I am of the strong belief that our Cold Civil War will eventually go warm if not hot.
From Zero Hedge:
Members of US militias aren’t waiting for Congress and special counsel Robert Mueller to move against the Trump administration. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, militia activity has spiked in the early days of Trump’s presidency, which could be problem for the deep state and Democratic lawmakers who have joined in opposition to the president, and maybe even for Trump himself.
An intensifying atmosphere of disillusionment and anger is attracting new members to these groups, which could be a problem for Trump if he fails to adhere to his campaign promises - something that could trigger a backlash from a legion of heavily armed former supporters.
"What would concern me is that nobody gets more angry than a fan spurned," James Corcoran, a professor at Simmons College in Boston who has watched militias closely for decades and has written extensively about the movement, told the AJC.
The spike in activity runs counter to a trend that’s as old as the modern militia movement, which first emerged in the early 1990s after the election of President Bill Clinton. Typically,militia activity trails off when a Republican administration is in power, but increases when Democrats are in power. Zero Hedge Article
Usual disclaimers. Carlson is OK now and then. Krauthead is a jackass. But even this establishmentarian expresses skepticism of the Left's "Any Means Necessary" mentality.
A retired attorney in Virginia Beach is so incensed that Republicans couldn’t repeal the Affordable Care Act he’s suing to get political donations back, accusing the GOP of fraud and racketeering.
Bob Heghmann, 70, filed a lawsuit Thursday in U.S. District Court saying the national and Virginia Republican parties and some GOP leaders raised millions of dollars in campaign funds while knowing they weren’t going to be able to overturn the ACA, also known as Obamacare.
The GOP “has been engaged in a pattern of Racketeering which involves massive fraud perpetrated on Republican voters and contributors as well as some Independents and Democrats,” the suit said. Racketeering, perhaps better known for use in prosecuting organized crime, involves a pattern of illegal behavior by a specific group.
The lawsuit lists as defendants the Republican National Committee and Virginia’s two national GOP committee members, Morton Blackwell and Cynthia Dunbar, as well as the Republican Party of Virginia and state party Chairman John Whitbeck.
All week we were strung along with a Sessions leak crackdown. The news cycle comes to a conclusion and we are served up a press conference where Sessions announces that he will START cracking down on the illegal leaking of confidential information. No indictments. No arrests. Not even the mention of a grand jury. Hell, Mueller has only had his job half as long as Out Of Session Jeff and he is already stacking the deck for the Clintons. Why is Sessions so damn incompetent?
Stupid?
Beleaguered?
Overwhelmed?
Weak?
Weak?
Weak?
Quisling?
Swamp Rat?
Traitor?
Duplicitous?
Stupid?
The motives are not as important as the results, which happen to be zero. Jeff Sessions is Donald Trump's biggest mistake to date and it is high time he is shown the door. Bye bye, Fredo. CNN has saved a seat for you.
CNN has lost its collective mind. They actually hired a courtroom artist or the equivalent to bring us a noteworthy news item.
Good for Mark Dice to report on the antics of CNN. I will not watch them except for their coverage of the 2016 election. I find the sophistry and long faces amusing.
Leftists seem to have a lot of time on their hands. We have previously discussed The Occupy Amazon movement. The trolls hop around from politically incorrect author to politically incorrect book and leave 1-Star reviews.
Usually, they do not read the book in question. You won't see point by point refutations. How can the troll do that if he does not even possess the book? Instead, you see a lot of one or two sentence blurbs. They might not have read the book in question (although Amazon has a purchase verification tab and these are supposedly buyers) they can write a terse condemnation. Their brevity gives them away.
I dislike traditional book reviews, Books are too enchanting to be treated with the formal formulistic formalities the New York This And That imposes on them.
I ramble when I discuss books because a good book is thought provoking. Tamny has given us a five star fiesta. Milton Friedman made that which seemed complicated, simple to understand. Thomas Sowell would later surpass Friedman in this talent. Sowell was a teacher by trade btw, and that might account for his ability to teach. It is high praise to compare Tamny to Friedman and Sowell and that is exactly what I am doing.
Tamny uses icons of popular culture to illustrate his points and this is highly effective. The Rolling Stones were chased out of the UK by the taxman and they took hundreds of jobs with them. An onerous inheritance tax nearly destroyed the livelihood of an entire estate-village that is the fictitious Downton Abbey. Tamny's example of Lebron James is not quite as persuasive but I will put that subject on the shelf for now,
Tamny reminds us just how simple the subject of economics really is. The four pillars of macroeconomics are:
1. Trade
2. Taxes.
3. Regulation.
4. Currency
History provides abundant examples of how to do these things right, that is, to promote maximum prosperity. Yet, the experts usually do the wrong thing. The blueprint is available but the smart guys ignore it.
The single most important takeaway from "Popular Economics..." is the importance of a strong currency. Tamny reinforces my viewpoint that Richard Nixon was a disastrous president and that his shotgun divorce of dollar and gold had inflicted turmoil that is felt to this very day. The populace might understand the results of bad trade policy, bad tax policy, and bad regulatory policy but bad monetary policy....not so much.
Tamny lays it out. Strong dollar good. Weak dollar bad. A president who strengthens the dollar is a good president. A president who weakens the dollar is a bad president. Reagan, Clinton good. Bush II, Obama bad. Coolidge good. Hoover, Roosevelt bad.
Tamny does not stop there. He asks the reader to imagine a world where standardized measurements--the inch, the second, a degree of Celsius--were constantly changing. Chaos would ensue and would affect every aspect of daily life. Cooking, baking, home repair, auto maintenance would be all but impossible during periods of extreme volatility. Tamny reminds us that money is primarily a means of measuring wealth, not unlike the gram, the ounce or the cup. It is as absurd for leaders to manipulate the value of a currency as it is to change the sizes of measuring spoons.
For a short book, Tamny covers a lot of ground. He believes, as many of do, that the 2008 financial fiasco brought us a cure far worse than the illness. With that stated, he blames the housing collapse not on social engineers, credit default swaps or the usual scapegoats. Tamny posits that it was the declining dollar that eclipsed everything and only when the dollar was reinvigorated did the economy start to recover.
This blogger's biggest fear of Donald Trump is not that he has a bad temperament that will ultimately trigger a nuclear war or that our enemies won't like us or that he will say bad things about Rosie O'Donnell. My biggest fear, and I have felt this early on in the primaries, is that Trump will not appreciate the importance of a strong dollar. Let's hope the president reads John Tamny.
Popular Economics: What the Rolling Stones, Downton Abbey, and LeBron James Can Teach You about Economics by John Tamny. 5 Stars!
I spend much too much time reviewing Election 2016 coverage. I have to cut back for a while.
It's more than pure nostalgia at play here. There is a Youtube 22 or so minute recap of the last Super Bowl. I have watched that at least a dozen times. That is an exercise in unadulterated nostalgia. Election night is a horse of a different color.
Yes, there is some reliving of an adventure and there is some schadenfreude, of course, but there is so much more. We sometimes ask if the fourth estate are liars, idiots or both. Most of us say both. Yet, the self-professed experts--to the person--seem genuinely fooled, even shocked, by the events of November 8. I guess if you live in a bubble...
On Hoosierman's recommendation, I watched 6 hours of ABC's coverage of this historic night. It was intriguing. These arrogant know-it-alls put Trump in the past tense early on. They were downright giddy, pointing out Trump's many errors. Then, lightning struck.
In fairness, ABC saw the inevitable fairly early on. I also have to extend reluctant praise to ABC for coming up with a snazzy presentation. Reluctant praise also for George Stephanopolis, who despite his obvious partisanship, did a great job of moving the ball around.
I don't expect you to watch all six hours but you might get hooked like I did. In case you want some highlights:
Nate Silver initially puts Hillary at 71% and later bumps her up to 78%. Around 3:16:27 he has Trump at 78%.
When the tide turned there were the usual charges of bad temperment, MAGA stupidity and so on. Cokie Roberts suggests that the disaffected were those left behind by technological advances. No, Cokie, coal miners, steel, workers, oil field workers, pipeline builders want to UNLEASH technology. It is Washington that has left them behind.
There is a humorous comment by Matthew Dowd circa 5:21;;00 where he rails against Trump's disrespect for the press.
BTW, J. D. Vance nails it at 5:23;30.
ABC
Jonesing for more, I watched most of CBS's coverage. It was dowdier, they waited much longer to call the results, and it was chockful of charges of "racial animus." By comparison, ABC was downright evenhanded. I took notes and in retrospect, I wonder why I did so.
There are some humorous moments. CBS tells us that Florida is in a dead heat. They switch away to Clinton HQ and the correspondent tells us that the mood has changed since Florida was called for Trump. She switches back to CBS HQ and they continue the Florida is too close to call bs.
I got to get back to life. No more media analysis for a while.
I do fall into rabbit holes from time to time. Take the Trump Prophecies, for instance. I was not aware of the many Christians who predicted a Trump Presidency years ago. That subject is still intriguing.
On a related note, dreams about Donald Trump--usually shared by fundamentalist Christians--is a topic that is much more popular than I had suspected. I spent a lot of time on that subject before I walked away concluding that this set of dreams is as idiosyncratic as any other dream. Lots to see but nothing to put in a a jar and save for posterity.
Which brings us to the Second American Civil War. I thought I was in front of the curve on this one. I found some loose ends here and there and I bookmarked text and video. And then, I found it. Someone went and compiled a 51 video Youtube playlist concerning The Second American Civil War. The blogger is a laggard once more.
The playlist starts with Newt Gingrich reading Dennis Prager and goes in all different directions. Heavyweights like Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh are included as well as lesser known figures. I had seen about a third of the vids prior to stumbling onto the playlist. I will be returning to that rabbit hole soon. Playlist link.
