Tuesday, September 20, 2016

How the Left manipulates elections

So how is the George Soros funded Left trying to rig the elections? J. Christian Adams tells us at PJ Media.
Below are ten top agenda items of the organized Left to transform American election outcomes by transforming process rules.

You're probably only familiar with one -- the Left's fight against voter identification laws. But the Left’s agenda goes far beyond opposition to voter ID.

For example, tens of thousands of aliens are on American voter rolls, if not more. And they're voting. The Soros-funded Left opposes efforts to find and remove aliens on the rolls, because the aliens are voting the way they want.

Voter ID is only one component of election integrity. You need to know about the Left's expansive agenda to permanently transform the American election process.

1. Block Citizenship Verification

2. Early Voting

3. Out of Precinct Voting

4. Felon re-enfranchisement
Ex-cons vote for Democrats at astounding rates, approaching 9 to 1. Multiple presidential elections would have likely come out differently had felons enjoyed the right to vote. Felon voting advocates want Democrats to win elections, period.

5. Mandatory Voter Registration
Of course, voter registration plays an important role. It allows election officials to verify the identity of registrants, to place them in the correct precincts, and to ensure that duplicate registrations don’t exist.

These concerns, however, are considered nuisances to mandatory voting advocates.

6. Dirty Voter Rolls
Leftist groups are opposing efforts to clean voter rolls across the country. Millions of phony and obsolete registrations infect the rolls.

These groups have sued the Ohio secretary of State, and have interfered in other attempts to keep the rolls clean. They say their aim is to prevent a valid voter from being removed improperly -- but they can’t even find a single voter who was removed contrary to law.

7. Foreign Language Ballots

8. Same Day Registration

Same day registration is a law that allows you to walk into a polling place for the first time, register to vote, and cast a regular ballot. It is a top agenda item of the institutional Left.

Voter fraud associated with same day registration allowed Senator Al Franken to win in 2008, and also helped President Obama win Ohio in 2008.

9. State Qualification Instructions on Registration Forms

Of course it is a federal felony for an alien to register, and another felony for them to vote. But guess who has to investigate and enforce that law?

James Comey’s FBI, and Loretta Lynch’s Department of Justice.

10. National Popular Vote
This change would shift power and GOTV dollars to large urban areas. The Electoral College reflects the fact that the states are independent sovereigns. The Constitution respects the state's power to cast votes for president as a sovereign state, and with it comes the consent of the state to participate in the federal system.

The states control the casting of electoral votes under our Constitution. That’s what the left hates. They prefer large urban areas decide the outcome of presidential elections, areas where an effective two-party system doesn’t exist. When the corruption of Philadelphia and Detroit can directly taint the outcome of national elections instead of being confined to the casting of Pennsylvania’s and Michigan’s electoral votes, the lawless will have triumphed.

If you can't remember the particulars of the list above, the theme can be summed up as follows: more federal power, more centralized control, and less state control.

You’ll notice that opposing voter ID didn’t make the list. While voter ID is important, the institutional Left has bigger fish to fry.

These 10 agenda items move hundreds of thousands of votes, while voter ID would stop a comparative whisper of illegal votes.

The institutional Left understands that controlling the process rules leads to power. The machinery matters more than the policy. So watch for these ten agenda items to be repackaged and forced upon an America that once treasured decentralization of power and the rule of law.
Read more here.

Monday, September 19, 2016

Self-replicating robots

Ever want to escape the earth? There are billions of other worlds out there, and while we don’t know a lot about most of them, there’s a good chance at least one is better than Earth itself. With the possible exception of Mars, it’s extremely unlikely humans living now will ever make it to any of those distant worlds. What might, instead, is a Von Neumann self-replicating robot probe.
Read more here.

All is well

We had a scare this evening. We thought the newborn baby goat had disappeared. She had been placed with her mama inside the fence where the hens free range.

After about a half hour of looking, we still had not found the baby. The mama was frantically calling for her. Then, Amanda found her wedged in between a pallet and a tarp. She hugged the baby, had the horse kiss it, then handed it off to Kim.

Mom, dad, and baby were reunited.

It seemed to me that daddy goat had only one thing on his horny mind, so we encouraged mom and baby to go find a place to nurse.


Ensnaring her subordinates and friends in a web of deceit.

Austin Bay writes at Observer that the overriding issue in this campaign is honesty.
...This month’s fascinating pro-honesty sequence of events began on September 7, when The Washington Post and New York Times panicked as the sky fell on their world. While moderating an NBC-sponsored forum focusing on defense issues, Matt Lauer made the mistake of asking Hillary about her mishandling of classified national security information (the Media Privilege term is “email scandal”) and her record for obsessive lying (what Democratic operatives with by-lines call “the trust issue”).

Read the Time.com transcript. Lauer asked her if her mishandling of classified information wasn’t more than a mistake, but a display of very bad judgment—judgment so awful as to disqualify her from serving as commander-in-chief.

Totally fair question, and one the press should have asked in March 2015 when we learned she was using her own private communication system that was beyond the reach of the Freedom of Information Act.

Washington Post and New York Times editorials lynched Lauer. Suddenly The Today Show co-anchor was yesterday. For seeking to elicit truth from the powerful—and in Hillary’s case, a presidential candidate who avoided press conferences for almost ten months—Matt was treated as a treasonous deplorable, a pariah on par with Rush Limbaugh.

Lauer violated Media Privilege protocol. According to the rules of Media Privilege, presidential debate moderators are supposed to Go Full George “War On Women” Stephanopoulos and Complicity Yours Candy Crowley, making certain the Democrat shines and the Republican gets hammered.

...Matt Lauer’s September 7 questions cut to the real core of the 2016 election. The decisive element in every judgment Hillary makes is how it affects her, personally and politically—not how it might help or harm America. Like William Safire said in 1996, Hillary is a congenital liar. She cannot be trusted with the power of the presidency. To say otherwise is to Wage War On Honesty.
Read much more here.

"After he came back from Afghanistan two years ago, he became real religious"

Edwin Mora reports for Breitbart,
Authorities have taken into custody a 28-year-old U.S. citizen of Afghan descent, Ahmad Khan Rahami, who has been linked to planting two pressure cooker bombs in New York City on Saturday that wounded 29 people and suspected of placing several other similar explosive devices throughout New Jersey as part of a bombing spree.

The New York Times (NYT) reports:

The dramatic arrest of the man, Ahmad Khan Rahami, came after the police issued a cellphone alert to millions of residents in the area telling them to be on the lookout for the suspect, who was described as ‘armed and dangerous.’

Mr. Rahami, 28, was identified on surveillance video near the locations of both the bomb that exploded in Chelsea [NYC] and another device that did not detonate a few blocks away… It remained unclear whether there were other suspects who the police were searching for in the connection with the bombing.

Rahami is a United States citizen of Afghan descent. It is unclear when he became a citizen. However, it is known that he traveled back to Afghanistan a few years ago with his family.

His last known address was in Elizabeth, New Jersey where he lived with his family after emigrating from Afghanistan.

He reportedly lived with three brothers, a sister, and their father.
Read more here.

Do you know what Charles Koch stands for?

Why does the Left hate this man? Helping people help themselves. Permissionless innovation. Get rid of corporate welfare. Freedom of speech. Help children learn their aptitude. Integrity, humility, work ethic, responsibility, courage. The left hates Mr. Koch like we on the right hate George Soros. Mike Rowe interviews Charles Koch.

Protecting

I am amazed to watch the protectiveness of Kezia, the mama of the eight new pups. Kezia doesn't want to be fenced in with the pups, but if any other animals dare come close to the pups, including this horse, Kezia is there to fiercely protect her brood.

Impugning others for "making conclusions"

In the New York Times reporting about the bombings this week, Ann Althouse shows us how they slanted coverage toward Hillary:
That caught my eye because of the way the NYT, in an earlier report, blogged here, made Donald Trump seem bad for for saying "I must tell you that just before I got off the plane, a bomb went off in New York and nobody knows exactly what’s going on." The Times followed that by saying that Hillary Clinton "seemed to scold Mr. Trump for his quick assessment. 'I think it’s always wiser to wait until you have information before making conclusions,' Mrs. Clinton said." The Times omitted what Hillary said right before that: "I've been briefed about the bombings in New York and New Jersey." All we had were 2 candidates having heard about what happened and calling it a bomb. But the NYT presented it to look as though Trump was impulsive and Hillary was sober and thoughtful.

So today Ann is wondering
How was it possible for the NYT to say "No Tie to Global Terrorism Is Seen" less than a day after a bomb explodes with an investigation getting underway?

Ann continues, It's dangerous to elevate Hillary Clinton for issuing the sober bromide "it’s always wiser to wait until you have information before making conclusions," because it makes me want to think of the times when she made a conclusion before she had information. For example: "We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with."
Read more here.

Who is spending money for t.v. and radio ads?


Here are some numbers that will surprise you.
of the $149,912,723 millon in booked TV and radio spending through election day for these three presidential candidates, $145,299,727 is being spent by the Clinton campaign combined with pro-Clinton PACs.
Read more at adage.com.

Baby time

Lots of babies around here this morning.

The black goat in the background just gave birth a few minutes ago. I don't know if you can see her baby, which is at her right leg. I didn't want to get too close, because mama has not seen me before.
Here is another picture of mama and baby.

Over here at the bottom of the aspen tree are some new pups. Their dad is a beautiful golden retriever, and their mama is a poodle. Four black pups and four white ones.

What is the root of Hillary's hate for us?

Kurt Schlicter writes at Town Hall,
If you refuse to bend a knee, if you insist on defying her, if you refuse to play your assigned role as a supporting character in the creepy psychodrama that is her life, then you are worse than nothing. You are the enemy. We’re all the daddy she could never please, the husband who humiliated her, the world leaders who snickered at her ridiculous reset button. Psychologically, she can’t confront them, so her warped mind assigns their wrongs to us.

...But as misguided as it is, her hate is real. She said it herself – the enemy she is most proud of fighting is you. Not al-Qaeda. Not Gadhafi. Not Saddam Hussein before it became unfashionable.

You. Fellow Americans who have committed the unpardonable sin of refusing to submit to her will. And you know it because she has told you again and again in word and deed.

She will never be the president of all Americans – in fact, her venomous hatred of her fellow citizens seems to be making it less and less likely that she will ever be the president of any Americans. But if she wins, just imagine it. Imagine her hatred backed up by an energized federal government packed with her partisans.

Will the Justice Department check her? No, it will be a club to bludgeon her enemies into submission – and we know who her enemies are, don’t we?

Will the IRS check her? No, the IRS uproar will be not a cautionary example of government gone rogue but a template for the future.

Will the FBI check her? Get real. Comey is too busy counting his 30 pieces of silver while wearing a loincloth made from the pelt of his legendary integrity.

She hates us. We are deplorable. We are irredeemable. And so neither she nor her loyal minions have any self-imposed moral limits on what they may do to us to ensure that we are utterly crushed. Take away our rights? Strip away our livelihoods? Prevent our participation in our own governance? It’s open season on us, all because she hates us.

Except real Americans don’t react well to being told to shut up and slink away while the elite decides how things are going to be. Hillary Clinton is, at this moment, managing to lose to an immensely flawed guy who is essentially a walking, talking middle finger to her and the smug jerks like her who presume to look down on us.

But there is still a good chance that she will slip through, that there will be a President Hillary Clinton. And then all bets are off.

...Let’s hope America chooses the lesser of two evils, and if it instead chooses Hillary, let’s hope I’m wrong about the result. But I fear I’m not. Because one thing is absolutely indisputable.

Hillary hates you.
Read more here.

Obama's legacy: Trump!

So Barack Obama tells a black audience that if they do not turn out in large numbers to vote for Hillary it will be an insult to his legacy. Just what is his legacy? Victor Davis Hanson tackles the subject.
Without policy achievements to hang his hat on, Obama’s rhetoric will be how he’s remembered – and the results have been ugly.

On his recent Asian tour, President Obama characterized his fellow Americans (the most productive workers in the world) as “lazy.”

In fact, he went on to deride Americans for a list of supposed transgressions ranging from the Vietnam War to environmental desecration to the 19th century treatment of Native Americans.

“If you’re in the United States,” the president said, “sometimes you can feel lazy and think we’re so big we don’t have to really know anything about other people.”

...What, then, is the presidential legacy of Barack Obama?

It will not be found in either foreign- or domestic-policy accomplishment. More likely, he will be viewed as an outspoken progressive who left office loudly in the same manner that he entered it — as a critic of the culture and country in which he has thrived.

But there may be another, unspoken legacy of Obama, and it is his creation of the candidacy of Donald J. Trump.

Trump is running as an angry populist, fueled by the promise that whatever supposed elites such as Obama have done to the country, he will largely undo.

Obama’s only legacy seems to be that “hope and change” begat “make America great again.”
Read much more here.

Sunday, September 18, 2016

Obama bans dabbing

Change needs to come swiftly or it may be too late.

Bookworm writes,
Over the past eight years, Obama has wasted our economy, weakened our military, led us from behind into retreat and failure, and has been determined and resolute only about turning America into coyote chum. Change needs to come swiftly or it may be too late. Trump’s creativity, energy, and ability to feed off of hurdles and losses, bodes well for a lugubrious, wounded country that needs to be up and lively very quickly.
Read more here.

Criticizing Trump, then raping an illegal alien

sundance reports at Conservative Treehouse,
You might remember a Hispanic political activist named Tony Yapias, who was extremely critical of Donald Trump’s assertion that some illegal Mexican aliens were rapists.

This week Tony Yapias has been arrested for rape. However, not only was Yapias arrested for rape – his victim was, …wait for it…, yep, an illegal alien.

Yes, it appears Mexican rapist Tony Yapias felt additionally empowered by the fact his victim was less likely to be able to contact law enforcement.


Read more here.

“The price of inaction is far greater than the cost of making mistakes.”

John Farnam writes about the lessons learned from the San Bernardino terrorist attack
Other than the obvious lesson that being constantly armed is essential in our current age, here are some additional points gleaned from reports on the Islamic terrorist attack in San Bernardino, CA on 2 Dec 15 at the County Public Health Department’s Christmas party.

People at the gathering reporting hearing multiple “popping sounds.” Moments later, a person clad in black, wearing a mask, and bearing a rifle, started shooting at attendees.

(1) Warning is scant! Denial/hesitation is lethal. Always have a plan and exit-strategy in place.

(2) People in motion get hit less often than people who are stationary. So, get in motion instantly. You can decide what to do WHILE you’re moving!

(3) Some victims waited for instructions. They’re still waiting! You must think independently and be courageous enough to act unilaterally, and quickly, upon your own conclusions and judgement. Waiting for/seeking “approval ” or “consensus” will be fatal.

(4) In the San Bernardino attack, a second active murderer followed the first. So, don’t relax too soon! In modern terrorist attacks, it is best to assume the presence of multiple threats.

(5) As I’ve said before, “rescue” is mostly myth. The attack will likely be over long before even the first police arrive, much less the SWAT Team. In the interim, you’re on your own!
Read more here.



The plague of female rage

Antonia Hoyle writes at the Daily Mail, and explores
Why are modern women so aggressive? It's been called the dark side of equality - a surge in respectable women flying into violent rages for the most trivial reasons.

...Research has also found that women are significantly more likely to be verbally and physically aggressive to men than vice versa — something physicians are seeing more of in their clinics.
Read much more here.

Will we have another good view of the moon tonight?

It looks like it.

Does the blooming never stop?

I started to get bummed out about the fact that many plants, including produce, have been hit by freezing temperatures at night up here in the high altitude mountains outside of Santa Fe. No more sunflowers, for example. Then I noticed that the high desert cactus are starting to bloom!

I went a little further, and saw these purple flowers just now coming in to bloom. Does it ever stop?

Sexual abuse of boys by adult females

Ally Fogg writes at the Guardian,
Children do not have affairs with older women, they are abused by them.


...Clinical research offers no support for the idea that victims of childhood sexual abuse are less damaged when the offenders are female. Meanwhile, there is evidence that male victims of female offenders may find it harder to get help and address the consequences, when everyone tells them they should have enjoyed it.
Read more here.

Dallas police officer sues Black Lives Matter and other rabble

Mark Ramirez reports at the Dallas Morning News,
A Dallas police sergeant has filed a federal lawsuit against Black Lives Matter and others for inciting race riots and anti-cop violence.

...The listed defendants include not only those associated with the Black Lives Matter movement but public figures such as the Rev. Al Sharpton, Louis Farrahkan, George Soros, the New Black Panthers Party and even President Barack Obama and presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

...The suit accuses the defendants of inciting supporters and others "to engage in threats and attacks" against law enforcement officers around the country, including the July 7 murders of five Dallas officers by Micah Johnson after a Black Lives Matter demonstration.

Update: Glenn Reynolds does some digging, as usual, and finds that the officer filing the suit is himself black.

It is not calm in Germany

Christopher Caldwell reports at The Weekly Standard,
Germany is blowing up again over migration. The Saxon town of Bautzen has, like dozens of similar places across Germany, a barracks for some of the million or two Middle Eastern migrants who have been streaming across the Mediterranean for the past year-and-a-half. People in Bautzen aren't used to foreigners, and now groups of young men have taken to congregating in city's central square, the Kornmarkt. The migrants say they come there for the free internet. This upsets the locals, 80 of whom waged a pitched battle against 20 teenage migrants on Wednesday evening. Alcohol was involved on both sides. To judge from the video at FAZ.com, accounts differ on who is to blame. The Germans say that the young migrants (whom they refer to as UMAs, the German acronym for unaccompanied minors seeking asylum) are harassing women and smashing things. The UMAs, in turn, say the locals (whom they refer to as "Nazis") accost them every day with shouts of "Foreigners out!"

The confrontations take place against the background of a more general society-wide anger in Germany. Last Saturday, Bautzen's right-wingers and left-wingers confronted each other on the streets, rather as they did a century ago in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and Germany's defeat in World War I. On Thursday night, following the fights, 350 people, most of them natives, were on the streets again. A cordon of police was required to separate the pro-immigrant and anti-immigrant sides—again, much as they once tried to separate the Communists and anti-Communists. More protests are planned for this weekend.
Read more here.

So you think you can keep on driving gas guzzlers well into the future?

Zero Hedge reports,So you think you can keep on buying gas guzzlers well into the future?
Great Bakken Oil Field is now down a stunning 25% from its peak in just a little more than a year and half ago:


...the Bakken will be producing a lot less oil by 2020 and very little by 2025. This would also be true for the Eagle Ford Field in Texas. According to the most recent EIA Drilling Productivity Report, the Eagle Ford Shale Oil Field in Texas will be producing an estimated 1,026,000 barrels of oil per day in September, down from a peak of 1,708,000 barrels per day in May 2015. Thus, Eagle Ford oil production is slated to be down a stunning 40% since its peak last year.
Read more here.

Japan's virgins

Then UK Telegraph reports that over 40 percent of Japan's single adults
aged 18 to 34 found that around 42 per cent of men and 44.2 per cent of single women had never had sex.

The study is carried out by Japan's National Institute of Population and Social Security every five years.
Read more here.

Domestic violence against men has tripled in decade

David Wooding reports at The Sun that in the UK,
DOMESTIC violence against men has trebled in the past decade, shocking official figures reveal.

A record 5,640 wives and girlfriends were convicted of assaulting their male partners last year — up from 1,850 in 2007.


The issue has become a taboo because victims are often too ashamed to talk about their experiences.

But an MP is now calling for action after evidence emerged the problem is growing at an alarming rate.

Stats released by the Attorney General show 177 women are convicted of domestic abuse EVERY WEEK.

They show 1,850 women were convicted of domestic violence in 2007 but last year the total dealt with by the courts had risen to 5,640.

Crown Prosecutors insist any form of domestic violence is serious and there is no bias or lack of concern when dealing with male victims.

Tory MP Philip Davies, who uncovered the stats, said: “When people think of domestic violence, they automatically think of men abusing women.

“But the vast increase in the number of women convicted of domestic violence over the past decade must not be overlooked.

“We must not forget the male victims.

“Both male and female perpetrators of domestic violence should be dealt with equally harshly by the courts and more should be done to help victims of domestic violence whether they are men or women.”

More than 52,000 women have been prosecuted for assaulting their partners since 2006, the figures show.

Trump's trolling

Victims of illegal alien crime

At Breitbart Julia Hahn reports on a speech Donald Trump made at a luncheon to honor “America’s most forgotten families”– the victims of illegal alien crime. Read it here.

Kellyanne Conway and Bill Maher

Trump and Hillary react to last night's explosion in New York City.

We have all become accustomed to each of the candidates responding to news events by rushing to find something to use in a direct attack on their opponent. But Hillary and her cohorts at The New York Times have really stepped in it today, after a bomb injured 29 people in New York City. Ann Althouse explains here.

Sun Tzu's advice

Read Oregon Muse's thoughts on how the birther controversy got started.
Of course, Obama could have cleared up all of this nonsense immediately and at any time. So why didn't he? I think it's mainly because a number of conservatives were chasing their tails over this (*cough*wnd*cough*) and Obama was merely following Sun Tzu's advice to never interrupt an enemy while he's making a mistake.
Read more here.

Are you redeemable?

Here's the quote from Hillary:
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people, now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric. Now some of those folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.
Although I do not have eleven million visitors to my website, not even eleven thousand, I surely am one of those she considers irredeemable, don't you think? As Oregon Muse informs us in today's book thread,
So she's just consigned millions of Americans to the burning pits of hell. Inescapably. Hopelessly. No chance whatsoever of getting out. That's what the word 'irredeemable' means.
Read more here.

Saturday, September 17, 2016

Meat cleaver-wielding Palestinian

Ed Driscoll brings to our attention the biased reporting of in-the-tank-for-Hillary New York Daily News, on whether or not the latest jihad terror attack was in fact a terror attack.
MOVE ALONG CITIZENS, NOTHING TO SEE HERE: Meat cleaver madman, a Palestinian, was in Midtown to appeal deportation order before he sliced cop, the New York Daily News reports:

The meat cleaver maniac who hacked an off-duty cop is a Palestinian busted two months ago while screaming in Arabic outside a Brooklyn synagogue.

Suspect Akram Joudeh was only in New York for Thursday’s Midtown rampage because he was appealing a deportation notice — with a hearing set for Oct. 14, a high-ranking NYPD source told the Daily News.

Warning — cognitive dissonance ahead!

Cops found two knives inside Joudeh’s car after answering the July report of an erratic man on Shore Parkway in Brooklyn shout “Allahu Akbar!” — or “God is great” in Arabic.

But the source said investigations by the NYPD and FBI showed Joudeh, 32, was emotionally disturbed and not a terrorist threat.

Especially not in an election year. (See also: Minor Libyan unpleasantness on September 11, 2012.)

3 new strains of norovirus that are causing gastro outbreaks.


Jacinta Bowler writes in Science Alert,
Australian scientists have discovered three new strains of norovirus, which they say are responsible for a local outbreak of viral gastroenteritis over the last couple of months.

At the worst point of this outbreak, cases of gastro outnumbered influenza during peak flu season in some areas of Australia.

Norovirus is a single-stranded RNA virus that causes vomiting, diarrhoea, nausea, and in some cases, a temporary loss of taste.

The virus is spread through things like aerosol particles and infected faeces, and can stay on surfaces for at least seven days. As few as five virus particles are all that’s needed to infect someone with norovirus.

Worldwide, the virus affects 267 million people, and causes 200,000 deaths per year, usually in patients with weakened immune systems, such as infants or the elderly.

In 2012, researchers from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia had found a strain of norovirus they named Sydney 2012, which was causing a worldwide pandemic of gastro.

"Norovirus is highly infectious and can spread through aerosol particles when people vomit," said lead researcher, Peter White.

"During the past 20 years there have been six global epidemics of norovirus, in 1996, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2009 and 2012."
Read more here.
h/t Glenn Reynolds

Hillary slams stigma around sexually transmitted diseases

Hillary Clinton Thanks Woman for Shattering STI Stigma

Hillary Clinton’s powerful letter to a 24-year-old writer living with genital herpes is striking a nerve on social media.

The Washington Post wrote about the person in the photo above, who received the letter from Hillary Clinton.

Either he really isn’t American born or he’s a con man.

Why has Obama been so zealous about protecting his college transcripts? Bookworm speculates,
He could easily shrug off bad grades by explaining that he was bored and has since grown, and that he should be judged by his adult accomplishments, not the grades of his youth. What Obama cannot shrug off, if my theory is correct, is the fact that his transcripts all list him as an African national. There’s no good way out of that: either he really isn’t American born or he’s a con man.

Bookworm continues,
Incidentally, that same effort to elevate himself explains the boast about his Kenyan birth in his literary bio. As an American born black, he’s uninteresting . . . one of many. As a Kenyan-born outside observer of America, he has more traction.
Read much more here.

"I was going to read this book.....I really was."

Commenter Daniel B, is quoted by Don Surber about Hillary's new book and his health.

I was going to read this book.....I really was.
But just as I got started, I found myself under sniper fire, passed out, and fell and hit my head. After that I got double vision and had to wear glasses that were so damn thick I couldn't even see to read. Then I had an allergic reaction to something and started coughing so hard I spit out what looked like a couple of lizard's eyeballs, my limbs locked up, and I passed out and fell down again, waking up only to find out I had been diagnosed with pneumonia 2 days earlier. Somehow I managed to power through it all, but it's a good thing I was able to make a small fortune on this random small trade in the commodities market (cattle futures or some such thing) and then, miracle of all miracles, a few banks offered me a few million to just talk to their employees for a few minutes - and all that really helped out because I swear I was dead broke and couldn't figure out how I was gonna come up with the 6 bucks to pay for this book, let alone pay the $1,500 for my health insurance this month. I still want to read it, but, honestly, what difference at this point does it make? I hear it sucks anyway.

h/t Gerard Vanderleun

Internet trends

Gerard Vanderleun brings us a summary of Mary Meeker's annual Internet Trends report, which goes in-depth on these issues:
• Global Internet users have surpassed 3B; India has supplanted the US as the world’s second-largest Internet market.

• Internet user growth remains consistent (led by acceleration in India), while smartphone user and shipment growth have slowed.

• In the face of a slowing global economy, key macro growth drivers from the past 2 decades are less certain.

• Internet advertising (particularly via mobile) continues to grow, but so does ad-blocking, pushing the envelope on development of more innovative ad formats.

• New online-first brands have rapidly grown in popularity for the millennial generation with their focus on omni-channel and personalized distribution strategies.

• In communication, video and images shared are growing as a means of storytelling; creators, consumers, and advertisers are taking part.

• Messaging has evolved from simple, expressive conversation to business-focused use cases, with Asian platforms often leading the way.

• More efficient and often more convenient than typing, voice-based interfaces are ramping quickly and creating a new paradigm for human-computer interaction.

• Transportation is being re-imagined, as the rise of car computerization, autonomous driving, and sharing transform our understanding of mobility.

• Looking to China, Internet leadership continues, as the country boasts global innovation powerhouses in e-commerce, messaging, travel, financial services, and on-demand transportation.

• The proliferation of data generated by a multitude of devices has fostered tremendous business opportunity, but privacy concerns abound.

A Hillary insider comes clean

A blogger named Larry Johns writes,
I am shocked at the audacity of Hillary Clinton to decry Donald Trump as a birther because her campaign not only pushed that item in a bid to discredit Barack Obama, but mounted a sustained campaign attack Obama on a broad array of issues. How do I know? I was part of that effort and was in regular email and phone coordination with Sidney Blumenthal. Sidney was the conduit who fed damaging material to me that I subsequently posted on my blog.

In some cases Sid Blumenthal actually provided a draft piece that I would slightly modify and publish under my name. Most of the time, however, Sid provided background information and researched material that I would use to craft pieces. How many? I am providing the links to 63 blog articles that I posted (and in one case was posted by Susan Hudgens, who assisted with the blog) between January 2008 and June 30, 2008.

Here is simple summary of material (in writing or through a verbal briefing) that I received from Sid?

Information surrounding the corrupt business relationship between Barack Obama and Tony Rezko.

Information about Barack Obama’s ties to Palestinian radicals.

Information concerning Barack Obama’s longstanding ties to the American terrorist, Bill Ayers.

Information concerning Barack Obama’s close ties to radical clerics–i.e., Jeremiah Wright and Father Michael Pfleger.

Information concerning allegations that Barack Obama was not a Information concerning allegations that Barack Obama was not a natural born citizen.

Information concerning Barack Obama being adopted by Indonesian Muslim Lolo Soetoro.
Read more here.

Bomb explodes at charity run in New Jersey

Talia Tirella and Dan Mannarino report for pix11.com,
SEASIDE PARK, N.J. — Seaside Park has been placed on lockdown Saturday after a pipe bomb-styled device exploded in a garbage can near the Seaside Park Semper Five 5K Charity Run route.
Read more here.
The race was canceled.

True?



h/t Open Blogger

Clinton campaign stealing money from small donors

Joshua Pundit reports,
Donate once to Hillary Clinton’s campaign using a debit or credit card and you’re likely be the gift that keeps on giving whether you want to or not.

The Clinton campaign has been caught red handed victimizing small, usually low income donors by the simple method of just resubmitting what was supposed to be a one time donation over and over again

One of the people who was victimized by this fraud was Carol Mahre. She presents the evidence:

Hillary for America processed a total of $94 in unauthorized charges to Carol Mahre’s US Bank account. This follows a pattern in which unwitting donors are charged multiple times, but always for a total of less than $100, which is a key trigger point for banks’ internal action systems. Photo: Courtesy Carol Mahre

Liz Crokin reports at Observer,
Hillary Clinton’s campaign is stealing from her poorest supporters by purposefully and repeatedly overcharging them after they make what’s supposed to be a one-time small donation through her official campaign website, multiple sources tell the Observer.

The overcharges are occurring so often that the fraud department at one of the nation’s biggest banks receives up to 100 phone calls a day from Clinton’s small donors asking for refunds for unauthorized charges to their bankcards made by Clinton’s campaign. One elderly Clinton donor, who has been a victim of this fraud scheme, has filed a complaint with her state’s attorney general and a representative from the office told her that they had forwarded her case to the Federal Election Commission.

...“We don’t investigate fraudulent charges unless they are over $100,” the fraud specialist explained. “The Clinton campaign knows this, that’s why we don’t see any charges over the $100 amount, they’ll stop the charges just below $100. We’ll see her campaign overcharge donors by $20, $40 or $60 but never more than $100.” The source, who has worked for Wells Fargo for over 10 years, said that the total amount they refund customers on a daily basis who have been overcharged by Clinton’s campaign “varies” but the bank usually issues refunds that total between $700 and $1,200 per day.

The fraud specialist said that Clinton donors who call in will attempt to resolve the issue with the campaign first but they never get anywhere. “They will call the Clinton campaign to get their refund and the issue never gets resolved. So they call us and we just issue the refund. The Clinton campaign knows these charges are small potatoes and that we’ll just refund the money back.”

The Observer story goes into detail about the ordeal of 81-year-old Carl Mahre. She sought help from her son Roger, who is a lawyer. His summary:
If you and I did this, we’d be thrown in jail. This is theft, fraud or wire fraud—it’s a federal crime!”

The incident hasn’t just left a bad taste in Roger’s mouth. Carol decided she’s not going to vote for Hillary even though she’s voted for the Democratic presidential nominee every election since President Dwight Eisenhower won reelection in 1956. “My mother is a lifelong Democrat and she’s voted every election in her life for a Democrat but she’s not going to vote for Hillary,” Roger said.

The New York Times reported in 2007 that Clinton’s first presidential campaign had to refund and subtract hundreds of thousands of dollars from its first-quarter total often because donors’ credit cards were charged twice. Additionally, it was reported that Clinton had to refund a stunning $2.8 million in donations, three times more than the $900K President Barack Obama’s campaign refunded.

Another bank source told the Observer that Clinton’s motivation in purposefully overcharging donors is not only to rake in more money for her campaign but also to inflate her small donor numbers reported to the FEC. “This gives a false impression about how much money Clinton has raised,” the source said. “The money that the bank has refunded would not be reflected in the FEC filings till after the election. This gives off the illusion to the public that her support and the amount she’s raised is much greater than what it is in reality.”
Read more here.

This is what we get when we elect ignorant and arrogant dilettantes who think that they understand the complexities of geopolitical intrigue.

At Ace of Spades Open Blogger tells us about a change in the way Syria responds to Israeli jets flying over their airspace. Syria used to do nothing about it. Now Asaad thinks Russia has his back. Micah Halpern reports at Observer, (Tuesday)
Syria shot two surface-to-air missiles at Israeli jets—and they shot at the Israeli jets not even over their own air space.

These were not errant missiles or spillover shots which is military parlance for mistakes. These missiles were calculated and intentionally targeted shots from an S-200 Russian missile system aimed at Israeli jets that were, quite frankly, targeting Syrian rocket launchers.

This is a major change in Syrian engagement. It could signal an escalation of tensions between Israel and Syria, especially because three mortars were shot from Syria into Israel later that day.

We know that Russia has given Syria the green light in many areas. I cannot imagine, however, that Russia signed off on this latest adventure. Russia does not want to test its technological military prowess against Israel over Syria.

The potential embarrassment to Russia would be so humiliating to them and jeopardize their entire Middle East plan. Imagine if there engaged in a dog fight over Syria or the Mediterranean and Russia took more losses than Israel. The entire episode would take only a few seconds—blink and it’s over. If Israel were to emerge victorious, which is highly probable, not only would Russia lose face but the ripple effect of that encounter in the Arabic and Muslim world would turn Israel into a superpower even greater than the Arab world already believes her to be.

Russia cannot afford that kind of risk. They are playing for the long run in the Middle East. This was an amateur move on Syria’s part. There will be repercussions.
Read more here.

Open Blogger adds this important observation,
This is what we get when we elect ignorant and arrogant dilettantes who think that they understand the complexities of geopolitical intrigue. The world is going to suffer for a very long time because Obama and his idiot surrogates in the state department think they can outmaneuver the rest of the world.

They haven't yet...not once, and it has been almost eight years.
Read more here.

Friday, September 16, 2016

Noticing...or not

Tonight in all directions the sun's setting colors were gliding through big rain clouds.
The meat chickens seemingly could care less.



Disruptions and technological progress

Writers at The Futurist bring to our attention the concepts of Invisible Disruptions : Deep Learning and Blockchain
...we can project that the average home of 2025 will have various wonders. Multiple ultrathin TVs hung like paintings, robots for menial cleaning, VR-ready goggles and gloves, sensors and microchips embedded into clothing, table-sized surface computers, intelligent LED lightbulbs with motion-detecting sensors, and a 3D Printer, to name a few. The home network of at least 15 nodes manages the entertainment, security, and energy systems of the home simultaneously.

At the industrial level, the changes are even greater. Just as with telephony, photography, video, and audio before them, we will see medicine, energy, manufacturing, media, and legal industries become information technology industries, and thus set to advance at rates much faster than before. The economic impact of this is staggering.

The authors link to an article by Mark Perry, written at Christmas time in 2014. Perry points out,
For an American consumer or household spending $750 in 1964, they would have been able to purchase the 21-inch color TV/entertainment center from the Sears Christmas catalog pictured above (includes phonograph and AM/FM radio). An American consumer or household spending that same amount of inflation-adjusted dollars today (about $5,600) would be able to furnish their entire kitchen with 5 brand-new appliances (refrigerator, gas stove and oven, washer, dryer, and freezer) and buy 7 state-of-the-art electronic items for their home (a Toshiba Satellite 14″ laptop computer, a Garmin 5 Inch GPS, a Canon EOS Rebel T5 DSLR Camera, a Sony 1,000 Watt, 5.1-Channel 3D Smart Blu-Ray Home Theater System, a Sharp 50 inch LED HDTV, an Apple iPod Touch 32GB MP3 Player, and an Apple iPhone 6 [with 2-year contract]). And of course, even a billionaire in 1964 wouldn’t have been able to purchase many of the items that even a teenager can afford today, e.g. laptop computer, GPS, iPhone, digital camera.

As much as we might complain about a slow economic recovery, the decline of the middle class, stagnant median household income, rising income inequality and a dysfunctional Congress, we have a lot to be thankful for, and we’ve made a lot of economic progress in the last 50 years as the example above illustrates, thanks to the “magic and miracle of the marketplace.”

Back to the article by
There is insufficient understanding of Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of ‘Creative Destruction’, where the process of technological change topples existing norms and replaces them with new ones in a new power hierarchy.

Proceeding to the present, it is not technological disruption that is new, but the exponentially rising rate of change means more sectors, businesses, and lives are being transformed at greater speed through an ever-widening cascade of disruptions.

Incumbents often go to great lengths to suppress disruptions, even if they themselves attained the position through some previous disruption. Whenever an incumbent industry has a misguided belief that disruption can be prevented outright by going to the government to get protectionist barriers erected around it, that industry merely experiences a temporary delay in the disruption, after which the reversion to the trendline is necessarily sharper. The script unfolds predictably. The incumbents focus more on political favors than innovation, which is usually a poor strategy when multiple industries are simultaneously seeking favors from the same government. In the meantime, the successors ascend to great heights at a speed the regulatory complex cannot handle, and the entire situation becomes more headline-grabbing than it otherwise may have been. Examples of such industries include publishing, taxis, and universities, all of which predictably ended up seeing their disruption happen in a compressed time, with the post-disruption landscape ending up where the general trendline would have predicted anyway.

Just a few of the examples of creative destruction that are currently underway include :ust a few of the examples of creative destruction that are currently underway include :

1) ...Artificial Intelligence (AI), after decades of quiet progress unnoticed by those outside the field, is now on the brink of making an immense economic impact.

2) 3D Printing accelerates many aspects of design, prototyping, and manufacturing, enabling greatly improved or even entirely new processes, products, and services.

3) ...Computing itself is on the brink of its first major transition in about 60 years.

4) ...Education, both higher and lower, is being disrupted by the day.

5) ...The transportation sector is currently a nexus of several simultaneous technological overhauls. Strong, light nanomaterials are entering the bodies of cars to increase fuel efficiency and safety. Engines are migrating to hybrid and electrical forms and reducing energy wastage through new design innovations. New models of ride-sharing such as Uber will alter assumptions about car ownership while monetizing unused seats. The declining price of computing ensures that the timeline for luxury features to trickle down to average cars continues to compress. The $25,000 car of 2020 will be superior to the $50,000 car of 2000 in almost every technical measure.

6) ...The financial services industry...

7) ...In the healthcare sector, there are a number of disruptions seeking to crack the innovation-obstructing walls erected across the industry in country after country.

8) ...The energy sector...

9) ...After decades of stagnation, space exploration is finally seeing a handoff from being the exclusive endeavor of 3-4 major governments to being a target for private enterprise. Private spaceflight is becoming cost-effective through companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX. From these flight capabilities, asteroid mining might be a decade away from yielding trillions of dollars of valuable elements from nearby asteroids.

...These disruptions are just some of the examples in the pipeline for the next few years, shaking the foundations of old, rigid structures. The common theme among all of them is their deflationary nature, and their process of destroying certain types of jobs while creating other jobs elsewhere at higher renumeration. This is creative destruction at its finest.
Read more here.
h/t Sara Hoyt at Instapundit

What states are most and least able to attract new citizens?

Joel Kotkin has the latest information about which states are losing people, what income brackets they fall in, and the same for states that are gaining people here.

Shapiro admits Trump's got all the momentum

Ben Shapiro admits,
...it’s difficult not to fall into the trap of believing that the immediate is the permanent. Six weeks ago, conventional wisdom (and my own opinion) was that Donald Trump would be creamed – after all, the man had demonstrated no capacity to control himself, he’d appointed an alt-right-pandering new head to his campaign, and he was trailing by double digits in a bevy of swing states.

Then Wikileaks began dumping material, Hillary Clinton continued to flail, went absent from the campaign trail, called half of Trump’s supporters “deplorables,” and physically collapsed in full sight of cellphone cameras. And Trump began using a teleprompter, logging off Twitter, and generally shutting the hell up more often.

Suddenly Trump’s got all the momentum, and slew of positive polls to boot.

...For Hillary, the problem runs deeper. People think she’s corrupt and dishonest. That’s because she’s corrupt and dishonest. To stop being Hillary, she must stop being corrupt and dishonest. It’s easier to feign sobriety than it is to feign truthfulness. Even when Hillary tells the truth these days, it sounds like a lie. And there’s no way for her to escape herself.
Read more here.

“Pets are becoming a replacement for children”

Abha Bhattarai writes in the Washington Post,
Young Americans are less likely to be homeowners, car owners or parents than their predecessors, but they do lead in one category: Pets.

Three-fourths of Americans in their 30s have dogs, while 51 percent have cats, according to a survey released by research firm Mintel. That compares to 50 percent of the overall population with dogs, and 35 percent with cats.

The findings come at a time when millennials, roughly defined as the generation born between 1980 and 2000, are half as likely to be married or living with a partner than they were 50 years ago. They are also delaying parenthood and demanding flexible work arrangements — all of which, researchers say, has translated to higher rates of pet ownership.

“Pets are becoming a replacement for children,” said Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University and author of “Generation Me.” “They’re less expensive. You can get one even if you’re not ready to live with someone or get married, and they can still provide companionship.”

...Last year Americans spent $11 billion on pet-pampering alone.

A majority of millennials — 76 percent — said they are more likely to “splurge” on their pets than for themselves, including for expensive treats (44 percent) or a custom bed (38 percent), according to a 2014 study by Wakefield Research.
Read more here.

Are you a drone flyer?

Jamie Condliffe writes at MIT Technology review,
Forget the football. The latest pastime to become a full-fledged sports phenomenon is drone racing.

Breakneck speeds, daring maneuvers, lucrative TV contracts, and large cash prizes—it’s way more exciting than golf.

Competing for supremacy in the air at small scale isn’t a new phenomenon: people have been going head to head with remote-controlled aircraft in fields for a long old time. But in the last few years, technology has provided competitions with a huge shot of adrenaline, in the form of the first-person view.

Nowadays, the small, nimble drones that zip through the air at speeds over 100 miles per hour are equipped with light, high-definition cameras, which wirelessly beam footage back to a pilot. A head-mounted display makes it feel as if that person controlling the drone is right on board.

...For some of the best drone flyers, though, straight-down-the-line racing is already starting to lose its appeal. In a recent Wired feature, the widely revered pilot Carlos Puertolas explained that as head-to-head races becomes the mainstream, there’s more excitement to be found in flying freestyle—as he demonstrates in this dizzying video. As in snowboarding or skateboarding, this is drone racing’s alternative scene, where tricks and stunts, rather than outright speed, are what demonstrates talent.

Drone racing, then, has all the attributes of a modern sport: big money, TV coverage, speed, fierce competition … and a breakaway tribe that prefers to shun the commercialized side of things. Sounds like it’s time to tune in.
Read more here.

Are you showering correctly?

Everything you ever wanted to know about showering can be found at The Daily Mail (It must be a slow news day).

Good news!

Andrew Ellson writes at The Times in UK
Teenagers born since the turn of the millennium are the most socially conservative and thrifty generation since the Second World War.

The newly classified Generation Z are much less likely to approve of gay marriage, transgender rights or the legalisation of cannabis than Baby Boomers, Millennials or Generation X, a study has found. They also have a much more prudent approach to saving and spending than any generation, except those born in 1945 or before.
Read more here.

Marrying Marxism to culture

Do you know about the Frankfurt School?

The robot was the game changer

Richard Winton and Matt Hamilton report in the LA Times,
An hours-long standoff in the darkness of the high desert came to a novel end when Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies used a robot to stealthily snatch a rifle from an attempted murder suspect, authorities said Thursday.

..."The robot was a game changer here,” said Capt. Jack Ewell, a tactical expert with the Sheriff’s Department — the largest sheriff’s department in the nation. “We didn't have to risk a deputy's life to disarm a very violent man."

Deputies ordered Bunge to surrender several times but he refused. A sheriff’s SWAT team arrived with armored vehicles and tried to coax him to surrender for more than six hours.

Eventually, officials deployed the robot to gain a closer view of Bunge’s hideout. The camera showed him on his stomach, with his rifle at his feet, Ewell said.

To seize the firearm, they hatched a plan that relied on distractions. Deputies in an armored vehicle approached to the front of Bunge, yelling at him through a public address system to surrender. A helicopter whirred overhead.

From behind, the olive-colored robot approached and extended its claw into Bunge’s hideout.

"The robot was able to move up and grab the gun without him noticing,” Ewell said. “He never knew it happened.”

Deputies quickly reversed the robot and recovered the gun. Then, they sent the device back to the berm and had the robot grab the wire fencing, exposing Bunge’s hiding spot.

"He only realized the gun was gone when the robot returned to pull down the wire,” Ewell said.

Bunge surrendered immediately.
Read more here.

How the Obama administration used our tax dollars to try to unseat Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu

Adam Kredo reports in the Free Beacon,
Congress on Friday launched a wide-ranging probe into a secret Obama administration-funded campaign to unseat Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to information exclusively obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The probe comes on the heels of an internal government report determining that the State Department provided hundreds of thousands to an organization that plotted to unseat Netanyahu in the country’s 2015 election.

Obama administration officials were found to have deleted emails from State Department accounts containing information about its relationship with OneVoice, the non-profit group that led the effort.

OneVoice, which was awarded $465,000 in U.S. grants through 2014, has been under congressional investigation since 2015, when it was first accused of funneling some of that money to partisan political groups looking to unseat Netanyahu. This type of behavior by non-profit groups is prohibited under U.S. tax law.

A group of nine leading lawmakers led by Sen. David Perdue (R., Ga.) are now formally petitioning the State Department to come clean about the effort and provide answers about how U.S. taxpayer dollars were permitted to be spent on an organization working against the elected leader of America’s closest Middle East ally, according to a readout of the investigation obtained by the Free Beacon.

“State Department officials failed to properly vet the OneVoice grant proposal because they failed to properly conduct an analysis of risks in the pre-award phase,” the senators wrote in a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry. “Unfortunately, it seems that inconsistency and apathy toward oversight of such grants at the State Department is not new. Our aid dollars should be going toward solving real problems, not contributing to the destabilization of allied governments.”

The lawmakers—including Sens. Ted Cruz (R., Texas), Mark Kirk (R., Ill.), Orrin Hatch (R., Utah), Mike Lee (R., Utah), and Johnny Isakson (R., Ga.) among others—wrote that the State Department turned a blind eye to OneVoice’s highly partisan activities and failed to perform proper oversight about how U.S. funds were being spent by the group.

...State Department officials were aware of OneVoice’s partisan activities, but still permitted the grant money to be awarded, according to the senators, who are pushing for the administration to take disciplinary action against the officials involved.

...They also are seeking to determine what “disciplinary action” is being taken against U.S. officials who knew about the plan to unseat Netanyahu but failed to take action to report this behavior.
Read more here.

Getting desperate?


Joe Schoffstall reports in the Washington Free Beacon,
Hillary Clinton ally David Brock is offering to pay for new information on Donald Trump, hoping that damaging audio or video on the Republican presidential candidate will be submitted to his super PAC.

Brock, founder of the left-wing Media Matters and operator of Correct the Record super PAC, recently posted the plea on Correct the Record’s website and is referring to the project as “TrumpLeaks,” NBC News reported.
Read more here.

Are we a dying culture?

Today Chateau Heartiste postulates a brief theory about three cultures.
Healthy culture: Alpha men, deferential women

Unhealthy culture: Entitled men, entitled women

Dying culture: Deferential men, entitled women

America is a dying culture. Trump is the last chance to meme more life back into America.

Insider details of the famed Bohemian Grove

Aaron Klein writes in Breitbart,
Perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of Colin Powell’s hacked Gmail account saga is that dozens of messages contain insider details of the famed Bohemian Grove — a place the Washington Post once described as “where the rich and powerful go to misbehave.”

Bohemian Grove is a 2,700-acre campground in Monte Rio, Calif that serves as a meeting place for top politicians and businessmen who are members of the Grove society. The site’s annual secretive meeting takes place for two weeks in July, with Powell writing that he was present at last July’s event.

...Powell sarcastically writes the attendees amounted for “half the nation’s GDP,” and that they were “all bitching about everything and discussing their next golf club to join, a G5 vs. a Global Express and their fifth home (Nantucket or Palm Beach).”
Read more here.

Jimmy Fallon gets to mess up Trump's hair

For those of us who missed it, Ann Althouse tells us about Trump's visit to "The Tonight Show" with Jimmy Fallon last night.
Does Jimmy Fallon get to mess up Hillary Clinton's hair?
She's going to be on "The Tonight Show" Monday, and Trump was on the show last night. Jimmy Fallon ended the interview by asking to mess up Trump's hair. Trump agreed!



That took some nerve. And yet if Trump had said no, it would have seemed stiff and prissy. Trump took a risk. He leaned in. It was a risk to let Jimmy have control of how much to mess it up, and then a risk to stand exposed with messed up hair and to look prissy by trying to fix it up afterwards.

Unlike with the Commander-in-Chief Forum, Trump went first. He put in a great performance, but Hillary has the advantage of seeing what Trump did before she goes on. I await her entry into the Hair-Messing Challenge.

The whole interview is excellent — relaxed and entertaining. Other clips are: "Donald Trump Talks Media Coverage, Polls and His Vocal Transformation," "Donald Trump Clarifies His Relationship with Vladimir Putin," "Donald Trump Returns for Another Mock Job Interview for President," and "Donald Trump on Board Games, His Health and Fast Food Habit."

Enjoying their last day before becoming someone's organic meal

Some meat chickens, looking for something green to eat, wandered perilously close to a Russian Sage plant blooming in the bright New Mexico sun this morning. Then they kindly fertilized it! I forgave them this time, because there is a rumor that today might be their next-to-last day of freedom.

Thursday, September 15, 2016

No word from the Donald on this one

Colin Powell emails someone about Bill Clinton being out "dicking bimbos." Donald Trump has not commented. Could this be the reason?

Did someone say #DickingBimbos?

The Lovelock "Juice"

In the LA Times David Ng writes about OJ Simpson's life in Lovelock Prison in Nevada.
...Though Simpson was initially a loner at Lovelock and had some trouble with fellow prisoners, he has since evolved into a model inmate determined to make parole — which could happen as early as next year, when Simpson will be 70.

...After initially being withdrawn, Simpson in recent years has become more social, mingling with fellow prisoners who often refer to him by his nickname, “Juice.”

...Even if he is paroled next year, Simpson’s legal woes won’t be over. He will likely face a mountain of financial obligations, including the $33.5-million judgement against him in the 1997 civil case for the murders of his ex-wife and Goldman.

He “has never honored or paid one single penny of the judgment,” Fred Goldman, father of Ron Goldman, told The Times.

The Goldman family wants “to enforce the judgment so that Simpson doesn’t profit from what he did,” said Daniel Petrocelli, an attorney for the family. Any payments would be divided between the Goldmans and the Browns.
Read more here.

Foolishness and Hubris

Publius Decius Mus writes at Claremont Review of Books,
One of the paradoxes—there are so many—of conservative thought over the last decade at least is the unwillingness even to entertain the possibility that America and the West are on a trajectory toward something very bad. On the one hand, conservatives routinely present a litany of ills plaguing the body politic. Illegitimacy. Crime. Massive, expensive, intrusive, out-of-control government. Politically correct McCarthyism. Ever-higher taxes and ever-deteriorating services and infrastructure. Inability to win wars against tribal, sub-Third-World foes. A disastrously awful educational system that churns out kids who don’t know anything and, at the primary and secondary levels, can’t (or won’t) discipline disruptive punks, and at the higher levels saddles students with six figure debts for the privilege. And so on and drearily on. Like that portion of the mass where the priest asks for your private intentions, fill in any dismal fact about American decline that you want and I’ll stipulate it.

If conservatives are right about the importance of virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character and so on in the individual; if they are right about sexual morality or what came to be termed “family values”; if they are right about the importance of education to inculcate good character and to teach the fundamentals that have defined knowledge in the West for millennia; if they are right about societal norms and public order; if they are right about the centrality of initiative, enterprise, industry, and thrift to a sound economy and a healthy society; if they are right about the soul-sapping effects of paternalistic Big Government and its cannibalization of civil society and religious institutions; if they are right about the necessity of a strong defense and prudent statesmanship in the international sphere—if they are right about the importance of all this to national health and even survival, then they must believe—mustn’t they?—that we are headed off a cliff.

A Hillary presidency will be pedal-to-the-metal on the entire Progressive-left agenda, plus items few of us have yet imagined in our darkest moments. Nor is even that the worst. It will be coupled with a level of vindictive persecution against resistance and dissent hitherto seen in the supposedly liberal West only in the most “advanced” Scandinavian countries and the most leftist corners of Germany and England. We see this already in the censorship practiced by the Davoisie’s social media enablers; in the shameless propaganda tidal wave of the mainstream media; and in the personal destruction campaigns—operated through the former and aided by the latter—of the Social Justice Warriors. We see it in Obama’s flagrant use of the IRS to torment political opponents, the gaslighting denial by the media, and the collective shrug by everyone else.

...the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle. As does, of course, the U.S. population, which only serves to reinforce the two other causes outlined above. This is the core reason why the Left, the Democrats, and the bipartisan junta (categories distinct but very much overlapping) think they are on the cusp of a permanent victory that will forever obviate the need to pretend to respect democratic and constitutional niceties. Because they are.

...We can lament until we choke the lack of a great statesman to address the fundamental issues of our time—or, more importantly, to connect them. Since Pat Buchanan’s three failures, occasionally a candidate arose who saw one piece: Dick Gephardt on trade, Ron Paul on war, Tom Tancredo on immigration. Yet, among recent political figures—great statesmen, dangerous demagogues, and mewling gnats alike—only Trump-the-alleged-buffoon not merely saw all three and their essential connectivity, but was able to win on them. The alleged buffoon is thus more prudent—more practically wise—than all of our wise-and-good who so bitterly oppose him. This should embarrass them. That their failures instead embolden them is only further proof of their foolishness and hubris.

...The election of 2016 is a test—in my view, the final test—of whether there is any virtù left in what used to be the core of the American nation. If they cannot rouse themselves simply to vote for the first candidate in a generation who pledges to advance their interests, and to vote against the one who openly boasts that she will do the opposite (a million more Syrians, anyone?), then they are doomed. They may not deserve the fate that will befall them, but they will suffer it regardless.
Read more here.

The female equivalent of Hugh Hefner

Chateau Heartiste writes about female porn addiction.
She is a verbal drug pusher, shoving words as potent as cocaine at her own gender.

But according to Laurie Kahn, producer of the documentary film Love Between the Covers: “More than 70 million people in the USA alone read at least one romance novel per year, and most of them read many more.”

The US Census for 2015 shows there are 100 million women between 18 and 64 years old living in the United States. If Kahn’s number is correct, and assuming that the majority of those “70 million people” are women, then up to 70 percent of American women are covertly consuming literary pornography.

Does any of this matter? Parents want to shield their kids from visual porn, but they don’t feel nearly the same protective affront when a woman is reading a pulp romance novel in public.

You are sitting on a bus during your morning commute. In the seat next to you, there is a male passenger reading Penthouse. Chances are you may feel upset, perhaps disgusted. You might even demand that he stop.

On the other side, there is a female passenger holding a book with a very plain cover, entitled Into the Fire. With a mysterious title like that, this book could be about anything. If you ask, the passenger will tell you that it is a “romance” novel by Meredith Wild. The passenger has always loved these kinds of books, she tells you, ever since she read Jane Austen as a teenager. Innocent fairy tale, you conclude.

Both passengers are consuming pornography. But the woman is doing it so discreetly that almost no one recognizes it—often, not even the statistics.
Read more here.

Instant karma



h/t Chateau Heartiste

Does she prefer human company?

We have over one thousand chickens laying eggs. One of the hens prefers to lay her daily egg up high on a shelf in the room where I clean the eggs.

After she got down, I checked to see if she laid her egg. Here it is, clean and brown as it could be.

Who is more likely to commit a terrorist attack in America?

Reihan Salam is alleged to have written in National Review,
...as a share of their population (1%), Muslims in America are 5,000% more likely than non-Muslim Americans to commit a terrorist attack.
I cannot find the link. I read the quote here.

Tirade

We have all read and heard about Hillary's tirades. Allegedly she threw a huge one immediately after being questioned by Matt Lauer at the Commander-in-Chief forum last week. The source for the story is an NBC employee. One of the people who got shouted at was Donna Brazile, a black woman who is a veteran in Democrat politics. Hillary is alleged to have shouted at her,
“You stare at the wall like a brain dead buffalo, while letting fucking Lauer get away with this betrayal? Get the fuck to work janitoring this mess- do I make myself clear???”
Read more here.

Hillary's basket of deplorables words: weapons to Intimidate her cucked-up enemies into a cowardly submission

Chateau Heartiste writes that Hillary,
whether she understands it or not, enunciated the tenets of the Left’s new Secularism faith. The Seven Deplorable Sins are a guide to how the typical shitlib measures a person’s worth, because everyone needs a religion, even shitlibs who have discarded Christian Puritanism for “enlightened” atheism. The religious compulsion is an evolved trait in humans; all that differs across generations is how it’s expressed.

“You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the ‘basket of deplorables.’ They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it,” Clinton said.

Compare and contrast with the Seven Deadly Sins of traditional Christianity:

Lust
Gluttony
Greed
Sloth
Wrath
Envy
Pride

...The inverse of each of the Seven Deplorable Sins is the same: blindness. Pattern denial. Willful ignorance.

In contrast, the inverse of each of the traditional Seven Deadly Sins is a list of seven virtues.

...The modern religion of Secularism doesn’t proselytize for anything Good. All it preaches is the child-like virtue of Not Bad. It aspires to nothing but avoidance of social opprobrium. The problem with that ethos is the ever-shifting definition of what qualifies as socially unacceptable. The Secularist’s Seven Deplorable Sins are outgrowths of temporal sensibilities and the detritus of verbally dexterous status whores jockeying for power, distinct in nature from the Seven Deadly Sins which resonate precisely because they tap into timeless truths about humanity and fallen man.
Read more here.

Noblesse oblige

Chateau Heartiste has some recommendations for those who wish to make America great again.
Noblesse oblige — the idea that the powerful, wealthy and fortunate are morally obligated to act magnanimously, particularly toward the less fortunate — is out of style, having been replaced with a quickness by noblesse malice, my coinage to describe a modern American nobility that not only disavows magnanimity, but actively seeks to make life more miserable for the lesser classes. Noblesse malice is what we get when the elite that actively hates the subjects under their rule are joined in their hatred by the institutions (media, academia, religions) traditionally tasked with exposing and indicting the elite’s depredations.

...The Trumpening is a righteous airing of grievances by those despised non-elite Whites, channeled into one man who had the perspicacity to recognize an opportunity to give voice to the voiceless when he saw one. But Trump can’t do it all. Once he disposes of the House of Clinton, like the House of Cuck Bush before it, and ascends the HuWhite House throne, he’ll need ideas and goals to make America consolidate again. If the Trump era will have a lasting legacy, it will need to usher in the return of noblesse oblige.

Go here to read his three suggestions for achieving that.

What is your sexual market value?

Chateau Heartiste writes today about sexual market value. One of his commenters noticed that there are an increasing number of women who have tattoos, are single mothers, or are obese. Chateau Heartiste takes a look at all three here.

Are you working hard today?

Rush Limbaugh notes that
Mrs. Clinton, who's working so hard that she contracted pneumonia for us, practically took the whole month of August off, except for a couple of fundraising dinners....
Ann Althouse analyzes,
Is she working hard? We're barraged with arguments that contain a set component: Hillary works very hard. But has she been working hard these last 4 years? I've been questioning the use of the "hard work" meme to cover for failure and to give credit where it's not due, but quite aside from that is the factual basis of the reputation for working hard. We're invited to believe that Hillary has become unhealthy because she's been working so terribly hard, but it may be that Hillary is unhealthy and she's not working hard because she's unhealthy.
Read more here.