Tuesday, October 23, 2018

Tuesday roundup

Utter savages - today's edition:

On Monday night, a huge boulder was hurled through a window of the Bakersfield, California office of House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). Vandals subsequently stole office equipment following the shattering of the window.
Piers Morgan says this kind of stuff is what is driving the rise in Trump's - and the GOP's - rising poll numbers:

 Of course, Trump remains a hugely divisive and polarising figure with a penchant for flying loose with the truth and heavy on the inflammatory rhetoric.
But love him or loathe him, there is no denying that he’s winning.

So once again, I can only advise the Democrats to stop their ridiculously self-defeating state of perpetual Trump outrage and work out how they’re actually going to beat him.

Because right now, Trump’s kicking your a**.
Also along these lines, Roger L. Simon at PJ Media says that "The Caravan Means the Wall Will Be Built."

David French at NRO says, "Stop it with this idiocy about how the possible rollback of Title IX's definition of sex to include people who resent the DNA they were born with (an expansion of the definition that happened on the Most Equal Comrade's watch) somehow deprives such people of their humanity."

Robert Stacy McCain on how listening to the likes of Richard Florida has accelerated our cultural rot:


One of the Bad Ideas of recent years that bothers me most — because it is both widely believed among the elite and easily demonstrable as wrong — is Richard Florida’s theory of the “Creative Class”:
While I was in Massachusetts last fall for a book event hosted by Pete Da Tech Guy, we visited a Mexican restaurant in Worcester, a somewhat run-down city that was once a major manufacturing center. Picking up the local free alternative weekly Worcester Magazine, I was thumbing through it and noticed an ad proclaiming the city’s enthusiastic devotion to LGBT rights.
I doubt that anyone in America, asked to name a city notable for its vibrant homosexual community, would name Worcester, Mass., off the top of their head, but it was obvious the local Chamber of Commerce had bought into Richard Florida’s analysis, which uses “a gay index (ranking cities by the concentration of gay couples in the population)” as one metric of urban growth potential within his “creative class” theory . . .
The problem is that this is a reversal of cause and effect. Prosperity attracts artists and intellectuals to a city, but they are not the ones who create the basis of prosperity. Ancient Athens was famed for its architecture and philosophy, but its prosperity was due to the success of the Athenians in commerce and in war. Through the Aegean port of Piraeus, the ancient Athenians developed a vast merchant empire, establishing colonies throughout the region, as far as modern-day Turkey and Italy, and the wealth obtained by trade enabled the Athenians to equip a powerful army and navy. The Athenians were an adventurous, enterprising and warlike people, and it was these qualities that made their city wealthy, thus attracting the artists and philosophers. Richard Florida’s “creative class” theory gets this causation exactly backwards, confusing certain traits of wealthy places (especially tolerance of homosexuality) as the reason those places became wealthy.
Great Jake Wagner piece at The Resurgent entitled "the Collective 'We' and the Republican Form of Government." He launches into his subject by noting how Michigan leftists are fond of talking about "our water."




13 comments:

  1. The caravan will help Trump build his wall so much that I wonder whether he isn't behind it somehow. The announcement of the roll back of trans might be designed as well to provoke more outrageous protest over something most Americans find rather absurd. There ain't gonna be a blue wave. Of nothing else it's all so confusing that the meddlers may be succeeding again. Gonna be an interesting couple of years. Oh, the market, one of Donnie's major bragging points, is down 1.4% this morning over bad news from 3M and Caterpiller. Big deficit increase over Corp tax cuts too great a price to pay as they will always continue to whine about something holdi.g them back.

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  3. Having money forcibly taken from then that they'd otherwise put to productive and profitable use certainly holds them back.

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  4. So you continually say. More bull shit.

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  5. Productive uses like contributing to PACs to work their will with all their mullah?

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  6. That's one - very small - use.

    In fact, the first time I ever heard of Dan Quayle, much less knew anything about him, was when I met him in person at his campaign office in Indy when he was running for Senate. We presented him with a check from the Indiana Chapter of the American Metal Stamping Association. Organizations, like individuals, have reasons to prefer certain candidates over others.

    But there are other uses, such as research and development, developing new products, investing in capital equipment, hiring people, paying dividends to stockholders.

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  7. But really, spelling out the uses isn't necessary. What a person or an organization does with his, her or its money is no one else's business. The money does not belong to the government.

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  8. We all pay taxes dude, so your cop-out is bull poopie.

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  9. Paul Voelker, former Fed Chairman under Carter & Reagan says we're headed towards plutocracy: "“There is no force on earth that can stand up effectively, year after year, against the thousands of individuals and hundreds of millions of dollars in the Washington swamp aimed at influencing the legislative and electoral process...”

    “The central issue is we’re developing into a plutocracy,” he told me. “We’ve got an enormous number of enormously rich people that have convinced themselves that they’re rich because they’re smart and constructive. And they don’t like government, and they don’t like to pay taxes.” Washington, when he arrived, “was a city filled with bureaucrats,” he said. “It didn’t make them bad.” At the time, civil servants — like his father, the township manager of Teaneck, N.J. — were respected. “I grew up in a world in which good government was a good term,” he said.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/23/business/dealbook/paul-volcker-federal-reserve.html

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  10. He may have some career accomplishments at the Federal Reserve, but he's showing here that he's capable if being quite infantile. For one thing, there is nothing wrong with being rich. One's income or assets ought not to have anything to do with how much they're taxed. And the phrase "don't like government" is so sweeping as to be meaningless. He's being intellectually lazy, avoiding going into any look at what kind of government or how much government these "rich people" might be talking about. to be fair, maybe he's never read any Locke or Burke or Madison. Ditto the shit about "good government." He needs to stop it. Of course, every city, state and nations needs roads paved. Bit if he's talking about redistribution or "social insurance," he ought to have the balls to say so. And "don't like taxes." Who does like having their money seized at gunpoint?

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  11. And your comment "we all pay taxes" is at least as lazy. Of course, and no one's disputing that some degree of taxation is necessary. But if we had the size and scope of government we had prior to the 20th century, we wouldn't have to be taxes anywhere as much as we are, or as much as Democrats would like to tax us.

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  12. Now it's time to whip-out your at gunpoint BS.

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