President Trump Speaks On Border Security

President Trump from the Oval Office.

(Start video at 5:50. Ends at 15:35.)

The Democrats offer excellent service at the legal Ports of Entry, where the Illegals do not cross, and nothing to stop the flood in the hundreds of miles between border crossings. They offer faster processing of legal entrants at the Port of Entry but nothing to detain or deport illegals who are apprehended and nothing to apprehend the people who overstayed and are now illegal and already within the United States.

By analogy if you went to the Democrats with a gunshot wound they would offer a very nice x-ray and the service of a plastic surgeon to reconstruct that hole in your front, but nothing to stop the bleeding or repair the damage everywhere else.

The only argument they made for reopening the 25% of the government that is now not funded is that small business loans are not being processed. That is small beer and argues for a reexamination of the role of these programs and how they are administered. If the Federal Reserve and federal and state bank examiners are doing their jobs there should be enough liquidity to ensure that good businesses can get loans without getting the approval of a federal bureaucrat.

Trump keeps mentioning Steel because it connects with Democratic base union steel workers, who were always hard Left and are now swinging over to support Trump. This is an economically, socially, and racially unifying message that paints the Democrats into an elitist corner.

Speaker Pelosi and Senator Schumer in response.

(Start video at 3:25.)

"Chinatown" Morality Productivity and Power

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Morality and Productivity are rare and mutually reinforcing conditions that just happen, perhaps randomly, to have developed faster in the West. Ancillary benefits or attributes include the Rule of Law, Self Government, and Privacy including Private Property Rights. Under the assault from the Left they are eroding.

Forty-five years ago in a film "Chinatown" could represent the Other as a place where the Law was subservient to Power, but ordinary people could hope to not be affected. What F. Scott Fitzgerald said about the very rich applies to the very powerful, only the cynicism is not soft but hard. Without the intricate and complex and flexible and resilient but sometimes fragile system accreted over the centuries of Western Civilization the restraints on Power erode and both Morality and Productivity are lost.

In China, and most human societies, people live and die under regimes either efficient or chaotic but all eroding under a corruption founded on a lack of Morality and the arbitrary nature of Power. That Power naturally seeks to protect itself by using technology to extend its access to information and its ability to control and respond to threats. The threats are real, although an increasing number arise from the very lack of Morality that the erosion of Western culture in the face of arbitrary Power expressed as Socialism fosters. Individuals desperate for protection seek the benefits of the technology and support its use by those with Power.

1. Now we are all in "Chinatown."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cWnubJ9CEw


2. Facial recognition surveillance cameras in schools.
h/t Closed Group

3. China is facing a Moral Crisis.

h/t Wretchard T. Cat

The Death of Singh

The Democrats think that we are no better than Latin America or most places in Asia or Africa. Those are places where Reporters are hirelings of criminal gangs, as are politicians, and Reporters are hunted with dogs and disappear in the night. They may soon get their wish. If Officer Singh's family and friends turned on the Press or a politician and just tore them to pieces, would the police stop them? There comes a moment when the police won't. Trotsky described when the Cossacks allowed the women to crawl to safety under the bellies of their horses. When that happens the Old Regime falls.

NYPDBrooklynNorth: They say a picture is worth a thousand words....RIP Corporal Singh

On Pride

"Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall." - Proverbs 16:18 KJV

I have a vision. Bill de Blasio invites all of the homeless and "undocumented" to shelter in the NYC Subways, citing Climate Change, and the Shutdown, and Trump as reasons. The paying customers refuse to enter the subways and tens of thousands do not renew their monthly $121 Metrocards. The City implodes as businesses that can, especially in Finance, Media, and other professional services, relocate operations to New Jersey or elsewhere "For the duration." Many never return. This will initiate a cascading chain of disasters as all of the progress painfully made under Giuliani and Bloomberg unravels, with less of a prospect of a recovery.

We are not blessed with any special Divine Grace or Virtue inherent in our race or air or soil. We are in fact no better than anyone else, and only gifted with the wasting asset of what those who labored before have left us. Without constant and loving care there is no reason that New York City would not within a few years descend into the spiral of decay depopulation and violence that overwhelmed both Beirut and Detroit. They were both lovely cities, and they were both proud.

On Texts, Sacred and Otherwise, and Oaths of Office.

What makes the Bible or another sacred scripture valid for a binding oath or affirmation, and the Constitution does allow for an affirmation instead of an oath, is that the scripture is immutable and not subject to alteration according the changing interests of the person holding it. While King James and others have sponsored translations that codified secular interests the principle holds that the content is considered as external to and unchangeable by human will.

The Constitution fails that test. It is designed to be amended by politicians to reflect changing needs and interests, although the process is deliberately made complex.

The Koran may be objectionable on the grounds that its content may be antithetical to those of the Constitution, as might be some text sacred to a future Rosicrucian, but that is a harder argument to win than a claim that swearing on the Constitution is sufficient. Is the politician who so swears then bound to never support any future amendment?

Even an absolute monarch when consecrated is called to appeal to be judged by some power greater than their own Will. Detroit's Congress Member Ilhan Omar swore on a Koran. She would be judged by an impersonal and unloving god and by comparison to the standard of a bloody and duplicitous tyrant but that is a standard, which others may fear, that is beyond her control. Senator Sinema is held to no standard but her own.

CBS News: "Kirsten Sinema takes the Oath as Senator on a copy of Constitution instead of Bible"

On Nancy Pelosi's Taxes

In 1984 Geraldine Ferraro was a United States Member of Congress from Queens NY. She was a not very prominent Secretary of the House Democratic Caucus whose seat was in effect a gift paid for by her wealthy husband, real estate investor John Zaccaro. In 1984 she was chosen over Dianne Feinstein to run for Vice President with Walter Mondale against the ticket of Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush. Questions were asked about her husband's business dealings and her financial disclosures the Congress, and her husband was eventually forced to disclose his tax returns. The Mondale - Ferraro ticket was crushed.

Nancy Pelosi will now face pressure to disclose her tax returns and those of her family. Questions about her father who was Mayor of Baltimore and her families possible links to organized crime will be asked. While the media will rally to her defense the process will be painful and the results may prove cataclysmic.

We can take it for granted that if the target was a Republican and the Democrats were in control of the Executive, or even if it was just that there was a potential Republican target and the information was in the custody of partisan Democrat staffers in the IRS and DOJ, then any embarrassing information in the files would be leaked or a partisan judge would be found who would order its release.