Category: Politics

At Donald Trump’s recent victory tour through Michigan, one of the speakers was a powerful CEO from a major industrial power in the United States, Andrew Liveris of Dow Chemical. Mr. Liveris, who Trump has appointed to chair his American Manufacturing Council, announced that Dow soon will create a new research and development center in Michigan that will provide two hundred jobs. He made it crystal clear that the decision to build it in the US when it could have been located anywhere in the world was directly attributable to the industry friendly policies of our incoming president. In his speech Liveris used an expression that should be adopted and promoted by the Trump Administration:

“We could have waited,” Liveris said. “We could have put it anywhere in the world. … We’re going to use American hard work and American dreams and we’re going to fight for the Dow Company in the U.S.A.”

“You’re paving the way through your administration your policies to make it easier to do business in this country,” Liveris told Trump. “Not a red tape country, but a red carpet country for American business. That’s what we have to do.”

I don’t know about you but that particular phraseology just lit up in my mind, eliciting an involuntary, “Hell yeah!” My desire for an America that is a red carpet country rather than a red tape country was my primary motivation for supporting Donald Trump; I just never thought to voice it quite that way in all my pre-election writings on his behalf. If the Trump Administration wants a catchphrase for its economic plan, they could do a lot worse than The Red Carpet. It’s every bit as catchy as the New Deal and a lot more self-explanatory.

Crossposted at American Thinker

Over at American Thinker, publisher, Thomas Lifson, has a lead piece today about what investigations into the Oakland warehouse fire which killed thirty-six have uncovered so far. Not so unsurprisingly, the decrepit building had not been inspected for thirty years but what is much more enlightening (and infuriating) is the annual compensation paid to those city employees responsible for such public safety inspections:

…in 2015, Craig K. Chew, the assistant chief of inspectors, made $362,211, $147,000 of which was “benefits.” The Alameda County administrator Susan Muranishi made $729,162 in 2015, of which $313,503 was in “benefits,” which included bonuses.

The Alameda County sheriff, Greg Ahern, made $627,935 in that one year.

One has to wonder what the chief of inspectors makes if his assistant gets that kind of money. And of course none of these overpaid hogs at the public trough will be held accountable for all those needless deaths. The entire state of California, like most political entities under the governance of liberal Democrats and in thrall to public unions is headed for financial disaster when all these overpaid public servants retire at 80% of their highest pay. The Dallas Police and Fireman’s Pension Fund board had to put an emergency stop on lump-sum pension distributions this week, after panic withdrawals threatened to swamp its cash reserves.

There’s a lot more of that coming in Democrat-controlled enclaves like New York City, Chicago, and Detroit, for starters. Stay tuned…

Ol’ Poe has graced this planet for more than three-quarters of a century now and never has he witnessed such a massive and immature emotional response to a presidential election loss as what we are now witnessing from the Clinton camp. From the mainstream media down to first semester community college freshmen, the wailings and lamentations have been unprecedented and unending, perhaps lending further support to Dr. Savage’s contention that liberalism is a mental disorder.
As an old man who supposedly has achieved a modicum of dignity with his advanced years, I realize that it could be seen as undignified to revel in the grief of the sniveling snowflakes, but dang all if this little video with a Roy Orbison tune from my teen years didn’t just make me grin from ear to ear:

Dignity be damned, I just can’t help but revel in their damned silly self-pitying!

Symbolic of the Castro-inspired journey through Cuban history, the Russian-made jeep that was pulling Fidel Castro’s remains around the island broke down and had to be pushed through the streets towards the final resting place of the Communist dictator for a period yesterday, according to Fox News;

The Russian-made jeep ferrying Castro’s ashes broke down and needed to be pushed on Saturday en route to the late leader’s final resting place.

The breakdown of the jeep in the midst of adoring crowds chanting “Long live Fidel!” was symbolic of the dual nature of Castro’s Cuba. While his legacy inspires fierce adulation by many of the nation’s citizens, others continue to grumble about Cuba’s autocratic government, inefficient bureaucracy and stagnant economy.

I’ve given this a lot of thought. Well, at least a couple of days’ worth of it… or maybe more like an hour or so. Well, okay – about 15 minutes, because that’s all that is really required to address the issue of the Lemmings and their addiction to Lemmingism.

Lemmings, as most of you know, are pack animals that migrate in herds, or so the mythos goes. They’re so dumb that if someone tells them to jump off a cliff, they’d run right up to the edge and take the plunge. We’ve already seen Lemmings gather in large groups to do things that have an air of Da Stoopid to the more rational among us. For instance, running onto a busy highway in the dark while wearing dark clothing and holding up a lit-up cell phone is one memorable episode. Another is building a human dam at a major university at one gate to block the flow of cross-campus traffic.

There are other incidents as well, almost too numerous to mention.

Mind you, these are not the small, furry rodents who became legends for doing dumb things because Disney cameramen chased them off a cliff. (Yes, they did. Bad boys!) These are physically adult humans who act like small, furry, stupid, legendary rodents.

One of the co-characteristics shared by wild lemmings, those cute little Arctic tundra rodents, and urban-dwelling Lemmings, those nasty, loud-mouthed, dumbass types, is that they both suffer population explosions on a recurring basis. With the wild ones, it’s frequently a seasonal thing related to food, females and fighting, as they are well-known for their warning displays and aggressive behavior towards predators, including humans. With urban-dwelling Lemmings, the population growth takes longer to generate, as much as eight years until the demographic per urban area has become densely-packed and visible during the daytime, as well as at night.

Both species tend to be vegetarian by nature, the wild tundra lemmings consisting almost entirely on roots, seeds and grasses, while the urban-dwelling Lemmings tend to graze several hours per day on lettuces, sprouted roots, quinoa and other seeds, and tofu. Not a lot of difference there, if you get my drift.

Indeed, even the thought processes of the wild lemmings and the urban Lemmings seem to be similar. The urban Lemmings do have some seminal concept of the real world, but it is distorted by their population density and herd choices.

For example, you and I will generally agree that 2 + 2 = 4. Urban Lemmings will argue to the death with you that 2+2 = 5, and will go to great lengths to explain how they reach that conclusion, while completely missing one important point: 2+2 can also equal 6. On the other hand, wild lemmings, when confronted with such a simple mathematical concept as “2+2 equals something”, will blink and show you very quickly that 2+2 = 6 to 10, depending on weather and food resources, hence their regular and very real population explosions.

Therein lies the difference between wild lemmings and urban-dwelling Lemmings. The wild lemming as a genus has a very direct, real-world, real-time approach to life. The urban-dwelling Lemmings, as a population group and species, are bound by the Tenets of Lemmingism to ignore the real-world, find safe spaces to hide from the Daylight of Truth, and to swallow without question whatever baloney they are fed, no matter how rancid, infested and stale it is, or how much it clashes with the Reality that they utterly abhor and deny.

The wild tundra-dwelling lemmings, as a genus of up to thirty species, are well able to take care of themselves. They can adapt quickly and easily to changes in their environment, and survive undisturbed by those changes. They can find food, shelter and companionship without trouble.

The urban-dwelling Lemmings are a different problem. Taking into consideration that The Times, they are a-changin’, and are forecast to be changin’ drastically for the next 85 to 90 years, (well beyond the lifetimes of most urban Lemmings), it is not an inhuman or politically incorrect thing to propose that their species be allowed to become extinct. This means do not feed them, do not house them, do not clothe them and have them spayed and neutered at a low-cost vet clinic.

After all, if the wild tundra lemming can be, and is, a self-sufficient little furball that does quite well on its own, we can attempt to instill that quality in the urban-dwelling Lemmings by giving them a push in the right direction. We can acknowledge their herd instinct and their need for a safe space. A reservation of unused land, perhaps some place near a decommissioned nuclear reactor in the Pacific Northwest, would do nicely. I know, I know: there’s that whole thing about radiation and food, but after all, 18 months after Hiroshima was flattened by a 10KT nuke, people were growing radishes and eating them. Something good might come out of this; a reality check, perhaps, after a decade or two, might manifest itself.

Just an idea I thought I’d throw out there.

For an extraordinarily uninformed and angry section of our country, straight white men are the scourge.

In a rambling and incoherent profanity laced social media post, a Lynchburg, Virginia female school board member laid out her straight white man theory of all that is wrong with America. Her bottom line, straight white men are the source of all evil, which if placed up front would have saved my reviewing all of her f-bomb laced and borderline psychotic offering. If you desire, you may go read the pathetic and vulgar twaddle yourself. If you have children in the Lynchburg school system, you may want to consider who you have in charge of educating your children. That goes for the remainder of our country too.

I am not exactly sure what message she is communicating by disparaging “straight white men.” But I will assure you that if the target of her rant was any group other than white men, she would be in hiding for fear of her life. To see one group singled out in society and blamed for all that is wrong is eerily reminiscent of Nazi treatment of Jews. As a product of their ignorance, it is these people who so readily label straight white men as Nazis. Do they want to march us off to concentration camps? Eradicate us from the face of the earth? From her dissertation, it appears she would enjoy turning on the showers. I am no angel and I have greatly disliked some people, but I have never felt the level of hatred for anyone or group that this woman expresses. Sadly, she is not the lone ranger. The same faux “rage” is fermenting across our media platforms and stoked by players who want to see America destroyed – straight white men and everyone else.

I am straight which means, I presume, that I align with the social and cultural norms that established the foundation of our country and which have been under constant assault for decades. I am also Christian and white. I live in redneck country, although I am not sure if rednecks and straight white men are the same evil. I respect the flag of our country and the sacrifice of the men and women who, from our beginning, have kept it flying and the rest of us free. I stand and face my flag or the music when I hear the Star Spangled Banner. I stand for the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America. I also stand for the Army Song. I believe in the right to keep and bear arms and I do. I read the Bible most days. Might I recommend it to you? The Founder’s Bible and The American Patriot’s Bible are laced with historical articles showing the influence of Judeo-Christian values on the founding of our country and our government. If you are a former member of the Lynchburg School Board I also recommend this item in case while reading your head explodes. I do not support abortion. I do believe that marriage is between one man and one woman. I believe the Ten Commandments are not the ten suggestions. I believe in our Constitutional Republic. I believe in following the law. I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies foreign and domestic. The oath has no expiration date. In some minds, I alone make up a whole basket full of deplorables.

I served much of my life in the Army. I served with straight white men and probably some not so straight, but who chose to keep their sex lives private. What a novelty that is these days. I also served with straight white women, straight Black men and women, straight Hispanic men and women, straight Asian men and women, straight American Indian men and women and likely some not so straight from all of those groups, Atheists, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists….and probably some categories I left out. Most of them were apolitical. As serving members and Veterans, they comprise a tiny, tiny minority of Americans.

“’Never in the history of mankind has so much been owed by so many to so few.” – Winston Churchill.

Very few of the people I served with gave a rat’s rear end about your color, gender, sexual persuasion, religion or any other identifier of the day. What they cared about was a common purpose and whether or not they could depend on you when it counted. Some of them could out cuss a Lynchburg School Board member but rarely directed it at one of their brotherhood or sisterhood. I actually lived in the tolerant and accepting utopia liberals like our school board member seem to pine for. Maybe the brotherhood and sisterhood utopia I knew has been harmed by recent year’s social engineering intending to add the same divisions into the Armed Services, but I offer that you will not walk into any US military unit and find a mindset that says to improve we must eradicate some group or another unless they are a threat to what they vowed in their oaths to defend. It is a mindset that continues when one leaves the service.

Our country began losing its common purpose many years ago. Sadly, our school board member and many like her have another common purpose in mind. To achieve it, they apparently believe they need to rid the place of straight white men. Her spoken desire is for a society is actually the bigoted and intolerant one she professes to deplore. She is just too filled with hatred and stupidity to realize it.

© 2016 J. D. Pendry

The Military Times reports that the Cato Institute Washington think tank “is offering a radical idea” to repair the veterans’ health care system. Force active duty servicemembers and veterans to buy health insurance;

In an online essay last week, institute Director of Health Policy Studies Michael Cannon recommends dropping the idea of free health care for veterans and instead offering better pay for current troops and vouchers for current veterans to buy their own coverage on the open market.

He also calls for privatizing the Veterans Health Administration — something the major veterans groups have all argued against — with shares of the new publicly-run company to be given to veterans and servicemembers based on time in service.

The idea is not new. The Obama White House offered the same proposal in 2009 and it was rejected by veterans and Veterans’ Service Organizations. The cost to a service-connected service member would make the insurance not affordable for wounded soldiers who don’t work, generally, because of their injuries. Like the Affordable Health Care Act, the plan depends on insurance companies to disregard the fact that they’ll never again turn a profit in order to make the plan affordable.

As with many ideas generated in Washington, this one has a social justice warrior component, too;

“(In the event of war), the added risk of deaths and injuries would cause premiums to rise, which would increase the amount of added pay Congress must provide each service member. The result is that future Congresses and presidents would have to confront this enormous cost of war at the moment they decide to send U.S. troops off to war, and every day they decide to keep them there.”

Using service members’ health as a political tool just doesn’t seem right to me.