Archive for September 2017
I agree with Trump’s PR tweets
…Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help. They….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 30, 2017
…want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort. 10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 30, 2017
More than three million people live in PR, the commonwealth’s government can’t figure out how to get some of those people to drive trucks to transport the stuff sitting in the ports to where it’s needed?
It’s the opposite of Texas where prole whites organized themselves to help with hurricane relief. In Florida, even a nun took a chainsaw and started clearing debris. In PR, no one is doing anything to help themselves, they are waiting for people from the mainland to do everything for them. Why don’t Puerto Ricans have the same initiative to go out and clear the roads?
Too good for Republicans
Yesterday I wrote that the only good thing in the Trump tax plan was removal of the deduction for state taxes. Looks like the only good part is already being rejected by Republicans.
I also predicted that nothing would ever get passed because, as with the ACA bills, zero Democrats would support it, and a few Republican dissenters would kill it. Looks like that’s already happening.
The guido Congressman is back!
http://www.silive.com/news/2017/09/in_oct_1_announcement_grimm_wi.html#incart_river_home_pop
This could only happen on Staten Island.
The article also reports that Grimm has the support of Guy Molinari, for whom a spaceship was named in the TV series The Expanse. (I say that the most mind-blowing part of the whole series is that in the future, a spaceship will be named after a guido politician from Staten Island.)
The Orville and the Prime Directive
This post contains spoilers for episode 4.
The Orville S01E04, If the Stars Should Appear
This is the best episode so far, this season. Quite a bit better than a typical episode from the first season of Star Trek TNG.
Some minor spoilers ahead
Could the NFL really destroy itself?
I know, it sounds too good to be true that the NFL could be destroyed (by a massive drop in viewership and game attendance) because of their failure to uphold the 100-year-old tradition of respecting the national anthem when it’s played at the beginning of sporting events.
When have boycotts ever worked? People said we should boycott Starbucks when they introduced December cups which weren’t very Christmassy, but what did that amount to? Absolutely nothing. Why is the NFL different?
I think it could really be different. Every single NFL fan now knows about the controversy, and the majority of white fans are mad about it. It’s a much stronger reaction than Starbucks’ non-Christmas cups. It gets to the heart of what prole whites believe in. They believe in the America and the flag, even though, economically, America hasn’t returned the love to prole whites during the last fifty years.
A wise NFL would realize that the prole whites love the flag, and they would give their fans what they want, and in fact that’s what professional sports have always done. Some commenters have asked why the national anthem is played at professional sporting events. Someone said it had something to do with Woodrow Wilson, but I always assumed that there was an ulterior motive of tricking fans into conflating their patriotism for America with their love of watching other people play sports.
Let’s step back and ask why people watch sports. “It’s entertaining” is a simple answer, but why be entertained by football (or baseball or hockey or basketball) when there are thousands of hours of stuff on Netflix that you could watch instead? Why would I watch sports when there are still several seasons of Star Trek Voyager that I haven’t watched? (Well I, personally, would choose Voyager over football anyway, but that’s just me.)
There are two key aspects to the NFL’s entertainment monopoly:
(1) Fans have an emotional bond with the team. When the team wins, they themselves feel the emotional elation of winning. When the team loses, they themselves feel the misery of defeat. The NFL is endangering this emotional bond by allowing the players to disrespect the national anthem. Once the emotional bond with the team is lost, football becomes much less interesting entertainment and a lot more easily replaced by those thousands of hours of stuff on Netflix.
(2) People watch because other people watch. When the proles go to work on Monday, they can talk about the game on Sunday. But if everyone stops watching the games and stops talking about them, why watch yourself? I believe as viewership falls off (if that actually happens), there could be a tipping point at which, very suddenly, it’s no longer cool to talk about Sunday’s game, and instead you get the opposite message from your prole social circle, that you shouldn’t have watched the game because those millionaire players and owners have disrespected the U.S.A.
On the other hand, I could be completely wrong about this. P.T. Barnum, or someone else like that, once said that you can never go broke by overstating the extent that prole whites are suckers.
There’s an NFL game tonight
I hope that NFL fans can get their act together and NOT watch the game. Make the owners and players pay for the disrespect they’ve shown for their fans and their country. It’s easy to do something. Turn off the damned TV. That’s all you have to do.
HBD and North Korea
The NY Times reports that there is amazement that North Korea can manufacture its own rocket fuel. It was previously thought they were getting it from Russia or China.
But I am not amazed. As I already explained, North Koreans have genetically high IQ, we must not put North Korea into the same category as crappy low-IQ third-world countries in Africa or the Middle East.
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It’s HBD denialism which got us into this mess. It was assumed that a crappy third-world-level economy means a nation can’t produce advanced weapons.
Actually, it’s low genetic IQ which means that a nation can’t produce advanced weapons. Low genetic IQ also means that a nation is doomed to have a crappy third-world-level economy, but when we have a nation like North Korea, where the crappy economy is caused by the Korean War + trade embargoes + communism + extremely bad government, they still have the genetic IQ needed to produce advanced weapons.
The Jones Act
I think the Jones Act is very unfair to Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Alaska, and any other U.S. territories affected by it.
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Because of the Jones Act, a non-U.S.-flagged ship (which is pretty much all ships) leaving Florida can stop and deliver goods to every island in the Caribbean EXCEPT for Puerto Rico.
A ship returning from California to Asia cannot stop at Hawaii and deliver stuff there.
It’s unfair to PR and HI.
I’m in favor of protecting American workers, we should do that by reducing immigration.
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Of course, the downside of eliminating the Jones Act would be a complete end to U.S. ship building and the U.S. Merchant Marine.
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It should be noted that Trump’s temporary waiver of the Jones Act for hurricane relief is a matter of optics, because according to CNN, there’s already a massive amount of relief aid stuck at the ports in San Juan because there’s no logistics infrastructure to deliver it anywhere.
But why not do it? It makes Trump look like he cares.
Tax plan
The bad:
- Why is Trump pushing this at all, before he fixes immigration?
- Elimination of estate tax, a giveaway to the richest of the rich who nearly all hate Trump.
- 25% pass-through tax, a big loophole that makes the higher 35% rate moot for everyone rich enough to afford accountants to turn their income into “pass-through” income. Making the tax plan a massive tax cut for the rich, lowering the top rate from 39.6% to 25%.
- Tax break for “money” that’s overseas. Money is in quotes because in most cases that money is mostly an accounting trick to avoid paying taxes and not a bunch of bills in suitcases that are waiting to be paid to U.S. workers if only Republicans could “liberate” it from foreign captivity. Do big corporations like Apple and GE really need another tax break right now?
- Move to a territorial tax system? The worldwide tax system keeps companies honest and prevents them from shifting all of their “profits” to low-tax countries. See above.
- Elimination of AMT: new loopholes for the rich.
The good:
- Reducing the value of tax deduction for state income tax, which punishes high-tax states like California and New York which never vote Republican. I say just pass this and forget about the rest of this stupid plan.
The prediction
- Suddenly, Democrats will care about the budget deficit and Republicans will forget they ever cared about it. Politicians from both parties disgust me.
- Like ACA repeal, zero Democrats get onboard, and enough Republicans refuse to cooperate so that nothing gets passed.
Lion of the Blogosphere 