Do American “conservatives” even know what a conservative is?

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Let me therefore tell you what a conservative is: someone who wishes to preserve the best things from our past even while accepting the necessity of change. Going further, it is to learn from our own past about how to negotiate the future.

The question for the day is whether the following is or is not a “conservative” policy: ‘They’re destroying Europe – I’m not going to let that happen to the United States’ Trump doubles down on non-citizen Muslim ban.

On the Muslim ban, which is likely Trump’s most controversial position, he’s not budging.

‘I don’t care if it hurts me,’ he told hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. ‘I’m doing the right thing.’

‘I’ve been guided by common sense, by what’s right,’ he continued.

‘We have to be careful. We’re allowing thousands of people to come into our country,’ he said. ‘Thousands and thousands of people being placed all over the country that, frankly, nobody knows who they are.’

‘We don’t know what we’re doing,’ he added.

He may be wrong about what he’s doing, but the policy is the very essence of conservative.

The snow job of Kilimanjaro

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From An Inconvenient Review: After 10 Years Al Gore’s Film Is Still Alarmingly Inaccurate of which there is more along the same lines as this:

One of the first glaring claims Gore makes is about Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa. He claims Africa’s tallest peak will be snow-free “within the decade.” Gore shows slides of Kilimanjaro’s peak in the 1970s versus today to conclude the snow is disappearing.

Well, it’s been a decade and, yes, there’s still snow on Kilimanjaro year-round. It doesn’t take a scientist to figure this out. One can just look at recent photos posted on the travel website TripAdvisor.com.

In 2014, ecologists actually monitoring Kilimanjaro’s snowpack found it was not even close to being gone. It may have shrunk a little, but ecologists were confident it would be around for the foreseeable future.

“There are ongoing several studies, but preliminary findings show that the ice is nowhere near melting,” Imani Kikoti, an ecologist at Mount Kilimanjaro National Park, told eturbonews.com.

“Much as we agree that the snow has declined over centuries, but we are comfortable that its total melt will not happen in the near future,” he said.

And even then when the film came out I recall being told that the snow levels had been affected by the felling of trees at the base of the mountain. Al Gore is himself the very embodiment of why the scam keeps going. Whatever may be the truth, what is undeniable is that he has made an absolute fortune from it.

Gore’s been harping on global warming since at least the late 1980s, but it wasn’t until 2006 he discovered a way to become massively wealthy off making movies about it and investing in government-subsidized green energy.

As for the rest of us, Denmark Slashes Wind Power Subsidies to Curb Runaway Power Costs. Australia, much of which is built on a foundation made of coal, has energy prices at near enough the same level. For a bit more, you can go here.

Here is something governments don’t seem to know: corporate revenue funds capital accumulation, innovation, and economic growth

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An interesting article by Stephen MacLean on Government Greed Axes the Golden Goose that got me thinking. The way you hear governments tell the story, there is a much larger amount of tax these corporates should pay than they actually do pay, which coincides with some fictitious number related to the amount of money they wish they could cream off for themselves.

But looked at another way, it may well be that the most socially beneficial outcome is for corporates to pay as little tax as possible so that their earnings can be ploughed back into their firms. The role of business is not as a means through which governments can raise money, but as a mechanism through which material welfare is provided to a community. The higher are the business taxes paid, the worse off the community ends up. As MacLean writes:

Middle-class Americans would be among those most hurt by Washington’s tax grab, as it is corporate revenue that funds capital accumulation, innovation, and economic growth. Tax away profit, and you tax away employment opportunities.

Thus, the most socially responsible approach to taxation by corporates may be to avoid paying taxes to the largest extent they are legally able. They are doing these governments a favour, but, as with so much, political greed far exceeds common sense.

Niall Ferguson on anti-Semitism in the Labour Party in the UK

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Now it’s Niall Ferguson: The resurfacing of anti-Semitism in Britain. I fear that if they think others can be reasoned out of their hatred of Jews, they have no sense of the history of anti-Semitism. For some, it comes with their mother’s milk. This is what Ferguson has to say.

Bashing Israel appears to be an effective way of mobilizing Muslim voters, who account for roughly half the electorate in Bradford West. Nor is Bradford the only place in Britain where this goes on.

When you put it that way, what become clear is that this is a problem that will only get worse and for which no solution comes to anyone’s mind. The attitude to Christians is, of course, no better with the only difference of significance being there are more Christians than Jews in the UK so they cannot be as blatant about what they really think.

Julie Burchill on anti-Semitism in the Labour Party in the UK

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On the continuing discussion of anti-Semitism in the UK, this, of course, gets right down to it: Labour Party “Jew-hatred” is cynical bid for Muslim vote.

The strange fruit which was allowed to blossom by a Labour Party, smug in its anti-racist credentials, has turned the party into a rotting edifice fatally riddled with the ancient disease of anti-Semitism.

The long, lonely road here started with the perfectly ­reasonable desire to be anti-racist and ended up poisoned by what I call Paint-Chart Politics.

PCP is the equally illogical inversion of conventional racism – in this case, the furthest-from-white is always right.

And, hence, the Labour Party has found itself supporting a sexist, homophobic, nihilist death cult – Islamism – just because the majority of those who practice it are dark skinned and the majority of Jews white.

Not an ounce of decency in it, nothing moral or fair-minded, similar to Labor in Australia. It’s only the votes that matter and values go up in smoke.

Where the triumphs of human genius may lead

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I’ve been reading my way through at a quite leisurely pace a quite instructive book by John Simmons with the title, The 100 Most Influential Scientists: a Ranking of the 100 Greatest Scientists Past and Present. What did amaze me was how many I had never heard of, including one Rudolph Virchow, ranked 17, who had discovered, if that is the right word, the biological cell sometime during the nineteenth century. Quite an amazing man (which left me wondering about my own education in that I had never before heard his name). But it was this passage by Simmons that really made me stop:

Virchow became politically engaged after investigating a typhus epidemic in Upper Silesia, home to the oppressed Polish minority in Prussia. As part of a commission formed by the government after revelations in the press, Virchow travelled to the region and issued a report which found that the fundamental causes of the epidemic were social. This was the first of Virchow’s political thrusts, and he prescribed for the epidemic “democracy, education, freedom and prosperity.” He asked rhetorically a question that resonates no less clearly today than in the nineteenth century: “Are the triumphs of human genius to lead only to this, that the human race shall become more miserable?” (Simmons 1997: 90)

It is something I have been thinking about as I work on the third edition of my Free Market Economics, since whatever else prosperity has or has not done, it has not brought happiness and contentment. Not good, but perhaps also not possible.

Trump is also helping us work out which commentators should be ignored from now on and into the farthest future

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Conservative is not defined as idiots who prefer a socialist of the opposite party in government than a person closer to their own perspective representing their own party if not every conservative box is ticked. This is George Will – quoted at Powerline – demonstrating that he is long past his use-by date:

Were [Trump] to be nominated, conservatives would have two tasks. One would be to help him lose 50 states — condign punishment for his comprehensive disdain for conservative essentials, including the manners and grace that should lubricate the nation’s civic life. Second, conservatives can try to save from the anti-Trump undertow as many senators, representatives, governors and state legislators as possible.

This man is a certifiable loony and to think he has been seen as a respected commentator for two generations. These are the same people who prefer Labor to the Libs if the more conservative party is led by someone on the left. Here is a reply to what Will has written from the Powerline comments section in relation to Trump. Something similar could be written about Australia. You know, like how perfection is the enemy of the good.

George Will is a prissy little girl in a bow-tie. He is the future of nothing. His views on Trump, like those of the worthless National Review, are foolish, exaggerated and wrong. The certitude folks express here about Trump losing 50 states. Jeez. Is that wishful thinking, or do you all have dead people whispering in your ears? I think it is just as likely Trump wins in a landslide.

I get the negatives on Trump. Who can miss them? He wears them like a billboard on his orange head. But stop dismissing Trump supporters or rather, voters who might vote for Trump over Hillary as idiots and uninformed imbeciles. That simply isn’t true, certainly not in all cases.

I tire too of the conservative purity test. Reagan granted amnesty to illegals, got Marines killed in Beirut because at the time he was as ignorant of the middle east as Obama is today; Nixon invented the EPA; Romney was never a conservative; George W. Bush? One of America’s worst presidents. I get that he’s a nice guy. He’s also a Christian proselytizer, who looked in Putin’s eyes, and saw his soul (Putin gave it up long ago), found democracy in the beards of tribal crazies, got us into two wars he managed to lose, passed a prescription drug benefit for old white people that still costs billions. Did I mention that he spent money like a sailor in a whorehouse?

Conservatives? Really? Conservatives have done NOTHING in almost 60 years to curb the growth of government. Trump is no damn white knight. But right now America is run by a big-eared ignorant ass, who gets his advice from people of color Marxist ideologues he met in Chicago or college, and twenty-something pinheads who never worked outside of government.

On his worst day, Trump would be better than them. Try looking at it this way. Cruz thinks the system works, that he can fix it. You want idiocy? There it is. The system can’t be changed. It will roll along, getting bigger and bigger and more inept until it caves in.

Trump may even be the only man in the race who understands this. And he will in no way, no matter what he does, be worse that pompous self-absorbed ass Americans put two times into the white house.