Who’s Afraid of Socialism? (non-paywall) Despite all the debates over what is or is not socialism, a simple fact remains: socialism is in theory the ownership by the workers of the means of production, and this can occur in degrees. In its absolute form, workers would be shareowners in the businesses for which they work, whether mediated through government or not. In lesser degrees, they could be partial shareowners or shareowners-in-kind, receiving wealth taken from those businesses and mediated through government to be delivered in the form of entitlements, or direct payments or payments-in-kind to citizens. The West right now is about sixty percent capitalist and forty percent socialist, having realized that socialism in its pure form — exemplified by the Soviet Union — will fail consistently, but that socialism-with-capitalism allows the economic engine of the free market to subsidize the socialist welfare state and then use some Keynesian magic to increase the value of currency on the basis of the size of the socialist part of the state. This circular Ponzi scheme allows government to benefit from the free market two ways, first in using it to power socialism, and second in making a profit from debt/currency sales on the basis of the artificial inflation of demand created by Keynesianism, using demand-side economics to power what would otherwise be a supply-side economy. All of this leads up to the big question: Democrats are excited about socialism, but to embrace it directly leads to them giving up their successful “we’re normal Americans but just more compassionate” position and revealing themselves as Utopian revolutionaries in the Communist model. If you want to know why they desire third-world immigration, here it is: normal Americans will recoil, but the third world types simply see such radical stances as bolder, stronger, and more helpful.

Pentagon moving 250 active-duty troops to Eagle Pass, Texas, because of migrant caravan We have the basis of a really exciting showdown here. Trump gave Democrats three weeks; they have made exactly zero overtures to compromise, seemingly smug and self-satisfied in what they imagine is a leadership position. A new migrant caravan is coming through and Trump is moving the military into place. If even one migrant carries a weapon, Trump will have his emergency, and at about the time for him to have nearly universal support to declare a need for a permanent barrier without the approval of the legislature.

Oklahoma bill would revoke teachers’ certification if they walk out and protest Slowly, slowly conservatives are learning exactly how toxic unions are. What really got workers better condition was the recognition that doing so produced better output; specifically, anti-Semitic Nazi Henry Ford applied traditionalist principles and demonstrated that better worker treatment led to better results (non-paywall): His primary motivation for the wage increase, however, was economic. Ford hoped to reduce the company’s high turnover rate and retain its best employees. The increased cost of wages was offset by increased production and decreased training programs and other costs associated with hiring new employees. Furthermore, the wage increase provided Ford employees with enough money to purchase Ford automobiles, which further increased the company’s sales. However, some business leaders and journalists criticized Ford for what they perceived as social welfare policies; The Wall Street Journal wrote that he brought “biblical or spiritual principles into a field where they do not belong.” In the end, Ford’s business goals were realized and his wage increase had its intended effect: turnover declined sharply, and profits doubled to $60 million from $30 million from 1914 to 1916. In other words, like slavery, worker abuse existed in a bubble between people beginning a new skill and figuring out how to do it correctly. The union actually reversed the process by not allowing business to get to this point. Instead, unions took money out of the business, which both raised the costs of industry and passed on those costs to the consumers. In terms of the cost of a product, all of upper management salaries are a tenth of a cent, but labor costs are the biggest input outside of raw materials, and sometimes even exceed those (at a Coca-Cola plant for example). This means that you can pay your CEO $30m and not have a problem, but if your workers cost 150% of what they do in other areas, you are headed for bankruptcy. Consequently, American business moved offshore or found other ways to avoid hiring permanent American labor. Whole segments of our production were simply given up to the third world, and we set ourselves on the path to globalism on that basis. Unions not only raised employee wages, but threatened the existence of business itself with strikes, and that meant that any place without those disadvantages would simply crush us. That meant that many “company towns” died as the plants went away, whole swathes of careers vanished, and America became a “service economy” instead of a productive one. This all happened from 1945-1985, roughly, because after the interruption of WW2 the unions came back and were more destructive than ever before. Any conservative who defends or tolerates unions is not a conservative, and not very aware of history, either.

Elizabeth Warren’s web of lies just totally collapsed As usual, no one is talking about the real story here, which is that thanks to civil rights and affirmative action, if you can both be a minority and be competent, you will make out like a bandit. Barack Obama was our affirmative action president, and he was incompetent but apparently still the best that the field had to offer; Kamala Harris, Mazie Hirono, Sylvester Turner, Kwame Kilpatrick, Maxine Waters, Lee Brown, Cory Booker, John F. Kennedy, John Kasich, Condoleezza Rice, Marco Rubio, Charles Rangel, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Paul Ryan, and Robert Kennedy are all non-whites who were elected under the affirmative action theory that their ethnic background was more important than their competence, to disastrous results. JFK was such as disaster that some allege that the CIA, Sicilian mafia, KGB, and LBJ worked together to blow his jug, which had the unfortunate consequence of putting utterly corrupt prole LBJ into the White House so that he could fully botch the Vietnam War that JFK had only started to botch. LBJ, who may or may not have been Jewish (although he was a legendary friend to Jews), made his career start in part by manipulating minorities despite being wholly insincere in his support of them: I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you. — As quoted in “What a Real President Was Like: To Lyndon Johnson, the Great Society Meant Hope and Dignity”, by Bill Moyers, The Washington Post (13 November 1988). As long as you are black, and you’re gonna be black till the day you die, no one’s gonna call you by your goddamn name! So no matter what you are called, nigger, you just let it roll off your back like water, and you’ll make it! Just pretend you’re a goddamn piece of furniture! — Said to his chauffeur, Robert Parker, when Parker said he’d prefer to be referred to by his name rather than “boy,” “nigger” or “chief.” As quoted in Parker, Robert; Rashke, Richard L. (1989). Capitol Hill in Black and White. United States: Penguin Group. p. v. ISBN 0515101893. Retrieved on 6 January 2015. I’m going to have to bring up the nigger bill again. — Said to a southern U.S. Senator upon the occasion of the Republicans re-introducing the Civil Right Act of 1957, according to LBJ’s Special Counsel Harry McPherson. As quoted in McPherson, Harry. Interview with Michael L. Gillette. “Transcript, Harry McPherson Oral History Interview VI, 5/16/85, by Michael L. Gillette, LBJLibrary.” 16 May 1985. Let’s face it. Our ass is in a crack. We’re gonna have to let this nigger bill pass. — Said to Senator John Stennis (D-MS) during debate on the Civil Rights Act of 1957. As quoted in Caro, Robert A. (2002). The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate, Volume 3. New York: Knopf. p. 954. ISBN 0394528360. Retrieved on 6 January 2015. Sam, why don’t you all let this nigger bill pass? — Said to Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn (D-TX) regarding the Civil Rights Act of 1957. As quoted in Dallek, Robert (1991). Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1908-1960. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. p. 519. ISBN 0195054350. Retrieved on 5 July 2014. These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don’t move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there’ll be no way of stopping them, we’ll lose the filibuster and there’ll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It’ll be Reconstruction all over again. — Said to Senator Richard Russell, Jr. (D-GA) regarding the Civil Rights Act of 1957. As quoted in Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (1977), by Doris Kearns Goodwin, New York: New American Library, p. 155. Son, when I appoint a nigger to the court, I want everyone to know he’s a nigger. — Said to an aide in 1965 regarding the appointment of Thurgood Marshall as associate justice of the Supreme Court. As quoted in Dallek, Robert (1991). Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1908-1960. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. p. 519. ISBN 0195054350. Retrieved on 5 July 2014. I’ll have them niggers voting Democratic for two hundred years. — Allegedly said to two governors (whose names were not given) regarding the Civil Rights Act of 1964, according to then-Air Force One steward Robert MacMillan. As quoted in Inside the White House (1996), by Ronald Kessler, New York: Simon and Schuster, p. 33. Affirmative action has been a cash-in for the last century and a half because, much as defending “the poor” was a way to succeed during early class warfare, it allows politicians and others to socially signal allegiance to egalitarianism and engage in moral preening that displays positive symbols about their morality as a method of redirected attention from negative data about them. African nationalist Osiris Akkebala notes that for white people, black people are merely pawns in class warfare, which enables white people to both maintain control over other ethnic groups through the illusion of assimilation, and demonstrate allegiance to class warfare so that the egalitarian herd supports them: Stay away from white folks class war with each other and engage in a war of your own for freedom away from America Black Afrikan people… Unity is what became our motivation and Loving our Blackness became our Strength and with that combination the wall of Segregation came Tumbling Down, but in the process Lucifer was already planning on how to maintain control over our Mind, so the Luciferian Social Planners introduced the arsenic poison Integration, with Assimilation becoming the cause of your insanity… The Left is perfectly fine with dropping Elizabeth Warren. To them, everything is a means to the end of equality; that requires imposing means-over-ends morality on the rest of us for anything else, however. They can let her go and lose nothing. However, they fear that we might see the flaws of affirmative action that caused her to sign up as a Mongolian immigrant (Amerind) instead of a white girl from the suburbs; she got much farther ahead as an Indian than a Caucasian. If people see how bad affirmative action and civil rights really are, they might demand that those go away, and that would deprive the Left of its favorite weapon against the Right.

Millennials prefer music from 20th century ‘golden age’ to the pop of today, research suggests For approximately thirty years, there was a “golden age” of pop music, which reveals to us that pop is in fact too simple and therefore too much driven by aesthetics to last very long. The simpler the music, the more it has to use instrumentation, production, performance, and novelty to sell itself. This is why classical music essentially removed all of those things and focused on the difficult task of knitting together melodies into coherent patterns over a long time, which forces the use of harmony, timbre, rhythm, and other techniques not as ends in themselves but as means-to-the-end of producing an intense, complex, nuanced, and enduring musical experience.

America’s ‘Working Rich’ Lead The Way Among Country’s Top Earners When the Left talk about “the rich,” just as when they talk about “the poor,” they are using categorical logic against us. Cause/effect logic is superior: why do people have what they have? It comes down to their genetics and choices. One of the smartest guys I know makes pennies as a schoolteacher, but he goes to sleep every night knowing that he is a hero. I know a lot of smart people who own their own businesses, which is exponentially harder to do than just having a day job. If you want a more competent world, let them take home their money and then give in grants to people like my schoolteacher friend. Support genius, let it thrive, and most of all, reproduce abundantly!

Democrats launch 10-year ‘Green New Deal’ for clean energy Green = the new blank check. In the 1930s, poverty was the blank check. In the 1960s, civil rights was the blank check. In 1789, inequality and class warfare formed the blank check. The Left relies on rationalization: it decides what it wants, and then goes hunting for an argument to support it, using an “ends-over-means” calculus in order to find any justification, excuse, validation, or rationalization — all reversed cognitive process, not from demand to goal but goal to demand — that can get it what it wants. This alone tells you that you should never trust egalitarians/Leftists or any other individualists. To them, everything is a means-to-the-end of their goal, namely “equality” which means that they can do whatever they want without the rest of us “judging” them for being dangerous mental incompetents.

Europe’s new Reformation (non-paywall) Europe has always sought an order that can unite it, especially Germany which is its powerhouse. The church destabilized Europe by fighting the aristocrats. Ultimately, Europe suffered most because as it expanded, its different branches fought with one another. Perhaps we would all do better to affirm our Germanic heritage and unite on that basis.

New York Times subscriber numbers are skyrocketing in the Trump age Who leads the enemy? For decades, The New York Times has served as the uniting voice of the Left, lending legitimacy to its ideas with theories about it actually working better. Never mind that they lie; if they read it in the NYT, the good bourgeois burghers of the genteel Left conclude that not only is it true, but the rest of us are idiots for not joining the brigade of people mouthing the same empty tropes in unison. It makes them feel superior to us.

Facing facts: Blackface is awful, but is it always and immediately disqualifying from public office? As always, the position that Amerika takes is that we should stop firing people for opinions, including those expressed in behaviors. True, we all want to see the Left get served up its own medicine, but the bigger opportunity here is to set a precedent where no one gets fired for saying the “wrong” things or dressing up in blackface. In fact, perhaps we should do it on a regular basis until our species grows up and gets over the idea that being “offended” by parts of reality is important or even defensible. For example, this nonsense (non-paywall) — obviously designed to distract from the blackface scandal — needs to stop.

Pope admits clerical abuse of nuns including sexual slavery If Christianity survives, it will do so by discarding its centralized nature. When you make one interpretation of one book the absolute/universal truth, you lose its metaphorical nature and replace it with a symbolic one, which essentially means “obey good or be seen as evil” which in turn means that you have created a target property, “good,” which every single evil person out there will try to capture. When priests are created by a bureaucratic structure, those who are willing to put up with the nonsense get ahead in that structure, and this filters out those who are more honest and replaces them with those who are so obsessive that they jump through every hoop so that they can get to a place of power so that they can then abuse it. This applies to education, social conformity, and loyalty tests as well. You can only reward those who are competent, which is a “subjective” determination by your best existing people and therefore “not fair” to the grumbling herd. When you try to make a System to regulate that, you end up rewarding the bad and punishing the good, which is why bureaucracy is suicide.

Germany: Migrants ‘may have fuelled violent crime rise’ Zero sane people are surprised by this. The third world is impoverished because it fails to unite on producing shared resources, facilities, and institutions; it is this way because it is highly individualistic, or everyone doing whatever they want with no social consequences. That means that anyone who is not that way has died out long ago. Even more, diversity naturally causes ethnic competition and resentment, a war in which rape/crime are inevitable weapons.

Saudi study: Millennial jihadis educated, not outcasts For the Left, “education” means “indoctrination.” However, the more that people learn, the more they realize that society needs a center, and our brew of democracy/consumerism/entitlements cannot do this. For that reason, they drift toward “extremes,” which is another way of saying that they affirm the common sense that existed before the Left took over and brainwashed us all into their brand of oblivion.

Think no evil: kind thoughts can boost immune system, study finds Ignore the hippie title and look at the reality: decreasing threat response means greater health. Our society does nothing but amp up our threat response in order to force us to do what it needs from us, whether going to boring jobs, voting, or conforming to social norms so that we support the System. It is making us all unwell, and does not care, because it intends to simply replace us with more compliant and less sensitive people.

A man who travelled nearly 200 miles to reach his injured mother arrived before an ambulance reached her. Socialized medicine means infinite demand on finite resources. This means that someone will have to make choices about who gets what resource. That in turn imposes the high cost of a bureaucracy on what would otherwise be straightforward local services. In the end, socialized medicine means worse care for those who actually need it, and better care for those who are heavily invested in using the system, since they will be motivated to work around the bureaucracy since they interact with it on a regular basis. But it’s all free!

Pompeo: US Has Not Taken China’s Threats ‘Remotely Seriously’ The high cost of Leftist “education”: people have no idea that history repeats, that humanity is basically unchanged, and that Asia has invaded the West multiple times. As a result, they live in the idea bubble of policies, theory, incentives, and the like, and forget the primal motivations that guarantee that history will repeat itself. Until the West is conquered, Asia will always feel like the second best.

Justice Department opens probe into Jeffrey Epstein plea deal Team Trump found a way around the deep state: investigate the investigators when they allow Leftists to get away with blatant crimes. This could in turn be parlayed into “Build my wall, or get investigated and go to jail!”

Children raised by same-sex couples do better in school, new study finds (non-paywall) This study actually affirms the opposite: wealthy gay couples who have lots of time to devote toward the awkward process of producing and raising children have kids who do better on tests, according to a very small sample size. In other words, this effect will quickly reverse if applied outside a highly selective group.

Chinese billionaire Huang Xiangmo stripped of Australian residency, banned from returning over ‘political interference’ concerns People in the West are slowly re-learning what a “total state” means. Even the private firms are working for the state. In fact, they benefit from a feedback loop with the military where stolen technology and new inventions flow between private industry and the armed forces. This means that whenever Chinese officials are abroad, they are working for the state and its military, which means that they are spies. Even more, Chinese nationals — people born in China or of Chinese descent — will work for the state, since they have the ugly choice of either rejecting their heritage or embracing it and consequently being forced to work against their host nations. As the twenty-first century warms up, it becomes clear that while ideological wars were the theme of the last century, race wars are the coming theme that we will have to wake up and accept despite not wanting to do so.

‘Sad reality’: Handful of WA measles outbreak sites are in Russian-speaking communities Diversity does not work, in any form. Every minority group will work against the majority, however that is defined out of the mosaic of identity factors — religion, ethnicity, culture, race, class, profession, politics, and general philosophy of life. It turns out that the Russian speakers up in the Washington state area do not trust government much, nor do they particularly think ahead when it comes to science and medicine, and so the outbreak has occurred among them and not the wealthy white anti-vaxxers that our media loves to satirize. These people may turn out to know more than we think; research shows that exposure to mumps and measles as a child reduces adulthood chance of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. Across medicine, the wider theory that early childhood diseases prevent later autoimmune issues is gaining traction, including a recognition that some childhood viruses stay with us for our entire lives and, if we do not learn to fight them, manifest in worse problems later. Perhaps the solution here is to avoid panic and instead recognize these diseases as a natural part of childhood, even if some of the weaker children are culled in the process.

Russia Pledges Response to Norwegian Military Activity Russia has always feared attacks on its Kola Peninsula, and now finds itself enraged at Norway for building up its submarine fleet in anticipation of Russian aggression. This in turn tells us how the Russians hope to wage the next war: with submarines leading the way for a denial of American re-armament of NATO, much as plays out in the classic Tom Clancy and Larry Bond novel Red Storm Rising.

Are we eating the world’s megafauna to extinction? We analyzed how human activities are impacting the conservation status of megafauna within six classes: mammals, ray‐finned fish, cartilaginous fish, amphibians, birds, and reptiles. We identified a total of 362 extant megafauna species. We found that 70% of megafauna species with sufficient information are decreasing and 59% are threatened with extinction. Humans are eating the world to extinction. Even if we all live in 500 square foot apartments and eat vegan diets, there are still too many of us for nature to survive. Every human requires space for living, agriculture, education, roads, shopping, parking, storage, government, research, healthcare, and many other uses. The more concrete we put down, the weirder our climate gets in many local areas at the same time, displacing jet streams and disrupting local weather patterns; the Left mistakes this for “climate change,” but really it is simply too much city. Since 55% of us live in cities, this will only get worse, and as our numbers increase, we are hunting anything we can eat to death, which since it cannot be centrally regulated, will only get worse. To end this problem, we would have to end foreign aid and trade with the third world and dismantle our own entitlements programs, which would allow population to reduce itself naturally. The sooner we do this, the more of nature we can save, and we can also stave off our future as living in apartment blocks where the only nature is a park nearby or greenhouses that produce our increasingly disgusting substitute food.

Hindu right-winger arrested for re-enacting Gandhi assassination Indian nationalists point out that Gandhi endorsed diversity and therefore was not an advocate for actual Indian nationalism. For some reason, this upsets people, probably because as diversity fails worldwide, the peoples of Earth are turning to hardline nationalism as a way to protect them from domination by other ethnic, cultural, racial, and religious groups.

Antique store stands by KKK figurine: ‘I’m sorry if you’re offended, but we feel it’s a part of history’ The pushback against political correctness intensifies, this time at a store that sells collectibles and rightly points out that historical artifacts will include the parts of history that snowflakes dislike. Leftists do not believe this because in their world, nature is bad but humans forcing equality on each other is the only permissible good activity since it will lead to Utopia, and any deviation from this is therefore — in their binary view of the world — the ultimate evil and must be destroyed before it corrupts more souls. Egalitarianism is a mental virus that drives people insane by making them accept the Big Lie that people can be equal, which forces them to then rationalize all other beliefs so that they support the lie, at which point they become outright hostile to reality, depth, nuance, detail, and time.