President Trump explains why he will not sign the “Covid relief” bill passed by Congress on Monday (December 21, 2020).

He rightly objects that it has very little to do with “Covid relief”. While it lavishes dollars on foreign countries and absurd esoteric causes, it grants a mere pittance to suffering Americans:

Seriously dangerous inflation has begun and will rapidly increase.

Senator Rand Paul decried the “Corona relief” bill, 6,000 pages long, passed late last night (December 21, 2020), without any member of Congress having read it. And he cried a warning.

Breitbart reports:

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) blasted the $2.3 trillion government spending bill — $900 billion of which is dedicated to coronavirus relief — criticizing Republicans for voting to print money with impunity. …

Rand Paul rightly called it “a deficits-don’t-matter disaster“.

He continued:

This bill is free money for everyone. … And yet if free money were the answer, if money really grew on trees, why not give more free money? Why not give it out all the time? Why stop at $600 per person? Why not $1,000? Why not $2,000?

Maybe these new free-money Republicans should join the everybody-gets-a-guaranteed-income caucus. Why not $20,000 a year for everybody? Why not $30,000? If we can print up money with impunity, why not do it?

The treasury can just keep printing the money. That is, until someone points out that the dollar no longer has value. 

To so-called conservatives who are quick to call out the socialism of Democrats: if you vote for this spending monstrosity, you are no better. When you vote to pass out free money, you … abandon forever any semblance of moral or fiscal integrity.

He assessed that the difference between the parties on this issue “is less Adam Smith versus Marx and more Marx versus Engels.”

[He] further explained the country’s fiscal situation, noting the nation brought in $3.3 trillion last year and spent $6.6 trillion.

The deficit was a “record-busting $3.3 trillion,” he said … [though] “such extraordinary spending habits have been going on for decades.”

“Today’s money is gone, so Congress is spending tomorrow’s money,” he said, noting that the country finds itself $27 trillion in debt today with no cuts, offsets, or prioritization in Congress.

Spend all this money and leave the future to figure itself out …

He also pointed out that Congress is helping to perpetuate lockdowns “by supporting states implementing rules that are arbitrary and unscientific”.

And –

Governors are picking winners and losers while family businesses are being wiped out. The need for help is real … but it’s clear that government has worsened the economic damage and acted as the biggest obstacle to economic recovery.

Think Venezuela, comrades.

Will Donald Trump return to lead America and the world?

Conrad Black thinks that he could.

He writes at American Greatness:

It is a tainted election, with a poor result and a disquietingly unprepossessing presumptive president-elect.

A tainted election it is. And the [probable] president-elect Joe Biden is certainly unprepossessing, but the pejorative is too weak. More to the point, he is senile and corrupt.

The writer goes on:

The current president did great damage to himself by his frequent lapses into boorish self-obsession.

Conrad Black has often criticized President Trump in those terms, lending strength to the unjustified contumely flung at him by his enemies. (Too many commentators who generally support him, feel compelled to ritually note something about him they disapprove of, as if to cover themselves from accusations of poor taste or weak discernment.) Donald Trump is not obsessed with himself, but with the desire to make America more prosperous, more happy, more great. He has a great talent for the comic riposte, with a perfect sense of timing, and often laughs at himself.

Example:

His haters call him “Orange Man”; so he finds fault with the lightbulbs Obama wanted to make state-approved and compulsory by saying, “They make me look orange – has anyone noticed that?”

And when insults are flung at him, as they constantly are in the most vulgar, filthy, vicious, murderous terms, he can and does retort, chiefly by applying apt tags to their names – never vicious, never cruel, never obscene, never outright lies as are those they apply to him.

Examples:

They say he is disrespectful of women (which he is not), so he retorts, truthfully – naming his most persistent female denigrator – “Only Rosie O’Donnell.”

They say he is a misogynist – and yet, with puritan tight lips, they also accuse him of adultery and prurience. True, he indulged in locker-room boasting about his prowess at sexual conquest – as men do. His haters wail that it is an immense stain on his character, making him a threat to all women. Thousands of the loathsome army of feminists put on pink hats and took to the public square to pretend they had been deeply insulted. They are the same sort of women who defended Bill Clinton against justified accusations of actual sexual exploitation and even rape.

They pretend to be appalled that he called Kim Jong-un “Rocket Man”. Considering that no name would be bad enough for that murdering communist dictator, “Rocket Man” was mild enough, and more importantly it stigmatized him for the menace that he was, firing off rockets that could carry nuclear warheads.

The president stood unflinching and unshaken as insults were flung at him continuously as hailstones, and they made not a visible dent in his composure – yet they call him “thin-skinned”! Battalions of haters with powerful means to do him harm hampered and undermined him in every way they could dream up, accusing him of absurd crimes and disgraceful actions which they knew to be pure fiction, yet he steadily proceeded to do great good for his country, and to spread peace in the world at large.

They say he is a racist. But he has worked all his adult life with and among people of many races and has never shown the least trace of race prejudice. To justify this accusation they say he called Mexican aliens entering the US illegally “rapists” – which too many of them, whatever their number, were and are.

They say he is anti-Semitic. But not only are members of his own family including some of his grandchildren Jewish, no American president has ever done as much for the Jews as he has done. No leader of any country has done as much. His amazing achievement of brokering peace between the Israelis and the Arabs alone has earned him a place among the great leaders of history.

They say he called neo-Nazis “good people”, which is a flat lie. That he encourages “right-wing extremism” though he never has and never would. That he welcomes the support of the KKK. He does not. The KKK was founded and manned wholly by his enemies, the Democrats.

Even some of his friends and supporters blame him for habitually writing short messages to his followers on Twitter. How else should he communicate with the millions of them when the media refuse to report the truth of what he says or what he does? Conrad Black grants him that, saying: “In a pioneering way, he used social media to communicate directly with the public and successfully countered the traditional political media.”

Some of those friends speak of him as being “flawed”, as if a there could ever be a human being – even that revered Jew who they say lived in the age of Augustus – who is not “flawed”.

Conrad Black is one of those friends. But his admiration for Donald Trump is nevertheless strong. He writes:

He also had an outstanding  term of achievement in the face of unprecedented obstruction and illegal harassment, as well as the almost unanimous and hysterical antagonism of a totalitarian opposition media. And so he’s being evicted.

The new administration comes in for serious censure:

Taking his place is a ramshackle coalition of big media, big money, big tech, big league sports, Hollywood, most of Wall Street, and an odious ragtag of urban guerrillas masquerading as civil rights crusaders. … The Democrats … have been effectively taken over by socialist, self-hating whites, white-hating blacks, and guilt-ridden renunciators of any recognizable version of American history and values. …

The political atmosphere is so charged, it is intolerable.

Donald Trump narrowly won his campaign in 2016 against the bipartisan post-Reagan political class that he and an adequate number of his countrymen believed, with a plenitude of evidence, had thoroughly misgoverned the country. The previous 20 years under administrations and congresses of both parties had been an unsatisfactory time of endless, fruitless war in the Middle East and an immense humanitarian refugee disaster, the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, millions of unskilled immigrants pouring illegally across the Mexican-U.S. border, unfavorable trade arrangements, and China advancing by leaps and bounds at America’s expense. Trump effectively ended almost all of that and eliminated unemployment and oil imports as well. 

Much, probably all, of the good that President Trump did will likely be undone by the corruptocracy coming to power.

Conrad Black, consolingly, declares that the incoming administration will fail:

The celebration of Trump’s enemies will soon bore the public and the media will soon cease to lionize the ungalvanizing Biden and his entourage of political manipulators and faction-heads. There will be little leadership, little unity, and they will be to the left of the country, stalled by the Congress, and generally tedious and ineffectual. The times will not be gentle and the attempt of Anthony Blinken and John Kerry and the other quavering Obamans to sanitize the world and collegialize the Western Alliance will be an almost total failure.

He conjectures that Donald Trump could return triumphantly to power :

If he holds his fire for a year and allows the mediocrity and ineptitude of Bidenism … to be exposed in its infirmity, Trump will make the greatest American political comeback since FDR came out of his convalescence from polio and rolled his wheelchair into the White House, which would be his home for the remaining 12 years of his life.

A return of the great president is deeply to be desired. But the ramshackle coalition of Leftist forces that Conrad Black describes is united in one thing – a passionate determination to take away every existing and imaginable means and opportunity the Right could make use of to regain power.

As our commenter Cogito has several time pointed out, the reign (so to speak) of Donald Trump can be likened to that of the Emperor Julian (361-363 C.E.). Emperor after emperor had allowed the dark tide of intolerant Christianity to spread over the Roman Empire. Julian tried to stop it. But he was killed in battle before he had succeeded. For a little while there was light, but when he was gone the darkness came back and Europe remained stagnant for a thousand years.

We would liken it also to the decade of Margaret Thatcher’s leadership in Britain. She tried, against ferocious resistance, to stop the advance of socialism. For a time the British people were free and prosperous, share-owning and property-owning. Then swamp creatures in her own party and the opposition defeated her and the decay of the kingdom resumed.

While Donald Trump has been in the White House, America has enjoyed prosperity and freedom. Was it nothing more than a brief bright interval in a time of Western decay that is now again gathering pace?

Or will President Trump return?

Alexander, Caesar, Washington, Napoleon, Churchill, Thatcher, Reagan, Trump.

There he stands among his peers – people who personally redirected the course of history. No matter what he does from now on for as long as he lives, he has already earned his position among the greatest leaders of our common Western past.

Matthew Boose, writing at American Greatness, seems to go even further in his admiration of Donald Trump, suggesting that he may be uniquely great, at least in American history:

There’s a reason that Trump commands a fierce devotion … He is an historic phenomenon, a singular personality the likes of which we have never seen, and are unlikely to see recur, in our lifetimes. 

Trump has done what few men can say of themselves: he altered the course of events in a way that no one saw coming. Totally by surprise, he presented an opportunity to save a nation in decline, an opportunity which, if lost, … may never return. That is what has made these four years so momentous, so eventful, and so full of conflict. Trump’s enemies sensed it too, which is why they have worked so desperately to crush him.

Few men could have withstood the extreme pressures that Trump has faced these four years. Millions of Americans have been inspired by his incredible tenacity through it all.

America does not produce many great men anymore, but Trump is a great man: he has an unusual degree of courage and willpower, qualities rare in our time in any measure. …

Trump and his supporters understand that the opposition is vicious, evil, and totally without honor, and that future leaders who want to defend America in more than name would have to be willing and able to incur enormous hostility and personal risk. …

“Trumpism” is a vague thing, and the Republican establishment and the kept Right are eager to jettison Trump and leave us with an ersatz version of his movement. Trump’s primary achievement … is that he made the Republican Party the home of a multi-racial working class. [Which is true but] this elides an essential part of Trump’s rise, which was that he acknowledged American whites who had felt put upon and alienated in an increasingly hostile regime. Any “Trumpism” that lacks the courage to push back against the relentless, anti-white sentiment of the Left is counterfeit.

Trump’s movement is a genuine revolution. Like any revolution, it is liable to corruption and change. This has happened with many movements before: the momentum gets lost, and it turns into a husk of its former self. … It is possible that Trump’s movement dies with him. History does not always [or ever? – ed] offer second chances. …

If Trump’s downfall really is a fait accompli, then millions of Americans will take his loss like a deathblow to America. If that is cultism, count me in. We are lucky to have Trump. He is an American hero, the best—the only—real defender we have had in generations.

Can Trumpism survive without Trump?

Can America survive without Trumpism?

Millions who want to live in freedom with limited government cannot compromise with millions of big-government collectivists.

Those to whom an individual’s race is of no consequence cannot endure race quotas (euphemized now as “diversity”).

Those who want secure borders cannot share territory with those who want “open” borders (effectively no borders at all).

Those who want impartial justice and equality under the law cannot co-exist with those who want judicial discrimination on grounds of race, class, sex, or history.

Those who know that only free market capitalism makes for prosperity and wish to pursue their own economic goals unhampered by regulation will not tolerate “redistribution” of wealth,  whether by means of high taxation, state-run health care, nationalization of industries or any other government-imposed impoverishing devices on which collectivists insist.

Those who know that slight changes in climate will not endanger human life cannot endure being bludgeoned by global warming mythologists into accepting a poorer way of life “to save the planet”.

Those who want one (hospitable and expanding) culture with one official language, cannot accept multiculturalism and multilingualism being imposed on them by the others.

These are two different nations.

There is nothing to be gained for either of them by alternating administrations, each undoing what the other has done – a fruitless, weakening, wasteful procedure.

Two incompatible nations are sharing one country. Territorial division is not possible.

What can be done?

Art Laffer – yes, he of the Laffer Curve – has faith in President Trump’s ability to restore the US economy when the coronavirus scare is over.

Watch the stock market for optimistic predictions, he says. You will find them there.

Here’s a clip from the interview with Art Laffer conducted by Stuart Varney of Fox Business News on May 12, 2020:

Catastrophe. Cataclysm.

Have billions of lives been devastated and millions of people reduced to poverty by a computer software error? 

Thomas D. Williams writes at Breitbart:

The UK’s coronavirus lockdown was caused by “the most devastating software mistake of all time, in terms of economic costs and lives lost,” according to a report by a British newspaper.

The essay is referring to computer modeling by Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College London that predicted enormous deaths in the UK and elsewhere and led to draconian lockdown measures.

The Imperial College team published a 20‐​page report on March 16 forecasting that an uncontrolled spread of COVID-19 could cause as many as 510,000 deaths in Britain and as many as 2.2 million deaths in the United States. …

The predictions, which were considerably wide of the mark were the result of radically deficient modelling, according to a report in British newspaper The Daily Telegraph by software developers David Richards and Konstantin Boudnik …

Imperial’s unreliable microsimulation model moved policymakers to “mothball our multi-trillion pound economy and plunge millions of people into poverty and hardship,” the authors note.

The simulation code was so bad, the writers insist, that they “would fire anyone for developing code like this and any business that relied on it to produce software for sale would likely go bust.”

Imperial’s model “is vulnerable to producing wildly different and conflicting outputs based on the same initial set of parameters,” they state. “Run it on different computers and you would likely get different results. In other words, it is non-deterministic.”

In their contention that the Imperial model was “fundamentally unreliable”, the authors question why the government did not get a second opinion before radically altering the lives of millions of citizens.

The writers register their suspicion that “the [British] Government saw what was happening in Italy with its overwhelmed hospitals and panicked.”

Did the Ferguson team’s wildly wrong computer modeling also influence the US federal government’s decision to quarantine the entire population, causing businesses to close, many perhaps permanently, and impoverishing millions?

It seems that it did.

Can even the Midas touch of President Trump restore the lost wealth of America? Is there a doctor or magician who can resurrect the late economy?

Our reader and commenter Cogito, a General Practitioner, wrote the following as a comment on our post Boom again? (May 9, 2020).

With his  permission, we feature it here as an article with which we wholly agree.

We don’t know everything about the COVID virus certainly, but we know quite a bit.

We know that the virus can be very dangerous to the elderly and the medically fragile. Indeed the vast majority of deaths are precisely in this group.

We also know that the overwhelming number of people who contract the disease (possibly 99.9%) will survive. We know that most people will have minimal or minor symptoms.

COVID is not and should not be seen as a significant threat to our way of life. It is not the biggest crisis ever faced by Western Civilization. It is not the biggest public health crisis ever faced by Western Civilization.

Yet, it is astonishing that a virus of such low lethality and morbidity could bring the world’s mature market economies to their knees. It makes no sense logically or empirically.

Furthermore, there is no convincing scientific evidence that lock-downs even work. We know this simply by observing and comparing those states such as Sweden and Taiwan, and Japan which did not lock-down or did so only minimally have fared as well or better than those states who locked down tightly.

Another issue about lock-downs that disturbs me is that they run contrary to medical science and history. Quarantines, as far as I can determine, have always been used to isolate the sick. But here, we are isolating healthy symptom-free people. Most unusual.

In addition to these medical observations, I have other concerns social, legal, and political. Lock-downs are proving to be harmful. We are beginning to see (anecdotally for now) more suicides and domestic violence. I witness the growing depression and anxiety in my patients every day.

Then there is the question of civil liberties and overreach by our political masters. Political leaders threatening to follow us on our cell phones, lock-downs which are nothing but a kind of house arrest of citizens who are guilty of nothing, police ticketing people for sitting in parks, “snitch” lines being instituted so neighbors spy on neighbors. Readers of George Orwell would find these measures disturbingly fascistic.

And then, of course, there is the catastrophic economic downturn we are facing now. If Mr. Trump can’t turn this around, we are doomed to a new Dark Age of grinding poverty and misery.

Under (probably gynocratic) communist tyranny.

How long will it take for the thriving economy that President Trump conjured up to get going again?

The Wall Street Journal pleads:

[T]he strict lockdowns were a government policy choice. But the damage is done, and our focus isn’t on recriminations. The issue is what to do now, and the public is wise enough to know that public health can’t be sustained without a healthy economy. Americans can see the destruction all around them. They know the virus will be with us for a long time unless there’s a vaccine, so we have to learn to live with it and have a functioning economy

No politician wants to admit it, but we are moving to a de facto policy that gives people and businesses the leeway to open and make their own risk calculations. Most Americans are smart enough to know they need to take precautions and social distance, and businesses have no incentive to endanger their employees. Meat packers are learning that lesson the hard way.

The tradeoff isn’t between lives and livelihoods. The policy goal has to be to protect both as much as possible. Deploy more personal protective equipment, greatly increase testing, build surge capability to handle flare-ups, and isolate society’s most vulnerable to keep hospitals from getting overwhelmed. But for heaven’s sake reopen the economy so we don’t consign millions to years of poverty.

We expect President Trump to do it again. We say, if anyone can, he can.

We want to hear arguments For or Against our opinion.

The admirable Senator John Kennedy discusses on Fox News the House Democrats’ response to the economic crisis brought about by the coronavirus pandemic.

His anger at how the Democrat majority exploited the emergency to serve their own petty interests at the expense of the tax-payer is justified. The Republican minority had to give in to their  absurd demands in order to get the urgently necessary bill enacted into law.

Which is the party of true compassion could not be clearer.