So what I'd like to know is ...

How did the would-be assassin know where and when to find Donald Trump?  Was he just lucky like Gavrilo Princip?  Or was he "lucky" like Thomas Matthew Crooks?

How the Working Man got stabbed in the back

It's Labor Day, which means "It's the end of summer".  It used to mean a lot more than that - a celebration of labor in general and the working man in particular.  Just in my lifetime, this has been stood on it's head - literally, politics of labor is upside down from when I was a kid.

It used to be that the Democrats stood for the working guy, and the Republicans were the party of Wall Street and the Country Club.  Man is that different now.  I wrote almost a decade ago about the rise of Donald Trump is basically explicit Class terms.

Which seems weird, because it was the Democrats and their buddies the Socialists and Communists (and the University professors, but I repeat myself) who were always bringing up Marx' class theory about politics.  You don't hear that anymore, either, which is really interesting - it's the Dog who Didn't Bark.  An old post from Eric Raymond explains this completely:

Marx believed, and taught, that increasing exploitation of the proletariat would immiserate it, building up a counterpressure of rage that would bring on socialist revolution in a process as automatic as a steam engine.

Inconveniently, the only place this ever actually happened was in a Communist country – Poland – in 1981. I’m not going to get into the complicated historiography of how the Soviet Revolution itself failed to fit the causal sequence Marx expected; consult any decent history. What’s interesting for our purposes is that capitalism accidentally solved the immiseration problem well before then, by abolishing Marx’s proletariat through rising standards of living – reverse immiseration.

I wrote about that here. Even in the 19thm Century - maybe even during Marx' own lifetime - this was a realy problem for Marxist theorists.

The most forward-thinking Marxists had already figured out this was going to be a problem by around 1910. This began a century-long struggle to find a theoretical basis for socialism decoupled from Marxian class analysis.

Early, on, Lenin developed the theory of the revolutionary vanguard. In this telling, the proletariat was incapable of spontaneously respond to immiseration with socialist revolution but needed to be led to it by a vanguard of intellectuals and men of action which would, naturally, take a leading role in crafting the post-revolutionary paradise.

Hey Vladimir, maybe the proletariat was incapable of spontaneously responding to their immiseration because they were undergoing the most remarkable increase in their standard of living that the world had ever seen?  No?  Better to kill 10 million of them?  Oooooh kaaay.

Only a few years later came one of the most virulent discoveries in this quest – Fascism. It is not simplifying much to say that Communists invented Fascism as an escape from the failure of class-warfare theory, then had to both fight their malignant offspring to death and gaslight everyone else into thinking that the second word in “National Socialism” meant anything but what it said.

And the walls of the US House of Representatives are adorned with fasces.

During its short lifetime, Fascism did exert quite a fascination on the emerging managerial-statist elite. Before WWII much of that elite viewed Mussolini and Hitler as super-managers who Got Things Done, models to be emulated rather than blood-soaked tyrants. But Fascism’s appeal did not long survive its defeat.

Hey, none of OUR Representatives are fascists!  Don't look at the wall decorations!  I mean, fascism is for losers - HEY, stop looking at the wall decorations!

Marxists had more success through replacing the Marxian economic class hierarchy with other ontologies of power in which some new victim group could be substituted for the vanished proletariat and plugged into the same drama of immiseration leading to inevitable revolution.

So the working class stiffs that the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats all used to stand for were doing decently well, and might just start voting for the other guys.  What to do, what to do?

Outsource all the good high paying hourly jobs.  Use Environmentalism to justify this - I mean, you don't want your kid to drink dirty water or breathe dirty air, right?  Better for them to grow up to be methheads because there's no jobs and no hope for the future.

Meanwhile, the government and associated white collar employment exploded, pretty much at the public's expense.  These people voted in great numbers - and always for the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats, and big business found that they could really enhance their profits by getting in bed with the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats.  Some new regulations to kill new upstart competitors is just what the doctor ordered.

I wrote about that at length here.

And now people are mystified about the rise of Brexit/Donald Trump/Les gilots jaunes/Alternative fur Deutschland.  And remember how the UK Labour party got wiped out five years ago?  How voters in their heartland of formerly industrial Britain voted for Tory politicians for the first time in a century?  Sure, Labour just won (in a very low turn out election); does anyone think that their voters from Sheffield will ever be back in the way they used to be?

Raymond discusses at length this inversion of politics around Labor, using the UK as an example:

This is the Great Inversion – in Great Britain, Marxist-derived Left politics has become the signature of the overclass even as the working class has abandoned it. Indeed, an increasingly important feature of Left politics in Britain is a visceral and loudly expressed loathing of the working class.

To today’s British leftist, the worst thing you can be is a “gammon”. The word literally means “ham”, but is metaphorically an older white male with a choleric complexion. A working-class white male, vulgar and uneducated – the term is never used to refer to men in upper socio-economic strata. And, of course, all gammons are presumed to be reactionary bigots; that’s the payload of the insult.

Catch any Labor talking head on video in the first days after the election and what you’d see is either tearful, disbelieving shock or a venomous rant about gammons and how racist, sexist, homophobic, and fascist they are. They haven’t recovered yet as I write, eleven days later.

Observe what has occurred: the working class are now reactionaries. New Labor is entirely composed of what an old Leninist would have called “the revolutionary vanguard” and their immigrant clients. Is it any wonder that some Laborites now speak openly of demographic replacement, of swamping the gammons with brown immigrants?

Is it any wonder that the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats are bleeding support and desperately trying to import a whole new voting class of unassimilated immigrants?  Interestingly, Donald Trump is doing very well here among Latino Americans - and so Biden/Harris opened the border and Nancy Pelosi is pushing amnesty.  Parliament is dissolving the People and electing another one.

This is all very weird for me, because this has all happened in my lifetime.  I used to be a Democrat - a real one, a strong supporter of the party - because they stood for the Little Guy against Wall Street.  Now Wall Street is the party of Bill Clinton and Hunter Biden, not of Youngstown or Akron or Toledo or Fitchburg.  Those places are all going to vote for Donald Trump (yes, even Fitchburg in deep blue Massachusetts).

It's all upside down.  And it's upside down all over the Western World, for exactly the same reason.  On this Labor Day, ponder what it would take to get a bunch of political parties to sell out their strongest supporters - to stab them in the back, really.  They sure must have had some powerful motivation.

I do so wonder what that motivation might have been.

Just how bad is the illegal immigration problem?

Libertarians have ditched their support for "free markets and free people":

I would prefer not to lose my Libertarian purity certificate. I want a political philosophy that is simple and has universal application. That way I don’t have to think too hard. For the last 30 years libertarianism has been that philosophy. Name an issue of the day and I can give you the answer. Sluggish growth? Privatise, lower taxes and de-regulate. Busy roads? Privatise. Inflation? Abolish the Bank of England or re-introduce the Gold Standard, or, er… privatise the Bank of England. OK, some issues are not quite that easy but usually they are. Until we get to immigration. Because if libertarianism means open borders then libertarianism is wrong because open borders are a disaster.

Read the whole thing, and the comments.  And remember that this is Libertarian Central.  If the Open Borders crowd has lost Samizdata, they've lost everybody.

Vince Gill - One More Last Chance

So some Covid Karen tells us we all need to forgive and forget about the damage, deaths, and pain inflicted by the Covid lockdowns.  Lots of folks are talking about this - I particularly like Aesop's. Better people than I have written eloquently about the death and destruction, and about how forgiveness requires repentance.  I really don't have anything more to add about that, either.

But one thing struck me about Karen's (actually Brown University Economist Emily Oster) article.  Specifically, this:

The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet. These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward. [My emphasis - Borepatch]

Whoa, slow down Cowpoke.  There wasn't any luck involved at all.  Case in point, Borepatch, March 22, 2020 - a week after lockdowns were imposed:

There are three very interesting Coronavirus narratives emerging in just the last day or two:

1. The virus looks to be less bad - and perhaps much less bad - than we had feared.  As we learn more, we learn that the worst case scenario that had been put forward is much less likely.
2. Government actions have been a factor in making the outbreak or response worse or of using the outbreak to cover up their failures.
3. The government response is strangling the economy.  By their own admission (i.e. bills being discussed in Congress), there is at least a Trillion dollars of damage so far.

So look at this situation: things are not as bad as we feared, governments are to some extent demonstrably incompetent and untrustworthy, and the draconian crackdown/overreaction is destroying businesses, jobs, and people's lives.

Man, I sure was lucky in that analysis, wasn't I?  But I guess that I'm particularly lucky because a month later I wrote this:

Most importantly of all, we're not tracking (well, modeling) how many of the Kung Flu deaths are people who had severe health problems and would likely have died soon anyway.  Sure, there are stories about young healthy people keeling over from this; we know that this is a vanishingly small minority of the total deaths.

But we know that we are putting the population of the country under severe strain, and that this has very real consequences.  Aesop left a comment from the health care front lines that illustrates this:

And yes, in one night, three of the traumas we had were domestic violence.

Normally, we see one of those a month; at worst, one a week. Not three in one night.

But it hasn't been that way every night. Yet.

Man, that's two in a row for Borepatch!  How lucky can you get?  But wait - there's more!  Posted here September 3, 2020:

A groundbreaking new study commissioned by Revolver News concludes that COVID-19 lockdowns are ten times more deadly than the actual COVID-19 virus in terms of years of life lost by American citizens.

Up until this point there had been no simple, rigorous analysis that accurately and definitively conveys the true costs of the COVID-19 lockdowns. Accordingly, Revolver News set out to commission a study to do precisely that: to finally quantify the net damage of the lockdowns in terms of a metric known as “life-years.” Simply put, we have drawn upon existing economic studies on the health effects of unemployment to calculate an estimate of how many years of life will have been lost due to the lockdowns in the United States, and have weighed this against an estimate of how many years of life will have been saved by the lockdowns. The results are nothing short of staggering, and suggest that the lockdowns will end up costing Americans over 10 times as many years of life as they will save from the virus itself.

Bold in original.  That's some medical response, right there.

In all honesty, this really isn't controversial at all.  We've studied the health effects of unemployment for decades and decades.  We know what happened to employment, and how many people lost their jobs.  Applying known health impacts to those people allows us to quantify mortality due to the lockdown.  It's just math.

What is interesting here is the analysis of age at death.  For virtually all (90%) of Covid deaths, the patient was very old.  This means that there were few "life years" left for that patient.  However, for unemployment caused mortality the age at death was much younger, and so there were many more years for each of these people.

The process of higher mathematics gives the result that is in boldface in the quote.

It's hard to see a more counter productive government response.

Man, I must be the luckiest man on the face of the earth, stringing these analyses and predictions together like that.  I'd better buy a Powerball ticket for tonight!  [/snark]

So what is it that makes me so much smarter than a Brown University Professor?  I wrote about this in the April post linked above, specifically:

Once a government executes a particular power, they will want to do it again.  Most of the country in under house arrest; where does that lead in the future?  To SiG's point that people will answer this by saying that people will die and isn't it heartless to let them die over a hypothetical, let me reply by asking how many people?  Because we don't know the number because we're not measuring the factors that would tell us the answer: how many are very sick and would die within the next 6-12 months?  Sure their lives are valuable but do we wreck 50 million lives to give them and extra 6 months?  That sounds harsh, but that's exactly the tradeoff that we are making.

It's the Unseen.  And the costs are Unseen, too, because no Governor in the land wants to make it explicit to the voters just what are all the many miseries that have been unleashed on them by said Governor.  That it is Unseen is not by accident.

And so our policy makers see the situation poorly, looking through a glass darkly at only a portion of the situation.  Of course the resulting public policy is hideous.  Interestingly, the misery is concentrated on Trump voters (the hourly wage class), not the governing class (who work from home via videoconference).  You can't get to your factory job that way, but the salaried class are doing fine.  No doubt this is all a coincidence.

Even a private University like Brown cannot exist without the generous support of the Government.  Professor Oster has a financial incentive to follow the government with respect to this policy, and when a person's dinner depends upon their support for a particular policy they tend not to see any evidence that runs counter to that policy.

Oh, and no doubt Professor Oster did just fine during the lockdowns while working class people in Providence lost their businesses.  No doubt this was all a coincidence, too.

Moving on is crucial now, because the pandemic created many problems that we still need to solve.

Student test scores have shown historic declines, more so in math than in reading, and more so for students who were disadvantaged at the start. We need to collect data, experiment, and invest. Is high-dosage tutoring more or less cost-effective than extended school years? Why have some states recovered faster than others? We should focus on questions like these, because answering them is how we will help our children recover.

Many people have neglected their health care over the past several years. Notably, routine vaccination rates for children (for measles, pertussis, etc.) are way down. Rather than debating the role that messaging about COVID vaccines had in this decline, we need to put all our energy into bringing these rates back up. Pediatricians and public-health officials will need to work together on community outreach, and politicians will need to consider school mandates.

The standard saying is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop as well. Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward.

Point of order, Professor Oster: it wasn't the pandemic that caused all this damage.  Rather, it was the government imposed lockdowns (supported by "experts" such as yourself) that did.  Some of us called this very, very early: April 21, 2020 to be specific:

There is simply no rational, science-based justification to keep the lockdowns in place anymore.  We see this recognized by Governors (who are starting to end the lockdown) and by the population in general (who are starting to willfully violate the lockdown).  Everybody but the "experts" is starting to recognize this, and the "experts" may be refusing to recognize it so that they don't get blamed.

We knew this from the very beginning, but dim-bulb "Experts" like Professor Oster got this public policy wrong all the time.  They got it was catastrophically wrong. Yet somehow the "experts" keep wanting another chance to get things catastrophically wrong again.  And again.  And again.

Professor Oster wants us to give these same "experts" one more last chance.  There's a Country music song about that.

(Best country music cameo ever)

One More Last Chance (Songwriters: Vince Gill, Gary Nicholson)

She was standing at the front door
When I came home last night
A good book in her left hand
And a rollin' pin in the right
She said you've come home for the last time
With whiskey on your breath
If you don't listen to my preachin' boy
I'm goin' to have to beat you half to death

Give me just a one more last chance
Before you say we're through
I know I drive you crazy baby
It's the best that I can do
We're just some good ol' boys, a makin' noise
I ain't a runnin' 'round on you
Give me just a one more last chance
Before you say we're through

First she hid my glasses
'Cause she knows that I can't see
She said you ain't goin' nowhere boy
'Til you spend a little time with me
Then the boys called from the honky tonk
Said there's a party goin' on down here
Well she might've took my car keys
But she forgot about my old John Deere

So give me just a one more last chance
Before you say we're through
I know I drive you crazy baby
It's the best that I can do
We're just some good ol' boys, a makin' noise
I ain't a runnin' 'round on you
Give me just a one more last chance
Before you say we're through

The "French Haircut"

E.M. Smith has a typically thoughtful post about what is happening in Europe right now:

Do note that at present the EU & UK are having about a 10% to 20% reduction in their natural gas flows. This is about 5% to 10% reduction in their “Carbon”. Now both currencies have dropped about 1/3 of their value vs the $ US (that is also losing value fast to inflation….). They also have a political revolution in the starting phases, governments being turned out, and massive marches in the streets. It isn’t even winter yet… With that small a step toward the WEF “Decarbonization Goal”, this is what you get. What do you think will happen with a double of that “decarbonization”?

He then goes on to point out that the EU's "accomplishments" to date are only about 10% of the decarbonization goal and that to meet these goals each of the next ten years will have to do even more than what the last year has seen.  He points out:

Street Protests in the EU / Europe writ large are the prelude to riots that are the prelude to insurrections and revolts. I’ve often said these Elite need to remember “The French Haircut”. Yet they do not.

A lot of folks in Europe are going to die this winter.  We'll see what things look like in March, but I wonder how many of the EU governments will still be in power by then.

 

It's not easy being green

Wind energy company fined $35M for killing hundreds of bald eagles:

An American wind energy company has admitted to killing at least 150 bald and golden eagles, most of which were fatally struck by wind turbine blades, federal prosecutors said. 

ESI Energy pleaded guilty Tuesday to three counts of violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) after eagles died at three of its facilities in Wyoming and New Mexico, according to a statement from the Justice Department.

Nice going, Greens.  If the rest of us even pick up an Eagle feather from the ground we can go to prison, but your corporate buddies just cop a plea and, the cost to electricity rates, and go back to collecting their subsidies.

I'll believe that the Greens are serious when they insist on prison time for this sort of thing.

(via)

So Mikhail Gorbachev est mort

The Press is falling over themselves to talk about what a guy he was, and how the Soviet system was (in the WaPo's term) "a seven-decade experiment born of Utopian idealism". Well OK then.  Remember, I did not read Pasternak but I condemn him ...

Oh, and the cartoon at that last link?  The one with two Gulag prisoners working in the snow and with the caption that said I won the Nobel Prize in Literature.  What was your crime?  You know, the cartoon that won a Pulitzer Prize?

Yeah, the WaPo would never publish it today.  Scratch a journalist, find a commie.

And so, here's a (err) toast to Mikhail Gorbachev, from back in the day when truth could still be spoken.

Hector Berlioz - Dream of a Witches' Sabbath from Symphonie fantastique

I was raised in the Episcopal church.  It's been getting weird for decades and now seems to have pitched over the edge into the abyss of - dare we say it? - heresy: The Episcopal Church comes out in support of sex changes at all ages.

Sigh.

I don't know what a Chalcedonian christian can do these days.  I won't attend the Witches' Sabbath at the Episcopal church, that's for sure.  Although Hector Berlioz wrote some great music that would be appropriate for their so-called "mass".

 

Tab clearing

Here's a selection of what I've been looking at.  There's no connection other than I found each fascinating, even if I don't agree 100% with all points.

John Michael Greer (the artist formerly known as The Arch Druid) looks at the Georgia Guidestones (recently blown up) and connects them to Klaus Schwab and his Great Reset - and brings ancient Mycenae along for the ride.  Here's a flavor from a loong and thoughtful post recommending some modesty from today's "elites".  I expect he will be disappointed by their lack of humility moving forward:

Grant for a moment that modern American society crashes to ruin over the next few centuries, following the usual trajectory of civilizations on their way to history’s compost heap. Grant that the decline and fall has the usual effects: population drops to 5% or so of the precollapse peak, most technology and information resources are lost, literacy becomes a rare skill, and a long and bitter dark age settles over the land. The people of that future time will use storytelling the same way every other illiterate culture has done—it’s apparently hardwired into human brains at this point, after so many generations of evolutionary selection in its favor. What stories will they tell about us?

If you think the stories in question will be the sort of thing that would allow us to preen our egos if we happened to hear them, think again.

The Bitter Centurion echos this in a very personal way.  If the "elites" think that they will be remembered as Gods they don't understand just how much people hate them today:

I've never truly hated anyone the way I hate these 'elites'. These corrupt politicians, corporate oligarchs, and central bankers. The people who have gotten obscenely rich and powerful on the backs of the regular, common folks who are constantly forced to do more with less just to provide for their families.

The entire globe is on the cusp of a Third World War with the Russians, not to mention the internal strife and turmoil in several nations around the world we are seeing as a result of this 'Build Back Better/ESG' bullshit, cooked up at the World Economic Forum. All the major conflicts and problems we are seeing in the world today, every single one of them, is entirely THEIR fault. It is all their doing.

Why can't America build anything?  Basically elites and government bureaucrats.

What Edward Gibbon got wrong about the fall of the Roman Empire.  This is a good overview but Gibbon really needed someone to take him aside when he started blaming it on Christianity.  After all, the Eastern Roman Empire was much more devoutly Christian than the Western portion and survived the West by a thousand years.  A millennium isn't exactly a rounding error, Eddie.

So why is Joe Biden so under water in the polls?

Russia -

The world’s largest exporter of wheat.

The world’s largest exporter of fertilizer.

The world’s largest exporter of natural gas.

The world’s second largest exporter of oil.

America -

The world’s largest exporter of LGBTQ+.

— RAMZPAUL (@ramzpaul) June 16, 2022

 

It's a real mystery,that's for sure.

Hat tip: Don Surber.

But no more mean tweets, amirite?

The Queen Of The World saw this on the Book of Faces.

 

The Democratic Party loses the signal

Electronic communications rely on the concept of a Carrier Wave.  Basically, this is a well-defined electronic signal that all devices can "tune" into, and upon which the actual message is transmitted.  If you lose the carrier, you lose your connection and you can't communicate with anybody.

You Old Farts will remember the old dial-up modem days.  You see, most houses back in the paleolithic age (say, the 1990s) only had one phone line.  Hen Junior wanted to jump on Compuserve (or, Lord forbid, America Online), his biggest worry was often that Mom would pick up the phone to call a friend.  When the phone went off-hook, the carrier signal went all skew-wumpus* and the modem connection dropped.  There was even a long running BBS joke Hey! Wait! Don't pick up the ph{#`%${%&`+'${`%&NO CARRIER

Good times, good times.

Well, the Democratic Party has had control of the carrier wave to the American people for a long, long time.  The first post I tagged Biased Media was way back in 2008, and it was obvious even back then.  They've been used to jamming the Republicans access to the Carrier for a long time.  This has given the Democrat's a big advantage for a long, long time.

That's been going away for a long, long time.  Reagan beat Carter, and then whats-his-name from Minnesota.  The Republicans swept control of Congress in the 1990s.  The whole "Bush lied" (about Iraq) dates back to Hillary Clinton who needed Media air cover for her vote to authorize the Iraq invasion in 2003.  Sure, Obama won in 2008 but the 2010 elections decimated the Democratic Party, as the country reacted in revulsion to the far left-wing policies of his administration.

In my counting, that's 40 years of increasing rejection of the Democratic Party's narrative pushed by an increasingly weak and irrelevant media.

And so here we are at today.  We've had two mass shootings in as many weeks, and three or four in the last couple of months.  It's so perfectly set up to support the Democratic narrative that people are wondering if this is yet more FBI instigation**.  And yet, it's not moving the needle in the Democrat's favor.  Consider:

• Senate Majority Leader (Democrat) Chuck Schumer has refused to move forward with a gun control bill.  This is despite all the recent mass shootings.  Schumer may be a jerk but he knows how to count votes, and he knows how to look at what the polls say about issues.  The American people are entirely uninterested in more gun control, and forcing his party to put their necks on that chopping block is something that he (wisely) will not do.
• Covid is over, and every time a (Democrat) politician or bureaucrat suggests further lock downs or restrictions this "news" disappears from the media in a day.  It's political suicide, any why the Democrats would love to ride that crisis further, they know they'd just ride it into the ditch.
• Russia! Russia! Russia! is over.  Polls are starting to show that people want sanctions to end so we can import oil from them to drop gas prices.  The joke is I can't believe that it's MonkeyPox season!  I still have my Ukraine decorations up!
  

• Oh, yeah - I forgot all about the riots.  And MonkeyPox?  Bitch, please.

Each of these has had a shelf life measured between 2 months and 2 days, but the lifetime is shortening.  And as this has played out, Joe Biden's approval ratings have continued sinking.  He's now the least popular "President" since Harry Truman.  That's 70 years.  If you actually remember Harry Truman, you're really, really old.  Polls repeatedly show that people would prefer Republican candidates over Democrat ones by 5, or 8, or 10 points.

My point is that the media and the Democrat Party (but I repeat myself) is that crisis after crisis after crisis, all blamed on the Republicans, or Vladimir Putin, or White People have had precisely zero effect.  Nada. Nichto.  ничто.  无.

So to my point - The Democrats are very unpopular, and are getting increasingly unpopular.  The Media has lost all ability to change this trajectory.  We will leave for another day the question of whether the Republicans will be any better, but in all honesty - could they possibly be worse?***

We will also leave for another day the question of how legitimacy is established in a "Western Democracy" when elections are repeatedly stolen.  There's no question that both the Democratic and Republican Parties are up to this, and since "free and fair elections" are the bedrock of the American sense of political legitimacy, what happens when this is under minded needs to be explored in more detail.****

I shall endeavor to address these open items this weekend.  But I maintain what I said ten years ago after another notorious mass shooting: no new gun control laws are on offer.  And if Republican s are smart, after the Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade they should counter all gun control proposals with "Common Sense" abortion control proposals.  You'd have to pop popcorn to enjoy the meltdown that would induce.

* Technical term in computer networking, I was told.

** Remember the jury that refused to convict the people who were "plotting to kidnap" the Michigan Governor because almost all of the folks who were involved were FBI? 

*** Spoiler alert: maybe.

**** Spoiler alert: nothing good.

So gun control is back on the menu

Color me skeptical that the Democrats can do much in the current political situation - their margins in Congress are razor thin and rely on a fair number of Democrats from gun friendly states like West Virginia.  But we're hearing the usual banging of the gun control drum, so it's time to dust this 4 year old post off.  I mean, it's on the right hand side bar for your convenience, but some things need to be said again, and again.

(originally posted March 2, 2018)

I confess. I'm not opposed to gun control.

Confession, they say, is good for the soul, so I confess.  Man, I feel better all ready.

I don't object to gun control.  What I object to is stupid and useless gun control.

Unfortunately, all we seem to hear are stupid and useless gun control proposals.  As a public service, here are two simple rules you can use to figure out whether a gun control proposal is stupid and useless:

Rule #1.  Can the person proposing the law state what they think the law will accomplish?  Most of the time it seems that they can't.  For example, what good would banning bump stocks do?  They were (maybe) used in one crime in the Republic's history.  Is the goal really to prevent something that has only happened once?  Really?

Rule #2.  Can the person proposing the law state how likely the law is to accomplish the goal from Rule #1?  Considering that you can make a bump stock from a string and a key ring, is it rational to ban bump stocks?

That's it - two simple rules to identify non-stupid and non-useless gun control laws.  So let's use these rules to look at some gun control laws and see if they're stupid or not:

1994 Assault Weapons Ban.  Stupid.  The law was supposed to stop people from buying military style semi-automatic rifles.  It didn't.  The AR platform is likely the most popular rifle in America, and was so during the "ban".  The Department of Justice said that the ban had precisely zero effect on gun crime.

Gun Free School Zones.  Stupid.  It was supposed to stop people from taking guns into schools.  That sure worked great, didn't it?

I could go on with this, but you can add your own.  My point, though, is that the gun control proposals (magazine size restrictions, one gun a month purchase limits, etc.) are stupid and useless.  I'm willing to leave open the possibility that some gun control proposals could be non-stupid, at least in theory.  But I sure haven't seen any yet.

UPDATE 2 March 2018 12:45: This line of reasoning continues in a second post.

School shootings are for pikers

95 years ago 38 children and 6 adults died in the Bath School Disaster. Andrew Kehoe hid hundreds of pounds of dynamite in the basement of the schoo0l in Bath Township, Michigan.  He rigged two timers, one for each wing of the school.  Only one detonated, and it's likely that the body count would have been higher if the other had also detonated.

All the while he sat in his truck outside the school.  When first responders appeared, he detonated the bomb in his truck, killing himself and wounding several of them.  In all, 58 were injured but survived.  Yeah, he had a gun.

Oh yeah, before he left in the morning he killed his wife.  Quite a guy.

I'd be more impressed with the gun control crowd if they would (a) also talk about other mass murders that didn't involve guns, and (b) knew about other mass murders that didn't involve guns.  They don't, and they don't.

When do The Powers That Be respect International Law, and when do they not?

It seems that one of Trump's Defense Secretaries has a new "tell all" book coming out, and in it he talks about how Trump wanted to bomb the drug cartels in Mexico and how awful that was.

I mean, what a shocking, awful, disgraceful violation of International Law - sending an attack into the territory of a sovereign ally.  Unthinkable!  I mean, he probably wouldn't have even let the government know he was going to attack!

Sort of like this:

That's Barack Obama his own self, saying that he basically knew he was violating International Law, for good reasons.  And what was the reason?  3,000 dead Americans, and the Pakistani government unwilling or unable to do anything about the perpetrators on their soil.

So what was Trump's reason?  Oh, wait:

More than 100,000 people died from drug overdoses in the U.S. in 2021, more than in any other year on record, according to provisional data released by the National Center for Health Statistics Wednesday.

So Osama bin Laden killed 3,000 Americans and was killed ten years later.  That's 300 a year, or about one a day.  The cartels kill 100,000 each year, or about 275 Americans a day.  But it was awesome that Obama violated International Law and it's The Worst Thing Ever that Trump even thought about it.

It makes you suspect that all this pious bloviating from the "Elites" is a bunch of hooey.  And it makes you wonder if they think that 275 people from Youngstown, Ohio and similar places in the hollowed out "Fly Over" America are less valuable (and less worthy of protection) than one person working high finance in the World Trade Center.

Actually, I don't wonder at all.  It does make me wonder if J.D. Vance is right: "If you wanted to kill a bunch of MAGA voters in the middle of the heartland, how better than to target them and their kids with this deadly fentanyl?..."

Man, Trump sure hired a bunch of snakes in the grass.

This is the most important blog I've read since The Archdruid Report

Dominic Cummings has a substack where he posts the most insightful musings that I've read since I ran across The Archdruid Report back in 2016.  His post about how to reboot the Government Agencies is an absolute must-read. 

He is very thoughtful, and probes deeply.  I think his criticism of Donald Trump is mostly fair:

And Trump showed:

1. He does not understand power in Washington.

2. He doesn’t have a CEO mindset or skillset in the Bezos/Gates/Jobs/Musk sense of being able to execute at scale and speed.

3. Like Boris Johnson, his insecurities mean he can’t face his lack of skills and trust/empower anyone to build the team to run the administration for him.

4. He has some showman skills, a good nickname game and a sporadically good twitter game. But like Johnson, he prefers to spend his time babbling about and at the media rather than the (often mind-numbing) problems of institutions and incentives you need to focus on to change big things.

This combination meant Trump made a lot of noise but got very little done.

He could not control the government. He was sometimes right, sometimes wrong, sometimes idiotic, often right in his complaints that the media were lying, but very little he said mattered because his words did not connect to power. He annoyed the swamp but he couldn’t drain the swamp — not the tiniest corner.

This is a very short overview of his thoughts on what would avoid these pitfalls:

So, the most important thing for the next GOP candidate and their team to appreciate is this: if you want to have a serious effect, if you want to have a chance of dealing with serious crises, if you want to bend the arc of culture rather than just have a cool-sounding job, then you should generally not be trying to ‘take over the institutions and run them’, you should not develop a traditional ‘reform’ agenda, instead, like Lincoln and FDR, you need to be the once-every-~70 years sort of a President who actually controls the government.

This means appointing people to many parts of DC not to ‘reform’ the department/agency but to close it while someone else runs the startup to replace it (if it needs replacing) operating on completely different legal and management principles and staffed by completely different sorts of people. This does not of course mean closing everything — there are parts of the regime that can carry on pretty much as before — it means closing and reopening those parts necessary to control the important parts of government, such as the Pentagon.

 Highly, highly recommended, even though it is a very long - dare I say Borepatchian? - post.

Hat tip to Isegoria, who finds the most interesting stuff.

No go away, or I shall mock you a second time

Alinsky's Rule 5: Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.

I mean, I can't even ...

 

Quote of the Day - Conspiracy Theories edition

Francis Porretto thinks that we are entering the Golden Age of conspiracy theories and that it's all the Media's fault:

Now, whatever the truth of the matter – and it may be quite a long time before we have it, if we ever do – the proliferation of wild theories is a direct consequence of the loss of trust in the major media. The dynamic is fairly straightforward:

• The organs of information have proved themselves un-trustworthy, and the fora for discussion arbitrarily silence persons who deviate from the “official truth.”
• Thereafter, conversation will admit any and every thesis that might explain why we’re being force-fed a steady diet of lies.
• Since there are innumerable possible explanations for such a thing, they will multiply and proliferate without limit.
• The “zero plausibility threshold” was set by the major media, which have demonstrated indifference to the truth.

     Perhaps this would be beyond the comprehension of a small child. However, I’d expect a teenager to get it without a beat. Look at how much crap the “authorities” in their lives feed them.

I think he's right.  When all the media's legitimacy got sucked out of the room, something was going to fill the vacuum.  I guess we're seeing what that is.

We have always been at war with East Asia

A fish doesn't notice the water it swims in.  The Western populations swim in a sea of State sponsored propaganda.  Perceptions are carefully shaped so that only Approved® preferences emerge.  Unfortunately for the "Elites" they have pushed the envelope so far from most people's perceived reality that propaganda collapses.  It seems that the American public remains sane:

The Economist/You Gov poll showed that despite a barrage of pro-war media coverage only 19% of Americans support "sending soldiers to Ukraine to fight Russian soldiers."

54% oppose.

You have to dig very deep in its poll story to find this gem. It is almost as if they were trying to manipulate the public.

So you have to dig to find out that Americans oppose World War III.  The "Elites" trying to shape public opinion have a long way to go still.  Good.

And the scare quotes around "Elites" is well earned.  A great post at Liberty's Torch lays out the case against them:

Rule by moral midgets is the rule now. The posturing Trump could not contain his feverish wish to bomb Syria in 2017 and Clinton before him inexplicably took it upon himself to bomb Serbia relentlessly for over 70 days. Obama chose groveling on the international stage as his signature gesture and his Secretary of State wet herself with glee at the death of Gaddafi. The entire political class of the United States has chosen to chase will-o’-the-wisps fueled by arrogance and delusions. Denial of fundamental biological reality is now an integral part of the mental processes of said class, superbly “educated” to a man but ignorant of life’s most precious truths.

It’s not only an American phenomenon. All but a few European leaders desire anything but national suicide by immigration to vindicate the most vaporous and sappy sentiments of compassion, fairness, and historical retribution. A mere 104 years after the massive slaughter of The Great War and not a one of that lot could summon the courage let alone vision to lift a finger to derail the asinine U.S. encroachment on Russia or question its inherent assumption of some unique Russian depravity or willful nonobservance of civilized norms. Slavic brutes!! Lessons learned from the reckless slide into the massive slaughter of modern industrial warfare? None.

Top.  Men.  Good thing the People still retain some common sense.

Why Joe Biden is in trouble

John Michael Greer looks at the bumbling and incoherence seen from the current Administrations and ponders how they can be so incompetent.  It's the Soviet Union all over again, where ideology is everything and results nothing:

The more tightly you focus your educational system on a set of approved abstractions, and the more inflexibly you assume that your ideology is more accurate than the facts, the more certain you can be that you will slam headfirst into one self-inflicted failure after another. The Soviet managerial aristocracy never grasped that, and so the burden of dealing with the gap between rhetoric and reality fell entirely on the rest of the population. That was why, when the final crisis came, the descendants of the people who stormed the Winter Palace in 1917, and rallied around the newborn Soviet state in the bitter civil war that followed, simply shrugged and let the whole thing come crashing down.

We’re arguably not far from similar scenes here in the United States, for the same reasons: the gap between rhetoric and reality gapes just as wide in Biden’s America as it did in Chernenko’s Soviet Union. When a ruling class puts more stress on using the right abstractions than on getting the right results, those who have to put up with the failures—i.e., the rest of us—withdraw their loyalty and their labor from the system, and sooner or later, down it comes.

We've seen this play out before.