Pragmatically Distributed

This one had better not slip beneath Trump’s radar. The Republican Senate, staying true to form, is wobbling with the repeal.

If Obamacare is to be scrapped the impetus for its end will have to come from significant White House pressure on the Republican Senate to get it done and done right.

And there should be no question that it is in Trump’s interest for it to be torn up. If it is not Trump will have to manage this unmanageable albatross. If he is forced to run a largely untouched and failed program he will find himself diverting political capital dealing with Obamacare that he would best spend on other initiatives.

The rule the White House should keep in mind is the higher the percentage of Obamacare is repealed the freer Trump will be to act elsewhere, the lower the percentage the less free Trump will have to maneuver.

The question of how much of Obamacare the Republicans will be able to get rid of brings us to the matter of whether the Republicans will repeal only Obamacare’s taxes.

Preferably the Republicans would also repeal the regulations that go along with the ACA. However, the Senate maneuver they plan to use that will prevent a filibuster by the Democrats technically only allows the Senate bill to address taxes.

Language repealing the regulations could be appended to the bill if the Senate Parliamentarian either agrees the regulations are directly related to the taxes or, if the Parliamentarian objects to their inclusion, the Parliamentarian is fired by the Republicans and replaced with a more compliant Parliamentarian.

Continue reading “Repealing Obamacare”

A powerful decoy it is, but too powerful to waste on just another media cycle.  I therefore recommend sending this terrifying device of chemically pure persuasion off into the political atmosphere only if circumstances demand a major distraction.

Given all the other diversions chewing up DC’s bandwidth – the latest being the administration’s nominee to the Supreme Court – my proposed decoy will most likely not be needed for some time.  But eventually events happen.  When they do, Trump and his team would do well to keep this ace up their sleeve.

The ace to play when the moment arrives is a threat to open a criminal investigation into the Obama administration over its potential connections to Islamic terrorism.

The advantages this maneuver brings to the card table are numerous.

First it is useful because the investigation can be broken down into many sub-investigations into distinct terrorist groups and terrorist nations Obama seemed to have an deep affinity for.  Collectively each investigation has the potential to distract for years.  One investigation could be made into Obama’s deals with Iran; if he secretly flew $400 million worth of Swiss franc notes to Iran there is no telling what other deals he made with them.  Another could look into why the Egyptian representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood were going in and out of the Obama White House before and during the Muslim Brotherhood’s coup attempt against the Mubarak regime.  Then are questions to be answered about why America was really arming ISIS in its war against Syria’s Assad, and many other matters.  None of the answers are likely to put the last administration in a positive light.

The second advantage is that Trump as President now has access to the Federal records about Obama’s cozy relationship with Islamic terrorism.  Given how well planet Hillary handled her email system it is unlikely Obama’s goons were smart enough to erase the vast paper trail Trump now has at his fingertips.  As President he can choose to declassify bits and pieces of information about Obama’s dealings anytime it suits his media manipulation strategy.  He can also send the media and Democrats in the wrong the direction by hinting at false leads about where the investigation is really going.  Obama did not pardon anyone in his administration for any crimes they may have committee; as a result Trump is both able to have his Justice Department bring Obama’s henchmen and henchwomen under oath and/or have them brought before a Congressional Committee.

The final advantage is that its use would tie the Left in a feedback loop of recriminations.   Because the ego of Obama would compel him to publicly dispute the investigation’s findings, the Democrats would circle the wagons around Obama not knowing what information bombshells Trump might be holding back on instead of fighting Trump on ground more favorable for the Left.

The executive order issued by the Trump administration banning immigration from seven Muslim nations gives us the opportunity to debunk any moral and doctrinal equivalence between the arguments Jews and Christians have derived from the Bible to justify religious violence vs. Islamic obligations based on the Koran and Hadiths to wage holy war.

Because both the Bible and Islamic texts frequently discuss warfare against opposing religions, it has been suggested that Muslims are not inherently more difficult to assimilate into Western norms than Christian or Jewish immigrants.

As usual, this argument made by the Left is false.  When Biblical endorsements of violence are put in their right context and then compared to the doctrine of Jihad, Islam stands out as uniquely incompatible with Western civilization.

Because the New Testament borders on pacifist, the crux of this debate centers over how the Old Testament compares against the Koran.  The Old Testament records numerous stories where the Israelites came into fierce conflict with their neighbors and how God favored the House of Israel provided they were sufficiently devoted to God.

The essential difference between these justifications of Israelite violence and Muslim jihad is that Israelite defensive obligations are limited to only defending the land of Israel as promised by the Abrahamic Covenant.

Unlike Islam there is no Old Testament obligation to forcibly conquer all of mankind under Judaism.  Provided they are not at war with Israel or a threat in Israel’s immediate vicinity, Jews are nowhere commanded to subjugate or forcibly convert Scythians, Ethiopians, Greeks, Numidians, Chinese, Persians, Romans, Carthaginians, Gauls, Indians, or any other peoples contemporary with Ancient Israel.

Islam however is commanded to militarily conquer the globe.  Though they do not always follow this tenet of faith, they do strike at their non-Islamic neighbors whenever they feel they have the upper hand or are consumed with enough religious fanaticism that are willing to engage a superior opponent.  This command is not only distinguishes it from Judaism and Christianity but it also distinguishes Islam from any other known major religion.

It is the worldwide ambitions of Islam that make its followers inherently incompatible with Western civilization, and any non-Islamic Third World nation, and why its employment of violence against non-believers cannot be reconciled with civilization as Biblical faiths can.

Or the portions of the Deep State that still know how to use firearms and have yet to be converted into transgender research centers.

This is necessarily a small number of personnel following the disorder of the Obama administration. But their limited size makes them not unimportant. Without their guns a coup can go nowhere. Any scheming to the contrary on NeoGaf, DKos, and similar sites monitored by the Otis Index amounts to empty bleetings.

Even suggestions from within the Deep State in support of this Kos-coup are not coming from those who know how to stage one. The CIA is the most hostile towards Trump of all defense, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies. But the anti-Trump leaks it has been making to the media are being made mostly by the Valerie Plame sort who are more used to giving campus lectures on global warming than performing real espionage.

Long gone are the days when Eisenhower could wink at the CIA and have them bring down Mossadeq a month later. The few remaining CIA agents who are familiar with bringing down governments and counter-intelligence operations are white males over 60 who mostly supported Trump. All of the other armed branches of the Federal Government from the military, to the FBI are Trump territory.

Those hoping for Trump to be removed are in reality left with the hope of impeachment. Their hope is a mirage because impeachment would require substantial votes from Congressional Republicans for whom there is no good time to do it from their own perspective of political self-preservation. If Trump’s approval stays above 30% they can’t impeach him before the mid-terms without damaging their own Congressional chances when his supporters stay home with Trump’s encouragement. By the 2020 general election they are better off waiting to see if he wins reelection than trying to remove him from office; if he is unpopular enough that he is at risk of impeachment the voters will remove him for them without their getting the blame for it.

And that distortion field proved dangerous enough for the election.

Then it faced off against what might best be called a media DDoS attack on the voter’s entire sensory network.  The objective of this offensive was to block out any remotely accurate information about the Trump campaign by the distortion field being processed by the, admittedly, already limited mental horsepower of the American voter.

To counter this vast fire power the distortion field had only one Twitter account, a candidate who could barely recite a bullet point list of his priority policies, and a red hat.

Our heroic distortion field – an electromagnetically perfect field of persuasion – literally defeated the entire planet, inflicting such devastation against its enemies that we are tempted to say it would have won even without the hat.

The distortion field now has much more than Twitter, Trump, and a red hat.  It now has control of the White House.  With this control its persuasive powers can only become amplified to even greater degrees.

The Office of the Presidency always brings to its occupant great control of the political conversation in Washington.  It does not guarantee conversation translates into policy, but it does set parameters on what policy is at least discussed.  And what is discussed indicates who is going on the attack.

Consider how this offensive power of the Presidency can synergize with the distortion field.

Continue reading “Trump’s Reality Distortion Field will be Stronger with Trump as President than Candidate”

Animated by the great spirit of Confucius we continue with our duty towards the great cause of rectifying the names.

The name we select to rectify today is Nationalism as it is understood within the context of contemporary Western Europe.  The question around its name is whether the European nationalists of today are correctly equated with Fascists.

The answer is no; their historical parallels are to the Anglo-Saxon model of Parliamentary Nationalism, or Democratic Nationalism, particularly the American Nationalist model.  Parliamentary Nationalism is the advancement of the interests of the nation state combined with robust democratic and property rights for citizens.

If the connection between European Parliamentary Nationalists and American Nationalism is not obvious to conservative Americans it is because they take it for granted that American Democracy will pursue nationalistic objectives and remain Democratic.  At the same time American conservatives never associate the actual practice of American Democracy with the word ‘Nationalism’.

This is not the case for the history of Continental Europe where Nationalism has only recently been tied to constitutional rights.

The most significant difference between the history of American Nationalism (known commonly as just ‘Democracy’ or ‘American Democracy’) and all forms of European nationalism has been how each region transitioned to a nationalist system.

After America won the War of the American Secession (wrongly called the American Revolutionary War) our transition to ‘Parliamentary’ (so to speak, in America’s case) Nationalism was immediate and seamless.  Independent from the Old World’s politics, class stratification, and inherited privileges, the founders were free to fashion a Republican system of government on a legislative blank slate.  Perhaps most importantly, the nation’s elite embraced this new Constitutional framework because membership in the elite was no longer legally dependent on aristocratic bloodlines in a new nation where royal titles were not legally recognized.

Continental Europe’s transition to Nationalism was, not seamless, but chaotic at times and hampered by inertia at others.  Before the Cold War, European Nationalism went through three stages.

Continue reading “Modern European Nationalism is Parliamentary Nationalism not Fascism”

Speculating (rationally!) about autism makes for a fine exercise of the rational faculties of the mind.  Or, it does for those of you who still have some logical faculties remaining in your neural algorithm.  However few of you that may be.  But whatever is left of your kind is surely reading Pragmatically Distributed where we now direct the audience’s attention to the mystery that is autism.

Autism has proven a difficult puzzle to solve primarily because whatever its cause is must be one that has become more commonplace in modern environments but which was previously much less frequent.

As autism researchers can confirm, identifying a cause that satisfies this condition is no easy matter. Whatever causal factor it may be is hidden among a multitude of other possibilities as a result of the numerous changes in society seen in just the last fifty years; exponentially more than seen in almost any other half-century.

Nonetheless, much trial and error testing has been done by physicians during the course of treating the disease, and some candidate explanations have emerged from this process.

One theory for the increase in autism cases is, in our view, particularly interesting.

It has been proposed that Lyme disease might be causally related to autism.  According to this theory, Lyme infections accumulate heavy metal toxins such as iron, mercury, and cadmium and use these metals to construct a fibrin-based cellular matrix (called biofilms) that shields the Lyme microbes from attacks by the body’s immune system and antimicrobial drugs.  These toxic metals gradually poison the body and result in autistic symptoms.

Unfortunately, studies exploring the link between Lyme and autism have proven inconclusive.

However we would like to propose a modified theory – that autism is related to chronic infections of any kind, not only Lyme infections, and that chronic infections have been the inevitable result of decades of antibiotic usage.

Continue reading “Autism – Potential Causes and Treatment”

The preliminary report investigating the hacking of the DNC’s computer system has been released, with still no hard evidence offered that the Wikileak got DNC emails from Russia. 

This comment about the matter was made by myself at Lion’s  –

Were the idea true that the hostility Islam harbors against the West could be mollified with greater efforts on the part of the civilized to compensate for the “historical grievances” and “suffering” of Muslims at the hands of supposed Western “Imperialism”, France would be the one of the greatest beneficiaries of such leniency.

Almost every suggestion Muslim apologists have wished Western states adopt to appease the Arab Street has long been the consensus policy of France.  Since Suez the French have been calling on Israel to concede ever more territory, with the most recent expression of this Arabist sentiment coming in their vote for the recent UN resolution; they have strenuously warned against moves to halt Iran’s nuclear program; and they famously joined with Germany and Russia to oppose the Iraq War in 2003.  Only with the intervention in Libya did France join a policy that might have offended Arab opinion, but even this was done with humanitarian intentions of saving Muslim lives.

But a reward for their consistent Arabism is nowhere to be found; Arabism that the West’s anti-American Muslim apologists assured everyone would lead to Muslim goodwill.

Continue reading “Terrorism In France Proves Foreign Policy Is Not Why Muslims Attack The West”

The odds of Marine Le Pen continuing this year in France the political trends set by Britain, America and Italy in 2016 are becoming less and less promising.

To win the French Presidency Le Pen must capture the votes of at least three quarters of the mainstream French right, hold reliably FN voters, and make inroads among the traditionally Socialist French working class.

These goals may have been attainable against a Socialist opponent in France’s two way runoff.  Unfortunately for her, sitting President Hollande will leave office with the worst presidential ratings since WWII and his Socialist Party lying in ruins.  With the Socialists having no hope of surviving to the second round (for very well-deserved reasons), the runoff is set to be contested between the French mainstream right and Le Pen’s Nationalist Conservatives.

The standard bearer of the centre-right is François Fillon; against him Le Pen has little hope of achieving her above mentioned voting targets primarily because Fillon is satisfactory to most mainstream conservatives:  Small town and rural Catholics have responded positively to his religious conservatism; or what qualifies in France as religious conservatism, anway.  Though not as conservative on immigration as Le Pen, his calls for greater security and immigration reductions should spare him being outflanked on this issue.  And his willingness to open France to more free market competition has been met with relief by a traumatized French business class, who do, in fact, exist despite their being under a near constant state of political siege since 1789.

Continue reading “Le Pen & The French Presidential Election”