You will be surprised what is happening in California. Can you believe they are producing so much solar power that electricity price is negative. Yep, you read it right.

Why would I be surprised by something that demonstrates exactly what I said in my comment?

To shrink my comment to bullets:
— solar is inherently distributed so the best use is distributed
— solar can save a dollar or two of fossil fuel costs in a traditional fossil powered grid when the sun is out and shining
— but since the sun does not shine continuously–and energy demand often peaks in the evening–solar is really limited without a better storage mechanism.

Your negative electrical price is not a signal that solar is kicking ass and taking names, rather it is a signal that
A) yeah solar works but
B) solar is a failure as a grid energy source right now because we can not store the juice it cranks out

A negative price is not an indication that an investment is a winner. Rather it indicates that California/Californians have put in place a whole lot of solar capacity that will never pay off–that investors or consumers or taxpayers will take a bath on.

Good idea. Military spending is obviously the biggest target for cuts in the federal budget, although we should not forget that another way to balance the budget is to increase taxes.

The military is actually a massive jobs program that also provides education, healthcare, and foreign vacations for the poor. I would recommend a 50% cut for the army. With the Navy and Air Force we still have enough power to obliterate every Nation on Earth.

The remaining 50% of the army should be relocated to the Mexican and Canadian borders and the leftover bases used as camps to “concentrate” illegal immigrants prior to deportation, and also as euthanasia camps for Medicare recipients who refused to leave the country.

Another area that needs to be looked at, although a lot of it is in the budget of the states, is the prison system. Expensive and far too many people in it, and no forced labor to make them pay their way. Prison meals to be reduced to beans and rice and water one time daily. All federal prisons can be relocated to the state of Greenland.

Foreign aid could be eliminated altogether and the US could reduce the size of its embassies in most places, or eliminate them all together.

Banning the import of foreign-made cars could revive the motor industry in Detroit.

Medicare expenses could be massively reduced by introducing euthanasia at 70. However those who are already over that age could be grandfathered or grandmothered in. Exemption would be given to over 65s who voluntarily leave the United States and unenroll from Medicare.

Social Security disability could be abolished in the same way.

The VA can be abolished. If former military personnel cannot take care of themselves–euthanasia.

A total ban on foreign vacations would massively reduce the number of federal officers working in passport control. A 100% tariff on airfares for people visiting the USA would get rid of most foreign tourists and reduce the need for federal traffic police and lousy breakfasts.

Cutting the number of Supreme Court judges to one would save a pretty penny. Or possibly the whole job could be done better by AI.

All National Parks should be auctioned off. Also all Native American reservations should be privatized.

All interstate highways should be tolled at 50 cents per mile. $1 per mile for foreign tourists. $2 per mile for immigrants or H1A Visa holders.

Remaining deficits in the federal budget could be covered by a one time “clean air you breathe” tax, which would be prorated according to how much you weigh. Corporations would count as 1 lb.

The Jews were also disturbed, but more patient, sending their offspring regular checks to keep them afloat.

See Sam Kashnerls When I Was Cool. Kashner’s parents were absolutely wonderful.

No, America has always been about people regardless of race, ethnicity, and religion coming here and forging their path. It’s who we are.

1790: Congress passes naturalization law limiting citizenship to ‘free white men.’

1882: Congress passes law completely outlawing immigration from China (which remains law until ca. 1946).

1924: Congress passes law favoring immigration from Northwest Europe (which remains law until 1965).

So for the first 177 years of our history we were emphatically not about immigration “regardless of race, ethnicity, and religion.”

And I’ll go even further: even many or most of the changes of the last 60 years that have led to our current large-scale immigration were sold to the people as lies. Example: the 1965 immigration bill wasn’t supposed to upset the ethnic balance of the country. Example: the 1986 amnesty was only supposed to apply to ca. one million people, and was supposed to secure the border. Example: the “Temporary Protected Status” program was supposed to be, well, temporary.

The United States rose to superpower status based almost entirely on the immigration of white Christians and Jews. We probably could have tolerated a fair amount of Asian immigration, as well, if the Burlingame Treaty hadn’t allowed it in unlimited amounts, which resulted in a systemic shock demanding it be ended.

Happy New Year !

Whoops, meant this one:

Hello, Uncle Joe. I know you’re not the Soviet Uncle Joe, but since you mentioned the Russkies – they did pretty well for a while, but their Communist “some decent guns, but we’re out of butter” economy was not up to the task, guess.

I disagree with your and others’ point about the big push for science & math in the schools after the Sputnik “Russian moon” scare. It’s the timeline that doesn’t make sense. We’re talking about an effort in the schools, as worthless as it likely was, starting in, what 1958 at the earliest? That’d mean those kids that were immersed in it for aa few years at least wouldn’t graduate college until the mid-60s. Older, experienced engineers through the ’60s wouldn’t have even taken part. Our space program was successfully in progress before any of these students were working in it.

Then, there were the late 1940s and the whole 1950s. I’m talking X-1 with (the recently-passed) Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier in ’47, then the X-15 with Scott not many years later going 6M or something! New interceptor/fighters were being put out yearly – the whole Century-series was impressive. There was a whole lotta engineering going on then too, well before the incipient space program. Where were the beat-Sputnik kids of the 1950s, and where were the H-1B kids?

You, of all people—the Jews—ought to be thankful. Your ancestors received this opportunity, and you proceed to piss on their graves with your indignation and ingratitude.

I confess, I have never understood the appeal of this ‘Ellis Island schmaltz’ school of immigration advocacy. Let us stipulate for purposes of this discussion that there are no substantial differences, regarding potential, opportunity, human capital, society etc., between immigration in the Ellis Island, postwar, and present eras. What do you imagine follows from that? If I think I, or my ancestors, were fortunate to get in and should be thankful for American generosity, does it follow that I should repay this generosity by stabbing Americans in the back lest I be accused of hypocrisy? I think that true gratitude would consist of advocating for the best interests of Americans, accusations of hypocrisy be damned. In any case, the extreme, ‘Catcher in the Rye’, despising of hypocrisy as the ultimate sin is a childish Leftist obsession. It is an outgrowth of the “To thine own self be true” self-idolatry that entrances adolescents/Leftists – but I repeat myself. The venerable Duc de La Rochefoucauld in maxim 218 had a much better take; “L’hypocrisie est un hommage que le vice rend à la vertu..” = “Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.”

America was developed and became strong by a wide range of immigrants, whether it be from England, Germany, China, or Kenya, whether it be the “historic” wave or the “old” wave or the “new” wave.

Corvinus the Birther! Verily it is the End Times!

how BD destroys the communitarian folk music scene that had survived since the 1930s

I haven’t seen the movie, but if that is accurate, no great loss. That scene was as artificial as any other. The career of Phil Ochs made that grimly obvious.

Ya gotta love the Fermi-Einstein argument. That is not who Musk and Vivek are arguing to bring in, and that is not who is going to come.

So Musk’s filter is in effect a financial filter. Bringing in an immigrant is the same analysis as a corporation uses when it decides to hire one more employee – will this person contribute more than we have to give them? If it is a net positive, we should “hire” them.

This is a much simpler analysis for a business – you just have to figure out how much salary you are paying that employee this year and how much more revenue he will bring in. Even then, you might have to do a deeper analysis – maybe you have to rent more office space so that employee has a desk so you have to add that to his salary, etc.

But for an immigrant, you have to consider many more factors, unto the 7th generation. It’s pretty common among 3rd world immigrants that dad is a pretty hard working guy. But then he has kids and the kids are negatively influenced by American culture and instead of being hard workers are juvenile delinquents. And dad maybe brings over his wife and her parents and his parents, none of whom are working. If you are Wal-Mart (or Tesla) and you hire dad, he is a net positive because you don’t have to pay for all of the others, but as a nation we do.

Then there are all the intangible factors of shifting a nation’s culture. Immigration is like putting salt in your soup. A little is good and a lot is too much.

Elon Musk is a South African refugee to the United States (along with Peter Thiel, David Sacks and David Friedberg). This is in large part because Musk’s Afrikaner and British ancestors decided that, instead of repelling the Bantu invasion that came down into SA from the north, that they’d instead employ the Bantus as cheap labor.

Today, the white South Africans who settled and built the country are just 7% of its population. They were the ones who built the country and made it habitable. They brought the irrigation and agricultural technologies to its deserts thereby supporting the creation of cities and large populations in a land which was previously only capable of providing for a sparse population of pastoralist Hottentots.

America’s traditional integration was nothing like “immigration” today, but rather simply the conquest of the American landmass from primitive hunter-gatherers by NW Europeans.

The “dirty little secret” of America’s immigration is that its only real benefit was to bring in more white people to dilute the 1619 mistake, and push up the white share.

That’s pretty much it. I’d say the Germans were a slight upgrade to the Anglos in farming and mechanical ability. Most groups–like my Irish ancestors–not. Just bodies. But these distinctions were minor. The main thing was white bodies. As long as these immigrants were both capable of and happy to integrate–to absorb traditional Anglo-American norms, throw in with, marry and be un-hyphenated Americans–and be loyal to their fellow Americans, it worked ok.

Then we–mistakenly–allowed in those do not share Western norms, hold themselves apart, are integration hostile, bitch and whine about Americans and refuse to throw in and be loyal. Waving in random foreigners is just insane. A recipe for an unpleasant quibbling, querulous empire–an imperial marketplace–not a nation. Which, of course, is what the people doing it want.

I don’t know why it is so important to some people that Obama be stupid. There are a lot of stupid ADOS blacks but Obama is not an ADOS black and he is not stupid.

Wokeness was a form of hysteria that finally went too far, like the Jacobins in the French Revolution, followed by a rejection of it. You saw more moderate liberals like Tulsi Gabbard, Glenn Greenwald, Elon Musk, RFK Jr., Alex Berenson and Joe Rogan go over to the other side. After the election, the Democrats said they needed their own Joe Rogan and Rogan pointed out they already had him and lost him.

Trump will reduce immigration and curb the worst excesses of DEI. Where he will fail is in reducing inflation and balancing the budget. The economic situation is getting worse but is not quite bad enough the voters will accept big cuts in government spending. Trump has said he will not cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the Defense budget. If you add interest payments, which are not going down, that is seventy percent of the federal budget off limits to cuts.

Voters will think they can keep kicking the can down the road a while longer when it comes to making the needed reforms. The situation will continue to deteriorate until things get so bad voters will put in someone like Milei in Argentina. Milei has reduced inflation and balanced the budget in his country. It is too early, though, to see if he will have a long term success there.

Achmed, it’s nice to see you back here commenting again. You and a couple other of the better commenters here, PhysicistDave and res, all seemed to have left around the same time.

Unfortunately, in the case of PhysicistDave he may no longer be with us. He had said he suffered a stroke right after getting the Covid vaccine. That may have been followed later by another stroke. It’s sad to think that PD may have been one of the victims of the inadequately tested and unsafe Covid vaccines.

It looks that way to you because you did not drink the Kool Aid. If you buy into the Narrative that put Zimmerman on trial to begin with, then Precious was a strong, beautiful Black woman. She was in effect the grieving widow and of course you would want to put her on to gain the sympathy of the jury. She was the last person on earth to talk with St. Trayvon. Please Precious, convey to us the thoughts of the Immaculate Child as he was being pursue by the white Devil Zimmerman.

This may sound utterly ridiculous to you but you do not live in (that) Clown World.

We keep having these trials – Bernie Goetz, Zimmerman, Chauvin, Penny over and over. Each time the Narrative gets tested – 400 years of white men oppressing and murdering Proud Black Men without any consequences. Black men who were jus’ mindin’ their business and dindu nuffin. Let us finally have Justice!

Depending on the mood of the time, sometimes the thin tissue of lies that is Narrative does not withstand any scrutiny at all and sometimes it stands strong in spite of its thinness because the public WANTS to believe at that moment. And the true Believers cling on to the bitter end. Because it’s not about the Truth, it’s about upholding the Narrative.

“A man without religion is a free man.” Such almost-charming “village atheist” naivete! If the “man without religion” is addicted to cigarettes/alcohol/weed/meth/coke/, porn/sex, pizza, TV, video games, [insert vice of one’s choice here], he’s not the “free man” he thinks he is. One can be even more enslaved by one’s ideas and opinions.

Wise rulers have always seen religion as necessary for the preservation of social order. John Adams said: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” If Americans abandon morality because they have forsaken its basis in religion, they will need a Caudillo to drag all the woman-burners to the guillotine.

Yet more: religious faith can greatly expand one’s personal freedom as well. It’s unfortunate that there were no religious Sikhs in that subway car when that poor woman burned to death. The Sikhs say: “Do not give fear. Do not take fear.” Since they feel certain of Eternal Life, they do not fear death. That’s why they have always made the best soldiers in the Indian Army.

You most likely don’t know any truly religious people; I don’t blame you because there are so vanishingly few left. If you like to read books, you may read about some of the religious sages of the past. Confucius was freer than you will ever be. Meister Eckhart was freer than you will ever be.

Buddha said, “The raft is not the shore”, so a truly free man, who has “graduated” from his religious faith and practice, can let all the external trappings of official “Religion” drop like a worn-out rag. Master Dogen Zenji famously said, “I have returned from China with empty hands; not a trace of Buddhism remains.”

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” – Goethe

“If we’re to chuck either the docs or the lawyers … easy call.”

I used to think this too but after the way “our” healthcare system has performed in the past few decades, especially during the COVID abomination, I am no longer so sure. Healthcare in this country has become every bit as parasitic as the legal system.

I’ll disagree with EM on this issue. We should not be importing a professional-managerial class, but training one domestically.

You should have stopped there Art.

But this

IMO, annual issuance of settler’s visas should be somewhere between 250,000 and 400,000 people .

is frankly nuts. You’ve got all sorts of reasonable immigration procedures–if we needed people.

But the most obviously thing in the world is the US does not need any more foreign people. We had something like 160 million people when I was born in the 50s, and we are now more than twice that. (Probably 340m+ after the “Biden” Administration’s open border.)

Huge swathes of America are just “gone”. Growing up in the Midwest, I thought I might find California–the dramatic geography, the weather, the science+technology, the modernity–a great place to live. Now it’s full of Mexicans and Asians and houses there–especially in “neighborhoods with good schools”–cost a packet and the government is a thinly disguised protection-racket, “want California weather/scenery … it will cost you”.

Housing in coastal metros is essentially unaffordable to ordinary American young people starting out on their own. And this has crept inland to inland metros that have anything going for them. Decent jobs are scarce. The un-and semi-skilled labor market is flooded with Hispanic immigrants. And the AI and robotics revolutions are rushing down the tracks.

Sure if we’ve got some grad student who looks like a real stud in battery technology or robotics or thorium cycle, ok, we can offer them the chance to stay, provided overall good genes/health, and a “good fit”–not white or Christian hostile, willing to integrate and fully throw in with us, be an American and nothing else. Maybe we could profitably pick up 10 or 20 thousand of such demonstrated high-quality people a year. But that’s it. There is no way–none–that Americans benefit by importing hundreds of thousands of foreigners.

But let’s give the kids an ‘effing break and stop this insane deluge. Let’s leave America for American kids.

I’ll disagree with EM on this issue. We should not be importing a professional-managerial class, but training one domestically. You want immigrants who have basic skills (they are proficient in English), obey the law, work for a living, and are willing and able to learn to navigate the social matrix in which they have placed themselves without calling in lawyers.
==
IMO, annual issuance of settler’s visas should be somewhere between 250,000 and 400,000 people . Aspirants are in a queue ordered according to the date you passed all the qualifying screens.
==
In order to get a spot in the queue, you should have to pass a cursory background check, a physical, and a proficiency test in English (written and oral). You get married, you and your wife have a common spot in the queue halfway between the date you were married and the date you entered the queue. You have children, your common spot in the queue is adjusted rearward with each child.
==
If one of the children reaches age 21 while you’re waiting, he’s assigned a spot of his own in the queue just behind the common spot and will be henceforth assessed separately.
==
You arrive at the head of the queue, an assessment of your family’s conduct and characteristics is undertaken (looking for criminal activity by any family member or for medical problems in family members not previously examined) and a delay is imposed if anything salient is discovered, knocking the lot of you back in the queue a number of places. Again, any children you have over 21 are assessed separately from the rest of the family.
==
If you’re not knocked back, everyone in the family over the age of 14 has to pass the English proficiency test if they have not done so in the last four years. You’re parked at the gate until this task is completed.
==
Single adults from problem countries are not offered spots in the queue. Married couples with children can win a spot and older and established married couples (both over 40, married at least seven years) can win a spot. If you’ve been cleaved off because you’ve reached 21, you have to get married and have children before you can enter, and your spot in the queue is adjusted rearward with your marriage and each child. About 25 countries would be classified as ‘problem countries’.
==
It’s important that the matrix of reception be properly ordered.
==
(1) Access to common provision for immigrants should be a function of their work credit – i.e. the number of quarters of f/t employment they’ve logged in the country or that their husband, father, or mother has logged on their behalf.
==
(2) There should be public sector positions, occupational licenses, and security clearances which are closed to immigrants; not the whole lot, but important segments.
==
(3) Bar for petty misdemeanors, aliens should be placed in preventive detention if accused of a crime; if their case is not processed or they’re acquitted or their eventual sentence is less than time served, they can be indemnified.
==
(4) Aliens are not offered parole. They serve a clipped sentence and then are deported upon release and their right of domicile is suspended for a term of years. They can return if they’ve been abroad for that term and can pass a background check, &c. The terms should be long – 60 years for a mid-grade felony, 15 to 20 years for a low-grade felony, 5 years for a high misdemeanor, 2 years for a petty misdemeanor, four months for a submisdemeanor violation.
==
(5) To be eligible for naturalization, you should have spent the majority of your natural life in the United States as a palpable resident living within the law. The median lapse of time between entry and eligibility would be in excess of twenty years.
==
(6) Recruitment and promotion in public sector positions should be regulated by examinations. Ditto private natural monopolies. Collective bargaining agreements should be debarred from allocating benefits by ascribed traits. Certain activities in workplaces which map to common crimes (e.g. extortion or harassment) should be deemed tortious. Otherwise, catch-as-catch can in the labor market.
==
(7) As a rule, the custom of producers should not be dictated by law. Exceptions: public agencies, government corporations, natural monopolies, providers of medical services, and (in certain contingencies) providers of services for travelers. Otherwise, freedom of contract and association prevail.
==
Temporary residents should be limited to accredited employees of foreign governments (and their dependents); authentic refugees (and their dependents), of which there are few; and students, teachers, and their dependents. The stock of temporary residents should be limited to about 0.5% of the total population and the extant stock should regulate the ration of educational visas distributed each year. (Schools wishing to recruit students or faculty from abroad should have to purchase visas in multiple price auctions).
==
The civic status of someone born in the U.S. should be that of his mother unless he is of legitimate birth and his father has a preferred status, in which case the father’s status is controlling. Only a citizen can beget a citizen.

No one is forcing whites to live in the most expensive big NE cities (or the suburbs thereof). Philly is 100 miles from NY but houses in (reasonably) safe suburbs are maybe 1/2 of what they are in the NY suburbs. If you go to W. Virginia, it’s yet half again and W. Virginia is all white people. Maybe they are not the best sort of white people but they are definitely white.

No one really knows why Latinos live so long but they do, despite the fact that they spend like 10 cents on their health care system (which it turns out doesn’t really do shit in the US, just wastes trillions of $ – you can get some cutting edge cancer treatment that cost $1M and it increases the mean survival by 6 months. BFD. Maybe it is hybrid (Indo-European) vigor. Maybe they have a better diet with fewer highly processed foods. Maybe they exercise more because they don’t have cars and do manual labor.

Very true.

But the Confucian-influenced societies of Northeast Asia somehow do not get bogged down in endless legal wrangling, as here. Law itself can’t be the whole answer.

I’m awaiting “Johnny Somali’s” day in court. It should be glorious.

which is sort of like having your only encounter with English literature be with Ernie Bushmiller and Ogden Nash.

🤣

Obama’s father had the fifth highest IQ equivalent score for his age cohort in Kenya.

What is really amazing is that despite that, he behaved like complete a stereotypical African male – sowing his seed widely and taking no interest in his children (naturally Barry idolized him and hated his white grandma who actually raised him), becoming a dissolute drunk, etc. Somehow his blackness was a more important clue to his behavior than his sky high IQ.

Barry OTOH takes after his Puritan ancestors – he’s a one woman man, moderate in his habits, etc. A weakness for tobacco is perhaps his only failing, aside from hating white people.

Talking of manifestos, the girl who killed two yesterday in Madison, WI has also left a manifesto. It, while being filled with outbursts of a troubled child from a broken family, has a strong resonance that it represents what may be happening in a lot of troubled and broken families. This may be a fentanyl crisis bursting out from the barrel of a gun.

https://channel2now.com/2024/12/16/article/news/crime/abundant-life-christian-school-shooter-natalie-rupnows-full-manifesto-revealed/

At the climax of the recent US campaign, when the prestige media were accusing Trump of incipient senility to deflect from their obvious complicity in hiding Biden’s obvious senescence, Trump off-handedly did three hours of unscripted live broadcast with Joe Rogan. Biden’s supposedly spritely and joyful ‘brat’ successor, Kamala, turned down a similar invite unless it could be limited to 30 minutes of scripted talking points … at her own premises.

Besides Putin’s annual live four hour public Q&A, I was impressed earlier this year at his spontaneous opening 40-minute disquisition on Russian history in his interview with Tucker. By contrast, on the same day, my pResident held an emergency press conference to deny that he was a senile retard (which of course left him looking like even more of a senile retard). This was because the Special Prosecutor looking into one of his minor crimes deemed the pResident too much of a senile retard to prosecute even though he was obviously guilty.

Sometimes the contrasts are too striking to ignore, no matter how much they gaslight.

Another Great Moment in Political PR history (to me) was when I was visiting Britain as youngster. I was aware they had a divisive Prime Minister named Margaret Thatcher, but I had no other information or opinion about her (pre-Internet and all that). I was at a shop where they had BBC Radio on. Apparently, the UK PM periodically goes on Radio and anyone in the UK can call in to speak to the PM and the PM responds on air live. Well of course the BBC management all hated Thatcher, so they screened the calls for the most hostile and vicious—but also clever and articulate—callers to pass on to Maggie. I had naively supposed the British were polite, so I was shocked when caller after caller ruthlessly harangued the PM in intemperate and often personal terms live on air. But I had underestimated the Iron Lady. One by one, she calmly and convincingly eviscerated each attack, leaving the substance a heap of ruins and the attacker impotently seething.

I was stunned. The worst attacks the country could muster against a totally unscripted and unassisted PM, and yet she defeated every one of them in single combat. It was like she played verbal King of the Hill against fifty million people and won. Without breaking a sweat.

“The Prime Minister of Britain is truly a Great Woman,” I thought.

Which I’m sure was the opposite outcome the BBC intended.

Britain isn’t a basket case.

Fundamentally, skiing is a very artificial activity for some one who doesn’t live in a mountainous or alpine area

http://www.mountainyahoos.com/SkiResorts/Dubai.html

It works in Singapore, Belgium etc.

Malaysia, less well. Lebanon, not at all.

“But perhaps the US high education system should be made to mimic that of Germany”

I think Germany funnels more people into technical training or apprentice programs. It would probably be an improvement on what we do, which is sending off half of graduating high school seniors to four year colleges. That has led to a surplus of college graduates and a watering down of the college curriculum since many students can’t handle a traditional college education. It has also led to leftist indoctrination of large numbers of young people.

I went to night school while working and got a two year degree in accounting. That was enough to get a low level accounting job and a middle class income. I also ended up with no debt. So many young people now have a heavy debt burden they can’t pay off because their degree did not lead to a decent paying job. The school I went to had a three hundred page catalog with dozens of two year degree programs that would probably lead to something better at less cost.

See Almost Missouri’s answer. “Elitism” is one of those vague magic words that places the Ivy League above the law.

Not to be naive. All societies require a mechanism to select their ruling classes, who will then apply the law. We had one once, and it worked sort of OK, but it’s been hacked. See the other article about civil rights law.

Having attachment to three Scandinavian women, two of which inherited my DNA, I can attest to the idea that anti-white white women is basically a WASP/Five Eyes phenomenon: Oceania, Canada, UK, USA.

Against your weighty sample size of 3, we have the country of Sweden which has managed to transform itself into the rape capital of Europe in a period of a few years through sheer demented ‘altruism’.

BEFORE her popularity soared on social media denying that hate crimes play an insignificant role in our society.

Oy, that double negative gets you every time. Sad!

Kind of a sad effort, really. Obviously Gillibrand thought this would get some political traction – otherwise why do it – but what it shows is that the Dems are so bereft of concrete ideas to counter the changes coming next month the best they could do was a for-show stunt that has so little foundation in actionable reality that it hasn’t occurred to any ERA supporter over the last 40 years.

Also interesting is that the ERA explicitly addressed equal treatment based on sex. In light of the current cultural moment where the left tries to extend rights on the basis of gender identity, obviously the only way this amendment would further that is if it was subsequently decided through an act of Congress or perhaps some court that declaring that gender identity = sex for purposes of the law. Which ironically would be using the ERA to empower men.

So no, woke hasn’t gone anywhere and won’t for awhile. I do see some evidence that a portion of the left is pretty sick of performative stuff like this, since it’s burned up a ton of political energy and capital over the years at the expense of more concrete economic goals.

Bannon: I’m also for big restrictions on legal immigration. Every college and engineering school is flooded with foreign students taking American jobs. American jobs should be for Americans.

President Trump and I disagree on this. He said every college and community college… pic.twitter.com/1tWLSz5W3m

— Grace Chong, MBI (@gc22gc) December 18, 2024

The awful anti-white liberal white women are not going away. They will be around for years to come. Keep an eye out for them in public life and in your private life. There is nothing they love more than to destroy a white heterosexual man’s life.

https://barsoom.substack.com/p/world-war-time-loop

You’re going full Corvinus. Never go full Corvinus.

This writer marshals some strong arguments against your view:

The Big Shining Lie: We’re Better Off Now–No, We’re Poorer, Much Poorer

It that version before or after they edited out Beria?

That’s why Magnus Carlsen gave up classical chess in favor of blitz and bullet.

Fischer saw this coming decades ago – that’s why he invented Fischer Random.

“Ukraine has every liberty to chart their own course.”

Fine, then why didn’t the West side with the “freedom fighters” from Donbass, ethnic Russians trying to break free from the Kiev illegal banderite regime, like they did with Albanians in Kosovo and Muslims in Bosnia? If you had any idea what you were talking about, you’d know that Kiev came down on hard on ethnic Russians, not only in the East but also in Odessa and Mariupol, and that when Russia intervened, there had been a civil war going on since 2014, the year the CIA and the State department coup’ed Janukovich with the help of their Ukrainian neo-nazi stooges.

“You have an active imagination.”
And you are totally detached from reality. So the second Irak war didn’t happen? Or the 2014 Euromaidan coup in Kiev? Doesn’t the Wold Bank and IMF blackmail countries into doing their bidding or else no international loans? Welcome to the real world!

“Well, I suppose the US. just carried on with Europe’s tradition of imperialism.”

In a way, yes. America turned into a puppet for the globalist Anglo-American Establishment ( vid. Carroll Quigley). A tool for global imperialism, sucking America and its ordinary citizens dry. Left unchecked, globalists ( or internationalists, like David Rockefeller Jr. prided himself to be called) will leave America as bankrupt as their prior victim, the UK. Now all that’s left of Britain is The City, that is banking, and the rest is turning fast into a sprawling ghetto prison where impoverished natives have to fight with third world hordes for scraps over the ruins of their former great country.

Yes. It’s “Russia, Russia, Russia” all over again.

The amount of pull, twist and manipulation “our” US has in Romania is beyond what you know.

My late father-in-law taught me some things. A retired army colonel there, he was involved in the nuts and bolts of how that country ran, both under Ceaușescu and after. When he was still alive, he cried to me whenever “my” America forced something on “his” government.

Basically, countries like Romania are entirely controlled by “our” empire. The sad thing is, they went from being controlled by the Soviet Union to being controlled by the neocon US/West. Fact. He witnessed it, and I watched it with him.

What bothers me now is that that country, and some people I know and love there, are being placed on the front lines in an American proxy war against Russia.

BTW, our real estate sale there finally happened today, and the money was transferred to us. I can’t tell you how much work we had to do to get this shit to happen. Whatever, it is a timely, precautionary exit of assets from a very questionable place at this time.

Vaccines normally are tested five to ten years before being approved. It was not particularly irrational to avoid getting an inadequately tested vaccine using a novel technology never tried before with unknown potential long term negative effects.

For those who did not want to risk the vaccine, some doctors attempted to develop and implement early home treatments using expired patent drugs like HCQ or Ivermectin, nutritional supplements, and cheap patented steroid drugs that could be used if someone got sick. These home treatments never became widely available because the government threatened doctors trying to use them with the loss of their licenses. This was done to maximize profits for big pharma by leaving mass vaccinations and three thousand Remdesivir as the only way to deal with the disease.

I was let out of the hospital after a few days after a doctor said I did not look particularly sick. A couple weeks later my personal doctor said he was surprised my x-rays showed no lung damage, unusual for someone who had been hospitalized. It is quite likely I could have gotten well quickly with an early home treatment. No such treatment was ever made available.

I believe I have pointed out all this to you multiple times with it always going in one ear and out the other without it ever sinking into that little parrot brain of yours. Following your stupid and thuggish behavior during the epidemic of supporting yanking the licenses of doctors trying to provide an alternative to the vaccines and blaming the victims who became sick because they could not avail themselves of the treatments they wanted, you then went on to support an idiotic war pitting the Ukraine against a much bigger country it could not beat. Now that the Ukrainians are losing, I am laughing at you. You are a really funny guy, HA.

Medical “insurance” isn’t pure “insurance” at all. Insurance is supposed to protect you from unknown large catastrophic risk – your car is totaled in a collision. Your car insurance doesn’t pay if you need new windshield wipers.

The reason it exists in the US in the 1st place goes back to the wage freeze of WWII. Massive war spending would have unleashed a Biden like inflationary surge so the government froze wages and prices instead. Employers were not allowed to lure workers by offering them pay raises. But fringe benefits were not capped so large employers starting offering things like health insurance on top of the frozen wages. In those days, there was not much that medicine could do for you and health insurance was a minor cost anyway.

Health insurance has a “catastrophic” element to it, but most of the money that flows thru the system (with a lot of friction as the health ins. cos skim a lot of the $ on the way) is for routine care for which you should be paying out of pocket. Your annual health checkup is not an unknown large catastrophic risk, it is an expected expense like new tires for your car.

“Obamacare” should have encouraged the issuance of true catastrophic health insurance that would cover you if, heaven forbid, you were stricken by some costly illness but instead it did the opposite and mandated coverage of every conceivable condition, ensuring that the premiums would be very high. Imagine how much your car insurance would cost if it included coverage for all repairs and maintenance and car owners had no incentive to skimp because any costs would be covered by insurance?

” The people in Europe who began calling themselves “Antifa,” a label eventually exported the USA by the 2010s, are today’s nominal anarchists.

How often do we see “Antifa” committing acts in line with the old vision of Propaganda der Tat (“propaganda of the deed”)? The anarchists of the late-19th and early-2oth century were ready and willing to use anti-state terrorism.”

Today’s antifa are not anarchists. They are enforcers of current state tyranny. There is nothing “anti-state” about their terrorism.

The original antifa of National Socialist Germany were promoters of communism/Bolshevism. They were typical communist revolutionaries, seeking to install a different form of government, not eliminate government.

It is futile to attempt a discussion with you.

And yet so many commenters still do. I don’t know why. Corvirus’ whole purpose here is to “nuh uh” and annoy. Steve once called him/her/it an “ankle biter”, which seemed accurate enough. Stop feeding him and maybe he’ll go away.

Essentially all of our insane race/DEI stuff that is happening today is a product of the failure of the central premise of the civil rights era: if we eliminated de jure discrimination and gave blacks preferences across a broad spectrum for awhile then they would naturally catch up to whites.

Obviously this didn’t happen despite tens of trillions in wealth transfers, explicitly pro-black discrimination, overhyping of black achievements and contributions, and turning a blind eye as their culture deteriorated into an appalling mess that everyone secretly is revolted by.

Much of the social policy pursued by the left (and some by the right) are based on the idea that man and society can be perfected through the application of enlightened political choices and programming. Additionally, the modern left looks at the upliftment of blacks as the single most important social endeavor of American history. The former cannot accomplish the latter and it’s driven them to increasingly bizarre and totalitarian efforts in pursuit of the impossible. As I mentioned, I think there is a minor but not insignificant share of the left that is beginning to realize this and most are hoping there is some kind of softer version of civil rights-oriented policy they could still push to satisfy their consciences and have a marginally positive effect.

Along with this, I think the more perceptive political strategists on the left recognize it’s now a political loser that will not claw back the working class defections to the GOP that have grown for three straight presidential elections. This is a difficult situation for them because they are dependent on 90+ support from blacks to win national elections and this group is accustomed to being catered to, but the rest of the country increasingly doesn’t care about.

That photo and reading list are embarrassingly phony. Who believes this stuff?

I only wish the guy was photographed while reading Noticing.

and even a Chinese community.

And then there is history:

One of the many contemptible aspects of the Garland/Biden Department of Justice has been the normalization of punishing whistleblowers. I don’t know if this apples to Agent Shapley; I am most familiar with the case of Eithan Haim, a surgical resident who worked at Texas Children’s Hospital. Haim became aware that TCH continued to perform transgender interventions on minors once it became illegal in Texas. And that TCH’s leadership was lying when they announced that they had desisted from these practices.

In leaking the information to Chris Rufo, it appears that Haim was scrupulous about maintaining patient confidentiality and following HIPAA. That was irrelevant to the DOJ, who has been engaging in a jihad to ruin the gender heretic’s life in every way they can.

From this past summer, the US Attorney’s press release. And a defense of Haim at the National Review.

Haim continues to discuss his experiences on Twitter, which unsurprisingly now include motions to gag him. Public awareness of DOJ/FBI lawfare could diminish trust in these institutions.

>They rioted.
It was much more of an IRL shitpost. Especially, in comparison to months of the “mostly peaceful protests”. Why do you even acquiesce and validate the use of that term?

Biden should have pardoned the January 6 protestors as a ‘gesture of reconciliation.” They’ve actually been rotting in jail.

They should have taken advantage of the educational opportunities available in jail to improve themselves. They would also be able to get a free psychiatric examination.

Thanks. I try, and I continue to discover musical artists that I did not know about. We all have our tastes.

One of my philosophy professors in college liked to say, with regard to relativism, “Everything is a matter of taste, but some tastes are better than others.”

He had worked as a carpenter building apartments in San Francisco before he earned his Ph.D. in philosophy.

On Christmas Day this year, my godson will give a performance on the organ in the same church in Transylvania where I became his godfather at his christening that I attended 14 years ago. We have pictures of me holding him there in the church in his little, white, christening outfit.

He cried when the priest put the water on him.

The organ he will play is so old that the bellows were powered mechanically by men in the days before electricity.

He is gifted, like my wife. He loves music and music theory. We have had detailed conversations about this. He speaks English fluently, which he learned entirely on his own, via the internet, by communicating with other young people around the world. He is 14 years old, and his parents are always amazed when he converses with me, very adroitly, in my native language.

He will play the organ in that old church in his hometown in Transylvania on Christmas Day.

Tears are welling up in my eyes now…

Did it have a red cover?

Why, pray tell, would you doubt it?

You’re lucky he didn’t respond “citation required.” And if you respond that your grandmother told you he’d again insist on a citation.

You can’t criticize the left if you also do what you’re criticizing the left for.

The Jan 6 rioters can rot in jail and be thankful they weren’t mowed down en masse. And yes yes yes yes yes yes yes I say the same thing about antifa and BLM too, but the Jan 6ers are WORSE, because antifa and BLM never humiliated our nation before the entire world by rioting at our CAPITOL, never tried to take Congress hostage, kill the Vice President, and overturn an election by thuggery.

Re-posted from Peak Stupidity:

https://peakstupidity.com/index.php?post=3143

——–

The rise, fall, and re-rise of “pardons” and relation thereof to the de-Westernization of U.S. political life

The closest analogy to the 11-year blanket ‘pardon’ for “all crimes, known and unknown, charged and uncharged” would be the medieval system under which the emperor could declare, arbitrarily, whether a given person would be ensured life and liberty or deprived of life or liberty.

See the concept of the “imperial ban.” It was a form of what we now know as the U.S. system’s presidential pardon, except in the reverse: the governor’s or president’s pardon cancels a convicted man’s conviction. The “imperial ban” cancels an otherwise-“unconvicted” man’s natural right to life and liberty (in later-standard thinking; see wording of the Declaration of Independence). Placed under the “imperial ban,” a man was a public enemy who was to be killed.

This kind of arbitrary authority exercised by the established powers of Europe undermined their legitimacy. It was great fuel to all the endless swirl of movements back to the Reformation or even to the Renaissance. I’ve noticed non-Europeans are okay with arbitrary authority, but Westerners never are. We demand things make sense.

You’ll find lots of people praising the Chinese and others here towards the mid-21st century, but the Chinese permit their awful government exercising a cruel form of repression and running a system that would be stomach-churningly distasteful to any Western stomach. Corrupt-bargain “pardons” (and non-prosecutions) and illegitimate convictions: people are okay with them, though some might find it in them to complain here and there. The two-thousand-some political prisoners now crammed into a special built prison in Hong Kong (following the hostile crackdown by the PRC after the 2019 anti-China protests), a typical PRC-Chinese isn’t outraged; we, Westerners, are outraged on their behalf more than their nominal fellow-countrymen are.

Pardons are a harkening back to a system that is best left behind in medieval times, or with PRC-China and its satellites or imitators (if any). The tacit recognition of this was that the “pardon” power was so seldom used for so long, except for cases here and there for kind of symbolic purposes.

Who was the first president to start to really strain the “pardon” power? I think it may have been Bill Clinton with his series of pardons for campaign donors late in his second term. There is even a Wiki page “Bill Clinton pardon controversy.” The biggest of all was the oligarch Marc David Reich (1934-2013), alias “Marc Rich,” a man tied extensively to Israel who fled U.S. justice for many crimes. He was pardoned in full by Clinton on the morning of January 20, 2001, along with other lesser characters of similar type, nepotistic favors done for donors and the like.

By the time the first orange-haired president blumpfed his way onto the scene, the major controversy in 2001 over Bill Clinton’s pardon of the Israel billionaire “Marc Rich” ca. 15 years earlier, would’ve seemed child’s play. In other words, at some point in the 2000s or 2010s a line was crossed by which this kind of pardon was conceivable and no longer would elicit the kind of shock that Bill Clinton’s wave of corrupt D-insider pardons elicited in 2001. Trump had little compunction about nepotistic pardons: there were many Trump “Marc Rich’s” in 2017-2021. Biden’s pardon of his ne’er-do-well crack-addict son is a blatant case but not one of an abrupt break in precedent.

A de-Westernizing system with the power of “pardons” in place may be a dangerous thing. Yes, it is only part of the story alongside selective prosecution and other things including legalized-systematized anti-white and anti-male laws and preferences (“this employer gives special consideration to all women, people of color, certified LGBTQ community members including pre-op Transgender individuals”). But the “pardon” power if used in this way, including as used by Trump, can undermine the legitimacy of institutions in a way we, Western people, traditionally would have treated as taboo.

A system with lots of corrupt pardons or corrupt prosecutions ends up looking like so many backward Mid-East type countries, or the more backward of the ex-communist-bloc countries. That is clearly the way things have gone: the USA a wealthy society but no longer a firmly-rooted Western-normed society.

He doesn’t need political cover to end the abuse of the J6 protesters. He should just do it and in announcing it provide a meticulous inventory of just how okupiers and Antifa had been handled in blue jurisdictions over the ten years previous. Give us the names of the judges and prosecutors.

It’s perfectly in keeping with everything else that’s happened during this scumbag’s tenure in the White House. Most administrations are characterized by a total indifference to the will of the people — that goes without saying — but Biden’s presidency has been distinguished by its calculated antagonism. Literally every move he’s made during the past four years was designed to piss off the public, and this is a final, sneering “fuck you” to the American people from the most egregiously awful president in our history.

Speaking of “the family’s corruption”, could it be that one of the reasons why customers pay usurious interest rates on credit cards may be found in the person of Joe Biden? Ever since he was elected senator from Delaware in 1972, he has been living off the largesse showered upon him and his family by the credit card companies/banks who run his home state.

Fun “rule of law” compilation 🙂 :

SUPERCUT!

Corporate media: Obviously Biden would never pardon Hunter pic.twitter.com/gJRhASCAUs

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) December 2, 2024

Corvy loves to point out shortcomings in others (mostly imaginary ones) but we never learn about Corvy himself.

What Corvy has been hiding is that his family is literally synonymous with racism. He is from the Crow family – the JIM Crow family to be specific.

This is Attorney Bradley Edwards.

He represented 70 trafficking victims of Jeffrey Epstein starting in 2009 & was instrumental in bringing him down.

He dedicated a decade of his life to the Epstein trafficking case.

This is what he said when asked about Trump's involvement… pic.twitter.com/asAUx1dFgO

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 2, 2024

Scientific American was a respectable and challenging publication in 1985. During the succeeding 12 years, it was turned into something more akin to New Scientist or Omni. I recall an article by a retired physicist lamenting this published about 25 years ago. He said when he began his career he’d been told that if he discovered something truly important, (1) submit it to Physical Review Letters or a like rapid publication journal in order to claim priority, (2) submit a detailed paper to the apposite section of Physical Review, and (3) submit it to Scientific American so that a scientifically literate non-specialist audience can read it. It was not an academic journal, but it was adjacent to that. I haven’t looked at it in nearly 20 years; I’m assuming it has gotten worse, like everything else.

The Conversation was not a melodrama.