Days of Change

Racism is Crazy

The United States has never had a history of White people indiscriminately killing populations of Black people. Even so, slavery made Africans and their descendants non-persons in the country. Even after Juneteenth 150 years ago, Blacks (Africans, their descendants and mixed race people with even small amounts of African ancestry) dealt with formal and informal government restrictions on their liberty for another century.

Sadly, the condition of the African-American community is probably the worst of any ethnic group in the country. Jobless rates are higher. Broken families are the norm. The culture is often promoted by exploiting some of the worst behaviors and choices one can make. One has to ask if blaming the distant past is more of an excuse than a reason these days.

Even though Black on Black crime and murder is more common than White on Black counterparts, (Black on White crime is actually more prevalent) every incident where a Black person gets the worst outcome in a dispute with a White person is promoted in the media.

In the last few months, national news has been made every time a Black person has died when at least one White Police officer was around. In Baltimore, 6 officers were indicted, and three of them are not even White. So, while a shot up movie theater and an attack on Gabby Giffords are the acts of a crazy person. the shooting in Charleston was a premeditated terrorist attack, at least for the race hustlers who insist the word “terrorist” be used.

Today, a Black police officer was killed by the Black prisoner he was transporting. I suspect that won’t be a big part of the story in the national news tomorrow.

Out of Their Left Minds

A funny thing happened on the way to Hillary Clinton’s nomination. Bernie Sanders, the only other announced competitor in the Democratic party, has been drawing larger crowds than Clinton. Now, this isn’t necessarily a game changer. Sarah Palin was wildly popular, but she had nowhere to go when she was stumping for a lousy candidate with terrible campaign staff. Clinton has shown more interest in short video clips and big, shadowy donors. Sanders thinks he can run on he power of the grass-roots.

I have and still think that Hillary Clinton is ultimately unelectable. A lot of super delegates seemed to think the same in 2008, doing what they needed to sink the Clinton ship. What they got was the worst kind of socialist. Obama is a president willing to push socialism when it means kickbacks in the right places and support economic authoritarianism when his donors put their money on the line. Recent polls show that Democrats are more left than ever and the right side of the party is becoming non-existent.

It is entirely possible that the progressive idiots who think they invented wisdom will gravitate toward an old socialist over a hawk who failed at every big government initiative she tried. I would look for the party to set up another challenger very soon. He will talk centrist and govern left. Most important he will be electable. Competence is not part of the equation.

Racially Motivated

The problem with the concept of micro-aggression is that it lowers the bar for offense so low that even thoughts can be perceived as actions. Anything someone doesn’t like can be labeled as an aggression against them (or someone else). That’s why a “hate crime” is too much like a thought crime. Hate goes to motive, it is not a crime in itself. Crimes are crimes, the results are the same.

The mass shooting in Charleston, SC last night was racially motivated. The perpetrator talked about what Black people did before he started shooting. There are pictures of him wearing Apartheid era flag patches on his jacket. It was also a crime, with signs of premeditation. I have to wonder, though. Does it matter if he was filled with hatred or evil or insanity?

What I do know is that the usual suspects of liberal special interest groups and the media have been promoting a race war where the police are supposedly indifferent to Black citizens and kill then due to harsh treatment and neglect. There is little to no proof that those actions are racially motivated. At worst, they are the result of bad practices and weak oversight.

We have to remember that there is true evil in the world. When we forget this is when the personal slight becomes an unforgivable offense. The events of September 11, 2001 put what really matters into perspective. I hope it doesn’t take a tragedy every time to make us realize what real evil is.

So, The IRS is Corrupt

I have suspected for some time that the GOP didn’t care about Tea Party groups stymied by the Obama IRS because it served their short-term goals. If they had any brains, they would know that when the left’s goals are aligned with yours, it means your long-term goals are really in trouble. Now, surprise, we learned that the IRS tried to keep information from the Republican-led Congress. Now, the GOP is gonna get pissed.

One of the main problems with government is that it doesn’t do anything better. Some things are necessary, like a military or a legislature. Many of the other departments and programs administered by the government are a result of lazy thinking that centralized distribution is “better.” Most times, the federal government does little and puts the responsibility on states and localities. Only the regulation is centralized. This is Obamacare in a nutshell.

The point is that anything the government does is inefficient and expensive. We should make government smaller as a goal in and of itself. If I were Congress, I would slash the employment budget at the IRS by 40% and see what happens. If we lose $100 billion is tax revenue, it might still be worth it because it’s more money in American pockets.

Trump is Worthless

I hear about Republican candidates from the Sean Hannity Radio Show. Sean makes an effort to point out the advantages of each candidate. However, in the case of Donald Trump, there is no there there,

A decade ago, I wrote on another blog about what an awful person Donald Trump was. This was at the height of “The Apprentice” which has pretty much run its course now. Since then, he has co-opted the Tea Party movement, become a fixture on Fox and made a mockery about Obama’s lack of biographical transparency by constantly obsessing over a birth certificate.

Donald Trump is a self-promoting ass. I hope the marketing people he hires get a good salary, because his campaign won’t do any good for anyone else, except for the Democratic Party. Then again, Donald Trump has been a major contributor to New York Democrats for years.

The European Wage

Los Angeles made the unsurprising step of creating a local minimum wage of $15 per hour. This is considered a victory for two liberal factions, the lower class who think that’s a lot of money and the upper class who think it’s not a lot of money. I’m tired of arguing with idiots, so I will go math free on this one.

In Europe, many of the guaranteed employment and wages are a part of daily life. I’ve already pointed out that working is generally optional since the dole works well for many. Businesses can’t really say the same. McDonalds in France put in thousands of automated kiosks to increase order accuracy. I guess not having to employ thousands of people was just a bonus.

So, good luck with your new wage. It’s entirely theoretical since it will be hard to find an unskilled employee making that amount.

Who’s Taking the Fall?

Since the Republicans took control of both houses of Congress, the front-runners for the presidency have been Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. Both have the money advantage and therefore an organization. They both have tacit support of their national party. Popular support is something of an afterthought. It’s also the reason why neither front-runner got their party’s nomination in 2008.

Jeb Bush will announce his run this week and Hillary re-announced her run this weekend. Neither has overwhelming support among primary (or caucus) voters. My guess is that one of them will suffer the loss of the nomination. Bush has the worst chances because as each of the dozen or so GOP candidates runs out of money, they could endorse anyone but Bush. Democrats of late tend to fall in line. Beating Hillary would require another Obama-style campaign designed to go after super delegates and party insiders. Don’t discount displeasure with Hillary. It knocked her out of the nomination in 2008.

I’m not one of those “both parties suck” iconoclasts. One is rotten to the core, the other is only highly corrupted. I could have lived with McCain or Romney as president, I just suspected they couldn’t win. Ultimately, I’d rather have a Republican who’s not that conservative win the presidency than whatever label some Democrat applies to herself.

Just Because of Crappy Service

I sometimes imagine that the Whole Foods and Starbucks crowd who talks about $15 minimum wage doesn’t really understand the quality of employee who works in the average fast food joint. Maybe they do, because that kind of wage would start to kill the industry. For years, the left has assumed that big stores and big restaurants are getting ahead by dropping wages. The reality is that supermarkets were some of the first places to employ the kind of lean material handling processes found all over manufacturing today. They work smarter, not harder.

Mass production is what gives us cheap and plentiful goods. People in the old days who didn’t know where their next meal was coming from would have loved the kind of reliably identical food that comes from chain restaurants and frozen dinners. However, now that food has gotten so cheap and rich people have so much disposable income, the rise of the artisan entrée has arrived. Artisan is mostly a term covering all things hand-made. Your average fast food burger is made by hand, but with pre-measured ingredients. McDonald’s even has an artisan chicken sandwich. In the foodie world, artisan is more about food being different all the time. I think we’ve all experienced that. One recipe is the good result, the rest are crap. Practice should make perfect, not more practice.

Back to my gripe. I’ve noticed that the employees in fast food have gotten dumber and occasionally surly over the last 5 years or so. I wouldn’t pay more so they could get $15 an hour. Now, I might accept higher prices if the current crop of fast food workers were fired and replaced with a better screened group of professionals. Unfortunately, reality tells me that won’t happen. Certain jobs have been so denigrated that certain people won’t work them, even if they would do a great job. They certainly won’t make more if they do a better job than the people around them.

Someday I hope to get my wish of an almost entirely automated restaurant.

Trading Our Life Away

The headline for me today is “The legislative process makes no sense.”

What we call “fast track” authority is actually two things, one is Trade Adjustment Authority and the other is Trade Promotion Authority. Since we are not allowed to know what the trade agreements say, the titles are all we get. For whatever reason, the TPA passed, but the TAA did not. While this trade bill is a White House priority, the Democrats (who are facing elections in just over a year) oppose parts of it. The administration now has to rely on the Republicans to do Obama’s bidding… again.

Fair trade is a good idea in theory, but in practice, every other country practices levels of protectionism. They’ll let us buy from them, but they make it more difficult for us to compete in their markets. It’s not only tariffs, but their own promotion of domestic industry to make them competitive over us. Presidents always seem to want the ability to create these deals fast and without oversight, probably because Americans hate them.

I literally got into an argument 12 hours ago about my own company about manufacturing domestically. The current plan is to turn the clock back about 5 years and start assembling a product in the USA from parts made in China. The parts thing is unavoidable. Most US fabrication houses are expensive and don’t have enough customers to get prices down. We kind of tried to get fabrication domestically.

The latest proposition is that some lower assemblies would be better handled outside of our production facility. This way lies madness. We are a horrible distribution company. We can’t put in these orders in a timely enough manner to have things built ahead and then finish assembly here. Our customers’ unreasonable demands and our inability to plan is what allows us to come back to the US. Plus, our state is giving us tax breaks to manufacture here.

That’s one of the things that’s insane. At the state level, taxes are so high that businesses have left. Instead of lowering taxes, they grant tax-free status to some businesses and let the others languish. At the federal level, we let the competition blow us out of the water with devices that are so cheap they can throw out 20% of them because they are DOA at the customer’s location.

Trade policy is a good thing. It is intended that one country with a surplus of goods can trade with another country that needs it and has a surplus of something else. Instead, we export our need for slave labor to countries that recreate their entire culture to serve our material requirements.

Hillary 2.0

The story is that Hillary Clinton is relaunching the campaign that hasn’t gone anywhere just in time for Jeb Bush to announce a campaign everyone has known about for months. This is the drawback of the primary process. You need to run to start collecting money for a campaign. The people with the least chance jump in as soon as they can sustain a campaign to get early access to money. Still, everyone has to get in at some point. The first actual votes are more than half a year away, but the reduced debate schedule and an open field has made the GOP slate too big to hold a debate.

Hillary has a different problem. She has to collect money as well, but the Clinton Foundation is there to create the list of donors. They will get the same (or more) priority access as the shady people tho contributed to the Foundation earlier. People just don’t like her. She was the lightning rod that helped derail “Hillarycare” in 1993. Conservatives find her too liberal, liberals don’t find her liberal enough. She is neither as personable or as willing to cut deals as Bill Clinton was.

Restarting her campaign is violating the rules of the Obama campaign machine. Their strategy was always to run the emperor with no clothes, convince the media he had the best clothes and destroy and intimidate the people who pointed out he had no clothes. Hillary Clinton is in a reaction mode, but not one that will lead to better campaigning. If the Republicans are lucky, she will be the candidate for the Democrats who is bad enough to counteract the lousy campaigns that Republicans have recently waged.