Letter to Liberals: Censorship and COVID: An Attack on Science and American Ideals. As Tablet‘s David Samuels wrote, in one of that piece’s many eye-popping passages, “At this point, the fact that Robert F. Kennedy is the country’s leading ‘conspiracy theorist’ alone qualifies him to be president.”

So is the enemy of your enemy your friend? Depends on your tolerance for unlikely conspiracy theories, and your comfort level in Kennedy’s proposed punishments for alleged perpetrators. Where Jeffrey Tucker sees an orator with a “command of facts, history, and issues,” motivated both by “truth-telling in an age of nonstop lies” and a genuine urge to “heal” the political divide, I see someone whose presentation of facts — including grave accusations of criminality — have been repeatedly and persuasively found lacking.

April 21, 2023

The bigger the government, the worse it does everything

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Sarah Hoyt wants you to see the illusions that the government and the legacy media have invested so much time and effort to make you believe:

The last century hasn’t actually brought about great “scientific” improvements in governance or the condition of man. It has brought about better production and better commerce, which was enough to stop the periodic famines which plagued our ancestors.

Famines and scarcity subsist only where pernicious central governments stomp on human liberty and individual freedom. And they need to stomp pretty hard. We haven’t managed it. But there are rumors out of China and Venezuela. And of course Russia managed it, just as they did the near-starvation of “never quite enough.”
However, all those advances in material culture didn’t bring about similar advances in centralizing government and “sculpting” the new man.

Humans remain human. And the more centralized, over a larger area, that government is, the more inefficient it is. Even — fortunately — at creating misery. Government that requires certain results gets certain results reported. Even if they have nothing to do with reality.

Sure, the Soviets didn’t have nearly our nuclear arsenal. But the people at the top there MIGHT very well have thought they did, at least after a while. Because the underlings had to report it was done. or else.
All of you repeating the nonsense about boiled frogs, and how their sloooooowwww plan has worked perfectly are just buying into the same juvenile, retarded lie. NONE of their plans ever worked perfectly. Their history is littered with five year plans that worked only in someone’s imagination.

So why would their plans work better in a far away place they never fully understood? With a people who are notoriously averse to obeying?

Of course they didn’t. They don’t. You can convince yourself they have, particularly if you listen to the left and ignore all the times they got stomped on, got smacked, got their cookies taken away.

Look, their plans at changing THE PEOPLE and the people’s beliefs worked so well that despite their total control of federal democracy, two presidents that broke the script, almost 40 years apart, were enough to wreck all their illusions and control. Reagan and Trump, amid a train of uniparty parrots were enough to destroy the left’s certainties and “control”.

This is because their control was always — and still is — largely not real. It’s an illusion created by the mass-industrial communications complex. Here as in Russia, they don’t control ANYTHING but the narrative. The narrative is how they keep telling you to give it all up, because, look, their plan worked perfectly, and now your children are theirs and mwahahahaha.

In true fact, they’ve broken their teeth on America. They’ve managed — with propaganda — to take over the sectors that are less in contact with reality: academia, the arts, the rarefied heights of corporations. (Those aren’t really business. They’re to business what MBAs are to running a lemonade stand. Having worked for corporations, the large ones have more in common with massive, inefficient states than with commerce of any kind.)

The rest of us? We have not surrendered our guns or our minds. Yes, the propaganda machine keeps pushing those who have, but that’s the only thing the centralized state was ever good at: propaganda.

But if their plans were working perfectly, “Let’s go Brandon” would not have gone viral. That one proved not only that the majority of people aren’t with the left, but also that the majority of people see the media manipulation. More importantly, do you remember what the “Let’s go Brandon” was all about? Right. There were spontaneous flash mobs forming everywhere screaming “F*ck Joe Biden.” I’d known about them for months. They were forming everywhere, including in New York City. That one was just one that was caught on camera. (Because of course, the media never showed those.)

March 22, 2023

California – Embrace the Unicorn! No, the other Unicorn!

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

Chris Bray on California’s hoped-for path to transition away from fossil fuels:

California has the progressive vision to go all-electric, with laws and regulations that phase out gas water heaters, furnaces, and cars in the near future — while transitioning away from the production of electricity through the use of nuclear and natural gas technologies. Putting the teensy-weensy engineering questions aside and embracing the unicorn, this deep blue vision of the future means the state needs to build wind and solar power facilities in massive quantities, and now. California currently has about half the power it needs to do what it says it plans to do in just ten years.

But President Joe Biden just announced a move that aggressively advances the progressive vision of preserving wilderness and preventing development, naming the Avi Kwa Ame National Monument in the Mojave Desert — preventing solar and wind development on 506,814 acres of lightly populated and federally owned desert land. The coalition of tribal and community groups that has worked to get the national monument designated make the anti-solar point explicit on their website:

Where progressive coastal urbanites see the progressive project of decarbonization, people in wilderness-adjacent areas see industrial blight, and express that view in the language of progressive conservationism. To a degree not explored by the false binary of media-defined American politics, in which good people on the left face bad people on the right, California’s future is an increasingly sharp conflict between left and left — and note what kind of permits energy companies have to get to build big wind and solar plants in the desert:

When progressive California builds its progressive energy infrastructure, it’s going to incidentally take a shit-ton of bighorns and tortoises and birds. I assume I don’t have to explain the euphemism.

March 19, 2023

Ron DeSantis as an American Neville Chamberlain

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

Andrew Sullivan points out the inanity of comparing Florida Governor and potential presidential candidate to former British PM Neville Chamberlain over DeSantis not including the idea of increasing support to Ukraine as “a new Munich”:

Governor Ron DeSantis speaking with attendees at the 2021 Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA at the Tampa Convention Center in Tampa, Florida on 18 July, 2021.
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.

For a written statement on foreign policy from a potential presidential candidate, it was, I suppose, a big deal. The salient sentence from Governor Ron DeSantis:

    While the U.S. has many vital national interests — securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness with our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural and military power of the Chinese Communist Party — becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them.

It’s open to some interpretation. DeSantis says the Ukraine war is not in the “vital national interests” of the US, but is it maybe still in our general interests? Not clear. And he commits to no further entanglement, which could mean sticking with where we are now, but no more. Sure: no F-16s. But that’s also Biden’s position.

“Territorial dispute?” That set a lot of people off. But of course it’s undeniably, at some level, a border dispute. The entire post-Soviet settlement was a redrawing of national borders — and marked an extraordinarily rapid advance of Western arms and allies to the edge of Russia itself. In any kind of perspective, the current war has come at the end of that now-disputed settlement, and is indeed a debate over where Russia ends and Ukraine — which literally means “borderland” — begins. DeSantis didn’t blame Ukraine for its self-defense. He didn’t defend Putin. He merely proffered a different view of vital US national interests in the medium-term.

The gall!

The Blob declared another “Munich!” — an ancient neocon ritual — and declared the DeSantis candidacy all-but-over. Chris Christie called DeSantis “Neville Chamberlain“; Chuck Schumer asked, “I have to wonder what [DeSantis] would’ve thought if he was around in the 1930s”; Jenn Rubin called DeSantis “pro-Putin“; and the WSJ warned of a return to “isolationism in the 1930s”. This morning, the WaPo dusted down and wheeled out their perennial “appeasement!” editorial. And we got a French-Brooks double-whammy direct from 1983. Churchill envy never dies.

And I’m sorry. But I don’t get it. It is surely perfectly fine for a country to have two political parties that differ on foreign policy. In fact, it’s a critical advantage that democracies have over more rigid regimes: it helps us correct mistakes in time (and sometimes not), change personnel, and adjust to an always changing reality.

And in the 21st century, after the collapse of the imperial ideologies of the 20th, the role and reach of the United States is legitimately open to debate. It makes sense that one party would be more interventionist and one would be less so; it makes even more sense for the conservative party to be the one more skeptical of wars, small and large, and the unintended consequences they invariably entail.

That’s what’s happening — partly in reaction to the catastrophic, and bipartisan, hyper-interventionism of the first two decades of this century, and partly because of the rise of China. And it’s a good, normalizing thing. It will keep pressure on Biden not to escalate any further; and force us to think through the ugly compromises that will almost certainly confront us in the future. DeSantis’ position is pretty much where Obama was on Ukraine — and Obama was not some far-right fanatic. Money quote:

    The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do. … We have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for. And at the end of the day, there’s always going to be some ambiguity.

Replace “core” with “vital” and it’s DeSantis’ outrageous position. Yes, Putin miscalculated badly and invaded Ukraine, which means a new situation, and defense of Ukraine. But the core reality of America’s and Russia’s interests is unchanged. And Putin is not in command of a huge war economy and occupying the Sudetenland. He’s stuck in Eastern Ukraine, for Pete’s sake, and can barely move. China is maneuvering to counter and exploit our escalation. We need flexibility. What we absolutely do not need is some kind of shrill, bipartisan consensus on yet another war — and the usual McCarthyite smears of critics.

November 19, 2022

“But actually, vat ve haf to confront is ze deep, systemic, and structural restructuring of our world”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Because, as Chris Bray points out, there’s no point in restructuring the non-structural structures or something…

The G20 leaders flew to Bali this week to cosplay social repulsiveness and to hear from Klaus Schwab, who has no government position or formal place in the G20, making the G20 gathering a kind of executive committee meeting for something that rhymes with “Morld Meconomic Morum”.

The terrifyingly vacuous Bond villain said that ve must fundamentally restructure ze vorld, flattering the geniuses like Justin Trudeau and Joe Biden who will now use their personal wisdom and strength to do the restructuring.

(That’s an excerpt — the whole thing is here, if you want to punish your mind.)

There’s so much to love in this babbling, starting with the fact that the wealthiest and most powerful nations in the world can’t manage to deliver decent audio. But listen to what the man says:

1.) Looking out into an audience of the world’s major national leaders, he says that we face a global “multi-crisis”, made up of “economic, political, social, and ecological, and institutional crisis”.

Accepting the premise for the sake of argument, who caused all that crisis? Hello, leaders of the ruined world, I honor your wisdom and clarity, and turn to you to fix your broken countries that you’ve been leading.

2.) “But actually, vat ve haf to confront is ze deep, systemic, and structural restructuring of our world. Und zis vill take some time! Und ze vorld vill look differently, after ve haf gone through zis transition process.”

This is all of Klaus Schwab in three sentences: We must do structural restructuring, see, not non-structural restructuring. And after we have completely, deeply, systematically restructured literally everything in the entire world, the world will look — wait for this, because this is insight from the most renowned of all the experts, a deep mind who you may struggle to follow — different. Yes, changing things a lot makes them not be the same. Und zis is vy Klaus Schwab receives ze big bucks! You and I could not think at this level! Stand at attention!

3.) “Politically, the driving forces for this political transformation, of course, is the transition into a multipolar world, which has a tendency to make our world much more fragmented.”

Political fragmentation, then — the transition into multipolarity — causes fragmentation. The fragmentation into multipolarity makes the world fragmented, thereby, you see, fragmenting it. Careful, Klaus, you’ll accidentally write a whole Thomas Friedman column with your mouth.

The man is like a novelty gift with a pop-up clown inside it: You press the button, and it makes nonsensical streams of word-sounds. Fortunately, however, Klaus was speaking to an audience of Joe Biden, so I’m sure it sounded deep in the room.

November 6, 2022

How bad do the midterm elections look for the Democrats? Even Andrew Sullivan is voting Republican this time

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

From the free-to-cheapskates excerpt of Andrew Sullivan’s Weekly Dish:

“Polling Place Vote Here” by Scott Beale is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 .

The day I received my absentee ballot from the DC government, there was a story in the Washington Post about the DC Council’s imminent vote:

    The bill would eliminate most mandatory minimum sentences, allow for jury trials in almost all misdemeanor cases and reduce the maximum penalties for offenses such as burglaries, carjackings and robberies.

Over the past few years, violent crime in DC has been rising fast. Last year the murder rate was the highest since 2003, and this year the death toll is slightly higher so far. Carjackings are up 36 percent and robberies are up 57 percent. Almost all this hideous violence is inflicted on African-Americans, including many children. It permeates outward, creating a deeper public sense of insecurity and out-of-control crime. Tent cities are now all over the city. People suffering from mental illness patrol the streets. You feel the decline in law and order, the slow fraying of the city, every day.

And yet the Council has decided that now is the time to make it harder to prosecute and easier to defend violent criminals, partly in the name of “equity”. Yes, it’s part of a longstanding “modernization” of the criminal code, but they had to include these provisions and now? And this isn’t new. Just before the crime explosion took off, the DC mayor had “Black Lives Matter” painted on the street in letters so large you could read them from a plane, and allowed “Defund the Police” to remain next to it. That summer, woke mobs were allowed to harass anyone in their vicinity, yelling slogans that vilified all police — and the MSM took the side of the bullies. After the summer of 2020, the DC police force dropped to its lowest level in two decades.

So guess what? I’m going to vote for the Republican and the most conservative Independent I can find next Tuesday. And I can’t be the only Biden and Clinton and Obama voter who’s feeling something like this, after the past two years.

There was no choice in 2020, given Trump. I understand that. If he runs again, we’ll have no choice one more time. And, more than most, I am aware of the profound threat to democratic legitimacy that the election-denying GOP core now represents. But that’s precisely why we need to send the Dems a message this week, before it really is too late.

By “we”, I mean anyone not committed to the hard-left agenda Biden has relentlessly pursued since taking office. In my view, he and his media mouthpieces have tragically enabled the far right over the past two years far more than they’ve hurt them. I hoped in 2020 that after a clear but modest win, with simultaneous gains for the GOP in the House and a fluke tie in the Senate, Biden would grasp a chance to capture the sane middle, isolating the far right. After the horror of January 6, the opportunity beckoned ever more directly.

And yet Biden instantly threw it away. In return for centrists’ and moderates’ support, Biden effectively told us to get lost. He championed the entire far-left agenda: the biggest expansion in government since LBJ; a massive stimulus that, in a period of supply constraints, fueled durable inflation; a second welfare stimulus was also planned — which would have made inflation even worse; record rates of mass migration, and no end in sight; a policy of almost no legal restrictions on abortion (with public funding as well!); the replacement of biological sex with postmodern “genders”; the imposition of critical race theory in high schools and critical queer theory in kindergarten; an attack on welfare reform; “equity” hiring across the federal government; plans to regulate media “disinformation”; fast-track sex-changes for minors; next-to-no due process in college sex-harassment proceedings; and on and on it went. Even the policy most popular with the center — the infrastructure bill — was instantly conditioned on an attempt to massively expand the welfare state. What on earth in this agenda was there for anyone in the center?

October 31, 2022

“If The Regime doesn’t have their canned narrative ready to go, it’s real news”

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

At Founding Questions, Severian offers some preliminary thoughts on the new field of “Brandonology”, specifically how to determine whether what’s in the legacy media is news or propaganda:

I’m throwing this out there now, because it’s shaping up to be a long-term project and I think we can all contribute to it as needed. But as Brandonology / FNGology is such a new discipline, it’ll help to lay in the foundations.

The first step in analyzing the “news” is determining whether or not it is, in fact, news. “News” here being defined as “an unplanned event — or catastrophic fuckup of a planned event — to which The Regime is forced to react in more or less real time”. Lot of that going around recently, such that we’re spoiled for choice. Pick pretty much any of the shenanigans in Ukraine: The botched assassination of Alexander Dugin; the Nordstream sabotage; the Ukrainian dirty bomb false flag. Those clearly fall into the “catastrophic fuckup of a planned event” category …

… or do they? Because as Z Man pointed out in great detail on his last podcast, all of that stuff seemed to catch The Regime flatfooted. Yeah, somebody planned those things, but that somebody wasn’t Brandon, or anyone close to Brandon, or anyone in position to prop up Brandon. Which is the surest tell for actual news (as defined above) right there: If The Regime doesn’t have their canned narrative ready to go, it’s real news.

The necessity of the canned narrative also allows the keen Brandonologist to anticipate the “news”. For instance, it has obviously started to dawn on The Regime that they’re going to get walloped in the midterms, so they’re trying out narratives as we speak. Z Man identified one I hadn’t seen, something about Brandon “inadvertently” saying something about the debt ceiling that’s supposed to give the Republicans all kinds of ammunition against him. I’m not so sure. I’ll have to look into it, but the fact that it squarely blames Brandon — who The Regime still insists is the very picture of mental acuity and vigor — pings my radar a bit. I think the stuff Her Nibs is rolling out is much likelier the Narrative being developed — she’s outright stating that “the Republicans” are going to engage in massive voter fraud.

Which to normal people is chutzpah beyond belief, but that’s how The Regime rolls. The 2016 election was, of course, full of Russian Hacking™. The 2020 election, by contrast, was the cleanest canvass in human history, and you’re an insurrectionist, a domestic extremist, and of course a racist if you dare to suggest the mere possibility of an American election being tampered with. But wouldn’t you know it, those dastardly Russians are going to rally here in 2022, because you can’t keep a Russian Hacker™ down. They might even hire a few prostitutes to pee on a bed for good measure; that’s how evil they are.

Further complicating the task, though, is that “botched op” thing. We’ve got Brandon et al. on record threatening Nordstream, so you know that was an American caper gone bad … but gone real, real bad, because if The Regime had been fully in the know, there’d have been a whole bunch of Tier Four Stoyak about lousy maintenance on the pipelines for months in advance.

October 30, 2022

Andrew Sullivan on the rise of Rishi Sunak (or was it “Rashid Sanook”?)

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

In the free-to-cheapskates excerpt from his Weekly Dish newsletter, Andrew Sullivan contemplates the differences between how Barack Obama was seen as a historical figure to the US media and yet that same media can’t manage to see how Prime Minister Sunak is “the British Obama”:

Rishi Sunak shortly after becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2020.

In his inimitable way, Joe Biden this week celebrated the rather remarkable fact the the new Conservative prime minister in Britain is the grandson of Indian immigrants:

    As recently as today, we’ve gotten news that Rashid Sanook is now the prime minister. As my brother would say, “Go figure.” And the Conservative party! … Pretty astounding. A groundbreaking milestone. And it matters! It matters!

He got the name wrong, but he’s Joe Biden. He gets names wrong. But unlike many on the left, especially the woke left, and perhaps because he is old enough to remember the after-effects of colonialism, Biden could bring himself to see what a staggering moment it is. It really is. It has gotten a bit obscured in the incredible mess of recent Tory politics. But staring us in the face is a historic shift.

It’s an Obama moment, after a fashion.

[…]

No, Sunak didn’t run an inspirational campaign like Obama. He’s not an orator even close in skill, he hasn’t won an election in his own right, and he didn’t come out of the blue. But he’s even younger than Obama when he took office — just 42, five years younger than Obama when he became president, and, unlike Obama, a slip of a thing and only 5’7″. And, for understandable reasons, Sunak seems much less worried about the cultural and political aspects of breaking the race barrier than Obama was.

Sunak is, for example, an openly practicing and proud Hindu. He lit Diwali lights around 11 Downing Street and took his oath on the Bhagavad Gita. That’s not someone running from his heritage. And he is also a Brexiteer from conviction, and, unlike Truss, a fiscal conservative who’s a realist about what can and can’t be done in a period of extraordinary economic stress for Brits and massive post-Covid debt.

All of this suggests something too many liberals have forgotten. These countries of alleged “white supremacy” have less racism than almost anywhere else in the world. It is hard to imagine a non-white president of France or Germany or Italy — let alone China or Russia or anywhere in Central Europe. It is hard to think of another empire that was deliberately unwound by its architects, and who then, within two generations, installed the grandson of former colonial subjects to its most powerful office. And Obama, of course, was twice elected with more heartland white support than Hillary Clinton.

Sunak has, moreover, been selected by the Tory party — that bastion of alleged bigotry that has already had three female prime ministers in its history, and now also a non-white man, James Cleverly, as foreign secretary, and a woman of Indian ancestry, Suella Braverman, as home secretary. Three of the top four ministers of state in Sunak’s cabinet are non-white. The new chairman of the Conservative party is Nadhim Zahawi. I’m telling you this because the US MSM — who are usually obsessed with racial representation in every single mundane situation — suddenly aren’t that interested, when some of their woke priors are rattled.

This is true of the broader American left. A faction obsessed with racial “equity” cannot take a moment to observe a historical moment of extraordinary proportions. Some, like Trevor Noah, have even completely invented a racist “backlash” against Sunak that simply hasn’t happened, apart from one call on one radio call-in show. (I was on BBC Radio this morning talking to an interviewer who was simply baffled by the projection.)

Noah has the excuse of being a comedian. But the New York Times‘ coverage has been almost as ludicrously slanted as its usual coverage of post-Brexit Britain, and it quickly ran two op-eds by British leftists trashing Sunak. Every story that refers to his ethnicity always slams his class “privilege” — i.e. that his parents were middle-class children of immigrants. This morning, the paper ran another hit-piece on Sunak’s wealth. The only benefit of his Indian ancestry appears to be that he will help the Indian diaspora in Britain itself. The incredible arc of imperial history finally coming full circle? Barely a mention.

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