Category: Politics

If the election didn’t provide enough horror and dread… A trick-or-treater who showed up at our house last week:

(note the bandage on his ear)

And here’s my 90-year-old mom meeting a chainsaw killer with Costco chocolates. Mindy the Crippler is ready to provide backup. Not in frame: three of Regina’s grandkids (9, almost 11, and 15), all of whom had an epic evening.

Barack Obama says that each of us should vote for a politician who shares our racial identify, e.g., Blacks for Blacks and whites for whites (video): “Kenyan raised by white mother in Hawaii urges Chicago’s [B]lack men to vote for Indian woman raised in Canada”.

It seems, however, that many of us aren’t willing to heed the advice of this Nobel Peace laureate. Here’s some potentially troublesome data for Donald “white guy” Trump:

The underlying source has a front page showing the same information over time:

With the American population overall, whites have dropped from 85 to 69 between 1964-2020 while Blacks have gone from 64 to 72. In other words, Americans overall prefer Blacks to whites and Donald Trump isn’t the Presidential candidate who identifies as “Black”.

(Why don’t Americans in general have a “warm” feeling about Asian-Americans? Why aren’t they the most-loved group by all subgroups within the U.S. and by Americans overall? What’s not to love about a neighbor who is unlikely to commit a crime and very likely to pay taxes? One can see from the above data that Kamala Harris is wise to identify as “Black” rather than “Indian” or “Asian”!)

From the same source, as government has grown to consume a larger fraction of the economy the percentage of Americans who “care a good deal” about who becomes president has increased:

And the democratic process is guaranteed to make our government larger, as a percentage of GDP. Roughly twice as many Americans want a larger government as want a smaller government:

Among Democrats, its a roughly 17:1 ratio of people who want a larger government to those who’d like to see a larger role for private enterprise and private spending:

It’s not just Maskachusetts… Americans in general have grown to hate those who vote for the opposing party:

“Importance of American Identity” is interesting. There was a dramatic decline from 2012-2020 in the percentage of Americans who thought that being “American” was important. The shift for Democrats has been particularly dramatic so it makes sense that they’d support giving higher priority to the interests of migrants than to the interests of the native-born working class.

Loosely related… the New York Times reminds us that there is one class of Americans that is even better than the merely Black:

Speaking of the New York Times, a white reporter lists all of the reasons “Why Is Trump Gaining With Black and Hispanic Voters?” and fails to consider the possibility that Black and Hispanic voters might be capable of rational thought and, therefore, might have concluded that Donald Trump would do a better job at running the U.S. government than his opponent would. The reporter and his/her/zir/their editors posit that Black voters might like Trump because he is entertaining or that they are filled with “resentment” about “woke cultural norms”. It’s an interesting window into the mind of the white Democratic elite!

“High Taxes, Big Spending, Low Unemployment: Tim Walz’s Economic Record” (Wall Street Journal, a purportedly conservative newspaper, August 2024):

[Walz] also pushed through a $2.6 billion infrastructure bill—the largest in state history—that will benefit residents and businesses.

This is a news article, not opinion. So the Wall Street Journal reports it as an established fact that taking $2.6 billion from individuals who would have invested it or spent it privately and giving it to government contractors “WILL benefit” residents. In other words, the WSJ is certain that the government will spend this money better than individuals would have. Therefore, a Reagan-style appeal to shrink government should be rejected by essentially all American voters (readers of Democrat-affiliated media, such as the NYT, certainly aren’t going to argue that limiting government spending is beneficial).

Separately, how will the $2.6 billion in Minnesota taxpayer funds be spent? A press release says that “Black, Brown, and Native communities” will benefit more than second-rate white people:

I think this is why sharp-penciled guys such as Paul Ryan have been sidelined or forced out of government and why Congress will never stop borrowing and spending (which also dooms us to at least moderate inflation, I think). If tax-and-spend is great then borrow-and-spend is at least good.

Readers: Are there any candidates running for election this week on your ballot who seriously advocate for a smaller government?

Given the upcoming election this week, I thought it would be a good time to look at how the credentialed class perceives the world. These are the folks who determine what appears in our media and, ultimately, what policies get implemented in Washington, D.C. Where can we find the folks who’ve bubbled to the top of our meritocracy? At the bookstore! The pictures below are from the Barnes & Noble in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, August 4, 2024 (folks in Florida, of course, are not at the heart of national policymaking, but I think this Barnes & Noble is representative of what bookstores nationwide offer to the righteous).

First, a few happy images:

(The Wealth of Refugees (Oxford University Press) is my favorite. There has never been a situation in which Country A has offered to pay Country B for some refugees. Canada doesn’t offer to pay the U.S. for a share of the flow across our southern border, for example. In fact, there are countries that are willing to pay fines to the EU rather than accept refugees, thus suggesting that refugees have a negative value. At market prices, in other words, our four-year-old minivan is worth more than all of the world’s refugees put together. The author (“Alexander Betts is Professor of Forced Migration and International Affairs, and William Golding Senior Fellow in Politics at Brasenose College, at the University of Oxford.”), who no doubt hasn’t been willing to pay to get a refugee in his/her/zir/their own household, apparently has a much more sophisticated way of establishing value than the market.)

Then some delicious schadenfreude about how badly Republicans are doing:

But the core of the political book section is mostly about fear. If we can’t get abortion care at any stage of a pregnant person’s pregnancy on every street corner in every state, that’s a “new [and bad] America”:

American democracy is under “threat” and/or very nearly already replaced by fascism or National Socialism (“Nazi”).

One thing that might help save democracy is making sure that peasants get all of their information from sources approved by the elites:

We also need to get rid of a frightening and dangerous religion, especially if practiced without supervision from city-dwelling Democrats, that threatens our national well-being:

The news isn’t all terrible because some brave souls are fighting back:

A restatement of Joe Biden’s wisdom, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black”:

Harvard professors share their wisdom at a $400,000 discount from list price and without the need to reside in a pro-Hamas encampment. From the Amazon page about this book:

They draw on a wealth of examples—from 1930s France to present-day Thailand—to explain why and how political parties turn against democracy. They then show how our Constitution makes us uniquely vulnerable to attacks from within: It is a pernicious enabler of minority rule, allowing partisan minorities to consistently thwart and even rule over popular majorities. Most modern democracies—from Germany and Sweden to Argentina and New Zealand—have eliminated outdated institutions like elite upper chambers, indirect elections, and lifetime tenure for judges. The United States lags dangerously behind.

The only way to preserve our democracy, in other words, is to eliminate most of its institutions because they’re “outdated”. (I guess the nomination of Kamala Harris, for whom nobody voted in a primary, is a decent first step.)

If a peasant were to vote for a conservative this coming week, it is because he/she/ze/they is a fool who has been taken in by a transparent grift:

My take-away is that fear seems to be the best way to motivate someone to buy a book or cast a vote. Peasants are promised almost nothing in exchange for a correct vote, but are threatened with catastrophe if they vote incorrectly.