Free Republic

[I lost my wife of 35 years last December. But we must go on. Life is too precious and short. Stay strong and cherish all the good memories. It is unusual for couple to not argue in a long marriage. But the happy memories are paramount and helps us heal the pain of loss.]

---

My sincere condolences. May you find comfort in the children she gave you and (hopefully) the grandchildren who resulted.

Eric Adams 2028. You heard it here first.

[Felon should not possess firearms while incarcerated. But allowed back into the general population, everyone of adult age should be able to protect one’s life with arms. They are not to be used while in the process of, or to perpetrate a crime; nor to threaten, the way I see it.]

---

Indeed. What we need isn’t gun bans for felons. It’s three strikes laws for serial felons.

Glad to see this. The idea that felons lose the right to own firearms never made any sense. It was a fig leaf for gun grabbers. The kind of people who would obey this law aren’t career criminals anyway. The ban is a solution looking for a problem.

[HAMAS is built on a foundation of hate that is near total in Gaza.

Israel can kill every member of HAMAS but the hate will live on in Gaza (and in the USA among those Joe Biden’s team imports) for many decades.

The hatred is now magnified by Israeli war destruction and damage.]

---

Slaughter breeds submission or at least resignation. 12% of Germany was killed in WW2. Germany’s hatred, such that it attempted to kill the world and repopulate it with Germans, died with its huge losses. As a % of population, the Russians lost half as much. Without large scale slaughter to induce submission, Palestinian hatred will never die.

Muslim massacres of Christians in the Middle East killed Christian hatred. Christians there became resigned to Muslim butchery, eventually becoming aligned with Islam against their Christian brethren who showed up during the Crusades. Middle Eastern Christians often hate the West. The fusion of Nazism and Communism that was Baathism was dreamed up by Michel Aflaq, a Middle Eastern Christian. George Habash, a prominent and vicious Palestinian terrorist leader, was a Christian.

Wouldn’t require a single bomb. Cut off the water. In three days, some of the population is either dead, or wishing it were. In 14 days, everyone is either dead or so weak from thirst, the IDF can march in arrest or kill Hamas with minimal opposition, turn the spigots back on.

[Shannon Briggs was a professional boxer with 60 wins, 53 by KO.
Jake Paul is a social media influencer.

Maybe when Tyson is 79, Paul could beat him.

Tyson was one of the hardest hitters in boxing. He seems to be in good shape. It doesn’t matter that he’s 57, it matters he’s a top professional and he’s fighting an amateur.

This shouldn’t be legal. If this fight is legitimate, Tyson could kill Paul, or leave him with lifelong damage.]

---

Exactly what I was gonna say. Only way to limit the damage? Make this a bare knuckle event.

Bit mealy-mouthed about his navy career. Says naval aviator to suggest Tom Cruise, when he flew a P-3 from a land base. A P3 is exposed to substantial risk, but an F/A-18 or even a helo would be sexier and might have sealed the deal.

Democrats give blacks a lot of freebies Republicans do not. That’s why they get the black vote.

Although black people are, on average, more conservative than white liberals, a significant break among black voters from the Democratic Party should be unlikely, because the Democratic Party treats black people collectively as an interest group it services, and the GOP does not.

Giving stuff to and doing stuff for black people is one of the main things the Democratic Party is about. Central to its messaging is that they do things for black people. That is why Joe Biden promised to nominate a black Supreme Court justice, and Gavin Newsom promised to fill a Senate vacancy with a black appointee.

The Republican Party’s messaging to white people isn’t as explicit, but the subtext is clear. They’re saying that the Democrats want to take stuff from “you,” their prospective voter who is probably white, and give it to “somebody else” who is probably black or an immigrant.

For black voters to switch in large numbers from the party that promises to give stuff to black people to the party that opposes giving stuff to black people, the Democrats have to err spectacularly. Basically, black people have to hate the stuff the Democrats are giving them.

One major thing the Democrats have been giving black people since 2020 is the Black Lives Matter agenda: Less policing, less traffic enforcement, less pretrial detention, less imprisonment, fewer police interactions with black men in areas where a lot of black people live.

It is possible that a lot of black people actually hate the Black Lives Matter agenda. It is possible that they are upset that people are driving sixty miles an hour down the street where their kids play. It is possible they blame Democrats for the rise in crime and disorder.

Black people bear the brunt of rising crime much more than white people do, so when white liberals believe crime is a conservative bogeyman, they think they’re being antiracist, but they’re actually dismissing the concerns of black people who are experiencing rising crime acutely.

The other thing that might be happening is that the GOP message that the Democrats are taking something from “you” and giving it to “somebody else” is appealing to black voters more than it has in previous cycles, because this time, the “somebody else” is migrants.

A lot of black voters live in large cities and a lot of migrants have flowed into those cities in the last couple of years, and black people in those cities are experiencing more negative impact from this than white liberals are.

The school gymnasium or the community center in a black neighborhood may have been turned into a shelter for migrants, or migrants may be congregating in a park in a predominantly black neighborhood. City programs that historically benefited black residents may be cut to defer funds to migrant services.

White liberals experience the migrants as, like, an unlicensed vendor selling cut mango in front of the art museum, and black voters experience the migrants as MS-13 selling fentanyl on their block.

I still have a hard time imagining that a lot of black voters are going to support Donald Trump, who, for better or worse, has successfully been tagged as a racist. But if black people are really fleeing Joe Biden, then it reveals a stunning disconnect, because the Biden administration has been more dedicated to “stuff for black people” than any Democratic administration in my lifetime.

If Biden is losing the support of black voters, then that means that crime and immigration are more important to black people than the BLM agenda, the appointment of black judges and executive branch officials, affirmative action and diversity policies, and student loan forgiveness.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puppet_Masters

[~”annual income 19 pounds 6”
~”annual expenditure 20 pounds”

What matters in measuring poverty is the net income after withholding to fixed expense ratio.

Chattels are usually not a realistic measure of wealth or poverty.

If you have a $2,000 rent monkey on your shoulders it can be a problem if only making $15/hour.]

---

Renting out rooms is a thing. This isn’t rocket science. Renters and homeowners have been taking in boarders since pretty much caveman days. Back in the day, a perfectly sober hobo without any hope of employment who had to sleep under a bridge, rummage through garbage heaps for scraps of food, and often went hungry, was considered poor. Today, an overfed welfare recipient who spends the entire day in air-conditioned comfort watching TV, getting high or playing video games is considered poor. There’s a difference. Poverty has been redefined to mean something other than absolute material deprivation.

The poverty line keeps getting pushed up because it has been redefined to mean people in the lower bottom half of society. There will always be a bottom half. Even in “communist” societies, there is a bottom half. The reality is with the exception of substance abusers who don’t want to quit, no one in America is actually materially deprived to the point of hunger or being homeless. Heritage explains:

---

https://www.heritage.org/poverty-and-inequality/commentary/obamas-policies-redefine-poverty
[A new Heritage Foundation study reminds us that America’s “poor” maintain a standard of living much of the world would envy. Typically, “poor” Americans have more living space than the average European. Plus air conditioning, cable TV, and computer games. They are well-fed, and report they are not hungry.

They usually have a refrigerator, stove plus microwave, washer and dryer, dishwasher, and cell phone. That’s the case in most households that our government defines as “in poverty.”

Most of America’s “poor” own a car. A third have two cars. And 43 percent own their homes.

By defining poverty so broadly, we drain resources that instead could be focused on those who truly are in dire straits. And we spend billions that could be cut from the budget instead.

Because we overdefine and oversubsidize “poverty,” the Census Bureau reports that we have 43 million poor people. To help them, we spend over $900 billion a year in federal and state dollars. Do the math. We spend more than $20,000 apiece for each person deemed poor. For a family of four, that’s $80,000. And it’s on top of what they may earn for themselves.

We spend it through over 70 means-tested programs that give cash, food, housing, medical care, and more. As the Census Bureau explains, “The official poverty definition uses money income before taxes and does not include capital gains or noncash benefits (such as public housing, Medicaid, and food stamps).”

The new Heritage Foundation study (“Air Conditioning, Cable TV, and an Xbox: What Is Poverty in the United States Today?”) pulls these numbers together out of official reports from a variety of federal agencies into a coherent picture.

As Heritage authors Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield conclude, “Most of the persons whom the government defines as ‘in poverty’ are not poor in any ordinary sense of the term.”]

Ukraine ping

Unconditional defeat would be for Ukraine to occupy Moscow, impose its rule the way the Allies did on Germany in the postwar era. That’s not on the list of Western demands. What the West wants is for Russia to withdraw to its internationally recognized borders.

Resource-wise, the West is matching, at least on paper, Russian war expenditures. In reality, not really, because Russian gear costs a fraction of its Western equivalent, and Western leaders are intentionally throttling both the quantity and quality of equipment offered to Ukraine. But close enough for government work. And Western equipment, even when much older than its Russian counterpart, tends to outperform.

Then there’s the fact that even when the West focuses on non-military aid to appease Putin, money is fungible. The non-miltary aid handed to Ukraine means it can shrink its welfare state budget to focus on military production. That is likely what has powered its innovation in drones of all kinds, kept Russian advances limited in the face of intense shell hunger and Ukrainian manpower inferiority.

[Forbes did an exhaustive study on the number of Americans killed in Mexico. The murder rate was 0.5 per 100,000. Of those killed, almost all were involved in buying or selling drugs. Between 40 to 50 million prople visit Mexico each year. Pre COVID it was at the higher end.]

---

The methodology is suspect. Tourists are there episodically, for days at a time. Expats and traveling businessmen aside, Americans are in the US 99% of the time. Throw that in, and maybe the murder rate is 50 per 100K.

It’s analogous to tree hugger stats claiming that the odds of a large predator attack are lower than that of being murdered. They’re not factoring in the reality that humans come within firearm range of thousands of human strangers daily, whereas probably not even 1 in 100,000 people comes within range of a non-human large predator daily.

Ukraine ping

As a % of the 1941 American economy, the US sent 7% per year to Russia during WW2. Russia was one of the Axis powers that started WW2, switching sides against Germany only after it was invaded in 1941. That 7% is 2x the 2024 defense budget allocation. In 1941, it was 7x the annual prewar US military budget. By comparison, aid to Ukraine as a % of the US economy is under 1/4%. In other words, relative to the US economy, aid to Russia during WW2, a former ally of Germany, that, like its Teutonic counterpart was sworn to world conquest was almost 30x the current aid to Ukraine.

That vast disparity in aid sent is one reason Russia advanced against Germany, while Ukraine is stalled against Russia. Another key factor was the hammer blows struck against Germany by the Western Allies though a systematic effort to raze German cities via incendiaries and high explosives, an effort that wiped out 2m German city dwellers. While the atomic bomb came too late to be tested on Germany, the combined death toll from bombing Japanese cities was 50% the number inflicted on the Germans.

[I went to Mexico City. I felt safer there than some of the American cities I’ve been to.]

---

Feeling and being are different things. Criminals offend in Mexico because they have near impunity. They offend in the US despite a fairly effective although imperfect criminal justice system that varies by municipality due to the political preferences of local voters.

Amlo might be fiddling the numbers. No body, no crime. Would be amusing, but unsurprising if the guy took a direct hand, by having a goon squad from among the cartels who have him on payroll cremate or bury remains from homicide scenes, so as to keep the stats in the capital pristine.

---

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/21/mexico-city-murder-rate-dropped-disappeared-number-rises
[But one data point complicates the picture: the ever-growing number of disappeared people in the capital. Each year hundreds, sometimes more than a thousand, go missing.

This has spurred investigators to take a closer look at the city’s success story.

“I think it’s quite probable that lots of the people who disappeared have in reality been murdered,” said Elena Azaola, an academic and member of the citizen council for the Search Commission in Mexico City. “And these homicides are not being counted.”

Azaola’s research underlines that the official data on homicides and disappearances is so fragmented and inconsistent that it is hard to draw any conclusions with confidence.

Mexico’s forensic service, its National Geography and Statistics Institute and the National Public Security System each compile their own homicide tallies – and most years those totals differ by hundreds.

Meanwhile, every year since 2016, the cause of between 25 and 47% of violent deaths has not been identified, making it difficult to know if they were homicides, suicides or accidents. This proportion is far higher in Mexico City than anywhere else in the country, for reasons that are unclear.]

---

Amlo is also working the reduce the missing people statistics, by declaring that people who are still missing are no longer missing. Amlo being on the cartel payroll is no mere rumor:

---

https://www.propublica.org/article/mexican-president-lopez-obrador-called-our-story-slander-and-our-reporter-a-pawn-here-are-some-facts
[To recap: Our story, which was based on interviews with current and former officials and a review of government documents, disclosed the existence of a previously secret investigation by the DEA into reported donations to López Obrador’s 2006 presidential campaign by traffickers working with the so-called Sinaloa Cartel.

The case began when a Mexican drug lawyer working as an informant for the DEA reported in 2010 that he had participated in the meeting at which the donations were first negotiated, officials said. He reported having given most of the agreed-on funds to an operative in López Obrador’s 2006 campaign, Mauricio Soto Caballero. The informant then enticed Soto to come in on a small-time cocaine deal. DEA agents arrested Soto in McAllen, Texas, and he agreed to work undercover for the Americans to stay out of federal prison.

Ultimately, three other witnesses, including Soto, confirmed the drug lawyer’s account to the DEA, officials said. To gather more evidence for a possible corruption case, the DEA had Soto surreptitiously record two conversations with the man to whom he said he had given most of the traffickers’ money, Nicolás Mollinedo Bastar, one of López Obrador’s closest aides.

Justice Department prosecutors reviewed the tapes and found them incriminating but not decisive, people familiar with the case said. DEA agents wanted to go forward with a more elaborate sting operation inside Mexico, but DOJ officials rejected that plan in late 2011, in part over concerns that even a successful prosecution would be viewed by Mexicans as egregious American meddling in their politics.]

[Unless President Trump has, at minimum, a 10 point lead in ALL demographics ... Biden will steal it again.

A 10 point Trump lead would be very hard to steal.]

---

No theft involved. In 2020, Biden led by as much as 10% in the polls all through the election. In the weeks before, he averaged 8%. He won by 4%. In other words, the polls overestimated his victory margin by 4%.

Biden’s problem this polling cycle is that instead of leading by almost 10% all through, he is averaging a tie. Throw in a 4% bias in his favor, he is looking at a 4% loss in November. Note that Trump lost the popular vote by 2% to Hillary and still won on electoral votes.

https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/president/general/2020/trump-vs-biden
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/president/general/2024/trump-vs-biden

Bottom line is that defeat in 2024 for Biden looks as inevitable as victory seemed in 2020.

David “Jigaboo” Trone should consider trying out as a comedian in his off hours. While he claims the word he intended was bugaboo, what he actually uttered could be considered a gaffe in the classic sense of inadvertently saying what he really meant. “Training wheels” might be accurate, but the ratchet, re the kinds of acceptable words that might be used in reference to blacks, keeps slouching towards Wakanda.

[I’m always amazed at so called leaders that install hurdles to invention for success rather than assist in facing the problem of the need. In many cases they are the chief failure of the endeavor. You can’t force people to be brilliant. The leader can only create an atmosphere suseptable to their efforts.

If the leader demands the methodology, then the extent of the success is limited only to the leader’s provisions, not to the limits of the inventor. It is rare when you can find a subordinate that will give you that above and beyond for the continued accomplishment of the base company. And you don’t badger him/her into attainment, you allow the free flow of the accomplishments and thus create both your own and his/her own future prosperity. A good leader should always create their own competition, not stymie it. And this is done through the thought that people don’t work for me, they work with me. And the only thing I can really do for them is take the pressure of overall reponsibility away and allow free enterprise. A horse runs best when the reins are stretched. Give them the reason, the training, the atmosphere, the horse power, the reward possibilities, and get out of their way.

wy69]

---

Alack, people who achieve great things tend to be slave drivers. Alexander’s conquests garnered him little personal goodwill, and his family was slaughtered by his underlings upon his demise. That’s because he drove them hard, to the edge of mutiny. And as his extreme demands drove dissension even among his inner circle, he killed a number as an exemplary measure, to tamp down any further discord. Only when even this failed, and the potential for violent death at the hands of his own men had reached a critical level, did he finally relent, and mellow a little.

Steve Jobs was a visionary. He presided over four revolutions - (1) the creation of the first mass market personal computer, (2) the creation of the first mass market PC with a graphical user interface, (3) the routinization of computerized animation (during his tenure at Pixar) at a level never before achieved and (4) the creation of the first portable devices with touch driven graphical user interfaces that were as intuitive as its rivals were clunky. And through it all, he was known as a very difficult boss, abrupt and moody, prone to belittling his minions and terrorizing them with threats of firing, many of which involved actual separations from the companies he ran.

I am not a fan of Apple devices and have never bought or owned one. But the man was truly sui generis - one of a kind - in the way he made his vision a reality where others failed. And his relentless scumbaggery was, unfortunately, as integral to the success of his efforts as his exquisite personal taste, which flensed away everything that should not be part of the final product, while keeping a close eye on cost.