The election is over

Donald Trump just closed the deal with the American electorate.

Turn out the lights, the party's over

The only thing that the Democrats had going for them was the lockdown.  The breathless hyping of the 'rona was intended to fan the flames of fear which would justify further lockdown and economic devastation.  They then blamed Trump for all this, while the media shamelessly covered for them.  That's all gone now.

They say that, 'All good things must end'

But stop and think about what they're selling.  Fear.  Who wants to buy that?  Who would  choose to live their lives in fear?  People will only do that if there isn't a better alternative.  Donald Trump just gave the American Public a better alternative.  It's this: Sure, you might catch the virus.  It's not that bad.  I know, because I caught it.  Now it's time to get on with things.

Miguel compares it to FDR's first inauguration address: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."  Miguel points out that Trump is not an orator like FDR was which is true, but actions speak louder than words sometimes, and Trump checking out of the hospital speaks really, really loudly.

What's even funnier is that the media simply can not not cover this.  It will be front page news for the whole week.  They won't be able to stop themselves, because this is something that people will want to hear about, because they really don't want to live in fear forever.  It will drive ratings, which drive profits.

The end of this week is 24 days from the election.

There's been a cynical joke that the 'rona lockdowns will end on November 4.  The handwriting is on the wall now for the lockdowns - people will start to look for justifications, because there is finally an alternative to the fear.  The justifications are (as I have been posting for months and months) really thin tissues of exaggerations.

And Trump is ready to play his the next card: call out the overreaction by government officials.  Name incidents, describe how innocent citizens were arrested.  Name the officials responsible.  Remember the guy out paddle boarding all by himself?  Remember how he got arrested?  Do you think that Trump can't shine the light of attention on that?  Do you think he doesn't have dozens of other examples, like playgrounds being closed?  Do you think that the electorate won't pay attention to him when he talks about that?

The Press will want to defend the Democrats against this attack but there's really nothing they can do.  I mean, when you see a video of a Mom arrested because she let her kids play outside, who are you going to believe: CNN or your lying eyes?  That's next week gone, too.  Then there are only 17 days until the election.  Does anyone think that Joe Biden will be able to turn things around in two weeks, especially when he's selling fear and Trump is selling hope?

He doesn't even need to talk about the lives and businesses destroyed by the lockdowns.  That's there, and everyone knows all about it.  Trump is going to paint the Democratic Party as the party of tyranny and fear and the Republican Party as the party of freedom and normalcy.  As the song goes, he'll use the 8x10 color glossies with circles and arrows to make his case.  Heck, he'll point out that the (Democratic) Governor is Michigan is ignoring her State's Supreme Court ruling to keep her thump on the public.  There's your tyranny, writ large.  And a whole bunch more, too.

I've said for a while now that Trump will easily cruise to a win next month.  Now it's looking like the down race Democrats are going to get slaughtered, because they'll be selling fear and tyranny against hope.  Good luck with that.

Remember last election with all the Republicans celebrating and the Democrats crying?  Second verse, same as the first.

What a crazy, crazy party
Never seen so many people
Laughin', dancin'
Look at you, you're havin' fun

But look at me I'm almost cryin'
That don't keep her love from dyin'
Misery, 'cause for me the party's over

 

When do rooftop solar panels not work?

During a blackout:

Californians have embraced rooftop solar panels more than anyone in the U.S., but many are learning the hard way the systems won’t keep the lights on during blackouts.

That’s because most panels are designed to supply power to the grid -- not directly to houses. During the heat of the day, solar systems can crank out more juice than a home can handle. Conversely, they don’t produce power at all at night.

So systems are tied into the grid, and the vast majority aren’t working this week as PG&E Corp. cuts power to much of Northern California to prevent wildfires.

You need expensive batteries and special equipment to run off-grid, and most people don't have them.  And the sweet subsidies from non-solar rate payers don't cover these, so solar lovers will have to pay out of their own pocket.

It looks like a generator is a lot cheaper, and maybe more reliable.

Hat tip: biker, former co-worker, and all around good guy Burt via email.

It's no longer the "Al Gore Effect"

Now it's the "Swedish Brat Effect" ...

The previous coldest day this early in Autumn here in Boulder was 34 degrees on October 8, 1985.
We are currently 8 degrees below the previous record at 26F, which is 43 degrees below normal for the date.@GretaThunberg arrives in a few hours to lecture us about global warming

— Tony Heller (@Tony__Heller) October 10, 2019

Hat tip: Don Surber

Mess with the bull ...

Get the horns.  From ten years ago, a post that says you really, really do not want to mess with a building full of veterans.

Valley Falls, NY: Bad place to burn a flag

The local VFW didn't like this fellow burning their flag.

The young man was given three choices: get turned over to the police, go one-on-one in a fight with a seasoned war veteran, or be duct-taped to a flagpole for six hours with a sign around his neck identifying his alleged crime: flag burning.

The young man in question seemingly was turned down at the bar, because he didn't have an ID. Angry, he cut down the Post's flag and set fire to it.

Then he found out the meaning of "a building full of Veterans".

Now before someone starts singing about the young man's First Amendment rights, let me point out two things:

1. He stole their property and destroyed it. They caught him, and gave him the choice of going to jail for theft.

2. As Trace Adkins puts it in his song Fightin' Words, Son, the First Amendment protects you from the Government. Not from me.



Hat tip: From My Position ... On The Way.

Snerk

Election 2020 prediction: Trump 522, Whoever 16

I want to be first on the block to call this - Trump will carry 49 States in next year's Presidential Election.  The map will look like this:

This will take some explaining, so here goes.

The Democrats were outraged that Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 but Trump won the Electoral College.  Lacking the votes for a Constitutional Amendment to eliminate the Electoral College, they came up with a sneaky but very clever idea - get individual States to pass laws giving that State's Electoral Votes to the winner of the national popular vote.  I am not a lawyer, so don't know how this would play out in the Courts, but let's run with this idea.

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact binds signatory States to assigning their Electoral Votes to the winner of the national popular vote.  The compact comes into force when States representing 270 Electoral Votes have passed the law.  Currently States representing 189 EVs have passed the law and it is under consideration in States representing another 116 EVs.  So there's quite a good chance that it will come into effect, as the Democrats intended.  The States that have passed it or where it has been introduced are shaded light red in the map above. (Note that the dark red States voted for Trump and there's no reason to think they won't next year as well)

So where do I get away with calling a 49 State landslide for Trump?  After all, we haven't seen this since Reagan in 1984.

You see, Trump came within a couple million of winning the popular vote: 62,984,828 (Trump) vs. 65,853,514 (Clinton).  That's a little over 2% of votes cast.  The margin for the Democrats is very thin, and this is using 2016 figures.  Now consider Trump's advantages for next year, when compared to 2016:

1. He is an incumbent, which is a big advantage.  Only five incumbent presidents lost re-election during the 20th Century, and each faced challenges that Trump almost certainly won't: Taft (Teddy Roosevelt split the Republican vote with his Bull Moose Party), Hoover (Great Depression), Ford (only President because Agnew resigned in disgrace and then Nixon resigned after Watergate), Carter (disastrous foreign policy led to Iranian hostage crisis), George H.W. Bush (Ross Perot split the Republican vote).  None of these seem remotely plausible, so count on Trump to pick up some popular vote simply due to incumbency.
2. Republicans like him more than they did in 2016.  A lot of Republicans held their noses when they voted for him in 2016, and presumably some more didn't even come out to vote.  Trump was an unknown (from a policy perspective) then; now he has a record to run on, and it is pretty much a solidly Republican record.  Sure, his personal style is very unusual, but from a policy perspective he's not at all out of the Republican mainstream.  He'll pick up some votes here towards the popular total.
3. The economy is doing well.  Non-Republicans (mainly independents and blue collar Democrats, but count in a bunch of African-American men) will vote their pocketbooks next year.  That's more popular votes for Trump.
4. A shockingly weak Democratic field will depress Democratic voter enthusiasm.  Each of the Democrats who are running are either non-entities (Castro, Gabbard, Ojeda, Delaney, Yang, Buttigieg, Gillibrand, a bunch of others nobody has ever heard of) or have terrible, exploitable weaknesses: "Creepy Joe" Biden, Fauxahontas, "Lock up the parents when the kids skip school" Harris, Commie Bernie, and the "Fake Hispanic" O'Rourke.  Quite frankly, it's hard to see the Democratic base get wound up on any of those, so count that as fewer popular votes for the Democrat, equivalent to more popular votes for Trump.

Remember, Trump only needs a couple million more votes to get all the Electoral Votes from the Popular Vote Compact States.  Quite frankly, items 3 and 4 above will get him close, and the others will put him over the top.  It's really hard to see that those 4 advantages won't add up to 3 million more votes - like I said, that's 2% of all votes cast.

And so the Democrat's cunning plan will turn around to crush them next year.  It's too clever by half.  Of course, this all falls apart if there aren't enough other States signing on to the plan to bring the total up to 270 EVs.  We'll have to see about that.

Britain's government collapses

Prime Minister May resigns after drubbing at the polls in yesterday's EU elections.  Nobody cares: viewers were furious that the BBC pre-empted a popular home improvement show for the PM's resignation speech.

Here's the reason she quit, boiled down:

It's that last set of numbers compared with all the others.  May didn't have the leadership to turn Parliament around.  Now she's gone, and may have taken the Tory Party down with her - quite an achievement, really.

And this game of rope-a-dope was a catastrophe for the EU as well.  It's certain that the next UK Prime Minister will invoke Article 50 to leave the EU immediately, but the EU Parliament will be stuck with a bunch of euroskeptic EMPs, unless they expel them all.  The optics on that are miserable.

Me, I'm enjoying the popcorn.

Postscript: Heh:

The Slow Motion end of the EU has begun

Election results are notoriously ignored in the EU, but geez louise:

• LONDON (Reuters) - Investors are on edge on the eve of elections to the European Parliament as they weigh the chances of eurosceptic groups grabbing a third of seats, a level at which analysts say they could stir more trouble for governments and the economy.
  The rise of populist, eurosceptic parties has thrust the European elections, normally a dull affair mostly ignored by global markets, to the forefront of portfolio managers' list of concerns.
  ...
  "It's clear that eurosceptics are going to get more votes than they have before," said John Taylor, co-head of European fixed income at investment firm AllianceBernstein.
  "[If they can get a third of votes] they might become a very disruptive influence when you need Europe to come together to fight things like a trade war."

Anti-EU and anti-establishment parties are on a roll in Europe, following similar results in Australia.  The EU Parliament is admittedly an empty suit, but it has to be a major embarrassment to have 30% of the MEPs from parties that despise the EU.

The globalist Left finds itself astride the march of Progress, futilely shouting "stop".

The world wide collapse of the Left reaches Australia

Adam Piggot muses on how the Labor party lost an "unlosable" election.  The Greens Sink Labor:

Queensland won the election for the conservative Liberal party, not because of what they did but rather because of what Labor didn’t do. Labor didn’t stand up for its heartland in the face of the Adani protests. Not only that but labor has failed to understand that its traditional working class voters in outback mining towns are more and more in a high income bracket, a situation that is only a fairly recent development. When tradies are on a cool 250K pay packet then Labor’s class warfare tax brackets suddenly don’t have quite the appeal that they once had.

This culminated in the election campaign when a worker at the Gladstone Port in Queensland politely quizzed Shorten on what he was going to do for workers who are now finding themselves in a high tax bracket. Shorten fluffed the question but his real troubles began the next day when the worker had his contract terminated by the company for daring to ask the great Labor leader an awkward question.

Labor has been infected by the Green mind virus and assumed that the majority of Australia would vote like inner-city Melbourne. But with the working class now often making more money than inner-city lefties, a threat to their new found livelihoods in the form of stopping a major coal mine was just the tip of the iceberg, as Labor intended to roll out radical Green proposals to go 100% renewable energy in Australia.

Status is a positional good - there really seems to be a zero sum game at work in status hierarchies (if one person gains status, it is as measured against the other members of that hierarchy who lose status).  This is the vise in which the Left now finds itself: as more and more of their support comes from urban, white collar workers - many of whom find themselves in jobs that have modest pay, like school teachers or government clerks - then seeing higher pay for "lower status" jobs like the trades, mining, and manufacturing (and the resulting higher financial status) is a psychological blow for their core base of supporters.

I mean, here you are with all this student debt for your Masters in Education and some low-life deplorable coal miner is making twice as much as you?

The Left has a built-in preference for policies that will damage the trades, mining, and manufacturing, so that the Left's core support base will be relatively better off as the people in these "deplorable" jobs lose income and status.  Of course, this doesn't do a thing to raise the incomes of the Left's core support base, but nobody ever said that cognitive dissonance ever lead to rational outcomes.

What is a disaster for the Left (in Australia and world wide) is that the Deplorables have caught on to the game, and are now voting as a bloc against the Left.  It's self-defense - there's no ideological congruence with "conservative" parties, but that actually makes it worse for the Left: acting in self-interest is a much stronger predictor of outcome than ideology.

And so the Left keeps losing elections that are "unlosable" - BREXIT, Trump, Brazil, Italy ... the list goes on and on.  The Green Agenda is toxic at the polls.

Quite frankly, the only places you see success for the Greens is at isolated local levels where there is essentially a single party state - California, New York, a few other places.  Unsurprisingly, these are the places facing the biggest fiscal crisis as productive (read: tax paying) members of the Deplorables decamp to friendlier locales.  If anything, this accelerates the coming collapse.  New York and California Democrats are getting short term psychological benefits for their core supporters at the cost of long term lower incomes for those same supporters.

Hey, nobody ever said that cognitive dissonance lead to rational outcomes.

Twitter bans French Government in order to comply with french "Fake News" law

This is delicious:

A social media campaign from the French government has been blocked by Twitter - because of the government's own anti-fake-news law.

Since December, France requires online political campaigns to declare who paid for them, and how much was spent.

But now Twitter has rejected a government voter registration campaign.

The company could not find a solution to obey the letter of the new law, officials said – and opted to avoid the potential problem altogether.

LOL.  The French.Gov is, of course, beaucoup fâché at this whole countretemps - the idea that a vaguely-worded law might actually be used against them!  Why it's nothing short of lèse-majesté.

Couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of Statist Pricks.  This post is tagged "statist pricks" because, well, you know.

Joe Biden and the Democrat Party

This is pretty funny.

And Gillette can die screaming in a fire.

Offered without comment

Missouri Senate tells Feds to bug off about gun control

This is interesting:

Like it’s predecessor, SB613, Bill SB367 and it’s companion, House Bill HB786, would prevent all state agencies and their employees from enforcing any federal law that infringes the Second Amendment in any way, including gun registrations, fees, fines, licenses and bans. Originally authored in 2014, a former version of the bill was also passed, but vetoed by then Missouri Governor Jay Nixon.

The bill prohibits Missouri agencies from cooperating in the enforcement of those laws.  It's exactly what states like California are doing regarding immigration enforcement, which is a little shadenfreudalistic.   It goes further, though, into territory that seems perhaps a legal bridge too far:

All federal acts, laws, executive orders, administrative orders, court orders, rules, and regulations, whether past, present, or future, which infringe on the people’s right to keep and bear arms as guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the United States I and Section 23 of the Missouri Constitution shall be invalid in this state, shall not be recognized by this state, shall be specifically rejected by this state, and shall be considered null and void and of no effect in this state.”

Now I am not a lawyer, so don't know how this would play out regarding, say, NFA tax stamps for automatic weapons built and sold within the state.  Interesting times, as the provinces increasingly are rejecting the authority of the Capital.

Well that certainly didn't age well

One week ago:

On the quest to become one of Los Angeles’ most revered sports institutions, a victory Sunday in the Super Bowl is only the start. What comes after will be almost as important for the Rams.

If President Donald Trump invites them to the White House, they have to decline.

Today:

Problem solved, I guess.

It's funny because it's true

But if you torture the data it will confess to anything.

I must say that I'm digging this meme.  For those unfamiliar with it, back during the days when government policy encouraged off-shoring of manufacturing jobs there were a lot of articles in the press that laid off factory workers should learn to code.

Now that's funny

pic.twitter.com/DdFzCQTBme

— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) December 16, 2018

It's funny because it's true.

Associated Press: the Democrat's winning strategy

It seems like they're not tired of all the winning they've been through lately:

It’s not one size fits all, with every candidate checking every box wanted by the activists driving the opposition to President Donald Trump and the GOP Congress, and Democratic voters typically aren’t tapping the most liberal choices in targeted districts. But, taken together, the crop of nominees is trending more liberal than many of the “Blue Dog” Democrats swept away in Republicans’ 2010 midterm romp. 

That means voters now represented by a Republican will be asked to consider some or all of the mainstream Democratic priorities that may have been considered “too liberal” in the past: more government involvement in health insurance, tighter gun laws, a path to citizenship for people in the country illegally, reversing parts of the GOP tax law, support for LGBTQ rights.

Ignore that Trump is an effect, not a cause.  Keep focusing on him, Democrats.  It's not eight years of over the top leftie policies, nope, no way, nada, no no no.

Double down of what got Trump elected - this time it will be totally more effective.  Do it again, only harder this time.

Tagged with the post tag "shadenfreude" because, well, you know.

Hat tip: The Queen Of The World, who is not tired of all the winning either.

It's high time for some Common Sense Press Control

The Media is all in for curtailing the our Second Amendment rights.  OK, then - maybe we should look at curtailing their First Amendment rights.

After all, this has a better chance of reducing school shootings than any of the gun control proposals that we've heard.  And their publications are commercial in nature - they make money on talking up the school shootings, which likely encourages more school shootings - which leads to higher ratings and more money for them.  Which is more important: Media profits or children's lives?

After all, we're constantly told that if it saves one kid's life than we should do it, amirite?

Go sign the petition.

NSA discovers that oft evil will shall evil mar

The International Standards Organization has rejected two NSA developed encryption ciphers.  It used to be that NSA ciphers were considered the gold standard, but there is a wide perception that if there aren't explicit backdoors that at least NSA knows how to crack the ciphers (i.e. the cipher is "broken as designed").

In a sense, this is a shame, since the ciphers were designed to be usable by low power processors on the Internet Of Things.  The IoT can use all the security help it can get, but ISO looks like they're not convinced that NSA is actually helping.

And FYI, this is the second time NSA has tried to push through these ciphers, and the second time they've been rejected.

Hat tip: Bruce Schneier.

Youtube suffers a Mass Irony attack

pic.twitter.com/YftpEyrjqS

— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) April 4, 2018