Archive for February 2019
Quinniapac Texas poll
https://poll.qu.edu/texas/release-detail?ReleaseID=2602
I think this is a strange state for this type of poll, because Texas isn’t a swing state. What’s important for predicting the winner of the 2020 presidential election is how the candidates compare in key swing states.
However, this poll shows what polls showed back in 2016, that Bernie Sanders would do very well against Trump. Joe Biden also. Kamala Harris is much weaker. A minority woman is just not a very likeable candidate.
Furthermore, when it comes to the shy voter bias (also known as the Bradley effect), it’s possible that Harris’ numbers are inflated by white (including white Hispanic) respondents who want to virtue-signal to the pollster that they will vote for the minority women, but then in the actual voting booth they will be more comfortable voting for an old white man, even if that old white man is Trump.
It has nothing to do with policies. Bernie and Biden are supposedly on opposite ends of the Democratic Party, with Bernie being a socialist and Biden being a moderate. But people seem to forget that swing voters are a lot more into personalities and other non-policy reasons for voting. If people knew what policies they wanted, then they probably wouldn’t be swing voters in the first place.
In 2016, the Democratic establishment ignored polls which showed that Trump was close to even with Hillary but way behind Bernie. “The polls don’t know anything, Hillary will beat Trump because she has woman power! And Trump can’t possibly win because he’s racist.” Well that didn’t work out very well for Democrats, did it?
The Class Ceiling
The Atlantic article headlined The Class Ceiling says what I’ve been writing in my blog for years.
1. It’s beneficial for a young person to have rich parents willing to pay their rent in an expensive city like London (this is a UK-biased article) where the best careers are, so they can work their way up to high-paying self-actualizing jobs. Young people without that parental support likely to get stuck in second-tier careers in second-tier minor cities.
2. Hanging around other upper-middle-class kids when young helps a person pick up an upper-middle-class way of thinking and behaving that makes it much easier to fit in, get along, and be liked by management at upper-middle-class professions. This is one of the major benefits of sending your kids to private school.
WikiLeaks
This is what the Washington Post <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/02/27/four-big-takeaways-michael-cohens-explosive-testimony/?noredirect=on"says:
Cohen alleges that in July of 2016, Trump held a phone call with longtime adviser Roger Stone, in which Stone informed him that a WikiLeaks dump of Hillary Clinton emails was coming, to which Trump said something like: “Wouldn’t that be great.”
Duh! Of course it would have been great if that had happened! I sure wish I could read what was in those emails that Hillary deleted. I bet it was a lot more than just yoga appointments.
But Stone was full of sh** because there never was a WikiLeaks dump of Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails. He was just passing on some unfounded rumors.
This is not collusion with Russia or Trump doing anything illegal, this is just Cohen recounting a private conversation in order to create the perception that Trump is guilty of something.
That the WaPo is reporting this as if it were grimly meaningful demonstrates again how our fakestream media is all about being anti-Trump.
Predictions
I haven’t logged into Predictit.org since my failed guess that Mike Pompeo wrote the anonymous op-ed (now I think I was totally wrong about that, Nikki Haley surely wrote it).
I’ve already written that Biden isn’t going to run and Bernie will win the Democratic nomination, so I put some money on that!
Then I saw the Mike Bloomberg bet, and I say that Bloomberg has much closer to a zero percent chance of running than 30-something percent, he surely is smart enough to realize he’d be throwing out his money by doing that.
Then I get to the Donald Trump impeachment bet. Remember it only takes a majority of the House, which is controlled by Trump-hating Democrats, to impeach. Republicans impeached Clinton, and Democrats hate Trump a lot more than Republicans hated Clinton, and the whole purpose of Mueller’s report will be to create the appearance of impropriety to give Democrats an excuse to vote to impeach.
Remember, it’s not illegal to pay hush money
What Trump did is only alleged to be illegal (not proven) because Michael Cohen paid the money before Trump paid Cohen, and Mueller claims that’s an illegal campaign loan from Cohen to Trump. Which is ridiculous in my opinion. Cohen is someone who works for Trump and not a campaign donor.
Cohen is the one who is supposed to be a lawyer, so unless he correctly explained the law to Trump, and then Trump said “I don’t care about violating the law,” you can’t blame Trump for this mistake.
The other big accusations are that Trump made several HBD-aware comments about blacks in what were supposed to be private conversations with his lawyer. That Cohen is testifying about this makes Cohen a huge slimebag. This is what Trump gets for hiring a guy who went to law school at Cooley, one of the crappiest law schools in the United States.
There will also be testimony that a lot of what Trump says is bullshit, but everyone already knows that, and that’s opinion not fact. Once again, Cohen is a real slimebag for going out of his way to dredge up this legally irrelevant stuff.
I suppose that Cohen feels that Trump threw him under the bus (which Trump, who had the power to pardon him, surely did), so Cohen wants revenge. And maybe Cohen now believes that the nation is really controlled by Trump-hating liberals and Trump is a powerless President, so he wants to suck up to the real powers.
Latest nationwide poll
Click to access Political-Intelligence-2.26.19.pdf
Bernie moves up 6 percentage points since last week, it’s now Biden 29 Bernie 27.
Also, Bernie gets the largest share of Biden’s second choice votes, so if Biden doesn’t run (and I don’t see Biden acting like he’s seriously going to run), Bernie’s lead will increase that much more over everyone else.
Polls don’t lie!
The worst you can say about polls is that they tell the truth about how people would vote today and not how they will vote a year from now. And that they can have sample bias and a margin of error.
Jussie Smollett: could he be innocent?
https://theblast.com/jussie-smollett-nigerian-brothers-homophobic-tweet-defense/
According to The Blast:
(1) Homophobic tweets by the Nigerian bodybuilders have been uncovered.
(2) “Sources close to the case tell us the testimony from the brothers went ‘sideways’ while speaking in front of the grand jury, so the proceedings were halted and a criminal charge was filed instead.”
(3) This part isn’t new news, it has been widely reported that Smollett claims the check for $3,500 was for personal training services.
Is it possible that Smollett is actually innocent here?
Remember that when I first heard about the incident, I wrote: “I suspect that the attackers had some personal grudge against Smollett, and pretended to be racist Trump supporters to deflect attention.”
But then attention turned to Jussie Smollett making it all up.
But many of the reasons that people were initially suspicious of Smollett turned out to be false:
People said it was suspicious because the attack wasn’t caught on video, but there actually was a video camera at the location of the attack, it was just pointed in the wrong direction.
People said that the release of the photo of two persons of interest was bogus, they were just two guys who had nothing to do with the attack. But actually, the picture did show the two guys involved in the attack.
People said Jussie not turning over his phone meant that there was no phone call to his manager. But we now know that the phone call did happen, and the real reason Jussie didn’t turn his phone over to investigators was because he didn’t want them to see evidence of other things. Maybe he was hiding his illegal drug purchases from the Nigerian bodybuilders?
A few days ago I wondered why Jussie didn’t throw the Nigerian bodybuilders under the bus. One possible hypothesis is that Smollett is a moron. He so bought into the narrative of racist whites that he couldn’t believe that two black guys pretended to be racist Trump supporters, nor could he believe that two black guys who he thought were his friends secretly hated him. Maybe they just pretended to be his friend because he was paying them a lot of money for personal training services and drugs, but secretly they despised him.
As to why Smollett wasn’t beaten up a lot worse, given that huge bodybuilders were presumably capable of really hurting Smollett if they wanted to, maybe that wasn’t the Nigerian brothers’ goal.
The part about the Grand Jury proceeding being halted is an especially weird twist. They say that a Grand Jury would indict a ham sandwich, so the bodybuilders’ testimony must have been pretty awful if prosecutors became worried that the Grand Jury wouldn’t return an indictment.
Let’s not forget that the Nigerian bodybuilders are shady people. According to the Washington post::
1. They filed for bankruptcy in 2016.
2. Older brother pleaded guilty in 2012 to aggravated battery and was sentenced to two years of probation for a stabbing that occurred a year earlier about a block away from the brothers’ home, according to Cook County records.
3. Younger brother was ticketed for a DUI in 2015.
* * *
Let me point out that the police said on Monday that “there’s a lot more evidence that hasn’t been presented yet that does not support his innocence.” But I don’t know what that evidence is, so I can only evaluate the publicly known evidence.
Bernie pulls ahead
Most-recent New Hampshire poll has Bernie pulling ahead of Biden. With Biden apparently not entering the race, Bernie is seems like the guy who’s mostly likely to win Biden’s supporters, given that they are both old white men who have the best claim to being next in line.
I don’t think that Bernie can be stopped by anyone but Biden, and Biden doesn’t want to run.
Prostitution
Back when I was a libertarian, it was obvious what I was supposed to think about prostitution. But now that I am an HBD realist and a social conservative, I realize that the state has a place in protecting people from impulses that aren’t good for them or for society.
Legal framework
That said, criminalizing prostitution doesn’t make sense under the current legal and sexual framework. Once upon a time, sex was considered sacred and something that only should be done within marriage. Adultery was illegal. Pornography was illegal. Sodomy was certainly illegal! Strip clubs were illegal. Where once upon a time, people were expected to be virgins until they married (even though it may not have been true a lot of the time), today people are considered LOSERS if they reach a certain age and still haven’t had sex.
Today, almost anything goes between two consenting adults. But, apparently, not if one adult is paying the other adult. Unless we are filming porn, in which case, then it’s OK to pay the participants for having sex on camera.
In the dissent to Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), Justice Stevens wrote, “[T]he fact that the governing majority in a State has traditionally viewed a particular practice as immoral is not a sufficient reason for upholding a law prohibiting the practice.” As you know, Bowers was overruled by Lawrence v. Texas (2003).
In the recent case of Perez v. Roseville (9th Cir. 2018), the court writes, “Lawrence makes clear that the State may not stigmatize private sexual conduct simply because the majority has “traditionally viewed a particular practice,” such as extramarital sex, “as immoral.”
So I don’t see how prostitution can constitutionally be punished as a crime given what Courts have said about other types of sex.
Sex slaves in Florida
With respect to the news story from Florida, I find the sex-slave angle pretty dubious. How can anyone be “slave” in this day and age? Were there armed guards preventing these women from running away?
And if they really were “slaves,” how were the male clients supposed to know that? The New York Times did a series of article about how the workers at nail salons were slaves, but no one said that the women who went to nail salons were “monsters” because of that.
Despite that NY Times article, nail-salon slavery continues. It’s clear that we need to crack down on illegal immigration. We need entry-exit visa tracking. We need more immigration raids of businesses that employ foreign workers like nail salons, massage parlors and restaurants (where slavery also exists but no one accuses people who buy food of being “monsters”). Illegal immigration isn’t just bad for American workers, it’s also bad for the illegal immigrants.
They couldn’t afford better prostitutes?
The weirdest part of the story is that extremely rich people were going to this seedy-looking massage parlor in a strip mall.
Why is Kim Jong Un traveling to Vietnam by train?
Because his country doesn’t own a single passenger-carrying airplane capable of making the trip.
Lion of the Blogosphere 