Washington Poop.

The disappointment, the head-slapping, the wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth — such are the predictable reactions among pundits, prognosticators and political strategists when the guy who surely couldn’t win surely did.

…

So it’s been for the past few days since Donald Trump grabbed the wheel from overnight sensation Kamala Harris — who, it must be said, performed miraculously given her abrupt campaign of just 103 days. Trump has enjoyed decades of name recognition. And despite his multiple, familiar offenses, including the “big lie,” he is likely to win even the popular vote, the first Republican in 20 years to do so.

But how?

Just bad luck, I suppose.

Read it.

Those in power talk about inflation as if it’s a natural occurrence.

They’d have you believe that there’s no more sense in blaming government leaders for a bout of inflation than in blaming them for rainy weather on the weekend. This is nonsense.

The White House and Congress deserve to be blamed for inflation, because the amount of money the federal government spends determines the amount of money that the Federal Reserve creates, and that in turn determines how much inflation occurs.

The more money there is, the more inflation there will be.

When private individuals create money, they may face imprisonment for the crime of counterfeiting. Private counterfeiting is recognized as a form of theft: Counterfeit bills that are accepted and put into circulation increase the money supply and cause everyone’s dollars to be worth a little less.

When the government and the Federal Reserve expand the money supply, it has the same inflationary effect, only on a much larger scale and without the risk of imprisonment.

Gothamist.

For the first time in four years, New York City did not break a new record for drug overdose deaths in 2023, according to new city data released Thursday.

But while overdose deaths are down among some groups of New Yorkers, the figures show there’s been little progress in the hardest-hit communities. Black New Yorkers are still recording high rates of overdose deaths and rates increased in some low-income communities, according to city data, which advocates say is a stark reminder that these communities need more resources.

The city recorded 3,046 overdose deaths in 2023, down 1% from the previous year’s 3,070, according to the data. About 100 fewer white New Yorkers died of accidental drug overdoses in 2023 than in 2022, and the overdose death rate dropped 9% in the wealthiest city neighborhoods.

To be clear, these ‘overdose deaths’ are happening to PEOPLE WHO VOLUNTARILY TAKE ILLEGAL DRUGS. A drug overdose is not like rain, which droppeth on the just and the unjust alike; IT IS THE CONSEQUENCE OF A CHOICE. If a ‘community’ is ‘hardest-hit’, IT IS BECAUSE THAT COMMUNITY IS CHOCK FULL O’ DRUG USERS. This is like saying that a guy who puts a gun to his head is ‘hardest-hit’. This is not a ‘stark reminder that these communities need more resources’; it is a reminder that these ‘communities’ need FEWER DRUG USERS. Additional ‘resources’ will merely GO TO BUY MORE DRUGS, unless the root cause of the problem is addressed, which is ILLEGAL DRUG USE.

Unbelievable.

Read it.

No. Chemicals are not killing people. People are killing themselves (and occasionally others) by using chemicals in search of a utopia that doesn’t require any work. If it weren’t fentanyl, it would be heroin, or meth, or crack, or oxycontin, or whatever’s fashionable this week.

People make choices, and sometimes those choices are stupid. Think of it as evolution in action: Natural selection always acts to remove the weak and foolish, and there’s a point to that, to make sure that such do not reproduce. The modern ideology is that it’s the government’s job to save people from themselves (and the taxpayers’ job to pay for it), regardless of what those people themselves choose to do. Nature always wins, sooner or later.

Read it.

I first saw this term on Hacker News. It made me vomit, and of course the defenders gave the usual accusations and evasions:

You must be in favor of traffic violence.
Language evolves; get over it.

But no, we already had “traffic accidents,” so “traffic violence” is just an excuse for grifters to grift.

The first one doesn’t even deserve a response. But let’s consider the “language evolves!” defense.

This excrescence is, of course, modeled on the success of the trope ‘Gun Violence’, invented by the Woke to remove agency from the people who actually use the guns and place the blame on the guns themselves.

The Economist.

Perhaps we might do something to the drivers? After all, contrary to proglodyte mythology, cars don’t drive themselves (any more than guns shoot themselves).

The Hill.

Surgeon General Vivek Murthy is declaring firearm violence in the U.S. a public health crisis, not only for the tens of thousands who die from gun violence each year but also due to far-reaching trauma that impacts the wider population.

In his advisory, the first time a Surgeon General has declared a public health advisory on gun violence, Murthy highlights recent statistics on gun violence in the U.S. which show a consistent rise in deaths due to firearm-related injuries.

And of course the reason they’re doing this, pretending that guns are just wandering around shooting people by themselves, like thunderstorms, is because government employees aren’t willing to take steps against the root cause, which is People Behaving Badly, and want to use the excuse of ‘public health’ to put more restrictions on gun ownership.

The biggest step we could take to reduce ‘gun violence’ is to ban black males below the age of 30 from possessing firearms. But that will never happen, so we’re faced with all of this hand-waving and wheel-spinning.

John C. Wright.

The managerial bureaucracy and civil service currently sets the agenda for major politicians, for the UN and the EU and the WEF, and all national and international organizations attempting to install a New World Order.

This New World Order regards men as fungible, interchangeable, merely resources to be used for given purposes. We are livestock to them.

If the population is aging in one nation, and new and younger workers are needed to pay for their pensions, merely importing a goodly number of units of people is regarded as prudent by the New World Order bureaucrats.

The fact that the migrants have different language, religion, worldview, different values, virtues, vices and cultural identity than do the native born is irrelevant to the bureaucrats.

To them, human life is numbers in a ledger.

Such thinking is the inevitable result of Identity Politics. No one is an individual, merely an instance of a class, whatever class is most useful for the person pushing his opinion.

New York Times.

As you might expect from a Voice of the Crust like the Times, the answer is ‘really bad’. And they focus on ‘how are they bad?’ rather than the more interesting question of ‘why are they bad?’.

Let’s start from scratch (no pun intended)(well, maybe a little bit….):

1. People buy processed food because it gives them something to eat that takes less effort than ‘making it from scratch’–the same reason they drive cars rather than walk, the same reason they use washing machines and dishwashers rather than doing their laundry and their washing-up by hand. If I’m hungry, a Big Mac takes me ten minutes at the drive-through as opposed to an hour shopping at a grocery store and cooking it on a stove I might not even have (assuming that I even know how to cook, as most people today don’t). My mother learned how to cook at Home Ec in High School. When I was in High School, they didn’t even offer Home Ec, because obviously everybody was going to go to college and so we had no time for that working-class shit.
2. ‘Prepared’ foods don’t last as long in storage as bulk food ingredients. Uncooked rice, flour, and pasta will last a loooooong time. Already-made-up dishes need to survive weeks or months traveling from the ‘factory’ to the store and from the store to the home and in the home until people sit down to eat them. To create these ‘shelf-stable’ comestibles, manufacturers load them up with ‘preservatives’ that keep them from going bad but give woke nutritionists the galloping never-get-overs. (Compare how long home-made bread lasts before going stale with the loaf you buy at Kroger.) Chemically-faked ‘artificial flavors’ also stay potent longer than those extracted from nature.
3. People, when buying ‘prepared’ foods, prefer stuff that tastes good. (Surprise, surprise, surprise….) That’s why kids would rather eat Frosted Flakes than Grape Nuts. Modern parents want kids that are quiet rather than healthy. Hence the prevalence of taste-enhancers like high-fructose corn syrup and artificial flavors.

So there is it. People have preferences (the swine). Sellers of food pander to those preferences (the swine). The only reason Cola-Cola no longer contains cocaine is that it’s against the law. In a world in which none of the Common Folk have any agency, in which everything that is wrong is wrong because ‘the devil/corporation made me do it’, in which the reason a black teen shot his girlfriend is obviously the fault of Smith & Wesson, we need comprehensive regulation by the Cloud People so that the unenlightened will be saved from themselves.

The Foundry.

No, she didn’t ‘lose her son to fentanyl’; fentanyl isn’t a random occurrence of nature, like a typhoon or an earthquake. Her son chose to take fentanyl and did so until he died. Part of the failure is on his parents, who didn’t arm him with the mental and spiritual tools to avoid that sort of destructive self-indulgence.

Evolution works whether one wants it to or not. Natural selection, like gravity, works automatically, and specializes in removing from the gene pool the weak and the stupid. Our technological has permitted the weak and stupid to survive and breed, and such a defective system merely prolongs the inevitable.

Unfortunately, evolution is not a speedy process, which means that many of us will live out our lives before the proper balance is restored. Sucks to be us.

The Pentagon’s new recruitment policy is a disaster (The Hill)

What’s behind Gen Z and the US military recruitment crisis? (Scripps News)

Inside the Navy’s quest to fix its recruiting crisis (Navy Times)

U.S. Military Struggles to Fill Its Ranks (KQED)

The only branch that has no problem making its quotas is the Marine Corps. Do the other branches look at what they’re doing and what Marines are doing and try to figure out what works? Of course not.

Read it.

Did a “nonbinary bathroom ban” kill an Oklahoma trans teen? That’s what tax-funded news wants you to think.

The PBS NewsHour again demonstrated its fealty to “trans” issues, while adding yet another new definition into the brave new mix, in a Thursday evening story on the tragic case of Nex Benedict, a “non-binary” Oklahoma student who died mysteriously one day after a fight in a school restroom.

How much of a stretch is it to suspect that if the details of this ‘mysterious’ death actually came out, we would see that there’s nothing mysterious about it at all?

Read it.

“In a world that is not conforming to the narrative of continuous Progress, the response from self-declared progressives has been to try to rewrite our past into the multicultural utopia that they wish to see realised. This will not end well. The war on reality cannot be won.”

– Luke Dodson

At this moment, when there is an awful struggle over the Hebrews’ place in the world – so dire that you’re waiting for World War Three to vaporize everything you’ve ever cared about – one observes the Jewish American scene with trepidation. Since I am a Jewish American, I’m just going to flop this one on the table like so much meat to see what kind of animals it brings out of the woodwork to fight over it.

The Foundry.

The Left has found its newest implausible scapegoat for a crime wave that began in 2020; namely, foreign car companies.

A recent editorial column in The New York Times, “Kia and Hyundai Helped Enable a Crime Wave. They Should Pay for It,” has been part of a spate of national and local media stories blaming the massive surge in car thefts on the Korean automaker. (Kia is owned by Hyundai.)

A number of blue cities beset by crime and auto thefts have decided to sue the automakers following the success of a class-action lawsuit earlier this year. On the list of cities suing Kia and Hyundai are Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, and New York.

The contention here is that it’s the fault of the South Korean car companies for making some of their vehicles too easy to steal.

The Atlantic.

This article offers an appalling insight into the proglodyte mind.

Income is one vital indicator of well-being, but it is not the only one: Things like health outcomes and social mobility matter too. That’s why we should shift our focus from poverty to disadvantage. Disadvantage is a more useful term than poverty because we aren’t just talking about income—we’re trying to capture the complexity of a person’s life chances being hindered by multiple circumstances. Disadvantage is more accurate because it implies an injustice. People are being held back—unfairly.

It’s not enough to just describe the position of the poor. It must be described in a way that blames someone else. “People are being held back–unfairly.” The obvious assumption is that if it weren’t for that unjust, unfair ‘holding back’, they’d be just as ‘advantaged’ as everybody else. Are they morons? Doesn’t matter. Are they lazy? Doesn’t matter. Are they vicious? Doesn’t matter. Are they feckless?Doesn’t matter. Do they come from a culture that encourages crime, violence, and venality? Doesn’t matter. They are ‘disadvantaged’ and therefore victims. They have no agency. Their life circumstances have no relation to what they do or don’t do. They are ‘disadvantaged’ and therefore victims, like a species of fish or insect.

Go ahead and read the whole thing; it reads like anthropologists discussing a species of animal, governed by instinct and unable to exert any control on their own lives. That’s what people outside the Crust look like to the Anointed: A different species that must be controlled and manipulated, whether they like it or not.

Disgusting.

The Other McCain.

Gloria: “Daddy, did you know that sixty-five percent of the people murdered in this country in the last ten years were killed by handguns?”
Archie Bunker: “Would it make you feel any better, little girl, if they was pushed out of windows?”

That exchange from a 1972 episode of All in the Family always comes to mind when I here politicians and the media discussing “gun violence.” My guns have never perpetrated any violence, and probably your guns are equally innocent, but liberals have a quasi-religious belief that criminals are not responsible for crime. No, it would be wrong to blame the criminals and put them in prison, according to Our Moral and Intellectual Superiors™ in the Democratic Party.

Gates of Vienna.

For many years the legacy media have identified firearms as the major social problem, one that has to be dealt with by restricting the rights of law-abiding citizens to acquire and retain guns. Whenever some criminal, terrorist, or lunatic blows people away using a gun, politicians and TV talking heads belabor the populace with diatribes about “gun violence” — as if guns made the decision to kill innocent people, rather than maniacs and thugs.

…

That pesky gunfire just keeps erupting! It’s like cosmic rays — it just happens. The only way to keep people safe is to take away their right to own firearms. That’ll fix it.

The Foundry (Victor Davis Hanson)

A transgender Tennessee mass shooter this week executed three adults and three nine-year-old children at a Nashville private Christian school.

Supposedly, she left behind her a manifesto justifying her mass killing. As of this writing, law enforcement officials have declined to make the document public.

Yet in about a nanosecond after the news was disclosed, the left-wing activist machine kicked in, led by politicians, entertainers, and the media.

Apparently the shooter was the real victim, and anyway Republicans are to blame.

Joel Kotkin wrings his hands damned near off.

An author should be pleased to see his thesis bolstered by events. Yet since writing The Coming of Neo-Feudalism in 2020, I have not found any joy in the continued growth of the West’s class divides, as wealth becomes increasingly concentrated in ever fewer hands. The good news is that the working and middle classes are not yet out for the count, and are showing welcome signs of pushback against both state and corporate power.

A lot of current journalism is like this: The author lays out a bunch of things that he says are happening (without any attempt to describe just exactly why that is; one hopes that he gets around to it eventually, but such hopes are frequently disappointed), and he just assumes that the results of these evil processes are as disturbing to his readers as they are to him.

Personally, I don’t have any problem with ‘concentration of wealth in even fewer hands’ when the ‘fewer’ refers to hundreds of thousands if not millions of ‘hands’, ‘fewer’ only in comparison with the total population of what is (let’s face it) one of the world’s largest countries, AND knowing as I do that ‘concentration of wealth’ is necessary before that wealth can be used to generate even more wealth. Presumably increasing dispersal of wealth would be a better outcome in the author’s eyes,  but dispersal of wealth merely means that it will be used for consumption rather than investment (dammit, there’s that pesky Econ 101 again), which makes a lot of people slightly better off in the short term at the cost of making everyone worse off in the long term.

Further fisking is left as an exercise for the reader–and I would encourage you to do so; the mental muscles required by this process rarely get enough work in these degenerate modern times.

Read it.

In all this hand-wringing, one might be forgiven for thinking that a bunch of guns just got together one day and ambushed this poor kid. Like rain, ‘gun violence’ falleth upon the just and the unjust alike.

(Hey, maybe we could blame deforestation on Chainsaws Behaving Badly.)

Read it.

In a reflection of a changed political landscape, a new report by the advocacy group Giffords finds that 525 significant gun laws have passed at the state level since the 2012 massacre.

Laws passed: Many.

Lives saved: [chirp] … [chirp] … [chirp]….

Read it.

After all, those guns just run around killing people.

If we were going to be ‘honest about guns’ we would ban young black males from possessing firearms.

Read it.

After all, the guns just walked in and started shooting by themselves.

Charles C.W. Cooke takes on the “shit happens” Narrative.

Even now, the day before the midterms, the New York Times cannot help but cast Joe Biden as an unfortunate bystander to his own presidency.

This is endemic in the Narrative Media. Nothing bad that happens to the Fashionable People happens because of something they did; it all just descends on them like rain out of heaven. AIDS ‘just happens’ to homosexuals; it’s not the result of self-indulgent irresponsible behavior on their part. Monkey pox? They were just, like, standing there when it hit them. Michael Brown? Just walking down the street, minding his own business, when he was viciously attacked by racist police. George Floyd? Just walking down the street, minding his own business, when he was viciously attacked by racist police. In the proglodyte world, nobody has agency–everything happens to you, nothing you can or could do would affect how you are treated by The System, SOCIETY IS TO BLAME under the influence of Republicans and other minions of Sauron Donald Trump.

This is the basis of Affirmative Action, especially in education. Grades aren’t something that is achieved; they are assigned to you by a (manifestly racist) system; nothing to do with you and everything to do with The Man; and so you are entitled to the same benefits as a white or Asian (honorary white) student who busted his or her ass to achieve that 3.95 average.

This is the basis of the proglodyte affection for abortion: This poor girl was just walking down the street when a fetus entered her body, like being struck by a meteorite; no action (or inaction) on her part would have affected this unfortunate stroke of ill luck. Like getting food poisoning or tetanus, we must save her from this bad turn of the wheel.

The Biology Deniers use this to push transgenderism: These poor kids just happened to be assigned the wrong sex at birth, and we must therefore exert every effort to compensate for this nasty trick that fate (and Republicans) have inflicted upon them.