Category Archives: culture

Nice Things

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President Xi Jinping and his cronies in the People’s Republic of China government look like they’re settling in for a long trade war with us. The claim, too, is that deteriorating relations with us, and allowing them to deteriorate further, are a sign of Xi’s strength as a leader of the government and of the Communist Party of China.

This misunderstands, though: those deteriorating relations are a good illustration of Xi’s weakness as a leader, not his strength. It takes strength, mind you, to be willing to change course when the chosen one proves…inopportune.

There’s this, too, from Shi Yinhong, Director of the Center on American Studies at Renmin University in Beijing:

Trump’s actions have seriously agitated the Chinese leadership, who now realize that there’s no chance of reaching a fair deal with the US.

Right.  Because it’s unfair of us to demand the PRC stop stealing our intellectual property and our technological secrets. It’s unfair of us to object to the PRC extorting tech transfers and domestic “partnerships” and requiring backdoors into proprietary operating software, all as a condition of doing business in the PRC.

Even the PRC’s wartime decision to devalue its currency, intended to counter the effect of tariffs on its exports to the US, cannot work well over the intermediate- to long-term. That devalued currency serves to make imports into the PRC—things like oil and natural gas both as energy for production and as fuels for home heating, transportation, marine shipping and things like components for assembly into larger components or finished products in PRC factories—more expensive, it lowers the return on US and other dollar-denominated debt instruments, and through those, it drives up the cost of domestic products that depend on those imports.

It also encourages capital flight into a host of suddenly more valuable currencies—primarily dollars, but yen, won, euros, and pounds, also.

And: whether tariffs cost us more than the PRC’s counters cost them remains to be seen. However, that’s not a matter that can be assessed solely in dollars or yuan. Our economy is much larger, wealthier, and more diverse than is the PRC’s; we can absorb more such costs than it can.  And I haven’t gotten to the costs of military buildups.

Finally, there’s this on the PRC’s trade war: as companies continue to move their supply chains away from the PRC in response to the stress of this war, as sellers (including farmers) find other markets than the PRC for their goods and services (and crops), the PRC’s war is weaning these enterprises off the PRC market, which can only work to the PRC’s long-term detriment.

All of this illustrates why the good citizens of the PRC can’t have nice things.

Guns and Deaths

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Here are some actual data—facts that the Progressive-Democrats running for President are pleased to ignore—as produced by Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra):

Average # of deaths per day in US:Abortion: 1,778
Heart disease: 1,773
Cancer: 1,641
Medical error: 685
Accidents: 401
Stroke: 401
Alzheimer’s: 332
Diabetes: 228
Flu: 150
Suicide: 128
Opioids: 115
Drunk driving: 28
Underage drinking: 11
Teen texting-and-driving: 8
All Rifles: 1

His sources:

Abortion: (link: https://nrlc.org/uploads/factsheets/FS01AbortionintheUS.pdf )
Heart disease/cancer/accidents/stroke/alzheimers/flu/suicide: (link: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm )
Medical error: (link: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/22/medical-errors-third-leading-cause-of-death-in-america.html )
Opioids: (link: https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/epidemic/index.html )
Drunk driving: (link: https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/impaired_driving/impaired-drv_factsheet.html )

Yet those Progressive-Democrat politicians want to control rifles, ultimately to take away all of our weapons.

And with the killings over which they cry their crocodile tears, they shed none for the babies’ lives lost to abortion. Instead they shrilly demand women’s right to kill those babies, pretending that those killings are matters of “health.”

Lies of Progressive-Democrats

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Here’s another.  Recall Congressman Joaquin Castro’s (D, TX, and brother of Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Julian Castro) doxing of donors to a Trump campaign organization.

[T]he Texas congressman’s original tweet included a list of San Antonio residents who had donated large amounts to the Trump campaign, along with the names of their employers. …
“Sad to see so many San Antonians as 2019 maximum donors to Donald Trump,” Castro tweeted, along with the Twitter handles of several owners of local businesses who apparently donated to Trump. …
The list—titled “WHO’S FUNDING TRUMP?”—had 44 names of donors and their employers.

Now Castro is claiming the list was no problem at all.

[He] is not backing down from his tweet outing Trump donors in San Antonio, insisting they weren’t “targeted or harassed” and that it wasn’t a “call to action.”

And that’s Castro’s straight-up lie.  The exposure itself was a targeting move, and a call to action—a call to harass those 44 folks who’s only wrong-doing was their effrontery of disagreeing with Castro.  Castro knows this, and in his own words to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (D, CA), Castro is too cowardly or agreeable to Party to admit his misbehavior and to correct it.

I’ll add a couple more words: Castro’s behavior is typically dishonest.

Castro’s claim that the data he published were already publicly available? A cynically offered sophistry. He didn’t need to broaden the availability.  He chose to do so, though, for his carefully developed and executed purposes.

Suicide Pact

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Now The Wall Street Journal has joined the bandwagon.

Gun rights need to be protected, but the Second Amendment is not a suicide pact.

Indeed, they do, and it is not. But violating the Second Amendment as a matter of routine, or gutting it as the Progressive-Democrats want to do (background checks? Where would the Progressive-Democrats stop? They refuse to say, they refuse to articulate their limiting principle) certainly would be national suicide.

…those in the gun lobby who claim that denying access to guns from those with a history of mental illness violates individual rights.

This is a cynically offered straw man. No one in the gun lobby argues that denying access to guns from those with a history of mental illness violates the individual rights of that person with that history. Their argument is that the definition of such a history is too vague for practical applicability. More broadly, their argument is that the laws don’t adequately protect the individual rights of those surrounding or otherwise associated with the individual in question.

Lies of Progressive-Democrats

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Here are some of the more despicable examples as Progressive-Democrats—including those running for President—look to politicize an El Paso tragedy for their personal political gain.

Washington state Governor and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Jay Inslee:

The first order of business to reduce white nationalism is to eliminate white nationalism in our White House. The sentiments of fear and division, and outright racism, that this president has emboldened out to be sickening to anyone.

What’s sickening is Inslee’s active condonement, along with his confrere in Oregon’s governor’s mansion, of Antifa’s active violence against conservatives, indeed against anyone to the right of their Leftist extremism.  What’s sickening is Inslee’s manufacture of racist beefs where he knows none exist.

Small-town mayor and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg:

The President of the United States is condoning white nationalism[.]

Made without a shred of evidence, even as Buttigieg gives eye-wash words to events in his own town—while enhancing “outrage” over a police shooting, playing up the fact of a white cop shooting a black man while ignoring the salient facts of a cop shooting a man and the facts surrounding the man’s behavior at the time.

Senator and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar (D, MN):

I do think Trump’s rhetoric has fueled more hate in this country.

She ignores the fact that Trump’s rhetoric has only fueled the hatred of the Left and its Party as he has been unhesitant to call out, bluntly, the Progressive-Democratic Party politicians’ refusal (not failure) to perform, their knee-jerk obstructionism of anything not proposed by them.  Klobuchar also carefully ignores the racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric of her fellow politicians in the House—fellows like Ilhan Omar (D, MN), from her own State, yet; Ayanna Pressley (D, MA); Rashida Tlaib (D, MI); Alexendria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY)—who routinely spew their race- and Jew-hatred, even calling Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) racist for disagreeing with them.

Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Robert Francis O’Rourke:

He [President Donald Trump] is a racist, and he stokes racism in this country. We’ve had a rise in hate crimes every single one of the last three years.

If Trump stokes racism, he’s an utter failure at it.

All of these august personages, along with many more of their Party, have dishonestly manufactured a race crime out of Trump’s calling out their icon, Elijah Cummings’ (D, MD) failure to deal, to even try to deal, with the terrible, inhumane conditions in Inner City Baltimore. They’ve gone so far as to claim it’s racist to criticize Cummings, to claim that saying no humans would want to live in a rat-infested environment is racist.  This kind of made-up charge, centered as it is on their manufactured racism is itself stinkingly racist.

All of these august personages, again along with many more of their Party, outright refused to decry Omar’s anti-Semitic remarks, passing instead a carefully saccharine resolution decrying rude talk and being mean.

This is the pernicious, dishonest—dare I say, evil—racism toward which we can look were this Party to retain majority in the House, gain it in the Senate, and place one of these racist candidates in the White House.

Which points up this piece, from a different perspective.