“At Least I’m not a Communist” (Who I will totally vote for if Nominated)

Posted: February 19, 2020 by datechguy in elections, politics, primaries
Tags: ,

People are having a lot of fun with James Carville’s back and forth with Bernie Sanders particularly this bit

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but while folks are enjoying it they seem to be missing the most significant part of it.

It’s no secret that Bernie Sanders is at best a socialist, and at worst a communist. Sanders honeymooned in the USSR while it was still the USSR (think Having a honeymoon in Berlin 1938). Has defended every single socialist dictator that has arisen over the last 50 years and even has a crew of supporters who, as Project Veritas has pointed out, not only downplay the evils of Communism but long to put the Gulags in play here in the US.

Meanwhile his agenda thanks to a lot of money that has been thrown around the University System over the last few decades (after all for the price of one Big missile you can by a ton of academics and unlike bombs they can be used over and over for a multiplying effect) has become the agenda of the Democrat party. If you look at Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar positions you will see almost no sunlight between them and Bernie.

Enter James Carville.

Carville is a member of a species that used to inhabit the Jim Crow south but has now migrated to the large cities, a “yellow dog” democrat. The term meaning that such a person would vote for a yellow dog rather than any republican.

For Mr. Carville his party affiliation is his public religion. To him the election of Democrats on the local, state and national level supersedes everything outside of his household and thanks to his age, cultural background and marriage he is that rare modern Democrat who exists outside of the bubble so many in the media/hollywood/academic left do.

He understands that socialism and communism do not play outside of the enclaves of academia or the rich elites who uses it as a way to signal virtue and that to embrace this path can doom the party not only on the presidential level but all the way down to the state and local races.

To quote:

We have candidates on the debate stage talking about open borders and decriminalizing illegal immigration. They’re talking about doing away with nuclear energy and fracking. You’ve got Bernie Sanders talking about letting criminals and terrorists vote from jail cells. It doesn’t matter what you think about any of that, or if there are good arguments — talking about that is not how you win a national election. It’s not how you become a majoritarian party.

Note the argument here, the crime isn’t doing any of these things, it’s TALKING ABOUT THEM, but it’s the next answer that’s key here.

I’ve been clear about this: If Bernie is the nominee, I’ll vote for him. No question. I’ll take an ideological fanatic over a career criminal any day. But he’s not a Democrat.

Now think about that for a second, James Carville openly and publicly calls Bernie Sanders a Communist with all the historical connotations that involves but also says publicly on the record that he will vote for him over Donald Trump who he dubs a “career criminal” (although I’m wondering if he had that same opinion before 2012?).

Now you might ask yourself “DaTechGuy, why would he publicly state that he’ll vote for a communist if nominated by the Democrats in 2020? Why isn’t he ‘Never Bernie’?”

Well he gave the answer to that question later in that same interview:

The purpose of a political party is to acquire power. All right? Without power, nothing matters.

And that dear friends is utilitarian Marxism boiled down, period.

Carville cares about power, he sees Bernie as an obstacle to power so he must be stopped before he is the nominee, but once nominated is the only path to power so he must be supported, no matter what.

That is what the Democrat party has become, we might debate when it became this (I realized it back in the 1990’s when I left) but that’s where it is.

Update: Fun tweet via Instapundit:

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The truth is to the Democart/Media/Left a candidate who is a socialist or a communist leading the ticket like Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer et/al is not a crisis unless the voting public find out about it.

The Case for Getting Rid of the CIA and the FBI

Posted: February 18, 2020 by julietteochieng in Always look at the bright side of Trump, Uncategorized, Uncomfortable Truths
Tags: , , , , ,

by baldilocks

This morning, I shared this very long piece by Angelo Codevilla, who outlines what close observers have figured out for themselves.

What, then, is CIA good for?

Its founding myth combines a historical falsehood with reference to technical circumstances that have not existed for at least a generation. (…)

The truth that analysis of Intelligence must include a multiplicity of sources, and that a central repository of information is needed for that, was always the strongest argument for the existence of some sort of central facility where “all source analysis” could be done. But, since at least the 1980s, computers have made it possible and imperative for all analysts, regardless of their location, to access everything securely. Nowadays, ironically, CIA’s insistence on managing the access and distribution of information is the biggest barrier to universal, all-source Intelligence analysis.

Today, CIA is good for confidential meetings with the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC News, etc., through which it joins—if it does not lead—campaigns to shape domestic American opinion.

What is the FBI good for?

Once upon a time, FBI foreign counterintelligence officers were cops first. Like all good cops, they knew the difference between the people on whose behalf they worked, and those who threaten them. They had graduated from places like Fordham, a Catholic, blue-collar university in the Bronx. Like T.V.’s Sergeant Joe Friday, they wore white shirts and said yes, sir, yes, ma’am. Unlike CIA case officers, FBI officers mixed with the kinds of people they investigated, and often went undercover themselves. The FBI jailed Capone and dismantled the Mafia. Because it used to take counterintelligence seriously, it was able to neutralize Soviet subversion in the USA. The old joke was that, in any meeting of the U.S. Communist Party or of its front groups, a majority of attendees were FBI agents. The only U.S. Intelligence penetration of the Kremlin was the FBI’s recruitment of a U.S. labor activist whom high-level Soviets trusted.

In the late 1970s, that began to change. Director William Webster (1978-87) refused to back up the officers who had infiltrated and surveilled the New Left’s collaboration with the Soviets against America in the Vietnam War. Webster also introduced contemporary political correctness into the FBI. Asked by the Senate Intelligence Committee why his FBI had neither infiltrated nor disrupted the Jim Jones cult that resulted in the deaths of 900 Americans in Jonestown, Guyana, he answered that he would no more have interfered with that religion than with the Catholic Church. Not incidentally, the Jim Jones cult was associated with the Democratic party.

Thus FBI officers became standard bureaucrats who learned to operate on the assumption that all Americans were equally likely as not to be proper targets of investigation. They replaced the distinctions by which they had previously operated with the classic bureaucratic imperative: look out for yourselves by making sure to please the powerful.

Take a cup of coffee or tea and read the whole thing. And I should point out that I’m old enough to remember when it was considered paranoid and crazy to believe that the intelligence agencies were domestic enemies of the American people.

Their concerted efforts against Donald Trump, however, have turned out to be a vast miscalculation.

Do I think that these agencies could be scrapped? Yes, but one might liken it to surgical removal of an aggressive cancer: expensive and painful, the body will need time to recover, and the surgeons will have to monitor the patient for new growth.

It can be fixed but it will never be over.

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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China, socialized medicine, and me

Posted: February 18, 2020 by chrisharper in Uncomfortable Truths
Tags: ,

Hundreds of people wait to register to see a doctor in Guangzhou, China.

By Christopher Harper

If you want to see what socialized medicine looks like, China is a classic example—a system unable to meet the needs of many patients in normal times that crashes into chaos when a crisis occurs like a coronavirus.

During my travels throughout China over the past five years, I was able to see the system up close and personal. See https://datechguyblog.com/2018/06/05/healthcare-in-china/

While the wealthy can pay for the best care with foreign doctors, most people are relegated to overcrowded hospitals. In the countryside, residents must rely on village clinics or travel hundreds of miles to find the closest facility.

The country does not have a functioning primary care system. China has one general practitioner for roughly every 7,000 people, compared with the international standard of one for every 1,500 to 2,000 people, according to the World Health Organization.

Another major issue, particularly in a crisis like a coronavirus, is the system for handling patients at hospitals, which often is the place where most people go for treatment.

When I went to a hospital in Guangzhou, the third-largest city in China in the southern part of the country, I registered to see a doctor and waited for one hour to see a physician to diagnose a persistent cough.

I sat in a large waiting room to see the doctor—where you can get sick from some of the other 60 to 70 people with a variety of illnesses.

The doctor seemed competent during my five-minute visit, but I then had to go for tests, waiting for another two hours with 50 other people because the hospital closes for lunch from 12:30 p.m. to 2:30 p.m.

It took only a few minutes to get the results of an EKG, but the blood tests came after two hours.

I then saw another physician—in my case, another hour of waiting—before receiving three prescriptions to soothe my chest cough. It took another 30 minutes to have the prescription filled. Again, those waiting for prescriptions amounted to roughly 100 people.

By the time I was done, I’d been around hundreds of people, with a variety of diseases that I could have gotten, and they were exposed to my illness.

All I had was a chest cold and needed a prescription for some medicine. A visit, which would have taken me 15 to 30 minutes with my family doctor in the United States, took more than six hours in China.

But there’s more. At the time I was getting my chest cold diagnosed, hundreds of thousands of children were found to have been injected with faulty vaccines, amplifying the already existing frustration with the health care system.

In recent years, scandals have erupted over bribes to physicians from those who could afford to pay to move to the front of the line for critical treatments.

In my experience in China and elsewhere, socialized medicine may be adequate as long as there is no serious health threat.

Here’s what every voter should ask a Democrat candidate for president: Would you prefer socialized medicine fighting the coronavirus or the current system that exists in the United States? For me, the choice is pretty simple.

Don’t let this VA #2a Victory Fool You

Posted: February 18, 2020 by datechguy in Uncategorized
Tags:

There are still plenty of gun control bills moving forward, in fact as Bearing Arms note Governor Ralph “Klan Robe or Blackface” Northam will likely be signing a few this year

While the gun, magazine, and suppressor bill is dead for this legislative session, it will almost surely be back again next year, and in the meantime Gov. Northam will likely get a chance to sign several gun control bills, including measures that would roll back the state’s firearm preemption law, change training requirements for concealed carry licensees, and more.

The most dangerous thing about a victory like the one yesterday on HB961 is for people to think the fight is done. In fact I’m sure that there will be a lot of effort to make you think this is the case so that next year when Trump is not on the ballot and conservatives are basking in wins nationally and elsewhere the left can sneak these bills though.

That is the plan and it will only fail if they stay scared. Make sure you keep them so.

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