Sunday, October 14, 2018

Jennifer Delacruz's Red Flag Warning Forecast

The weather's changing rapidly from wet and rainy on Friday to gusty and windy tonight into tomorrow. October is normally going to get those Santa Ana conditions, so I guess this is a return to normal.

In any case, here's the lovely Ms. Jennifer, for ABC News 10 San Diego:



Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.



How #Democrats Created Insane 'Social Justice' Mobs

From the inimitable Robert Stacy McCain, at the Other McCain, "The TrigglyPuff Party: How Democrats Created Insane ‘Social Justice’ Mobs":


Commenting on the irrational female rage unleashed by the Kavanaugh confirmation circus, Stephen Green remarks: “The Democrats have worked hard to lock down the Trigglypuff vote, but at what cost of even slightly more moderate voters?” But do such voters really exist?

We are more than 25 years into a cycle of increasing polarization that arguably began with Bill Clinton’s election as president. Clinton’s radicalism — remember the so-called “assault weapons” ban? — sparked a backlash that cost Democrats the control of the House that they’d held for 40 years. Everything thereafter increased the partisan divide: The budget standoff that led to the government shutdown, the Lewinsky scandal and the impeachment crisis, the Florida recount in 2000, the Iraq War, the recapture of Congress by Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats, Obama’s election in 2008, the Tea Party movement, on and on.

It is not the case that America’s politics have become more divisive because the Republican Party has moved further right. Liberal pundits, commenting from within their ideological cocoons, habitually apply labels — “far right,” “extremist,” “white nationalist,” etc. — to depict the GOP as beholden to a dangerous fringe, but this is just paranoid propaganda. The typical Republican voter in 2018 is actually no more “extreme” than his father was in 1988. Nor is the policy agenda of the GOP now any more “far right” than it was in the presidency of Ronald Reagan. The cause of the increased partisan divide is not that the Republicans have moved right, but that Democrats have moved left.

What happened, when did it happen and why did it happen?
What happened?

A whole helluva lot, lol, but keep reading.


Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

I gave my oldest son this book last Christmas, and now it's coming out in a feature film, due in theaters November 19th.

At Amazon, Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give. (The "movie tie-in" edition is here.)

And Judy Woodruff has this, at the PBS News Hour:



Ann Coulter on 'Watters' World' (VIDEO)

Coulter's new book is here, Resistance Is Futile!: How the Trump-Hating Left Lost Its Collective Mind.

And at Fox News:



Why China's Rise Won't Happen

From Gordon Chang, at the National Interest, "China's Rise (and America's Fall) Just Won't Happen. Here's Why":


"This geopolitical recession is something really simple—it’s the end of the U.S.-led global order," Ian Bremmer, head of risk advisors Eurasia Group, told the ANZ Finance & Treasury Forum in Singapore this week.

Bremmer’s message plays well, and not just to those attending financial conferences. Most American policymakers, for instance, have bought into his “declinist” predictions about China’s rise and America’s fall. At least two—and maybe all three—of President Donald Trump’s immediate predecessors accepted the premise of eventual Chinese dominance.

For a long time, those predictions were generally accepted. Most recently, however, there are even more reasons to challenge the assumptions underpinning the narrative of declinism.

Declinists make one fundamentally incorrect assessment. “So that is one big reason why we have entered a geopolitical recession,” Bremmer told the crowd in Singapore. “All of the major international underpinnings of the U.S.-led order have become unmoored over the last 25 years.”

The most important reason for the establishment of the U.S.-led order after the Second World War was the dominance of the American economy, and the most important justification for declinist views has been China’s stunning four-decade economic revitalization. There is no shortage of predictions when in dollar-denominated terms China’s gross domestic product will overtake that of the U.S.

The gap between the two economies is still wide, however. Last year, the U.S. produced $19.39 trillion of GDP. China’s 2017 GDP, at a reported $12.84 trillion, was only 66.2 percent of America’s.

And that gap is, in reality, widening. Beijing’s official National Bureau of Statistics reported 6.8 percent growth for the first half of the year, far in excess of the American rate.

Yet China’s number is surely exaggerated. Beijing claimed nearly identical 6.7 percent growth for 2016. The World Bank, however, has cast doubt on that figure by releasing a chart in the middle of last year.

So what was China’s gross domestic product increase in 2016 according to the World Bank? Answer: 1.1 percent.

Shocked? The 1.1 percent figure is surprisingly close to the single best overall indicator of Chinese economic activity, total primary energy consumption. In 2016, total primary energy consumption, according to Beijing’s official numbers, was up 1.4 percent.

America’s economy, thanks to Trump’s deep cuts in taxes and regulations, is powering ahead. In the first two calendar quarters of this year, the economy grew 2.2 percent and 4.2 percent. The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow forecast for the just-completed third quarter is 4.2 percent.

China’s economy is beset by excessive debt accumulation and other maladies, but the main factor inhibiting economic potential is not a systemic debt crisis—a concern to be sure—but the abandonment of reformist policies. Xi Jinping, the Chinese ruler, has turned his back on Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and opening up” program that is credited with sparking Chinese growth for almost four decades. Instead, Xi for a half decade has been reinstituting the Stalinist state model that Mao Zedong embraced in the early 1950s.

Xi’s reversal of liberal economic policies has been matched by his reversal of political and social policies. He has de-institutionalized the Communist Party, thereby heightening the risk of political instability. At the same time, he has demanded conformity—“absolute loyalty”—and tightened social controls. The institution of a nationwide social credit system , which will assign a score to every resident for all his or her actions, is but one example of the state’s attempt at total control of society.

China, as a result, is moving from authoritarianism back to totalitarianism, readopting a model that brought the People’s Republic to the brink of economic failure twice, once during the Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s and early 1960s and again during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the mid-1960s to mid-1970s. China’s economy cannot be expected to do well in an increasingly intolerant political atmosphere, as the country’s own history suggests.

And there is one more reason to doubt Chinese economic dominance: demography. China will soon join the ranks of shrinking nations. The population will peak somewhere around 1.44 billion people at the end of next decade according to the U.N.’s World Population Prospects: The 2017 Revision. By the end of the century, China will have a population of 1.02 billion.

China’s decline has implications for its competition with the U.S. In 2015, China’s population was 4.4 times larger than America’s. By 2100, China is projected to have a population only 2.3 times larger.

China’s projected decline—and we should remember the U.N.’s estimates seem to overstate that country’s demographic potential—does not mean the Chinese economy cannot succeed, but it does mean it will have to succeed in spite of demography. China’s four-decade burst of growth occurred during the reaping of the “demographic dividend,” an extraordinary increase in the size of its workforce...
Still more.


Saturday, October 13, 2018

Amber Lee's Sunday Forecast

More rain this weekend?

Well, here's the lovely Ms. Amber with the forecast, for CBS News 2 Los Angeles:



Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future

Following-up, "America's New Mainline Ideology."

I do read a lot of the current Marxist revolutionary literature, but I've fallen a bit behind. (It takes a lot of time, and I've been enjoying a lot of classic fiction literature this past year.)

In any case, perhaps it's time to order some more books.

See Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work.



Democrats Becoming 'More Ruthless'

Folks are noticing, dang!

Here's the recent piece at Politico that got some pushback on Twitter the other day, plus more from the Republican National Committee Below:




Evelyn Taft's Weekend Forecast

Lots of rain last night, and tremendous thunder and lightning.

Here's Ms. Evelyn with the forecast, for CBS News 2 Los Angeles:




America's New Mainline Ideology

This is perhaps the best explanation of "cultural Marxism' I've read. (ADDED: With the exception of Linda Kimball, "Cultural Marxism," at American Thinker back in 2007; a great piece.)

Very good.

At the Mises Institute, "Is Cultural Marxism America's New Mainline Ideology?":


Another name for the neo-Marxism of increasing popularity in the United States  is cultural Marxism.” This theory says that the driving force behind the socialist revolution is not the proletariat — but the intellectuals. While Marxism has largely disappeared from the workers' movement, Marxist theory flourishes today in cultural institutions, in the academic world, and in the mass media. This “cultural Marxism” goes back to Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) and the Frankfurt School. The theorists of Marxism recognized that the proletariat would not play the expected historical role as a “revolutionary subject.” Therefore, for the revolution to happen, the movement must depend on the cultural leaders to destroy the existing, mainly Christian, culture and morality and then drive the disoriented masses to Communism as their new creed. The goal of this movement is to establish a world government in which the Marxist intellectuals have the final say. In this sense, the cultural Marxists are the continuation of what started with the Russian revolution.

Lenin and the Soviets
Led by Lenin, the perpetrators of the revolution regarded their victory in Russia only as the first step to the world revolution. The Russian Revolution was neither Russian nor proletarian. In 1917, the industrial workers in Russia represented only a small part of the workforce, which mainly consisted of peasantry. The Russian Revolution was not the result of a labor movement but of a group of professional revolutionaries . A closer look at the composition of the Bolshevist party and of the first governments of the Soviet state and its repressive apparatus reveals the true character of the Soviet revolution as a project that did not aim at freeing the Russian people from the Tsarist yoke but was to serve as the launchpad for the world revolution.

The experience of World War I and its aftermath showed that the Marxist concept of the "proletariat" as a revolutionary force was an illusion. At the example of the Soviet Union, one could also see that socialism could not function without a dictatorship. These considerations brought the leading Marxist thinkers to the conclusion that a different strategy would be required to establish socialism. Communist authors spread the insight that the socialist dictatorship must come in disguise. Before socialism can succeed, the existing culture must change. Control of the culture must precede political control.

Cultural Control Rises in Tandem with Political Control
Helping the neo-Marxists was the fact many of their efforts in taking control of culture happened parallel to the encroachment of the state on individual liberties. Over the past decades, at the same time when so-called political correctness has been on the rise, the American government obtained a vast arsenal of repressive instruments. Few Americans seem to know that the U.S. is still under emergency law that has been in force since George W. Bush used the executive privilege to declare a state of national emergency in 2001. In the same year, 9/11 opened also the path to push through the Patriot Act . From a score of around 95 points, the Freedom House "Aggregate Index of Freedom" of the United States has fallen to 86 points in 2018.

Moral Corruption
The way toward the rule of the cultural Marxists is the moral corruption of the people. To accomplish this, the mass media and public education must not enlighten but confuse and mislead. The media and the educational establishment work to put one part of the society against the other part. While group identities get more specific, the catalog of victimization and history of oppression becomes more detailed. To turn into a recognized victim of suppression is the way to gain social status and to obtain the right to special assistance, of respect and social inclusion.

The demand for social justice creates an endless stream of expenditures deemed essential — for health, education, old age, and for all those people who are "needy," "persecuted" and "oppressed," be it real or imaginary. The flood of never-ending spending in these areas corrupts the state finances and produces fiscal crises. This helps the Neo-Marxists accuse "capitalism" of all evils when, in fact, it is the regulatory state that provokes the systemic failures and when it is the excess of public debt that causes the financial fragility.

Politics, the media, and the judiciary never pause at waging the new endless wars: the war on drugs or against high blood pressure or the campaigns that assert the endless struggle against fat and obesity. The list of the enemies grows every day whether racism, xenophobia, and anti-Islamism. The epitome of this movement is political correctness, the war against having one's own opinion. While the public tolerates disgusting expositions of behavior, particularly under the cult of the arts, the list of prohibited words and opinions grows daily. Public opinion must not go beyond the few accepted positions. Yet while the public debate impoverishes, the diversity of radical opinion flourishes in the hidden.

The cultural Marxists drive society morally into an identity crisis by the means of the false standards of a hypocritical ethics. The aim is no longer the "dictatorship of the proletariat," because this project has failed, but the "dictatorship of political correctness" whose supreme authority lies in the hands of the cultural Marxists. As a new class of priests, the guardians of the new orthodoxy rule the institutions whose power they try to extend over all parts of the society. The moral destruction of the individual is a necessary step to accomplish the final victory.

Opium of the Intellectuals
The believers of neo-Marxism are mainly intellectuals. Workers, after all, are a part of the economic reality of the production process and know that the socialist promises are rubbish. Nowhere was socialism established as the result of a labor movement. The workers have never been the perpetrators of socialism but always its victim. The leaders of the revolution have been intellectual party politicians and military men. It was up to the writers and artists to conceal the brutality of the socialist regimes through articles and books and by films, music, and paintings, and to give socialism a scientific-intellectual, aesthetic and moral appearance. In the socialist propaganda, the new system appears to be both fair and productive.

The cultural Marxists believe that someday they will be the sole holders of power and be able to dictate to the masses how to live and what to think. Yet the neo-Marxist intellectuals are in for a surprise...
Still more.


Gordon Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

At Amazon, Gordon Chang, The Coming Collapse of China.



Gay People Are 'F–king Terrified' to Criticize #TransCult Ideology

Arielle Scarcella's a cool chick, and actually kinda hot, even though she's lesbian.

She's something of a career sexologist, or at least she's monetized her "hobby" of sexual identity and identity politics. Robert Stacy McCain calls folks like this "occupation activists" --- that is, the make a job out of their politicized sexual identity.

Anyway, the Other McCain has a post up on Ms. Scarcella. See, "Arielle Scarcella: Gay People Are ‘F–king Terrified’ to Criticize Trans Ideology":


Arielle Scarcella has 550,000 subscribers to her YouTube channel, which makes her one of the most popular lesbian YouTubers. Some of her videos have more viewers than the average program at CNN (but let’s be honest, CNN is barely more popular than the Hallmark Channel). Her popularity is the only reason Ms. Scarcella has been able to survive telling the truth about transgender activists, who have harassed her viciously for months because of her criticism of their bizarre ideology.

In a video this week, Ms. Scarcella explained that most gay and lesbian YouTubers are “f–king terrified to even touch on an trans topics — about the blatant misogyny that the SJW trans activists promote, about how the Left is so far left at this point that they are suggesting conversion therapy and hiding it behind the agenda of ‘queer’ progressiveness, about how some bisexual YouTubers have made videos and public statements saying that our ‘genital preference’ is a whole bias, when in reality it’s not a bias, it’s not a preference, it’s our sexual orientation and it’s not something we can help, about how little gay men are actually policed for their sexual orientation in comparison to lesbians — not very much at all.”

Fear of being labelled a “TERF” (trans-exclusive radical feminist) causes many lesbian YouTubers to avoid the topic of transgenderism entirely, Ms. Scarcella explains, because SJWs (social justice warriors) like Riley Dennis have specifically targeted the lesbian community as “bigots” for rejecting relationships with men who think they’re women...
Keep reading.

Looks Like Democrat Heidi Heitkamp Is on the Way Out (VIDEO)

If Heitkamp loses, there's really no path for the Democrats to retake the Senate.

Republicans are absolutely gleeful about race. Heitkamp voted against Brett Kavanaugh, which to me doesn't make sense, other than what some say was the senator's pledege of allegiance to leftists who'll secure her a fat think tank job when she's out of office, or a university administration position, or some such far-left progressive sinecure to fatten the woman's coffers.

In any case, at Politico, "GOP closes in on Heitkamp knockout — and control of the Senate":


The North Dakota Democrat is down in polls. And if she loses, Democrats can all but kiss their hopes of winning the Senate goodbye.

Republicans say they’re on the cusp of delivering a knockout blow to North Dakota Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp — and virtually ending Democrats’ hopes of winning the Senate.

Heitkamp is down in public polls by a significant margin, and most political handicappers think Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) is the favorite to beat her. If she goes down, Democrats would basically have to run the table in every other battleground race to take the chamber.

Republicans have had Heitkamp losing by double digits in their private polling for weeks, according to a GOP strategist working on Senate races. Democrats argue the race is closer but acknowledge she is down even in their polling, after her vote against Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court.

“At this point, it’s really ours to lose,” said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.). “The race, probably to her detriment, has been nationalized around the Supreme Court and Trump.”

In an interview on Wednesday, Heitkamp acknowledged she’s facing an uphill battle but hinted that she believes Cramer could still self-immolate, pointing to his comments on sexual harassment and a new trade deal with Canada. In a story published last weekend, Cramer told The New York Times that sexual assault accusations and the #MeToo campaign against Kavanaugh were a “movement toward victimization” of men. He also was scolded by Canadians over his comments about new NAFTA negotiations.

“There’s a level of arrogance and rash statements that doesn’t reflect the typical North Dakota, common-sense contemplative, work-together kind of attitude,” Heitkamp said. “You can say all these crazy things, but sometimes the crazy things you say and how you behave has real consequences here.”

And her allies assert that Heitkamp is far from done. They point to her universal name ID, retail campaign skills and her surprise win in 2012 despite being down in the polls. In a state of just 750,000 people, and where perhaps 150,000 votes could win the race, winning over even 15,000 voters in the next month could make the difference, they argue.

“This is certainly the state that seems to be the most vulnerable. But that was probably the case a year ago,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). But he added, “It’s a tiny state, where you can make a lot of progress” meeting voters in person.

Democrats say their private polling shows Heitkamp's numbers recovering after dropping by double digits during the Kavanaugh fight, according to two Democrats familiar with the race. Heitkamp came out against Kavanaugh shortly before he was confirmed.

She's also seen a gush of online money into her campaign coffers since she came out against Kavanaugh, Democrats say. But she needs to mount a dramatic comeback in order for Democrats to have any shot at taking the Senate. It’s a long shot in any case, but nearly impossible if she loses.

Democrats need to net two seats to win majority, even as a half-dozen of their incumbents are in tough races. The party has four opportunities to flip Republican-held seats. But if Heitkamp loses they'd need to win three of those four, plus hold nine seats in states carried by Trump in 2016...
More.


No PAC Money: Republicans Cutting Loose Vulnerable GOP Congressional Candidates

This was at NYT yesterday, "Republicans Abandon Vulnerable Lawmakers, Striving to Keep House."

And then this today at LAT, discussing my district and Huntington Beach, "Top GOP funding group snubs incumbents Rohrabacher and Walters 3 weeks before midterm election":


In a worrisome sign for two endangered Orange County lawmakers, a major Republican Party funding group has passed over the pair in its opening round of broadcast television advertising across Southern California.

The omission of Reps. Dana Rohrabacher and Mimi Walters by the Congressional Leadership Fund, a political action committee closely aligned with House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), comes at a crucial inflection point in the midterm election when the two parties begin assessing their likely winners and losers.

The decisions are particularly acute for the GOP, which is facing a tsunami of Democratic campaign cash ahead of a feared blue wave on Nov. 6.

“Republicans are taking a cold-blooded look at races to decide where to put resources and where to withdraw resources to put somewhere else,” said Stuart Rothenberg, a nonpartisan election analyst who has spent decades sizing up campaigns.

The GOP has already cut loose several incumbents, including Reps. Mike Coffman in the Denver suburbs and Mike Bishop in southern Michigan.

Democrats need a gain of 23 seats nationwide to take control of the House, which they surrendered after a blowout loss in the 2010 midterm election.

Candidates in California, where more than half a dozen seats are being seriously contested, are at particular risk of being cut off financially because of the state’s exorbitant advertising costs. Money saved in the costly Los Angeles media market can be spread over several contests in other states that may be considered more winnable.

The Congressional Leadership Fund, which collects multi-million-dollar checks from the Republican Party’s biggest donors, says it is spending nearly $12 million on cable television ads in four House contests in Southern California

On Friday, the super PAC launched an additional $5-million ad campaign on the main broadcast stations in Los Angeles, the nation’s second most expensive media market after New York.

But the fund’s opening broadcast ads support only two of the four Republican candidates in the Southland’s hardest-fought races: Rep. Steve Knight of Palmdale and Young Kim of Fullerton, relegating its Rohrabacher and Walters ads tocable channels with fewer viewers.

Courtney Alexander, the super PAC’s communications director, declined to comment on its advertising maneuvers.

“If the election were held today, we believe that both Mimi Walters and Dana Rohrabacher would win their reelection,” she said.

The fund is free to add Walters and Rohrabacher to its broadcast lineup later. But millions of Californians have already received their ballots by mail, so immediate advertising is crucial to the fate of the two lawmakers, who are each facing their most serious challenges ever.

Rohrabacher has served 15 terms in Congress and Walters is bidding to win her third term.

Their Democratic challengers are already spending heavily on broadcast television ads. Walters has aired some broadcast commercials too, but Rohrabacher has not.

Nationwide, Democratic candidates have raised far more money than Republicans. As a result, GOP candidates are counting on outside groups like the Congressional Leadership Fund to come to the rescue.

But those groups must pay as much as quadruple the rates that television stations are required by law to offer to candidates, so the Democratic dollars are buying far more ad time. And those dollars are expanding the political battlefield, pressuring Republican strategists to make hard decisions on where to commit precious resources and which candidates to let go.

“While most people talk constantly about whether [Democratic enthusiasm] will translate into turnout, it’s definitely translating into dollars,” said Rob Stutzman, a veteran Republican strategist in Sacramento. “Dollars aren’t decisive always, but it’s always a big advantage.

“When you’re these national committees and you’ve got problems in the suburbs of Dallas, Kansas City, Chicago, Philadelphia, you’ve got to start making decisions on where you can most effectively spend,” Stutzman said...
Still more.

Pregnant Kate Upton

Maybe Ms. Kate will be at the ALCS game today in Boston.

But see Drunken Stepfather in the meantime, "KATE UPTON PREGNANT NIPPLES OF THE DAY.


Rita Ora in Clash Magazine

Fantastic!

See, "Rita Ora Is The Fourth Face of Issue 109."

FLASHBACK: "Rita Ora for 'Lui' Magazine."

Chrissy Teigen Big Fat of the Day

At Drunken Stepfather, "Chrissy Teigen Big Fat Hard Nippled Tits of the Day."