Month: September 2018

I meant to comment, and forgot, in the last post that New York, to take one example, has had many gangs, many gangsters, many mafias.  Over time, you have no doubt had rival Italian gangs, but you have also had Irish gangs, Jewish gangs, and now you have Russian gangs.

Self evidently, they fight with one another.

But to the point, if you hate the Italians, the Russians do not become saints because they are killing Italians.  It’s a fight over stuff and territory, and the geopolitics of gangsterism do not change when the people pursuing said politics still think like gangsters.

After World War 2, the Russian gangsters simply said “Eastern Europe belongs to us.  If you don’t like it, invade us.”  And just like that, the Russian Empire was expanded, the Russian gangsters had more power over more people, more potential to inspire terror, more things to steal, more swagger to their walks.

Very, very few people see with their own eyes.  It is not a particularly difficult thing to do, but we are trained from an early age to see through the eyes of those who want to speak for us, through the eyes of “experts” who, like all human beings, can be corrupted in many ways, not least through vanity, money, and complacency.

Most of these “Anti”fa rallies have people with Communist flags.  Why?  These kids have been taught that the Communists opposed the Fascists. Logically, then, anyone who opposes Fascists must be good.

But in reality it was AMERICA and Britain which opposed the Fascists.  Liberal, “capitalistic” democracies.  We are the ones who opened up a second front, enabling the Soviets to get their legs and push back.  We are the ones who loaned them the money, and sent them the equipment, which kept them in the war.  They are the ones who betrayed us when the war was over.

People forget that Hitler and Stalin signed a secret buddy pact.  Stalin was a huge admirer of Hitler.  He had a man crush on him.  He refused to believe it when Hitler invaded, and ordered his troops to ignore what he was quite sure was a fake invasion.  This cost the Soviet Union dearly, and it was based solely on Stalin trusting Hitler, who he regarded as a fellow, if you will pardon me using the term, Mensch.  He thought they were two peas out of the same pod, both saving the world, albeit in slightly different ways.

They split up Poland.  People remember–those who remember anything at all, which is a decreasing number–that Hitler invaded Poland.  They forget that the Soviets, imitating the Nazis from the east, invaded at the same time.  They did the same things.  They executed political prisoners and stole peoples stuff.

The Nazis built many of their death camps in Poland, so they killed more people outright, but the Soviets committed the Katyn Woods massacre of the intelligentsia of Poland.

Who opposed both of these regimes?  The people who marched behind American and British flags.  The people who embodied everything all totalitarians hate.

It is a mark of our times that these imbeciles burn the American flag, and fly the Soviet one.  We were the good guys.  This is absolutely, categorically unambiguous, even if no doubt people who want one standard for their people, and another for everyone else, can truthfully point to places where we fell short of our ideals.  Of course we did.  All men fall short.

But the difference is that in America we always try to learn, and to do better.  We allow criticism.  For the Soviets, SUCCESS still meant mass death, and the abolition of all human rights, including the right not to be executed for saying something unfashionable.

We are breeding a generation of morbid creatures who know nothing, but consider themselves unique and misunderstood geniuses.  It is an ugly sight to behold.  This is how Communism started in the first place: emotionally detached eggheads with vast underground reservoirs of hate, violence, and intolerance.

I’m no lawyer, but I have long had the vague understanding that slander could legally be argued to begin with a claim which cannot be proven by the accuser, or disproven by the accused.  It is something which is manifestly injurious, which cannot be resolved by the person being attacked by any means other than a protestation of innocence, which may or may not be believed, which may or may not help.

Put another way, injury can be done to innocent people, for which there is no legal recourse.  This is not a satisfactory state of affairs. I grant that for public officials the standards may need to be a bit different, but not so different that anyone can say anything any time without any evidence, and without any consequence, at least as far as things like confirmation–which deal directly with character–are concerned.

Kavanaugh did not deserve this.  He may not be the solid conservative I want, but he is certainly qualified for the job, and did nothing to warrant being run through the ringer.

It would likely be very politically imprudent but I wonder if Kavanaugh could sue Ford for defamation of character.  That used to be a thing, back when all sides believed there WAS such a thing as character, and back when half the populace was not being driven into hysterical rages by a relentlessly mendacious and hyperpartisan media.

I’m thinking of a country song “That’s my story”  He keeps saying “I ain’t got a witness, and you know I can’t prove it, but that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.”  And of course, he is lying to her, as she proves.

If you don’t have a witness, in our court system, absent forensic or other evidence, you have no case.  You cannot prosecute a crime.

I read a second accuser has come forward, one who makes an allegation with no witnesses, despite the event allegedly happening at a crowded party.

Here is the thing: as long as the Democrats can find people willing to prostitute their credibility to further Leftist aims, this thing will never, ever end.

The proper response to their continuing to lower the bar for character assassination is to raise it.

How is this for a standard: If an account of an alleged event is not backed by sufficient evidence that a prosecutor could bring a case, then it should be rejected as anecdotal, unsubstantiated slander.  It should not even be allowed into the Senate, if it can’t pass a basic sniff test.  You can’t stop the media from running with everything, and doing what they do, which is confuse the shit out of everybody and throw all dissidents and free thinkers under the bus at every opportunity.

But we can prevent future shit shows by putting this policy in place. 

As I think about it, the strongest objection to be made to Ford’s claims is that she has no female supporters who knew both her and Kavanaugh back then.  Kavanaugh has 75 women asserting he is a good guy, and that he never did that sort of thing.  They are asserting that, as women, they believe him.  The views of these women should count, too.

It is no doubt true that women often don’t report unwanted sexual advances–which is really more or less what this was, as on her own account it was not rape, a fact which the news media insists on blurring by continually calling it a “sexual assault” which by their definition would be amply met by pinching a woman’s ass, which was quite a different animal 36 years ago (1982)–but they DO tell their friends.  There is nothing major that happens to any woman that, in nearly all cases, she does not immediately tell to a friend.  This is my view, from the outside looking in, but as someone who has had many female friends over the years.

All the women, seemingly, who knew both are on Kavanaugh’s side.  None of the women are on hers.  She has a hard Left, Soros funded lawyer on her side.  She apparently has the notes of a psychotherapist.  But she has no one willing to back her in her story, which she cannot even locate at a place, or a specific time. 

And the people she has claimed could corroborate her story have all said they remember nothing.

I would contrast this with Bill Clinton’s rape of Juanita Broaddrick.  She told several friends immediately.  They remembered it and backed her.  But she didn’t report it.  Her story only came out after the Paula Jones (I think it was) lawsuit, and I think she only testified in response to a subpoena.  And it is worth noting, too, that Broaddrick was a DEMOCRAT.  She was working on the Clinton campaign.  She was trying to help him get elected.

Ford, obviously, is trying to derail the nomination of a good man because he is not an unhinged Leftist.  The Democrats said they would oppose ANY nominee, and it is not hard to see Ford’s emergence after Spartacus failed as a fallback plan.  The same thing would be done to Mother Teresa.  It would be done to Gandhi if he did not fit their ideological agenda.

Dear God, can we please find a way to end this madness?

I’m inching my way through the movie “Norma Rae”.  It’s just one on my list of movies I feel like I ought to have watched at least once.  I’m not grooving on it too much, although you do have to admire the labor organizers chutzpah (and that is the precise word to use).  I admire anyone with that degree of persistence, even if I disagree with the goals.

Well, in any event, that movie dates from 1979.  And they got their union.  Then I got thinking, North Carolina textiles: were they not decimated around the same time the Rust Belt was forming?  Some time not later than, say, the mid-1990’s?

Actually, here is an excerpt:

By the late 1980s, the apparel segment was no longer the largest market for fibre products, with industrial and home furnishings together representing a larger proportion of the fibre market.^[29] Industry integration and global manufacturing led to many small firms closing for good during the 1970s and 1980s in the United States; during those decades, 95 percent of the looms in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia shut down, and Alabama and Virginia also saw many factories close.

So when Reuben the labor organizer got there, there was already pressure on the industry.  His timing was terrible.  He was leading them into a trap.

It took a couple minutes of digging, but yes, everyone in that plant–some 3,000 people–lost their jobs.  I will admit to feeling a few moments of inappropriate Schadenfreude at that.  This is wrong, as I see it, since people asking to live better lives is a good thing.  Unions are not bad things, and they were absolutely indispensable for a long time in this and other countries.  They were the only block on shameless abuse and regional plutocracies.

My Schadenfreude is not directed at the actual workers.  They were getting used and manipulated on all sides.  It is at the Democrat Triumphalism which this movie represents.  That movie is intended to say, this is why Democrats are good.  This is why we are the party of the working man and woman.  We are on the side of ordinary good people, and opposed to the rich and abusive.

But everything they build crumbles.  It works for a minute, then they prop it up to make it look like it is still working when it starts to fail, then when it fails and they can’t hide it, they blame anyone but themselves.  It is a zombie disease, one that is regrettably infectious, and insanely common.  Everywhere you look, this disease is waiting for you.

It is on the street corners of most major cities, handing out paper poison.

I’m thinking about this some more.  Either the polls showing a drop in positive views of Nike were wrong, or something is not adding up.

I reread both articles I posted.  The first one, showing a stock surge, is certainly true.  But this could EASILY be accomplished by one or more billionaires chipping in to show their political support for Nike.  Jeff Bezos could buy a hundred million in stock and not bat an eye.  So could Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, George Soros and many others.  It is scary to contemplate how many scary rich hard core Leftists there are out there.

And when you read more carefully, Nike users in general trend more Left than the population as a whole–they are more Chipotle than Cracker Barrel–but that is not the same as saying that all their customers are solid Democrats.  This is plainly not true.  Let us say an average company has 50% support from Republicans, and 50% from Democrats.  Nike is 40/60.  But this still means 40% of their business needs to come from people who were likely pissed off by the ad.

And the 30% sales increase was only over Labor Day weekend, and has to be compared to a normal 17% sales increase.  So it is a relative doubling, but that could easily be explained as a short term pattern of Leftists buying Nike because they are pissed at Trump.

The real metric will be where their sales are in a year, or even the 4th Quarter of this year.  If I am right, the energy they built among part of their customer base will be more than offset by losses everywhere else.  If their sales do not justify the stock valuations, then either the stock will fall, or we will know somebody is manipulating it.

I had posted a while back that openness means enjoying surprises and the unexpected. It occurs to me that a good word for this is play.  Play is where you don’t know what is going to happen, but you expect to enjoy it.  It is embracing the unexpected, and your own power in creating it.

As I understand it, sexual arousal is a function of the sympathetic nervous system–the system which reacts to external events–and sexual orgasm is a function of the parasympathetic, the system which calms the sympathetic system down.

The release is made more enjoyable by the tension.  When you consider this, it is not really that remarkable that some people add to the tension by adding pain or constraint.  It is a wider swing.

And I was thinking the other day about the quality of release on orgasm.  You are physiologically wired to be able to release completely, to be fully open emotionally, to let down all your defenses, to be completely at ease.  This feeling is the one we really want.

But how safe is that with someone who is a stranger?  We are all supposed to be wanting to have sex with different people all the time, at least the men are.

It seems to me, though, that the quality of the sex, which is to say, ultimately, the quality of the orgasms, it connected directly to the level of trust.

The orgasm is very obviously physical for men, particularly, but there is always a latent, body wide potential as well.  This of course is very obvious in women, who in general do prefer to feel loved and secure with their partners, for this reason.

An orgasm, in some respects, is an act of trust.

And I think if we reverse this, we can see why some men–it is nearly always men–feel the need for a heightened power differential, as in rape.  If orgasm requires trust, and if they don’t trust women, then they need to know that woman is under their control.  They say rape is not about sex, but power.  I would suggest, though, that it might be better seen as sex through power, as sexual orgasm enabled by power.

I am perhaps doing some combination of rambling and speaking incoherently, but I think there is a thread of useful content in here somewhere.

Inflation really is THE key economic problem.  The ability to create money underlies the stability or fragility, the justice or the abusiveness of any economic system.  Stable money and free markets throw off wealth.  Funny money and intrusive governments create and continue mass poverty.

I was thinking about Keynes the other day.  He amassed himself a small fortune in currency speculation.  I actually think that is how Soros made most of his money too, come to think of it.

Keynes understood how inflation is the effect of covert wealth transfer.  He stated this clearly in his first book, “The Economic Consequences of the Peace”.  Afterwards, he obviously got to thinking, then realized all the totalitarian plans he was attaching himself to could be facilitated by getting control of money.

I will note he played a major role in the creation of both the IMF and the World Bank, both of which have, in general, failed to achieve their goals of aiding development.  But who have they benefited?  It is a good question I can’t answer at the moment.

The already rich is nearly always a good guess, though.