Sunday, June 30, 2024

Biden is an Alien

One recurring theme in the election is that Trump is entirely self-absorbed with no concern about the state of the nation.
How does that differ from what Biden and his supporters are doing?


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The Department of Homeland Security has identified over 400 immigrants who have come to the U.S. from Central Asia and elsewhere as “subjects of concern” because they were brought by an ISIS-affiliated human smuggling network, three U.S. officials tell NBC News.

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“The Houthis are the first entity in the history of the world to use anti-ship ballistic missiles ever,” Navy Vice Admiral Brad Cooper recently told CBS’s 60 Minutes. He added that it would convey a “false sense” of superiority to describe the Yemen-based militia group as “ragtag.” “Ten years of being supplied by the Iranians very sophisticated, advanced weapons,” he added, has produced a well-armed and adept force firing powerful ordnance at both commercial vessels and U.S. Navy ships.

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Biden is an Alien

An article by Hoel last year tried to summarize the strange UFO resurgence, which he attributes to the influence of Alien aficionado Senator Harry Reid, a press eager for clicks, and an embedded governmental subculture advancing a subset they could milk. (Reid's initial UFO grant was for $22 Million. Million!)

It might be fun to revisit after the recent exposure of the massive U.S.A., Biden manipulation,

This is an attempt at a summary.

"To sum up the story as far as I understand its convoluted depths: diehard paranormal believers scored 22 million in Defense spending via what looks like nepotism from Harry Reid by submitting a grant to do bland general “aerospace research” and being the “sole bidder” for the contract. They then reportedly used that grant, according to Lacatski himself, the head of the program, to study a myriad of paranormal phenomenon at Skinwalker Ranch including—you may have guessed it by now—dino-beavers. Viola! That’s how there was a “government-funded program to study UFOs.”

Our current journalistic class, unwilling or unable to do the research I can do in my boxers in about five hours, instead did a big media oopsie in The New York Times, running the story and lending credibility to the idea the Pentagon did create a real serious task force to investigate UFO claims. The fervor in response to these “revelations” memed into existence a real agency at the DoD that now does actually study UFOs, simply because everyone “demanded answers”—which is totally understandable, given the journalistic coverage. However, the current UFO task force is staffed by, well, the people willing to be on a UFO task force. According to the Post:

And who was in charge, during the Trump administration, when the Pentagon created a UFO Task Force to investigate incursions of unknown objects over America?

Stratton—who believes the ghosts and creatures of Skinwalker Ranch are real—officially headed up these Pentagon investigations for years.

The “chief scientist” of this Pentagon task force was Travis Taylor, who is and was a co-star of “Ancient Aliens” on the History Channel. He currently stars on “The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch” on the same network.

This official embedding makes it difficult to break the veneer of legitimacy unless you know the whole story, simply because there’s likely a lot of coordination by professional UFO enthusiasts behind the scenes, which is why you’ll occasionally read stuff about how anonymous sources from other insiders confirm the accounts. Here is a piece by Michael Shellenberger at Public from Wednesday, in which he says that the David Grusch account is supported by insiders:

'The Pentagon says there's no credible evidence of alien spacecraft, but several military and intelligence contractors with inside information say there is.'

I can’t possibly know, but a good question is whether these ah, anonymous contractors, were, by any chance, just anyone marginally associated with the original AATIP/AAWSAP? Or those currently in AARO? To make this point in another way: since a bunch of people who investigated spooky stuff at Skinwalker Ranch got government money, and the original bad reporting on that memed into existence an actual program at the DoD who now do study UFOs (a slightly more sober group but one that still contains some long in-the-scene characters), as well as likely triggered a lot of interest in the subject within the intelligence community, in theory there are now a bunch of people who are basically Ancient Aliens extras or enthusiasts who might reasonably count as former or current “insiders” at the DoD, and they can go around supporting one another’s accounts about rumors of secret programs because they all believe those very same rumors, which are mostly just decades-long popular UFO theories. This cycle of back-rubbing, which just so happens to guarantee funding and attention, is everywhere. When Fox News brought on an investigative journalist to discuss the David Grusch story, who did they bring on? None other than Jeremy Corbell to vouch for Grusch (there was no mention of Star Trek conventions.)

And if you think that there’s no coordination here, ask yourself why you’re suddenly seeing UAP (“Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon) rather than UFO as the abbreviation. That’s a longtime attempted rebranding by “ufologists” because UFO had too many negative associations."

Now, one could argue that the development of mendacity as a national trait could invalidate this criticism but that could invalidate all criticism (which may be where the culture is going.)

Saturday, June 29, 2024

An American Success Story



The 'Chevron Decision' is a big deal. But, as with the presidency itself, there is a gulf between form and substance.

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In the first five months of this year, Beijing’s National Bureau of Statistics noted that foreign direct investment into China amounted to 412.5 billion yuan (about $568 million). That is some 30% below the level of such flows during this time last year. What is more, these latest figures show a faster rate of decline than in the January-April period and the 12th consecutive month of declining direct foreign investment into China.

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The 'threat to democracy' charge is part of the routine anti-Trump attack. The argument is he is more concerned with his own advancement than the nation's. Now, where on the scale of nation-scorning ambition is what the Democrats have done with Biden?

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An American Success Story


The debate restored politics to its proper place: entertainment. A participatory sport. And mendacity and unsubstantiated mutual accusations.

ICF would never come up in such a discussion but might be more indicative of American politics than any topic discussed.

ICF International Inc. was born as the Inter-City Fund in 1969 to finance and help minority-owned businesses apply for and secure governmental contracts. Since then, its focus has shifted radically. Today, it is the most important environmental organization you have never heard of.

ICF International Inc. staffs the United States Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) in the Office of Science and Technology Policy within the Executive Office of the President. It provides a yearly report on climate change to Congress called Our Changing Planet and is responsible for the content of the climate.gov website. In 2022, its annual budget from the United States government was a stunning $3.6 billion. In 2024, it topped $5 billion — an increase of nearly fifty percent during the first two years of the Biden Administration.

A giant oak from a pinecone.

Who are these people? 

But this kind of thing is hardly surprising considering we don't even know who makes the decisions in the Oval Office.

Friday, June 28, 2024

No Debate




No Debate


How could these people think that Biden was going to do well in the debate? They know what he is. They have been managing the country as a shadow government for years. What did they think was going to happen?
Or is this the state of American politics, looking at something for years and not seeing it. Or wishing it away.
Maybe the Deficit is who we are.

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This problem with Biden is not new. This has been how the government works for the last years. They have been running the country with this situation without complaining. Why the change?
Why not just continue on with Jill, Blinkin, and Sullivan?

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Can Trump beat any Democrat other than Biden?

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How do the Democrats solve this? If he steps down, that makes Kamala the Prestdent. Can they ride him to the convention and then replace him so Kamala can be bypassed?

The decision will have little to do with what's best for the country. The decision will be how best to control the nation and maintain their influence.

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As an aside, did abortion have a too prominent place in the debate with the incoherent Israel policy, the idiotic Afghanistan withdrawal, the disasters on campuses with its weird antisemitism, and the astonishingly defiant shifting of school loan responsibility having very little prominence?

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So, in thrall to symbolism and appearance, will the Democrats be hung on their Kamala petard?

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The baseline of this fiasco of a debate is this: this was possible only because the press and the politicos manipulated the last years for their own advantage and the detriment of the nation.

***.

Do you think that Putin and the Chinese are watching this and saying, " Their system doesn't work."


 


Thursday, June 27, 2024

Tax the Rich


Few individuals have been more integral to the Obama-Biden project to “realign” the U.S. with Iran and strengthen the Middle East theocracy – at the expense of Israel, America’s Sunni Arab allies and partners, and U.S. national interest – than Rob Malley.
The lead negotiator behind President Obama’s signature Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Malley was brought back into the fold when Joe Biden came entered the Oval Office. Biden tabbed Malley as Iran special envoy to resurrect that nuclear deal. Last summer, however, the longtime progressive foreign policy hand suddenly had his security clearance revoked and was placed on unpaid leave while under investigation by the State Department and FBI for potentially mishandling classified information.
Huh?

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China is expected to emerge as the world's largest economy before 2030, with India becoming the third-largest by 2050. Both China and India are likely to surpass the United States, which is currently the largest economy in the world. The EU's share of the world’s GDP is projected to drop below 10%.

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A sexual assault lawsuit filed against Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott earlier this year has been dismissed because it 'lacked merit'.

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Tax the Rich

The concept of "raising taxes on the wealthy" packs a lot of notions into a deceptively short phrase--like "small cancer" or "local insurgents." Taxes remove money from very interested individuals and give it to casual, inefficient groups. Could the government ever be a successful venture capitalist? Run a successful charity? Even build a specific project without the protection of a monopoly? The answer is no because the government has too many mouths to feed, too many debts to pay, too many cross-purposes to cross. The government is a huge crazyquilt of competing factions, influence peddlers, friends, and relatives--and these are just the legal conflicts with the task at hand; not even considered are the thefts, criminal inefficiencies, payoffs, and errors of commission and omission of the amateurs, hacks, and idiots involved.

Anyone who thinks taxes result in a redistribution of wealth does not admit that the redistribution occurs long before the target group ever sees the residual. The government tax system is a huge disassembly line where money goes in and is removed at every intervening station along the way until the tiny amount remaining dribbles out at the end. It is a huge game of Telephone where the outcome is nothing like the planned input. So rather than the interested individual spending his money--and benefiting those he invests in or pays--in an efficient and targeted way, his money, when taxed, dissipates along the channel and becomes lost, like the "broken window theory" where the power and advantage of commerce barely keep up.

Any tax, regardless of whom, removes money from investment and commerce in the system and dampens commercial development. That is a tax on everyone. Whether you want to subsidize those parasites along the way is another question.

Wednesday, June 26, 2024

The Origins of Government



George Latimer, a pro-Israel centrist, defeated U.S. Rep. Jamaal Bowman on Tuesday in a Democratic primary in suburban New York. Bowman is a member of "the Squad," a political outlier of anti-Israelism, socialism, and general incivility.
A lot of money was involved.

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The U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. attacked Israel's management of the West Bank in the U.N. in the Security Council.

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It is pretty well established in law that charter schools cannot be discriminated against based on religion but, nonetheless, the Oklahoma Supreme Court struck a Catholic charter school down.
These people will not stop.

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Trump will enter the debate with parts of a gag order.

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Amed Rosario needed just 2 stitches to close a cut near his lip after being hit by a 99.6 mph pitch by Jared Jones in Pittsburgh. The injury looked a lot worse. But Brandon Lowe, who was also hit by Jones in the same inning, has a broken right pinkie toe.
Whether the league admits it or not, there is a problem with the speed of pitching, the need to advance pitchers' careers, and the defensive reaction time of batters.

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The Origins of Government

The debate is tomorrow and Biden has been huddling for a week with 16 advisors to prepare, apparently to the exclusion of other work.

Imagine if they had been as assiduous with other projects, like the Afghan withdrawal, Covid management, and deficit spending.

Worse, maybe they were. Maybe these were not errors, maybe they are the Left's best policies.

Tuesday, June 25, 2024

Outlawing the Enlightenment


16 million dollars has been invested into the Democrat Primary Race--the Primary(!)--over Bowman's House seat.

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So, how's the 320 million dollar Gaza Humanitarian Pier going? This is looking very Afghanistan Withdrawl-like.

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A ransomware group known as LockBit claimed to have hacked the Federal Reserve Bank

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Hamas Skimmed $1 Billion in U.N. Aid for Weapons and Tunnels, Suit Says.
About 100 Israelis sued the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, saying it pays local employees in dollars that buoy the terrorist group.
(NYT Headline)

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Outlawing the Enlightenment

Rufo has an article in City Journal on DEI. Not the Journal's best but its initial concept is that the public university is the result of a "compact." Public universities in the United States originally rested on an agreement between the citizen and the republic: the citizens would provide funding for the university to train young people to advance the public interest and the common good. In recent years, however, this compact has disintegrated, and considerable efforts will be needed to rebuild it.

He uses the University of Colorado Boulder’s DEI program as an example.

"The basic predicate of CU Boulder’s DEI program is that “Black, Indigenous and People of Color,” or “BIPOC,” students are failing because of “white supremacy culture.”

What is white supremacy culture? According to CU Boulder’s DEI documentation, it includes “individualism,” “perfectionism,” “a sense of urgency,” “worship of the written word,” and “objectivity.” These traits are supposedly vestiges of “whiteness” and unavailable to racial minorities—an unintentionally bigoted attitude.

Next, CU Boulder’s DEI bureaucrats would have you engage in a 21-day “Racial Equity Habit Building Challenge.”

One of the resources included in this program is a guide on “How to Be a Better White Person.” The document supplied a protocol on how to accomplish this task. Step one: “Realize you’re white.” Step two: “Recognize your privilege.” Step three: “Know things.” Finally, from a related resource, instructions on how to be an “ally” to racial minorities: “Transfer the benefits of your privilege to those who lack it”; “amplify the voices of the oppressed before your own”; “acknowledge that, even though you feel pain, the conversation is not about you.”

This is not the language of an academic program but of an abusive relationship.

Unfortunately, the language of DEI has also taken hold in CU Boulder’s curriculum. For example, the university has recently included a course on “Critical Whiteness Studies.” The syllabus is replete with activist terms, such as “institutionalized whiteness,” “white privilege,” and “white fragility.” The basic concept is that “whiteness” is an irreducibly malicious essence, loaded with ancestral guilt.

Human history is brutal and filled with injustice. But to scapegoat one population group, European whites, as the essence of evil is nothing but propaganda. Obviously, none of this meets any genuine scholarly standards—and that’s a pattern characteristic of DEI.

Finally, DEI is used as a justification to hire scholars of favored demographics and ideologies. CU Boulder has explicit and implicit racial quotas in hiring, which, in theory, violate the law. According to one professor, more than 90 percent of recent hires at CU Boulder’s College of Arts and Sciences have been diversity hires. Of the remaining 10 percent, some might lay claim to other protected identities, such as “LGBTQ,” reducing the percentage of “oppressors” even further.

This is unethical and immoral. But under DEI, it is a requirement of social justice.

The problem with DEI is not merely administrative or curricular. When its principles are adopted wholesale, DEI compromises the fundamental purpose of the university and the basic compact between the citizen and the state.

In fact, the degeneration of universities into centers of ideological activism—which American taxpayers are currently subsidizing—violates basic democratic principles to such an extraordinary degree that we urgently need to implement dramatic reforms."

Monday, June 24, 2024

The Genes of Politics

Surfing legend Tamayo Perry has died following a shark attack in Oahu, Hawaii.

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“Pre-1983, mortgage costs were in the CPI as were car payments pre-1998. Now, price indexes do not include borrowing costs. Thus, when interest rates jumped last year, official inflation did not fully capture the effects it would have on consumer well-being.”
Indeed, if we measured inflation as we did in the 1970s, the inflation that started in 2021 would have peaked at 18 percent—double its reported peak. That’s higher than the worst of the 1970 and ’80s. Inflation’s current annual rate would be about 8 percent.
(Larry Summers)

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In recent months, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), which rules the southern state of Tamil Nadu, has used AI to resurrect its iconic leader M Karunanidhi from the dead, using lifelike videos of the former movie writer and veteran politician at campaign events. (He died in 2018.)

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The Genes of Politics

Aristotle thought Politics was the highest philosophical pursuit as it dealt with the creation and behavior of the city-state; ethics was only individual. But politics in theory bears little resemblance to politics in practice. And political parties are politics' worst distillate. Antagonism, belief founded on conjecture, mendacity, distortion--all these are the nature of politics and the essence of political parties. And these basic sins are intensified when the system begins to show it does not work.

As dirty and harmful a bastard as politics can be, it comes from pure and noble parentage. Politics is the result of man's basic assessment of Man. That is, the nature of Man is the foundation of any political viewpoint. A political movement will be either the exploitation of Man's qualities as they see them or a reaction against those qualities for some perceived greater good. In either case, politics is the creation, the child, of our philosophy of life, of what we believe Man is and what the world he inhabits should be. If we believe Man a depraved killer, society should probably bear some aspects of a prison. If we think Man has been ruined by technology but has a good heart, perhaps some agricultural society would make sense.

But if something is not constructed correctly, it will fail. If your assessment of Man is erroneous or the world he is to inhabit completely fantastic, the resultant political structure will not work. It may take some time to fail--as power can compensate for unreality for a while--but in the long term it will not work. The Russian communist state was built on several gigantic fallacies and was doomed from the start. No support by the KGB, no pressure from Reagan, would have anything other than a minor effect. Internal flaws will bring a structure down. In government this means that some basic assessment and judgment of human nature must be made and, for the system to succeed, must be accurate.

Very bright guys have tried this before and have not agreed at all. Kant was thrilled with the Enlightenment, Rousseau thought it was a disaster. The problem is that most people think these guys are abstract thinkers with no practical meaning. That is untrue. These people either point to a future direction or are representative of it. Kant led to the English evolution, Rousseau led to the French Revolution and eventually Napoleon. Marx was worse as he unleashed a pious and charitably sounding philosophy that was arbitrarily homicidal. It is quite one thing to have people fail in a system because the protective nature of the system has been overestimated or the people themselves have, it is quite another thing to target a large element of the culture for extinction because of some vague and unprovable belief. It is no wonder that Hitler and Stalin found so much comfort in their treaty, the 
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact: they must have recognized the fraternal homicidal gleam in the eyes across the table. Leaders and government theorists will influence us if they possibly can--they want to--and must be thought of in that way. Governments and leaders try to exploit what they think we are; so what we are, and their assessment of us, matters.

But the assessment of Man is difficult. Our analysis will always be contaminated by our hopes and prejudices. Worse, group behavior might be different from individual behavior--like flocking of birds--and the results from groups might be entirely unexpected. Even worse, times change. New factors--technological, religious, scientific--are introduced or removed. The ground changes. So political belief might come from optimistic views of Man, hopeful, radical, inspired, mystical--anything. But the evaluation of Man which forms the foundation of every political movement must be true. Man's personal plugs must fit the political outlets. For the outcome of inaccuracy in politics is chaos--until it is rescued--stabilized--, as it always is, by despotism.

More than the English Channel separated the development of the English state from the collapse of the French state. The English experience for the time was simply truer.