Lincoln won in 1860 with an absolute majority of electoral votes but only 39.8% of the popular vote. His presidency was declared illegitimate by the Democrats, seven states immediately seceded and formed the Confederacy, and the Civil War began a few weeks after Lincoln's inauguration. The parallels to our time are remarkable.So even in 1860, the Democrats were playing the "But we won the popular vote! The Electoral College is UNFAIR!" card after losing an election.
And of course, having lost the election, the southern Democrats immediately seceded.
If the "Civil War" was really about slavery, then the Democrats seceding from the country following the election of someone commonly thought of as an abolitionist really does emphasize their history of racism, doesn't it?
But the War of American Southern Independence was over state's rights and economic issues, because the North was getting rich on the backs of the South.
Speaking of which, slavery was a net loss for the United States. It makes a very sound economic argument against slavery. It does so by excising the moral component first and looks at slavery solely as an economic activity, to the extent that the writer felt the need to add a disclaimer at the beginning of the piece advising the reader that slavery is morally reprehensible (which it most assuredly is).
Slaves are far less productive that free laborers. They have no incentive to do any more work than the absolute minimum to avoid punishment, and have zero incentive (and a number of disincentives) to use their brain to perform tasks more intelligently. So every slave is a potentially productive worker converted into an unproductive one. Thus, every dollar of capital invested in a slave was a dollar invested in reducing worker productivity.The only exception I take to that description is with the penultimate sentence. Every slave is a potentially productive worker converted into a much less productive one. Slaves don't do no work (which would be "unproductive"); they do the minimum required.
And for that bare minimum of work, they must be fed and housed and clothed exactly as a non-slave worker must be. The only difference here is what you have to pay to do that.
Slavery, as an institution, was doomed; and even if we had not fought that war, it would have ended. Which do you think would be more productive: a machine shed full of mechanized farm implements, or a couple of bunkhouses full of slaves?
I also don't find the fact surprising that under 10% of America's 19th century economy involved cotton production. Saying that cotton was 50% of the 19th century economy is like saying that 50% of today's economy is computer software. It's not that it's just not so; it's economically impossible.
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SEND HER BACK. Send her back to Somalia. She's in the country illegally. She received her citizenship under false pretenses and committed perjury to get it. She's a bigamist and has committed tax fraud.
SEND HER BACK.
So say we all.
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Oh, my, this is just something to behold. That entitled Democrat bitch who complained about racism after a fellow (white) Democrat called her out for being an entitled asshat and taking more than 10 items into the "10 items or less" lane at the supermarket--"just two Lefty assholes having an asshole pissing match in a Publix"--well, it turns out she sent out a tweetle-thing sympathizing with the moron that shot up that school in Florida, thus birthing Little Hitler and his ilk.
Sometimes I read these things and I just want to laugh like Eric Cartman did in some episode of South Park or another.
That wasn't actually the one I was thinking of, but it'll do.
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The last paragraph of this Borepatch post sums up global warming.
The science is settled, you see, but no, you can't have the data. You can't even see what was done to quality control the data, because it might damage a government's ability to protect it's national interests.It's all about money and control.
Look: if you need to adjust the hell out of the data to make it show something, you're not doing science.
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I always do keep my belt fastened unless I need to hit the head. Otherwise I stay in my seat with the belt on. Turbulence can be sudden and very violent, and you need something keeping your butt in your seat if the plane hits a sudden downdraft.
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Why does Britain need a navy? The United States is the world's policeman, isn't it? *rolleyes*
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NYC cops can't even arrest someone without being hassled by idiots and they're not allowed to do anything about the idiots. The people who think that the police are the problem are the ones who are turning our major cities into shitholes.
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Karl Denninger's prediction of economic disaster were what fueled my own predictions, but the scenarios he forecast never came to happen. Greece caused problems, but not the way he said it would, and the problem has been...contained, about as well as we could hope for. The rest of the PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Spain, etc) have not blown up.
At the core of this is the fact that a very large number of people have a vested interest in things not going into the shitter. Not just the big banks and the politicians, but everyday people, as well. So everyone pretends just as hard as they can that everything is peachy keen, even when it is not.
Denninger is right when he says that there is a crack-up coming; but I don't think it's going to happen the way he says it will. The fact that I think he's going right to a worst-case scenario does not mean that something must be done; we are very far beyond the point where things should have been fixed, and were not, because certain people liked the status quo a lot better than they have ever liked fiscal discipline, and the American working public stubbornly refuses to agree to give their entire paychecks to the government.
Meanwhile the rolls of welfare recipients grow ever larger, despite "reforms" that were meant to shrink them. Transfer payments account for half the federal budget--two trillion dollars' worth!--and the Democrats are desperately trying to find ways to increase that figure (free medical care, free college, free-free-free!) without a concomitant increase in taxes to pay for it.
Two trillion dollars is, by the way, $3.8 million a minute. Every minute of every day of the year, the federal government spends $3.8 million dollars. On an annual basis, that's about $5,500 dollars for each and every person living in the United States.
So, next time you look at your tax bill, just remember that $5,500 of it is going to support not just the people who can't work, but people who will not work.
The US can't afford this. Somewhere the budget has to be trimmed to something we can manage, or else taxes have to increase to make up for the shortfall.
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This happened in San Francisco and although they called the police, no police ever came.
You see, the rich and powerful, they live behind locked gates with armed guards standing by them--and police show up lightning-quick when called--so they are unaffected by this kind of horseshit. The average citizens, however, do not have any of those advantages.
The long and the short of it is that San Francisco is a shithole just like a whole slew of other major Democrat-run cities. It's a cesspit of crime and vagrancy because the elites running the place do not care about anything other than looking like they're compassionate human beings.
But their compassion is misplaced.
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Cries of "racist!" just aren't working all that well any longer.
The American race hustle is getting kind of old and it's a sure loser for the Democratic Party. Why they can't move beyond it and engage with the many other mighty matters of our time is one of those abiding mysteries of life, like why the birdies sing, or why the Mets can't get decent relief pitching. I daresay that in my lifetime this country has bent over backwards to assist, accommodate, and uplift the demographic that styles itself nowadays as people-of-color. None of that has managed to abolish significant economic inequality. But, really, what else can be done? Spend trillions more promoting fatherless households?It's overused. This is racist, that's racist, the other thing's racist, you're racist, your history's racist, racist, racist, racist!
Any time over the past 30 years, if the Democrat party found itself on the losing side of an issue, it was because whoever beat them was a racist. It worked really well back then; people shied away from the label like Superman from kryptonite. And so--like a two-year-old given candy to keep him from swearing--they started using it for all kinds of things, even things which couldn't be racist, like trees.
You think I'm exaggerating about that last, but I am not. Remember the complaint that blacks didn't like to go to national parks because the trees there reminded them of lynchings? I think that's when we all hit peak racism, right there, when people started trying to convince us that trees are racist. That was, by the way, in the middle of Barack Hussein Obama's term in the White House.
Americans are no longer as willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the charges of America being racist. We elected a black man President, TWICE. STFU.
And yet, Democrats are hauling that charge out with ever-greater frequency and amplitude.
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Ah, the story of the Gimli Glider. Definitely a cautionary tale against switching to the metric system.
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Cataline talks about superhero movies and asks when the fad will end. He points out that with the release of Avengers: Endgame, we are probably pretty close to that point; and I don't doubt he's right.
The nice thing about the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) to that point was that they had a story they were trying to tell, and they did it 100% correctly: establishing characters first, moving them together, collecting the pieces and assembling them into a coherent whole. Infinity War was the culmination of years of collective effort and the result of solid storytelling, where the people making the movies didn't let anything overshadow good story.
Now? Black Panther and Captain Marvel presage the next step for superhero movies: "The Great Awokening", where story and characterization and all that other stuff is heaved over the transom in favor of social justice propaganda. The next Thor movie is going to star Natalie Portman as Thor...Thorina? I guess? The name of the movie will be Thor: Love and Thunder.
Which has a title like a porn parody and won't be anywhere near as interesting. Natalie Portman is 90 pounds soaking wet and is going to be portraying Thor. Apparently, she is still viewed as his love interest is going to be 40 when this is released, Not exactly the peak of her fertility years. She has always been so wooden termites follow her around. Also Valkyrie, is now the KING of Asgard is looking for a lucky girl to be her queen. In short, this movie is trolling it's core audience.The rest of the lineup that was pimped at ComiCon sounds similarly uninteresting.
The question I have: is Natalie Portman's character actually going to be named "Thor" after she takes up the hammer and mantle etc? Or is she just going to be someone else who can wield Mjolnr and not actually Thor (the way the next James Bond movie has a black lesbian 007 but Daniel Craig plays James Bond)?
Because let's face it: I'm not watching the movie to see "some chick wields Mjolnr" unless that's the title of the film. If it's "THOR" then I want to see Thor swinging Mjolnr around and doing the usual Thor stuff. Thor is a specific character in the MCU; they could get someone other than Chris Hemsworth to play him, but it has to be a man because Thor is male. Okay, if Griselda Notthor can pick up the hammer and use it, the movie should be called GRISELDA.
Okay, try remaking Gone with the Wind only have Scarlett O'Hara played by Chadwick Boseman (who played the eponymous character in Black Panther). It doesn't work, does it?
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Going to play reactivating the AC by ear. It's going to be needed some day this week; I just don't know when, yet.
Got up today and cut the grass. I just used the tractor; no time for the pusher. In the process, I backed into the birdbath and broke it, so this weekend I'm going to have to go get more concrete adhesive like the stuff I used to repair it before, and glue it back together. *sigh*
But it's nice outside, the windows are open and the fans are off, so it's reasonably quiet.