Category Archives: Politics

Suicide Watch

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In the 17th century, European settlers in North America saw the native populations as an obstacle to progress. That was not an unreasonable proposition since the natives had not made it far past the Stone Age. They were using stone arrows and spears, wore animal skins and lived in nomadic tribes. From the perspective of Europeans, these people were barbarians.

The locals may not have been very advanced and they were certainly not very bright, but they soon figured out that it was a bad idea to let the white man settle in their lands. A long war of attrition won by the technologically superior (and eventually numerically superior) whites turned North America into a European outpost and then a European country. The point being that even primitive nomads could quickly figure out that the tribe that controls the land wins and the tribe that loses, dies out.

Everywhere else on planet earth, human populations have been killing one another over land since the dawn of time. So much so we have developed elaborate methods to keep tribes apart from one another. People knew that mixing a bunch of Tribe X into Tribe Y’s turf was going to lead to violence. One tribe would try to dominate the other, assuming the other tribe was going to do the same thing. It’s just a fact of human existence that people used to understand.

Now, against that backdrop consider what the GOP is considering for the end of this summer. It will consist of at least four bills, to be voted on by the end of the summer. One bill is an amnesty for illegal aliens that doesn’t lead to citizenship.The second bill is a Dream Act–like amnesty granting green cards (and eventual citizenship) to illegals who came as juveniles. The third bill will require tracking of foreign nationals. Finally, the fourth bill increase importation of low-skilled workers to compete with unemployed Americans.

And though none of the bills is likely to offer a path to full citizenship, the fact Republicans are preparing to take on immigration at all is a sign the party is coming to grips with a political reality: if they want to win elections in the long run, they’ll have to face the issue.

After the last amnesty in the 1980’s, the GOP’s share of the Hispanic vote declined from 37% to 30%. In fact, it has never again risen above 31% and that was with George Bush, who spoke Spanish and was super friendly to Mexicans. Bush arguably did more for Mexican peasants than any Mexican leader in the history of the country. Bush expanded resettlement and dropped the English requirement.

The author of the piece just assumes it is the GOP’s problem to fix what the Left has destroyed. Liberal democrats were the champions of the last two amnesty deals and are behind the current amnesty deal. In fairness, the global elites are buying off people like Boehner and Ryan so both parties have their snouts in the trough this time. Still, the assumption that the GOP has to win the votes of invaders, rather than citizens says a lot about the state of the American political elite.

Immigration is neither a good thing nor a bad thing. The degree and timing is what determines the right course. In boom times, it may make sense to bring in guest workers and ramp up the naturalization of immigrants. The numbers should reflect the needs of the native population. In lean times, like the last five years, foreign workers should be thrown out with some rare exceptions, like those who possess some unique skill. We don’t want to deport all of our hockey players.

Nothing like economic necessity is involved here. The ruling elites of America have concluded that America is too white. They want to remedy that by importing fifty million Hispanics, who they consider non-white. If it were practical, they would bring in fifty million Congolese, but the running of slave ships over the Atlantic is bad form, for now. The question that comes to mind is “If our government hates us, what would they be doing different?” Replacing the population sounds like hatred to most people.

That’s part of what is driving the mass suicide we see going on throughout the West. When the majority of British school children are not British, it is not hard to see what the future holds for the Brits. At every turn, the citizens of the West are being told that they are worthless or that they are evil. It’s done in pop culture, the media and public policy. When the political leaders care more for the welfare of foreigners, the message is clear. There are other factors for sure, but the West is dead, so the people are dying.

Our Meaningless Constitution

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Most people still think the courts are the defenders of the Constitution. After the ACA ruling, it is impossible to hold that view. Maybe Roberts was pressured into changing his opinion, but the fact that such a thing is a possibility argues against the court being the great defender of the law. On the other hand, if he simply changed his mind, it says that these judges are not bound by an internal logic. They are just as prone to follow the fads as follow the law. Either way, the law is no longer a fixed thing that can be defended.

He could also just be a nut. We like to think it is impossible for crazy people to make it to the top, but history says otherwise. Caligula is the best example. He was obviously a homicidal madman from the start. Ivan the Terrible is another good example. You can be a crazy and ambitious and ambition can overcome just about any defect. Therefore, Roberts could very well be a kook or suffer from some nervous condition. Regardless, it just shows that the Constitution is what the court says, not what is written on the paper.

With that in mind, this gun case looks ominous.

Abramski bought the gun because he could get a discount, and checked a box on the relevant form saying the gun was for him. But he sold it to his uncle.

Abramski was later indicted under federal law for making a false statement material to the lawfulness of a firearm sale — and for making a false statement with respect to information required to be kept in the records of a license firearm dealer.

But Abramski’s lawyers told the high court that since both he and his uncle were legally allowed to own guns, the law shouldn’t have applied to him.

His team argued that Congress never intended for a lawful buyer who transfers a gun to another lawful owner to be prosecuted under this law — and that the intent was all about making sure straw buyers don’t purchase guns for people not allowed to have them, like certain convicted criminals.

But the government argued that he violated the plain language of the law, when he said on the form that the gun was for him. They argued he never gave the seller any idea that he planned to essentially resell the gun to someone else the dealer would have no opportunity to vet.

Much of Wednesday’s arguments centered on the question on the form — prepared by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — and whether the agency’s decision to include the question gives it the force of law, enough to make it a crime to answer untruthfully.

In a sane society, a natural right of the citizen enshrined in the founding documents would require the state to meet a very high bar before it could infringe on that right. The acquisition of and possession of arms is a fundamental right of a free citizen. The Founders regularly said this. They put it in the Bill of Rights. They were explicit that this is an inalienable right of the citizen. That’s not a contestable point. Therefore, the state must meet a very high burden before it can regulate the acquisition and possession of arms.

It gets worse. The Federal law against straw purchases was clearly meant to end the practice of people buying guns in bulk and then selling them to blacks in the ghetto. We can pretend otherwise, but that’s what the law is designed to inhibit. It was never intended to stop private sales, which is what the Feds are trying to do here. If owning a gun, in order to defend against tyranny, is an inalienable right, then the state has no role in the private sale and purchase of guns. That should be obvious, but here we are anyway.

Stalemates

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Conservatives have been programmed to reject anything that smacks of pessimism regarding America’s future. They continue to hold out hope that some combination of miracles will put the right people in charge of the state and they will set about reforming the nation. Then there are those who blithely say something along the lines of “we always muddle along somehow. We can make it through this.” It’s a weird combination of fatalism and optimism. They accept they will fail, but things will work out anyway.

The fact is, things can and will get much worse, perhaps catastrophically worse, if the current ruling elite is not reformed or replaced. This post min the NYTimes is a good example of just how rotten the ruling elite is now. Notice the use of the word stalemate when describing the current situation. While technically true, the fact is most Americans would be fin with ending all immigration. The only reason this is a topic is the Left wants to flood the nation with non-white immigrants. The stalemate is really an assault.

It is considered an inevitability that 30 million Mexican peasants will be granted citizenship, despite not going through the regular process. It is just a matter of getting passed this pesky “stalemate” business. It is also assumed that the number of legal immigrants will be increased to some number just below whatever the Left wants. In other words, to the people in charge, a stalemate is really just an interregnum or a pause in the steady march toward whatever the Left wants. They know they will eventually win. They are right.

Obama’s Rage

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To the surprise of no one, President Obama is not blaming white people for his low approval ratings. This was entirely predictable. No black politician in the last fifty years has passed on the opportunity to play the race card. The only thing remarkable here is that it took this long for Obama to start doing it. His use of the race card in his re-election bid was rather subtle. Of course, he no longer has to worry about getting white votes now, so he can let his freak flag fly, as the smart set is fond of saying.

As Theodore Dalrymple points out, politicians are mediocre people with ambition. They succeed because they have a ruthlessness that allows them to do horrible things to the other people in their way. That’s what democracy selects for, which is why every democracy is overrun with sociopaths and lunatics. Obama was able to rise to the top because he was useful to his backers and he was willing to say whatever had to be said in order to rise to the top. Like all politicians, he has no soul.

For Obama, it manifests a bit differently. Blacks in American politics operate under some different rules than whites. Obama was not getting anywhere if he walked around with a nappy afro and a pick sticking out of it. He was never going to get far with the Choom-gang look either. In fairness, a white guy is not getting far if he looks like Kid Rock and a Latino cannot look like Aaron Hernandez. But, blacks are raised to believe they must act white in order to succeed, so they rage against this forced adaptation.

Because all politicians are are special form of sociopath, they see anything less than unconditional love as an unconditional assault. That means when they fall in the polls, they want to rage against the voters. For whites, this usually means blaming their advisers or the media. For black politicians it means blaming that white avatar that always have hovering over them. For lame duck Obama, fading into obscurity, he is free to vent his rage against the people who made it possible for him be in the White House.

Going Left

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Everyone agrees that America has moves steadily to the Left over the last century or so. America in the 1950’s was not that much more liberal than it was in the 1920’s, but it was clearly heading Left. Today’s America is much further Left than it was in the middle of the last century. In other words, the direction has remained the same, but the pace has quickened. As the nation’s rulers have dropped Christianity as their organizing morality, they have embraced the various fads on the Left as a secular religion.

It has not been a steadily increasing shift. It has been in fits and starts, with spasms of radicalism, followed by quiet periods. The period from the assassination of JFK through the Nixon administration was spasm that shifted the country way over to the left compared to the America of 1958. We are in the midst of one such spasm now, which can be dated to the 2000 election. That seemed to radicalize or maybe energize the radicals, who have been on the warpath ever since.

An example is in the comments of a post on Marginal Revolution. Tyler Cowen mentioned that Peter Schuck is “largely a Democrat.” That’s a subtle way of saying he is a liberal, but not crazy like most of them. He still retains the ability to criticize the actions of his ideological clan, if not his ethnic tribe. That seemed to upset some of the readers, who went into the full purity spiral. Here is a comment from someone calling himself Matt that captures the fevered mind of the modern leftists.

Schuck is “largely a Democrat” in the same way that Joe Liberman is “largely a Democrat”, which is to say, not really. He’s most famous for arguing that children of unauthorized immigrants born and raised in the US should not be US citizens. He’s not conservative compared to, say, the average state senate member from South Carolina, but he’s pretty far outside of the mainstream of the Democratic party.

Notice how Joe Lieberman, a liberal’s liberal for his entire Senate career is now “outside of the mainstream” for the modern Left.  Matt and his coreligionists are now so far Left that yesterday’s liberal is now a reactionary. Cults always need a Trotsky and Lieberman continues to fill that role for those radicalized in the Bush years. It’s not that his position are really outside the acceptable, it’s that Lieberman was willing to associate with the people the Left still considers the face of evil. It’s guilt by association.

That is a feature with all radicals. Because there is no limiting principle to things like anti-racism or opposition to war, they can always out radical the most radical guy, but adopting an even more extreme position. In this spasms of radicalism, the Left lurches further to the extreme, which drags the center with them. The professional Right, of course, chases after them, which only helps drag the center to the Left. When this spasms burns itself out, the new center will be far to the Left and conservatives will defend it as the new normal.

 

Inequality Thoughts

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Jim Geraghty has a post up on National Review Online about the “polarization” of the public over politics. Usually what these guys mean by polarization is that the public is not buying what the media is selling them. When a non-liberal shows up on campus to give a speech and is heckled, he is polarizing. When an abortion fanatic shows up at a Catholic college and is heckled, he is courageous. Anyway, the point of his post is that people are mad and it has nothing to do with politics.  I posted this in the comments:

First off, Frank Luntz is probably a sincere person and all around great guy, but his profession is closer to witchcraft on the empiricism scale than it is to science. He makes his living telling the Sean Hannity audience what they want to hear. I don’t want to call him a charlatan as I think he believe this stuff. If he were not performing on the Hannity show, he would be watching it.

Second, income inequality is not just a leftist fad for the political season. Keep in mind that the Left has embraced the modern tools of crowd sourcing. While far from perfect, they are very useful in defining trends. Americans are increasingly aware that the folks in charge live vastly different lives than the rest of us. There’s also a growing suspicion that the interests of the ruling class are at odds with the middle class. A rich tech billionaire moaning about paying his market rate does not go unnoticed.

Third, this is not the first time America has seen this sort of problem. The new robber barons are different in that they are Davos men, cosmopolitan citizens of the world who got rich from global capitalism. Their loyalty to country and culture is nearly non-existent. That makes them seem <i>alien</i> to the hoi polloi. The robber barons of old were men who embraced country and culture.

Global capitalism is a boon to rich people in rich countries and smart people in poor countries. It is a bane to the middle class of rich countries. As a political matter, the GOP has a choice. It can be the party of the middle class and stop chasing after the favor of the plutocrats. This, I suspect, is a lost cause. Alternatively, they can go back to their historic role as accountants to the ruling class. The Left works on reorganizing society and the Right keeps the books.

The narrative says the GOP represents conservatives, by which is meant middle-class white people, but that’s a myth. The recent actions of Boehner and McConnel make that clear. The early embrace of Chris Christie as the choice for 2016 is another clear sign the party would like to be rid of the Tea Party and the other non-conformists. For half a century, the GOP was about defending the public finances and defending against the communists. Otherwise, they went along with whatever the liberal democrats wanted.

A careful reading of history shows that all ruling elites have these two factions. One side wants to charge ahead with all sorts of schemes. The other side wants to tap the breaks and steer clear of trouble.  Otherwise, they agree on most of the important stuff. In modern times, we are seeing the ruling elites move closer, as they begin to define themselves in opposition to the people over whom they rule. In Europe, this is well under way as formerly ideological opposites are now in power sharing deals. The Tories and Labor, for example

The question is whether the people on the outside will go along with this deal. In America, the slow grinding down of the middle-class is not going unnoticed. Europe has all sorts of weird social unrest. People are unlikely to go along with a new system where everyone is relatively poor compared to the ruling elite. Then there is the question of sustainability, as global capitalism rests on the belief that borrowing rates at the top can always be zero.

This can only work if the elites can control capital almost entirely and even then, it is hard to see how that can be sustained. People will first note that “both parties” fail to deliver, while the wealth gap grows ever wider. Then the people notice that voting has no effect on the process. That’s when people start looking for option, usually at the extremes. The Left will search out screamers who promise to rally the fringes against the middle-class whites, while those middle-class whites tart listening to those promising to defend their stuff.

In the end, gross inequality leads to social unrest.

 

The Deep State?

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I’m not a big believer in the alleged “deep state” that runs the country. I do think the rich and powerful exercise a great deal of influence over government. In fact, it is reasonable to say that the rich run the country and the political class is mostly their servants. That seems obvious. Rich guys parade in and out of the White House every day. The fact that these folks have a commonality of interests also seems obvious. Look at the push by rich people to flood the nation with peasants. Open borders favors the rich.

There’s a long way from that reality to the idea of a deep state, but when you see stories like this you have to wonder. Then only reason any of this is out in the public is the Snowden affair. Big bureaucracies like the NSA start making comical blunders like this when they reach a certain size. Still, it suggests the permanent ruling class is not the life-serving Congressmen and Senators, but the life-serving hacks in the bureaucracy.

The life-servers in the intelligence blob are the kings of the hill because they hold everyone’s secrets. It is not a big leap from that to thinking the rich guys telling Congress what to do also are pulling the strings at the NSA. On the other hand, maybe the security services have enough dirt on the rich to control them as well. Maybe it is just a weird balance of interests that keeps the whole thing running. The one thing that unifies all parties is making sure the public never gets what they want from government.

Democracies Always Murder Themselves

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In the 1970’s and into the 1980’s, New York City was a terrible place, mostly due to the Left throwing open the prisons. They also encouraged blacks to run wild, which they were more than happy to do without much encouragement. As a result, the ghettos were ferociously violent. Drugs were rampant. Crime in general was a huge problem, even among the cops. In the early 70’s some radicals were still blowing stuff up.

Ed Koch was mayor and he spent most of his time was explaining away the dysfunction of city government, claiming it was just the new normal. He lasted into the 80′ basically on the claim he prevented the city from going bankrupt. He gave way to David Dinkins, who was a complete failure. By the end of his time in office, New York City had suffered at least thirty years of corrupt and incompetent left-wing mayors.

Giuliani came in after Dinkins and started to clean up the city. He cleaned up the petty crime and rounded up the gangsters. He cleaned up and professionalized the police force using modern techniques like noticing that most crimes are committed by young black males. He did not say it like that, obviously, but what he was doing was clear to everyone, even if they publicly said otherwise. Crime control is about race realism.

The boom in financials certainly made it easier as it gave him a viable tax base. Unlike his lefty predecessors, he did not look at Wall Street as a the enemy. He embraced the new financial class by embracing gentrification of the city’s neighborhoods. Bloomberg, nutty as he is, carried on the polices for another decade. Today, a white person can live in places like Harlem and Queens, without getting mugged every day.

Now ehre we are, after all of that, with another left-wing wacko as mayor, promising to reverse all the polices that cleaned up the city. Bill de Blasio was born too late to be a part of radical stuff in its bombing years, but he was nonetheless educated by them after they moved into the universities. He defended Daniel Ortega in the 80’s and he still thinks Castro got it right. Despite the multi-decade experiment in progressive madness that nearly destroyed New York City, de Blasio is convinced this time it will be different.

“We recognize a city government’s first duties: to keep our neighborhoods safe; to keep our streets clean; to ensure that those who live here – and those who visit – can get where they need to go in all five boroughs. But we know that our mission reaches deeper. We are called to put an end to economic and social inequalities that threaten to unravel the city we love. And so today, we commit to a new progressive direction in New York. And that same progressive impulse has written our city’s history. It’s in our DNA.”

He’s right about the DNA part. True believers like de Blasio are born to join mass movements like cults and extreme religious movement. That’s why democracy always fails. These typesare always with us and they will never quit. They keep working the system until they can impose their brand of lunacy on the rest of us. The fact that everything he advocates has been tried and failed horribly will not deter him or his supporters. They are always armed with the phrase, “this time it will be different.”

The Founding generation dismissed democracy out of hand as the surest path to national suicide. They were smart men who had a realistic understanding of human nature. They were mostly skeptics, at least by the standards of their day. They knew the lower classes would always vote themselves a raise from their neighbor’s wallet. They knew the excessively religious would try to vote in their kind. They knew democracy was a terrible way to run a society, so they tried to build a system to prevent it. yet, here we are.

Stupid Smart People

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This story in the Washington Post suggest the health care debacle will have an impact on the midterm elections. One thing we learned from the Nate Silver experience is that polling does not tell us much of anything on its face. The polls today have little correlation to what will transpire on election day in November of 2014. Whatever you may think about his methods, he was more right than wrong in 2012, so I it is not a bad idea to take his word for what it all means, which is not much right now.

Then again, when you see stuff like this it is hard to imagine things getting better for the Democrats next year. This should be the honeymoon period as goodies get dispensed and the Democrats take credit for it. Obama should be enjoying good numbers, as the people tend to get sentimental about the siting president at this stage. If people are angry about Obama’s polices and by extension the Democrat agenda, imagine how people will feel when the bill comes in 2014. Things look gloomy for them.

On the other hand, the Stupid Party always finds a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, so it is safe to assume they will not gain much from the health care issue. That’s the thing though. Why are they so predictably stupid about these things? How is it that these people got to this point? They are not retarded or even dimwitted. It takes a degree of cleverness to be a politician, even at the town level. When you get to national politics, you need to be a shrewd operator. Why are Republicans so bad at politics?

Of course, it is not just the Republicans. They are the most egregious, but the fact is, all politicians are quite stupid in their execution. Further, they have clueless people on their staffs and there is an army of people in the policy side who get everything wrong. Look at the Bush people. Most of his advisers were smart Jews from the neocon side of the party and they got everything wrong. In fact, they came close to destroying the Republican party. Again, it’s not just Republicans. It is the entire political class.

Look at Obama. According to Steve Sailer, Obama is above average in IQ at the minimum. He thinks he is in the top-2% or maybe higher. John Derbyshire makes similar arguments. John approaches the political-IQ issue a little different. He points to Obama having a high verbal-linguistic intelligence. That high verbal is a huge advantage in politcs, relative to math aptitude. Derbyshire and Sailer are first rate on the IQ beat so if they think Obama is an elite IQ, they are probably right about it.

So, why did Obama sign off on that stupid health care program?

Even if you want to dismiss the argument that Obama is smart, the army of people around him are certainly not blockheads. Pelosi looks like an opium addict, but she did not get to where she is by being stupid. Chuck Schumer is a smart guy. He got a perfect score on his SAT, when that counted for something. Surely the army of policy experts involved in creating the bill were smart enough to know that the bill they created was going to be a political disaster. There really is no way to blame it on stupidity.

How is it that so many smart people could be so stupid? The explanation offered by partisans is that this unfolding disaster is part of a sinister plan to turn the country over to a single payer. That sounds good when you write it down on the napkin at the bar, but in reality it looks like madness. These people are wired to be politicians and politicians always seek to be on the good side of the voters. Even rabid ideologues avoid crossing the people until they have total power.

If the plan is to smash the system and then rush in with a replacement, this is a ham-fisted way to go about it. If you’re so clever to scheme this sort of way, you should be clever enough to remove your fingerprints. If this does collapse private insurance in America, liberalism will be discredited for a generation, maybe forever. The folks replacing the demolished system will not be radical socialists. Now, radical socialists do suffer from a weird form of myopia, but are they really that myopic?

That still leaves a long list of incredible stupid statements that work against the interests of these bright people. Obama admitting that he just learned that insurance is complicated probably lost him five points of support. Pelosi’s crazy act makes even her most fanatical supporters cringe. Then you have back benchers like Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. How in the heck can we explain her existence? The inescapable conclusion is the political class has a large number of very smart people who say and do outlandishly stupid things.

We may be led by smart people, but they do outlandishly stupid things.

Liberal War on People – The Smoking Front

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The Left is slowly working to ban the electronic cigarettes. Their reasoning has nothing to do with science since science clearly says these things are vastly less harmful than smoking. The second hand smoking claims, always dodgy in terms of science, evaporate with these things. What comes out of the smoker is water and no one has ever claimed harm from second hand water vapor. Plus, there’s no smell. That’s one of the major selling points, so, the liberal scolds had to come up with a different excuse:

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn said the ban would make it easier to enforce the city’s Smoke-Free Air Act, which banned smoking in bars, restaurants and other indoor public spaces.

“Because many of the e-cigarettes are designed to look like cigarettes and be used just like them, they can lead to confusion or confrontation,” Quinn said.

So these anti-smoking zealots just hate smoking so much, they don’t even want to see images of it in public.  Therefore, in order to make it easier for the scolds to harass people enjoying themselves, they will now pretend virtual smoking is real smoking. This really does make the point that it was never about public health. It was always about imposing their values on others. It’s not even about the values, so much as the act of forcing people to comply with their rules. It’s about the scold getting scold the wicked.

Smoking is unhealthful and it is proper to encourage people to avoid the habit. At this point, everyone knows this. The costs of deleterious habits should always be on the person engaging in them, where possible. Smokers should be charged a hefty premium on their insurance and taxes levied on tobacco. Banning smoking in closed spaces is fine, even though the science is dodgy. Bars and restaurants that permit smoking should post a sign over the door making it known. Let the market sort that out.

Vaping, from observation and a little research, is a far less harmful activity than smoking and not a burden on others. It may pose no harm at all. If the nicotine is removed, you’re left with an asthma inhaler. The stuff in these things is propylene glycol, the same stuff they use in some inhalers. It is used in all sorts of food and medicines, approved by the FDA for decades. Sucking in anything but air is probably posing some risk and there may be some unknown risks with these things, but they are less harmful than smoking.

Sensible public health policy should always encourage the sorts of trade-offs that improve public health. In this case, giving people an incentive to switch from tobacco to vaping would be the wise policy. yeah, it looks weird seeing people wrapped in a cloud of vapor, but it beats seeing them outside the door smoking. Instead, the busy bodies are running around looking for a reason to torment those hooked on nicotine. It’s a good reminder that the people who rule over us are petty miserable tyrants.