Fire At Will, Donald!

DUCKS IN A ROW: WORKING FOR THE DONALD

The Trump administration has come to resemble a shooting gallery a year into his first term. Really is anybody surprised? The man's catch phrase on his TV show was "You're fired!" His blind supporters make excuses for the chaos. They excuse his embarrassing simple-minded tweets, and if you criticize him they jump all over you. I know the swamp draining process is going to be chaotic. Pundits like Bill Whittle point out that the most positive thing about Trump is his bull in a china shop approach to the DC establishment. Tear it all down, they say. We can always rebuild from the rubble.

Protecting the government from its own people may just be the smartest thing they could do. Firing FBI and justice department officials caught protecting presidential candidates from the consequences of their own corruption is probably necessary. Look at how corrupt the FBI became after 8 years under a Democrat president. I just hope President Trump becomes enough of a conservative to clean that place out. We don't need another J. Edgar Hoover. We don't need law enforcement agencies that support the political agenda of the dominant political party or the president. 

We don't need a CIA that massages the data it delivers to the president - telling him what they think he ought to know and not what is really going on. That's what happened to President Bush his first year in office. Under Clinton CIA learned not to tell the president things he didn't want to hear. It explains why Bush didn't know what was happening prior to 9/11. I remember in 2001 having dinner with a CIA staffer. It was entertaining to listen to him screaming about how electing Bush was the worst thing ever. Well the reason CIA was upset about Bush was that they were all Democrats at the top and they were manipulating the daily security briefings to give the president what the CIA thought he ought to hear rather than the whole story. CIA officials, who came up under Bill Clinton, were furious that he was president and not Al Gore. So they focused on manipulating Bush instead of doing their job and as they'd done time and again during the Clinton administration, they missed all the red flags. Next thing we all knew, four airplanes were hijacked and crashed by terrorists with a death toll of 3000 Americans who paid for the political struggle in the American civil service during the early months of the Bush administration.

A lot of folks think that Trump will save us, but I'm not sure he'll do much more than blow things up. Of course the first step to renovating a rotten building is often to blow it up and start over. We'll see. At least it's not Hillary Clinton at the helm. At least the economy is recovering and promises to keep doing so if Trump doesn't turn into a Democrat and ruin everything.

And yes he does these stupid tweets, but hey, he's talking effectively to the 50% of Americans with less than 100 IQs and he does it frighteningly well. That monumentally irritating habit of adjectivizing his opponents - lyin' Ted, leakin' Comey, Rocket Man, Crooked Hillary, etc.. It would be nice if he'd be a bit more sophisticated, but he can't. I don't think he knows any other way to get his way. Democrats have been aiming at the lower 50% for decades using simplistic phrases like "soak the rich", Democrats are for the poor, Republicans are mean, and that sort of thing.

So the heavy attacks by Democrats on Trump pretty much guarantee that he is going to keep on doing what works with the lower 50 and the rest of us be damned. He's not worried about us. He figures the rest of us can keep up. That's monumentally sad in some way, but probably the only way to poke holes in the swamp so that at least some of the sludge will leak out.

© 2018 by Tom King

Unions, Parties and Killing Golden Geese

I have a friend who is a union man and we tend to get into some lovely conversations. I'm a conservative as you've probably figured out. Unions are pretty much NOT conservative and union men seem to take a particular delight in vilifying the president and the Republican Party, so sometimes the conversations get lively.

Let me make this clear. I feel about Unions the way I feel about Donald Trump. They both are doing some good, but sometimes they are their own worst enemies.  The idea of unions started out to be a good thing. The railroad union, in particular, to give it credit was able to work with the railroad companies to solve some of the problems of the economic transition that occurred in the twentieth century. The railroads were dying until finally the unions and the company figured out how to work together. That's how it should be done. 

But there are unions that don't do that. They ossify procedures, hiring and firing and pay rates. Unions can become so busy protecting specific jobs (and the Union income stream from dues) that the companies they work for keep folding. Hostess Bakeries was killed because their Union refused to budge. The union dug in its heels, the company couldn't adapt and folded. Retirement plans went away. So did a lot of jobs with the death of company and along with it, our supply of Twinkies and Hostess Cupcakes. Eventually someone else bought the brand but it was a near thing. 

Unions can do a lot of good, but too often in their blind hatred for the companies they work for, they kill the golden goose. I fault Unions for being so in the tank for Democrats. They do that because as in the case of Chrysler and then GM, the unions protect their turf so vigorously they frequently play a part in driving their companies to the brink. Let's face it, if a company can't make a decent profit, why should the continue to do business? Then when the company is on the brink, unions expect taxpayers to swoop in and bail them out, saving union jobs and failing companies. 

It's the same problem with environmentalists. These people want to somehow prevent the climate from changing. Unions want an unchanging job market. We are passing through climate changes as we always have. We are experiencinga titanic shift economically, as disrupting as the shift from a largely agrarian economy to an industrial economy. We are moving from an industrial to a tech-based information economy. Rather than preserve outmoded buggy whip manufacturing jobs, we need to be finding ways to adapt to the new reality.

The climate? Climates change. Get over it. We just have to deal with it. Clean up messes - absolutely. Stop polluting as far as possible. Of course. But do we have to create some vast centrally planned economy with an attendant huge army of bureaucrats to try and manage from Washington, a nation of 350 million individuals? That's absurd. The only way to do that is to simplify everything, stuff every peg, square, round or triangular into the same shape holes. That's why Marx was so in love with the idea of a homogeneous proletariat. If everybody (or at least most of us) were treated the same the theory was that they would be easier to manage for the leader class.

A nation of individuals is tough to make steady and predictable. Things change rapidly in a free market economy. Some businesses will close. Some will adapt. We're not asking mom and pop hardware stores to suddenly sell dresses because Walmart set up shot next door. But they can adapt  maybe sell hardware items that Walmart doesn't sell. They can offer higher levels of service that Wally World cannot offer because they have to sell such a huge volume of stuff.

In a time of upheaval, we have to change and adapt. In the past 200 years the world has changed in a profound way.  Two centuries ago we could be certain that, barring an attack by the nation next door and being carried off as slaves, for the most part however it was for your parents, it would be the same for you. After the huge scientific revolution of the 19th and 20th centuries, we came to believe that our lives would inevitably better than the lives of our parents.

It's ironic that the "progressive" movement that rose up seems to be attempting to reverse that course by making "progress" stand still. By insuring that everything from the jobs we work at to the very climate we live in stays the same, progressive behavior impedes progress. It's a losing battle. The world is changing and huge monolithic organizations and governments cannot possibly keep up. The reason America has thrived in this The future does not belong to those who learn something and then do that same something all their lives. That type of job is going away. The future will require us to learn how to learn, unlearn, and relearn something different. It will call for education that harks back to the old liberal arts education where we learn basic skills like math, writing, logic and computer skills and then layer on that first skill set you need to enter the workforce.

After that the worker has to stop worrying about fairness and start looking at what works to make that worker valuable to his employers. Here unions could play a role so long as they don't become the monolithic organizations, an image to the "beast" corporations they hate. If instead of propping up dying companies and industries we let the ones which try to kill themselves go ahead and die. We could spend that same money encouraging new companies to step in and start clean. We could train workers to do the new jobs using the new technologies and to meet the needs of a changing market.

The world is changing. There was a reason Chrysler was dying in the 80s and GM in the 00s. They probably should have. Someone or several someones could have bought the good parts and started clean. If the unions had been smart they'd have focused on working with newer, smarter, leaner companies. Sadly, too often the unions over time can become about accumulating power and fat budgets for the bosses instead of what they were about in the first place - a fair shake for workers on wages and safety. So when big bad corporations fall, unions probably should let them. Practically they never will.

There's a reason Detroit is rotting away. If you keep an industry barely alive and never get beyond treading water, an industry will rot and along with it the community that depends on that industry. Can corporations become corrupt? You bet, especially when they hook up with corrupt government which protects them. If one could allow a partnership of workers and the markets to which their labors provide goods and services to work as free markets can, we could keep corporations in line. But corruption doesn't just happen in board rooms. It can be found top to bottom. It happens in board rooms, union halls and city halls.

When owners and workers finally realize they are both on the same team and we get over envying the wealth of people who risk everything to start these companies, we might just see a greater sharing of the wealth. There's a reason Ford wasn't involved in the bailouts of the automakers. Henry Ford started the 40 hour week and assembly line and took care of his workers in ways no other corporate magnate did. There were free market reasons why he did right by his workers. Oddly enough he was very popular with people like Hitler because he was a capitalist who was also something of a socialist. Fortunately, his focus on his employees and treating them well hung with the company for a long time and kept them from falling into that adversarial relationship despite Ford's folly in embracing socialism.

It's amazing to me that very wealthy people cannot do the decent thing for very long, before they look round and decide to hook up with the government to try to take some of the responsibility for being decent people off of themselves. This protects their wealth, but puts the lion's share of the tax burden on the middle class through confiscatory taxation. Back in the 50s, when the upper tax rate was like 70%, very few of the 1%ers actually paid that tax rate. The rich were famous for hiring staffs of tax attorneys who helped them navigate the loopholes that the Democrats they support put into the tax codes. In the 50s and 60s the fat cats were supposed to pay 70%, but very few paid anything near that rate and some paid almost no taxes at all. 

There is no simple solution so long as we have vast complicated piles of regulations, laws and rules that hide the true intent of the government from the governed. It's not just evil corporations, it's evil government bureaucracies.

I think the devil's purpose is to keep us divided and fighting among ourselves. And what better way than to convince us to sling slogans at one another and lash ourselves to the mastheads of our ideologies. I used to do community organizing and it's so hard to get people to look beyond their pet ideologies and listen to each other. If you can, sometimes you can figure out how to fix the problem. Usually, people that figure out solutions that make sense just get pushed aside if they start talking sense that doesn't fit someone's ideology. Leaders on both sides of the ideological divide believe they need to keep the strife going in order to keep their jobs.

It's heartbreaking to watch the land that I love destroy itself from within. So it's good that Jesus is coming soon.

© 2018 by Tom King

Would Regulating the Media Stop Mass Shootings?

Mass shootings should be illegal, except where
the population has been safely disarmed first..

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN PRESENTS GUN CONTROL PROPAGANDA AS "SCIENCE"

A guy who commented on a Scientific American article complained that he didn't get enough of a "reaction" to his suggestion that we create laws to limit media coverage of mass shootings and suicides in order to reduce the number of mass shootings and suicide. To be fair, there is some research that seems to say that coverage of such events creates a kind of "contagion" that stimulates others to emulate the behavior. And it's true. Right after the recent Parkland High School shootings in Florida, police stopped four potential mass shootings and/or bombings aimed at high schools by disgruntled kids. The media pundrity's reaction was predictable. They covered the guns. They didn't cover the bombs. And they didn't give much time to the story if no one died. In the media, if it bleeds it leads they say.

In the wake of the Parkland High shootings, even the venerable "Scientific American" put up a pro gun control article entitled "Why are White Men Stockpiling Guns?" It was a blog to be sure but it lacked any pretense of being anything more than a politically motivated anti-white male hit piece with a lot of gun control and racist talking points. It made little effort to maintain the pretense that the article's conclusions were based on science. Some might object to my calling the article racist, since the racism was aimed at white guys. It could be considered sexist too as it absolved blame from women as well as non-whites placing the blame for gun fever directly on males. The blog was an incredible bit of white guy shaming for having been published in an ostensibly serious scientific journal. It basically intimates that white guys are (1) less intelligent (2) are fraidy cats and (3) racist and that's why they are stock-piling guns, a fact that should make you very afraid. That is to be expected. It's the progressive narrative after all. The guy who suggested muzzling the media is at least closer to a method of solving the problem than the traditional hand-fluttering gun control lobby.

The truly ironic thing about the guy suggesting that media were exploiting acts of violence to get attention was that his big complaint was that he wasn't getting enough attention for his comment, especially from the conservative right. He is, in point of fact, trying to get the same kind of attention he's complaining about the media getting. He utilizes a subtle kind of bullying hoping people will pay attention. Okay, he wanted a reaction from the right? Here I go, though not in the way that he'd probably hoped as it won't get him many likes on facebook or hits on his comments on Scientific American..

First off, mass shootings and suicides cannot be solved by making more laws. Both behaviors are already against the law. No one who commits a mass shooting or kills themselves cares what the law says about it. While I myself have railed against the media for encouraging copycat behavior with their nonstop coverage (i.e. glorification) of those who kill others and/or themselves, writing laws to prevent media coverage of these events will not solve the problem. At least it won't solve the problem without causing a whole bunch of those dreaded "unintended consequences" that central planners almost always cause when they try to create top-down solutions.

As soon as you begin to restrict the freedom of the press, you set in motion some very bad things. The rights retained by the people are not permitted to be infringed by the government. These rights are, according to the Constitution, rights we hold first and foremost. The government we formed is expressly forbidden to touch those inalienable rights. Touch one right and you set a precedent to infringing them all. Remember, lawyers and judges are very big on precedents.

Here's the deal. The US murder rate is dropping steadily in the United States (Except, of course, in stronghold Democrat Party run cities), but we are told we have a "gun problem" and need to "do something about it." In other words make some more laws. But the problem is not a legal problem. It's a cultural one, a social problem and even a religious problem.

In embracing progressivism's assumptions, we've wound up in a trap of our own making. While our attention-starved commentator is right, the media does exacerbate both suicides and mass shootings, if we as Americans (especially millennial-Americans didn't feel entitled to be catered to and paid attention to by our fellow citizens, we wouldn't feel the need to shoot them in large numbers. You could have said romantic poetry in the 17th century led to more suicides. It probably did. It's likely that Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet led to more teenage suicides. The Bard went a long way toward making suicide attractive to teenaged star-crossed lovers. 

That said, this would not have been so had the cultures of the time not embraced certain foolish ideas about the relative value of emotion over reason. The old Renaissance romanticism had a pernicious effect on culture. It made us too trustful of our own emotions and far too easily swayed by emotion-based propaganda. Emotion became a tool for adjusting the beliefs of the gullible ignoramuses that make up the unwashed masses - Marx's "proletariat". So now the propagandists are suggesting that gun control laws, which make us feel good and morally superior about ourselves for supporting them, will somehow solve the mass murder and suicide problem.

It won't!  The solution to reducing mass murders and suicides is not to change people's feelings but to restore a cultural that values reason. Restoring reason to its former glory is something today's intellectuals really don't want to do though. Most of our post-modernist intelligentsia seem to firmly believe that cultural attitudes are going the right way. All is according to the progressive plan for re-inventing America. It is no surprise we've raised millions of youth to believe their feelings are of far more value than their reason. Obiwan Kenobi even told kids to "Trust your feelings, Luke!"

Perhaps if we could somehow address the cultural imperative that says your Facebook post needs to have a lot of likes lest your feelings be hurt, maybe kids wouldn't feel so deprived if they weren't the center of attention all the time. Perhaps if we created a culture where truth was valued above approval by your peers, where work yields rewards far better than just showing up for a participation trophy, then perhaps we might eventually get to the point where we have a media that values the truth above ratings.

Take the White Men story in Scientific American. The author makes this startling statement:

• A white man is three times more likely to shoot himself than a black man—while the chances that a white man will be killed by a black man are extremely slight.

Okay, let's examine that. FBI data show that while 500 black-on-white killings and 229 white-on-black killings were reported in 2015, 2,574 homicides were committed by whites against other whites, and 2,380 by blacks against blacks. Somehow the author made it look like black-on-white killings were "extremely slight". And few of us will notice this pretty heavy shading of the truth. This is truly remarkable given that more than twice as many black men shoot white men as the other way round. The author leaves out the fact that these kill rates he dismisses as "extremely light" are not adjusted for the percentage of the population represented. Black men make up less than 8% of the US population. White men make up a good 31% and total white people more than 60% if you don't count Hispanics as white, which they kind of are.

So black men murder white men at a rate of more than two to one in actual numbers while being less than 1/4 as numerous in the population as white men. The narrative our kids are getting from the media, though is that white men are cowards (that's why they have guns in the first place), that they are slaughtering black people with their nasty guns and that they are pretty much more dangerous and more stupid than anyone else, especially if they own guns.

The truth is that it's the education system that needs to be "fixed", both at home and in schools. In CS Lewis' "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe", old Professor Kirk complains, "What are they teaching in schools these days?" Lewis himself pointed out the dangers of teaching young people that truth was about how they felt about it in his essay  "Men Without Chests". In looking at "modern" education Lewis complained that while the old system was a kind of propaganda, men teaching boys to be men. The new system is entirely propaganda, substituting a subjective standard of "whatever I feel about a thing" for objective reason. “Another little portion of the human heritage," says Lewis, "has been quietly taken from them (children) before they were old enough to understand.” 

If parents and educators will not teach children to think for themselves as individuals, if we role model slavish devotion to the herd in our own daily lives, we raise children to be lemmings and not American individuals. When that process becomes complete, the proletariat will become a tool for government to manipulate as it will. We will have exchanged one form of relatively ineffective mass murder for another form far more powerful and effective at slaughtering people in large numbers. Check the history of collectivist proletariats in just the past century. It's not a pretty picture. The rate of slaughter in these progressive collectivist states puts American school shooters and mass murderers in the shade. And I bet the Russians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodians and Venezuelans didn't think it could happen in their countries either.*

© 2018 by Tom King

* And by the way, in all those nations the media was regulated BEFORE the mass executions got to rolling along and usually after the citizenry had been disarmed.

Politics and Puppies

Be happy my progressive friends.*

YOU CAN'T WIN WITH THESE GUYS

Lately I've gotten tired of all the negativity on Facebook, especially around the discussion of politics. So, I've been posting pictures of puppies on my timeline, hoping puppies doing happy puppy things would help to promote peace and harmony with my progressive friends. 

 

Well that didn't work.

Now one of my progressive friends has criticized me because of my puppy pictures**. He says the puppies in the pictures I've posted probably come from puppy mills.

Ouch!

Man if a puppy can't make you happy, you must really must need to be miserable.

© 2018 by Tom King

*This puppy is a rescue dog named Daisy who blessed our home for six years. I miss her very much. She is certifiably NOT from a puppy mill.

**In all fairness to my friend we were in the middle of a fine old very political debate and neither of us were giving an inch. The snipe was in the neighborhood of an "Oh, yeah, so's your mother!" comeback. I don't blame him. Heat of the moment and all. It is very tempting in the middle of one of those heated debates to impugn your interlocutor's ancestry. I do my best to resist doing that, though - especially when there are puppies in the room.

I Rise Again....To Criticize the President

© 2017 by "The State"

For a second time in a week I gladden the hearts of my liberal friends for a tiny fraction of a second by criticizing President Trump.  The good president it seems, is about to start an ill-advised trade war. His economic advisor, Gary Cohn, just quit over the president's threat to place heavy tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum.

Here's the problem. Tariff's are inevitably counter-productive. On this, both the left center and right center agree.  Only fanatics on both fringes support tariffs as a tool of economic progress. Trump''s tariffs will focus initially on metals. The first impact tariffs on metals will have, will be to raise the costs of cars, construction, airplanes, guns, and ammunition. Even soda and beer will go up because of the increase in the price of the cans they come in.

Trump seems intent on finding a way to lose the 2020 election. The inflation that tariffs will cause will effect most, his own base. Beer cars and guns are particularly popular products with Trump voters. This will gladden the hearts of Democrats and dismay conservatives.

Tariffs will manage to undo the positive effects of the tax cuts he accomplished in his first year in office. It's not hard to see why the President seems to like tariffs. Tariffs are punitive in nature and that is how Trump does business. He charges ahead like the proverbial bull in the proverbial China shop. He has always used the tactic of burying those who get in his way with lawsuits. It makes sense that Trump would attempt to make America great again by financially punishing his enemies.

What Trump doesn't understand that other countries do not necessarily play by the same rules as America. Sovereign nations may reciprocate the punishment and jack up tariffs on American goods being sold to them. Trade wars are inflationary. They punish the poor and middle class. A narrow class of industries and labor unions may benefit somewhat, but the flood of inflation and job loss in every other industry and community that is not in the narrow sector that will be blessed with rising profits due to tariffs.

Tariffs also place us at a disadvantage with the rest of the world. American goods will become more expensive not only due to the reciprocal tariffs being charged for them, but will also be more costly because of the increase in the cost of materials like steel and aluminum needed to make American goods like aircraft, cars and guns which we sell elsewhere. Thus, goods made in China, resources obtained in South America, Africa and the Middle East will still cost the same in Europe and Japan while American goods will become more costly. Only American goods will go up in price. Goods coming to the United States will go up in price. Not so in the rest of the world

The result of such tariffs will be that the United States alone will pay the price.  On the international stage, one cannot bully and punish your trade partners in the same way you can sue and run roughshod over your competition in business. There are no world governments you can bribe to give you preferential treatment. There are no world courts where you can file lawsuits against nations that want to compete for trade on a level international playing field with you internationally. Other nations can give as good as they get. They may be smaller, but they can live without you.

In trying to punish the Chinese, I fear Trump may well give the World Markets into the hands of China and win for ourselves another recession only this time with massive inflation as well. I can see negotiating with nations who charge punitive tariffs on American goods. Perhaps a quid pro quo might help there. Same tariff they charge, we charge. It would be a diplomatic tactic designed to achieve a level playing field for American goods. I hope that's what he's doing. Tariffs should never be used to prop up an industry and labor force that's already in trouble and doesn't have the capacity to replace the goods and resources that we are targeting and making even more expensive with those tariffs.

This is one of the reasons I was reluctant to vote for Trump in the first place. Firmness with our allies and adversaries I do believe in, but we must not adopt all of Trump's business practices. Theodore Roosevelt called the presidency a "bully pulpit". He did not mean the term "bully" in quite the way it is used today. I hope Trump will remember that and courageously speak the truth from the bully pulpit. That, he has shown, to be a strength of his. I hope he will not also become an international bully. That, he has shown, to be a weakness of his.

Firm foreign policy such as protects American business from nations that force us to play on unfair playing fields is not what I'm talking about. Expecting fair treatment of our merchants is only right. Arbitrarily punishing all our trading partners is a mistake. Many nations depend on American markets to maintain often massive trade imbalances in their favor with us. A careful application of trade policies on a nation by nation basis could create for us trading partners who are partners indeed. Any nation that can be encouraged to trade with us on an equal footing, should be our fast friend. Any nation which seeks to take advantage of us, we should treat as they treat us.

Please, Mr. Trump, learn something from the brilliant men and women with whom you surround yourself. We need a new form of diplomacy; one that does not appease our enemies and ignore our friends, but rewards our friends and treats our enemies as the treat us. Americans would applaud the withdrawal of foreign aid from nations which commit human rights violations. Americans would cheer should Trump manage to create a fair trade agreement with nations that place prohibitive tariffs on American goods and yet expect favorable trade practices toward themselves.

Please Mr. Trump, negotiate with each nation individually on trade and then explain Americans what you have done. Don't just tell us China's trade practices are unfair.  Tell us in what way they are unfair and what you propose to do about it. Reward our friends. Refuse to bow to our enemies' wishes. If you tell us what you have done, your people are less likely to make an agreement simply for the sake of making an agreement.

That would certainly get Mr. Trump back into my good graces. Not that he cares about that, but he ought to. I'm not the only person who might have voted for him in 2020 who feels that way.

By Tom King © 2018

Oh Frabjous Day - Liberals Rejoice, I'm Criticizing Trump

I'm often accused of blindly following President Trump and never criticizing him, even though I didn't vote for Trump or for that matter his Democrat opponent. I rise this day to criticize the president. Apparently, Mr. Trump spoke hasty words yesterday and appeared to advocate taking guns first and following it with due process.

While he was advocating this with regard to dangerous mentally unstable people to be sure, he needed to be careful how he stated that. It certainly gives the wrong impression. I'm sure Trump means well, but once again, he has demonstrated a genius for aggravating his followers.

Ben Shapiro said this about the latest evidence that Trump's a reluctant conservative at best. "So yes, this is Trump just mouthing off. But it proves once again that on matters of governing philosophy, Trump is no conservative. He’s just a guy who says stuff he thinks will play for the audience in front of him."

Conservatives should set up a howl when Trump starts sounding like a Democrat. It's going to be the only way to keep him on the conservative plantation. Trump is a populist and that's why I had problems with him in the first place. This is me howling!

© 2018 by Tom King