Bloomberg, Elitist Antii-Gunner and Racist?

Michael Bloomberg has been spending hundreds of millions of dollars in his bid to become president, swamping television sets and smartphone screens with carefully compiled ads that present the anti-gun billionaire as a pragmatic technocrat who can solve problems without needless partisanship. That narrative was challenged Monday evening as Twitter users shared audio from a 2015 speech to the Aspen Institute where Bloomberg talked about fighting crime by disarming young black men.

https://bearingarms.com/cam-e/2020/02/11/twitter-bloomberg-speech/?fbclid=IwAR0oGMRx3n7G3mkCEe91MIiZFvcdiBvqmDGUPDP4e2PSzC1CQNOfIeuiX-o

Journalism Isn't

When scrutinizing Trump’s economic record, our fact checkers oscillate from the hyper-contextual argument to the raw data, depending on which strategy works best to give Obama credit.

In reality, Obama, hampered by a Republican Congress, did virtually nothing on the economic front from 2010 onward. Why he deserves any special credit for the growth a decade out is a bit of a mystery.

But if we’re going to talk about Obama’s record, let’s mention that post-recession economies typically offer huge and dynamic job-growth potential. Yet Obama’s initiatives brought us the slowest recovery in American history. Trump had far less running room and so has a strong argument to make that tax cuts and rolling back the regulatory regime helped sustain what is now unprecedented growth, historically low unemployment, and a tightening labor market that has led to higher wage gains.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/trump-state-of-the-union-address-factchecking-factcheckers/#slide-1

Journalists pretending to be objective is impossibly silly. None of us is objective.

"In ten years ..."

When I see and article premised on a prediction of the future, I skip it. Why? Because as stupid as I am I have figured out that those who say they know what will happen are substituting the pretense of knowledge to calm their need for certainty.

The future is not known, nor knowable. I will not pretend to indulge the predictors. I also censor my own need to know what will happen and instead decide "if a happens, I will take action plan b, and if c happens, I will ..."

Once this choice is made, it is amazing how many BS article one can ignore. Once this observation of the unknowable nature of the future is accepted, it's amazing how worried we get over literally nothing. Said another way, it is human nature and just plain stupid to worry about predictions.

The boogeyman is mine now ...

Declare, 'We’ve got ten years to save the planet,' and you never have to recant.

It is a founding principle of Boogeyman alarmism that it be couched in vague terms. Only a novice at scaremongering would tell a little brother, “Give me your candy or the Boogeyman will come and sew your eyelids closed Thursday night at 6:07 p.m. Central Time.” Boogeyman leverage relies heavily on uncertainty. All predictions of Boogeyman activity must be non-falsifiable. Just say, “The Boogeyman will get you” and leave it at that.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/beware-the-boogeyman-alarm/

QS, you were trying to kill me. Hasta la vista, baby ...

It wasn't personal, he just wanted some of us, any of us over there in Iraq, to expire. Any dead american would have been a good american to him. He made sure the bombers had very potent IEDs. Well, I'm still here you son of an asshat, and you are fucking pieces and embers.

For all the current furor over the death of Qasem Soleimani, it is Iran, not the U.S. and the Trump administration, that is in a dilemma. Given the death and destruction wrought by Soleimani, and his agendas to come, he will not be missed.

Tehran has misjudged the U.S. administration’s doctrine of strategic realism rather than vice versa. The theocracy apparently calculated that prior U.S. patience and restraint in the face of its aggression was proof of an unwillingness or inability to respond. More likely, the administration was earlier prepping for a possible more dramatic, deadly, and politically justifiable response when and if Iran soon overreached.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/iranian-analytics/

We Make Our Own Meanings

The folks that write this type of stuff have this meaning - whites had more power, therefore their violent behaviors were more wrong than the violent behaviors of the folks with less power.

They should read "Guns, Germs and Steel" so they could see the reality of human experience. Those who progressed to agriculture had extra food and that allowed food storage, building of year around shelter, and specialization (smiths, farmers, politicians, priests, fishermen, carpenters, masons, etc). Disease followed, leaving the surviving "civilized" folks living in cities less vulnerable to the germs they supported via civilization. While they grew smaller and sicker eating an agriculturalist's diet, they could have a child each year, and would win the breeding wars.

Specialization and population growth was a two headed monster that allowed some groups to be as dominant as the whites were when they arrived in america. If they were violent to the natives, it was just as likely the natives were violent to them - only the ones with guns, germs and steel were better at warring and could replace those lost. The natives, limited to a  child every 4 years, could not compete.

One example, the Comanche, who were exterminating competing tribes to dominate the great plains and the buffalo, were estimated to have been 16,000 in number at their peak. At that time, there were already millions of whites. Were whites worse than the Comanche because they were better at genocide? In my view, no, whites were evolving to a point of view that exterminating, enslaving or dominating non-white, or non-Americans, was wrong. That's why there are still pockets of natives in this country. That they were as murderous as the natives but better at it does not make for me the meaning that whites were bad and the less powerful natives were good. Humans are humans, with many good and bad elements in how we struggle to secure our own safety and abundance of resources.

Crying about asymmetry of power is missing the point that human groups have struggled for dominance since they were human, and this point in history may be the most peaceful time that has ever been.

https://bt24news.com/analysis-comment/opinion-the-vicious-reality-behind-the-thanksgiving-myth/

What Does "inequality" Mean and How Should it Be Measured?

I should memorize this article.

There is a simple theory of inequality in which rich people have nearly all the wealth and income, and do nearly all the spending, while poor people struggle along with the minimum of those things necessary for survival. It’s understandable that some people think this way. In many places in the world today, and for most complex societies in human history, the picture is accurate. Moreover, the rich elite usually hoards most of the economic opportunity, civil freedoms, political power, legal status and other good things for itself and its children.
https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2019/12/03/inequality_is_decidedly_not_the_problem_in_the_us__103991.html

Clown Show for Clowns

"First it was COLLUSION! Can you believe it? Trump was colluding with the Russians to steal the election from its rightful owner, H.R. Clinton."
https://spectator.us/impeachment-pathetic-clown-show/

Good luck democrats, I hope it works as well for you as it did for the GOP.