Tuesday, July 08, 2025

$200 Tax Stamp on Suppressors Reduced to $0

Woohoo!

Gonna get me one...or...several...now!

Monday, July 07, 2025

Musk's New Political Party

I mean, ok, but I doubt this has much chance of changing anything significantly.
He doesn't seem to have thought this out, IMO.

Then, of course, there's the unseemly feud between Trump and Musk. They've both done great things for the country, but they're also both spazzes who don't seem to be able to control their mouths or their thumbs. Neither has the right temperament to be setting the tone of the debate.
   The more substantive question is: is the OBBB good or bad? Or, rather: is it good enough? Or, rather: is it more-or-less the best we can reasonably expect to get under prevailing circumstances?
   If Musk is right, and it's a catastrophe, then, of course, he's justified in saying so and pushing against it.
   Once again, though, I have no idea.

NEJM, the Medicalization of Everything, and the Political Corruption of Expertise

This is a good example of the kind of crackpottery we find on the elite left.
   Find some way in which some policy or other affects medical care / health. Then find some doctors or medical researchers willing to represent themselves as experts on these grounds. Then assert or suggest that the original policy is, therefore, in effect a medical matter--ergo the docs are experts who get to pronounce the policy good or bad.
   And--surprise--the progressive position is always the position supported by medical science--"the science" relevant to the matter at hand.
   This is the same kind of argument we get from progressive medical types concerning firearms: firearms affect people's health, doctors (and medical researchers) are the experts on health, ergo doctors (etc.) get to determine what firearm policy should be.
   Oh and, of course, there is the de rigueur conflation of legal with illegal immigration. Even I'm surprised at how resolutely dishonest the left is on this point. You'd think that the steadfast refusal to acknowledge a crucial distinction in a debate would eventually cause the public to simply discount the pronouncements of the offending faction. And maybe it has, outside the True Believer class. But the left has demonstrated its almost preternatural ability to ignore politically incorrect or otherwise inconvenient facts...
   Anyway, in this case, the position of the authors seems pretty much immediately contradictory. It seems to be: we can't run the health-care system without (illegal?) immigrants, because they are willing to accept unfairly-low wages... Now, normally the left stops here, suspending its histrionic obsession with "social justice"...  But the NEJM authors go on to say: And we've got to raise these wages. So...we can't run the system without illegal immigrants who accept low wages...but we've got to raise their wages because--etc. 
   Do these people every listen to themselves? Or read their own articles?

The Big, Beautiful Bill: "Jet Fuel for the Economy," or Literally the Holocaust of "Structural Racism"?

Mike Johnson: probably somewhere in the vicinity of the truth, I'd guess.
It's the same old bullshit from the Democrats every single time anymore. Like half of progressivism comes down to That's racist...
   But note that it's not just racist...it's "structural racism at its most deadly" [my emphasis] Wow! You'd have thought maybe the middle passage or the Holocaust...but I guess you'd have been wrong. Bigot.
   Anyway, I don't even pay any attention to such bullshit anymore. When the answer is the same every time...and it's always wrong...eventually you have to start doing logical triage... 
   And as for Planned Parenthood: if they want funding, they need to stop transing kids and whatnot. I'm generally a libertarian about abortion, but the left's torrid love affair with it is just too damn weird for me.
   Anyway, as for the particulars Randolph is on about: could be, I guess. But I'm skeptical.

WSJ: GOP Gambles on Trump Accounts; Dems Could Turn Them into UBI

link
   Universal Basic Income, IMO, should be regarded as the ultimate nanny-state boondoggle. Or, well, a boondoggle, as I understand it, is just an unproductive undertaking, a waste of money. UBI is the kind of thing likely to wreck lives and nations. It's an empirical question, of course...but I don't want the experiment run here. Let Minnesota wreck itself. That's kinda what the laboratories of democracy are for... 
   What no one should disagree with--but many progressives will, of course--is that [a] proponents of UBI must carry a very heavy burden of proof, and [b] the idea must be extensively tested before nationwide implementation is even considered. That is: conservatism must regulate any serious consideration of UBI. But this is almost just a characterization of the difference between conservatives and progressives (and, I must regretfully add: liberals). The left errs, in large part, by advocating for ceaseless, radical change based on ill-considered and largely untested hypotheses. They never stop pushing for likely-to-be-catastrophic change... This is why slippery slope arguments so often turn out to be sound when directed against the left. There's no doubt that the Editors are right--if Democrats see an opportunity to move these "Trump accounts" in the direction of UBI, they're likely to take it.
   But, furthermore, my own rather watery conservatism in this domain basically amounts to the thought--a radical departure from my view even a decade ago--that we're better off keeping the tax codes simple. There are all sorts of tweaks and fancy policies that might work if not for the law of unintended consequences... But, in fact, are likely to be a wash at best.
   Of course I don't know anything about any of this, so that's a relevant factor here if you're a stickler for that kind of thing...

Sunday, July 06, 2025

Julian Epstein: How Trump Became Washington's Unlikeliest Centrist

I don't see why it's unlikely.
To repeat myself repeating myself:
The left has radicalized to such an extent that it's ceded the center to the Republicans.
   The hysterical, fiction-based TDS of the left has been more durable than I might have thought. Most people I know are academicians or in the penumbra of intellectuals/pseudo-intellectuals that have academia as their center of gravity. They hate / are horrified by Trump, and will never change their minds. Arguing with them is a waste of your breath. It is just about exactly like arguing with a Christian about Jesus. If you think you're going to move someone out of the wagon-ruts worn into the terrain of their thought over decades of life...well, uh, you're wrong. To think that Trump is anything less than Hitlerian, they would have to renounce all their previous, impassioned, public declarations, admit they've been wrong about fundamental things their entire lives, accept ostracism from their tribe...and resign themselves to being seen as, basically, an evil person by their entire social group. It's a lot easier to just turn a blind eye to the evidence and remain in the comfortable embrace of warm, blue fantasies...
   Anyway: yes, Trump's basically a centrist. As others have noted, he's damn close to being a mid-'90s Democrat. He was a mid-90's Democrat. But 2008 Obama is too conservative for 2020s Democrats...
   Well, nothing new here.
   Just saying that it's not as surprising as this op-ed makes it out to be.

Saturday, July 05, 2025

Democrats Re: Independence Day

It's becoming more and more difficult to distinguish progressivism from mental illness.

NSFW:



Susan Crabtree: OMB Says States Use Education Grants for Radical Left-Wing Agenda

[1] This is undoubtedly true.
[2] Only a very few cases are cited in the article, however.
[3] As to the legal question of whether the administration can stop payment after Congress has allocated the funds...no idea. But I'm skeptical.

But look: K-12 and universities could end this kind of dispute right now by doing one simple thing:
Ending their leftist indoctrination and other misuse of public fund for leftist activism.
That is: live up to their public and pedagogical responsibilities.
It would be easy: just stop cheating.
Their argument seems to be:
It's bad for the government to bust us for misusing government funds, violating the public's trust and abusing students...because its efforts to stop us from doing those things might undermine some legitimate programs, too...
It's not like we're talking close calls here. Just stop using tax money on your loony political bullshit.
Though, again: the examples given in this piece aren't as outrageous as one might think. The most outrageous one seems to be hearsay.

WSJ: No One is Gutting the Safety Net

Who understands this stuff, anyway?
Not me, that's for sure.
I spend way too much time reading about it, and I have no idea who's right.
   I think we tend to fall back on our general political worldviews in such cases. And currently I'm inclined to think that the Republicans are more reasonable about...just about everything. The monstrous spike in Medicaid expenditures since '19 seems unlikely to be explained by a spike in genuine need...or so I guess.
   The Dems have repeatedly shown themselves to be driven by excess and misplaced sympathy--sympathy for illegal aliens despite the costs to the nation and its citizens; sympathy with "trans" "kids" despite the costs to girls' athletics, non-"trans" children swept up in the hysteria, and society at large; sympathy with criminals despite the cost to law-abiding citizens... We know that their general orientation disposes them to prefer giving out unwarranted benefits rather than to drawing lines and saying no sometimes.
   Anyway, I suppose I think: let's try it the Republicans' way for awhile.
   See what happens.

Friday, July 04, 2025

Independence Day!

249 years!

I remember the Bicentennial well...holy crap...

Trump's Lawfare Against the Free Press

I also don't know what to think about this.
The MSM is a giant vat of crap that's pulled out all the stops to get Trump (and the Pubs)...and part of me thinks: fight fire with fire.
But I certainly don't like the idea of the Administration suing for these kinds of things.
But, again, I'm so ignorant of the legal (etc.) details that I don't really know what to think.

What's Going on With the Budget?

I never understand this stuff.
In vague, general terms, it's seemed to me that the Dems are dedicated to cranking up both government spending and taxes. The Pubs have claimed dedication to lowering taxes and shrinking government and government spending. We're headed for deficit disaster (allegedly), and the question is: which side will blink first?
   Unfortunately, the Pubs have been more dedicated to cutting taxes than they've been to reducing spending. So we've really got two parties on the more spending side. This seems to leave us with no good options with respect to taxes: raising them is bad, but, given greater expenditures, so is not raising them.
   But I don't really understand anything about this stuff.
   I'm getting old enough now that I've gotta start at least acknowledging that I'll retire some day. Needless to say, I'd like more money rather than less. But I don't see how we can avoid cutting benefits. If we have to do it, we have to do it.
   I'm set up to get particularly screwed in all this, since my parents believed the tall tale about paying money into the system and then getting it back someday. So they got my brother and me Social Security numbers as soon as they could, and we started paying in. My father had a rather short-lived bus company, driving his co-workers up to McDonnell-Douglas, and my brother and I got paid for some of our work for the company. So I've been paying in since I was very young. But anyway, the point is: if anybody should be ticked off at the thought of benefit cuts, it's me. But what's bad for me personally isn't always bad for the nation.

David Strom: Medicaid Cuts Affect Mainly Able-Bodied Men Who Won't Work and Illegals; Dems Claim No Illegals Get Medicaid, But Sue to Prevent Cutting Them Off

Big if true.
Both those claims are empirical ones. I don't know whether they're true or not.
But, if they are, we should hope there'd be no disagreement about cutting these people off.
What's really crazy is that a significant sub-group of Democrats do disagree.
Strom writes:
Democrats are playing a verbal shell game, pointing to federal law to say that Medicaid dollars can't legally go to illegal aliens, so there is no money to be saved by cutting those funds off. At the same time, they are suing to hide the legal status of recipients to prevent them from facing ICE deportations--in other words, they are illegally spending Medicaid dollars for illegals and want to hide them from the feds.
If true, this doesn't exactly show that Dems don't want to cut off illegal Medicaid recipients, but just that they don't want Medicaid to be used to out them as illegal. 
   But this at least shows that they think it's better to pay benefits to illegals than to use Medicaid to reveal their status. And that comes to basically the same thing. There's no reason to think that Medicaid is special in this respect. Their real position is that we shouldn't use any means to reveal people's status as illegal. And, of course, no illegals (or virtually none, at least) should be deported. And, furthermore, they ought to receive Medicaid and other benefits. Let's not beat around the bush here. The fact that there's a narrow, winding justification for their position that doesn't exactly come down to open borders is just a distraction.
   Once again, we have a Republican party that--whatever its flaws--has a set of sane, ordinary, long-standing, commonsense positions here: people should only come into the country legally; those who come in illegally should be deported; and they damn sure shouldn't get benefits like Medicaid.
   The Dems, on the other hand, have gone so radical that--as I first noted nearly 20 years ago--their position is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish from open borders. Now, 20 years on, this could hardly be clearer: we must not stop them at the border, but once they're in the country, they cannot be removed. In fact, we shouldn't even seek to know whether someone is here legally or not. And from that it basically follows that they should have all the benefits of citizenship. If you don't believe that, consider the fact that some blue cities and states have made it legal for illegals to vote in local elections...
   Remember also that slippery slope arguments are commonly sound against the left--it's part of their worldview that we should always be moving farther left. We see this dynamic in the debate over the status of non-heterosexuals and other sexual minorities. The started with the reasonable claim that we ought not discriminate against non-heterosexuals. And they were right about that, and conservatives were wrong. But we've been on a slippery slope since then, through same-sex marriage (which I generally supported/support)...then very rapidly to "women have penises," to the brainwashing and sexual mutilation of children, and to the re-engineering of society to bring it into alignment with this gender pseudoscience. And, of course, the left isn't done. They're already floating trial balloons about the next front in their assault on the status quo: normalizing (and legalizing) polygamous marriage, pedophilia, and even zoophilia...
   A similar slippery slope has driven the left's positions on race. We went from Racism is bad to Racism is the founding principle of America, all whites are racist by definition, oh and there's no such thing as race...
   Anyway. There's nothing worth arguing about here, IMO...other than the empirical claims. Anyone illicitly receiving government benefits should be kicked off the rolls. 

Thursday, July 03, 2025

Frederick Kaufman: Trump's Big, Beautiful Mess

I don't understand this stuff.
All I can really do is hope for the best...whatever that might be.

The Trump-Musk Slapfight

   They've both done good things for the nation--Musk mainly with respect to Twixxer and free speech, IMO.
But neither one of them seems to have the temperament required to play such important roles in the government of the world's only superpower--or "hyperpower" as some characterize it.
   Trump's always been a desperate roll of the dice. He's right--extremely right--about a lot of things. And even if he botched the job--and thus far he isn't--he'd still be playing a crucial role in history by boxing out the now-virtually-insane Democratic party...
   But he remains--to a large extent, anyway--a loose cannon. He's largely kept it between the ditches to this point (to mix metaphors)...but it's not going to be a big surprise to anyone if puts us into a ditch at some point.
   OTOH, all he has to do to remain a net positive is occupy the office. Keeping the Democrats out of power unless/until they come to their senses is, I think, his most important role. And that part he cn't really botch.
   OTOOH, I think we also desperately need another Republican to win the Presidency in '28...and, of course, we need to keep at least one house of Congress--which shouldn't be that difficult. I still hope that the '24 loss will slap some sense into the blue team, though there's no sign of that yet. Maybe that's not all that surprising. Seems like the losing party has to go through a denial/excuse-making phase before it's psychologically capable of facing at least some of the facts. Usually this takes the form of an insistence that the losing party's ideas/policies are good/popular...but their "messaging" failed. And that's where the Dems are now. If they haven't started to moderate by next year at this time, though, it'll be time to up our FretCon level, I think.
   Trump's actual actions are generally good. But his words matter, too.

Worse Than Watergate?: CIA Says Obama's Trump-Russia Collusion Hoax was Corrupt from the Start

Big if true...but the MSM will kill this story no matter what.

Me, I just want to know the truth about all this...but the outlines of the truth have been fairly easy to discern for seven years now...

Wednesday, July 02, 2025

H. R. McMaster: Trump Ends the Folly of De-Escalation with Iran