All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
His thesis is that Buttigieg is not an achiever. He’s a participation box checker.
Interesting perspective.
Pelosi and Romney? How could I resist. Today’s dessert. Enjoy.
Jonathan Chait is an uber-progressive. If you don’t mind clicking to his post read the delicious despair as he describes how the Dem field will implode leaving Bernie to win or be cheated at the convention. Oh, so wonderful.
I found talking about my mad dream to found a continent-spanning, benevolent, fraternal association of American men so much fun, I’ve decided to start formulating various facets in a series of posts. It truly is an intoxicating pleasure to imagine the world returning to normal. A world where an American husband and father truly is the king of his castle.
One of the time-honored rituals of male bonding is the weekly poker game. This was extremely prevalent in the old days and was a great source of stress relief. Now granted it was also an opportunity for all sorts of destructive behavior ranging from alcoholism to adultery but I’m restricting myself to a more domesticated version where the game takes place at the homes of the participants and doesn’t involve hookers and straight razor fights. I prefer the game to rotate around the membership’s homes. That way it takes the burden off any particular wife to provide the necessary foodstuffs. However, the burdens have been lessened thanks to the introduction of online gambling and poker games that could be found when visiting sites like best-casino.net and others. Online gambling allows people to enjoy poker nights in the comfort of their own homes while still having a quiet night in.
It is important to make sure the membership is in relative agreement on which poker games are considered legitimate. Lately Texas hold’em has gathered a very large following but I don’t think restricting the play to one game is necessary. But to each his own. Also there have to be very specific rules on acceptable stakes. Personally, I think it’s better to keep things on the low side. Otherwise you run the risk of scaring off the guys on a limited budget. Besides losing a lot of money to friends is embarrassing and liable to cause hard feelings.
Now, most important, how to integrate the food into the game. Some purists believe that food shouldn’t be allowed during the play and reserved to a break in between sessions. For myself, I think a good pastrami sandwich and some premium chips enhances the game and in fact provides a good opportunity to look for your opponents’ poker tells. But agreement going in is a good idea.
But the most important aspect of poker night is the chance for men to get together and discuss all the important matters of the day without having to hear the annoying, high-pitched yammering of women. And one of those important aspects of life to discuss is the annoying things that wives do. Complaining about and making fun of wives is a time-honored male occupation that has, sadly, fallen out of style. Reviving this tradition is an add-on benefit of the weekly poker game.
And since this is the He-Man Woman Hater’s Club we’re talking about, think of a poker game as a good way to sound out prospective members on their orthodoxy on all the various club tenets. A poker game is a very relaxing environment and a good way to get to know people. It would make sense to allow the prospective member to take the lead on conversation and hang back to see if he’s HMWHC material. Also a poker game may be a good way to raise funds for a project or an outing. Each member can throw in a ten spot per game and accumulate that for a bigger purpose.
So that’s my first topic. Feel free to provide feedback and any stories about your own poker games.
Cast your minds back to the Obama days and remember all the horrors, all the defeats. Remember Black Lives Matter and the drumbeat of charges against police for trying to keep order in the streets. Remember Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown being painted as innocent children instead of the violent thugs they actually were. Remember Obamacare and the skyrocketing costs for insurance. Remember Fast and Furious, the Benghazi fiasco, Queer Marriage, Weaponizing the IRS and of course his domestic spying on reporters and his other enemies. Remember the unemployment nightmare where a whole generation of young people couldn’t find jobs. It was a bleak hopeless landscape as far as the eye could see. And the rhetoric painted it as the inevitable endpoint for our country, permanent stagnation.
But look what three years with the right sort of leader can do. Unemployment practically non-existent, rising wages, energy independence, our enemies in retreat, England throwing off the shackles of the tyrannical EU, Italy, Poland and Hungary resisting the EU forced immigration, Israel finding alliances with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf States and trade deals with China, Mexico and Canada.
And then it gets better. President Trump humiliates his enemies at every turn. Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Chuck Schumer have been attacking the President non-stop for four years and they have employed every vicious tactic and lie they could think of. And the net result? Today President Trump’s Gallup Poll approval numbers reached a new high.
And finally, we have the 2020 Race. The Democrats have assembled the most hopeless, unelectable collection of unlikable losers imaginable. Biden, Bernie, Fauxcahantas and Butt Pete. And I’m not even going to consider the eliminated nuts like Spartacus. These are just an embarrassment to the once great Democratic party. All of them are delusional and a couple are actually insane. With the Democrats advantaged by the paid for votes of all the parasites who live off the government they should be unbeatable but instead they’re about to get their heads handed to them.
And tonight, President Trump gave his State of the Union Address. And it was a barn burner. He touted the almost endless list of accomplishments and advancements that his administration provides for America. He had dozens and dozens of applause lines. I think the Republicans will be limping for weeks after all the wear and tear to their old hips and knees from getting up and down so many times.
And he brought on a full card of heartwarming or heartbreaking stories. Wives and families of servicemen. Parents of the victim of al-Baghdadi. A hundred-year-old Tuskegee airman and his great grandson. Rush Limbaugh receiving a Freedom Medal after the revelation of his late stage cancer diagnosis.
The President poured it on. And at the end his message was that he was counteracting the negative message of the Obama era and substituting the idea that America’s best days are still to come. It was masterfully done. It was confident, upbeat and the facts it presented were undeniable. It was a little overwhelming but it was very effective. He truly is a showman.
And most interestingly of all, he completely ignored the impeachment. Not a single word was said about Schiff or Pelosi or the Ukraine. And as much as I would have enjoyed him harassing those worms it was exactly the right choice. The speech is really the President talking directly to the American people and it was presented to give the American people the best sales pitch for giving President Trump his second term. And in my opinion, it succeeded.
Oh, this is so much fun to read. He bashes Paul Ryan and George W. Bush. And boy do they deserve it. He bashes the Never-Trumpers. Of course.
https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/03/republicans-learn-how-to-use-political-power/
He gives some reasonable praise to Mitch McConnell and I agree with that. Reading this was like drinking a perfect cup of coffee, very satisfying.
Reading the various accounts
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/03/iowa-caucus-2020-election-110600
https://theweek.com/articles/893559/trump-just-won-iowa-democratic-caucuses
it sounds like the Dems were trying to salvage some kind of face-saving for Biden coming out of the mess. Supposedly he divided up his votes with the Warren, Buttigieg and Klobuchar to allow the delegates to be distributed evenly. Oh, this is going so well for our side. Can’t wait for next week.
The latest corporate re-education-camp mind game is pointedly telling older white normal men that they harbor unconscious bias against people that aren’t exactly like them. And because of this condition they need to be shown their biases in a group setting where they can all be embarrassed and taken down a few pegs in front of others. Now this is just an extension of all the other sensitivity trainings that we have been enduring for decades. But finally, we’ve reached the point where apparently the evil is so ingrained that we can’t even be trained out of it but must assume it will always be there and so we’ll need to be punished in advance and at regular intervals to offset the effect.
The funny thing is that based on my harassment training I think I recognize in this process the text book definition of creating a hostile work environment. Here we have people being shamed and ridiculed not for anything they’ve done wrong but wholly on the basis of their sex and race. If there were a friendly group inside the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that was interested in fairness something like this seems like a class-action suit just dying to be litigated. Since I didn’t have a lawyer interested in the case, I simply told the quisling fink annoying me that all my biases were conscious and I’ll continue to cherish them as I do my tonsils and appendix.
Honestly, somebody eventually has to figure out a way to punish these corporations for this harassment. The constant celebration of the alphabet people has gotten more than a bit thick. There are stickers, posters, wall magnets and for all I know commemorative underwear to show support for the incredibly brave deviants. And if your cubicle is not festooned with these you could be accused of insensitivity.
We have leadership teams for women, Asians and heaven knows who else but apparently men are without leadership qualities. I wonder if word has gotten back to the ghosts of Hannibal and Napoleon. When we have our various upper management harangues, we are guaranteed to spend one segment on the miraculous powers of diversity and inclusion. We are assured that diversity is our strength but no actual proof is ever provided for this flat statement and a rigorous definition of what diversity actually is always escapes the speaker. But it is our strength.
Five years ago, one of our most mindful upper managers hired a new employee that checked a whole slew of diversity boxes all by herself. Needless to say, he was extremely pleased with this turn of events and told me specifically what a coup it would be for our department. After a short time, it became obvious that this employee was completely unqualified for the position and in addition would be absent for a good portion of her remaining tenure giving birth to three children. Meanwhile, the workload that she should have been doing had to be divided among the already understaffed department. Finally, after filling out her family she moved onto a new company at an even higher grade because of the prestige of her work with us. And just to add insult to injury her position wasn’t filled but left vacant since the manager knew that the rest of the department had somehow managed to get the job done without her anyway. Now that doesn’t mean that all minority employees are unqualified. Far from it. But it’s the fear of sinning against diversity that causes the train wrecks like the one I mentioned above. Instead of correcting the mistake they’ll punish everyone else in order to pretend that a diversity based hiring mistake doesn’t exist.
So, I guess that’s what they mean when they say diversity is our strength. Compensating for the bad diversity hiring decisions that management is afraid to correct forces everyone else to get stronger by dragging the dead weight of the sacred cow until luck sends it on to greener pastures. All hail diversity the strength that exhausts.
A week or so ago I critiqued an on-line article about finding common ground with leftists who were upset about being attacked by their even crazier neighbors in the “woke” community. In my analysis I rejected the value of accepting them as allies and as an alternative proposed a dialog with the Dissident Right. I said:
“So, in answer to the title of Mr. Klavan’s article, yes conservatism can be conserved but not by accepting non-conservative ideas and the people who live by them. Let the progressives, the liberals, the moral relativists, the feminists and the alphabet people battle with their even crazier “woke” brethren (or whatever gender bent category they prefer) on their own. We have nothing in common with them and nothing to gain by engaging with them. I would much prefer to engage with the fringe groups to the right of us and see if we can find some common ground with them. Their ideas are more extreme than ours but they at least do not reject the values that we embrace. In many cases I think they have let pessimism radicalize their thinking and pushed them to conclude that only radical solutions to our problems exist. I think the last few years have shown that progress can be made if the right people get involved. If actual conservatives have a part in running the country better outcomes are possible.”
Recently I have read several articles by the Dissident Right that seem to echo the idea that there is room for constructive engagement between the so-called “Civic Nationalists” and the so-called “Dissident Right” (wow, that a lot scare quotes!). Of course, from their point of view this merely means they are interested in proselytizing us over to their cause. And, fair to say, I’m interested in changing their minds about some of the darkest pessimism they have concerning America’s future.
To be perfectly candid, the biggest difference between realistic civic nationalists and the dissidents is their conclusions about racial identity. They are convinced that a minority majority America cannot maintain the essential characteristics that the country had when 85% of the population was of European descent. Now this is a very sensitive subject and even acknowledging that it could be an issue has been enough to get all kinds of people banished to the gulag of the de-platformed. Racial and ethnic topics are taboo for all but the anti-white cheerleaders of the left and their only object is to vilify everyone from Christopher Columbus to Kate Smith for not having read the playbook of the 21st Century Witch Hunters. But considerations of race and identity are important and should be able to be discussed rationally and constructively.
The descendants of the English who founded this country have a right to be proud of what their forefathers created. The United States is one of the most remarkable human inventions that can be pointed to. Along with the British, Roman and Athenian systems it evolved from, it has blossomed into a model that has impacted to a greater or lesser extent, the whole of the human world. Without a doubt, there was something about the people and the circumstances that surrounded the founding of this country that should be revered by its descendants and anyone who chooses to live in it.
The charges of guilt against America for conquering the country from the Native Americans and for slavery before the Civil War are absurdly hypocritical. War and slavery have been a part of every human culture including the Native Americans and Sub-Saharan Africans from the very beginning and to the extent that the United States and Britain have worked to eliminate slavery and embrace the idea of all humans being a family, they should be recognized as having made a quantum leap beyond the long depressing history of nations and empires murdering and enslaving each other to stay alive.
And this hypocrisy about America’s supposed guilt is, I believe, a big part of why the Dissident Right believes that a non-European majority in the Unites States will destroy the things that have made it unique. All of the hooting and hollering about Jefferson and Washington being slave owners and whatever the latest atrocities the Antifa idiots commit compounds the sense of unfairness that people feel when they are confronted with the ongoing discrimination that affirmative action represents. Anyone who has seen what corporate management has become knows that choosing a woman or a minority or an LGBTQ candidate is the only way to avoid being subject to the dreaded “diversity and inclusion” police. Your judgement will be questioned and your “unconscious bias” will be referenced by your upper management and the advocacy groups that have sprung up like poison mushrooms in every school, college, corporation and non-profit organization.
So, I’m cognizant of the outrages being perpetrated on the legacy population of the United States by, mostly, their fellow European Americans ostensibly for the benefit of these various minorities but I disagree with the dissidents on the conclusion that this has to inescapably change the country into something unrecognizable to those who loved it. And as a rationale I am reminded of the southern European immigrants of the 1890s and early 20th century. These people were equally considered unacceptably alien and a threat to the American nation. And indeed, when they flooded the country in their millions, they did create chaos and an explosion of crime. But by their desire to emulate the prosperity of their neighbors they instilled in their children the desire to be Americans in every sense and they did become Americans and they probably loved this country as much (if not more) than those Mayflower descendants who currently bad-mouth the United States for all the supposed sins that their woke brethren enumerate. This former wave of immigrants leads me to believe that we can absorb some reasonable amount of immigration. Obviously unlimited and illegal immigration is a danger to our system and needs to be stopped in order to allow the already large number of legal immigrants to assimilate.
But the current climate of “blame America” is the real danger I see. Whatever numbers of immigrants are deemed harmless to the country, they still must be inculcated with a sense of gratitude for their membership in it and toward the people and culture that built it. And to accomplish that our government must not be put in the hands of America-haters like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or any of the other Democrats who want to divide and conquer us.
As far as the dissidents’ opinions on HBD, I can’t confirm or deny whether there are such large differences between populations of humans as they claim. But if they do exist, I still do not see the relevance. There is plenty of variance in intelligence and other characteristics within populations and these ranges of variance act in hierarchical fashion to steer individuals to occupations and groupings that suit them more or less. The important thing is that people feel that everyone is at least given the same chance to try to succeed. A ditch digger who earns his money honestly doing the task he is qualified to perform is more honorable than the Ivy League legacy student who gets his spot in school and industry while more qualified candidates are rejected because their families didn’t vacation on Martha’s Vineyard.
My hope is that if honest reformers like Donald Trump can begin to roll back the harmful policies that the social justice programs of the 1960s and 1970s then maybe the dissidents will come around to our way of thinking and support reasonable reform of an admittedly dysfunctional system. But for now, I think it’s reasonable to begin a dialog with the Dissident Right. They were among the first who diagnosed the conscious malpractice of the Establishment Republicans and their clandestine collusion with the Left in marching this country over a cliff. They are just as legitimate a part of the nation as some of the radical groups that the Left has welcomed into its camp. Ostracizing them just to prove our purity is stupid and self-defeating.
So that’s what I think. That was long because it is difficult to talk about these things without being very clear about what I mean. But I thought it was worth saying. Leave your opinions, if you’d like, in the comments.
So, I’ve already assumed the President will be re-elected. The freak show that the Democrats have assembled for candidates is unmistakably a sort of bad joke they are playing on their constituency. Questions still need to be answered as to whether the Republicans can take back the House and what will be their majority in the Senate. And of course, these will have an impact on how the President will govern. With a majority in Congress he could enact legislation that would enshrine into law some of the things we want to see. But even without the Senate it’s interesting to consider what the agenda will be. Let me try.
But the most important thing President Trump’s administration can do is advocate for the re-litigation of all the unconstitutional affirmative action laws and judicial decisions that we have been afflicted with for the last fifty years. The Solicitor General has as his responsibility to push forward to the Supreme Court’s attention, cases that revolve around unconstitutional conditions. In my view, nothing could be more unconstitutional than the inequality at the heart of the various racial and sexual preference legislations that have been imposed on the country in the name of equality. The last time these programs were litigated in front of the Supreme Court it was admitted that these were unconstitutional laws but the Court stated that the remedy they were meant to provide had not yet been achieved. Well, considering how much time has now passed it seems high time another review takes place. Hopefully once President Trump replaces Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, we’ll be safe from John Roberts meddling with constitutional issues on the basis of his delicate feelings.
So, that’s quite an ambitious agenda. If even half of these things are accomplished it would be a revelation for our side to see. The important thing to remember is that an agenda is a checklist and needs to be hammered away at until it’s finished. If politicians are shown to shy away from providing effective support for a goal but instead provide excuses for why it can’t be done then you know it’s time to find a better representative for your agenda. The Bushes were the classic case of politicians who gave lip service to being conservatives but failed to support a single conservative goal. This needs to be remembered after President Trump’s second term ends. We’ll have to ask ourselves whether Mike Pence is up to the job he’ll be called on to perform. A fearless and effective leader has now been shown to be the key to getting stuff done.
I’ll send this list into the President. I know he’s busy right now but hopefully he’ll have some time after the State of the Union Address to chat with an important and influential thought leader such as myself. I’ll let you know what he has to say when he calls me back.