‘They Took a Wild Chance’

Posted on | January 2, 2019 | Comments Off on ‘They Took a Wild Chance’

Smitty has already commented on Willard’s embarrassing anti-Trump column, so I’ll refrain from further comment on that. What seems to have eluded the comprehension of Sen.-elect Romney and other #NeverTrump Republicans — looking at you, Jonah Goldberg — is that their insulting disdain for our President is rooted in their elitist loathing of the people who voted for him. That is to say, Mitt and Jonah aren’t just against Trump, personally, but they are against the 62.9 million Americans who elected him. Considering themselves to possess the authority of Platonic archons, our elite deny that the people are capable of self-government, and thus oppose their right to choose their own rulers.

Trump won because he got more votes in key states — including Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan — than Hillary Clinton. Also, quite relevantly, Trump got more votes in 2016 than did the Republican presidential candidate in 2012. Compare the outcomes:

PENNSYLVANIA
2012 — Romney 2,680,434 (46.6%), Obama 2,990,274 (52.0%)
2016 — Trump 2,970,733 (48.2%), Clinton 2,926,441 (47.5%)

OHIO
2012 — Romney 2,661,437 (47.7%), Obama 2,827,709 (50.7%)
2016 — Trump 2,841,005 (51.7%), Clinton 2,394,164 (43.6%)

MICHIGAN
2012 — Romney 2,115,256 (44.7%), Obama 2,564,569 (54.2%)
2016 — Trump 2,279,543 (47.5%), Clinton 2,268,839 (47.3%)

In these three Northern industrial states, the GOP vote increased by a combined total of 734,084 votes. However you explain this result, you cannot deny the fact that Trump got more votes and he did so despite the furious attacks of the liberal media establishment, and despite the vocal opposition of the #NeverTrump Republican elite. How much better would Trump’s re-election prospects be if his GOP critics would stop whining and start helping? Their endless petty complaints, their childish butthurt tantrums, are giving aid and comfort to the Democrats, and perhaps deliberately so. And it never seems to occur to the #NeverTrump crowd to wonder what was in the minds of those voters who elected Trump. Who are these people, anyway? Karol Markowicz is a Republican who didn’t vote for Trump, but who isn’t #NeverTrump:

To understand what happened, I devoured reporting about Trump voters and sought to understand them.
I wasn’t some liberal, mind you. I had worked for years in Republican politics. Yet I hadn’t known any Trump primary voters. I didn’t know his fans, his base.
Reading their concerns was eye-opening. They weren’t stupid, and they weren’t hateful. Mainstream politicians had ignored them for so long that they took a wild chance on the reality-TV star from Queens.

(Hat-tip: Hogewash.) Quite simply, the political elite of both parties are out of touch with the American heartland, and Trump was able to appeal to voters who felt their interests had been neglected. The elite’s objection to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” nationalism is evidence that our political establishment cares more about their own prestige than they do about the American people. The elite are our enemies.

Category: Donald Trump

It’s the Degeneracy, Stupid

Posted on | January 2, 2019 | 1 Comment

Instapundit calls attention to a study showing a 5-point IQ decline between men born in 1975 and those born in 1991 — between Generation X and Millennials, in other words — and researchers blame this on increased childhood time spent on computers, smartphones and videogames. Ace follows this with research showing that too much screen time contributes to psychiatric disorders among children.

While I don’t deny the destructive influence of all these gadgets, I think this research underestimates the ways in which demographic decadence has contributed to the decline in IQ. The problems that Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein described in The Bell Curve are highly relevant to any such discussion. If effective contraceptives are widely available, and if there are social pressures on young women to pursue college education and professional careers, fewer highly intelligent women will become mothers, and those who do become mothers will have fewer children. If the smartest women have the fewest children (and this is the general trend that has developed over the past 50 years), then the overall average IQ of the population will decline. This is not an opinion, but a fact — the science is settled — and our policy-makers have been ignoring the dysgenic trend for too long. Instead, we have doubled-down on a rhetoric of “empowerment” for women that is anti-natalist in effect, if not also in intent. There are limits to what can be done, in a free society, to reverse the disastrous demographic trends that have afflicted the United States in the past half-century. However, when we witness evidence of degeneracy, we ought not to pretend that we don’t know what we’re actually seeing, or what is causing our society’s descent into idiocy.

Could saying this be considered . . . offensive?

Here’s the thing: If you’re smart enough to comprehend the preceding paragraph, then obviously you must be quite intelligent. Besides which, people who enjoy reading about politics and current events are quite generally above-average. (Stupid people just watch TV.) It should be obvious that I, as a conservative, would never advocate any policy that would infringe anyone’s constitutional liberty. But what has happened is that the elites who control our institutions of education and communication do not wish to permit a free discussion of these demographic realities. You cannot solve a problem you’re not allowed to discuss, and so we keep drifting toward catastrophe in eerie silence.

UPDATE: Of course, Mike Judge’s 2006 film Idiocracy might be helpful instruction, for those too stupid or lazy to read books.

Category: Culture, Education

Ah, The “Character” Issue

Posted on | January 1, 2019 | Comments Off on Ah, The “Character” Issue

by Smitty

Bruce Campbell’s political doppelgänger opened the pie hole in the WaPo.

One is instantly reminded why we didn’t really want this gasbag in 2012, and why his loss to #OccupiedResoluteDesk surprised no one outside of Utah:

The world needs American leadership, and it is in America’s interest to provide it. A world led by authoritarian regimes is a world — and an America — with less prosperity, less freedom, less peace.
To reassume our leadership in world politics, we must repair failings in our politics at home.

No mention whatsoever of Korea, USMCA, anything. I guess, other than running for the Senate, Mitt has been at choir practice the last two years or something.

Mitt is basically rehashing Jonah Goldberg’s recent handwringing. As I was saying on Twitter:

Willard Mitt,
A tedious git,
Who couldn’t quite deliver,
Then beat his feet,
To a Senate seat,
And showed the world he’s a “giver”. https://t.co/iTHAMFWtd2— I Came; I Saw; I Got Over Macho Grande (@smitty_one_each) January 2, 2019

In reply to His High-Minded-Principled-Failure, a pair of great articles have arrived at American Greatness that should be of help both to Jonah and Senator Milquetoast.

First, Victor Davis Hanson points out the exhaustion of our so-called “elite”:

In short, instead of being a meritocracy, they amount to a mediocracy, neither great nor awful, but mostly mediocre.

This mediocracy is akin to late 4th-century B.C. Athenian politicians, the last generation of the Roman Republic, the late 18th-century French aristocracy, or the British bipartisan elite of the mid-1930s—their reputations relying on the greater wisdom and accomplishment of an earlier generation, while they remain convinced that their own credentials and titles are synonymous with achievement, and clueless about radical political, economic, military, and social upheavals right under their noses.

Remember the “new normal”? Our economic czars had simply decided anemic economic growth was the best Americans could expect and that 3 percent annualized GDP growth was out of the realm of possibility. Big government incompetence combined with Wall Street buccaneerism had almost melted down the economy in 2008. Recent presidents had doubled the debt—twice.

Read the whole thing, especially where VDH points out the case the the mediocracy would need to make to unseat Trump. Yes, Mitt, he’s talking about your Pharisaic hide.

More Jonah- and Mitt-specific is Roger Kimball:

On the contrary, people supported him, first, because of what he promised to do and, second, because of what, over the past two years, he has accomplished. These accomplishments, from rolling back the regulatory state and scores of conservative judicial appointments, from moving our Israeli embassy to Jerusalem to resuscitating our military, working to end Obamacare, and fighting to keep our borders secure, are not morally neutral data points. They are evidences of a political vision and of promises made and kept. They are, in short, evidences of what sort of character Donald Trump is.

Personally, I Jonah is making the strongest possible argument he can honestly make while still getting paid for it. You can define “character” in a way that Barack Obama is a better President than Trump, because BHO only ever had one wife, never had tabloid headings about adultery, and is (apparently) a good father. As far as the media has reported it. This far: =>||<=.

Anybody who wants another Obama administration is likely to have another swing at one in 2020, when Michelle steps up to the plate. And, again, only a chump’s chump would really want Her Majesty in office, appointing foes as Ambassador to Arkanicidia. Don’t be a chump: support Trump.

But my answer to the whole “character” question is this:

What I think Voltaire and Rousseau miss, but we see in the Epistle of James, is that character & deed are related like velocity & position.

The sum of deeds over time is character; the derivative of character with respect to time is a specific deed.— I Came; I Saw; I Got Over Macho Grande (@smitty_one_each) December 30, 2018

via RedState,

also: The Last Refuge

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: Goldberg > Romney > Trump

In The Mailbox: 01.01.19

Posted on | January 1, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: May You All Have A happy & Auspicious New Year
Twitchy: SNL Alum’s New Year’s Resolution Is To “Make Sure The Republican Party Dies”
Louder With Crowder: Alexandria Occasional-Cortex Goes Bananas When Called Out For Lying About The Bronx
Rod Dreher: Learning From The Spanish Civil War

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: What Happened To California’s “Bustling” Recreational Weed Market? also, The Montavilla Initiative
American Thinker: The Only Privilege In America Is Liberal Privilege
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday – And Goodbye, 2018! also, Happy 2019!
BattleSwarm: Why No New Housing Gets Built In San Francisco, also, Fleischman & Pie On The Gender Pay Gap Myth
Camp Of The Saints:
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday, also, Ending 2018 With A Feh
Da Tech Guy: It’s a Bot World We’re Living In, also, What Transgender Athletes Will Do To High School Sports
Don Surber: You Are Mentally Ill, “Ma’am”, also, Steaming Her Way Onto The Trumpenfreude List
Dustbury: Strange Search Engine Queries, also, Worst Titles Of 2018
First Street Journal: Why Should We Be Surprised That A Movement Based On Mental Illness Yields Insane Results?
The Geller Report: Riding The Subway In Germany – Watch Arabs Assault Train Passengers In NYE Assault, also, UK Muslim Goes On NYE Rampage, Stabs Three
Hogewash: My Year In Review Stuff, also, Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
Hollywood In Toto: Ellen Barkin Wants Louis C.K. Raped & Shot
Joe For America: Sen. Graham Skewers Nancy Pelosi With Savage Open Letter, also, Kaepernick LOST – Players Stop Kneeling, NFL Ratings Rise Significantly
JustOneMinute: I Was Not Ready For This Football
Legal Insurrection: Elizabeth Warren’s “Dukakis Tank” Moment, also, Net Neutrality’s End Brought About Faster Internet
Michelle Malkin: Say His Name – RIP Corporal Ronil Singh
The PanAm Post: The Danger Of The Colombian Left, also, Bolsonaro And The Importance Of Cultural Change For Political Victory
Power Line: The Knights Of Columbus Respond To Senators Hirono and Harris, also, The Hypocrisy Of Nike
Shark Tank: Florida Republicans Slam Baseball’s Deal With Cuba
Shot In The Dark: Happy New Year
STUMP: Bye Bye 2018 – And The 80% Funding Myth Persists, also, Happy New Tax Year!
The Jawa Report: The Un-American Dream, also, Noooo! Not Dr. Hook!
The Political Hat: Happy New Year!
This Ain’t Hell: New Year’s Day Feelgood Stories, also, General Mattis’ Farewell Letter To Troops
Victory Girls: VG Person of The Year For 2018 – Melania Trump
Volokh Conspiracy: Court Stays Ruling Invalidating ACA Pending Appeal
Weasel Zippers: Trump Ushers In 2019 With Trumpian Tweet – “Calm Down & Enjoy The Ride”, also, Illegal Alien Arrested In Deadly TN Crash Charged With Criminally Negligent Homicide
Megan McArdle: The Latest Journalism Scandal Proves It – Partisan Writing Is One Way To Keep Journalists Honest
Mark Steyn: The American Media, Suckered Again, also, Ave Atque Vale 2018

Category: Linkagery

Re-Learning Crap

Posted on | January 1, 2019 | Comments Off on Re-Learning Crap

This morning Smitty called to wish me a Happy New Year, and our conversation continued until I went off on one of my veins-bulging on my neck rants about Jonah Goldberg. See, my friend Professor Paul Gottfried cited me today:

Recently American Spectator-columnist Robert Stacy McCain issued a blistering response to Jonah Goldberg’s latest efforts at refurbishing his “Never-Trump conservative” credentials. McCain points out that Goldberg keeps reprising the same attacks against Trump that he’s been making for more than two years. Goldberg goes after Chris Buskirk at the American Greatness website for dismissing his brand of “conservatism” and for indicating that Goldbergism may be outdated. Despite the fact that Goldberg’s fans continue to devour his offerings, his invectives seem to have become tiresomely repetitive. . . .

You can read the rest of that, and I’ll be happy to discuss it with you in the comments, but did I mention I was on the phone with Smitty this morning? Because after I’d exhausted myself ranting about whatever, Smitty was like, “Oh, by the way, we’re recombombulating the frammajamitz to import the new codeframe blahblahblah . . .”

Maybe that’s not a verbatim quote, but the point is that what he was actually calling me about this morning was not to listen to my rant, but to inform me that a Shiny New Upgrade was about to be activated. And so when I finally decided to blog something today, the toolbox was some awful effing thing I couldn’t recognize and have been barely able to use.

This is McCain’s Law of Technology: Just about the time you get the hang of Upgrade 2.0, the nerds who understand this crap will introduce Upgrade 3.0, which is allegedly an improvement, but instantly makes you nostalgic for whatever it was they just replaced.

Or, to put it more succinctly: Progress is the root of all evil.

Category: Politics

Rule 5 Monday: Michelle Dockery

Posted on | January 1, 2019 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

I have a lot of friends who all think Terry Pratchett was God’s gift to the fantasy genre, but with a couple of exceptions I just haven’t gotten around to reading his books or watching the various movies & TV shows made from them. Until last night, when I spent a most pleasant three hours watching Hogfather, in which Miss Dockery plays Susan, a governess whose grandfather takes it upon himself to play the part of the title character when that character goes missing. Her grandfather being Death, this makes for an interesting story all in itself, but there’s a lot more to it, and it’s great fun. Here we see Susan with her grandpa when everything’s been wrapped up all tidy and proper, belike.

A family portrait.

Ninety Miles From Tyranny – Hot Pick of the Late Night, Morning Mistress, The 90 Miles Mystery Box #482, and Girls With Guns.

Animal Magnetism – Rule Five Hoofed Rats Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL – Mrs. Santas, It’s A Wonderful Life, Heather Unruh, Don’t Abandon The Kurds Rule 5, Sandra Bullock In Bird Box, Annalise Breaux, Bre Payton RIP, The Greatest Christmas Movie Evah!, Jamie Lee Curtis, and The Poseidon Adventure.

A View From The Beach – There’s Nothing Fishy About Laura Haddock, Friday Morning Fear, It Sure Is, US Huntress Gets UK’s Goat, “What a Night!”, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, ‘Tis the Night Before the Night Before Christmas, and Client 9 Did the Heavy Lifting with the Russian.

Proof Positive – Essie Davis, Vintage Babes, and HP doing Sex In Advertising.

Dustbury – Hande Yener, Alexandria Occasional Cortex, and not just the winner but the runner-up in the Celebrity Legs Gallery annual poll.

Thanks to everyone for their links!
Visit Amazon’s Intimate Apparel Shop
Amazon Fashion – Jewelry For Women

Category: Rule 5

Decline and Fall

Posted on | January 1, 2019 | Comments Off on Decline and Fall

Marcus Aurelius.

“I devoured Gibbon. I rode triumphantly through it from end to end and enjoyed it all. I scribbled all my opinions on the margins of the pages, and very soon found myself a vehement partisan of the author against the disparagements of his pompous-pious editor.”
— Winston Churchill, My Early Life

A six-volume hardbound boxed set of Edward Gibbon’s classic Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire can be purchased for $68.46 from Amazon, but I don’t suppose many young people appreciate what a tremendous bargain that is. Our youth seem to have no interest in history, and would prefer playing video games to reading books. But I mention Gibbon because I’ve spent the past few weeks with the Decline and Fall as my bedtime reading. I purchased my old three-volume Modern Library edition secondhand about 25 years ago, and am now on my second or third re-reading. Gibbon begins his survey by recounting the condition of the Roman Empire at its peak, from the reign of Nerva (96 A.D.) through that of Marcus Aurelius (180 A.D.) when the empire “comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind.” Nothing like this had ever previously existed in human history, an empire that stretched from Scotland in the north to the African desert in the south, from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to Turkey and Syria in the east, encompassing the entirety of the Black Sea as far east as modern Tbilisi in the republic of Georgia.

What caused the fall of this mighty empire, in a word, was decadence.

Rome’s greatness was rooted in the hardy virtues of the Republic, where the citizen-soldier was expected to serve in the common defense, and where the highest offices were held by men who had distinguished themselves in military as well as civilian life. A sense of hereditary honor was deeply inculcated in Rome’s leadership caste — the patricians — who strove to deserve their patrimony by the performance of civic duty. The patrician spirit of service for the public good inspired respect among the common people of Rome — the plebeians — who saw that they also benefited from increasing power and prosperity of the Republic. The origins of the Empire in the Republic, and the civil wars that made Augustus (Octavian, heir of Julius Caesar) the founder of imperial rule, are a subject of history that preceded by some two centuries the period at which Gibbon begins his tale of how the Empire, which had survived and even expanded despite the misrule of Augustus’s successors, declined toward its division and collapse. And the cause was decadence.

Success is too often in history the predecessor to destruction. Rome made unprecedented advances in so many fields, including architecture, engineering and military science, and conquered so many distant nations, that the citizenry obtained a condition of luxury hitherto unknown by any large population anywhere in all human history. A system of well-built roads connected every part of the empire, the Roman fleet commanded the entire Mediterranean Sea, and the powerful legions guarded the frontier from the Antonine Wall in northern England, across the Rhine and the Danube to the Tigris on the frontiers of Persia.

The strength of this military power created the Pax Romana, which made possible the flourishing of commerce and the arts, but this peace and prosperity eventually produced decadence, and by 476 A.D. Rome was sacked by the Goths under Alaric. This history, as memorably chronicled by Edward Gibbon in 1776, was once familiar to every statesman — Churchill “devoured” it as a boy — but today, in our own far advanced condition of decadence, how many young people know anything at all about what happened to the Roman Empire? This disinterest in history, this willful disregard for our civilization’s accumulated knowledge, is itself symptomatic of decadence. Young fools prefer 5-Minute Daily Meditations by a gay fashion magazine editor to studying history.