Chance of riots: Moderate!

So the latest over-a-year-old-controversy-but-now-we've-got-video-and-let's-face-it-some-people-are-too-stupid-to-do-anything-without-pictures-to-make-it-clear-to-them protest moment has been spurred on by the indictment of a cop in Chicago for first degree murder. I've referenced it a couple of stories down.

Now that video has been released of the shooting, the looters, er, excuse me, I mean protesters-for-justice are out and about again.

There were sporadic protests in Chicago yesterday. One featured this classic moment captured by an AP photographer:

Caption from News13: Lamon Reccord (right) stares and yells at a Chicago police officer 'Shoot me 16 times' as he and others march through Chicago's Loop Wednesday, Nov. 25, 2015, one day after murder charges were brought against police officer Jason Van Dyke in the killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast) 

Ah, reasoned, considered debate, the hallmark of Anglo-Saxon culture! Note that these are protests well after the fact, and AFTER the cop has been indicted (properly, in my opinion) for first degree murder.

But here's the more interesting bit: the protesters in Chicago are calling for a "shut down" of the famous Michigan Avenue shopping district on Black Friday. Has there ever been a clearer call for a flash mob to come loot and pillage? Hell, Attila the Hun would admire the chutzpah. 

And in NYC, a mob invaded Macy's last night (the night before Thanksgiving) in support of protesters in Minneapolis. Breitbart adds this following bit of helpfulness: 

Black liberation activists, revolutionary communists, and the Nation of Islam plan to target stores for demonstration nationwide on Black Friday.

Oh yeah, between ISIS, the Nation of Islam, black anarchists, black communists, and the white supporters of each, plus the propensity of blacks to riot for free shit anyway, tomorrow is likely to be about as much fun as the days after MLKjr was shot. I'll be staying home.

The Donald: Wall Street's Worst Nightmare

From CNN comes an article entitled "Donald Trump Terrifies Wall Street". The gist of it is that The Donald isn't willing to lick the shit out of Wall Street's asshole and call it ambrosia. Wall Street would even prefer Elizabeth Warren! Apparently Bernie Sanders (Socialist) is the only other candidate that gives them pause, and I suspect they fear The Donald more - Bernie just doesn't look like he'd have any chance of really doing anything (assuming he wants to) and The Donald could well kick the whole system in the ass.

Anyway, I consider that an endorsement/reason-to-vote-for The Donald. Still planning on not voting next year, but DAMN, home boy is pushing for my vote!

Is this Pope stupid or evil?

The Pope pontificates on the current refugee crisis, and manages to sound even more stupid than usual.

In an interview with Portugal-based Radio Renascença aired yesterday, Pope Francis declared that the current refugee crisis in Europe is being caused by a “bad, unjust” socio-economic system that worships “the god of money.”

In the interview, where questions were posed in Portuguese and the responses were given by Pope Francis in Spanish, the pontiff said coveting money will bring about both human and ecological ruin:

“This is the tip of the iceberg. We see these refugees, these poor people who are escaping from war, escaping from hunger, but that’s the tip of the iceberg. But underlying that is the cause, and the cause is a socio-economic system that is bad, unjust, because within an economic system, within everything, within the world, speaking of the ecological problem, within the socio-economic society, in politics, the person always has to be the center. And today’s dominant economic system has removed the person from the center, and at the center is the god of money. It’s the fashionable god today. I mean, there are statistics. I don’t remember very well, but — this is not exact and I could be making a mistake— 17% of the population has 80% of the wealth.”

Alternately, the Western nations, and those who have followed Western models of governance, economics, science, and, yes, social justice for their own, have made something of themselves while places like Syria have made nothing. The West isn't helping these places with its horrible foreign policy mistakes, but the basic problem in Syria is that the best ruler they've had since gaining their independence from the Ottomans was Daddy Assad, who once killed somewhere between 10,000 to 20,000 of his own people to punish the city of Hama for revolting against his rule. And yes, he was justified to do so, as the rebels weren't the dentists and shop keepers Obama likes to make fun of, but were instead the Muslim Brotherhood.

How bad is the Muslim Brotherhood? They think Egyptian society is too liberal. You know, the Egyptian society which mutilates over 90% of little girls by cutting up their genitalia. (As a father with a daughter, I find Egyptian men particularly sickening for this practice. How can they do this to their little girls?)

The West hasn't had anything to do with any of that. And that's the best the Arabs can do.

So no, Pope Francis, the problem isn't that the West is greedy. The problem is that the rest of the world needs people like Daddy Assad rto keep it from going completely to Hell.

From one of the UK rags:

Robots are going to steal the jobs of chefs, salespeople and models, researchers say as they unveil full list of likely robot professions 

Scientists have created a huge, in-depth analysis of what jobs are under threat from robots — with salesmen, chefs and even models all in the firing line.

Researchers have assembled a full list of all the things that robots are good and bad at, and so what jobs they are likely to take. In all, about 35 per cent of jobs are likely to have been taken on by robots in the next 20 years, researchers have said.

So naturally, our rulers want to import even more people to be unemployed in the future. One can only assume that our leaders are completely stupid, which seems somewhat unlikely given that they've got most of the power and money, or that they have something nefarious in mind.

 

Springtime for Hitler Merkel & Germany

The long held dream of German imperialists has finally come to pass: Germany now effectively leads Europe, even if it doesn't quite rule Europe. But it turns out that leading Europe isn't so much fun these days. From the New York Times:

In this summer’s migrant crisis — as with the unfinished debt crisis in Greece and the confrontation with Russia over Ukraine — Germany once again finds itself at the center of a European drama, compelled or condemned to lead by its wealth and size and by the lack of leadership from Brussels and other states in the European Union.

It should be noted that at least in the case of the Greek issue that it is largely a crisis of German manufacture.

But Germany is feeling the strain, because it turns out that (a) everyone else in Europe doesn't have the same characteristics as Germans, and (b) no one else in Europe cares for having their internal policies dictated by Germany. The immigration crisis is the best example of this. Germany is trying to tell countries like Hungary what they need to do about the immigrants coming to their lands. The Germans and the French have declared that they will take everyone. (How they're going to fit all of the Middle East and Africa into those two countries I have no idea.) This has the immigrants rushing through other countries, such as Hungary, Greece and Macedonia, to get there. These other nations DO NOT LIKE THIS. They don't want their own systems of social welfare and governance overwhelmed by a bunch of crazy-assed Muslims who couldn't get along with other crazy-assed Muslims, nor by a bunch of Africans seeking to live somewhere without other Africans.

I'm not sure what kind of point I can make here, other than that things are likely to get much worse before they get better. Germany is expecting to take in 800,000 asylum seekers this year. That's four times more than last year. If it just doubles next year that would be 1,600,000, meaning an increase of Germany's population by 2.6 million people in three years time. Germany had 80 million inhabitants in 2013, so that's a 3.25% increase in population ABSENT any other immigration, net of births & deaths.

That's huge, and it's just the start. The latest forecasts from the UN population growth charts suggests that Africa will go from having one billion people today to having 4 billion in 2100. Meanwhile, Europe's population is projected to fall  from the approximate 750 million people it has now.

But back to  the NOW. Germany is going to increase it's population by at least 3% over three years, and none of those people have family, connections, property, a place to stay, or food with them. They don't have jobs. Many will lack in any kind of skills useful to a modern society. Most won't speak German.

How in the name of God or reason can anyone think this is going to be anything but a disaster of monumental proportions?

Immigration Dump

A plethora of stories on both the US immigration situation and the European 'migrant' crisis. (Calling them migrants is bullshit, as migrants keep moving, and usually go home. These folks are coming to stay.)

First, Houston has become the spot for refugee relocation in the US, and can now boast that one in four of its residents are foreign born. (That's over six million folks in the metro area.)

E Pluribus Houston

City of Refugees: How Houston became a resettlement magnet

This is of course a thing to celebrate, according to the lords and masters of the times.

Second comes this report on what immigrants bring to the table. 

Report: More than half of immigrants on welfare

Yeah, that'll help. 

But then, there are immigrants and there are immigrants. Jorge Ramos isn't on welfare, and he doesn't want his special little snowflakes at all subject to those whose are: His children attend a $30,000+ per year private school. As the writer of the linked article puts it:

So the next time you hear Mr. Ramos passionately arguing that the US/Mexican border does not need a wall, remember this — he does so knowing that his kids are walled off in ways that most American children are not.

Another one of the elites wanting everyone else to put up with the mess they're creating while continuing to plunder the country. Ramos is a particularly obnoxious and dangerous guy, by the way, who works for an Israeli who wants America to open its borders to the Third World while Israel builds itself a big damned fence. But that can wait for some other time. Or you can go to Steve Sailer's site and do a search on Jorge Ramos and see what he's written. That's probably a better us of time on this topic anyway.

Of course, we are getting more articles with the "food rotting on the ground" and "Americans won't do this work" tropes, this time from Max Boot at Commentary:

Farmers are already feeling the effect of a drop in immigration brought about by improvements in the Mexican economy, which means fewer people are willing to take back-breaking jobs as farmhands. As The Wall Street Journal reports, “the decline in workers is reducing fruit and vegetable production by 9.5 percent, or $3.1 billion, a year, according to a recently published analysis of government data by the Partnership for a New American Economy, a nonpartisan group that supports a looser immigration policy.” The Journal notes that “farm companies are wooing employees by raising wages faster than inflation and enhancing medical and other benefits. Even so, many farms say these efforts have failed to meaningfully address their worker shortfalls.”

I addressed this topic earlier, but it is interesting that we keep coming back to the argument that we need to import an underclass to do the "back-breaking jobs as farmhands" rather than pay for either capital upgrades to the farms or pay wages that an American might find suitable. Keep track of those people who WANT an permanent underclass (they can't help but be a permanent underclass) that can't effectively "fight" for better conditions for themselves. (And I'm not even going to get into the topic of debt servitude that a fair number of these migrants find themselves in.) The whole point of flooding the country with Third World peasants is to force Americans into that same status - after all, "that's what you'll need to do to be competitive in the modern American information economy." The people advocating this transformation of America back into a plantation nation aren't pushing anything heavier than keys on their MacBooks, and you can be goddamned sure they never want to sweat for a living.

Meanwhile, Iowans continues to debate the impact of immigration on their state, which has hardly felt the impact at all from the vantage of a Floridian. They seem pretty sanguine to it, but then none of them live in a neighborhood that's 40% Haitian, for example. You can read that on your own, or not.

Finally, we come back to Europe. The Nordic countries, Sweden especially, have been very welcoming to refugees and immigrants. It isn't working out to well. The immigrants aren't integrating into society (for a variety of reasons, to be sure), and this is causing problems. (Sweden has a serious problem with rape, thanks to its newly imported Muslim underclass.) 

Societies with lots different ethnic groups tend towards becoming low trust societies. It isn't just that people do not trust "the other", but that they stop trusting people from within their own ethnic group as much, too. Evidence for this can be seen in the rise of anti-immigration parties and the reaction to those parties all over Europe. These parties are always branded Nazis, and the people in the new parties always feel that the leaders of their country are selling them out to foreigners and business interests. I have much more sympathy for the nativists on these issues, it's true, but the main point is that it is a sign of the cohesive and mostly mono-ethnic societies in places like Sweden losing the high trust that made their social welfare states possible. 

I'll just point out, again, that Europe is just starting to feel the first trickle of an impending tsunami of immigrants. Europe needs to get its act together soon, or it'll look more like Harlem in NYC than Haarlem in the Netherlands. The worst possible outcome may be if they wait until they realize that Europeans are, in fact, the fiercest, nastiest, bloodiest people on Earth, and take very direct action against the growing tide of non-Europeans in Europe.

Looks like the kittens will live in interesting times.

Another reason to vote for Trump.

I won't vote for Trump for a variety of reasons, but I'll admit that I have a growing, if grudging, respect for the man. Turns out Trump's pissing off the big agricultural interests, too.

Trump's brash talk about stopping undocumented immigration has excited GOP primary voters, turbocharged his campaign and spurred similar get-tough pledges from several rivals, including Sen. Ted Cruz and Gov. Scott Walker. But the view from many conservative-leaning agricultural communities is disgust, bordering on dread. Farmers say the candidate’s pronouncements have exacerbated already difficult labor shortages and brought counterproductive political attention to issues they had hoped to resolve quietly in Congress through legislation overhauling the nation’s broken guest-worker program.

This is the "Food rotting in the field" argument that Steve Sailer loves to bash.

The candidate’s inflammatory talk, especially his vow to deport 11 million immigrants in the country illegally, poses a serious threat to U.S. farmers struggling to get their crops to market, said Frank Muller, who grows tomatoes, peppers, almonds and walnuts on his California farm.

"My farm would shut down today if you removed my ... workforce,' Muller said. "You hear all these disparaging remarks about immigrants, but these guys are the hardest-working, most dedicated people ... I've ever seen in my life."

Trump's campaign declined to comment.

Roughly 1.4 million undocumented immigrants work on U.S. farms each year, or about 60 percent of the agricultural labor force, said Chuck Conner, president of the National Council of Farm Cooperatives, a trade group, and former deputy agriculture secretary during the George W. Bush administration.

Okay, so they use 1.4 million wetbacks a year as nearly slave labor. So why do these assholes want the other 10.6 million in the country? Bullshit starting to pile up, here....

Farmers say they depend on undocumented workers because Americans simply won't do the back-breaking labor required and the existing guest-worker program for foreign workers is badly broken.

Tim McMillan, a Georgia blackberry farmer and owner of Southern Grace Farms, said he could easily double his operation if only he could hire labor.

“We’ve got the land, we’ve got the water, and we’ve got the management — we’ve got everything in place but the labor,” he said. “I can’t get American citizens to do the work. They just don’t want to do it.”

Time to do some mathematics! Wetbacks comprise 60% of the agricultural labor force. There are 1.4 million of them. That means there are ~2.33 million agricultural workers in the country. The year 2012 has the most readily available data for me on the number of H-2A Visa workers in the country, who are the temporary LEGAL immigrant farm workers. (Call them drybacks.) There were ~65,000 of them that year. I doubt there has been much change in the program since then. So, 

 

  2,330,000

 -1,465,000

     865,000

That means there are 865,000 AMERICAN WORKERS who ARE willing to do the work. What the growers mean is that they can't get enough Americans to do the work at the rates they are paying. Solutions to that would be to either offer higher wages for labor or invest in more mechanization. Importing people to work as second- or third-class human beings (can't call them citizens) is essentially creating an underclass for the betterment of a few. American history is replete with examples of that, most notably the African slave trade. The consequences for society at large are never good in these examples. 

That is, America would have been better off if the English colonists had picked their own goddamned cotton*.

 

One final bit from the article:

The farm group released a study last year that found that if Congress passed an enforcement-only immigration bill — boosting deportations and tightening border security without improving farmers' access to immigrant labor — fruit production in the U.S. would drop by as much as 61 percent, food prices in grocery stores would rise by 6 percent and the average net farm income would drop by as much as 30 percent.

Look at those numbers carefully and you will see a not inconsiderable detail: According to the farmers themselves, labor costs aren't that big a part of the equation in the final price-to-market for the consumer, not if a 60% reduction in labor only results in a 30% drop in net farm income, and a mere price increase of 6%. I love cheap citrus as much as the next person (Down with SCURVY!), but I think I could absorb a one-time 6% hike in prices in order to have a country that's a little bit cleaner civilly and morally.

* That is something of an anachronism, but the point is clear.

Fun with text searches

Here's a fun story:

The surging ranks of America's ultrapoor

I applied the Sailer Text Search Test, and got the expected results. (Said test involves searching for the string of letters 'immig' or 'migr' to see if the text in question mentions immigration.)

The sheer dishonesty of the elites these days is stunning. How can one discuss rising poverty in recent decades in America without mentioning the massive influx of immigrants, both legal and illegal? Why the lower- and middle- classes aren't stringing these bastards up from trees, alive, with their guts hanging out is beyond me.

Note to Sanctimonious English Cunts

Slavery was imported into what became the United States of America by the English. The cavaliers in the South wanted the free labor, and the roundheaded Puritans up north were happy to profit from the trade thereby.

Please remember that the next time one of you Limey cunts wants to be sanctimonious about America's original sin: It was your sin first, we just inherited it.

(Next time we'll just leave you bastards to the Germans.)

David Gergen - Shill for the Olgarchy

There's so much dishonesty and crappy reasoning in this piece from David Gergen that it's hard to know where to begin. But I think I'll start with this:

It is not clear whether coming events will play into the hands of Bernie Sanders -- they should on inequality -- but they should certainly give Joe Biden more of an opening. A man who was at Obama's side in coming out of the recession, friend of working people, a good Catholic -- those could be high cards for him. 

I can see at least three blatant lies in this paragraph.

First, we never really came out the recession. As Bernie Sanders likes to point out (and Trump too, though not with numbers), if the Labor Force Participation Rate were the same today as it were in 2007, the U-3 unemployment rate (which is the one they always discuss in the news) would still be over 10%. Ten fucking percent unemployment for 6+ years! We only came out of the recession in anything other than a technical sense because we're lying about the numbers. And by 'we' I mean the people in charge, not any of us.

Second, Biden is no friend of the working people, having sponsored a bankruptcy reform bill in 2005 that re-wrote bankruptcy laws in a way favorable to the banksters, and in a way guaranteed to make wage slaves out of the vast majority of future college students.

Third, while I am not a Catholic myself, I do think it is probably hard to call yourself a good Catholic when you are in favor of millions and millions of abortions each year, and in fact want more and more all the time.

Maybe I'll address the more subtle lies later, but probably not. Not even a giant dung beetle from a Japanese Godzilla-type film* could digest a shit sandwich of this size.

* That would be a 'kaiju' film, to all the nerds out there.

Another sign of a booming economy: Food banks getting crushed by demand

The "economic recovery" in the USA has been going on since June of 2009, officially. Unofficially, (meaning, in the real world), there has been no recovery. The economy hit bottom, and then proceeded to slowly grow from that new, lower base case. But it has not grown fast enough, in terms of jobs or in terms of pay, to get the economy back to where it was.

For those that would cite employment numbers, such as the unemployment rate being low, well, you're a chump. I'm tempted to follow Tiny's advice* ("How many times I gotta say it? There's no percentage in smartenin' up a chump."), but I will just point out that the participation percentage cratering has been the real reason for the drop. If the participation percentage was where it had been, the UE-3 rate would be over nine percent, and maybe over ten percent. (I haven't checked the particulars in a while - it's too depressing, even for a cat.) And that is the REAL level of unemployment we've had for years now.**

One sign that the economy still stinks is that "Food Stamp" usage has ballooned under Obama, and has shown few signs of decreasing. (Usage has dropped since late 2013. However, as even the Huffington Post pointed out, that has largely been due to the government tightening eligibility rules.) Similarly, food banks are getting crushed. In fact, they're having to ration out what they give to families now, because of demand.

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) -- Food banks across the country are seeing a rising demand for free groceries despite the growing economy, leading some charities to reduce the amount of food they offer each family.

U.S. food banks are expected to give away about 4 billion pounds of food this year, more than double the amount provided a decade ago, according to Feeding America, the nation's primary food bank network. The group gave away 3.8 billion in 2013.

While reliance on food banks exploded when the economy tanked in 2008, groups said demand continues to rise year after year, leaving them scrambling to find more food.

"We get lines of people every day, starting at 6:30 in the morning," said Sheila Moore, who oversees food distribution at The Storehouse, the largest pantry in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and one where food distribution has climbed 15 percent in the past year.

Going from 3.8 billion pounds of food to 4 billion pounds of food is a growth rate of over 5%. Too bad the economy can't grow that fast. A depressing article, but I recommend you read all of it.

* From the movie The Set-up (1949).

** Which also ignores the rise of temp work & part-time work at the expense of full-time work. The employment situation is even worse than it appears.

A longer post coming in a minute, but I want to highlight one bit of bullshit from an (otherwise excellent) article to appear in that post. In an AP article about increased food BANK usage (as opposed to SNAP usage, which used to be know as Food Stamps), they pull a bit of reporting legerdemain. To wit:

The drop in food stamp rolls by nearly 2.5 million people from recession levels could be contributing to the food bank demand, he said, because people who no longer qualify for the government aid may still not earn enough to pay their bills.

Recession levels? RECESSION LEVELS? I call bullshit. The peaks of SNAP enrollment occurred in late 2012 and throughout 2013. Over 47 million enrolled throughout that stretch. That's from three and a half to four and a half years AFTER THE RECESSION ENDED. 

The only economic situation since the end of WWII to be as bad as the Great Recession has been the Obama Recovery. Things are unlikely to get better if no one will acknowledge the problem.