What If You Gave a Netroots Nation And Nobody Came?

August 19th, 2018

Did you know that the Daily Kos-founded Netroots Nation had their annual conference earlier this month?

If not, that’s OK. Evidently neither did anyone else.

Netroots Nation bills itself as “the largest annual conference for progressives.” This year’s conference was plagued with nearly empty events, racial incitement and wild radicalism far outside of the American mainstream, including items for sale with threats of violence.

This year’s conference just wrapped in New Orleans.

Wait a minute, how do you throw an under-attended conference in New Orleans? I mean, it’s in New Orleans.

Of course, the dwindling ranks of Netroot Nation are probably packed with dour feminists and vegetarians, so perhaps New Orleans offers less of an appeal to them than you might think.

Keynote addresses were delivered at Netroots Nation by Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Cynthia Nixon, and self-described democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. These speakers, and the conference’s legion of panelists, pushed an unrelenting new era of racially-focused activism and organizing.

The problem was, much of the time there was nobody there to hear it.

The conference was plagued by nearly empty events. “This is What Democracy Should Look Like” was a panel featuring Atima Omara, A’shanti Gholar, and Carol McDonald. With seating for more than 200 at the event, barely 20 Netroots attendees came to hear.

Also this:

“Among the topics at Netroots Nation were race, mobilization, race, voting rights, race, and cultural oppression by the dominant patriarchy.”

Media reports claim Netroots Nation got its usual 3,000 attendees, but I’m not seeing it in these tweeted photos:

And here’s Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, supposedly a serious Presidential candidate, speaking to what appears to be a half-full luncheon:

(Speaking of Booker, he claimed that he had no idea this sign he was holding had anything do do with Israel:

Which means Cory Booker is either a liar or an idiot…)

I would think that if they had anywhere close to three thousand people, there would be at least one picture from the event that showed at least a thousand people in one room, and I’m not seeing one anywhere online.

My impression is that far-left organizations like Netroots Nation suffer from one of the same problems plaguing the libertarians: All chiefs and no indians.

(Hat tip: NiceDeb.)

Kofi Annan, RIP

August 18th, 2018

There’s the usual outpouring of posthumous accolades now that former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has died at age 80. I know we’re supposed to be all de mortuis nihil nisi bonum, but in truth the best I can say about him is that, like the organization he served, he wasn’t completely useless. Annan never stopped a war, never prevented a rogue nation from obtaining nuclear weapons, and could never prevent UN peacekeepers from raping the locals. If you had a treaty whose outlines were 90% complete, he could get you the last 10% of the way, and if you wanted a dignified member of the bureaucratic chattering classes to make ritual condemnations of evils they had no intention of doing anything to end, he was your guy. These days the UN exists mostly to keep transnational diplomatic elites in caviar and denounce Israel. He was not the worst UN Secretary General, and was not the worst man to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

LinkSwarm for August 17, 2018

August 17th, 2018

Themes for today’s LinkSwarm: Jihad, rape and China. Not necessarily in that order…

  • So let me see if I have this story straight: New Mexico jihadis, one related to a New York City imam who might have been involved in 9/11, murdered three children, abused and starved 11 other children while teaching them to be school shooters, and the judge let them out on bail?

    A New Mexico state judge ruled Monday that five alleged Muslim extremists accused of training children to conduct school shootings do not have to remain in jail while they await trial for child abuse.

    Judge Sarah Backus released the five defendants, Siraj Wahhaj, Hujrah Wahhaj, Subhannah Wahhaj, Jany Leveille, and Lucas Morten, on a $20,000 “signature bond,” according to the Albuquerque Journal. That means that the defendants will not have to pay money unless they violate the conditions of their release

    It’s a good thing there’s not a huge foreign nation immediately to the south with a porous border they can flee to…

    And authorities just bulldozed the compound?

  • The great illusion of China’s economic growth.

    If China really had a savings rate of 46%, the economy would look quite different. There would be very little debt in the system; the banks would have a very low loans to deposits ratio and low leverage, like banks in nineteenth century Britain. Consumer debt would be almost non-existent, while the Chinese market would have an enormous variety of saving and investment schemes, to take care of all the accumulated wealth. New company formation would be very high, but “venture capital” would be very scarce, because new companies would be capitalized from the savings of the founders’ relatives and friends. Overall, China might well have a rapid growth rate, but it would be a very contented, stable economy.

    A recent Financial Times examination of China’s economy illustrates the problem; it shows consumer debt almost doubling as a share of GDP, from roughly 20% to 40% in the last five years and tells pathetic stories of young, highly educated Chinese who max out their credit cards, desperately hoping to boost their earnings sufficiently to pay that debt back. But Chinese elite youths brought up in a society with a 46% savings rate would have neither the desire nor the need for heavy credit card usage. First, they would have been brought up in families with a fanatical devotion to deferring consumption, so would regard the over-indebted Western Millennial lifestyle with undiluted horror. Second, because of their families’ savings habits, such elite youths would be beneficiaries of very substantial trust funds from their relatives, and so would have no need of credit cards.

    If the savings rate is fiction, then so are all China’s economic statistics. GDP is at least one third lower than claimed, to account for the missing savings, and growth rates over the last decades correspondingly lower, On the other hand, China’s foreign debt is all too real, and most of the domestic debt also appears to be solid, so China’ s gross debt, already alarmingly high at 299% of GDP according to the Institute for International Finance, is in reality about 450% of true GDP, substantially higher than that of any other country. With such a level of debt, China is not about to overtake the West, it is in imminent danger of collapse. Indeed, it is at first sight something of a mystery why it has not collapsed already under the weight of its excesses.

    (Hat tip: Iain Murray at Instapundit.)

  • Speaking of China, they got all pissy about the latest defense bill.
  • Also: “China Buckles, Sends Trade Delegation to Washington to Seek End of Trade War.” Maybe, just maybe, President Donald Trump knows a thing or two about negotiating strategy…
  • Today’s @realDonaldTrump approval ratings among black voters: 36%.” That’s up from 29% two weeks ago.
  • “Evil is a make-believe concept we’ve invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own.” That quote comes from an American bicycling across several foreign countries, including one where Islamic State followers killed him, his wife, and two fellow-travelers thanks to their “different perspectives.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Google has released a report on the paid ads they’ve run on political campaigns. It’s not completely useless, but then you drill down to congressional district, it only shows you total spending, not how much was spent by each campaign, much less links to the relevant ads.
  • Borepatch brings up an old and (to our media) deeply uncomfortable truth about the Catholic child rape scandal:

    A theme that keeps recurring in histories of the worst abusers is that they were trained in seminaries that were run by homosexual men and saturated with gay-liberationist subculture. Reading accounts of students at one notorious California seminary making a Friday-night ritual of cruising gay bars, it becomes hard not to wonder if gay culture itself has not been an important enabler of priestly abuse.

    Along those lines, the book Goodbye, Good Men: How Liberals Brought Corruption into the Catholic Church made this argument shortly after the original Catholic Church pedophilia scandal broke, and was promptly ignored by the media for not fitting the narrative.

  • Speaking of child rape, 30 Muslim men and one woman have been charged with multiple counts of rape and sex trafficking of women as young as 12 in West Yorkshire, UK. (“Luxury! We used to be raped 25 hours a day…”)
  • Ace of Spades is surprised to find Disney holding firm on it’s firing of James “I Make Pedophile Jokes” Gunn. Also, in the course of slamming (perhaps a littler too strenuously) Trump-skeptical establishment conservatives on their hypocrisy on the issue (RE: Roseanne), he does nicely articulate the logic of taking’s the Guardians of the Galaxy director’s scalp, even if Gunn was only joking:

    I will not be subject to one of your rules and yet permit you to be free of your own rule. If it’s your rule, you shall suffer under it just the same as me.

    We do not (yet) have a formal caste system in America, despite the obvious longing from the left and the NeverTrump rump to establish over-castes and under-castes.

    And it’s MUH #SacredPrinciple that we shall not have a tiered system of citizenship that the leftwing establishment as well as the “right”-leaning establishment so clearly crave.

    And I’ll sacrifice anyone to make sure that they do not put me in their designated under-caste.​

  • “Poll: Majority of Millennial Women Do Not Identify as Feminist.” Take a bow, Shoe0nHead! (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Newspaper editorial says that the MSM is falling into Prsident Trump’s trap:

    Trump may be both more relentless and obnoxious than his predecessors, but cries of “Fake News!” from the Oval Office are old hat. Presidents always blame the messenger. Even Barack Obama, the object of so much media fawning, groused about distorted coverage.

    This time, though, we are taking it personally. Striking at the bait Trump dangles. Joining the war he’s declared. Allowing him to goad us into abandoning the fundamental principles of our profession.

    Donald Trump is not responsible for the eroding trust in the media. He lacks the credibility to pull that off. The damage to our standing is self-inflicted.

    The independent press was built on a foundation of objectivity. Through a tradition of conscientious commitment to telling all sides of a story we convinced our readers, listeners, viewers that we were the source of fair and balanced coverage. We were equal opportunity scourges of scoundrels on both sides of the political aisle.

    Now, too many of us are following the websites, cable networks and blogosphere into point-of-view journalism that presents the news with equal parts fact and opinion. We’ve infused our reports with commentary and call it context.

    Journalists once kept their personal views personal, lest anyone challenge the motives behind their reporting. Now reporters post their opinions on Facebook and Twitter. They sob in newsrooms over the results of an election. News meetings and editorial boards are often indistinguishable.

    Respected journalists openly question whether remaining objective in the Donald Trump era is a sell-out rather than a virtue. Some have joined the resistance movement, blending journalism with activism.

    No one in our profession can say with a straight face that we cover Donald Trump the same way we have past presidents. We are not only giving him more scrutiny — rightly so — but we are making more mistakes in our haste to discredit him. Our accuracy ratings have fallen as we turn to poorly vetted anonymous sources and repeat every rumor that fits the narrative that Trump is a disaster.

    Yes, Trump is an extraordinary case. Chaos is the hallmark of his governing style. His personal conduct falls well short of presidential. But his administration has had successes, and the press is not as eager to cover those as it is his failures.

    Journalism seems to have turned a corner in search of some higher purpose beyond simply digging out the truth, presenting it to our readers and letting them decide what to do with it.

    Nothing about Donald Trump justifies tossing aside the standards that have allowed journalists to remain the trusted eyes and ears of the people.

  • “Patreon and Mastercard ban Robert Spencer without explanation.” That’s Robert Spencer of JihadWatch, not Richard Spencer the LARP Nazi.
  • By the way, Robert Spencer has a new book out: The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS.
  • MoviePass is getting ready to bite the moose. I can imagine a way you could make this thing work out: Make deals with large theater chains, exclude the first week of all movies, and the first few weeks for blockbusters, and make a deal to buy tickets at a steep discount to put butts in seats so theater owners can make more money off concessions. All things that MoviePass evidently never attempted…
  • The great plastic gun panic…of 1986. I think we can all remember how the widespread availability of the Glock resulted in the downfall of America…
  • The remote Australian town where people live underground and hunt opals.
  • Unlikely teamups:

  • Are you ready to take your cosplay to Flavortown? (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Texas News Roundup For August 16, 2018

    August 16th, 2018

    Here’s a basket of Texas and local news of note:

  • Back in the dim mists of time, Democrats used to nominate swing district candidates who could at least pretend to be moderates. This year? Not so much.

    Today, I’m highlighting another extremist Democrat in Texas, Gina Ortiz Jones, who finished first in a five-way primary, with 42% of the vote and then defeated Rick Trevino in the May runoff, to challenge Republican Rep. Will Hurd in the 23rd District.

    This is one of the most competitive districts in the country, and has changed hands five times between Republicans and Democrats in the past 25 years. Hurd, a former CIA officer and the only black Republican member of Congress from Texas, won the seat in 2014 with only a 2,500-vote margin over the Democrat incumbent, and was re-elected in 2016 with a margin of only 3,000 votes. In a mid-term where Democrats are energized by anti-Trump mania, Hurd faces a tough fight, and Democrats have poured more than $1 million into the Jones campaign.

    Fortunately for Republicans, however, Jones is way out of step with the values of this largely rural district, which stretches all the way from the suburbs of San Antonio in the east to El Paso in the west. The district is 55% Hispanic, and Jones has made a point of using her mother’s maiden name, with the slogan “One of Us, Fighting For Us” in her campaign.

    Except she’s not Hispanic. Her mother immigrated from the Philippines and her father (who never married her mother) was a white drug addict. While she’s using “Ortiz” to play the identity-politics game with Texas voters, however, she’s using a lesbian-feminist message to solicit support nationally from Trump-haters, promising to become the “first Filipina-American and first out-lesbian to represent Texas in Congress, and she’ll be the first woman to represent her district.“ She has been endorsed by all the usual suspects of left-wing extremism, including pro-abortion groups like Planned Parenthood and Emily’s List, pro-homosexual groups like Equality PAC, Human Rights Campaign and the LGBT Victory Fund, and the anti-Israel JStreetPAC, as well as the Feminist Majority, People for the American Way and the AFL-CIO. Her agenda includes socialized medicine, taxpayer funding for abortion, gun control, amnesty for illegal aliens, and every other issue you might expect from someone who attended elite Boston University.

  • Missed this earlier: San Antonio Dr. Jorge Zamora-Quezada was arrested for committing over $240 million in Medicare and other government fraud in a scheme that stretched back over two decades.
  • ICE arrests 45 in Houston area during 5-day operation targeting criminal aliens, immigration fugitives.”
  • There were also 110 illegal aliens arrested in the Rio Grande valley over two days.
  • “In what appears to have been a last-ditch move to sway a tax ratification election in their favor, South San Antonio ISD officials likely violated state law on Tuesday by paying district employees to go vote for the tax increase. But for those at home wondering, crime doesn’t pay. Despite their fourth-quarter efforts, voters defeated the tax hike by a 57–43 margin.”
  • The University of Texas “diversity coordinator” thinks that “The Eyes of Texas” is racist. (Hat tip: Mark Pulliam, on Twitter.)
  • How well did your local public school rank? TPPF has more on how to read the scores. (But also keep in mind Iowahawk’s illuminating essay on how demographics affect test scores.)
  • Muslim immigrant from Jordan sentenced to death for two honor killings.
  • The Idiots on the Austin City Council voted to subsidize a professional soccer team on city land. Because subsidizing a sport Texans actually like just wasn’t insulting enough. (More background here.)
  • 100% Renewable Isn’t Doable.” No matter what Georgetown says…
  • When is an interest rate swap a secret stealth tax increase? This piece walks you through how tiny Azle ISD’s machinations amount to a form of regulatory arbitrage to do just that.
  • Woman shoots masturbating bicyclist trying to break into her SE Houston home.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Twitter Randomly Banning Conservatives Yet Again

    August 15th, 2018

    Twitter is up to its old tricks:

    @OrdyPackard shows up as having a QFD ban. “QFD causes your tweets to be invisible within the latest section of the search, including hashtags, when the quality filter is turned on. Note that this quality filter is located on the search page, is turned on by default and will be reset for each search anew. It differs from the quality filter controlling your notifications. QFD was introduced on May 15, 2018 as part of Twitter’s so-called healthy conversation project.”

    And Gavin McInnis was banned outright. “I think what’s really going on here is Proud Boys have been successful in protecting speakers from Antifa.”

    I suggested one response:

    Persuasion, Ritual Magic, and the Kek Wars

    August 14th, 2018

    Sometimes you put up something you don’t actually agree with, and which most of your readership may find more confounding than enlightening. This is one of those times.

    Some may find the author’s theories absurd, or opaque, or illogical, and I’m not entirely in disagreement. But if you view them through Scott Adams’ “persuasion technique looks an awful lot like magic from the outside” filter, these essays make a certain amount of sense.

    I’m also posting this for two non-conservative science fiction writer friends to take a look at: Don Webb (an expert on Egyptian magic) and Will Shetterly (a socialist with an interest in the American class structure).

    So, without further adieu, here are excerpts from the four parts of John Michael Greer’s The Kek Wars:

    Every aristocracy begins as a set of tough, capable individuals who come to terms with some reality the previous ruling elite has ignored too long, and use that reality as a battering ram to break down the doors of the status quo and take power from the overly delicate hands that previously held it. As long as the new aristocracy stays in touch with the world outside its own circles, and provides the people it rules with effective ways to seek redress of grievances and communicate their wants and needs, it retains power—but when it retreats from that necessary interaction and closes its ears to the needs of those under it, it writes its own death warrant.

    The managerial aristocracy of contemporary America followed exactly that trajectory. It took power from an older aristocracy in the crisis years of the Great Depression, when Franklin Roosevelt spearheaded a not-quite-violent seizure of power and broke the grip of a failed social and economic orthodoxy. There Was No Alternative until FDR created one, and in his wake a new cadre of bureaucrats and intellectuals seized the levers of power and turned the established certainties of American life on their heads. The bare-knuckle international slugging matches of the Second World War and the early Cold War were grist for the new aristocracy’s mill, and when it was in its prime, it had the common sense to pay attention where necessary to the grievances and wants of those outside its circle.

    Fast forward to 2000 or so, and the members of this same caste had fallen into the same trap as the elites of the pre-New Deal era, and embraced a social and economic orthodoxy just as toxic as the one their predecessors overthrew. What’s worse, they made the same mistake as their predecessors, and convinced themselves that the policies that furthered their own interests at everyone else’s expense were not only the only alternative, but the only moral alternative.

    The policies in question? There were a galaxy of them, but the threefold core was metastatic centralism, economic globalism, and unrestricted illegal immigration. The fantastic proliferation of federal regulations since 1932 choked out small businesses and transferred wealth and power to big corporations and government bureaucracies; the elimination of trade barriers encouraged the offshoring of millions of working class jobs that, despite endless claims in the mainstream media, were never replaced, and were never intended to be replaced; the tacit encouragement of unlimited illegal immigration created a vast underclass of noncitizens who had no rights worth mentioning, and were employed at starvation wages under inhuman conditions, thus driving down wages and working conditions across the whole range of working class jobs.

    From Part 2:

    In last week’s thrilling episode of The Kek Wars, we talked about the way that America’s managerial aristocracy and its broad penumbra of lackeys and hangers-on retreated into a self-referential bubble to avoid noticing the consequences of their preferred policies. As they did so, those policies—the metastatic growth of government regulation that strangled small businesses and transferred power and wealth to huge corporations and federal bureaucracies, the trade policies that forced working class wages and benefits down below subsistence levels, and the tacit policy of encouraging unlimited illegal immigration that created a vast labor pool of noncitizens who had no rights and thus could be exploited with impunity—drove tens of millions of Americans into destitution and misery. Now it’s time to start exploring how the blowback to those policies took shape.

    Snip.

    Thus we don’t yet have a consensus ideology among the losers we’ve been discussing. The label “Alt-Right” is a grab bag of contending notions, not a specific set of proposals. The mainstream media’s loud insistence that the Alt-Right is all about racism, by the way, is straightforward disinformation; what the American aristocracy fears more than anything else is a rapprochement between working class white people and working class people of color, and the constant shrieks of “racism!” from the privileged classes are part of a strategy intended to stave off that ultimate elite nightmare.

    From Part 3:

    One of the lessons of the history of morals is that the more stridently you repress something, the more desperately people want to do it. In Victorian England, when sex was utterly unmentionable in polite company, the streets of London swarmed with prostitutes and brothels thrived, so that people could do in private what they wouldn’t dream of talking about in public. The drug abuse epidemic in the US today, similarly, is almost entirely a product of the much-ballyhooed War On Drugs—countries that treat drug addiction as an ordinary medical issue, not a subject for moral grandstanding, have much lower rates of drug use.

    Recent crusades against “hate speech” have had exactly the same effect in today’s America. Those who attend university classes or work in white-collar jobs know that their every word is scrutinized by jealous rivals ready to use accusations of sexism, racism, or the like as a weapon in the competition for status. Most people, forced into so stifling an environment, will end up desperately longing for a place where they can take a deep breath and say absolutely anything, no matter how offensive. The chans were among the internet venues that offered them that freedom. Posts on the chans are anonymous, so there was no risk of reprisal, and the culture of the chans (and especially of /pol/) tended to applaud extreme statements, so they became a magnet for the people we discussed in last week’s post: those who for one reason or another lost out in the struggle to become flunkeys of the established order of society, who were locked out of what had been the normal trajectory of adult independence by plunging wages and soaring rents, and who were incensed by the smug superiority of a system that assumed that it had all the answers.

    Snip.

    It was somewhere around this same time, too, that someone on the chans noticed that “kek” wasn’t just a funny way of saying LOL. It was also the name of an ancient Egyptian god, a god of the primeval darkness that gave birth to the light, who was worshiped in the city of Hermopolis—and who was very often portrayed as an anthropomorphic frog. Like Pepe, in other words. Following up this clue, another anonymous user found on the internet the photo of an ancient Egyptian statue of a frog, mislabeled as a statue of Kek. It was actually a statue of the frog goddess Heqet, but no one realized that at first—and the hieroglyphics of the name Heqet look rather unnervingly like a person sitting in front of a computer screen, with a swirling shape like magical energies on the far side of the screen.

    By the time this finished percolating through the chans, a great many people there were convinced, or ironically pretended to be convinced, and at all events acted as though they were convinced, that Donald Trump was the anointed candidate of the god Kek, bringer of daylight, who had manifested as Pepe the Frog and was communicating his approval to them with “gets.” In response, the chaos magicians of /pol/ flung themselves into action. Those of my readers who followed the 2016 US election will remember that rumors were swirling around the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton by this point, claiming that she had a debilitating health condition that she was hiding from the media and the voters. The operative mages on /pol/ focused their efforts on a single goal: making Hillary Clinton collapse in public.

    Snip.

    The thing that doomed Clinton’s campaign, more than anything else, was the inability of the candidate and her inner circle of advisers and managers to notice that anything was going wrong. Every time polls showed that a very large percentage of American voters disliked and distrusted their candidate, Clinton’s handlers simply looked blank and set out to reintroduce her to the voters, and when that didn’t work—and it never did—they simply looked blank and tried again. From my perspective, and not from mine alone, it really did look as though they were under a spell.

    As the campaign wore on, the Clinton machine’s weird detachment from reality became even more pronounced. People who were involved in local Clinton campaign organizations have written about the way their increasingly desperate attempts to warn the national headquarters that Trump was gaining ground in crucial swing states were brushed aside as irrelevant, while millions of dollars were wasted on venues such as Chicago, which the Democrats would have won easily if they’d nominated Zippy the Pinhead. As Trump held rally after rally in the critically important states of the upper Midwest, and the numbers swung further Trump’s way with every poll, the Clinton campaign ignored those battleground states and lumbered ahead as though going through the right motions would conjure up the victory that they seemed to think the universe owed them.

    Part 4: Trump as archetype/native American trickster god:

    Two features of the Changer myth seem particularly relevant at the moment. The first is pointed up skillfully in the stories. The beings who try to stop the Changer and keep the world the same just keep doing whatever they were doing when the Changer arrives: the man with the board keeps carving tree trunks, the man with the many-pointed weapons keeps looking around—and there they are today, the beaver beside his dam, the deer on the hill. Having refused change, they become unable to change, and keep on going through the motions of their failed plans forever. That’s exactly what Trump’s opponents have been doing since his candidacy hit its stride, and more particularly since his inauguration. “From now on your name is Protester,” says the Changer, and sticks a pussy hat on the person’s head and a placard in her hands…

    Food for thought, even if you’re deeply skeptical (as I am) about vast swathes of his theory…

    (Hat tip: Borepatch.)

    Mickey Kaus on Ann Coulter on Immigration

    August 13th, 2018

    This is an interesting breakdown on the different stands of restrictionist thought. Mickey Kaus starts off with his own position:

    My party line, in clip and save form, was:

    1. The immigrants we get, including illegal Mexicans, are mainly hard-working potential citizens, like waves of immigrants before them;
    2. The problem, as Mark Krikorian argues, is that we’ve changed, and the world has changed. We don’t need unskilled labor like we used to. Our native unskilled workers are having trouble earning a living.
    3. The main reason to limit immigration flow, then, is to protect wages of Americans who do basic work. We desperately need a tight labor market. We won’t get it as long as millions of people from abroad respond to any tightening by flooding our work force.
    4. The most important thing, then, is getting control of that number by securing the border — stopping illegal immigration. Once that’s done we can argue about what the legal number should be (and what should be done about current illegals).
    5. But if wages are rising, it could be a reasonably big number! See point 1;
    6. There are second-order worries about cultural assimilation, especially the huge flow from Mexico, a nation a day’s drive away many of whose citizens (polls show) don’t acknowledge the legitimacy of our Southern border.
    7. One solution is to let in more people from other, non-Mexican cultures — Koreans, Chinese, Africans, Indians, etc. We want diversity! Ha ha. That joke never gets old.

    But Kaus also notes that Ann Coulter (whom I’ve generally ignored over the last several years or so due to her tendency to say outrageous things solely for media attention) has some cognizant points for even more restriction of even legal immigration. The points Kaus summarizes seem to be from her book Adios, America:

    1) Cultures differ, and culture matters: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society,” said Daniel P. Moynihan in his finest try for Bartlett’s.** Does anyone really doubt this? If businessmen can make millions babbling about corporate “culture” — If Reddit can have a culture — why can’t we talk about the cultures from which immigrants come?

    Snip.

    2) Some cultures are “better” at becoming American than others: The fatal mistake, in Coulter’s eyes, was Teddy Kennedy’s 1965 immigration act, which “snuffed out the generous quotas from countries that had traditionally populated America–England, Ireland and Germany”–and added “family reunification” policies, allowing recent immigrants to bring in their relatives [not just their nuclear families], and those relatives to bring in their relatives, until entire Somali villages have relocated to Minneapolis.”

    Snip.

    3) Crime, in particular is an issue: Coulter was driven to focus on immigration, she says, out of frustration when she discovered that the government makes it virtually impossible to find good statistics on the amount of crime committed by immigrants:

    Every time you think the government has finally produced a real number of immigrants convicted of crimes in America, there’s a catch. Legal immigrants will be excluded, convicted criminals whose country of birth is unknown are left out, Hispanic criminals will be classified as white …

    Like Trump, Coulter thinks the actual amount of immigrant crime is “staggering.” Unlike Trump, she doesn’t claim the Mexican government is intentionally sending us bad actors. She argues culture, not conspiracy (or genetics). The habits we don’t like — a non-progressive view of women, for example — are characteristic of many “peasant” cultures. Mexico just has the closest.

    Snip.

    4) Legal immigration matters: When I first heard the restrictionists at the Center for Immigration Studies lump illegal and legal immigration together, I thought they were weird. After all, border-controllers spend a lot of time fending off the charge that they’re “anti-immgrant.” The usual response: “That’s not true! I’m not against immigration! I’m against illegal immigration,” etc. And if you want to get control of the situation — well, that almost by definition means targeting illegal immigration (while allowing whatever immigration you decide to permit).

    Yet if you worry about the effects of uncontrolled immigration on wages and culture, you have to admit that legal immigration, if large enough, could have exactly the same wage-depressing and culture-dissolving effect. Scott Walker got in huge trouble a few weeks ago when he dared to suggest setting the level of legal immigration low enough to allow U.S. workers to find good jobs. Had he joined Numbers U.S.A? No. He was just carrying the logic of supply and demand to its conclusion.

    Snip.

    5) Diversity sucks! According to Coulter, my idea of a Los Angeles in which Korean immigrants live with Latino immigrants to produce a vibrant synergistic whole is insane. Diversity is “a train wreck.” Her big gun in this argument is the inconvenient work of a beloved liberal professor, Robert Putnam:

    Contrary to his expectations–and desire –Putnam’s study showed that the greater the ethnic diversity, the less people trusted their neighbors, their local leaders, and even the news. People in diverse communities gave less to charity, voted less, had fewer friends, were more unhappy …It was not, Putnam said, that people in diverse coummnities trusted people of their own ethnicity more, and other races less. They didn’t trust anyone.

    Snip.

    6) We need a moratorium on immigration: You don’t need to accept any of Coulter’s heresies — cultures are unequal, diversity is bad, maybe today’s immigrants really are more problematic than previous waves — to oppose the smug consensus CW favoring “comprehensive” immigration reform. It’s enough to recognize that a) too much immigration bids down pay at the bottom, and that b) we’ll never control immigration if we try to do an amnesty before the border is secure (because the border security arrangements will promptly be undermined, as happened after the last amnesty)….She wants a 10 year “total immigration moratorium,” on the grounds that any loopholes will be abused and expanded by the immigration bureaucracy. “Just shut it down.”

    I agree with all Kaus’ points and about half of Coluter’s. One exception to that moratorium I’d make is letting in the very best knowledge-workers around the world, people with critical technical skills (advanced programming, chip design, etc.) that can be done anywhere in the world in the Internet economy, so it would be best for them to do the work here. (Of course, since even that program is currently abused (“My cousin Sanjay knows Sharepoint, let’s write the rec so only he can apply so we can get him over here…”), the minimum wage threshold to qualify should be something like three times the national average wage.)

    Even though this is an old post on an old book, the basic dynamics Kaus/Coulter outline are still highly relevant, if not more so after the election of Donald Trump.

    The American public wants a halt to illegal alien entry into America and limitations on immigration. The ideological core of the Democratic Party wants open borders at any cost. Something has to give.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

    Antifa Continues Assault String

    August 12th, 2018

    Antifa continues to do what they do best: assaulting police officers:

    Antifa radicals were behind several violent assaults that resulted in injuries in Portland, Oregon, during a right-wing free speech rally on Saturday [August 4]. The assaults included a journalist who was hit in the head with a water bottle, a counter-protester who was clubbed in the head with a modified trench club, and Patriot Prayer leader Joey Gibson, who was attacked while he walked through the antifa crowd. There were only four arrests.

    They also rioted at a Portland City Council Meeting:

    Far-left agitators stormed Portland City Hall Wednesday, cursing through bullhorns, disrupting a meeting, and assaulting security guards.

    The activists, including masked antifa agitators, were protesting what they called “police brutality” after Portland Police used strong crowd-control techniques to control the violent “antifascist” counter-demonstration Saturday at the Patriot Prayer rally.

    Police fired rubber bullets and flash-bangs into the rioting crowd after antifa counter-protesters refused police orders to get out of the street, and threw rocks and bottles at officers.

    But it wasn’t just in Portland. Over in Charlottesville, on the one-year anniversary of the LARP Nazi’s supposed “Unite the Right” rally, in addition to police, Atifa was also assaulting NBC reporters:

    It’s easy to understand why young, unemployed left-wing losers would join antifa: It’s fun beating up people and smashing stuff. But one wonders what George Soros hopes to accomplish, other than alienating moderates, by throwing funding their way…

    Edited to add: Saw this just after I posted this. Antifa brought their special brand of happiness to Toronto on Saturday as well:

    Edited to add 2: Also Berkeley:

    Berkeley police released video Thursday of roving bands of black-clad vandals who smashed the windshields of 21 city vehicles, setting one blaze, during a violent weekend clash between anti-fascist and anti-Marxist protesters.

    At least 20 people were arrested, many armed with a variety of weapons, at Sunday’s “No to Marxism in America 2” rally. During the height of the violent confrontation, a group of masked persons dressed in black clothing used hammers to vandalize 21 City of Berkeley vehicles parked in an off-street parking lot.

    One of the vehicles was set on fire.

    In a separate act of vandalism, at least two black-clad protesters can be seen smashing the windows of the Marine Corps Recruiting Center with hammers. The suspects repeatedly hit the windows with a hammer or tire iron causing an estimated $2,000 worth of damage. An ATM machine was also vandalized.

    How’d I miss that?

    On the other hand, I just naturally assume at this point that Antifa riot in Berkeley more often than not…

    Follow-Up: Dallas’ Democratic Mayor Pro Tem Dwaine Caraway Pleads Guilty, Resigns

    August 11th, 2018

    This is slightly belated news from earlier in the week I didn’t have time to post this Thursday, then forgot to put it in the LinkSwarm.

    In a follow-up to this week’s story about fraud at the Dallas County Schools bus service, Dallas’ Democratic Mayor Pro Tem Dwaine Caraway has plead guilty to federal charges of taking more than $450,000 in bribes and resigned.

    Caraway entered his plea Thursday morning before U.S. District Judge Barbara M.G. Lynn on charges of tax evasion and conspiracy to commit wire fraud…The payments were taken from 2011 to 2017 from Robert Carl Leonard Jr., the president of Force Multiplier Solutions (FXS), a technology company that puts cameras on school buses, according to federal court documents.

    Expect more guilty pleas from the Dallas County Schools criminals to follow…

    LinkSwarm for August 10, 2018

    August 10th, 2018

    This week has been saner but still busy:

  • Israel and Hamas have essentially been going at it all week.
  • “Illegal Immigrant Released by ‘Sanctuary City’ of Philadelphia Convicted of Child Rape.”
  • Why Dianne Feinstein was an easy mark for Chinese spys:

    In June 1996 — after the staffer had begun working for Feinstein — the FBI detected that the Chinese government was attempting to seek favor with the senator, who at the time sat on the East Asian and Pacific affairs subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee, which oversees US-China relations. Investigators warned her in a classified briefing that Beijing might try to influence her through illegal campaign contributions laundered through front corporations and other cutouts.

    The warning proved prescient.

    One Chinese bagman, Nanping-born John Huang, showed up at Feinstein’s San Francisco home for a fundraising dinner with a Beijing official tied to the People’s Bank of China and the Communist Party Committee. As a foreign national, the official wasn’t legally qualified to make the $50,000-a-plate donation to dine at the banquet.

    After a Justice Department task force investigated widespread illegal fundraising during the 1996 Clinton re-election campaign, Feinstein returned more than $12,000 in contributions from donors associated with Huang, who was later convicted of campaign-finance fraud along with other Beijing bagmen. The DNC and the Clinton campaign had to return millions in ill-gotten cash.

    Still, Beijing got its favored trade status extended — thanks in part to Feinstein. In speeches on the Senate floor and newspaper op-eds, she shamelessly spun China’s human-rights violations, as when in 1997 she compared Beijing’s 1989 massacre of hundreds of young demonstrators to the 1970 Kent State shootings, calling for the presidents of China and America to appoint a human-rights commission “charting the evolution of human rights in both countries over the last 20 to 30 years,” that “would point out the successes and failures — both Tiananmen Square and Kent State — and make recommendations for goals for the future.”

    Feinstein also led efforts to bring China into the World Trade Organization in 1999, which gave Beijing permanent normal trade relations status and removed the annual congressional review of its human-rights and weapons-proliferation records.

    Feinstein, still among the Senate’s most influential China doves, travels to China each year. Joining her on those trips is her mega-millionaire investor husband, Richard C. Blum, who has seemingly benefited greatly from the relationship.

    Starting in 1996, as China was aggressively currying favor with his wife, Blum was able to take large stakes in Chinese state-run steel and food companies, and has brokered over $100 million in deals in China since then — with the help of partners who sit on the boards of Chinese military front companies like COSCO and CITIC.

    China investments have helped make Feinstein, who lives in a $17 million mansion in San Francisco and keeps a $5 million vacation home in Hawaii, one of the richest members in Congress.​

  • “Of all Donald Trump’s many sins against the Great Church of the Transnational Leftist Establishment, his greatest may be his stubborn refusal to subordinate the needs of the normal citizens of the United States to the dogmas of our alleged betters.”
  • Good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun in Florida.
  • Elites vs. the Deplorables:

    Academic dogma postulates that white people cannot be the victims of racism, and such banal white demonization has now seeped into the larger liberal commentariat. With that bias comes the notion that one can smear the white working classes with impunity. Caputo, however, was not brave or stupid enough to visit a Trump rally and to suggest to the crowd around him to get to a Clear Smile clinic.

    If you are a non-white purveyor of such prejudice, venom like Jeong’s is contextualized through the lens of compensatory historical grievances. Someone’s grandfather mistreated your grandmother, so you can invert and then replay the roles with impunity. Or less charitably, life’s disappointments are always due to past cosmic injustice, not one’s own perceived tragic shortcomings or bad luck or just cruel fate.

    If you are an elite white liberal, you are a twofer: virtue signaling your identity politics bona fides, while psychologically squaring the circle of your own privilege. Those who ridicule less fortunate white others for their supposed racial privilege—themselves often the products of old boy networks, elite upbringings, inherited perks, prep schools and parental leveraging—end up as the privileged smearing the non-privileged for their privilege.

    Jeong is a Harvard Law graduate. Strzok has a master’s degree from Georgetown. The ridicule of the white working class by NeverTrump conservative pundits is read on the pages of the nation’s premier newspapers or voiced in hallowed symposia.

    Is such ignorance of an entire class because of, or in spite of such, elite training?

    Snip.

    “In answer to the now hackneyed question, who or what created Trump? All these purveyors of class and racial prejudice need only look in the mirror.”

  • “It has become apparent that the Democratic Party and its media supporters seem to have a problem with representative democracy and how it works. They lost an election they thought they’d handily win, and their reaction to it has been to have a long, screeching public tantrum.” (HT AoSHQ)
  • That “Democratic Socialist wave” crested and broke-up before it ever hit the shore: Just about all Bernie bros go down in Democratic primary defeats. “Rather than demonstrate that his movement has a broad reach across the electorate, Sanders has instead demonstrated that’s a fringe movement even within the Democratic Party.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Why the left are afraid of Jordan Petersen.

    It is because the left, while it currently seems ascendant in our houses of culture and art, has in fact entered its decadent late phase, and it is deeply vulnerable. The left is afraid not of Peterson, but of the ideas he promotes, which are completely inconsistent with identity politics of any kind. When the poetry editors of The Nation virtuously publish an amateurish but super-woke poem, only to discover that the poem stumbled across several trip wires of political correctness; when these editors (one of them a full professor in the Harvard English department) then jointly write a letter oozing bathos and career anxiety and begging forgiveness from their critics; when the poet himself publishes a statement of his own—a missive falling somewhere between an apology, a Hail Mary pass, and a suicide note; and when all of this is accepted in the houses of the holy as one of the regrettable but minor incidents that take place along the path toward greater justice, something is dying.

    When the top man at The New York Times publishes a sober statement about a meeting he had with the president in which he describes instructing Trump about the problem of his “deeply troubling anti-press rhetoric,” and then three days later the paper announces that it has hired a writer who has tweeted about her hatred of white people, of Republicans, of cops, of the president, of the need to stop certain female writers and journalists from “existing,” and when this new hire will not be a beat reporter, but will sit on the paper’s editorial board—having a hand in shaping the opinions the paper presents to the world—then it is no mystery that a parallel culture of ideas has emerged to replace a corrupted system. When even Barack Obama, the poet laureate of identity politics, is moved to issue a message to the faithful, hinting that that they could be tipping their hand on all of this—saying during a speech he delivered in South Africa that a culture is at a dead end when it decides someone has no “standing to speak” if he is a white man—and when even this mayday is ignored, the doomsday clock ticks ever closer to the end.

    In the midst of this death rattle has come a group of thinkers, Peterson foremost among them, offering an alternative means of understanding the world to a very large group of people who have been starved for one. His audience is huge and ever more diverse, but a significant number of his fans are white men. The automatic assumption of the left is that this is therefore a red-pilled army, but the opposite is true. The alt-right venerates identity politics just as fervently as the left, as the title of a recent essay reproduced on the alt-right website Counter-Currents reveals: “Jordan Peterson’s Rejection of Identity Politics Allows White Ethnocide.”

    If you think that a backlash to the kind of philosophy that resulted in The Nation’s poetry implosion; the Times’ hire; and Obama’s distress call isn’t at least partly responsible for the election of Donald Trump, you’re dreaming. And if you think the only kind of people who would reject such madness are Republicans, you are similarly deluded. All across the country, there are people as repelled by the current White House as they are by the countless and increasingly baroque expressions of identity politics that dominate so much of the culture. These are people who aren’t looking for an ideology; they are looking for ideas. And many of them are getting much better at discerning the good from the bad. The Democratic Party reviles them at its peril; the Republican Party takes them for granted in folly.

    Though it must be said that only a small fraction of the amorphously named “alt-right” embraces identity politics. (Hat tip: Will Shetterly on Twitter.)

  • Syrian chemical weapons scientist blows up real good.
  • Social Justice Warriors want biological women to never win another women’s sporting ever again.
  • Why Europe is drafting away from America.

    The global influence of Europe continues to wane, at least as defined by demographic robustness, technological innovation, the quality of higher education, and the ability to defend its interests. Its aristocratic elite classes are currently under constant challenge from populist reformers. And 73 years of peace have been hard on Europe, in the sense that the postmodern European cultural ideal is to avoid childbearing, most religion, and national defense.

    Snip.

    Europe continues to believe that the “Palestinian issue” is key to “peace” in the Middle East — a euphemism for distancing itself from Israel. In truth, the Middle East is undergoing the greatest revolution since the end of colonialism. The worries about Arab security are not the tardiness of Palestinian statehood but the existential threats emanating from theocratic Shiite Iran and the neo-Ottomanism of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey. In that sense, a conventionally strong and nuclear Israel is for now allied with an Arab world at odds with both Tehran and Ankara, and is likely in any major war to be on the side of an Egypt or Saudi Arabia. Yet for Europe, the Palestinians are the rusty key to peace, even as the latter are increasingly under suspicion by Arab nations as pro-Hezbollah and pro-Iranian.

    Europe for now is on the wrong side of the energy revolution, perhaps best epitomized by the near-suicidal green policies of Germany. As it dismantles coal and nuclear plants, Angela Merkel’s government finds its subsidized wind and solar projects utterly incapable of meeting Germany’s competitive industrial needs. The result will likely be a continual and massive importation of natural gas, increasingly from NATO’s supposed archenemy, Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The dream of hydraulic fracturing of shale gas throughout Europe is now largely dead and buried by opposition from radical environmental groups. The result is not a self-sufficient Europe enjoying renewable energy but a continent increasingly dependent for its mounting conventional energy needs on costly imports, with resulting energy costs that are making it uncompetitive with North American industries. Again, the contrast with the United States is telling: The latter went from foreordained, “peak oil” fossil-fuel dependence to becoming the largest oil, gas, and coal producer in the world.

    One symptom of European demographic decline, multiculturalism, and military impotence is massive illegal immigration from the Middle East and North Africa. The ensuing crisis of large unassimilated populations is said to be analogous to the influxes of illegal immigrants into the United States from Central America and Mexico. But there are key differences. As an immigrant nation without a hereditary aristocracy, the melting pot of the United States even in postmodern times has far better integrated, assimilated, and intermarried newcomers. Illegal immigrants to the United States are largely Catholic; challenges to assimilation are national, ethnic, and linguistic but not additionally religious as in Europe. Congressional and presidential policy reflects a majority opinion in the United States that now supports secure borders and measured, legal, meritocratic immigration. In Europe, official immigration policy is still at odds with voters.

    (Hat tip: Gregory Benford’s Facebook page.)

  • Is an upset brewing in Rhode Island?
  • Woman who was the daughter and granddaughter of women who used men simply as sperm donors wonders why men are suspicious of her. Also, from the comments: “What the writer only lets on, deep into the article, is that she was raised in a lesbian commune.”
  • Not even Democrats are wild about an abortion mill parking lot comedy tour. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Austin’s CodeNext planning process dies a very justifiable death.
  • Austin American Statesman kills weekly Spanish-language newspaper, offers all Statesman staffers voluntary severance package. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • DIY Pancreas. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • “Ocasio-Cortez Severely Burned After Accidentally Touching Book On Basic Economics.”
  • Ten honest plumbing tips. (Hat tip: Daddy Warpig.)
  • A tweet: