Monday, June 29, 2020

Calculating Reparations


OK this seems to be a hot topic since the Danes are through the city gates and threatening to burn more of the town if they aren't paid off. Keeping Kiplings thoughts on this topic in mind, let's see if there isn't some way to figure out who is owed and how much.

Between 200 and 400 years ago, some black people were rounded up by their fellow black people, and sold to some white people who took some of them to the British colonies or the recently formed United States, and resold them. There they labored up until 1865 for room and board and minimal healthcare provided by their owners. After this they were freed to do with their lives whatever they wished. 150 years later, lets see how they are doing compared to their former countrymen who avoided their evil fate.

I looked up some statistics, and keeping in mind that such numbers may not be entirely accurate, let's use them anyway as no others are available. First off how well are the Africans who avoided slavery by selling their cousins doing: I picked 2 countries, Ghana and Nigeria to represent Africa. Good picks? Who knows. Feel free to look up others. Most American slaves came from the West Coast of Africa, and there are a lot of small countries along that coast.

Current average income per household in Ghana is listed as $7442 USD/yr. Current average household income in Nigeria is listed as $15,746. I suppose it's higher there because of the larger proportion of royal princes in the general population. I could be wrong. Sue me.

The average black family in the U.S. is earning some $67,426 USD/yr. This is lower than the U.S. Average by a bit, but that's the published number.

This implies that at worst the former Africans are on average bringing home between $51,680 and $59,984/year MORE than they would be making had their ancestors never been enslaved. Put another way, the average black American is bringing home between 4.28 and 9.06 times as much as he could have been making “back home”.

Was the long strange trip easy? No! Life's like that. Easy for some and harder for most of the rest of us. The methodology has been published and re published, Simply follow the directions, and Voila! Cake! At this point it might be fair to ask how much of a gratuity the rest of us should be asking from these fortunate few for their 400-900% pay raises.

Tuesday, June 16, 2020

Get Trump – Chapter 6?



At least 6.

Started out with the locker room talk scandal, but as Trump never presented himself as a plaster saint, it didn't carry any weight.
Next came the Russia. Russia, Russia. Trumps energy policies pulled the rug out from under the Russians, and Gen Mattis put a stop to their more egregious adventurism in the middle east so unless Putin was trying to undermine his own country, the charge against Trump made no sense.

As a by-product of the Russia fiasco, the involvement of the DNC and Clinton campaign in the Steele dossier became painfully obvious.
The impeachment effort filled headlines daily with people increasingly noticing that it served as an excuse for the House to do nothing else. I suppose that if you know that whatever the House does will be stopped in the Senate, and vice versa, there must be little incentive to even show up for work.

The involvement of the Chinese in stealing everything they could get their hands on in the US and adventurism abroad was met with resistance which the left tried, unsuccessfully to label as racism.

The virus problem was used as an excuse to shut down the fastest growing economy ever seen and mute Trumps claims to economic success. Used as an attack on Trump, it worked, but it worked sort of like setting off a giant stink bomb in a crowded elevator. The Chinese are trying to blame the virus on Trump. So far, no one is buying that. Trump is trying to get people back to work and is meeting strong resistance from the Dems who would prefer we all stayed home and starved.

Now comes the latest attack: The George Floyd riots. Note that the riots are happening in Donk controlled cities, and that the municipal administrations are for the most part, siding with the rioters. Black Lives Matter? Not really. If they did, the riots would be put down, the Antifas would be jailed, and black-owned businesses would not be burned out. Unemployed blacks are victims and as such are actively courted by the Dems. It's a good thing since the last time we had unemployment this high they elected their president 4 times in a row.

The riots being municipal level disturbances, the president has limited ability to jump in and put them down. It's a local problem after all. Somehow Trump is expected to come up with a Federal solution to local police problems while the house panders to black nationalists and tacitly supports their militia, Antifa. As such, I expect the left will be actively supporting the riots all the way through November with calls for more every time some thug of the right pigmentation gets shot by a cop in the commission of a crime. They will probably call for more if Trump gets reelected to protest “Vote Suppression”, something that can be investigated through his second term. Get out in the street, wave a sign, spread plague, burn your house down, and vote Dem. It's a safe bet that if a Dem becomes President, money for the rioters will dry up over night.

Every Monday, for the last 3-1/2 years, we've been told that the coming Friday would be the big day with Trump frog marched out of the White House in handcuffs. I'm still hearing this. I expect to hear it until 2024, unless the election turns into a huge landslide of voters fed up with Dem shenanigans who hand Trump a second term with both the House and Senate. In that case, the republicans will revert to form and spend most of their time attacking each other.

Friday, June 12, 2020

Defunding The Police - How I'd Do It

Well, maybe not, but consider this: First the local government defunds the police. This frees up considerable monies which of course would NOT be returned to the taxpayers. Let's say it gets spread around among the other government entities.

First you let everyone know they're on their own so you encourage the populace to always go armed.

Second, you encourage the populace to view lawbreakers not as underprivileged victims, but as dangerous predators. This is the hard part as many elected officials view these people as valued constituents and supporters.

Third, if you are accosted by one of these predators, you are encouraged to use your armament to stop the predation, with an eye toward also including possible recidivism.

Lastly, you should call the newly expanded city trash service and have them pick up the debris and move it to the local landfill. This also requires that any paperwork would need to include not only cause of death (lead poisoning) but reason for death (Attempted Wealth Redistribution). Again we have to be careful here as tax collection, while being the same function as AWR, is done under color of law and shooting tax collectors is frowned on. At least by the local government who rely on the swag to keep themselves employed.

Thursday, June 11, 2020

Biden Calls For Military Coup!

Well, O.K. this is actually a fun with headlines post. Breitbart puts this up:

Biden: Military Will Remove Trump From W.H.

The actual story following the Breitbart link isn't nearly as exciting. More like a work of bad Science Fiction in Bidens head.
During an interview aired on Wednesday’s broadcast of Comedy Central’s “Daily Show,” 2020 Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden said that he has thought about what would happen if he won the election and President Trump refused to leave office and that he believes the military would remove President Trump “from the White House with great dispatch” if such a scenario took place.
When you think about it, Trump has refused to leave the office for 3-1/2 years now and I suppose the Donks are beginning to think that he won't. After all if it was them, they wouldn't now would they?

As long as we're cooking up conspiracies, how about this: The Wuhan Flu was developed by the Chinese at the request of the Clintonistas as a last-ditch effort to make Trump look bad by destroying all his economic gains. Makes as much sense as anything Biden has come up with so far.

Name That City!

I own the world  has a contest up to name the instant city the rioters have declared in the middle of Seattle. As of this printing, there are some 250 suggestions, some quite good.

I suggest naming the lace "Utopia" as this seems to be the stated objective of the founders. It does require that you ignore the sudden absence of food within the city limits, and the near instant appearance of a warlord type who is managing something that isn't actually a police unit, but which enforces his rule with a iron fist.

Gee! Who could have seen that coming?

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

Voting

Voting the man rather than the party is high principle indeed. Unfortunately it seldom pays off. The "Man" you voted for turns out to have no principles, just a talent for persuasion that tops his opponent. Should a man with principles actually get elected, no sooner does he take his seat than the political equivalent of Guido and Nunzio come by and carefully explain his first choice to him: He can keep his principles or he can keep his seat, but not both.

Democrats have an unpublished agenda of "Power for me, but not for thee". Dissenters are summarily tossed under the bus. Republicans are a party on minimalist government and carry this philosophy through to party management. Dissenters are tolerated and become known as "Mavericks" (McCain) or "Moderates"(Romney) who go on to destroy any narrow margins of majority their putative party may hold.

Vote the silver-tongued devil of your choice, but in the end, you get the Democrat platform. Quickly or slowly, your choice.

Friday, June 5, 2020

What's Bugging You?

Found this while attacking the stump in my back yard.
It's a pupae of a moth, and it's 1-1/2" long by 1/2" in diameter. Way back when, we kids would find these and our parents solemnly explained that we had found a which-a-way bug. When held with the pointy end up and squeezed gently, the pointy end would wiggle in a circular fashion. If you asked the bug "Which a way did (insert someones name here) go?" the angle of the tail, when you backed off the squeezing, would reliably indicate the direction in which the person would be found.

It seldom took more than one try to disprove this, but if you put the thing in a jar with a thin layer of dirt and a mesh cover, you would eventually see the moth emerge. By now I've forgotten what kind of moth it was but I seem to remember that it was one of the larger ones.

This one was dead when I found it.

Wednesday, June 3, 2020

Global Warming - Another Half-Baked Solution

And as usual, a solution looking for an actual problem. First lets look at global temps for the last 2000 years. The data is derivative, but plausibly reliable:



A slow downward trend with a slight rise which is being sold as catastrophic end of the world sort of event. Historically, the planet seems to have a maximum temp that it never exceeds:
Only about 1.5-2 degrees warmer than present. Also note the downward trend, crammed into the far right hand end of the graph. 

What interests me is the cyclic pattern of about 110,000 years when the planet is plunged into a global ice age which seems to last a lot longer than those short warm periods. Someone better than me at math could apply a Fourier Transformation to this and show the various event cycles that result in this periodic function. Maybe there's a small black hole in a wildly elliptical orbit that does this by disrupting the asteroid belt and bringing on extinction level meteor impacts.

Whatever, this solution to the problem of global warming, involving spraying the upper atmosphere with Sulfur compounds to reduce the sunlight coming in leaves me unimpressed. The last time this was done, the dinosaurs went extinct.

Tuesday, June 2, 2020

Gun Sales - Up Again

Topping the 3 million mark for only the third time ever, bested by the run on guns at the COVID outbreak in March, and the panic over possible new gun regs following a terrorist attack in San Bernadino. Certain people, by their behavior can sell guns at rates only dreamed of on Madison Avenue.
Currently the left is making it abundantly clear that if the "kinder, gentler" coup attempt against PDT doesn't work. more violent means will be perfectly acceptable.