Any illegal immigrant can be deported

Trump’s speech in Arizona doesn’t sound like he’s suddenly gone soft on illegal immigrants.

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Yes, Trump has assured us that he has most definitely NOT pivoted on immigration. Ann Coulter liked the speech quite a bit.

Trump goes to Mexico

Sounds like a brilliant idea to make him look more presidential. Let’s hope it’s not a trap.

UPDATE: It wasn’t a trap, therefore it was brilliant strategy to make Trump appear presidential.

Gotta love the New York Post

[People complained about seeing Weiner in his underwear, admittedly a not-so-pleasant image, so I put the picture beneath the fold.]

Hillary’s alt-right speech

Peter Brimelow at VDARE.com has very good comments on Hillary’s speech and Trump’s response.

Check out The Undiscovered Jew’s new blog

Pragmatically Distributed.

The Undiscovered Jew has been a longtime contributor in the comments, so I am happy to recommend his new blog.

Does Facebook know your politics?

This article in the New York Times made me curious. I followed the instructions, and discovered that Facebook thinks I’m “Very Liberal.” I guess their algorithm doesn’t work very well.

Genesis

Gozo thinks that the best Genesis albums ever, or at least the ones most worthy of respect, are The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Nursery Cryme and Foxtrot.

Genesis albums predating Selling England by the Pound sound to me like they were made by a bunch of kids who would have been playing Dungeons & Dragons had they been born a few years later. (Not that there’s anything wrong with playing Dungeons & Dragons. Awesome game, it was.)

The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway: As you know, this is a double-LP concept album and is supposed to be about a Puerto Rican kid who somehow is transported to an alternate reality where he searches for his brother John, who may or may not be a real person. There are some great prog-rock riffs, but it’s saddled with nonsense lyrics at best (written by Peter Gabriel while he was dropping LSD), and at worst the lyrics are downright horrible. The first LP is mostly pretty good, but the second LP has a lot of weird sound effects and those downright horrible lyrics I mentioned earlier. The other members of the band kicked Peter Gabriel out after that album (or something like that).

The concert footage above, with post-Peter-Gabriel Genesis playing “In the Cage” from The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway combined with a medley of prog-rock instrumentals from Wind & Wuthering is pretty epic. I love how Phil Collins leaves the lead-singer station during the instrumental section and heads over to the drums. There’s a similar live version on the album Three Sides Live. The live version is far better than the studio albums.

The three best Genesis studio albums are Selling England by the Pound (the first album in which Genesis finally matured), Trick of the Tail and Wind & Wuthering (the first two albums after Peter Gabriel left). The quality of Genesis degraded after Phil Collins pushed them away from prog-rock to a more jazzy/pop sound. I never listen to any of the albums after Abacab.

Best live albums, both awesome albums, are Seconds Out and Three Sides Live.

The crazy vinyl revival

Sales by dollar volume can be confusing because of inflationary pricing. Looking at a chart of units sold makes the vinyl revival look less impressive.

Vinyl LP/EP shipments peaked in 1978 at 341.3 million. That was a year when 8-track was dead and cassette tapes hadn’t yet made significant inroads into new music sales. In 1978, if you wanted to listen to music (besides radio), then you had to buy vinyl. There was no other choice. Vinyl sales dropped from 1978 to the mid 1980s not because people were buying CDs, but because they were buying pre-recorded cassettes.

Vinyl sales for the first half of 2016 were 6.2 million, an 11.4% increase year-over-year, so the vinyl revival continues to grow, but it’s still only 3.6% of what it was in 1978.

But hold on a minute. That only includes new sales. If you look at used plus new sales, the vinyl market is actually 2.5 times bigger. That article also has some interesting stats on who’s buying vinyl. It turns out that the majority of vinyl purchases are by people under the age of 35, buyers who are too young to remember stores full of new vinyl records. The vinyl revival is actually a hipster/youth-culture thing and not a bunch of old fogies who are too grumpy to go digital.

55+ people are a much larger percentage of vinyl listeners than vinyl buyers, because they are still listening to their vinyl collections they purchased new in the 1980s, 1970s, and even the 1960s.

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Me personally: My vinyl buying days started in 1983 and ended in 1986, as far as I can tell. I didn’t have much time to accumulate many records, especially with my limited money back then, so there are only about sixteen albums, and it turns out that I had crappy taste in music. There are four Night Ranger albums, and Def Leppard’s Pyromania album. There’s Journey Frontiers, a horribly un-listenable album. But I was surprised to find out that I enjoyed re-listening to Van Halen 1984 on original vinyl I purchased in the year 1984. And there are three Genesis albums and a Phil Collins (Sussidio) album which are pretty decent.

Crazy Eddie’s prices are insane!

The other day, I walked into a Barnes & Noble and I saw vinyl records for sale. The least expensive record was $21.99.

However, here we see this record that I purchased at Crazy Eddie for only $5.99. Crazy Eddie’s prices are so low, it’s like he’s giving everything away! How does he make a profit? He must be insane!

Click to see Crazy Eddie commercial. (And look at that massive selection! There must be about two hundred times as many records as they have at Barnes & Noble.)

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Have I mentioned before that Huey Lewis is one of the very rare Ivy League educated (Cornell) non-classical-music musicians?

Why do Americans love low taxes?

Andrew E. wrote in a comment: “Believe it or not, Americans like low taxes.”

Yes, I do believe it.

But, people aren’t thinking rationally about it, they are thinking with the animal parts of their brain. There’s a part that reviles at the thought of stuff being taken away from them, which is based on instincts from our caveman days when stuff was synonymous with having enough of a stockpile to survive the winter without starving to death. And there’s a part which craves status, and thinks that if only they had the money the government was taking away in taxes, they’d be able to buy the house in a “better” neighborhood or buy the stuff their friends have that they can’t afford; but what their emotions don’t realize is that if everyone gets the same tax cut, then the price of the “better” neighborhood goes up by that much and is still unaffordable, and they still can’t afford to buy the stuff their friends have because now their friends can buy more expensive stuff.

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Otis writes:

American’s like low taxes for 1 reason and 1 reason only: America’s large black population.

That is literally the only reason. If it wasn’t for the knowledge that their tax money would just be going to blacks, American would have similar tax rates and a similar social safety next to Western European countries.

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Chairman writes:

One entity can pool large sums of money together to invest in major projects with more efficiency than a large number of people each using their own money can. This principal explains why any large organization exists. The trick, of course, is to find a way to staff the government with intelligent and moral people whose interests are aligned with the general population’s. This is difficult but not impossible, though it’s rarely been accomplished.