The Fourth Way, Hugh Hewitt

https://www.amazon.com/Fourth-Way-Conservative-Playbook-Majority/dp/1501172441

I got sucked in on this one, not a bad book, but VERY wonky. It's objective is to present a clear path as to what Hewitt thinks will allow Trump to avoid losing ground in the midterms and to establish a lasting "Republican" majority. Strangely, it also talks about how likely it is that Trump will be impeached.

He bases that rather odd little chapter largely on a David Brooks column from Nov 11 that brought up impeachment (Brooks is the NY Times "conservative" columnist!), and the fact that "Republicans have done it before". The way Hugh wrote it I suspect that he is essentially threatening Trump to "keep his nose clean, or else". Yes, yes, we Republicans have principles, however in my opinion it is way PAST time to realize those principles are being used against us and become as Matt 10:16 "Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves." We need to focus a LOT more on the serpent part!

So Hugh's "plan":

• Do a "stimulus" that is 1/10th the BO stimulus, so $85 billion, and have it be "seed money" to get a bunch of low income clinics, basketball courts, swimming pools, etc built around the country in partnership with appointed "boards", majoring in low income areas. (this seems "fine")
  
• Do a bunch of navy ship building in the great lakes states that Trump flipped (fine)
  
• Do teeny tiny tweaky tax reform staying completely away from any sort of "flat tax". It needs to be read, but he makes a good case for not getting rid of home mortgage / chairitable deductions. In my opinion he makes a lot less of a case for continuing to allow state income taxes to be deducted. He asserts that it would "lose WI, IA, MI, PA etc, for what? Winning FL and TX TWICE?".
  
  My thought would be that a lot of the Trump voters, and the most likely potential Trump voters to add don't pay much in state taxes anyway. In any case, I hope someone has a better plan than Hugh.
  
• Appoint good judges (duh) He thanks Harry Reid for making it very likely that Trump can be successful at this. Yes, thanks Harry!
  
• He has a lot of tweaky defense ideas. I HOPE that Trump has some people that have a lot more innovative ones -- like massive containers full of 100's of thousands of tiny drones each with a little "c4" that can hit people, equipment, gang up and hit buildings, etc, etc with the computerized command and control capabilites to use them on subs, planes, and even from satellites. 

And that is about it. Very ho hum. Not recommended.

Sally Yates Gets a Scalp, BOistan Cheers

Sally Yates’s legacy of injustice | Power Line:



Howard Root sinned agains the Administrative State. He created a medical device company with 650 US employees, a billion in sales, and over 100 new medical devices in it's product line. The Administrative State took a run at him last year and failed. He decided the deck was stacked against him, so he "retired" at 56 this year. A "win" for the Administrative State.



BOistan is a nation that encourages the productive to give up in any way it can, it has been quite successful at it.



It appears that the Dakota Access Pipeline is "safe" now via Trump executive order. Consider a nation where companies and investors put up $4 billion, get ALL the approvals to build a pipeline, and when they are down to the last few miles, a bunch of lefties show up, block it, and the "chief" of BOistan decides to side with the protestors and shuts it down.



Why are 3rd world countries 3rd world countries?



Because investing in them is a fools errand -- you NEVER know if your project with be stopped, nationalized, bombed or whatever.



America was a nation with a Constitution and the Rule of Law. If you followed the rules, got the approvals, built "things, value, inventions, etc", you had a decent chance of not only creating some wealth that you might keep, but also creating a business that paid taxes, employed people that paid taxes, built homes, had kids, that sort of old fashioned stupid stuff.



BOistan went a long way to stamping that out, and the election of Trump was a reaction -- but BOistan isn't going down without a fight. It HATES families, invention, success, education rather than indoctrinaton, building things, generating electricity and CERTAINLY the creation of good jobs in the private sector. The kinds of people involved in those activities tend to oppose "The Party".



Will Trump even get a chance to govern and shift to even a "slightly more predictable BOistan"? The jury is definitely still out and it is obvious that "The Party" is no longer interested in anything but 100% opposition to Trump. When you have been able to take down guys like Howard Root and put the fear of massive losses into the hearts of investors that want to put money into BOistan, TP has had a VERY good day!



The creation of a totally immoral and dependent population with their hands out for alms and their heads bent in subservience to TP is the goal -- and ANY means of movement toward that goal is all that matters to TP.



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Special Tribal Wars, Fix Your RINOs

Bring On the Special Prosecutor - The New York Times:

The "news" of the surreal keeps coming.

We knew during the election that the left had gone around the bend, this is really not that surprising. The question that begs is if the Republican party wants to allow a twiddle of the dial from BOistan back toward the Constitutional Republic we used to have ... "America" I think it was called, or if they really want to sign on fully for the slide to a total pagan tribal state.

Based on the tail spreading of the peacock John McCain, it is certainly easy to see how a few RINOs could easily side with "The Party" and snatch a defeat of gigantic proportions from the infant cries of a new administration that won a victory of truly epic proportions.

As he as evidenced over the last 30 years though, John McCain is a man of a extremely strong principle -- he only has one. It's all about John, and John ALWAYS knows best. He is VERY loyal to John -- everyone else ... meh.

What he loves best is attacking a president of his own party -- he was fine with BO destroying America and creating the tribal state of BOistan. If BO's campaign plane had crashed in '08, McCain would have probably have renamed the country "John" or possibly "Songbird", supposedly his nickname at the Hanoi Hilton because he liked to talk to the Viet Cong so much. It is no wonder he likes "The Party" -- he probably thinks Schumer is Ho Chi Min.

Damn. If Trump is really a bad ass, finding a nice skeleton in McCain's closet and getting him drummed out of the Senate would be one of the very best ops to pull. Arizona is reliably Republican, it wouldn't change the balance in the senate.

It's been obvious since at least February 12 1999 (the day the senate failed to convict Slick Willie) that it is time for desperate measures ... the past 8 years made that abundantly clear.

Now, there is a chance, all be it a slim one, of moving the dial away from our current failed tribal state.  We have to expect the dominant tribe, TP to fight hard and DIRTY. It's all they know. Baggage like McCain needs to either muzzled TIGHTLY and QUICKLY, or better yet, removed.

Fix McCain, Collins and Murkowski, and I think we could reliably tell the NY Times to take a timeout with Fauxcahontas.


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Fake News Vs Imaginary News

Imaginary News | Scott Adams' Blog:

A good one from Scott Adams.

Essentially, all any of us ever sees of ANYTHING is "imaginary". Science is now fairly certain that the data arriving to our brains from our eyes, ears and other senses is WAY too sparse to create the movie, much less that meta-narrative that we are all CERTAIN that we "see". We are all living in our imaginations.

For 10's of thousands of years, our movie was our own little area of nature, our family, our tribe, our meta-model of how the "gods", "spirits", etc that surrounded and even lived in us interacted with all that was part of our existence.  Everyone we contacted in other than a battle shared our model ... and if they didn't, they were typically sent packing or simply killed.

 It was an incredibly rich model ... everything fit together. Our place, role, task, meaning, understanding, destiny, purpose, etc all made perfect sense to ALL of our tribe. We lived, we died. Our prey and the plants lived and died, the seasons lived and died. The stars and symbols they represented lived, died and came back each year! Our lives might go on in a "happy hunting ground", or our spirits might return to inhabit the area we lived, the creatures we hunted, or even other family members in future generations. We KNEW our place and our destiny!

Or we were created a shorter time ago, or by a longer term directed process with the same "wetware / spiritware / consciousness" ... we will never know the answer to that question in this mortal coil.

What we do know is that we were NEITHER evolved or created for the "reality" we find ourselves in. If we consider "The Matrix", a Black Lives Matter march, Obama promising over and over to "close Gitmo on day one", the media level of certainty that it was impossible for Trump to win, or virtually any discussion with Trump, it should be very clear that we no longer live in a "shared reality".

Not so long ago we were a Christian nation, we nearly all lived in a created universe that had meaning and purpose. Families were generally made up of two parents, a man and a woman, men were men and women were women. There was once a time when CBS news would not even consider using a forged document to take down a sitting president, and a president having oral sex with an intern in the oval office was unthinkable, and certainly career ending were it to occur.

We don't live there anymore. We live in a tribal state where "truth" is tribal -- as it was for most of man's history if you are an evolutionist. In any case, our nature and grasp of reality is very oriented toward tribal truth.  There are now no transcendent values, so there is no transcendent truth -- truth is whatever your tribe says. You have to agree with that, or you are no longer part of your tribe.

So, as I've beaten to death, in one tribes imagination, how good a fighter pilot W was 30+ years ago was "news", while in the other tribe it was a matter of no concern. 25% of the Democrat tribe considered 9-11 to be an "inside job". A similar number of the Republican tribe considered BO to be a Kenyan (according to his book, he was a Luo tribesman, but who knows, it's all imaginary anyway). We were once told that "if we liked our healthcare, we could keep it". In various imaginations, all of these things were "real / true / important / etc" ... and some of them still are. It all depends on what the imagination of your shaman is.

Outside of trivia like "2+2=4", reality is actually quite obscure and "culturally (tribally) determined". In Native American culture, hearing voices is a GOOD thing -- not so much in what used to be Western civilization ... I'm not all that certain in "post Western civilization" that it won't be just fine again.

So which press conference did YOU see? It is all a matter of your "tribe". I didn't watch the whole thing, but what I saw I kinda liked. The other tribes heads seemed to be exploding, which in a tribal state is always a good thing! (as long as it is the OTHER tribe!)

We worked VERY hard to get here. No shared transcendent truth! Everyone is FREE, FREE, FREE!  If Bernie was elected, even the beer and weed would be FREE, FREE, FREE!

It is all just grand! We have been assured for decades that this is exactly the way it "really is". Truth is an illusion. Your imagination is REAL! Long live Post-modernism and the fruit of it's loins -- Trump!

** Note, again, as a Christian Burkean conservative, I don't REALLY have a tribe. However, I AM a human being -- so I certainly feel the pull of the tribe, just as I get a shiver at Lambeau when the crowd chants "Go Pack GO!". When we used to have a nation to be proud of, I got that same shiver when Star Spangled Banner was played. I'd love to see is get down to the hard business of moving BOistan back toward what we once were ... I have no idea if that is even possible, let alone if there is a ghost of a chance for Trump to start that journey. The fact that pretty much half the country has decided to not honor an election isn't a good sign however.

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Making Sense of God, Timothy Keller

https://www.amazon.com/Making-Sense-God-Invitation-Skeptical/dp/0525954155

My love affair with the writings of Timothy Keller continues. I covet his level of intellect and especially his ability to lovingly yet strongly make significant philosophical and theological points with absolutely no regression to snark and put-downs. It is a level of intellectual maturity that I gaze in wonder at, and which puts me to such shame that I cry out for God's help to better emulate Reverend Doctor Keller's example.

For those familiar with how I read, this book now has a forest of tabs sticking out of it, and the inside is extensively marked. I find it to be nothing less than a potential basis for a igniting a new 21st century revival in the west to correlate with the rapid rise of Christianity in China, South America and Africa. The brokenness of North America and Western Europe in spirit, philosophy and community is glaringly obvious. This book provides a strong laymen's case for:
1). Why belief in God is rational as a basis for society
2). What happens when such belief wanes
3). Why the specific God -man Jesus Christ is the only basis for faith that works in our age (or any age)

The book is heavily sourced, so I'll try to give pages for specific quotes that will often have been sourced into the book ... I'll leave it up to the interested to run down the original authors.

p13 "The ideals of freedom ... of conscience, human rights and democracy are the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. ... To this day, there is no alternative to it". 

What we believe is always built on faith in SOMETHING. Morality must be based somewhere or it does not exist. What the west holds to be "self-evident" is only so because of our Judaeo Christian heritage.

Everyone needs to spend some quality thought time on the idea of the "Critique of Doubt" on page 38. Were this understood, everyone's level of smug would have to drop a ton, and that is ALWAYS great for the prospect of community!

"Polanyi agrues that doubt and belief are ultimately "equivalent". Why? "The Doubting of any explicit statement denies one belief in favor of other beliefs which are NOT doubted for the time being." You can't doubt belief A except on the basis of some belief B you are believing instead at the moment. So for example, you CANNOT say, "No one can know enough to be certain about God and religion," without assuming at that moment that YOU know enough about the nature of religious knowledge to be certain of your statement!

Page 74 reaches the following sad summary of current western culture than goes into a few pages of how it is that Christ is the "logos" (meaning) the Greeks intuited ... to which I would add "Man's Search For Meaning" as a worthy sourcebook.

"Western societies are perhaps the worst societies in the history of the world for preparing people for suffering and death, because created meaning is not only less rational and communal, but also less durable." 

Why is this the worst? Because without shared meaning, there is nothing to say to the suffering, dying, and bereaved. There is no shared community meaning of life, but rather the lack of shared meaning kills any sense of even real community. Thus, many suffer completely alone, bereft of even family as they struggle to seek blessing from the faceless government bureaucracy they realize they ended up worshiping by accident.

On page 105, in the midst of discussing why our attempt to make "freedom" the only moral value ... "Today, it is said, the only moral absolute should be freedom and the only sin should be intolerance of bigotry.", Keller points out  ... "Even in our supposedly relativistic culture, value judgements are made constantly, people and groups are daily lifted up in order to shame them, public moral umbrage is taken as much as ever. It is hypocritical to claim that today we grant people so much more freedom when we are actually fighting to press our moral beliefs about harm on everyone."

As Reagan put it, the secular left will "defend your right to AGREE with them to their dying breath". They will however not acquiesce to your right to DISagree with them, and will seek to silence you by any means including violence  -- because your lack of agreement is a threat to them and makes them feel moral umbrage. They have no admonition in their secular religion against judgement -- in fact, their judgement is one of the things they are most certain of.

On page 125, "We need someone we respect to respect us. We need someone we admire to admire us. Even when modern people claim to be validating themselves, the reality is always that they are socializing themselves into a new community of peers, of "cheerleaders", of people whose approval they crave."

Even more sadly, the requirements of conformance in your secular group are always increasing -- maybe you were fine with everything up to gay "marriage", or even transgender", however you were uncomfortable with that next step. Perhaps you are an atheist who finds Islam no more, and possibly less acceptible than Chritianity. You looked at it's tenets and see that as crusade era Chrisianity was, Islam can be violent, and you feel that it is obvious that a "progressives" should point that out.

You will likely run into this situation somewhere and find that compliance is NOT optional -- if you want to continue to be accepted by your group, sworn to the statement that  "individual freedom is all that matters",  you MUST comply with ALL their positions! Typically, you most often will shut up and comply, but at least subconciously you no longer really believe the group practices what they preach. (No Christian church or Christian does either -- that is why we repent and take communion over and over, we accept that perfect human consistency is impossible).

I'm getting long. The SUMMARY of this book is "simply":

1. It is every bit as "reasonable" to believe in God as it is to be an atheist. Increasingly, even MORE reasonable if one is bothered by the "anthropic argument" (we are here because we are here), or the latest physics asserting that there "must" be something like 10**500 UNIVERSES in order to support our existence being "likely".
2. If you want community and morals, there is scant basis for these elements of human existence outside of religion, and in the format we are familiar with in the west, outside of Christianity. Throwing the "baby" of shared values and community out with God/Christianity for the hope of "perfect freedom" is fraught with peril.
3. It's all about Christ. There is a really good reason that history is split into BC and AD. That difference is the divine person of Jesus Christ.

Outside of Christ, the world quickly descends into weeping and gnashing of teeth. It's going on all around us today -- families fall apart, people kill themselves to end meaningless lives, any tiny sense of community is trashed over smaller and smaller issues -- it is the politics that makes me cry when I look away from Christ. The Jim Jones cult of our age is the worship of the secular state. 

Christ is the BEST summary of the book -- keep looking at Christ and the Cross. Pray for your family, friends and community who have fallen into faith of the secular. 

The Truth Lament Strolls On

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/02/04/opinion/sunday/why-nobody-cares-the-president-is-lying.html?mc=aud_dev&mcid=fb-nytimes&mccr=FebPostElectionSubs&mcdt=2017-02&subid=FebPostElectionSubs&ad-keywords=AudDevGate&referer=http://m.facebook.com

I've been observing for a very long time that the concept of "truth" in the West has fallen on hard times. Knowledge of Philosophy and Theology are at all time lows. Very few can tell much about the relation between fact, dialectic and rhetoric, understanding of which would help the author of this column a good deal.

During his first week in office, Mr. Trump reiterated the unfounded charge that millions of people had voted illegally. When challenged on the evident falsehood, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, seemed to argue that Mr. Trump’s belief that something was true qualified as evidence. The press secretary also declined to answer a straightforward question about the unemployment rate, suggesting that the number will henceforth be whatever the Trump administration wants it to be.

So in a nation where many states have no voter id, what would qualify as "evidence". Here is some from a 2012 Pew Study:

• About 24 million voter registrations are no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate.
• More than 1.8 million dead people are listed as voters.
• Approximately 2.75 million people are registered in more than one state.

So that is an OPPORTUNITY of 27 million. If 10% of the opportunity voted, that would be 2.7 million. Up to now, nobody has really looked for voter fraud, nor do we still have a good mechanism. My son voted in Colorado, when I voted in MN, there was his name right above mine. MN requires no voter ID ... anyone that knows his name and the fact that he is registered could have walked in, voted as him, and be completely secure against prosecution and likely detection (they would have to do a cross-check between MN and CO). 

Of course, if one knows about fact, dialectic and rhetoric, they realize that is NOT the point. What Trump engages in, what the linked column engages in is rhetoric -- unidirectional convincing speech. If the author of the column and I engaged in a debate, that would be dialectic, and in both, we may or may not attempt to use "facts". I used a few (assuming you accept Pew as a source) in my response to his rhetorical response to Trump's rhetoric in which BOTH of them conclude that "the number will we what **I** say it is!" ... NY Times columnist asserts zero, Trump and minions assert "millions". 

NY Times columnist asserts that he is believable and Trump is not based on -- er, well, "bluster". A very common tool of rhetoricians.  

The Russian dissident and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov drew upon long familiarity with that process when he tweeted: “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”

Exactly, always has been, always will be. What difference did it make if W Bush was a great national guard fighter pilot or a mediocre one? None, but the idea of it was enough to take down Dan Rather. What difference did it make if someone "leaked" that Valeria Plame, who drove into CIA HQ everyday actually worked there? None ... but it occupied a lot of media pages for over a year anyway.

The point of rhetoric since Plato and Aristotle has been to convince humans at a level "beyond factual" ... because humans actually never do anything for purely rational and factual reasons, and they never have. As long as "your side" is winning, the standard human tendency is to never even observe the difference between factual basis and rhetoric.

When "your tribe" loses and you understand nothing about truth, philosophy, dialectics or rhetoric, you are suddenly adrift. Your "moorings" are slipped, and it is obvious to you that "the others" have somehow changed.

This may explain one of the more revealing moments from after the election, when one of Mr. Trump’s campaign surrogates, Scottie Nell Hughes, was asked to defend the clearly false statement by Mr. Trump that millions of votes had been cast illegally. She answered by explaining that everybody now had their own way of interpreting whether a fact was true or not.

It turns out that everybody has always had their own way of interpreting wether a "fact" was true or not -- it's just that the column author recently notices that less people than he thought were navigating the shoals of truth and falsehood based on the rhetoric of the NY Times.

Oroville Versus Flint, $840 Billion

Oroville Spillway Situation: Fast facts and timeline - KRCR:

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0131-highsmith-flint-water-crisis-20160131-story.html

It appears that loss of the Oroville dam in CA will be headed off. The 200K people that were evacuated have returned, we hope for good. Interestingly, the population of Flint Michigan was once 200K people as well.

Remember 2009 when BO assured us that he was going to "invest" $840 billion in "shovel ready" projects? We never really did hear a lot about what happened to that money "Cash for clunkers", $500 million lost on Soyndra, a few crony payoffs to ACORN and others. While the media is quick to find the shortest path between a government failure and a Republican in office, $840 billion can be thrown to the winds of political graft by a Democrat and nobody even expects that it will be linked up to fixing things like water systems in Flint or giant dams in California.

It isn't hard to find out a trail of what has happened at Oroville.

In 2005, DWR applied for a renewal of its operating license for the Oroville hydroelectric generating facilities. During the relicensing process, Friends of the River, Sierra Club, and the South Yuba River Citizen's League filed a motion to intervene in the relicensing. These groups alleged that the emergency spillway in Oroville should be classified as an "operational/auxiliary" spillway and should be armored with concrete, citing the potential for erosion and downstream runoff impacts. During the proceeding, FERC confirmed that the emergency spillway was properly designated and that it met all FERC engineering guidelines.

We all know the government of California is 100% lefty ... yes, yes, they elected Schwarzenegger, however he ran and governed as a Democrat with an R next to his name, and since the legislature was all Democrat, he really had very little choice. Unsurprisingly, Oroville is a near disaster that seems devoid of political recrimination.  The other underlying reason that we hear little about it is because the "extended drought in CA due to global warming" has been in the news for years, and they haven't figured out how to spin the end of it yet. The Oroville situation shows that the drought is over, which if one was rational and consistent would be a statement on global warming. It is of course not to be taken as such -- drought proves global warming, heavy rain proves global warming.

How is it though that when organizations like the Sierra Club are filing suit in 2005, such a project never gets funded as $850 billion is getting sprayed around? Nobody cares -- "BO was a great president, Trump is a disaster", thus saith the NY Times.

Michigan government is more varied than I would have assumed -- a pretty decent mixture of D and R.  They voted D for president from '92 on up to Trump. So since '92 they have been considered mostly a blue state. However, after the really heavy D cities -- like Detroit and Flint, went into bankruptcy (how does THAT happen?), they ended up electing an R (Snyder) to clean up the disaster as governor. Part of that cleanup involved putting managers in to try to fix the city finances, which resulted in moving to Flint river water in 2014 that ended up leaching lead out of old pipes -- which nobody expected.

Naturally, since a Republican was in the governors office, perfect knowledge of potential problems is supposed to be assured, and when something bad happens it is nearly assuredly due to "racism" -- NPR liked to run shows with crying black mothers talking of how the Republicans purposely poisoned her children. What would one expect?

The moral of the story? Government screws up a lot -- and often in BIG ways. It's a bi-partisan problem -- but don't expect anyone to connect at least half the dots for you.

Prediction though -- if Trump does any sort of a "public works / stimulus, etc", it will be a DISASTER according to the news!

When R's screw up, the media lets us know -- it is because they are nasty, racist, incompent, etc.

When D's screw up it isn't really a "screw up" --- it is like an "act of God", except D's generally don't believe in him, so it is "bad luck". Nothing to see here folks, move aloing.

A cynic like me looks at this and says "elect Republicans" ... at least they will get a TON of oversight from the media, and there is a "chance" they might improve because of it. They will still be working with a unionized beauracracy with no competiiton, protected jobs, etc, but at least THEIR jobs will not be guaranteed, so they might yell lounder at the union folks that they can't fire!

It isn't much, but at least it is SOMETHING!
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Goldberg, Confidence, Memory, Meaning

Donald Trump’s 4D Chess, Political Master Myth | National Review:

Here is what I consider to be Golberg's central pontification of the linked column:

But I’d like to inter a different common retort: that Trump is playing ten moves ahead; that he’s playing 4D chess; that he’s brilliantly distracting the media by creating this or that controversy. I’m willing to concede that there are times when he’s deftly sent the media chasing their tails. But the idea that Trump’s brilliant master plan is unfolding just as he intended is frick’n bonkers.

First, let it be said that I admire Jonah Goldberg and am even significantly jealous of him -- multiple books, respected journalist at the magazine founded by Buckley, who I nearly idolized.

I realize that in order to operate in life in the position he is in, he needs to:

1. Take firm interesting positions 
2. Always be confident no matter what  

To some degree, that is what it takes for "good mental health", even a "good Christian life". Living boldly in the present, forgetting  / forgiving ones past errors, enjoying and continuing to live boldly in the future present moments with no concern for the morrow. 

My position on Trump definitely "evolved" -- I thought he had no chance, I was aghast when it became obvious that he did, etc. I essentially went through the stages of grief. (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) as we ALL do sometimes many times in a day over matters great and small in our lives. I could go back and link some of my blog entries together and likely chart the progression (with some regressions) relative to Trump. 

Here is Goldberg in an NR column "Operation Destroy The GOP" in October of last year.

I feel like Charlton Heston screaming at the Statue of Liberty on the beach. You people blew it all up. You embraced a man who has no serious allegiance to the ideals you got rich peddling and who had a vanishingly small chance of winning in the first place — even if he had been the disciplined candidate he deceitfully vowed he would be. Trump is now an albatross on the party and he will leave a Cheeto-colored stain on both the GOP and the conservative movement for years to come. 

Goldberg was one of the founders of the #nevertrump movement on the right. He was CERTAIN that not only was Trump going to lose, but that his loss (and the very likely loss of the Senate with it) was "the end of the GOP" for at least the foreseeable future. Based largely on my reading of Scott Adams and the fact that I had COMPLETELY underestimated Trump relative to the nomination, I was "mildly hopeful" on election day, but far from certain that he would win.

When he started to look like he might win the nomination last spring, I started looking for "other information". It was a tiny example of the same logic that led me to find National Review in the late '70s when I realized that I wasn't ready to turn off my Christmas lights, put on a sweater and accept that the best days of America were behind us.

When I realize that I'm wrong, I like to do a reset and look for "other information". Apparently that is even odder than I realize.

I've been wrong too many times to believe that I KNOW that Trump is not playing "4D Chess" -- or to think that he is a bumbling corrupt idiot savant that happened to luck into the White House (maybe with Russian help). I firmly believe that it is possible that he is a genius with a master plan that STILL makes mistakes and can lose "battles" while still winning the war. Back in August, I was getting more convinced he had to be a "plant". Hell, maybe he WAS a plant, and in trying to throw the election he accidentally won because Hillary is such a putz. We have been living in insane times for certain at least since Slick Willie was able to skate with BJs from an employee in the oval office (or was that "oral office"?).

Goldberg is a smart person, WAY smarter than me. Does he realize that even his supposedly educated conservative readers have such short attention spans that they have forgotten what he wrote last fall? or is it simply true that nobody cares about such tired concepts as "truth", "consistency", etc? If that is true however, what is the objection to Trump? Or anything really -- if BOTH sides (all sides?) have abandoned consistency, truth, "history" (of even the less than 6 months sort), then what exactly do words mean?

Perhaps I missed the memo and everyone else but me decided that it IS actually true that we each defined our own meanings of all words -- including "IS" ... so we have passed through the looking glass, and everything operates with each of us playing Humpty Dumpty ...

"When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." 

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master— that's all."

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One With $1 Million or a Million with $1?

http://www.businessinsider.com/check-cashing-stores-good-deal-upenn-professor-2017-2

"Banks want one customer with a million dollars. Check cashers like us want a million customers with one dollar," Coleman, the RiteCheck president, said in Servon's book.

Good article, a little longer than it needs to be. For those of us who can afford to park $10-20K in a bank in order to get "free" checking and a bunch of "free" services, as well as being able to accept the fact that the money from checks we cash isn't "available" until the check clears, the bank is a "no brainer", and people that use check cashing services seem "stupid".

Sort of like "Trump voters". If you are doing pretty well in BOistan, the big banks and institutions seem "safe, sane and secure". Increasingly, unless you are in the "upper 50% or so", that isn't your world.

Pretty much the same phenomenon explains why the elites were wrong on Brexit and on Trump ... the "smart money", the "big bets" were against -- the greater number of tiny bets were FOR. How many more people turned out in the well off counties of the nation (or at least appeared to turn out) really doesn't matter. It's like winning the football game time of possession by a full 15 min quarter, but losing by 1 point. You lose.

We all tend to assume that those that disagree with us are "stupid" -- they very rarely are. The actual difference in "raw general ability" between an 80 IQ and 160 IQ isn't worth much on the street. SURE, it is worth a TON inside the DC beltway, universities, law, mass media, corporate boardrooms or the operating room. Most 160 IQ PHDs are smart enough to realize they don't want to take on a street-wise 80 IQ thug in his element. Their 160 IQ general smarts are enough to avoid the encounter and that is all that is required.

Typically, the 160 IQ person has leveraged their advantage to know "everything about nothing" in their specific domain. They know how to do brain surgery really well, but they have no clue to do anything but call AAA if their car won't start. The 80 IQ guy is forced to do the reverse, he knows "nothing about everything" that matters in HIS domain.

We tend to be amazed at tricks a trained animal can do. Even the very smartest apes barely make 40 relative to a human IQ, and that is only in very limited and highly trained/specialized domains. The 40 IQ ape is more like the 160 IQ PHD. The ape is out of his domain and struggling to compete on a scale that he is not genetically predisposed to compete on. So too the 160 PHD -- humans were designed or evolved to be "hunter gatherers" -- the street is much more like the jungle than a courtroom, executive office or medical operating room. The 160 IQ PHD would lose to the ape in the apes environment as well without weapons -- so probably would the 80 street smart guy, but he would have a better chance.

"Genius" is often like being a virtuoso violinist -- take away the violin and your skill is worth very little. The Davos assumption is that we need just a few more 160 IQ virtuosos -- and to hell with the 80-100 IQ "proles".

Where are you placing your bets?

The Chisago Resistance On Hold

Chisago County special election has DFLers hoping for rebound - StarTribune.com:

MPR was rather giddy about this prospect on Monday as well --

“People sense a real opportunity to start showing Republicans that Democrats are frustrated and they are going to stand up and resist Donald Trump,” he said, “and this is a perfect opportunity to do that.” 

Ah, a "pause" in the resistance!




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Fascism, You Keep Using That Word

| National Review:

Fascism is one of those terms that fits in with "Hitler" on the hit list of left wing name calling that is constantly used by people that don't understand what it means -- they may as well just say "bad", or "evil" to anyone that knows history at all.

While we are at it, let's make sure everyone is on the same meme page. The reference is from "The Princess Bride", the link gives a little background.

I've covered this umpteen times, using "Fascism" and "Hitler" to refer to the political RIGHT is like walking up to me and calling me "Miss" ... for those that don't know me, 6'4", 300ish, bald and bearded. I covered left vs right in detail here all the way back to the French Revolution.

The linked Sowell article has the following:

Unlike the Communists, the Fascists did not seek government ownership of the means of production. They just wanted the government to call the shots as to how businesses would be run. They were for “industrial policy,” long before liberals coined that phrase in the United States. Indeed, the whole Fascist economic agenda bears a remarkable resemblance to what liberals would later advocate.

The article also references the excellent work "Liberal Fascism" which I have reviewed.

The bottom line here is that in a post-truth tribal nation, the best myths win, so there is NO WAY the leftist tribe will be giving up the left-right inversion, Fascism, Hitler, etc mythology. They are not about to own "National Socialism", let alone Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, North Korea, etc ...

I'm not sure if Trump will be able to establish any really good mythology that works, but he certainly keeps throwing stuff at the wall. The best myths have very tiny pieces of truth and give those that believe in them a "slam dunk" -- "truth" at a general level is antithetical to myth making, since the truth is very rarely anything even close to a "slam dunk" on anything more complex than 2+2=4.

"97% of Scientists" is a great example.

If you want to explore, where you are on a slightly more sensible scale than MERELY left and right, this is an interesting site -- CERTAINLY far from any sort of "perfection", however I think an INDICATOR worth considering.  Here is my result.

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Tim Scott, Black Republican Senator on Tolerance

There is nothing very surprising about the video -- I prefer text, but very little reporting has been done on this from any source, left or right. What I learned from it was this:

1. Scott has the ONLY black chief of staff in the US Senate. 
2. Scott is one of three black Senators in the current US Senate (I looked this up) , here is one of the others ... I'll let you make you make your own determination on her "level of blackness"
   
   
   
3. He was nice enough to not read the ones that had the "N word" in them
4. The media is a lot more concerned about what happens to Faux Native American left wing women Senators than they are about Republican Black male Senators. 

The Certainty Refuge

Elizabeth Warren ‘Silenced’ -- Liberal Media Show Their Arrogance Again | National Review:

As I drove up and back from visiting my 90 year old dad this past Thursday I followed my usual varied diet of listening across the radio spectrum -- lots of NPR, some in MN, some in WI (they carry quite a bit of different stuff). AM talk radio -- little Beck, little Rush, little Hannity, little scratchy stuff I couldn't identify.

What struck me most was how everyone had views that were close to 180 degrees off from each other, yet all were totally and completely certain of their absolute correctness. We seem to have entered the "age of certainty". A rather amazing development considering that at least the elite prognostications have been not tracking all that well the last couple years.

Some of the "certain" positions on the radio that day depending on where one turned.

•  Trump's "Muslim ban" was the most dangerous unconstitutional power grab in the history of the nation, guaranteed to incite vast amounts of global terrorism.
• Trump's temporary hold on travel from 7 states identified as sponsors of terrorism that have little or no documentation on their populace by the Obama administration is in line with rulings from every previous modern president, including Obama -- and restricting this already vetted presidential power on the standing of university students getting back to class is a travesty.
• Trump's tweet questioning the ruling is a gigantic violation of the separation of powers and should be enough to impeach him.
• Too even compare Trump's tweet with Obama dressing down the SCOTUS sitting right in front of him during the 2010 STOTU address shows this nation has lost all perspective and ability to govern itself -- it has the attention span of a 12 year old male with ADHD. 

I could go on ... the linked article covers the Fauxcahontas timeout certainty/uncertainty. There is a quote that I guess I had been misattributing and misquoting for years, but thanks to Google, here it is. "What is certainty but the refuge of those whose faith is not strong enough to entertain doubt." I thought it was "Certainty is a poor substitute for knowledge" ... which I like much better, so I think I'll declare that to be true and attribute it to Scalia. We live in a post truth age anyway.

It is DEFINITELY true that the one constant now is TRUMP!  Obama was somewhat close to this much coverage in 2009, 90% of it radically positive -- 11 days after he was inaugurated, he had already affected the world positively enough to be nominated for a Nobel peace prize, which he would actually receive on October 9 of that year. I'm thinking that it is "certain" that Trump won't be getting any global awards this year -- but then  that would be in opposition to the linked article and my beef with "certainly".

Here is what I thought was the best of the article:

Let me make a confession. I have no idea who the Democratic nominee will be in 2020. Nor am I completely sure, since we are being honest, who the Republican nominee will be. (Trump, I guess?) McConnell’s decision to cut off Warren may have been a disaster of epic proportions for the GOP. Or it could have been a brilliant strategic move, elevating an unlikable Massachusetts liberal to the top of her party. McConnell himself is probably ambivalent. 

I do suspect, however, that if Harry Reid had cut off Ted Cruz’s microphone in 2013, the Nevada Democrat would have been hailed as a hero and genius. Even so: The shoe-on-the-other-foot argument may not count for much anymore. Nothing may count for much anymore. If the last year and a half has taught us anything, it is that what we think is supposed to happen does not. Brexit was not supposed to happen. Trump was not supposed to happen. The Patriots’ comeback was not supposed to happen. 

Yet here we are. And no one seems to be drawing lessons from any of this. I open Twitter and see the very people who were convinced Trump wouldn’t win the Republican nomination, who were convinced he’d lose the general election, immediately embrace the most negative interpretation of anything Trump says or does, of any event that might impact him in the slightest. They may well be right. But they just as easily may be wrong, as they have been, consistently, for some time. A modicum of humility and skepticism would go a long way. I understand that these qualities are not especially useful in a city of careerists and poseurs and pseuds. But why not give them a whirl nonetheless.

One thing we know for certain, this IS NOT the age of humility!
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Why Three Political Branches?

Ninth Circuit’s Donald Trump Travel Ban Ruling Is Dangerous | National Review:



Why does BOistan need 3 political government branches?



The old United States had a judicial branch that interpreted written law that was either:



A. Based on the Constitution



B. Created by legislature and possibly being tested for Constitutionality.



It was above politics.



The 9th circuit is certainly a pure political play, and the SCOTUS is very much the same -- "Scalia seat", 4 liberal, 4 conservative judges, etc.



I got to spend some time listening to NPR today and it was very clear that "they won" and "Trump lost" -- hooray, hooray.



Constitution? Law? Who cares. THEY WON!



No doubt if Trump manages to stock the federal court system with "conservatives", and the next president is left wing, they will ignore court rulings like BO did with losing the court case on spending funds on BOcare even though not appropriated by congress.



Apparently even Trump lacks enough of a lawless streak to willfully ignore even just a court -- let alone the clear statement of the Constitution ( CONGRESS shall appropriate) AND court rulings!





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Fauxcahontas Gets a Timeout

‘Nevertheless, She Persisted’: How Senate’s Silencing of Warren Became a Meme - The New York Times:

Somebody eventually needs to let the left know that rules are not created to protect the strong. Yes, yes, Fauxcahontas and all sorts of women's rights folks are very proud of their ability to ignore rules, propriety, tradition, etc. Jezebel in 2 Kings thought taking on the strong without any rules was a great idea -- she ended up being eaten by dogs.

Even the common turncoat McCain had the following to say:

“You don’t insult — whether it be from a letter, or from a message from God, or on golden tablets,” said Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona. “That’s the rules of the Senate.”

"The Party" (TP-D) seems in a mood to put pussy hats and vagina outfits up against big guys with assault rifles wearing cammo, while proudly screaming "NO RULES"!

Whatever blows their skirts up I guess.

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