All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
Reviews of blog posts and other articles
http://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=15958
How can you top “Industrial Rumpswabbery” as a post title? It cannot be done. And the contents are just as enjoyable. The Z-Man analyzes how we got from the horribly biased reporting of thirty years ago to our present state where the journalists are just lunatics who’ve escaped from some Ivy League holding pen.
It really simplifies the chore of deciding which main stream news sources to ignore, all of them.
Professor Gunnar Heinsohn provides a primer on how explosive population growth in moslem middle eastern countries makes employing small groups of American soldiers as peace keepers tantamount to suicide with no possible useful outcome as an offset. Once again Trump is the realistic grown-up in the room.
http://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=15929
He compares the economics of monarchical empires to the modern multi-ethnic states like the Soviet Union and present day America. Z-Man says that the monarchical empires valued their vassals because they produced wealth for the emperor but that the USA openly exploits the “social capital” of its society for short term gain. His thesis is that this is a new situation and it is not clear whether this exploitation can be made stable or whether it will completely undermine the state and collapse the whole enterprise.
Pretty depressing reading for the holidays but well thought out.
I used to read Jonah Goldberg and am not as adamant in my condemnation of him as I am for the more traitorous neo-cons like Max Boot and Bill Kristol. But it is always useful to read the most severe critics of the neocons. There is a lot to be condemned.
http://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=15909
Roger Kimball has a very nice article on the Wall Funding / Government Shutdown intersection. Remembering the G H W Bush, Read My Lips fail is very instructive. This is could be a decisive moment in the Trump presidency.
Shutting down the government over Christmas is an iconic move. Let’s see who blinks.
It’s a thoughtful essay.
At the end he says:
“That ugliness is what is fueling the populist movements. In Europe and America, the natives, physically and culturally divorced from their rulers, are now looking for alternative sources of authority. The people are recoiling at the ugly world created for them by their rulers, so the slow search for new rulers has begun. No one thinks about it quite like that yet, but in time, that corner will be turned. We’ll move from reform to the idea of starting fresh and leaving the ugliness of left-wing radicalism behind.”
That idea of searching for new rulers resonates with me. But I think the people who have had enough are going to have to do a lot more than wait for new rulers. We’re going to have to decide what the new agenda will be and won’t be.
As the linked article documents even liberals in Washington state and Canada rebelled against the insanity of paying more money for the hydrocarbon fuel we use to heat our home and drive to work. Any republican senator who votes for this deserves to be primaried and cast into the great abyss where Paul Ryan and Jeff Flake wail and gnash their teeth. But I guarantee that more than one idiot republican senator will.
https://dailycaller.com/2018/12/21/new-green-deal
We really deserve better politicians but I doubt we’ll ever get them.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/21/supreme-court-justice-ruth-bader-ginsburg-85-reportedly-undergoes-lung-procedure-.html
I wonder if this is what the broken rib incident was really about.
This is significant. At the very least I would assume she will need recovery time and absences to allow for chemotherapy. I could be wrong but I believe that her time on the bench will be less than two years.
Fox News has finally decided not to reflexively fold as soon as the Left bullies some advertisers into dropping a conservative opinion show. Tucker Carlson has of late been outspoken on immigration and other right-wing priorities and consequently has been the focus of all the usual suspects (Moveon.org, Media Matters, Sleeping Giants, etc.) hounding weak-kneed corporations to drop Right-Wing broadcasters.
Fox put out a statement saying they won’t cave. Sounds good. Let’s see if they stay the course or beg for mercy.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/fox-news-defends-tucker-carlson-we-will-not-be-censored-by-intimidation-efforts
https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/17/death-of-the-weekly-standard-signals-rebirth-of-the-right/
Chris Buskirk runs the American Greatness website. Chris is a civic nationalist who believes in restoring the American project. But in his post, he sounds a lot like the folks in the dissident right:
“But the Bushes killed the Reagan legacy and rather than capitalizing on his victories abroad to achieve his goals at home, they instead embraced the social democratic impulse that replaces core human institutions like the family and the church with the government. This was the point at which institutional conservatism lost its way and slowly became a shadow of the progressive Left—following always just a few paces behind wherever it led.”
That line about “following always just a few paces behind wherever it led,” could have been in a post by Vox Day or the Z-Man. To my mind, the information that has been percolating around the dissident right has finally become completely mainstreamed. That is very good news. I tell some of my friends who get discouraged that knowing the truth about the Fake Right is more important news than anything else. The sucker punches we took from the Fake Right did more damage than the direct attacks from the Left. Uniting the people on the right will make us much stronger whereas having false friends among the rich and powerful is an enormous negative.
Onward and upward.