I received some images from an anonymous source to share with the suggestion to start a “#OrangeYouGlad” campaign. Here is the first one. Share widely and freely.
If Democratic voters and party leaders are serious about winning the general election, they need to abandon Ms. Clinton’s sinking ship. The fiercely negative publicity Ms. Clinton is likely to elicit will diminish all chances the Democrats have to recoup majorities in both houses of Congress. Allowing the Republican party to win the presidency would be disastrous for Democrats—a fate that will be sealed with Ms. Clinton as the nominee.
Michael Sainato
May 31, 2016
Fellow Democrats Turn on Clinton
[I’m nearly certain all of the above is true. And I’m thrilled that someone as evil as Clinton is almost for certain going to fail in her attempt to become the most powerful person in the world.
But what I find most interesting is that nearly all people think in terms of what is good/bad for the political parties involved. They do not express concern for our country, our economic situation, or human rights in terms other than what it means to their political party/tribe.
In those, more appropriate, terms there are no good outcomes.
I’m going to keep preparing for the worst and stocking up on popcorn. My “tribe” is composed of less than a couple dozen people. Democrats and Republicans are “The Others” to me.—Joe]
One simple truth that could be endlessly reiterated, and effectively applied to nine-tenths of the statist proposals now being put forward or enacted in such profusion, is that the government has nothing to give to anybody that it doesn’t first take from somebody else. In other words, all its relief and subsidy schemes are merely ways of robbing Peter to support Paul.
Henry Hazlitt
May 27, 2016
The Task Confronting Libertarians
[Originally published in the March 1968 issue of The Freeman. Excerpted from The Wisdom of Henry Hazlitt]
[While I can see this has potential I can also see that many people feel completely justified in robbing Peter. Still it is worth trying and probably puts the advocate for the statist on weaker ground and will sway some to a more principled position.—Joe]
Politics has sometimes been called “the art of the possible”. But that implies a level of constraint that simply does not exist in democratic politics.
As a noted economist has pointed out, “No voting system could prevent the California electorate from simultaneously demanding low electricity prices and no new generating plants while using ever increasing amounts of electricity.”
This is just one of many ways the impossible can win elections. Beliefs can trump facts in politics. And have repeatedly trumped facts throughout history.
Thomas Sowell
2008
Applied Economics, 2nd Edition
[Everything of Sowell’s which I have read is awesome. This book is no exception. I have three more QOTDs to pull from this book.—Joe]
For several weeks I have been reading of Bill Clinton going on multiple trips onboard convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s “Lolita Express”. He would ditch the Secret Service and hop on board Epstein’s 727. Flight logs show he has taken at least 26 trips aboard the plane which:
…earned its Nabakov-inspired nickname because it was reportedly outfitted with a bed where passengers had group sex with young girls.
At first I sort of dismissed it as a wild conspiracy theory type of thing. But I keep seeing more and more about it. Now I see, supposedly:
“At least one woman on the compound was there unwillingly” and was an actual sex slave, according to the Daily Mail.
The woman was allegedly forced to have sex with “politicians, businessmen, royalty, [and] academicians” at the retreat and was just one of “more than 40 women” that have come forth with claims against Epstein, showing the vast scale of the man’s dark operations, which aren’t limited only to ‘Orgy Island.’
Moreover Epstein was invited to Chelsea Clinton’s wedding in 2010, amongst 400 other guests, demonstrating his close friendship with the Clinton family.
And yet Hillary remains married to Bill rather than pulling a Lorena Bobbitt to protect other women and divorcing him. It must be to lock in the Lolita lovers vote.
Yes, there are winners and losers in capitalism. The winners are those who are honest, industrious, thoughtful, prudent, frugal, responsible, disciplined, and efficient. The losers are those who are shiftless, lazy, imprudent, extravagant, negligent, impractical, and inefficient.
Bob Livingston
May 9, 2016
Socialism is an immoral system
[There are also cases in capitalism where people just get lucky (both bad and good luck). These bad luck situations are what the critics of capitalism typically focus on but bad luck happens in any system. And the “bad luck” examples of socialism are far worse (see Venezuela) than the capitalist examples.
A system with free markets and free minds (capitalism) is not only the most moral system but also has the best overall results. Even with the evidence on display from the last 7+ years of a socialist president that we have openly and thinly veiled socialist candidates for public office let alone serious candidates for U.S. President is mindboggling to me.
I’ve been stockpiling food and precious metals (steel, copper, and lead) in preparation for the end game which I have done all I could to avoid. I’m pretty much all set as best I can now. I think I just need to add some popcorn to my food stores.—Joe]
The Anti’s are out there. They can’t be bargained with. They can’t be reasoned with. They don’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And they absolutely will not stop, ever, until your rights are dead.
Ratus
May 25, 2016
Comment to They have to lie to win
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]
The Clinton email scandal continues to deteriorate. Most people following the issue will be aware of the review by the inspector general which was released yesterday. In part it said:
Two staff in S/ES-IRM reported to the OIG that, in late 2010, they each discussed their concerns about Secretary Clinton’s use of a personal email account in separate meetings with the then-Director of S/ES-IRM. In one meeting, one staff member raised concerns that information sent and received on Secretary Clinton’s account could contain Federal records that needed to be preserved in order to satisfy Federal recordkeeping requirements. According to the staff member, the Director stated that the Secretary’s personal system had been reviewed and approved by Department legal staff and that the matter was not to be discussed any further. As previously noted, OIG found no evidence that staff in the Office of the Legal Adviser reviewed or approved Secretary Clinton’s personal system. According to the other S/ES-IRM staff member who raised concerns abut the server, the Director stated that the mission of S/ES-IRM is to support the Secretary and instructed the staff never to speak of the Secretary’s personal email system again.
Emphasis added.
Ms.Clinton has also publically stated it was reviewed and approved. There are lots of other damning items in the review. And we haven’t even seen the results of the FBI investigation yet. Interesting time are ahead for “Crooked Clinton”.
But unless you “have your finger on the pulse” of some other sources you wouldn’t know that some really mindboggling stupid computer security practices were in place at the Clinton residence:
According to historic Internet address maps stored by San Mateo, Calif. based Farsight Security, among the handful of Internet addresses historically assigned to the domain “clintonemail.com” was the numeric address 24.187.234.188. The subdomain attached to that Internet address was….wait for it…. “printer.clintonemail.com“.
…
Ronald Guilmette, a private security researcher in California who prompted me to look up this information, said printing things to an Internet-based printer set up this way might have made the printer data vulnerable to eavesdropping.
“Whoever set up their home network like that was a security idiot, and it’s a dumb thing to do,” Guilmette said. “Not just because any idiot on the Internet can just waste all your toner. Some of these printers have simple vulnerabilities that leave them easy to be hacked into.”
More importantly, any emails or other documents that the Clintons decided to print would be sent out over the Internet — however briefly — before going back to the printer. And that data may have been sniffable by other customers of the same ISP, Guilmette said.
“People are getting all upset saying hackers could have broken into her server, but what I’m saying is that people could have gotten confidential documents easily without breaking into anything,” Guilmette said. “So Mrs. Clinton is sitting there, tap-tap-tapping on her computer and decides to print something out. A clever Chinese hacker could have figured out, ‘Hey, I should get my own Internet address on the same block as the Clinton’s server and just sniff the local network traffic for printer files.’”
I repeat, “Whoever set up their home network like that was a security idiot…”. It’s stupid to route your printer traffic via an outside network unless you are only printing the most vanilla of materials and need for people in the outside world to use your printer. Clinton had material on her email server that was highly classified. If she used the printer in this way it’s difficult to imagine that her printer traffic was not intercepted by unauthorized people. This is, in part, because whoever created the amazingly insecure system, essentially, advertised it to the public with the public subdomain records.
People need to go to jail over this.
Our country is in the best of hands.
I see it in terms of political liberals, who respond to simple niceness with ever increasing demands for total capitulation and subservience under their brutal and capricious rule, and who respond to the cruelty and threat of groups like Islam with ever increasing groveling and ass-kissing. Morals, principle, it all means nothing.
Say you have no problem with men dressing as women and suddenly they demand you let those men be naked with your six year old daughter in a gym locker room. Say your religion requires those transgender men be thrown from buildings and murdered, and they will seek to import you into the country, provide you with free welfare, and give you victim status to get special privileges over real Americans. It is not logical.
Anonymous Conservative
May 25, 2016
On Violence, Amygdala, And Shifting Toward K
[While his claim about the transgender goals are less than accurate his point has a lot of truth to it. The liberal/progressives are all about tolerance and acceptance and want to politically suppress people who display a Confederate flag, deface bumper stickers of NRA members, and riot at assembles of their political opponents. All these people are, almost without exception, peaceful and law-abiding.
The progressives of the world are insistent that Muslims not be discriminated against, that refugees, consisting of a disproportionate number of warrior aged men with a demonstrated propensity for sexual violence, be allowed into their societies. Most terrorists events in the world are the work of Muslims. Nearly all armed conflicts in the world today involve Muslims on one or both sides. And drawing blasphemous cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed will get you murdered.
So what gives? Anonymous Conservative proposed hypothesis is that these people have mental issues. I have to conclude either this or that, as frequently proposed by Lyle, these people recognize Muslims as the enemy of their political opponents and hence, after a fashion, they are their short term allies.
In any case it is not logical nor does it bode well for freedom.—Joe]
I find the topic of progressives and the use of force very interesting. I have been saying for years that it’s part of their nature.
Here we have more evidence of progressives actively engaging in violence to to get their way or to protest not getting their way:
The Nevada State Democratic Party warned the Democratic National Committee Monday that supporters of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders have displayed a “penchant for … actual violence’ and could disrupt this summer’s Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.
And more recently we have the violent protestors against Trump:
Albuquerque attorney Doug Antoon said rocks were flying through the convention center windows as he was leaving Tuesday night. Glass was breaking and landing near his feet.
“This was not a protest, this was a riot. These are hate groups,” he said of the demonstrators.
Yet in Moscow Idaho which is the most progressive city in the state, when my children went to high school (this was sometime between 1999 and 2002) the school insisted all students sign this:
Isn’t that interesting? They redefined the word violence to include words, looks, and gestures that are offensive or hurts a person’s feelings. Not only is self defense against the rules, but a student could get in trouble for “threating” to exercise their First Amendment rights. They are changing the language to achieve their goal of repression of basic human rights under the guise of preventing and stopping “violence”.
It is abundantly clear these progressives need to be educated on the topics of tolerance and human rights.
Barack Obama is single handily responsible for the sales of more guns and ammo than any human being in the history of the United States. Clinton could do better.
Richard Feldman
May 23, 2016
Hillary Clinton Could Topple Obama’s Record for Revving Gun Sales
[While there is more than a little truth to this, Chuck Schumer, Diane Feinstein, and numerous other evil politicians, as well as Bloomberg, Moms Demand, and The Brady Campaign contributed their fair share and will again contribute if our country is subjected to another President Clinton.
President Bill Clinton was a big part of the reason I became a gun owner and got into explosives. A President Hillary Clinton could be the reason millions more become gun owners.
You realize what this means, right? Anti-gun people should vote against Hillary to keep guns out of the hands of the American people.—Joe]
Via Bruce Schneier we have this extremely timely and fascinating article, The Evolving Challenges for Explosive Detection in the Aviation Sector and Beyond:
Another misnomer propagated largely in the press is that these type of explosives threats are not detectable with currently deployed technologies. This is false. The latest generation ETDs, when used in combination with the latest X-ray technologies, are generally excellent at detecting TNT, plasticized explosives such as C-4, PETN (Detasheet), and Semtex. This powerful combination of technologies should catch these explosives threats, even if it were concealed in the electronics of a laptop, because ETD swabs can detect minute amounts of residue.
Even an amateur chemist doesn’t have to think about this topic much to come up with explosives that are undetectable with the latest generation of explosive trace detection (ETD) equipment. As near as I can tell things I pointed out nearly nine years ago are still vulnerabilities.
The OIG also reported last summer that tests of the screening system showed that 95 percent of attempts to smuggle weapons through U.S. checkpoints were successful.
This has actually gotten worse since they started prohibiting weapons on board over 40 years ago. They should just give up on this and let passengers defend the cabin.
The reality of our current war on terrorism is that the costs are inversely correlated. Terrorists can use inexpensive but highly effective means to attack high-value and highly protected targets, forcing governments to take stricter and more costly measures to provide protection. Their model scales while ours becomes more difficult to sustain. Until we are successful in changing the paradigm in which cheap terrorism is effective terrorism, we need to be prepared to continue to invest in technologies and processes that make it more difficult for them to succeed.
Emphasis added. I agree with this. We must change the paradigm. We currently have nothing but security theater.
We are spending trillions of dollars and have nothing of substance to show for it. Those resources could, and should, have been spend in some serious elimination of terrorists rather than attempting to make it incrementally difficult for them at exponential costs to us. We have the resources and technology to make it exponentially expensive for them at incremental cost for us. We have a ruthless enemy who is willing to murder untold numbers of innocent people. We dealt with cultures like this in WWII and fundamentally changed their mindset to make the culture more tolerant to people who were different from them. These intolerant, evil, enemies are now tolerant, functional, members of a world society. It’s time to treat our current enemy with the known cure for evil.
If they are not happy with Vermont’s laws they should just move back to their safe space in NYC.
Geezum
May 13, 2016
Comment to Gun control bills fail in Vermont
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]
Typically, as with any debate over gun rights, rational viewpoints are hard to find. Sen. Loretta Weinberg, D-Bergen, said the new standards could lead to “every cabdriver, every pizza delivery driver, and anyone else living or working in a high-crime neighborhood to qualify for a firearms permit.”
That sounds a little extreme, but is that any more hysterical than the gun-rights activists sounding alarms about government conspiracies and widespread gun confiscation every time government wants to ban an assault rifle or expand background checks?
In general terms, however, Weinberg’s warning should be heeded. The gun-rights crowd is trying to exploit the death of Carol Bowne, a Berlin Township woman allegedly stabbed to death by an ex-boyfriend while she was awaiting a permit to carry a gun for protection. Would Bowne’s life have been saved by an easier permitting process? We’ll never know. But as tragic as her death was, we can’t allow politicians to use the anger and grief over that death to advance an unnecessary and dangerous relaxation in the state’s gun controls.
Asbury Park Press
May 13, 2016
EDITORIAL: Don’t loosen grip on gun control
[This is almost material that could have come from The Onion.
The thought of people living or working in a high-crime area being allowed to defend themselves is considered “extreme” and “hysterical”? Wow!
They say, “We can’t allow politicians to use the anger and grief over that death…” Interesting. We should remember that the next time some activist wants to use anger and grief over the tragic death of someone murdered by a criminal with a gun. But of course that’s not how it works with these people. They have zero problem with their own hypocrisy.
Of course it may not be hypocrisy. It could be the sky is a different color in their universe.—Joe]
This is an interesting idea:
For too long we have watched as automation has cost us blue-collar jobs. Automating government, and getting rid of the politicians and lawyers is something I could really get behind. For a while, there would be an increase in embezzlement, ponzi schemes, cons, thefts, and other non-confrontational crime, as the politicians and lawyers sought out new employment consistent with their psychologies, but once they were all behind bars, the world would be a considerably better place.
But there are a lot of other things to consider as well. Government is power. And people with pay a lot to have access to that power. Detecting the existence of and finding the source of corruption in a computer system may be far more difficult than when you are dealing with people.
Open source and independently operated systems may mitigate the risks. I’ll have to think about this some more… A LOT more.
Liberalism is a totally different thought process. Inherent to it is a drive to ignore reality and shift mental focus toward metrics that are, to any sane individual, totally irrelevant to the questions at hand.
Anonymous Conservative
October 11, 2015
Liberals are Socially Focused on Group Dynamics
[This reminds me of a conversation I had with an admitted Marxist after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He said the U.S. shouldn’t have invaded because we didn’t have the support of “our friends” France and Germany. I was confused. Why should this matter? And it was known at the time that France and Germany had been selling Iraq supplies for building WMDs which the U.N. was trying to find and being stymied by Iraq. As far as I was concern France and Germany were aiding an enemy and even if they weren’t, since when does the determination of right and wrong depend on whether your “friends” agree with you or not? He insisted it did but could not explain further than “it just does”.
The “progressive” mind is an example of mental defect.—Joe]
Roberts essentially told would-be Trumpistas not to bother the courts with important issues, that if you want to beat Obama you have to get your own strongman—complete with pen, phone, and contempt for the Constitution. So they did.
Ilya Shapiro
May 5, 2016
How John Roberts Begat Donald Trump
[H/T to Glenn Reynolds.
As others have said, the political left created Trump. Roberts isn’t generally considered a leftist, but he let stand a clearly unconstitutional law which was only supported by the political left.—Joe]