Taylor Swift, then and now

You Belong With Me (2009):

Blank Space (2014):

I don’t particularly like the video for You Belong With Me, but the song is great. It’s about a high-school-aged girl who likes the guy next door who’s a good looking football player, but her social status is far below that of his cheerleader girlfriend. Despite that, she is hopeful that their shared interests will compensate for her social status deficit and he will come around to seeing her as a romantic partner.

Five years later, Taylor Swift has lost her country twang as well as her sweet innocence. Blank Space is my favorite of the newer Taylor Swift songs. As shown in the video, Taylor Swift is a siren who is apparently irresistible to rich men because of her extreme beauty, sexiness, and wild personality. However, once an unfortunate man gets into a relationship with her, she turns into an insane psycho-bitch. Her transformation follows a trend in the entertainment industry in which female teen stars have to grow out of their youth by slutting it up. (As a side note, the lifestyle shown in the video is how proles imagine rich people live and is not how anyone really lives in the twenty-first century.)

By comparing the two videos, perhaps you can determine for yourself if Taylor Swift is just naturally skinny or if she is engaging in unhealthy dieting. I think it’s a little of both. She was very skinny as a teenager, but five years later she looks even skinnier, when you’d normally expect girls to gain a few pounds as they pass from their teenage years into their twenties.

Pennsylvania: the key state (and also the Keystone State)

When stupid political pundits assure readers, and themselves, that Trump can’t win the Presidential election, they drone on about the Hispanic vote and how Trump has alienated them assuring that he will lose.

But the key to Trump winning lies not with Hispanics, it’s with prole whites in places like Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania, according to the 2010 Census, is 79% white and only 6% Hispanic. Pennsylvania ought to be a slam dunk for Republicans—Republicans always win in Georgia which is only 56% white—but in Pennsylvania Republicans keep losing.

I believe that in an election against Hilllary Clinton, Trump will be able to win the support of prole whites in Pennsylvania who have traditionally voted Democratic. This is because Trump speaks to issues that matter to prole whites: immigration, free trade deals, national security. Trump is smart enough to avoid focusing on issues that turn off prole whites, such as tax cuts for the rich and the big issue that divides whites, abortion. I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump moves to the center on those issues after winning the Republican nomination.

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It just occurred to me that one of the reasons that journalists are so clueless about the Trump phenomenon is because they live in an upper-middle-class echo chamber. If they knew more proles, they’d better understand that Trump has a lot of support.

I’ve previously pointed out, many times, that journalists today almost entirely come from wealthy families, and they attended elite schools. They have no friends or relatives who are working class. They are cut off from what regular Americans think.

Establishment Republicans plan to vote for Hillary

The subject of Trump came up at a recent Beverly Hills lunch hosted by former U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Rockwell Schnabel.

Seated around the table in the private dining room of the Hotel Bel-Air were several of the West Coast’s most powerful Republican donors, including Ronald Spogli, the venture capitalist and former ambassador to Italy under President George W. Bush; his business partner Bradford Freeman; and Riordan.

A story that circulated after the lunch was that the donors engaged in a hypothetical question: “If it was Donald Trump running against Hillary Clinton, who would you vote for?”

One version has it that most of the Republicans at the table put their hands up for Clinton.

http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/261227-gop-donors-wrestle-with-possibility-of-trump-nomination

An indication that keeping the flow of immigrants is more important to these donors than anything else? Either that, or they fear Trump because, unlike all other politicians, they know he can’t be bought.

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Rubio still remains a very strong favorite in betting markets, but those markets are now telling us that if Rubio doesn’t make it, then Trump is strongly favored as the second-most-likely nominee over everyone else.

Laquan McDonald

With a name like “Laquan,” it’s as if his mother wanted him to become a criminal.

That aside, Laquan was breaking into cars, and when he was surrounded by police, instead of surrendering to them, he continued to walk around with a knife in his hand, he punctured a police car tire with his knife, and he was looking for a way to escape.

Now, the current rule is that the police are only allowed to use deadly force if a person poses an immediate danger to civilians or the cops. This is a change from the traditional centuries-old rule that law enforcement could shoot at someone who committed a felony and who refused to surrender to the police.

The police officer who shot Laquan violated the current rule, but I’m not sure the current rule is really such a good idea. It encourages criminals to disobey the police, and the police are forced to physically subdue the perpetrator which puts the police at risk, and in the long run I think that the result has been that the police go overboard with physically subduing people and do so unnecessarily. In the past, the police would more civilly give suspects the right to surrender peacefully, knowing that they could shoot them if they refused to cooperate or tried to run away.

In any event, Laquan could have easily avoided getting shot by the police if he had simply surrendered after he got caught. Even better, he shouldn’t have been breaking into cars in the first place.

Planned parenthood shooter was anti-abortion

It’s now clear that the shooter targeted Planned Parenthood because he was opposed to the organization. (Of course, this seemed obvious from the get-go, but some commenters kept insisting that it was just a coincidence that Planned Parenthood was involved.)

Although the shooter has some serious mental health issues and is not known to be part of an organized Christian group, there is no doubt that the constant accusation of Christians that Planned Parenthood is “murdering babies” created the justification in this guy’s head that it’s OK to go there and shoot the place up.

Planned Parenthood shooter seems like mentally ill person

Robert L. Dear Jr. seems too much like a mentally ill person for people to pin this on Christian anti-abortion evangelism, so the liberals will fall back to using this incident as a reason to push for more gun control. But it probably won’t work because they underestimate how much prole whites love, love, love their guns.

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The Washington Post says that the police are racist because Mr. Dear, who is a crazy white person, was allowed to surrender without being shot and killed.

Obama administration admits they could seal Mexican border if they wanted to

Before Paris, Turkish officials often rebuffed U.S. calls for a larger border force, saying the frontier was simply too long to effectively seal, no matter how many soldiers were deployed.

Turkish officials pointed to Washington’s inability to seal off the U.S.-Mexico border as an example of how difficult such operations can be. U.S. officials chafe at the comparison. “If we were at war with Mexico, we’d close that border,” a senior administration official said of Washington’s response.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-urges-turkey-to-seal-syria-border-1448674401

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I suspect that everything Russia said about Turkey and ISIS is correct. They are buying oil from ISIS and selling them weapons. They don’t really want to seal the border. Turkey sees the Kurds as the greater enemy, and ISIS is at war with the Kurds, and therefore ISIS is a friend on the theory that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Trump panic

The Republican establishment is nearing full-blown panic about Donald Trump.

The demise of Trump’s candidacy has been predicted by centrist Republicans and the media alike virtually since the day it began. But there is no empirical evidence at all to suggest it is happening.

http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/261252-gop-in-panic-over-trump

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Will the GOP try to draft Mitt Romney? A recent poll shows that Romney would win the New Hampshire primary if he were on the ballot.

Shooter at Planned Parenthood

We can hope he turns out to be a Muslim, but in all likelihood he’s a white Christian type, and the MSMS will have a field day saying “see, the real terrorists are white Christians.”

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Latias writes:

That’s pathetic Lion, hoping for a shooter to be a Muslim before the facts emerge. Seems like you want the news to conform to your worldview or political agenda.

My worldview is that a shooting at a Planned Parenthood most likely means a white pro-life Christian nut. And if that turns out to be the case, the MSM will take advantage of it to divert attention away from Islamic terrorism. So yes, I hope it turns out to be something that the MSM won’t feel smug about.

Online polls and Trump

There’s an article in today’s NY Times about online polls.

Trump does a lot better in online polls compared to telephone polls. But Trump is the only candidate who is affected by the method of the poll. The theory posited in the article is that respondents are embarrassed to tell a human about their support for Trump because it’s politically incorrect. If that’s the case, then the online polls will more accurately predict private voting-booth behavior, although embarrassment about supporting Trump could hurt him in the non-private Iowa caucuses.