It’s April, we’re back
And so March has sped by. The better part of a week was consumed trying to find someone at GoDaddy who could explain why their offer to convert this site to a “secure format”, um . . . didn’t work. (Seems a “plug-in” was required — a fact known only to one guy they keep hidden in the basement.)
Though frankly, it was time to dial back the pace we’d maintained from early October — when it became obvious Donald Trump was winning the presidential race, while the Lamestream Media was so trapped in their own self-referential Washington-New-York bubble that they actually believed a man drawing crowds of 50,0000 in rural airport hangars in swing states like Florida had no chance of beating a woman unable to climb a flight of stairs, who also seemed to have a devil of a time assembling a hundred mildly enthusiastic high-school girls in a college gym — anyway.
Others have done a fine job pointing out that the “defeat” of Ryancare — far from being a major defeat for Donald Trump — weakened the Anyone-But-Trump Speaker (who believed he could bring forth a fatally flawed “government insurance” bill drafted in secrecy by a bunch of insurance company lobbyists, and pass it in 18 days) far more than the new President, who remains free to embrace a better alternative a year from now.
The “tweets” that “prove” Donald Trump is mentally unstable — contending the Obama administration had his campaign wiretapped (angrily ridiculed by the New York Times . . . . after months of reporting what they’d learned from those wiretaps), and that most of Hillary Clinton’s popular vote majority can be attributed to the fraudulent votes of illegal aliens?
All in the process of being proved right in spades — and as a resident of Nevada, which went Democratic thanks only to the single “blue” county where the Culinary Union proudly brags of busing tens of thousands of Spanish-speakers to the polls, I can’t wait to see how different our state Legislature will look after all these illegal voters are rounded up and shipped back to their dirt-floored hovels of origin.
As for the fantastic narrative that all those tens of thousands of blue-collar Trump voters and rally enthusiasts were actually Russian spies disguised as blue-collar Americans in John Deere caps? Dementia.
If Hillary lost because of the Wikileaking of John Podesta’s emails, someone needs to ask why Hillary’s staffers were sending unencrypted emails to each other joking about how hard it was to “sober her up” late in the day, in the first place . . . and why they were still predicting a Hillary landslide on Election Day, months after they instructed “their press” to tell everyone it was illegal to even READ the Wikileaks emails . . . while also noting we’ve now learned the NSA knows how to hack an e-mail account using tools that MAKE IT LOOK LIKE IT WAS DONE BY THE RUSSIANS.
(Not that it would have taken sophistication beyond that of some bored high-school kid to send Mr. Podesta an e-mail saying “Your email password is insecure: please click on the following fake email site and tell us your password . . . dummy.”)
(Word is Julian Assange’s fate may hinge on the outcome of today’s Ecuadorian elections, by the way. Gosh, how politicians hate fresh air, sunshine, and people who ACTUALLY set about informing the public.)
The Democrat party continues to commit a bizarre form of political seppuku — with the failing New York Times and the viewer-hemorrhaging cable news networks egging them on — vowing to dig in their heels to block and obstruct anything Donald Trump tries to do (meaning anything Americans enthusiastically voted for), even if it involves declaring April to be Apple Pie Month. (Or National Child Abuse Month — https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/03/31/president-donald-j-trump-proclaims-april-2017-national-child-abuse .)
They think the public won’t soon tire of the president not being allowed to see even his routine appointees seated . . . a courtesy granted to every president in our history, including the previously most reviled “outsider,” Andrew Jackson?
Is there really much suspense as we wait to learn the Democrats’ fate on the hustings 19 months from now, running on the five-point platform of “1) Sanctuary, amnesty and free college tuition for illegal-alien child rapists; 2) Millions more terror bombers and genital mutilators welcomed and granted instant citizenship with voter ID cards; 3) Mandatory cross-dressing and Muslim indoctrination in the elementary schools; 4) Continued crippling of our economy to prevent the emission of carbon dioxide (a harmless gas necessary to life on earth) and 5) . . . Elizabeth Warren”?
We will doubtless wade back into the fray, by fits and starts. Meantime, we have not been idle. Having closed our Las Vegas brick-and-mortar store late last year, we’ve been busy upgrading our Online offerings of 3,000 vintage books and records, now searchable by topic thanks to ABE’s provision of “Curated Collections” and “Bookseller catalogs” — see https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/StoreFrontDisplay?cid=51238921 . (Use the “Show More” buttons. Don’t bother with the “Bookseller Browse” function — generated by some Canadian computer, it’s pretty sparse.)
See some intriguing recent finds at: https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=22321739303 , https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=22251770895 , https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=22130060444 , and https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=22183471741 .
Happy Spring!
April 3rd, 2017 at 3:27 am
Welcome back! 🙂 I was wondering where you went. It had been nice to see you post more.
April 3rd, 2017 at 7:20 am
Didn’t this use to be a libertarian blog? I hear an awful lot of Trump apologetics in this post (and others, recently). I can get behind the media-bashing – they fail in so many ways – but why do the Republicans get a pass? Come on, Vin. I know you’re happy that Hillary lost (we all are), but how can you be happy that Trump won? He’s an iconoclast, sure, but he’s also an asshole. In the long run, he won’t be any better for this country than any other Republicrat. I know he talks a big game about immigration, which is one of your pet peeves (and not a very libertarian one, by the way), but do you really think he will do anything to solve the perceived problems?
April 3rd, 2017 at 9:24 am
Hi, JA Pipes — Donald Trump is wrong on the counterproductive (and unconstitutional) War on Drugs. His dalliance with punitive tariffs shows histiorical ignorance and could prove economically dangerous. He’s not a principled minarchist, as I’ve pointed out to the point of tedium.
I’m happy he won because Hillary Clinton — who CHOSE HIM AS THE OPPONENT SHE MOST WANTED TO RUN AGAINST — isn’t president, and the statists are going nuts to find themselves in a plight of their own device. I believe in an earlier post I quoted Abe Vigoda as Sal Tessio: “Hell, he can’t do that; that screws up all my arrangements.”
I believe Libertarians who favor open borders — thus making common cause with leftist globalists whose response to each mass murder by a Muslim in the West is “Oh dear, I hope this doesn’t bring on another rash of totally fabricated Isamlophobic incidents — let’s all wear head-scarves during our march today to show our solidarity with those who’d like to impose Sharia law here, while jurisdiction-shopping for a judge who’ll stop Trump from using his duly delegated powers as president to limit immigration in any way” — are wrong. Foolishly, dangerously wrong.
Furthermore, they often appear more anxious to toe the “party line” and prove their “philosophical purity” than to examine with open eyes what mass Muslim migration into Western Europe is doing to women’s rights, gay rights, and civility and the simple ability to walk the streets in peace there, and anywhere Islam holds sway, given that primitive Islam neither comprehends nor honors any separation of religion and state.
Not to mention gang rapes, genital mutilation, honor killings, and burning down their free government housing because they don’t like the free food; they find the cell phone reception inadequate, and they haven’t been provided with a free, tax-funded girlfriend . . . all while refusing to find work. You want to import that, en masse?
(I insert links to reports on all this stuff from multiple sources — they’re hardly ever “clicked.” But it often takes less than 90 seconds for the condemnations of my purity to pour in. A lot of thoughtful weighing of the real-world evidence going on?)
As for the separate problem of states (including Nevada and California) allowing our trade unions to register and bus to the polls tens (probably hundreds) of thousands of illegal aliens who are voting illegally (In Nevada, you can register by showing your casino employment card and a utility bill), creating the margin that put Democrat machine politician Catherine Cortez Masto in the U.S. Senate instead of physician and reserve army officer Joe Heck (while stacking the state Legislature of this otherwise “red” state with Las Vegas Democrats and delivering Nevada’s electoral votes to Hillary Clinton . . . illegally), I find this wave of willfully ignored crime to be dangerous to what’s left of our sovereignty, disgusting, and repulsive. To be a “good libertarian,” am I suppose to say it’s a good thing, or just ignore it?
In this, I find “inflexibly pure” Libertarians begin to resemble the willfully blindered “progressive left” of 50 to 70 years ago, anxious to forgive or ignore or even cover up the “modest excesses” of Stalin and the gang as mere “growing pains” on the road to the finer, non-capitalist future of the “New Socialist man.”
Funny how communism (under whatever name) remains popular on American univsersity campuses which have never had to endure its wonders, not so much in Eastern Europe.
If Libertarians reject me because the positions to which I’ve finally come on these issues after sometimes painful examination and contemplation aren’t “doctrinally pure,” I’ll live. I’d far rather speak the truth as I find it to a smaller readership.
And yes, the Republicans in Washington are often as bad as — or worse than — the Democrats; worse because they CLAIM to be smaller-government freedom-fighters, while accepting essentially the same bribres to support essentially the same stifling regulatory bureaucracy.
Trump, however, is at war with the RINOs as well as the Democrats (whether he himself always sees this clearly or not) and is doing a bit better than I expected.
Yes, he’s a protean goofball who sometimes tweets before carefully weighing all the ramifications. But these tweets reveal a level of reflexive, “let the chips fall” honesty that’s been lacking in our government at least since the days of Harry Truman (if not Andrew Jackson), & I’ll admit to taking a guilty pleasure in the way this drives the establishment press crazy by violating all the “rules” they refuse to clearly enunciate, probably because said “rules” of decorum have their origins in the proper (thoroughly duplicitous) behavior learned in Ivy Leagure fraternity houses.
Furthermore, there’s method to his madness. The legacy press gets rope-a-doped. They spend months gleefully cackling over mildly embarrassing stuff they’ve learned about Trump via leaked wiretaps. He condemns Obama for wiretapping him, in a “tweet” that takes him 60 seconds. Mere days after their last “Trump wiretap” headline, the New York Tijmes squawks, “How dare he say he was wiretapped? What wiretaps? He needs to apologize!” And how many news cycles get eaten up with this nonsense, while Trump quietly guts 25 years worth of economy-crippling EPA regulations?
Yes, it’s a bit shocking to know eaxactly what the president was thinking at 5 a.m. But is it really so bad?
If Trump manages to accomplish a partial roll-back of the regulatory state for the “wrong reasons” (pragmatuic concern with jobs rather than having read & absorbed von Mises and Rothbard), I’ll take that over the government-shrinking acomplishments & current de facto platform of a “pure” Libertarian party that gives us Gary Johnson and Bill Weld, glazed-eyed “Republican Lite” gun-grabbers who would cheer a heavily taxed, state-regulated marijuana monopoly while shrugging that the rest of the War on Drugs is “too big to fail” . . . especially since the only useful role of a party that remains unable to muster as much as 5 percent of the vote after 45 years is to educate the kids about the non-aggression principle . . . which means you can’t outlaw opium and cocaine because they’re the favored drugs of the Asians and Hispanic minorities . . . and you’re obliged to say so.
— V.S.
April 3rd, 2017 at 10:22 am
Glad I come back to check the comments.
April 3rd, 2017 at 10:46 am
“we’ve now learned the NSA knows how to hack an e-mail account using tools that MAKE IT LOOK LIKE IT WAS DONE BY THE RUSSIANS.”
The CIA, actually. The NSA can doubtless do this as well, but a different smoking gun would be required to corroborate this.
April 3rd, 2017 at 7:33 pm
Frosty Wooldridge: We are “flat out being invaded”:
https://www.freedomsphoenix.com/Opinion/215523-2017-04-02-united-states-of-america-flat-out-being-invaded.htm .
— V.S.
April 4th, 2017 at 6:34 pm
For what does it profit a man if he should gain the whole world, but lose his soul?