Archive for the ‘News/opinion’ Category

I wonder where the kids of Fleeing New Yorkers will Flee to?

Posted: August 14, 2020 by datechguy in culture, economy, News/opinion, politics
Tags: , , , , ,

Capt Jake Cutter: Monsewer, you haven’t got the sense of a jack rabbit. Letting hot horses drink. Keep ’em away from the water till they’ve cooled out. Don’t you know anything about horses?

Paul Regret: I know enough about horses. When I want one I call a groom. When I’m done, I call a groom to take him and the groom says “Yes, sir, Mr Regret.” That’s all I wanna know about horses.

The Comancheros 1961

Wednesday I was reading an excerpt of William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech when he was the Democrat nominee for President in 1896 when my grandfather (Dad’s Dad) was a 16 year teen in Sicily. The speech concerned the big issue of the daysound, money a Gold standard vs Bi-metalism that is a gold AND silver standard.

The speech is of course famous for his big finish:

If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we shall fight them to the uttermost, having behind us the producing masses of the nation and the world. Having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and all the toiling masses, we shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

Now in an age unlike today where everyone knew basic scripture this was a big deal, but today a good half of the country wouldn’t have any idea what he was talking about and the whole issue of “sound money” in a age when we print it on whims (something that would have shocked both parties in his age) is even more comical. Of course given today’s educational system the very idea that an American High School Student let alone a college student who have even heard of Bryan, a man who any student pre-1962 would have known, is an iffy proposition at best.

But there is an earlier line from that speech that jumped out at me that gets almost no play today that I want to touch on. (emphasis mine)

You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard. I tell you that the great cities rest upon these broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic. But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.

That instantly resonated with me when I saw this piece linked at Stacy McCain’s site:

“There was no reason to leave before,” said a born-and-bred Upper West Side mom, who asked for anonymity. “Now, I’m done. I can leave tomorrow and never look back. If I never came back to this block, that would be fine.”

The six-months-pregnant mother of a toddler daughter just put her apartment of a decade near the Lucerne up for sale.

“I have definitely seen more crime, drugs and harassment in one week than in my whole experience growing up here,” she said. “I don’t want to see a child get hurt or raped, before they realize maybe it was a mistake to put [hundreds of] drug addicts and sex offenders near schools in the most dense residential population in the city.”

Stacy also links to ace who notes:

They’ve literally killed the cities. This is going to be the most transformative shift in 100 years.

This means we get to see if Bryan prediction of cities springing up again is right. In fact NYC is in many ways a shadow of its former self as suggested by this amazing video of a fellow touring the now comparatively empty sites:

There is no doubt that either NYC will correct this situation or other cites will rise because these people are going to live somewhere but Stacy McCain asks the key question concerning all these folks now fleeing for the safety of their families :

Thousands of families are now fleeing New York City, but the question must be asked: Who elected Bill De Blasio as mayor?

Probably a lot of those Upper West Side moms voted for De Blasio, because it was the trendy “progressive” thing to do at the time. Didn’t it occur to any of them to wonder what the consequences might be?

Nope they’ve been raised in Evan Sayet’s safe Kindergarten of Eden and they have no more idea how the real world works then Paul Regret knew how to water a horse. Their live has been so safe and comfortable that they had no idea how to deal when the reality of their voting record came knocking at their door.

So now they are fleeing and at least one Governor of a nearby state says come on down but does not include the required warning that I’ll helpfully add

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

After all remember what happened to Colorado.

The other thing that might happen is that the migrants from high tax states might bring their political attitudes with them, moving to new, low-tax states for the economic opportunity but then supporting the same policies that ruined the states they left. This seems quite plausible, alas, and I’ve heard Coloradans lament that the flow of Californians to their state involved a lot of people doing just that. (I suppose that migrants from lower-benefits states to higher-benefits states might support change the other way, but people who live on the dole seem to have pretty similar voting patterns regardless of location, which is why the dole is so popular with certain politicians).

Surprise surprise Colorado went from purple to practically blue & Denver is becoming a pit.

If I were one of those conservative billionaires (hello, Koch brothers! hi, Sheldon Adelson!) who are always donating tens of millions to support Republican candidates, I think I might try spending some of the money on something more useful: A sort of welcome wagon for blue state migrants to red states. Something that would explain to them why the place they’re moving to is doing better than the place they left, and suggesting that they might not want to vote for the same policies that are driving their old home states into bankruptcy.

Of course that will be their kids problem to figure out where to flee to if their parents turn their new homes into a pit. Let’s hope those parents love their kids enough to keep this from happening.

fyi I’ll be talking about this piece at 3 PM EST on the DaTechguy off DaRadio Livestream podcast

To leftists like Lori Lightfoot they are not people they are automatons

Posted: August 9, 2020 by John Ruberry in crime, culture, News/opinion, politics, Uncomfortable Truths
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

By John Ruberry

President Donald J. Trump isn’t the only public official prone to Twitter rants. Yesterday after a trip to Chicago’s lakefront on a hot and humid day, the city’s mayor, Lori Lightfoot, let loose on her constituents.

“It’s called a pandemic, people,” she Tweeted. “This reckless behavior on Montrose Beach is what will cause us to shut down the parks and lakefront. Don’t make us take steps backwards.”

That “reckless behavior” consisted of people gathering at the beach. Chicago’s 18-miles of lakefront parks were closed–they were guarded by Chicago police officers for most of the spring and much of this summer. The cops remained posted at these parks during the riots and looting in May–by people presumably spreading the COVID-19 virus. Riots of course are now, by the liberals, viewed as free speech. After the Lake Michigan parks opened, Lightfoot dispatched an army of “social distance ambassadors” to enforce safe-distancing. I reckon that this snitch army took Saturday off.

Leftist mayors like Lightfoot, Bill de Blasio in New York, Ted Wheeler in Portland, Jenny Durkan in Seattle, and Ethan Berkowitz in Anchorage, they, as I’ve similarly remarked before, love “the people,” but not people. They believe they rule over automatons, faceless entities consisting of countless “Julias,” the void visage featured in the notorious and creepy “Life of Julia” Barack Obama campaign video from 2012. Of course these Julias need an enlightened being, blessed with the correct knowledge, the wisdom of liberalism.

Someone of course like Lightfoot.

At Montrose Beach yesterday Lightfoot saw, like a child in a bedroom, toy soldiers or Barbie dolls to be ordered about. “The people” not people.

Chicago is making national headlines of course for violence, or more specifically, people shooting other people, sometimes killing them.

Late last month a 9-year-old boy was shot to death while playing in a vacant lot. The next morning on Twitter Lightfoot blamed “a bullet,” not the alleged shooter.

“When a 9 year old’s life is ended by a bullet,” she said in that Tweet, “we must all be outraged. These deaths are not mere statistics. And prayers alone will not sooth a broken heart.”

The gang culture that dominates many Chicago neighborhoods is the city’s real problem. And many gang members think it is fine to indiscriminately fire guns at people. Such as the unidentified hoodlum who shot 15-mourners at a funeral home ten days before the 9-year-old was slain.

In a reply to her own Tweet about the murder of that child, Lightfoot added, “Gun violence is every bit a public health crisis as COVID-19.” When I saw that Tweet I thought she had come around, as I thought she Tweeted “gang violence” instead of “gun violence.” If you scanned the brain of Lightfoot you won’t find the words “individual responsibility” paired together.

And if you are from one of those states that Lightfoot labels as a coronavirus hot spot and you visit to Chicago, you may be subject to social media monitoring to ensure you are quarantining.

Thank you Big Sister.

The ultimate responsibility for Lightfoot are the hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans, most of whom, I hope, are not automatons, the ones who voted for Lightweight. She won all 50 of Chicago’s wards over Toni Preckwinkle, who is possibly even more left-wing than Lori, in a runoff election.

What was it that H.L. Mencken said about democracy? Ah yes, here it is, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

UPDATE 4:30pm EDT: The mayor also known as Beetlejuice today dispatched police officers to block off access to Montrose Beach. And snow fencing is also preventing access to the beach on this hot and humid Sunday.

John Ruberry regularly blogs just north of Chicago at Marathon Pundit.

Spliternet? Spare me.

Posted: August 8, 2020 by ng36b in economy, News/opinion, Uncomfortable Truths
Tags: , , , , , ,
No, seriously, its not

There has been plenty of discussion about Microsoft’s attempted acquisition of TikTok and the recent executive order that barred working with TikTok, WeChat and other Chinese social media apps. But amid all of this came an interesting article in the BBC accusing the United States of “splitting the internet.” Yup, really.

“It’s shocking,” says Alan Woodward, a security expert based at the University of Surrey. “This is the Balkanisation of the internet happening in front of our eyes.

“The US government has for a long time criticised other countries for controlling access to the internet… and now we see the Americans doing the same thing.”

Dr. Alan Woodward

The article does backtrack a bit and brings up legitimate security concerns posed by China. It sparked my curiosity in Pompeo’s speech, which hasn’t really made the news. So I found the transcript, and Pompeo had outlined five lines of effort for a Clean Internet:

First, Clean Carrier. We are working to ensure that untrusted Chinese telecom companies don’t provide international telecommunications services between the United States and foreign destinations.

Second, we call Clean Store. We want to see untrusted Chinese apps removed from U.S. app stores.

Third, Clean Apps. We’re working to prevent Huawei and other untrusted vendors from pre-installing or making available for download the most popular U.S. apps. We don’t want companies to be complicit in Huawei’s human rights abuses or the CCP’s surveillance apparatus.

Fourth, Clean Cloud. We’re protecting Americans’ most sensitive personal information and our businesses’ most valuable intellectual property – including COVID vaccine research – from being accessed on cloud-based systems run by companies such as Alibaba, Baidu, China Mobile, China Telecom, and Tencent.

Fifth and finally, Clean Cable. We’re working to ensure that the CCP can’t compromise information carried by the undersea cables that connect our country and others to the global internet.

Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State, in a speech on August 5, 2020.

This list doesn’t resemble censorship. Nowhere in the list does the U.S. censor information from other countries, prevent people from being critical of the United States, or otherwise interfere with other countries operations. It narrowly targets tech Chinese companies with known issues while leaving an open door to every other nation. It highlights some significant problems like stealing of COVID vaccine research that not enough people are tracking.

There is this libertarian view that a free and open internet means government’s should have no role whatsoever in the internet. There are plenty of flaws with this idea. The largest flaw is that this view fails to act when an entity like the Chinese Communist Party seeks to dismantle the Internet and subvert it for its own good. The BBC would perhaps brush this off as “market forces,” and to be sure, the UK has stood on the sidelines while China filters Hong Kong’s internet and even the internet at UK universities.

Perhaps better said in the movie Team America: World Police: “Freedom isn’t free.”

You can, and should, limit government involvement and allow the market to drive innovation, but when an obviously dark force threatens to break the freedom of information on the internet, you must act to stop it.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

Is John Podesta Wargaming Session “Confederate” Enough to Make My Point?

Posted: August 7, 2020 by datechguy in elections, News/opinion, politics
Tags: ,

A couple of weeks back I wrote this piece noting how the Democrat leaders from Mayors to Governors to Party leaders like Pelosi on Portland were the same arguments being made by the defenders of Slavery prior to the civil war and the defenders of Jim Crow during the debate on the civil rights bill of 1957.

Now I’ll readily concede that given our current education system and the lack of interest in reading anything but Howard Zinn communist approved history some of these debates and arguments might not be familiar to the current Democrat Leadership like Nancy Pelosi or Democrat Mayors like Ted Wheeler or “Journalists” like Brian Stelter let alone the rank and file leftists/ Democrats posting on facebook or twitter.

But as someone who HAS read this stuff I find it incredibility interesting that the arguments of today’s Democrat left/media are the arguments of the slaveholder and the defenders of Jim Crow and are being made under the banner of Black Lives Matter.

That piece got me on Fault Lines Radio in DC and the host there, who in fairness gave me plenty of time to make my initial point, scoffed at my premise that this was a sign of Democrats talking like secessionists.

Then this story broke.

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Now I want to note three things here that are vital:

  1. These people are actually war-gaming states threatening to secede from the Union in Trump is re-elected.
  2. The people doing this wargaming are top officials in the democrat party to wit
  3. The people telling us about this scenario is the Democrat Party’s newspaper of record the NYT

Here’s the full quote from the NYT

But conveniently, a group of former top government officials called the Transition Integrity Project actually gamed four possible scenarios, including one that doesn’t look that different from 2016: a big popular win for Mr. Biden, and a narrow electoral defeat, presumably reached after weeks of counting the votes in Pennsylvania. For their war game, they cast John Podesta, who was Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, in the role of Mr. Biden. They expected him, when the votes came in, to concede, just as Mrs. Clinton had.

But Mr. Podesta, playing Mr. Biden, shocked the organizers by saying he felt his party wouldn’t let him concede. Alleging voter suppression, he persuaded the governors of Wisconsin and Michigan to send pro-Biden electors to the Electoral College.

In that scenario, California, Oregon, and Washington then threatened to secede from the United States if Mr. Trump took office as planned. The House named Mr. Biden president; the Senate and White House stuck with Mr. Trump. At that point in the scenario, the nation stopped looking to the media for cues, and waited to see what the military would do.

Note this isn’t some slub at a BLM rally or a local mayor or even some governor, this is JOHN F—ING PODESTA! The guy the Democrats sent out to the crowds to reassure them and send them home on election night because Hillary Clinton Couldn’t face them. He’s a power in the party and has been one of their biggest player for years.

And this guy representing a party supposedly outraged over statues of Confederate Generals and statesmen in the public square is actively wargaming blue Democrat states threatening to secede from the union if they don’t like election results?

Given this fact I think my comparison between the current Democrat leadership and the Democrats of 1860 is not only validated, but was on reflection apparently understated to the extreme.

Older Entries
Newer Entries