Archive for November 2016
What does the Treasury Secretary do anyway?
A very good question, and I’m not sure that the Forbes article, Who Is Trump Pick Steven Mnuchin & What Does The Treasury Secretary Do Anyway?, really answers the question.
The most important sub-agency under Treasury is the IRS, but I am not aware that previous Secretaries got into the nitty-gritty of directing changes in IRS regulations and enforcement. The subtleties of the more complicated tax regulations are too technical and complicated for anyone who has not spent years practicing tax law to understand.
It should be noted that the Federal Reserve Bank is a federal agency that is not part of Treasury but rather is set up to be quasi-independent from the Executive Branch.
Steven Mnuchin himself is a guy who had a big head start in life by being born to a rich Wall Street father who worked at Goldman Sachs, and then got into the business himself, also working at Goldman Sachs (it’s great to have connections) and later managing his own hedge fund. Then he got bored being a rich Wall Street guy and got into producing movies.
I’m not sure why Mnuchin wants to give up producing movies for the thankless and very low-paying (compared to what he’s used to making) job of Secretary of the Treasury.
* * *
The United States has a huge and growing debt, and the Treasury Department determines how to borrow more money and make payments on the debt.
Trump against free speech
Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag – if they do, there must be consequences – perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 29, 2016
Remember that Justice Scalia himself joined the majority opinion of Texas v. Johnson which held that burning the American flag is constitutionally protected free speech. And Trump has said that he wants to fill Scalia’s seat with a like-minded replacement.
An absolutist view of free speech is the only thing protecting HBD bloggers from being censored by the liberals. If Trump weakens free speech, and then he leaves office in four or eight years to be replaced by a Democrat, it could mean the end of HBD blogs. I could be thrown in prison!
This tweet, however, is consistent with my view of Trump as someone who generally has 1950s values (a decade when burning of the American flag was not well appreciated) and supports law and order, but who is not a deep thinker and is not well studied in constitutional law. That’s not to say that Trump isn’t smart, but he has used his intelligence to make money, make his apartment look like the Palace of Versailles, and marry trophy wives rather than concern himself with issues of political philosophy.
They say that they took his Android away from him during the last three weeks of the campaign so that he couldn’t spontaneously tweet without it being reviewed. Maybe they need to go back to that system.
* * *
Otis the Sweaty’s alternative interpretation:
Not sure if this was deliberate, but this tweet is great because it will provoke liberal idiots and BLM types into publicly burning American flags. Hello 10% more of the white vote!
I agree that Trump has a way with arousing the passions of the prole whites, but perhaps he will be better at governing the country if, now that he won, he goes a little more high class.
Also, your comment demonstrates that flag-burning isn’t really subversive. It never causes anyone to join the cause of the flag burners.
* * *
Mike CA says:
Lots of people say they are in favor of free speech until somebody says something they don’t like. Outlawing flag burning is just more political correctness.
Was there a historical Jesus?
Below is a copy and paste of something I previously wrote, but some of my newer readers may not have had the chance to read it.
* * *
This question is not whether God impregnated a virgin woman, but whether there was an actual man named Jesus who started Christianity, or inspired others he personally spoke with to start Christianity.
I always assumed the answer was yes. For example, Ghandi, a Hindu, seemed to believe that Jesus was a real person. He said, “The example of Jesus suffering is a factor in the composition of my un-dying faith in non-violence. What then does Jesus mean to me? To me, He was one of the greatest teachers humanity has ever had.” This is the polite thing to believe, but is it true?
Upon doing some research on the internet, I now think it’s most likely that Jesus was a myth made up by early Christians rather than a real historical person. Were Hercules or Dionysus real people? [Or Romulus and Remus?] Today we understand that they are myths, but during the time of the Roman empire, you might get punched in the face for telling someone that Hercules never existed. I mention Hercules and Dionysus because they were both, allegedly, the son of Zeus and a mortal woman. As you see, the idea of a guy being the son of a god but having a human mother was hardly very original. [And the same with Romulus and Remus. Not an original idea at all!] Dionysus was also resurrected, so that part wasn’t original either.
Learning that the Gospels weren’t actually written by people who knew Jesus or by the authors they are attributed to, and knowing the complete implausibility of the events in the Gospels, I am lead to suspect they were acts of creative story-telling rather than based on an account of an actual person’s life. And for all we know, Christianity evolved from a Dionysian mystery religion rather than being created from scratch. They are called “mystery religions” because we know nothing about them.
Some people seem to get pissed off upon hearing that Jesus never existed. Why does it matter?
Here is an extremely detailed explanation for why Jesus was not a real person. It has the aura of truth about it.
* * *
And in case you think I’m just picking on Jesus, there’s good reason to believe that Mohammed is also a myth and not a historical person.
And despite all this, yes, I prefer the religious holiday of Christmas over the secularized orgy of consumerism that we now call the “holiday season.”
The true meaning of Christmas
The true meaning of Christmas is to celebrate the birth of Jesus, which is a celebration that God loves mankind so much that he gave us a Son so that if we believe in him we will have eternal life in Heaven after we die.
By turning “Merry Christmas” into the secular “Happy Holidays,” the true meaning of Christmas was ripped out of the public consciousness and Christmas turned into a disgusting and sinful orgy of people buying stuff they can’t afford and don’t need: lust, gluttony, greed and envy all mixed in together.
The creator of the video will take it down
According to this article at The Wrap (and note that the traditional mainstream media like the New York Times is not reporting on this at all because they are following their custom to not write stuff about children of Presidents):
1. The creator of the video says he will take it down.
2. The creator of the video was diagnosed with autism at age 5. Can someone with autism spot another with the problem?
3. The video was viewed 1.2 million times.
I just checked the video and see that it has now been viewed 3.9 million times. This means that news that the video may no longer be available prompted 2.7 million people to watch it. If Melania’s goal was for the video to disappear, having her lawyer send a threatening letter had the opposite effect.
And I can guarantee you that some of those 3.9 million viewers saved a copy and that the video will reappear in the future.
* * *
Donald Trump, who is a master persuader (according to Scott Adams the creator of Dilbert), would have known that a threatening legal letter would only bring more attention to the story. Therefore I conclude that this is 100% Melania’s doing and that she didn’t consult her husband who is too busy interviewing people to work on his transition to have time to talk to Melania.
Analysis of TMZ story
Melania Trump has hired a famous lawyer who is now threatening a lawsuit over a video suggesting her 10-year-old son, Barron, is autistic, and the letter calls out Rosie O’Donnell as a bully.
According to the letter, obtained by TMZ, the YouTube video falsely insinuates Barron is autistic. The letter, and our sources familiar with the situation, say Barron absolutely is not autistic.
However, TMZ has not reproduced the actual letter, thus we have to rely on TMZ’s interpretation of the letter, and to be honest, I have very little faith that the author of the article can be trusted to accurately interpret the letter.
I suspect that Melania really is mad about the video, she wants to protect Barron, and she did have a lawyer send a letter that would sound threatening to the recipient. But there is absolutely no legal thing they can do about it. The Trumps are now public figures with little right to privacy. Speculation about Barron is constitutionally protected free speech.
This is also bad strategy on the part of the Trumps, they should ignore stuff like this. Melania is only bringing more attention to the story, and the video will never disappear; the more she goes after it the more she will incentivize people to repost it and talk about it.
All part of the plan, or Kellyanne Conway going rogue?
Four days ago, I wrote in response to Conway’s tweets:
Second-guessing Trump’s decisions in public like this would surely get Trump mad at her. Why did she do it?
Maybe, because Trump asked her, because he wants Romney to read it, because he wants Romney to beg harder for the job and/or show more public contrition.
Since then Conway has increased the volume of her anti-Romney campaign. The info from Scarborough suggests that Conway has gone rogue and it’s not part of some master plan.
Somali refugee did it
I suspect “sudden jihad syndrome” which is sort of a cross of beta-male-rage, schizophrenia, and straight-up Islamic terrorism.
This news story helps the Donald Trump narrative. Why do we need to allow so many refugees into the United States, especially from Islamic countries like Somalia?
Betsy DeVos, the cuckservative’s choice for Secretary of Education
What I know about her: born super-rich, married super-rich, Christian, devotes herself to cuckservative educational causes like school vouchers and charter schools.
Because Republicans deny HBD nearly as much as Democrats, vouchers and charter schools will not solve the real problems of education because politicians deny what the real problems are. (Republicans accept the liberal premise that there are no differences in genetic learning potential between students, and the most important problem to be solved in education is the black-white achievement “gap.”)
Those who try to measure the “success” of the vouchers and charter schools will try to determine if test scores have improved for poor, minority and “disadvantaged” kids, and I guarantee you that scores on the highly g-loaded reading and math tests will not improve. If anything, the public schools, with their emphasis on endless drilling for the tests, have maxed out any possible score increases for these kids, and higher quality instruction would probably result in lower scores.
Now, before I write any more, I want to state that I believe that most public schools suck, and that most non-religious private schools provide better education for the students. I wish there were some way that deserving middle class kids could have the opportunity to attend a superior non-religious private school.
But let’s get back to vouchers.
Liberals see public education as a valuable tool in the fight against the spread of prole sects of Christianity. If vouchers allowed parents to take their kids out of public schools, the parents who would care most about this are fundamentalist Christian parents who would send their children to a school where they teach that God created man and other such nonsense. The liberals have a valid point here.
Republicans worship at the altar of “free enterprise,” and believe that anything run by a private organization is going to be superior and more efficient to anything run by the government. But I think the reality is that public education isn’t that expensive. At all decent private schools, tuition tends to be three times the per-pupil cost of public education in the same geographic area. And those private schools also have fund raising drives on top of that, so they spend more like four times as much per student, and they don’t even have to deal with “special needs” students.
The simplest thing we could do to vastly improve the quality of public education is to separate the intelligent children from the less intelligent children. But liberals are adamantly opposed to this because they say it’s racist. And it’s not something that the cuckservatives are behind either, because the cuckservative’s greatest fear is being called a “racist.” And it doesn’t do anything to support their ideas about “free enterprise” and it doesn’t make Christian schools more powerful.
* * *
Joey Junger writes in a comment (to a previous post):
Not that it matters much to me one way or the other, but I seem to remember you saying that you didn’t like using the term “cuckservative.” It looks like it’s part of your working vocabulary now, though. Did something change?
I guess the word is too convenient to describe the type of conservative who is wedded to “free enterprise” and Christian right stuff, while being desperate to demonstrate to liberals and the mainstream media that they are good guys, not racists or misogynists.
* * *
Anyway, bad choice here by Trump. I suspect this was a position that he didn’t care much about, and he let his truecon advisers pick her. And at the same time he could check a gender diversity box!
Although the issues of vouchers and charter schools arouse people’s passions, what the Department of Education mostly does is manage the student loan program. A technocrat manager who could make that work more efficiently and help prevent students from being ripped off by lenders would have been a much better choice. Or imagine if Trump picked Bernie Sanders for this position! It would have been a bold gesture of reaching across the aisle, and Bernie Sanders seems to genuinely care about college students being ripped off by student loan lenders.
Beta-male rage at Ohio State University?
Hardly any info here. In declining order of likelihood:
1. Beta-male rage
2. Schizophrenia
3. Islamic terrorism
4. NAM violence
5. SJW angry about Trump
6. White nationalist terrorism
* * *
Well, just learned that a machete was involved. Beta males prefer guns over up-close-and-personal violence. This changes things!
1. Schizophrenia
2. Islamic terrorism
3. Beta-male rage
4. NAM violence
5. SJW angry about Trump
6. White nationalist terrorism
* * *
Some reports say there were TWO perps, but those reports are more often than not false. If there really were to perps, then Islamic terrorism rises to the top of the list, with schizophrenia disappearing.
With two perps:
1. Islamic terrorism
2. NAM violence
3. Beta-males raging together
4. White nationalist terrorism
5. SJWs angry about Trump
Lion of the Blogosphere 