General Michael Flynn has earned a purple heart. The corruption against him indicated by text messages is scandalous. The public will rally to his defense more and more.
Trump allows Mueller to continue, indicating strength not weakness. Trump is letting Mueller proverbially “hang himself”, or to be “Biblical”, build his own Haman scaffold. Lashing out at Mueller on Twitter comes from Trump’s “social nose” telling him to wait for public support so that when—not if—Trump fies Mueller, the public demands more investigations of the draining swamp, which still will not satisfy the public outcry against corruption.
By not yet taking so much action as demanded, Trump opponents will see him as moderate and his support could even increase in the 2020 election—already likely to increase since the normal mid-term losses long predicted by Symphony will only rouse Trumpists to get out the vote even more.
The Facebook scandal involving the said-to-be-dubious research group Cambridge Analytica neither indites Democrats nor Republicans since the group is likened to “mercenaries” who will work for anyone’s pay. It does raise questions about Facebook’s inside baseball, though at most Facebook’s involvement seems to have been not caring enough or not having policies prepared to handle what Cambridge Analytica was doing, but we’ll have to wait and see. Nonetheless, Facebook will end up being more regulated by Congress, something quite easily done through FTC regulations—Facebook is a company with publicly traded stock. We could see legislation imposing a kind of “fairness and privacy doctrine” on public social media companies. Facebook is becoming a de facto utility, a status clearly proven by how important it was to Cambridge Analytica.
The STOP, School Violence Act of 2018 sponsored by Orrin Hatch has due bipartisan support. It also contains provisions for training, something suggested by Symphony just after the Florida Valentine’s Day Massacre. Democrats naturally want more, but are supportive.
Scott Walker is self-destructing and may not win a third term. It began in his bid for the presidency when his campaign imploded. Initially, he over-reached. He was too much good for Wisconsin too fast and he wasn’t prepared to take on the wolves. Given the sudden spotlight, he aimed for the presidency. Now, he’s talking like George HW Bush when he reneged on his “read my lips, no new taxes” speech, then said he needed to raise taxes to get along with Democrats toward the end of his first—and hence final—term. If Walker doesn’t lose, then there either aren’t any good Republican or Democratic candidates in Wisconsin or history has decided to stop delivering justice upon those who don’t learn from it.
SpaceX is proving the benefits of both public funding and privatization. Surely both Liberals and Conservatives will want the claim. The US government paved the way for space exploration, but Elon Musk made the stage-one booster return to the landing pad. The world has not seen a breakthrough of this magnitude since Lincoln regulated the first transcontinental railroad through the government while it was built by competing private companies.
Californian idealists, whether right or wrong, are distracted. If they truly believe in their ideals to stand against the Federal government, they will need to stop ballyhooing sanctuary city talking points and repeal their anti-gun laws. Right now, California’s best friend is not social media, but the Second Amendment, specifically the part about a State-regulated militia. Many claim that the National Guard is the militia, but that idea has not been fully tested and vetted and it also has many categorical questions. Calling the national guard to stand against the US military might not work, though it’s a good guess the idea has been tossed around at least one conference room in the bowls of California’s state capitol. We’ll just have to wait and see.
Everything happening in Washington news right now means absolutely nothing.
Gun legislation means nothing—bills will get passed, but the public hasn’t heard about those bills yet. There just hasn’t been enough time to draft and debate them.
Security clearances get adjusted all the time. Politicians meet and talk all the time—a president who has actual negotiation experience, however, might seem a little surprising to people who don’t understand Trump. But, none of it is news and none of it will go anywhere. It’s all one big, giant distraction for what is actually developing, which we should see in the coming weeks and months.
The only thing that happened of significance was the US Senate’s unanimous passage of the “Taiwan Travel Act”, which would basically allow Trump to visit Taiwan and vice versa, as well as many other officials, and, of course, irritate the Chinese. Unanimous passage of a Senate bill? Why didn’t that make headlines from a press obsessed with “bipartisan cooperation”?
It didn’t make headlines because everything happening, this week anyway, is just a distraction from what’s really going on, whatever “else” that may be, in addition to Asia.
If we look at help and mutual interests, it would seem that the NRA is a covert Leftist organization and that anti-gun groups sponsor gun shows.
The best reasons and the best laws for gun owners are also the best-kept secrets, at least in NRA memes and Tweets. Gun owners often say that “gun control” means “hitting your target”, but where are the NRA bumper stickers calling for target practice, for high school students to take the Constitutionally required “Militia” course? It doesn’t have to be in high school, but high school makes the most sense since both Militia and high school education are performed by the State. By only rallying for guns, guns, yeah, yeah, the NRA seems to be making its own strawman defense for guns—giving the wrong reason for a half-right conclusion. It invites effective opposition.
Gun shows have a similar irony. Every time anti-gun laws are even discussed, gun sales go up. Florida just saw record attendance at a recent gun show.
Either the two groups are in cahoots or they don’t really think about the effects of their actions.
Taiwanese young men are required to attend a weekly class in high school as part of mandatory basic military training. After they have been out of school for a certain period of time, they are summoned by their government to report for four weeks of on-sight basic training. Their society does not have any guns in circulation, except the police, of course, and what unproven political-mafia machines might allow into the hands of “enforcers”, but that’s a different story. Taiwan’s society is light years safer than American.
The two cultures are very different. The United States has wide, open country where police response time is slower than the second-most densely populated country in the world. But, if basic military training can keep a gun-free society safe, imagine what already Constitutionally-required “Militia” training would do for the USA.
No one likes to read about school shootings. I was in high school when a student shot himself in the head, right in the hallway, Vinnie Garofalo, February 1998. I remember when a college classmate told our student body the reports from his former classmates at Columbine. “They’re dead,” she told him. “They’re all dead.” Now, the Editor needs to write about it and Americans need to read about it, yet again.
The Florida shooting is complicated, it always is. This one has a story behind the shooter that seems more personal than other times. No one claims his story is any alibi. Many heroes were made, both victim and living. One libriarian, Diana Haneski, was inspired by her friend’s heroism from Sandy Hook and protected 55 students by locking them in a media room. An assistant coach, Aaron Feis, protected three girls by shielding them with his own body, he did not survive.
Tragedy strikes. We reflect and ask why. Then we second guess ourselves and wish that we would have loved each other more and sooner. We go home. We cry ourselves to sleep. Then we wake up the next day and prepare to march for action. So, let’s talk action.
Emma Gonzales is right, in a sense even the minds of gun owners. To the gun owners, the NRA has been largely useless. They aren’t effective at protecting gun owner rights, only at rallying people up. At Columbine and with Michael Moore, the NRA’s reaction was generally useless. Rather than helping the nation navigate through the challenges, they just acted insensitive. The NRA’s Twitter account hasn’t posted since Valentine’s Day, when the Florida shooting happened, not even sympathy to the families. This seems to have been a “silencer” for the NRA. Politicians who receive money from that over-spiced “nothing burger” organization should be ashamed.
As for action, since we act like we’re ready for a candid conversation, let’s take off the gloves. Before you decide to click “next”, finish the next two paragraphs.
Why are we in deadlock about guns? As strong—and correct—of an argument as Emma Gonzales makes, there is another strong point that must be included in our united path forward. It’s the “elephant” in the living room, the reason we can’t finish the debate, which no one wants to so much as even mention. The dirty, politically incorrect, and inconclusive—mind you—little secret about why guns remain widely available on the market has three big beans: Russia, China, and ISIS. The wide-availability of guns in America is the only reason those countries—ISIS is a country—have not already invaded and killed millions of Americans—just as their governments have killed millions of their own people who aren’t allowed to possess guns. That’s our excuse that keeps us in deadlock over the gun debate—a deadlock that killed 17 people last Valentine’s Day.
The problem is not the Second Amendment itself, but that we only enforce half of it. We need the rest of the Second Amendment—the Militia army of civilians—a high school class with accommodation for handicapped and learning disabled, different standards for different gender, and it would be a requirement for every student in order to graduate and in order to vote in elections. The high school Militia course would teach self-discipline, readiness, hand-to-gun combat, safety in every situation, gun handling and discharge, emergency response, teamwork, and, like all military training, self-respect and self-sacrifice for others. If Nikolas Cruz had been required to graduate high school before he could buy a gun, he wouldn’t have been able to. If he had been required to get the mentoring a high school Militia class would have provided, he wouldn’t have wanted to.
That idea has been presented before by many people before. But, we don’t hear about it from the NRA. We didn’t want to have such a candid discussion about applying the whole of the Constitution—which would keep us safe from enemies, both foreign and domestic, if we would simply obey it to the full. We were too distracted with other news. So, since those other news items that we bicker about were worth the lives of 17 students, let’s take a review of the news items atop headlines in the days before the Valentine’s Day Massacre…
The Obama portraits, while acceptable, are intended to draw attention. The Smithsonian has more expressive art of Ford and HW Bush, more radical than the Michelle interpretation. Contrary to folk wisdom, the woman in the painting does resemble Michelle in those rare moments when she drops that goofy, fake smile for her natural “serious” face. It’s not that strange, as strange as it seems. But, the hue of the leaves in Obama’s piece and the street-art worthy style of Michelle evince an intent to use the presidential portraits as an opportunity to make some kind of statement. Whether that is right or wrong is up for debate, but they are trying to make a statement.
As for the leaves, to claim that they are marijuana is to claim either that the artist is botanically inept or that oneself is. The leaf in the picture more resembles the Ohio State “buckeye leaf”, which has been confused by the botanically inept in the past.
Michael Flynn was pursued by Obama’s leftover administration as retribution for endorsing Trump. It is said one should never hire friends. Hiring Flynn was a mistake, not because Flynn wasn’t up to the job of fighting in the wolf den—which he apparently wasn’t—but because it promoted him from being a target to being an easy target. In the end, however, Michael Flynn will learn just as Sarah Palin did, after being tossed to the wolves. And, the hostile takeover of Flynn’s life will be an alarm in itself to call out the folks to find out just what in the world was going on in the Obama administration that allowed this to happen. Flynn will come back to haunt the Democrats and bureaucrats.
George Soros has been dumping money into local DA elections that would normally elect Republicans. His candidates have been winning. Democrats and their voters who don’t stand against Soros will lose all credibility when next time they complain about the Koch brothers. While many Republican voters will be alarmed—and probably roused to a wrath those DAs will not want to face—the more interesting effect will be their tendency to self-destruct. People artificially propped into power rarely last, especially when they come from different stock.
…But, there’s nothing like a school shooting to put our priorities about the news in perspective.
The budget deal in Congress declares two myths, one from time travel budgeting, the other from silence. When the “experts” project a deficit based on the current spending plan, 1. none of the money has been spent yet and 2. none of the spending tax money has come in yet. They aren’t only counting chickens before they hatch, they already have them buttered on the Christmas dinner table.
The spending projection assumes the previous year’s tax income. If tax rates drop, so does the projected income drop, proportionately. There is some “trickle down” account for the assumption that consumers may spend more and employers hire more since they have the funds not taxed, but they don’t consider synergy. They don’t use AI simulations to project the slew of companies who haven’t announced—but will anyway do—investment within the market. New companies will be capable of coming into being which weren’t able to without the new financial ecosystem. Those aren’t accounted for because they can’t be predicted. The forecast we have is based not on synergistic outcomes—AKA reality—but on comparing last years results against this year’s new methods—AKA time travel.
The second myth comes from silence, namely renegotiating trade agreements. Adjustments making the US market part of a two-way street will also bring new revenue sources—rather than a one-way street that screws the US economy into the ground. These are part of separate agreements already promised, already underway, but largely unfinished and unreported. Budget forecast about those factors are simply silent.
The budget forecast isn’t any accurate prediction of the future, but a kind of comparison for number geeks in black-tie offices. What actually happens is never known until it happens.
