Archive for the ‘politics’ Category

You Can’t Eat Debt

Posted: September 15, 2019 by datechguy in Always look at the bright side of Trump, economy, trade
Tags: , ,

Col Von Luger: Flyers are gentlemen, not peasants to dig in the earth. So I am surprised.

Group Captain McDonald: The English have always been keen on gardening.

Col Von Luger: Oh Yes, but flowers? It this not so?

McDonald: You can’t eat flowers

Col Von Luger: Good Point

The Great Escape 1963

 

I must confess that I was concerned when President Trump started slapping Tariff’s on China having been taught from youth that tariff’s had been one of the underlying causes of the Great Depression and knowing that China has been a great holder of our debt.

His confidence in his ability to manage our trade problems apparently has not been misplaced:

China will exempt some agricultural products from additional tariffs on U.S. goods, including pork and soybeans, China’s official Xinhua News Agency said Friday, in the latest sign of easing Sino-U.S. tensions before a new round of talks aimed at curbing a bruising trade war.

This development is of some disappointment to those looking to defeat him politically but not to producers of Pork and soybeans:

“The importance of this market to U.S. pork producers is clear,” said National Pork Producers Council President and North Carolina hog farmer David Herring. “U.S. pork exports could single handedly make a huge dent in the trade imbalance with China.”


An outbreak of deadly African swine fever, which has cut China’s pig herd by a third since mid-2018, has propelled Chinese pork prices to record levels and left the country in need of replacement supplies from overseas. U.S. pork exports to China so far this year have largely fallen short of expectations.

Ed Morrissey sees what it means.

The concessions on pork and soybeans are significant, much more so than a two-week delay in tariffs. It signals that China can’t afford to deal with a lengthy trade war, especially not this year. They may not like it, but they still need to trade in order to feed their massive population, and China might have to get used to fully opening their markets and complying with agreements to do so.

President Trump, being more successful and more experienced in business than myself and recognizing that checking China’s expansion without military confrontation was a vital American interest apparently understands one of basic facts of life, a fact that he as a person who was born to wealth might not be expected to remember.

The most imposing nation no matter how large a standing army or how broad a shadow it casts on their neihbors, is impotent if it can’t feed it’s people.

Editor’s Note (DTG): While going through posts for the writers payday I found this post at the old blog in draft. For some reason it didn’t go up at the old blog, likely do to link issues. After reading it I’ve deemed it good enough to put up and pay for it, so slightly later than expected here via the last big of grief the old GoDaddy hosting site can give us is an election report from Pat Austin originally dated Sept 14th

The Washington Post has designated the Louisiana governor’s race as one of the top five governor’s races to watch in 2019-20.

John Bel Edwards has fairly high approval ratings (mid 50s) and is fairly adept at playing both sides of the line. He signed one of the strictest abortion bills in the country and he oversaw a massive Medicaid expansion. He probably feels fairly safe with the teacher vote because his paltry $1000-a-year raise allows him to say he gave the teachers their first raise in many years.

All in all, I think Edwards feels pretty safe.

His two Republican challengers, Eddie Rispone and Ralph Abraham, are splitting the Republican vote and it’s entirely possible that Edwards can stay comfy in his leather chair without having to worry about a runoff election. Should one of those two Republicans drop out, it might be a different story, but nobody is talking about that.

Adding more fuel to the gubernatorial debate stage will be the fact that now the governor’s office has miraculously discovered a budget surplus:

“Louisiana likely will have a $500 million budget surplus for the most recent fiscal year, significantly more than the $300 million initially thought, Gov. John Bel Edwards’ administration said Friday, setting off a new round of debate in the governor’s race over the state’s financial situation.

“Commissioner of Administration Jay Dardenne told lawmakers in a joint budget hearing that the larger surplus will allow the state to pay for “dramatic needs” in infrastructure, including a $14 billion backlog in road and bridge projects, and the Edwards administration cast the news as proof the state has emerged from years of uncertainty with a stable budget.”

Louis Gurvitch at The Hayride would like to remind everyone of the facts: Here are the plain facts: “Taxes are way up, the state’s oil and gas industry is being destroyed by lawsuits and over-regulation, and Louisiana’s percentage increase in government spending is the highest in the nation! Don’t even bother to ask about the government reforms we were promised…”

Gurvitch speaks the truth. I love Louisiana, but we are not attracting new business with the excessive tax burden we have in this state, and we are indeed over-run by trial lawyers.

The primary is October 12. We will see then if Edwards stands alone or if he will go to a runoff.

Links:
https://beta.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/09/06/top-governors-races/?noredirect=on

https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/politics/elections/article_284b8438-d4b5-11e9-a813-375cc60d6770.html

You’ll note that I didn’t do anything to commemorate 9/11 this year at all, not even the great victory on Lake Champlain in 1814 that I’ve occasionally mentioned.

I think constantly morning the dead in big ceremonies is a bad idea while we are still fighting any of these guys, all it does it give hope to our foes. Granted we are closer than we’ve ever been to them being utterly crushed, but till I think a smaller ceremony is a better idea.

Some might object and that’s your right but my take is a lot better than the NYT trying to pretend that airplanes attacks us on their own.

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Speaking on 9/11 the MSM hit Donald Trump for hitting them on 9/11. I’m not surprised, it sure beats having to report on the special election in NC where they were anticipating victory for weeks, until the President showed up the day before.

Then the 18 point deficit became a 1 1/2 point win for Dan Bishop and the media was no longer smiling

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

and election suddenly was no longer newsworthy.

Unexpectedly of course.

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Ok one more 9/11 thing can someone please tell me what was so offensive about this pizza? that it couldn’t be tweeted out on 9/11?

It’s one thing to want to be respectful, it’s another thing to be anal. This is anal.

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Antonio Brown is now been accused of rape in a civil lawsuit alleging that these events took place last year and in 2017.

I have no idea if this is true or not and I’m sure this is going to be topic #1 on sports media concerning the NFL, and frankly Brown’s statement concerning the event doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in him, but regardless of how you feel about Brown who is likely one of the least popular players in the league at the moment, it seems to me that this is well within the statue of limitations so I don’t understand why the person launching this suit is not filing criminal charges in addition to the civil suit.

Whatever your opinion of Mr. Brown I think that’s a valid question that deserves an answer.

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As of this writing (9/11) the Boston Redsox tragic number for wild card spot elimination is 9. On the radio two days ago the I heard a sports talk guy say the day they were official eliminated by the Yankees for the division that you would see the players tone it down. This suggestion insults me for two reasons.

Firstly until you eliminated. Teams have been known to collapse at the end so until you’re out of it you should play like you’re in it, not just for the your own team and fan’s sake but to force the guys in front of you earn it.

Secondly as professional athletes who are paid millions of dollars to play this game you are expected to play to win. This is entertainment and in a sport whose fan base isn’t what it was you can’t afford to mail it in.

Of course it would be nice if the players were as insulted by this suggestion as I was.

by baldilocks

Dennis Prager:

Our age loves scientific equations. Here’s one you weren’t taught at college but which affects you as much as the law of gravity:

GI – W = E

Good Intentions (GI) minus Wisdom (W) leads to Evil (E)

Prager uses an example that’s obvious — at least to the sane.

Communism, the greatest mass murder ideology in history, was for almost all its rank-and-file supporters rooted in their desire to do good. (This was rarely true for its leaders, whose greatest desire was power.)

The many millions of people all over the world who supported communism did not think they were supporting unprecedented levels of mass murder and torture or an equally unprecedented deprivation of the most fundamental human rights of a substantial percentage of humanity. They thought they were moral, building a beautiful future for humanity — eliminating inequality, enabling people to work as hard or as little as they wanted, providing their fellow citizens “free” education and “free” health care. They were convinced that the moral arc of history was bending in their direction and that they were good because their motives were good.

That’s why leftists have such moral contempt for those who differ with them. Because those on the left are so good, only bad human beings could possibly oppose them.  (…)

The problem with communists and with leftists who don’t consider themselves communists is not that none of them mean well. It’s that they lack wisdom.

As Thomas Sowell would put it, such people fail to ask this question: “And then what happens?” Should someone ask question, the wisdom-less doer of good will give a rainbow and unicorns answer, and that answer will be a revelation.

Take Robert “Beto” O’Rourke and his promise to institute mandatory “buyback” of AR-15s and other firearms should he become president.

“No. I don’t see the law enforcement going door to door. I see Americans complying with the law. I see us working with gun owners, non-gun owners, local, county, state, federal law enforcement to come up with the best possible solution. I have yet to meet an owner of an AR-15 who thinks it’s OK that we have these kind of mass killings in this country,” O’Rourke said when asked by the Washington Examiner about specifics of his plan.

When pressed further about how he plans to enforce his proposal for those who would not comply, he responded, “How do you — how do we enforce any law? There’s a significant reliance on people complying with the law. You know that a law is not created in a vacuum.”

Got that? He won’t use the enforcers to enforce such a law, but the law will be enforced.

Magically.

Beta Male is an easy target — if you’ll pardon the expression — but it’s clear that his “plan” is a perfect example of Prager’s equation. Does O’Rourke want to do good? I doubt it and think that he and other politicians who would forcibly disarm law-abiding Americans have tyranny as their ultimate goal.

O’Rourke knows that his proposal would lead to lots of dead bodies but he’s too big of  a coward to admit it, much less admit that the body bags would be a feature rather than a bug, from his point of view.

President O’Rourke presiding over a disarmed America would have enormous power.

It’s certain, however, there are some voters who do want to do good and who would vote for him or for one of the other Democrat candidates who are promising — as president — to confiscate private firearm property. Such voters want there to be no more mass shooters ever and believe that if the government just takes the tools away, mass shootings will simply stop happening.

Magically.

And it is here where the dearth of wisdom is most glaring among all good-faith advocates of gun confiscation: they think that government can fix humans. This notion has remained pervasive over centuries.

On the contrary, we human beings cannot change our flawed and sinful nature. Politicians can’t. Laws can’t. We can only be mindful of our individual natures and attempt to protect ourselves against those who abandon themselves to their sinful natures, mass shooters being among this number.

Those who are without wisdom believe that humankind is innately good — in spite of the evidence to the contrary that each one of us observes every day.

The perfect sinless, gun-less world that the doers of good say they want is promised by God, But He has conditions which a lot of them aren’t willing to meet. They’d rather let politicians like O’Rourke do the dirty work for them.

And that road will end in the same place it has all the other times.

O’Rourke has no chance of becoming president in 2020, but the front-running Democrats want to take the guns, too.

P minus G equals D. I’ll let you figure out what the variables indicate.

(Thanks to Bearing Arms)

Juliette Akinyi Ochieng has been blogging since 2003 as baldilocks. Her older blog is here.  She published her first novel, Tale of the Tigers: Love is Not a Game in 2012.

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