Category: Current Events

Say Rather, We Aren’t Going to Just Vote Our Way Out of This

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There is a well-known saying on the Dissident Right, “We aren’t going to vote our way out of this.”  This is based on a combination of two facts.

  • No matter how many times we won the Presidency and Congress by voting in GOP Establishment losers, nothing ever got better.
  • Changing demographics will eventually produce a permanent Democrat majority.

And in a lot of ways they are right.  The Republicans have been an unmitigated disaster at least as far back as George Bush the Elder.  No matter where in the government we elect them to they immediately become liberals.  Every Supreme Court that we supposedly dominate pushes the culture farther and farther to the left.  This point has been undeniable up until the election of President Trump.  Of course, you could also make the point that he isn’t really a Republican but either way he’s the first Republican in decades who actually has made a dent in the culture war.

As for the demographics, they have a point there too.  Non-white voters typically vote in higher numbers for Democrats than for Republicans and in a decade or so white Americans will cease to be a majority of the American population.

For me this means that just voting is not going to win the culture war.  But just saying we can’t vote our way out and doing nothing is foolish.  We need to find such men as Donald Trump who want to restore the culture to the things that we actually want.  Whether we can elect them or not is to be seen.  And it is not certain that we cannot form alliances of various ethnicities.  Forging a coalition based on common interests with anyone of any background who wants to have membership in the middle class seems a much better fit than the current confederation of the outraged that the Left has cobbled together based on the myth of the evil white supremacist monsters that somehow is holding back the other more virtuous people of America.

And sometimes it will mean forming alliances based on common enemies.  So, for instance, if both whites and Asians are discriminated against in school admission then it would be natural for them to form common cause to elect politicians who want to eliminate affirmative action in school and employment.  Or how about recruiting women who have seen their daughters displaced on sports teams by men in sun dresses.  Peeling women off the intersectional bandwagon would be a real coup.

But all of these considerations will follow only if we get our act together.  The important project is to kill the Left’s propaganda campaign against normal America.  Fighting back against Antifa and BLM and pushing back against all aspects of the progressive assault is possible, popular and critical to winning back our rights.  And to accomplish those things not only requires us to vote, it also requires us to organize politically.  It means we’ll have to get off our butts and find out if there is a Republican party organization in your area and whether any of the members are actually on the Right.  And if they’re not, try to organize like minded folks to pick someone who is and run him for some low-level post, state rep or dog catcher or whatever.  And if worst comes to worst run for the office yourself.  And it means we have to find out about the higher echelons of the party and support good men and work against the rinos.

So, getting back to the original idea, it’s true that we can’t get out of the hole we’re in if all we do is vote.  But the simple truth is that for decades all we thought we had to do was vote.  We were blind and the people we thought were on our side weren’t.  But that’s hardly a reason to say it can’t be done.  If we actually try, we may fail.  But if we do nothing we certainly will fail.  So, go down swinging.  Do something.  Who knows, you might surprise yourself and actually win!

Guest Contributor – The Fat Man – Antifa, Sci Fi, The Bomb, Consumerism and The Death of Innovation – Part 2

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Guest Contributor – The Fat Man – Antifa, Sci Fi, The Bomb, Consumerism and The Death of Innovation – Part 1

 

Warning: Part 2 contains a philosophical discussion of innovation that is a bit dense. If you’re here for the comic jabs at “The Muppets”, you may want to skip to Part 3.  My apologies.

(Editor’s note: Because the author was so expansive, I have divided Part 2 into two parts.  So, what The Fat Man refers to as Part 3 will actually be called Part 4.

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The hypothesis I will posit and attempt to demonstrate in the next two parts of this humble correspondence has two main themes. First, that the America of the hundred to hundred and fifty-odd years ending in the nineteen seventies was in every way exceptional; second, that it was so because it had to be.

What gave birth to the ASB that catalyzed an array of naïve musical craft forms into a global cultural phenomenon? How could it be that slave and peasant musical traditions could be combined and transformed to such success? How did a string of still photographs projected on a screen go from peep show to a universal, dare we say, artistic medium? And how did both these forms descend into their own basements? Why even is the use of a phrase like “artistic medium” to be feared and derided?

What if the same dynamic could be identified as the driver behind the creation General Electric and The Bomb that obliterated those two Japanese cities. What if accounting for that dynamic could answer Peter Thiel’s most interesting questions, “Why are our cities strangely old?”..…”Why did the space program abandon Mars?”…..”Why does it take longer to travel between cities in 2020 than it did in 1970?” Put more simply, how can the America that stormed Normandy and called a moonshot in 1961 “by the end of the decade” with Ruthian certainty end up frightened by Antifa?

To answer all these questions, we first need a definition of innovation that helps to describe some common process to all the unlikely triumphs we have mentioned, from Louis Armstrong to Robert Oppenheimer. We need a definition that comprises economic trends reflected in metrics like the GDP, and the commercial success of mechanical innovations like the production of replaceable parts in firearms; cultural phenomena like the art movements that come to be described as “universal”, or the emergence of global capitals like New York in the mid-century.

 

What is innovation

Galileo, Newton, Einstein and Heisenberg. These names transcend words like discovery and invention. For human beings, the members of this class are, along with a few others seemingly from other fields, other names like Homer and Shakespeare perhaps Mozart or Beethoven, the ones that define our world. We don’t have to worry about their sins or similarities because they are like their creations, both real and unreal. There is no E in E equals MC squared in the real world, any more than the number one. E and one are exclusively human. There is no ideal realm where they reside outside of our minds. They are beyond the hills, the animal or mineral, shared only in the humanly conceived eternal. They are wholly ours and once invoked by anyone they join the patrimony that is accessible to all if we choose to claim it. We can choose, however, to lose treasures like F equals MA or “it is the east and Juliet is the sun” or Euler’s identity. We can forget or revise or misattribute or commit a hundred other crimes against history. We can break the chain of humanity that links all ages and places to every remembered and forgotten name with the new and the unborn. We can fail to imagine.

Lesser mortals do lesser things. They discover like Columbus or Curie; they invent like Edison and Bell. A lightbulb is not humanity but it helped humanity read. The telephone was not a part of us though they did at times seem attached. America is not Italy but someone had to sign the map. We remember these names and forget, revise, misattribute them at much less peril, perhaps some would say, at no peril at all, perhaps, even to our benefit. But the status of the names of our discoverers and inventors matter today if not tomorrow. We need them today to tell our story, even our history, but they are not immutable giants like the others. Because we all know who gets to write history, the stories beneath these names can change from discoverers today to slavers tomorrow.

Far below the Olympian pantheon of Newton and the discoverer’s Rushmore of Edison, in a stratum of the day to day, lives innovation. It has no name but certainly is more fun. Discovery finds things and invention makes things but innovation gets to do things. And nameless, it is free to beg and borrow, not caring who found it or made it so long as it can use it. Innovation is the doing with what was discovered, invented, invested, neglected or just plain forgotten.

Innovation has no name, or at least it shouldn’t. The artifacts of innovation are not important, but their impact is. What is a subway or a skyscraper? Who would care except that they move infinitely more people faster in a crowded city than any combination of horse and car or fit infinitely more people to live and work on a half-acre than possible in any other urban plan? But innovation does not only serve the visceral. The long line of innovations that culminated in the gothic cathedral are nameless. But at some point, in the 11th or 12th Century, they lifted whole societies to spiritual consensus. Yet there is no name associated with the Gothic Cathedral except Chartres, Cologne or Notre Dame. In fact, subways, skyscrapers, cathedrals, choirs or even particular iPhones change as we use them and disappear when we don’t. Innovation doesn’t have his fun alone, we get to join in.

In the sense that innovation is not discovery or invention we can also say that it is not exclusively human. Because it is nameless is also, to the extent it is distinct, not aware. Innovators manage the details of their initiatives and even at times claim to plan their applications. But no one ever knows when they cross the boundary between an improvement or invention or discovery and true innovation. So as anyone who has ever seen the cat finally achieve the canary knows, animals innovate as well. Nor does one individual even ever really innovate. Beyond the clichés about standing on the shoulders of giants, innovation relies primarily on feedback loops whether from a market or a metabolism. And beyond animals, all biological systems possess in their ontogeny the mechanisms of not just change but proliferative innovation. From this perspective, no doubt, it is conceivable that by their ability to determine natural existence, the laws of physics in their constants and relations and limits do as well. Or at least one could probably find a business-minded physicist to agree. So, it is also cliché to say innovation is collaborative or diverse or possessing of secret ingredients, let alone genius. Innovation emanates as all phenomena do, that is to say, through itself.

This view of innovation is useful in a number of ways. It avoids the sociology of science associated with the Olympian creations that began our discussion. Newton’s human creations like numbers and letters truly are human constructs, artifacts. Concentrated matter moving through space is no artifact. The novel phosphorylation of a bioactive molecule that confers a replication advantage is a fact, observable, unaware, unstoppable. Humans can only participate in innovation; they cannot originate it. We are lucky when we properly observe it.

If innovation is not human then it must be free from the requirements of human logic. Innovation is not consistent or moral or balanced or meaningful beyond the very next step. Innovation is productive change and with that single modifier, alone it is unconstrained in ways no human system can be. It can comprise blitzkrieg and washing machines. It moves along paths that cross all boundaries and all borders. It can change its products, landscapes and even man-made literary forms. Innovation is free to impinge on domains that are aware and self-constrained without being so itself.

All we have said so far describes what innovation is not and qualities of its nature. But what is innovation? Economists define innovation as the translation of an idea or invention into a good or product that creates value as reflected in the customer’s willingness to pay for it. So, innovation in this context is the occurrence of a new offering to generate sales. But innovation is also a larger concept usually best measured by the economic idea of dynamism. Dynamism is defined as the creative destruction in an economy that reallocates resources across firms and industries according to their most productive use. Presumably this destruction can at least in part be bottom up, unplanned or subject only to market guidance.

In its broadest sense, as we have discussed it so far, we might simply define innovation as productive change. Change that moves in a self-defined positive direction. A successful virus is essentially a protein shell with an innovation factory coded into its genetic material. Its sole function is to continually make slightly inexact copies of itself so to ensure that some of its related progeny can survive the immune systems that act as it’s feedback loop. To that virus this is productive change or innovation.

So, when is change productive or destruction creative? The laws of physics and biology seem to imply these are oxymorons? Science holds that all change is random, certainly all destruction must be, so how then can it be productive and creative? Does not its anonymity and randomness exclude any notion of “positive”? The answer must be no, but only because reconciling these seeming contradictions leads directly to the question of intentionality and the origin of change. The origin of change is itself a question of first causes that, as we have said, is immanent yet unbounded by space and time. Even a physicist would agree that the universe is productive because of primal conditions whose own origins are inexplicable, partially observable, even describable, perhaps, but ultimately unaccountable. But where does the ineffability of productive change lead us in our search for its nature? It frees us. Clearly productive change exists as do distinct stars that convert matter to energy and men who turn forests to farms, so we are free to inquire and observe without accounting for first causes. In our investigation, we also can be dynamic along with others in our niche and join in the reallocation. But as human logical commentators, at least, we are obliged to make observations that suggest relationships, if not lessons.

So much for the ultimate source of change, what about proximate causes? What about their number and weight? This is not obvious yet it is the main business of our discussion. And although economics would seem to be the obvious framework to account for the proximate cause of innovation, those most familiar with that exercise commonly offer only very subjective, sometimes poetical explanations of even large changes in innovative trends. The great economist of innovation, Edmund Phelps, cites the loss of the “spirit of adventure and discovery” as chief among the proximate causes of the halving of the 3% annual growth in US GDP he attributes to American innovation going back two centuries before the 1970s. To understand the proximate causes of the end of American innovation in the 1970’s, we must first understand its proximate causes going back at least those two centuries and likely much earlier.

Plans for November 3rd and the Days Following

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Nota Bene: This is a frivolous post about how I intend to celebrate Election Day this year.  I will provide myself a fig leaf to justify this childishness by also discussing the serious topic of safety from mob violence during these dangerous times.  Fair warning has been served.

If President Trump is declared the winner on Election Day or shortly thereafter, I think it is reasonable for people to anticipate that there could be some serious safety issues in certain areas of the country.  And this is not idle or far-fetched reasoning.  The Left has already mobilized small guerilla bands to lead riots and arson attacks on all the major cities that they control politically.  It is only common sense that they might unleash a spasm of violence and destruction to protest the ultimate repudiation of their political stance.

If you live or work near one of these cities, I think it would be prudent to take certain precautions that week.  First of all be sure to listen to the local news and avoid any areas that have become habitual protest locales.  Figure out what work-arounds you can use to give them a wide berth.  Make sure you don’t have any Trump or Republican messages on your car or your person.  If you work in town but live outside leave early on election night and don’t stick around for any reason.  Postpone any activities in the city until the election madness wears off.

If I were planning ahead for this situation, I would consider calling in sick if you have any doubts at all about the chance of being caught up in a riot or other form of unrest.  Basically, it’s just not worth the risk.  With the whole COVID thing going on and remote work becoming so prevalent, it wouldn’t be difficult to get a day or two out of the office.

As for myself, I’m going to camp out and watch the whole nightmare from start to finish.  It’s become something of a tradition to watch the late state returns into the morning hours and listen to the clueless talking heads trying to justify whatever surprises emerge in the results.  I’m anticipating a Republican wave for the President, the House and the Senate so I’m hoping to end the evening by listening to lefty reporters and celebrities wailing and gnashing their teeth as YouTube fills up with blue haired women screaming and hyperventilating over their rage and despair in a replay of 2016.  In fact, in a couple of weeks I intend to start working on the menu to go with the Election Night party.  I’m thinking earlier on we can go with deli sandwiches, corned beef, pastrami and roast beef.  This will of course require potato salad and some kind of soup, maybe a sausage and bean.  Later on, we’ll go with smaller items, maybe pigs in a blanket with brown mustard.  And at the end of the night I’d say some kind of ice cream course.

And this plan will be in effect regardless of how the election returns or the write-in ballots or the judicial shenanigans play out.  The days when I hung on the edge of my seat worrying how Ohio or Florida or Pennsylvania votes is long gone.  This is all in-the-moment skirmishing that doesn’t settle anything.  We no longer have one nation making up its mind on what it wants its future to be.  We’re just watching two diametrically opposed nations wrestling with each other in a mostly bloodless conflict.  It’s like two men fighting for control of the steering wheel of a moving vehicle.  There’s no clear way for one or the other to take control and at all times the possibility of a fatal crash is highly likely.  We seem to be waiting for one side or the other to declare an end to the charade.

But that doesn’t mean we have to wallow in misery.  Life is to be enjoyed and even in the midst of hatred and insanity we must not miss out on all the things that make it good.  Election Day is in between Halloween and Thanksgiving and I intend to celebrate both those things and even have a little fun on Election Day too.  Live blogging the event is a given.  If we win and can celebrate the despair of our enemies all the better.  If not, then splendiferous foods will have to make up for it.

So, as you can see, I like to turn a negative into an opportunity to enjoy the catastrophe that is heading our way.  But whether you celebrate the election or head to bed early to avoid the stress and strain I am completely serious about taking precautions against some kind of insurrection by the Left.  These people are very angry and a little bit desperate.  They are trying to frighten us and apparently no longer worry about niceties like the law and human decency.  So, stay way out of their way and live to see the better day that we expect to dawn on November 4th when President Trump is re-elected and his new Republican House joins the enlarged Republican Majority in actually doing some legislating for a change.  Like maybe funding the rest of the Wall and ending trade with China.

Warning: Profanity Laced Meltdown by Leftist Upon Hearing RBG Died

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If you thought they went crazy four years ago wait until you see this one.  A padded cell and straitjacket would be the minimum infrastructure needed to keep this woman safe from herself.  She’s driving a car and I doubt she can see the road through her rage and panic.

Where do these people come from?  How do they get through their lives without growing out of the two-year-old tantrum phase?  November is going to be a meltdown regardless of how it works out.  Even if President Trump wins by two hundred electoral votes these people are going to go ballistic.  Watch yourself.  A lot of them are unhinged.

Guest Contributor – The Fat Man – Antifa, Sci Fi, The Bomb, Consumerism and The Death of Innovation – Part 1

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What does it mean when organizations like Antifa and BLM lead the national conversation but are led and populated by arrested, overfed, near-sighted, screen-addicted, basement dwellers? How can these loosely defined groups and others like them write and profess to follow manifestos built on concepts like fascism and communism, the nuclear family and non-binary identity, equality and liberty while clearly not understanding any of them. If we suppress the urge to laugh it off for a few seconds and consider what it means about our country and the West more generally, would that be useful or at least entertaining?

And finally, that our president uses these same concepts in the same contexts as these groups without pausing to at least try and clarify them, does that mean he’s actually their leader too or just the world’s greatest comic?

When you look at the endless tape of the peaceful demonstrators or if you’re lucky as I am and can simply look at the window and watch them at a distance, it is easy to be lulled into a lazy sense of voyeuristic unease. From far away the individuals in the crowds are reduced to hats and black raincoats all carrying some kind of staff and easily mistaken for at least a potential threat. Of course, when the camera pans to ground level or you even walk among them you realize they are those kids you remember from high school, if that was your terminal level of formal education, or junior college, or grad school, even a familiar post doc.  Whatever larval group of which you were a graduating member always included the kids that just weren’t ready, would never be ready, for the real world.

Our peaceful protesters are not the serious kids that just quit school to pursue real careers in crime, banking or software. I’m talking about the ones with the anachronistic long or shaved hair, over decorated skin and clothes, downward facing and backward looking. The basement dwellers, scared of life. Say what you will about Mao and Hitler, they weren’t scared of life. So how did our heroes become their self-appointed fellow travelers?

What brought our contemporary heroes out of the basement to frighten America? More interestingly, how could they frighten anyone? If you’re old enough to remember the summers of rage at the end of the 1960’s you know what real racial unrest looks like. Or anyone that has seen strike violence knows why it scares the average citizen. Those mobs were manned by the citizenry. However segregated Newark was in 1965, the city couldn’t survive with twenty percent of the population burning down buildings, and it didn’t. The Newark of 1962 was disappeared by 1975. Depopulated, de-educated, de-legitimated, poof.

But clearly our heroes didn’t, couldn’t, do that in 2020. The viral panic set the stage. It emptied out the streets like the white flight of the ‘60’s but didn’t spark the theatrical violence we see today. So, what did? Beyond the familiar slacker jobless ennui that inspired the Occupy Wall Street encampment and their occasional traffic-arbitraging self-immolations, what caused this moment? Racism? The word is its own answer. In 1968, even in Jefferson and Baltimore during the Obama years, the putative victims of racism did the rioting. Today it’s largely The Muppets.

The Muppets, hmmm, TV….is that a clue? Roger Scruton, who died in January of our anni mirabiles, took pains to remind us that it is culture, more specifically our definition of aesthetics, precisely the meaning of beauty that is the best way to understand a society. The poor man described the pain he experienced standing on a train platform while traveling in America and finding no escape from “the beat”, the deadening, soulless rhythm of western pop music. The reader can imagine how he felt about our other contemporary cultural products. Our visual arts, our architecture, the terrible things we expose and teach to our children. He no doubt finally rests in peace.

In pacem para bellum. In peace, for war. If you want peace, prepare for war. If we want beauty, if we want wisdom, if we want a growing and enterprising society, what kind of citizens do we need? Citizens. Growing. Are our heroes citizens? Are they growing? They do somehow look familiar? Like the barricade denizens of ’68? No, no they were rich French student hippies. More like tropes from the movies or even a comic book. Yes. But not old movies or comic books, more recent, like graphic novels or The Matrix. Yes, that’s it, they all seem to be aspiring to the art direction that gussied up Keanu Reeves (I only now realized that he has that most famous of comic book actor last names). I get it, our heroes want to be real heroes. But they only know Keanu or Deckard, a few other dystopian action figures. They are graphic heroes. We might charitably call them expressionistic.

Like all contemporary culture actors, our heroes carry the contradictions of Cultural Marxism. They attack the culture, humiliate the bourgeoisie, their parents, their schools, their unemployment offices, then retreat to the basement and their protection. It’s easy to hate them, but for America it is hard to admit she created them. How did it happen, they happen?

For me, it is far more interesting to answer the question by looking at the cultural collapse they reflect. When we do, we will know what the Muppets mean and why America chose them to use to frighten itself.

Why would America want to frighten itself? It’s evident it wants to, hosting all the Devil’s Nights it has in 2020, long before Halloween in places like Portland, Brooklyn and The Loop. In the shadow of the protests the professional criminals can come out of their nests, wave guns at their rivals and redraw their maps. America suffers all this to stir herself, especially our suburban cousins that so swear by the “peaceful protests”, so long as they only burn urban America. It is said when the protests came to Portland’s burbs, the curtains were drawn. Mission accomplished, the brief, but cold snap of fear did penetrate the high-tax school zones.

But from what do we now stir?  Covid, Trump, the caliphate, financial collapse, Iraq, Afghanistan, The Towers, the Kennedys? No, these were mere media trifles, like the Beatles. But they seemed important at the time, serious, didn’t they? In sleep even a fly seems serious and we fell asleep long before the Kennedys. What are the symptoms of sleep that can tell us when we fell? And why do we sense it’s time to get up?

Let’s follow Sir Roger’s advice and take America’s vitals through whatever we can call its culture for ten seconds without laughing. We are told that American popular music was born out of traditional, gospel, anthem and transplanted light opera genres. These genres evolved into what we call R&B and Jazz, Country. The ethnic music of Southern and Eastern European immigrants mixed together with native genres in vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley. All of this seemed to gel on the Broadway of the twenties to become what we today call the American Song Book.

You could argue that the ASB did not reach the high musical standard of the opera Toscanini brought to New York and later popularized through radio broadcasts on NBC. But looking back from today’s vantage, in the context of twenty first century western pop music, it sure seems to fit the label of art.

You can make a similar case for American movies. It’s true, there was no visual equivalent to Jazz to act as a foundation for American cinema. But the originality and popularity of Chaplin and Keaton’s output, their success at creating visual conventions that became an almost universally accepted, but wordless, language convinced even arid academic critics that the movies were developing a set of aesthetics that would one day support an artform.

None of this can be said of the other plastic visual arts in America such as painting, sculpture and with the exception of Wright, architecture, all of which were mired in the outpouring of European Modernism throughout the first half of twentieth century. And while there were many interesting American poets and writers, even leading figures such as Stein, Pound and Eliot, their work was primarily grounded in European ideas and precedents.

The fiction of the American Naturalists, Norris, Crane and Dreiser, could be argued to be American originals, but theirs was at best a minor native movement that did not blossom greatly as a literary genre, but did interestingly have an impact on film. Faulkner and his “school” could also be added to this list and can be usefully tracked as we diagnose what ails America.

Another fruitful area of American creativity and certainly the most materially successful is what is today referred to as innovation. Defined simply as growth generating change, innovation is an almost perfect, if indirect, measure of American culture. To innovate a culture must have intact, functioning communities capable of supporting a network of collaborating and competing enterprises. These simultaneous conditions can only exist in places where the culture not only supports the formal rule of law, but voluntary associations such as craft clubs that create the social capital needed to invest in creating new products and services. Innovation shares these requirements with all native American artforms.

We will use these cultural creations, American music, movies, some of its literature and compare it to the advance of innovation in the twentieth century, the American Century, to understand why in the twenty first, the homeland finds itself nurturing fear through home-grown hobgoblins in the form of hand puppets.

End of Part 1

 

Guest Contributor – The Fat Man – Antifa, Sci Fi, The Bomb, Consumerism and The Death of Innovation – Part 2

Can the President Eliminate the Deep State?

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Three and a half years into President Trump’s first term as President it would be fair to say that the United States government is still controlled to a great extent by a managerial class that works constantly and relatively unimpeded against the interests of the President and the Americans that voted him into office.

In order for his second term to have any lasting effect on the direction that this nation is headed President Trump will have to purge the Deep State from the executive branch agencies they control.  Can such a thing be done?  Has it ever been done before?  The answer to the second question is yes.  In the olden times a change of administration was the occasion for a massive purge of patronage office holders.  And to an extent that is still the case.  The agency heads are all political appointees that come and go as the party in charge is changed.  But the bureaucracy that serves below these appointees are permanent employees of the federal government and have job security that is almost bullet proof.  So as far as purging the Deep State the answer is at best a qualified “sort of.”  The rank and file drones working in the State Department, the Justice Department and the rest of the agencies are natural born progressives.  They live to interfere in the lives of ordinary people and relish the opportunity to exert their bureaucratic power on useful people that fall under their purview.  Even if many of the worst laws are eliminated these people will still make life hell for whomever they meet.  So, let’s assume this to be the case.

Be that as it may, the Deep State can be weakened substantially and the effort to do it should be the focus of the President’s efforts in a second term.  First and foremost, the Justice Department and specifically the FBI needs to be emptied of the viper’s nest that currently run it.  And if Barr won’t do it then he has to go first.  Why is Christopher Wray still the Director of the FBI?  He has obstructed the investigations into the Russia hoax and he has done next to nothing to stop the current insurrection that has gripped cities across the country.  Bill Barr has publicly praised Wray.  He acts as if the agency is working correctly.  That is simply not true.

Barr has talked about getting to the bottom of the hoax but he and Durham haven’t achieved anything after more than a year.  This more than anything makes it clear that he is afraid to destroy the status quo.  All of this must be crystal clear to President Trump.  So, what is his plan?

What seems to me to be the only way forward is to put someone in charge of the Justice Department who knows how it works but isn’t beholden to the network inside of it.  I’m not sure I know who could be that man but maybe Rudy Giuliani is right for that job.  He seems to be a true ally of the President and he was a federal prosecutor back before he was Mayor of New York.  And I think he would relish the chance to clean out the Justice Department.  But if Rudy isn’t the right guy maybe he knows who is.  Either way it’s critical that the second term start off by cleaning house of all the remaining top and mid-level cabalists in all the important department that are still obstructing and undermining the President’s efforts to fix the federal government.

So, to go back to the title of the post, can the President eliminate the Deep State, the answer is I don’t know.  But the rest of the answer is that he’s going to have to do it if he is going to survive.  These people are his mortal enemies and they’ll have to be destroyed for his sake.  And if there is going to be anything that fixes this country short of rebellion then getting rid of the Deep State is job one.  Let’s pray he succeeds.

What to Expect When President Trump Squares Off Against Chris Wallace at the First Presidential Debate

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Chris Wallace, the lefty shill from Fox News will moderate the first debate, which is scheduled for Tuesday, Sept. 29 in Cleveland.  Whether Joe Biden shows up either corporeally or even as a hologram, the real debate will take place between the President and Wallace, the lefty Media’s hatchet-man du jour.  I expect the first question he’ll address to Joe Biden will be a yes or no question, “Do you agree that President Trump is criminally responsible for all COVID deaths?”  Joe may flub this question by thinking it’s about him or by mistaking the term COVID for some kind of video-sharing service but either way it will be up to President Trump to slap Wallace around for most of the night in order to be declared the winner by the viewing public.

And I think he will.  President Trump is a savvy media personality and he knows that Wallace is there to try and swing the election for Biden.  And since Biden at this point is about as intellectually capable as a flat worm with its head cut off it’s up to Wallace to do the dirty work.  And he will.  He will go right to the COVID issue and try to portray every death as a crime that the President is responsible for.  But let’s face it, Wallace isn’t all that convincing a liar.  He always has that smug grin on his face and he always seems to be overreaching with his accusations and innuendoes.  I expect the President to drill down into Wallace’s accusations and push back very hard.  I hope the President calls him a liar and a lefty shill because that is exactly what Wallace is.  Chris Wallace is a poor man’s version of the commie that his father was.  Mike Wallace had gained credibility based on his long association with the news industry’s icons of yesteryear like Walter Cronkite and his work on the old television news series Biography and 60 Minutes.  But his son hasn’t got the gravitas that the elder Wallace had or his sonorous voice.  Chris’s voice is more of a nasal honk that annoys a lot of listeners.  I confess I will be disappointed if Wallace doesn’t get knocked around in these exchanges.  He really needs a good smackdown performed on him.

Now looking at the Biden component of the event, I am curious to see if his handlers try to use an ear piece to feed answer to Slow Joe.  That would be fun to watch.  Maybe we can pick up the signs that he is listening to an audio message.  I wonder if the Secret Service has the capability to jam radio transmissions around the people they are protecting.  And I wonder if the White House will have any kind of surveillance that picks up that kind of thing going on.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if after the debate an audio recording of someone prompting Joe were uncovered?  Well, I shouldn’t be too greedy.  I’ll settle to just watch and listen as Joe does his Biden act and eventually starts umming and uhhing at the end of every sentence he attempts to make.

And who knows, maybe they’ve loaded Joe up with pep pills to cut through the fog and he won’t embarrass himself.  But as long as the President goes on the attack about the substance of Biden’s long and undistinguished record in government it will be enough to carry the night.

So, sure I’ll be watching.  It could turn out to be a lot of fun.  I just hope Joe doesn’t get flustered and wanders off into the crowd.  He’d be bound to start sniffing hair and rubbing shoulders and even I have limits on what I’ll watch on tv.

update:

The comments section on Chris Muir’s Day by Day cartoon today (9/24/2020) has a lively discussion on the ins and outs of the debate.

Easy Company.

 

RBG Outrage Proceeds at a Brisk Pace

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I was just enjoying a sampling of left-wing panic articles about the prospect of a pre-election selection of RBG’s replacement on the Supreme Court.  You know it seems like only yesterday that the press and the Democrats were employing libel and slander on an industrial scale against Brett Kavanaugh without any concern for how it poisoned any possibility of civility or bipartisanship in the Senate.  And now they are hurling around terms like hypocrisy and unconscionable when talking about the Republican senate voting on a replacement for RBG.  They’re saying it’s inappropriate and uncivil and cruel.  Well, isn’t that special.

You know above and beyond how good it would be to decrease the number of lefties on the Supreme Court I am just overjoyed to see the Left shrieking and howling about this situation.  These are horrible people and anything that makes them angry and/or afraid is a gift from heaven and “a consummation devoutly to be wish’d.”  It is wonderful to see a milquetoast fellow like Lindsey Graham feeling his oats and maybe even displaying a little schadenfreude toward the colleagues that put him and the rest of the senate Republicans through hell during the Kavanaugh hearings.  Seeing him get up on his hind legs and sound like a man just shows what the Democrats have stirred up with their scorched earth approach to hard ball politics.  They’ve made lots of enemies and when they need friends there aren’t any colleagues on the other side of the aisle willing to reach across to lend a hand.  And after having their hands bitten before who could blame them?

And it is said that McConnell has the votes.  Of course, that is horse trading and maybe they’ve paid off Romney to keep him from stabbing us in the back again or maybe that one extra vote from Pence is all that’s needed to put them over the top.  But just the fact that President Trump and Mitch McConnell are game enough to go forward speaks volumes about how this presidency differs from the lame Republican administrations of the past.  Bush I and Bush II would have acquiesced as soon as the first shriek from the harpies was reported in the press.  In fact, even after giving in to them the Democrats and the press would still have taken the opportunity to pillory Bush as a monster for even thinking of such a hate crime.

When President Trump heard that Pelosi was threatening to impeach him again. His answer was that he hoped she did.  Now that’s the right answer.  Never back down, never apologize for doing what makes sense and hit back at them any way you can.  And just as a point of information didn’t Dorothy dropped a house on her back in 1939?  Or was it a pail of water?

I expect a concerted effort after the announcement to vilify the candidate any way they can.  Of course, since it’s going to be a woman the rape angle is going to be a really hard sell.  Maybe they’ll try to find a girl from her high school or grammar school that claims the applicant was mean to her.  It’s a little weaker than the Kavanaugh treatment but they’ll have to go with what they can make up on the fly.  If necessary, they’ll have a séance and have the ghost of RBG denounce the nominee as not a real woman for lacking abortion enthusiasm.

Feeling this happy about the suffering of some of my fellow human beings might be taken to mean that I’m a terrible person but I believe that if Mother Theresa were alive today, she’d be on my side.  These are awful people and them getting their comeuppance is poetic justice.

Anyway, another good week for the President.  Onward and upward and make the Lefties squeal like stuck pigs.

Media Uses Deceptive Headlines to Get Clicks

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If you see a headline like “Why the Trump Campaign Has Biden On the Ropes,” on a news aggregation site best to check who wrote it.  If it’s a lefty outlet like Newsweek you might find that the real title is, “The Trump Campaign Believes It Has Biden On the Ropes. Here’s Why.”  And if you bother to read it, you’ll find that the real thesis is the opposite of the original headline that caught your eye.

So, either the aggregator or the publisher is trying to trick you into clicking on their black pill article.  I like to look over Real Clear Politics every day to see what’s out there.  They’re a news aggregator that is useful because they make a point of balancing articles about 50/50 between left wing and right-wing sources.  But I suspect that their readership is more heavily right leaning, probably 70/30.  So, in order to increase clicks they seem to hide the lefty content as well as they can.

But I’m a wily consumer of the news.  If they leave the name of the publisher off the article, I hover my mouse over the link and eventually it reveals the web address and I can tell who wrote it.  Since there is so much political content during an election my rule of thumb for finding meaningful content is to look for left leaning writers who have good news for me and right leaning writers who have bad news for me.  That eliminates the stuff that is just partisan flag waving on both sides.  But apparently Real Clear Politics is trying to game things by altering titles.  So now, even if I think I’ve found something interesting I have to check the whole IP address to see who it came from and what the actual title is before I click.

I guess I could just read any stuff that sounds interesting but I like to limit any support for places like the NY Times or the Washington Post to a bare minimum just on the principle that not feeding trolls is a good strategy.  But even more importantly time is a precious commodity and wasting it reading nonsense is an offense against your own life.  Especially since some of these guys at places like the Atlantic will rattle off a 5,000-word screed.  That’s 15 – 30 minutes of your life you could have used to do any number of useful and enjoyable tasks.  Hell, throwing out the garbage would still be a more constructive and satisfying employment than reading some woke hipster’s take on why Joe Biden should get your vote.

So, if you have run into this problem the appropriate strategy is look at the web address of the link and you can typically tell the publisher and the actual title of the article.  But of course, a much better strategy is to go first to Orion’s Cold Fire.  The perceptive readers who come here know that we would never try to lure you in with deceptive titles.  And the writing and analysis is always top notch.