It's not doctored, it's a highlight reel

I think it's already been put to bed that the video the president tweeted out was not doctored.  I shared a number of videos discussing that earlier this week.  But Mark Dice has a good take on it, worth sharing:

Border wall hammer time

President Trump is going to drop the tariff hammer on Mexico for not stopping the illegal immigrant flow.

Friday Musical Interlude - The Thunderer

More from John Philip Sousa.

China's curious trade war salvo

Earlier this week I shared a video about China's neodymium near-monopoly.  Rare earth metals are a really important strategic asset for any advanced nation. I shared that because of the growing Trade War between China and America, and what China's options might be.

Guess what - China pulled the trigger on rare earth tariffs.

Interestingly this is probably a counter-productive move for China and probably good news for president Trump as rare earth processing used to be an American industry but has mostly disappeared.   A year from now bringing facilities on line will create jobs, and also help the trade imbalance with China.  That's not to mention that as a strategic resource, recreating a domestic industry for refining and processing will facilitate more domestic production and reduce reliance on a  hostile regime for that.

This indicates to me that China is very reluctant to pull the trigger on selling it's U.S. Treasuries.  I'm not sure president Trump needs to respond to this move because it will backfire on China in the long run.  Nut it will be interesting to see if he takes the opportunity to make more moves.  He probably will as not responding will appear to China as weakness.

Brandon Tatum: Mueller got Trump re-elected (+ more)

Brandon Tatum nails it on the Mueller new conference clown show.  If Mueller could not indict the president then why produce a report?  Why even have an investigation?

Remember when I said that impeachment was a distraction?

Way back a long time ago (earlier today) I mentioned that continued impeachment efforts are a distraction from real world issues that need to be addressed?  Here's another example.

An editorial by Liz Harrington at RealClearPolitics points out that the Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi are eyes-off-the-ball on the productive USMCA trade deal that the president negotiated last year but that Congress has yet to ratify.

“It all comes back to: Does this make a bigger paycheck for the American worker?” Pelosi said in 2015. “NAFTA did not, and our experience is not good.”

It used to be all about “bigger paychecks” for the current speaker of the House. But that was one month before Donald Trump launched his historic campaign that spoke directly to the forgotten men and women of America who had been left behind by trade deals.

We now have a better trade agreement for American workers. The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, will only make the best economy in modern American history stronger.

The deal negotiated by President Trump would add $68.2 billion to fuel an already booming economy and 176,000 new jobs. The USMCA continues the new era of prosperity under this administration, where America is a good investment again. The deal would drive $34 billion in new investments into American car manufacturing, creating 76,000 jobs in the process.

Nancy Pelosi is the house leader. Where is she? She's busy skirting impeachment discussions. But for the USMCA, skirting is not the right word. She's pretending to be blind to it's very existence.

Instead of working for all Americans and addressing issues of immigration, infrastructure, and trade, the do-nothing Democrats in the House are preoccupied with their Russia collusion fantasy, and endless investigations in search of a crime.

Pelosi knows the USMCA would receive bipartisan support, so she is stalling. The demands she made in April for Mexico to change its labor laws are being met. Tariffs on steel and aluminum have been lifted. There is now nothing holding Pelosi back.

Just as they are stalling on whether to begin impeachment proceedings absent a crime, the Democrats are delaying a better trade agreement for American workers – based on political calculations. If the USMCA means more support for President Trump and his pro-growth agenda in the next election, the Democrats aren’t interested -- regardless of how much the deal will help their voters.

That's completely true.  The question is whether voters will notice her deliberate distraction.  Let's hope so.

Mueller's a clown show

Mueller's parting shot trying to re-ignite ambiguity about his report was an amateur hour clown show. It proves he was not the right choice for the job.  Don't take my word for it, listen to these experts.

Alan Dershowitz, no fan of president Trump had this to say about Mueller's parting shot at the president:

The statement by special counsel Robert Mueller in a Wednesday press conference that “if we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said that” is worse than the statement made by then-FBI Director James Comey regarding Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign. Comey declared in a July 2016 press conference that “although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”

Comey was universally criticized for going beyond his responsibility to state whether there was sufficient evidence to indict Clinton. Mueller, however, did even more. He went beyond the conclusion of his report and gave a political gift to Democrats in Congress who are seeking to institute impeachment proceedings against President Trump. By implying that President Trump might have committed obstruction of justice, Mueller effectively invited Democrats to institute impeachment proceedings.

...No prosecutor should ever say or do anything for the purpose of helping one party or the other. I cannot imagine a plausible reason why Mueller went beyond his report and gratuitously suggested that President Trump might be guilty, except to help Democrats in Congress and to encourage impeachment talk and action. Shame on Mueller for abusing his position of trust and for allowing himself to be used for such partisan advantage.

Joseph diGenova had this to say at Fox News:

While he made it clear that his investigation is closed, the main takeaway from outgoing Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s surprise farewell statement to the media Wednesday is that he desperately wanted to take down President Trump, but simply couldn’t find a way to do it.

In a parting shot to cap off two years of outrages, Mueller tried to convince the American people that their duly elected president is a criminal who couldn’t be charged due to a technicality, and therefore it’s up to Congress to impeach him.

If not for a flimsy piece of paper that the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) compiled long ago, Mueller suggested, the president of the United States would be in the dock for “obstructing” an investigation into a conspiracy theory about his campaign and the Russian government.

This is so ridiculous that Mueller didn’t even dare to say it plainly. Instead, he fell back on the convoluted language in his report, hoping to obfuscate an issue that Attorney General William Barr had previously clarified by determining that the special counsel’s investigation did not produce sufficient evidence to justify charging President Trump with obstructing justice.

And American Greatness reminds us of the close friendship between Comey and Mueller:

Most Americans are unaware of the long history of comradeship and chicanery between Special Counsel Robert Mueller and former FBI Director James Comey. For nearly two decades, the pair have held the same jobs, earned the same foes, and swaggered in the same rarified sphere of political prestige and privilege.

This week, the country has been treated to another reminder of how often the twosome operates in tandem.

In fact, their prior relationship should have disqualified Mueller from overseeing an investigation into one of Comey’s fiercest critics and the man who fired him, President Donald Trump. Without Comey helping to fabricate the Trump-Russia collusion narrative in 2016, there wouldn’t have been a Mueller investigation into fabricated Trump-Russia election collusion.

You have to wonder if Mueller's parting shot was strictly a defensive play, given that the investigators are being investigated.

Issues and Insights asks the questions that need to be asked regarding Mueller, and it makes it seem all the more self-serving and defensive.

...This starkly politicizes presidential investigations going forward and indicts, if we may say so, the already-dubious system of weaponizing a lawyer with a blank check, no deadline, and an open-ended mandate for him to fish where he likes with minimal oversight.

“If we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so. We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime,” Mueller said. “We concluded that we would not reach a determination one way or the other about whether the president committed a crime.”

What kind of strange new standard is Mueller setting here?

Mueller had all the time and money he could want, recorded countless hours of testimony, compiled a mountain of documents, got multiple plea deals, chased down out every conceivable lead, and then says he couldn’t prove the president didn’t commit a crime.

Since when is the job of prosecutors to determine innocence beyond a reasonable doubt? And, short of that, feel free to dump all the evidence that didn’t lead to a criminal charge, but that makes the defendant look a suspect nonetheless.

How would the average American citizen like this said of him or her after a couple of years of 18 prosecutors scrutinizing his or her affairs? After reviewing all the evidence, we don’t have enough evidence to say that John Doe robbed that store. But we can’t say definitively that he didn’t rob that store, so here’s a bunch of embarrassing revelations about him that we uncovered along the way. Have fun.

Exactly.  Mueller does not deserve anyone's respect after this.  He didn't beforehand either, but this third-rate, amateur hour clown show of his, cements it - he's no more than a self-serving con man.

LOL: The impeachment talk is distracting from every issue

It's almost June. The year is approaching the half way mark a lot faster than anticipated for a lot of people. Quite a bit has happened this year, except from Democrats on Capitol Hill.  While they are stuck on impeachment delusion, the country continues to prosper, and geopolitical threats continue to exist.

China for example is talking about withholding rare earth metals in the continuing trade war with America.  Is that a sign they may not be willing or able to sell their U.S. treasuries (their nuclear option) despite some tough talk from the Chinese?  It's hard to say, but if you ask Democrats you'd probably get a confused look because impeachment sucks up so much oxygen in their world, there's no room for anything else.

Iran is saber rattling big time.  While the Washington Post and others might be disparaging the president's policy on the issue as incoherent or blusterous (it's neither, but that's for another day), Democrats are getting serious about the issue.  Wait, no they're still only talking impeachment.

Venezuela is trying to extract itself from the grips of a socialist driven starvation and poverty in an admirable exercise in attempted self liberation. The president is trying to help.  Democrats are talking about impeachment and subpoenas. 

The border crisis is ongoing.  Democrats are mustering their courage to begin impeachment proceedings.

I could go on, but you get the picture. Luckily, this will lead to Democrat electoral defeats across the board in 2020, because voters see a booming economy and real existential issues that still need to be confronted, both at home and abroad. Democrats only see impeachment. The singular focus of the Democrats is myopic and ultimately self-destructive.  In that light you have to wonder if A.G. Barr and president Trump knew that letting Mueller loose to repeat what he had already said, and (maybe) hint at congress to impeach the president would ultimately work in the president's favor.  I'm betting they did.

A couple more Mueller statement reactions

Newt Gingrich:



Ben Shapiro (the short version):

Reactions to Mueller's statement

Mueller's statement to the press should have been redacted except for the part where he was resigning.

Here are a few reactions:

Mueller statement nothing burger - unless you are a Democrat

Ugh, this garbage again.  Mueller's self-interest knows no bounds.  

Nothing new from Mueller. Democrats are frothing at the mouth to try to file for impeachment. But the impeachment talk will only hurt the Democrats.

John Cleese, persona non grata in London

Well, John Cleese does have a point.

China's neodymium near-monopoly

Supply, demand and neodymium, which is mostly from China.

Pelosi needed doctoring, not the video of her stammering

The media rushed to Pelosi's defense when videos showed her struggling to speak.  They claimed the video was doctored.  It wasn't.  Here's more (the relevant part is at the beginning and then restarts at 2:44):

YouTube bias is not all political

Maybe the YouTube-specific problem is less anti-conservative than we might think.  That's not to say there is NOT a bias - clearly there is, a lot of people and reports have shown - but rather that political bias is only a part of the bias problem.

There is an existential bias towards regular media that is as problematic as any other factor.  When you consider that traditional media is very liberal, the problem of political bias is exacerbated.

This is a really interesting dive into the data of YouTube's trending videos:

This also says nothing about all of the other issues at Google (or Facebook, or Patreon, or Twitter). Political bias is real, but so are systemic problems at these tech behemoths. 

To pretend otherwise is folly

China's strategy and what it means for America, as viewed by Steve Bannon.

America, China, the WTO, trade and Trump

(and China's nuclear option, and why they probably would never use it).

American takedown by Michael Knowles

Memorial Day anthem

Memorial Day

Wishing everyone a thoughtful, reflective and happy Memorial Day.

Pelosi slurs not doctored

I knew if I looked long enough, I'd find a YouTube video that had not yet been censored out of existence, supporting the hypothesis that Nancy Pelosi was indeed having trouble speaking.

After all, the right are not exactly like Dan Rather, are we.

Oh wait, it IS political

CNN, CBS, the Washington Post and others have leapt to the defense of Nancy Pelosi (most links deliberately excluded), claiming that the footage of her struggling to communicate has been 'doctored' and 'edited'  to make it look like she is slurring her words.   The "three things" comment while holding up two fingers is not doctored.  Her stammering is not doctored.

We've been through this before where they claim the video has been doctored.  Remember Jim Acosta whacking the White House intern's hand away and the media claiming that video too was doctored?  This IS political, it is a circle the wagons around her media effort.

Just last year, The Daily Mail (who are currently defending her along with the other mainstream media) posted a video of Pelosi struggling:

I'm not saying that the recent video is real or fake, but the savagery of the mainstream media response is both predictable, and only adds to the suspicion that they are saying 'doctored' the same way they claimed the undoctored Acosta footage (it was edited to highlight the issue but not altered in content) was fake.  Their protests are too virulent to be treated as innocent.  I think Shakespeare once said something about that.

Do we have a Pelosi problem?

Ummm, this is not political, just worrisome:

Sunday verse

CNN was in the tank for Democrats, now they've just tanked.

Tim Pool looks at the abysmal recent CNN ratings.  This is the price for dishonest advocacy replacing journalism.

Milo Milkshaked

Milkshake attacks continue, and they are really stupid.  The response is great. This is a brief extract from a Sargon of Akkad clip I shared earlier.

Saturday Learning Series - Defending Capitalism (Part 9)

Capitalism is humane, deal with it.

Milo is back

Speaking of Meanwhile in England, Milo Yiannopolous' reputational recovery continues. Sargon of Akkad, fellow social media pariah and one of the more recent cause célèbres among conservative outrage over censorship, speaks at length with Milo at UKIP event.

The recovery will be complete if he and Ben Shapiro ever manage to mend fences.  Remember what Reagan said; The person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is a friend and an ally - not a 20 percent traitor.  We need more of that attitude on the right.  Hear that NeverTrumpers?

Meanwhile in Canada, liberals being liberals

Watch this despicable agenda-driven ruining of a man's life for political purposes by a leftist Prime Minister and see if it doesn't remind you of what happened to Trump, Flynn and others in the U.S.  It's sickening.

Thankfully, just as the Mueller investigation led to exoneration, at least we know that Justin Trudeau is most likely going to be a one term Prime Minister and things here too, can be set right The justice system needs to be blind to political stripe just as much as it needs to be blind to color, religion, gender etc.  Why leftists don't get that is unfathomable.

Meanwhile in England...

Over in England, Prime Minister, and E.U. stooge, Theresa May has resigned after multiple unsuccessful attempts to ram through a horrible BREXIT deal in parliament designed to let BREXIT happen but really, just keep the U.K. as part of the E.U. 

What a disappointment as a Prime Minister, not even a shadow of Margaret Thatcher.

Transparency, what the Left doesn't REALLY want

Tucker Carlson calls out the Left's desire for transparency.  Didn't you guys just spend months saying you want everything released from the Mueller report?  Everything? They don't want transparency, they want their narrative, period.

Friday Musical Interlude - Stars and Stripes Forever

Happy Memorial Day Weekend. Stars and Stripes Forever by John Philip Sousa.

The U.S.-China trade war is not new, and it's not going away

Hunker down, this trade war is not going away.  In fact, it's been around for a long time already.  China became a member of the World Trade Organization in 2001 and while getting the benefits from being a member (indeed special consideration as a result of being classified a developing country), they have hardly played by the rules - unfairly protecting their markets, stealing intellectual property and manipulating their currency.  They have become rich not only at the expense of America but of many countries around the world.  They've leveraged that growth to expand their hegemony at home and abroad.

For decades no one stood up to them.  Abroad no country had the strength to do it alone, and without leadership from America, why would they try?  But prior presidents - Clinton, Bush or Obama - either ignored or outright facilitated China's rise.

China's government is communist. They are not good guys.  They are evil. They are preying upon foreign weakness and hoping to not have to deal with an America that stands up to them.  Enter Donald Trump.  He's breaking the Chinese domination model like a fever that has gone on for too long.  

It won't be easy.  It would have been a lot easier 5, 10 or 20 years ago but nothing was done.  President Trump is the literal bull in the China shop.  He's making the tough decisions about things like banning Huawei , which is clearly an espionage agent for the Chinese government.  He's in it for America for the long haul instead of a managed decline and ceding international superpower leadership to the Chinese.

Yes, tariffs hurt American consumers and producers.  They do the same in China.  But in the long run they help fairer trade and prevent China from breaking all the rules and not being called out for it.

I say that last part because I think even if president Trump gets a really good trade deal for America, China is going to cheat.  They're cheaters and they have been doing so since the communists took power.

The fact the the New York Times, South Korea and Breitbart all seem to be landing on the same page really says something important.  It says that this is a generational issue that really needs to be met head on, and now.   It's no time to be weak, because with each passing day that nothing is done, it gets harder to confront the Chinese government effectively.

The trade war, even if a deal gets signed and appeases the stock market, will continue.  It will continue as a cold economic war because it has to.  To not confront it is to abdicate our responsibility and to abdicate the future to a totalitarian, aggressive and corrupt China.

California's festival of fetid debris

California is a liberal Utopia.  Sanctuary cities, high taxes, and some of the most liberal laws in the country.  California is the envy of the world.  Right? Of course...but MAYBE:

and...



Two of the crown jewels of California are really only worthy of third world dictatorship city status.

Here's another take:

The E.U.'s "secret" strategy on Brexit

This is actually not so secret. The E.U. wants to make this hard for the U.K., which is ironic since Theresa May seems to have the U.K. making it hard on itself anyway.

AOC targets Pelosi

Impeach Trump.  That's the goal of the ultra-fringe wing of the Democratic Party. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is demanding it, along with many others in the party.  But Nancy Pelosi for all her ineptitude, knows politics.  She understands proceeding with impeachment will virtually ensure president Trump's re-election, and worse (for her) probably return Republicans to control of the House of Congress.

When voters see a party blindly pursuing a political goal in place of actual policy, and ultimately doing nothing for the country (even after Mueller report exonerated the president and everyone else of collusion and clearly indicated no obstruction), the Democrats are going to be toast. Burnt toast.  Let's hope they proceed with an attempted, and failed impeachment.

U.K vs. E.U. on Brexit

European Union insider footage that shows their disdain for Brexit, the U.K. and anything not E.U. friendly.  

Milo reputation repair with Jordan Peterson

Jordan Peterson interviews Milo Yiannopoulos, a (former) conservative provocateur who was lambasted publicly for comments that he made in 2017 that unfortunately were exposed after some editing done to deliberately destroy his reputation and value as a conservative speaker. It would seem that it was done by the establishment Republican / anti-Trump faction of the conservative universe. Other conservatives did not come to his defense and the liberal media, obsessed with victimhood, did not treat him like they would other 'victims'. Milo, did not even see himself as a victim, he refused. Unfortunately as a result of this combination of factors, he became a media pariah.

Jordan Peterson, never one to shy away from controversy, interviews Milo in a way that almost is like a therapy session. The conversation is revealing and might actually help repair Milo's reputation. Peterson prefaces the interview with this:

I should start by saying that Milo is definitely now on the list of those who no one acceptable socially should ever speak to, which I suppose is one of the reasons why I’m talking to him. I want to know what happened to him over the last few years, in his words, and I don’t really give a damn if that’s politically incorrect. I also plan to post clips directly from this discussion on Facebook this week. We'll all see (all who are interested) what happens when that occurs.

Milo's a hard man to categorize. Part journalist, part performance artist, part agent provocateur, part comedian and wit, Yiannopoulos is a man of immense and complex self contradiction. He’s half-Greek and half-Irish, but is know as an Englishman to the Americans with whom he has communicated extensively. He’s gay, and Jewish by descent. He married to his long-term boyfriend, an African-American man, in Hawaii, in 2017, but faces frequent accusations of racism. He is—or was—strangely attractive to young American Republicans, and completed a successful and controversy-ridden tour of US universities in 2016-2017. For at least two years, he was one of the most well-known internet celebrities, let’s say, on the political front, and caused more uproar than any other single person that I can think of.

In my view, for what it’s worth, Milo was such a figure of inner contradiction and outer controversy that I believed his time was numbered. Nonetheless, the circumstances of his demise were unpredictable, I would say (and that’s in keeping with his apparent destiny). After revealing details of his early sexual experiences at the hands of a decades older priest, whom he refused to name, he stated that he was an active participant in the events, and that such occurrences were far more common (and far more consensual) than people were willing to admit. I don’t think he ever recovered from the controversy that those comments generated.

In case it has to be said, and no doubt it does, I believe that what happened to him was absolutely unforgivable, and it would seem that he has come to share that opinion. Our conversation centered mostly around these issues, which I believe to be of wide general relevance. Hence the video.

Cummings and goings on - an ethics complaint

An ethics complaint has been filed with the IRS against Democrat Rep. Cummings and his wife. Via OAN:

Violent milkshakes? Really?

An addendum to my previous post on the mainstream left calling for an escalation of violence - here's Tim Pool once again, talking about Nigel Farage getting milkshaked.

Why is this a thing?  It's beyond stupid.

Mainstream leftists encourage escalation of violence

Violence gets encouraged.  Tim Pool, left-leaning libertarian, calls them out.

Are polls useful anymore?

In 2018 pundits were predicting a Democrat wave in the midterm elections. Didn't happen. In 2016 they predicted a Hillary Clinton landslide over Donald Trump for the presidency. Didn't happen. In the U.K. that same year they predicted that Britons would vote to stay in the European Union during the Brexit vote. Didn't happen.  Later in 2017, Theresa May, leader of the conservative party in the U.K. had called a snap election to capitalize on the Brexit vote and was expected to win an expanded majority in parliament. Didn't happen. And most recently, this week the Trump supporting Australian Prime Minister won a re-election no one thought he had a chance of winning. He was supposed to be trounced by the Labor Party.  Didn't happen.

Are polls useful anymore?  True there is an argument that polls can be used to direct a narrative  - voters can be asked leading questions, they can be oversampled from Democrat-leaning populations  and they can just be deliberately misinterpreted.  But there are other issues less sinister.  With the increase in mobile phone usage and a decline in landline phones, there are potential issues with how samples are drawn. Polling methodologies seem to be not working.

While pollsters need to rethink their methodologies, the broader lesson for voters, is to ignore the polls and just vote.  Voting after all, is what really matters.

Sunday verse

Saturday Learning Series - Defending Capitalism (Part 8b)

Continuing with the idea that socialism is evil, let's look at why it fails.

Ben Shapiro explains why socialism fails every time.



He also explains why it fails at being fair and moral:



Follow Ben's logic and you cannot help but conclude that socialism is serfdom.

Reason TV also explains that socialism fails where it is tried:



And yes, it is evil.


And Steven Crowder explains why democratic socialism is still socialism, in case you were tricked by their renaming it (like they did with global warming):


And oh ya, it still doesn't work:

Friday Musical Interlude - The Washington Post

John Philip Sousa's Washington Post March;

Sunday verse

Saturday Learning Series - Defending Capitalism (Part 8a)

Another sidebar here from the main thrust of defending capitalism; the argument today is that socialism not just flawed, it is evil.

Dave Rubin tones it down and explains in reasonable terms why socialism is just not cool (I've shared this one before).

Steven Crowder starts from the position that socialism is indeed evil:



Yaron Brooks explains why it is evil:



But socialism leads to poverty and violence, as it has in Venezuela:



Socialism leads to an unhealthy type of selfishness:

Friday Musical Interlude - Eminence Front, a reaction

One prolific reaction video channel is Tre Narcisse's Fish Out Of Water.  He reacts to easily 3 videos a day on most days, sometimes even 5 or 6.  Last August he reacted to The Who's Eminence Front.

His reactions to a song he hears for the first time and appreciates are great.

Let's create our own mass migration problem

With conservatives clearly personae non gratae (please excuse my Latin, I only got one year of it in school decades ago) in a multitude of cyberspace locales (Facebook, Twitter, Patreon, Youtube and Instagram among others), it's time we avoided what Tim Pool describes as our ultimate demise and take control of our own fate.

Here's his latest discussion on the matter:

What does that mean for us? Where do we go? David Rubin and Jordan Peterson discussed creating an alternative. We're supportive but still waiting.

In the meantime, I've started considering Minds.com it advertises itself as non-partisan. That it's a big selling point is a sad commentary on the American technocracy, but they are still a breath of fresh air. I'm not being paid by anyone to say this, I'm just looking around and it's all I can see at this point that is a viable option. I'd suggest we make these techno-corps pay for their own bias with a mass exodus to Minds. Then we can see if they smarten or wither away.

CNN is in it's death throes

CNN has been at the vanguard of trying to get alternative media (like YouTube) shut down.  This is particularly true of conservative media pundits.  This indicates to me that the thrashing about of CNN's death throes are driven both by financial considerations and ideological considerations.  In other words, it's the unfocused thrashing about of an organization that does not understand why it is dying, or perhaps even that is indeed dying.

death throes noun

Definition of death throes

: the violent movements and noises that are sometimes made by a person who is about to die

//The opera ends with the hero in his death throes.

—often used figuratively

//the death throes of a failing industry

Tim Pool discusses layoffs at CNN, which it (fairly) calls 'buyouts', knowing full well that the layoffs are still to come.

Bordering on Insanity

While Democrats favor sanctuary cities, no border wall, allowing illegal immigrants to vote and receive free health care, and even abolishing ICE, some sanity is perhaps starting to take hold. While American immigration and enforcement is bordering on insanity it may finally be starting to head in the right direction.  This as a result of a federal Appeals Court decision (via Gateway Pundit):

A panel of three judges on the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit cited many different reasons for allowing the migrants to stay in Mexico while they wait for an immigration judge to hear their cases.

...Last month Judge Richard Seeborg blocked President Trump’s policy of returning asylum seekers to Mexico as they wait their turn for an immigration judge to hear their cases. 

Judge Seeborg, an Obama appointee in San Francisco, granted a request by a civil liberties group that sued the Trump Administration on behalf of 11 asylum seekers from Central America.

The lawsuit claims the Trump Administration violated US law by failing to properly evaluate the dangers that migrants face in Mexico — it also accuses DHS officials of depriving migrants of their right to apply for asylum.

Tuesday’s ruling in favor of the Trump administration will stay in effect until the case continues before the appeals court.

This is a far cry from an all encompassing victory, but it does at least acknowledge the rule of law and coming from the notoriously liberal 9th Circuit Court of Appeal, it's a surprise.  With the New York Times recently recognizing that there is indeed a border crisis and that there is a need for a wall, perhaps the fog of the progressive liberal daze for more progressive voters, regardless of legality, is starting to lift.  But don't hold your breath.  Things may just have gotten so bad that they have merely decided to gear down their drive for a little while.

#WaronFreedom - episode 3

The time to stand up to Facebook, Twitter, Patreon, et. al. is now because what they are doing, now more obviously than ever, is singularly a political witch hunt to purge conservatives. It is also a war on freedom.

Who is standing up to them, along with president Trump? We all should be.

Sunday verse

Saturday Learning Series - Defending Capitalism (Part 7)

How do you know capitalism is the right way to go?  Look at the list of those who seek to discredit or destroy it.  To know someone (or something), know it's enemies.

Osama Bin Laden:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:

If you never believed that power doesn't corrupt, her pronouncements about being the boss should convince you that power does corrupt, and since socialism centralizes power and power corrupts, advocating socialism is akin to advocating corruption. But I digress.

All of communism:

communists, continued:



Envy:



Atheism (since it's aligned with communism):

It's an odd mix, I know.  But there are a lot more enemies of capitalism: there's a long list that consists of dictators, entitled sensibility people, and a whole host of useful idiots.  With all of that aligned against capitalism, it must be right, right?

Well, a list of detractors (negative negatives) does not prove the positivity of capitalism, even though it doesn't hurt.  In fact, many of the biggest positives about capitalism are what capitalism is not.  It's not authoritarian. It's not sloth-inducing.  It's not inhumane.  In a way it's a list of negative rights as former president Obama said, which is to say it enumerates what the government is not allowed to do rather than things the government must do.  But that's not the whole story - capitalism enables the opposite of those things; freedom, drive to succeed (along with the opportunity to do so where not impeded by government regulation) and through the invisible hand, selfishness as a tool to serve the greater good.  In the latter example in particular, it is absolute brilliance.

Friday Musical Interlude - SRV live

Even though April was "live" month, here's a bonus:  Stevie Ray Vaughan playing Jimi Hendrix' Voodoo Child, partly behind his back at Starwood Amphitheater in 1987.

Hey Conservatives, Stay in your lane!

Slowly but surely, conservatives are still being silenced. McCarthyism is alive and well in progressive liberal circles and this is the latest salvo in the war on free speech just because - different ideas.  This is truly scary and if you don't realize that, regardless of your political persuasion, you are on the road to serfdom.