1. Why President Trump is 'Inexplicably' Popular with Minorities
A superb explanation for that, and much more, by the inimitable Victor Davis Hanson follows.
2. Politicians ignore felonies in their midst, preferring to hector the misdemeanors of the universe.
3. One of the weirdest characteristics of our global politicians and moral censors is their preference to voice cosmic justice rather than to address less abstract sin within their own purview or authority.
4. American progressive virtue mongers see themselves as citizens of the world rather than of the United States and thus can impotently theorize about problems elsewhere when they cannot solve those in their own midst.
5. Big-city Democratic mayors are especially culpable when it comes to ignoring felonies in their midst, preferring to hector the misdemeanors of the universe.
6. Notice how New York Mayor Bill De Blasio lords over the insidious deterioration of his city while he lectures on cosmic white supremacy.
7. Mayor Bloomberg used to sermonize to the nation about gun-control, global warming, the perils of super-sized soft drinks, smoking, and fatty-foods, even as his New York City was paralyzed by the 2010 blizzard due to inept and incompetent city efforts to remove snow.
8. Or is the “Bloomberg syndrome” worse than that—in the sense that sounding saintly in theory psychologically compensates for being powerless in fact? Or is it a fashion tic of the privileged to show abstract empathy?
9. In the last years of Schwarzenegger’s governorship, Arnold gave up on the existential crises of illegal immigration, sanctuary cities, water shortages, decrepit roads & bridges, homelessness, plummeting public school performance, and a huge exodus of middle-class Californians.
10. Instead he began to lecture the state, the nation, and indeed the world on the need for massive wind and solar projects and assorted green fantasies. His old enemies began to praise him both for his green irrelevancies and for his neutered conservatism.
11. More recently, we often see how local sheriffs become media-created philosophers eager to blame supposed national bogeymen for mass shootings in their jurisdictions— killings that sometimes are at least exacerbated by the utter incompetence of local law enforcement chiefs.
12. Even the Pope gets into the same act. Pope Francis recently lambasted a number of European countries and leaders for their apparent efforts to secure their national borders against massive illegal immigration from North Africa and the Middle East.
13. However, before Pope Francis chastised the European continent for its moral failings, he might have explained to Italians or Greeks worried over their open borders why the Vatican enjoys massive walls to keep the uninvited out.
14. Better yet, the pope might have taken a more forceful stance against the decades-long and ongoing legal dilemmas of hundreds of global Catholic Clergy, who have proven to be pedophiles and yet were not turned over to law enforcement.
15. The cosmic idea of a United Europe is easy to preach about, but reining in what is likely an epidemic of child-molesting clergy is messy. Francis’s frequent abstract moralizing is quite at odds with either his inability or unwillingness to reform pathways to the priesthood.
16. Closer home, what was lacking in the recent Democratic debates were concrete answers to real problems—as opposed to candidates’ nonstop cosmic virtue signaling.
17. It is easy to blast “white supremacy” and “the gun culture” from a rostrum. But no one on the Democratic debate stage seemed to care about the great challenge of our age, the inner-city carnage that takes thousands of young African-American lives each year.
18. The inner-city murdering is tragically almost exclusively a black-on-black phenomenon that occurs in progressive-run cities with strict gun control laws.
19. When leaders virtue signal about global or cosmic sin, it is often proof they have no willingness or power to address any concrete crisis.
20. The public tires of such empty platitudes because they also see the culpable trying to divert attention from their own earthly failure by loudly appealing to a higher moral universe.
21. And then there is the role of hypocrisy: elites themselves never suffer the consequences of their own ethical inaction while the public never sees any benefit from their moral rhetoric.
22. New Yorkers in 2011 were worried more about the piles of snow on the sidewalks than they felt threatened by 32-ounce Cokes—while realizing that no snow blocked either the Bloomberg official or private residence.
23. So no wonder a recent 'inexplicable' Zogby poll indicated 51 percent of blacks and Hispanics might support Donald Trump. How would such a supposedly counterintuitive result even be possible? Here's how...
24. Minority communities live first-hand with the violence and dangers of the gang gun culture. More policing and incarceration of guilty felons improve their lives.
25. Secure borders mean fewer drug dealers and cartel smugglers in local communities, fewer schools swamped with non-English speakers, and social services not overwhelmed with impoverished non-Americans.
26. These can all be real concerns for beleaguered minorities. Yet they are virtue-signaled away by progressive elites whose own power and money allow them to navigate around the consequences of their own liberal fantasies that fall on distant others.
27. Add in a booming economy, rising incomes, and low unemployment for minorities, and the world of shrill yelling on the debate stage about “white privilege” seems some sort of an irrelevant fixation of the elite and privileged.
28. Rather than 'white privelege,' blue governance and shrill progressive nostrums have much more to do with dangerous streets, wrecked schools, whizzing bullets, and social services that are becoming inoperative.
29. So next time a legislator, mayor, or governor rails about plastic straws or the Paris Climate Accord, be assured that his/her state’s roads are clogged, his/her public schools failing—and he/she is clueless or indifferent about it.
Pay heed folks. The below tweet is from a patriot who I believe served our blessed nation in uniform with honor. Now I am going to say something I would never have thought I would say even a few days ago. It's a stream of consciousness thread. Bear with me.
2. Back in early 2016 and for years prior to that, I detested Donald Trump as a rich blowhard who had no relevance to my life. So I ignored him almost entirely. I have never watched a single episode of any of his TV programs and his other exploits were a source of irritation.
3. I only started paying attention to Trump in the second half of 2016 when he became the Republican nominee for president. I had serious reservations about him. But once he got elected, I was compelled to take him seriously. So I reflected diligently on Trump presidency to come.
What do you think the result of the below mentioned survey would be if the question was changed
from:
"Do you think companies should publicly support..."
to:
"Do you think companies should publicly profit from..."? nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-ne…
2. Where public company actions are concerned, there is not a dime's worth of difference between "supporting" and "profiting from." No public company deliberately and willfully takes any action that might hurt their profits.
3. We as a society should of course treat gays with exactly the same respect and dignity and rights and everything else that is accorded to straights. We are all equal.
1. Message for Anyone Bothered By SVB Customers Being Made Whole
Stop with the nonsense. You either don't understand or are scratching a rash you got from somewhere else. It doesn't matter who SVB customers are or what they do. No depositor is ever responsible for a bank failure.
2. Bank failures are always the fault of the bank management and the regulators. And as for the "due diligence," it is fair to expect the bank investors and shareholders to do that and take a bath when they get it wrong. It's not fair to expect bank customers to do that.
3. Expecting depositors to do due diligence on the bank where they deposit their money is like asking every customer who uses electricity to graduate in Electrical Engineering before flipping a power switch to turn on the lights in their home. It is stupid blather.
1. How to Solve a Problem Like SVB
Having delineated in the enclosed thread how we got here, this thread addresses where we go from here. The SVB problem by itself is not that hard to solve, but it is possible politicians (of both parties) will plunge the nation into crisis.
2. First and foremost, let me dispense with the buzz on Twitter created by @elonmusk with his enclosed tweet. This ain't gonna happen. So please stop wasting time reading myriads of columns that have sprung up from this font. Musk is just having fun.
3. JP Morgan Chase would be a natural buyer but government screwed Jamie Dimon badly in 2008 after he came through and bought Washington Mutual at government’s urging. WaMu was the largest bank failure in U.S. history, SVB being the second largest.
There was plenty of mismanagement at SVB, but first and foremost I want to reassure my followers (maybe the events that unfold next week will make a liar out of me, so take everything I say as unauthoritative stream of consciousness).
2. The main thrust of this thread is to point out why the SVB blowout is nothing like the root cause of 2008 financial crisis, and people shouldn't jump to those kind of fears or conclusions. This is very different. Things like this have happened before but ~50 years ago, not 15.
3. 2008 financial crisis was brought on by banks making too many bad loans that were prone to risk of default. SVB was brought down by not making enough loans, but investing the deposited funds heavily in safe bonds which were nonetheless exposed to interest rate risk.