In his first public statement of 2018, President Trump sent the following message via Twitter:
"The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than $33 billion in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies and deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools. They give safe haven to the terrorists whom we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!"
The first thing which should be clarified here is that Trump is not talking about foreign aid as the brief message would imply. The US pays Pakistan for using its sovereign territory for operations in Afghanistan. This might also include the cost of military supplies, advisers, and training that the US conducts with Pakistan for the same purpose.
The statement itself has several problems with it. The late Osama bin Laden may disagree that Pakistan gives the US little help. The Pakistani Government has actually been quite helpful; but the current government is unable to cope fully with Wahhabi infiltrators. And whoever is misinforming the President here (i.e. Rainbow Rex Tillerson, McMaster, etc) should recall that the previous Pakistani Government under General Musharaaf was much stronger. But Musharaaf was forced out by American pressure.
Musharaaf angered the arch-RINO George Bush Jr. by carrying out counterterrorist activities on his own and expecting Pakistan to be treated as a sovereign country instead of a Beltway colony. The last straw for the Swamp RINOs came when a joint British-Pakistani operation foiled a massive Al-Qaeda plot to hijack ten airliners at once. The US was left totally out of the loop and embarrassed that they were upstaged. In act of petty revenge, Bush forced both Musharaaf and British PM Tony Blair out of office.
Those events happened about 15 years ago, the time to which Trump alludes. The problems with Pakistan are largely ones of previous Administrations' bungling. Trump, too, is also getting advice from very pro-India interests. Indian-Americans are one minority that is heavily Republican. Unfortunately, most are RINOs like Nikki Haley and Bobby Jindal.
If Trump cuts off Pakistan, it is liable to make very little long-term problems for either country. Pakistan is also very closely allied with China: probably even moreso than with us. China will step into any void we leave. Maybe Trump is hoping to maneuver China into taking over US military responsibilities in Pakistan? It could be so; but it's hardly helpful to sour US-Pakistani relations in the process.
Wahhabi terrorism in Pakistan is a problem. But we have to recall here that ferreting out terror cells, radical mosques and madrassahs is a lot bigger job there than here. When it comes to the things that Trump accuses Pakistan of doing, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, the UAE, and Bahrain have been doing a lot worse---and soaking up a lot more American dollars in the process.
Trump needs to re-think this approach towards Pakistan. This doesn't mean throwing more money at the problem; but following the more constructive path of mutualism and win-win cooperation that has restored our relationship with China. The Swamp RINOs who are advising Trump on foreign affairs are too mired in the discredited Pax Americana approach of Clinton, Bush, and Obama. It didn't work for them and won't work for Trump either. Trump needs to reset with Pakistan and go to the Art of the Deal strategies in foreign policy, which have met with great success wherever they've been tried.
Vice-President Pence and Pakistani President
Abbasi Meet at UN in September
Since President Trump was elected, America has witnessed outbreaks of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). Various people across the socioeconomic spectrum have---at the mere mention of the President---gone completely berserk in public with no regard to their personal or public interests.
TDS attacks have resulted in arrests, injuries, and even an occasional unintentional suicide. Job losses and trips to the hospital psych-ward are the usual outcome. Jay Malsky, an executive producer at NBC, is another example.
Malsky was visiting Disneyland when he encountered a display of robotic statues of US Presidents. No sooner had his lighted on Trump than he began waving his arms and screaming incoherently. The few American parents who still take their kids to Disney stood in shock---reflexively shielding their offspring while security guards restrained the uncontrollable media 'elite'. According to some reports, Malsky was screaming death threats, profanity, and making obscene gestures as he was dragged forcibly from the park.
This is another reason for parents to avoid Disneyland. Aside from the homosexual grooming of children and the occasional kid eaten by alligators; Disney attracts kooks like these who ruin the already over-priced and over-hyped 'experience'. Many foreign countries actually ban Disney films as undesirable cultural imports; and a few foreign theme parks ended up closing. The company hasn't done anything especially productive since the 1960s. And it's also yet another statement of the caliber of executive personnel at NBC.
As for Malsky, his last major production was what passes for a comedy-musical these days titled Jay Malsky Slept with my Boyfriend. That's about all we really need say about him.
Meanwhile the economy expands, gangsters go down, the energy crisis gets fixed, the Swamp gets drained. While one guy does that, another screams insults at his effigy. Nothing describes the current cultural shift better than that.
Wow---just when everybody in the Blogosphere is contemplating 2017's most under-reported stories, the US Department of the Interior dropped a major bombshell. And yes, the Corporate Media is ignoring the story.
When President Trump signed the Tax Reform Bill last week, we noted the accomplishment of resuming the ANWR Project---which has gone nowhere since the Carter Administration shut it down in 1978. This allows for oil exploration and development on the massive Federal holdings in Alaska: amounting to over 90% of the State. Now for the last several decades, we've been told that America's days of energy independence is over; that Alaskan resources wouldn't effect our dependency on foreign oil; that we needed to consume less; invest in Green Technology; reduce our 'carbon footprint'; fight wars in the Middle East, etc.
And this week, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke revealed that all of this was a hoax. Zinke commissioned a survey of petroleum resources on the Alaskan Peninsula and territorial waters earlier this year and the report is in. Alaska alone has the productive potential of 17.6 billion barrels of crude oil and an unbelievable 50 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
So far from not reducing oil imports, Alaska could replace all of our annual imports for almost a decade. And this doesn't include our idle fields in the Lower 48 or the untapped resources in the Arctic and Pacific possessions.
According to EPA figures, the US imports almost half of its oil from our two neighbors Canada and Mexico. Latin America accounts for another 20%. We literally can---in the very near future---cut off these Middle Eastern parasites completely and have no energy disruption. Our own resources can take their place.
This is excellent news: but the fact is apparent that we have been lied to for years by our so-called Political, Media, and Academic 'Elites'. They couldn't have helped but known that their propaganda was nothing but mythology or that our national energy issues could have been solved long ago. And the entire Alaskan Congressional delegation agrees.
The denizens of the Beltway Swamp have no defense for this kind of negligence. Every day that the Trump Administration is in office makes their incompetence and corruption more apparent.
But the news of America on the brink of ending the energy crisis hardly registers with the Corporate Media punks. Today's headlines include a Confederate flag in the background of one of Ivanka's old pictures; and the President's taste for 'junk food'. But then again, this is the same Media scum who never bothered to question whether the energy crisis was real in the first place.
The University of California-Irvine has wrapped up another sports season. The UCI Anteaters won the first-ever E-Sports championship, and has come to dominate all other schools at playing League of Legends.
No, seriously. This isn't a joke.
"UCI made headlines last Fall by fielding the nation's first school-sponsored E-Sports team at a public university." UCI Magazine editors crowed, "The campus wooed players with athletic scholarships, and built a trailblazing computer arena."
Athletic Scholarships. For video-game players. UCI Vice-Chancellor for Student Affairs Thomas Parham thinks that the idea is somehow a great way to "weave its gaming endeavor into academics, research, and student life."
"It won't be just another sport." Parham sniffed. Parham is evidently a strong supporter of Snowflake Culture, having given a $1,000 donation to Obama's campaign, according to Open Secrets.
Rather than waste much time on the University's absurd rationalizations for such a program, we should take a close look at UCI itself and see whether this institution of higher learning is even worthy of any further public support.
UC-Irvine is the second-largest employer in Orange County, California. It has a reputation as a hotbed of Anti-Semitism and Jewish students and faculty have alleged discrimination and harassment. The school has hosted several Radical Islamic speakers including Holocaust Deniers. This is a fact that shouldn't be overlooked in Irvine's E-Sports program. A sizable number in the Tech/Gaming community are overtly anti-Jewish.
President Obama gave the graduation speech there in 2014. In 2015, the UCI student government banned displays of the American flag. Another major controversy centered on granting an exclusive concessions monopoly to Aramark Corporation. Aramark, it should be noted, has a major political lobby inside the Beltway Swamp. They've retained the lobbying firm headed by Tony Podesta's ex-wife, Heather. Heather Podesta is known inside the Beltway as The 'It Girl' of Washington and The Insider's Insider.
Jacques Derrida, who founded the philosophy of 'Postmodernism' taught at UCI until his death in 2004. In the 1990s, UCI researchers claimed Nobel Prizes in Chemistry and Physics; but aside from that, UCI hasn't produced much of any value since. Former UCI President Ralph Cicerone was a Climate-Change fanatic who turned most of the school's sciences in a leftward direction.
UCI has an endowment of a half-billion dollars and cranks out 9,000 diplomas a year for those paying the estimated $33,000 a year that it costs to attend. The head of this school is one Howard Gillman, a career academic bureaucrat who took over in 2014. He was appointed by Janet Napolitano, Obama's former DHS chief who now heads the University of California system.
Gillman is a vocal critic of President Trump, and published an encyclical against the proposed Travel Ban. Of course, by his own admission, he opposes it because "it unfairly discriminates against Moslems." Irvine, incidentally, is less than an hour's drive from San Bernardino, the site of the infamous Christmas terror attack in 2015. Despite Gillman's statements condemning anti-Semitism, he has failed to implement any of the promised reforms protecting Jewish students. In 2015, both he and Parham allowed Anti-Zionism Week to be observed on campus.
It certainly appears that our country wouldn't lose much by losing UC-Irvine. Irvine has a decent medical school, but the rest of the university could be defunded and closed down with no great loss to society.
We've said before that the Government needs to adopt the same strategy for funding colleges that it has for funding military bases: close the ones that are irrelevant and invest in the schools that produce. UC-Irvine would go to base-closure status, no doubt.
In case everybody missed it this holiday season, Red Pill Cult leader Vox Day has launched a new line of comic-books. Vox is under the impression that comics publishers Detective Comics (DC) and Marvel are pushing a Left-Wing agenda on America's youth. Vox calls ths being 'SWJ Converged' (meaning any organization that doesn't bow to his obvious genius).
Hence, his Alpha-Front group, Castalia House has introduced to us to a new superhero, Alt-Hero.
Despite the series being published in Finland, and the hero's girlfriend sporting the colors of a breakaway country which killed thousands of Americans; Vox tells us that Alt-Hero is all about defending American values. Looking at some of the excerpts of the series, it appears that Alt-Hero's character is modeled more on 'Based Stick-Man' than Superman, et al.
Reaction to the new series has been met by professionals and laymen alike with a mixture of laughter and disgust. But one of the most disgusting things is Vox' statement that his series is designed to elevate "every American, Western, and Christian value." What he's succeeded in doing once again is giving all Conservatives and Christians a bad name.
The reason that this series will fail---like most of Vox' schemes---is because it's ultimate goal isn't to produce anything of any socially redeeming value. It's based on Vox taking his petty revenge on an industry and "triggering SJWs". This is like his envious attack on John Scalzi. He fails to produce good writing because his objectives are personal; and therefore one-dimensional.
Alt-Hero, for example, makes it a point to use his superpowers to remove illegal immigrants from American streets. What kind of a superhero uses his incredible powers against migrant farm-workers? That's a bully, not a superhero. What makes superheroes super is that they fight super-villains. There is always something in the character of such heroes that they fight for the defenseless; they inspire hope and confidence in the people.
The second reason that Alt-Hero will fail is because Vox doesn't understand market forces. The Comics Industry is struggling---not because readers are leaving in protest---but because it's an old media form that can't compete well with the new. Comics are a product not only of the pre-Internet days, but of the pre-Television days. The Golden Age of comics meant a monthly issue or a 5-panel daily run in a newspaper. Today, we can download these same series and read them in their entirety in a couple of hours. A parallel form of media, which is no longer produced, were movie serials. Today, one can go to Youtube and watch in 3 hours what it once took audiences 15 weeks to see.
This is also the reason for the Comic Industry's modern tendency to create minority or female heroes and heroines. Not necessarily because they are 'SJW converged'; but because they are trying to boost their circulation by reaching out to wider demographics. Vox doesn't have a market beyond his own echo-chamber.
The third reason is just plain bad writing.
This is truly pathetic stuff. Again, Vox' narcissism is his undoing. He can't relate well to others and thinks that this kind of shallow narrative is actually going to appeal to anybody.
Other characters include the Red-Pill Girl version of Wonder Woman:
And these kinds of ridiculous villains:
While we believe that our culture could use some traditional comics again, this kind of material makes the postmodern stuff actually look good. If these are the 'Alt' heroes, we should probably stick with the ones that we have.
The Corporate Media has been busily inventing more fake-news to attack Trump this holiday season. While they were busy spreading unsubstantiated rumors about something- someone-supposedly-said-about-somebody-else, Attorney General Jeff Sessions was announcing that the US Department of Justice recovered nearly $4 billion from fraud cases committed by entities involved with the Federal Government in 2017.
Sessions identified Health Care, Housing, and Procurement Services as the largest sectors for fraud and abuse.
Despite Obama's boasts last year that Obamacare was fraud-free; over $900 million were recovered from pharmaceutical and medical device contractors alone. Mylan Inc., the central company in the Epipen Scandal forked over $231 million to Medicare and another $214 million to State healthcare agencies. Shire Pharmaceuticals was arguably even more corrupt than Epipen. They had an extensive list of blatant corruption that cost them $350 million in total fines. Session mentioned E-Clinical Works---a story we spoke of here in June---a healthcare software company who falsified its product's qualifications for government contracts. If we recall correctly, they were caught after their system failed during a data breach. They paid $155 million in restitution.
$543 million was recovered in housing and mortgage fraud. Mostly in these cases, the lenders were billing HUD to guarantee loans on properties which they knew to be unqualified. One company was actually certifying homes that were in substandard condition, then selling insurance policies to a provider which they controlled. The scam thus collected mortgages for dangerous building and collected again on the insurance when a problem arose.
Procurement Fraud was also quite blatant. The largest settlement came against a Kuwaiti firm for price-gouging foodstuffs for the US Military. This was a $95 million judgment; but raises the bigger question of why we have foreign contractors supplying the US Army.
Sessions mentioned catching a solar-energy company that ripped off $30 million under Obama's Stimulus Package; another $30 million from a company marketing 'Obama-phones' and a Small Business Administration contractor was caught bid-rigging and fined $16 million.
All of this corruption certainly adds up. It will be interesting to watch Swamp-Draining in 2018, for certain.
President Trump signed two bills into law today, one extending funding for certain government projects pending a Congressional vote. The other was H.R.1; the Comprehensive Tax Reform Act of 2017. This was something of a surprise, as most predicted that it would be signed in January.
The tax reform Bill is probably the most significant act---of many others---that the new Administration has accomplished. Senators McConnell, Hatch, Thune, Enzi, Black, Toomey, and Scott deserve credit as well, for accomplishing this tremendous feat before Christmas. This Bill eliminated several long-standing injustices in the Tax Code and contained with it two riders dealing with long-stalled issues.
The Corporate Media is gnawing its collective tongue in rage; thus they have failed to discuss the benefits of the new law.
One highlight of the Bill eliminated the Estate Tax on family farms. This alone would have made the Bill a great one. The Estate Tax on farms has been a decades-long injustice and has literally ruined thousands of farmers, ranchers, fisheries, orchards, etc. What would happen is that a farmer (for example) would die and leave the farm to his heirs. People in agriculture typically have very little money, but their estates were often valued in the millions because their land and equipment was high-value. Their heirs thus were hit with an Inheritance Tax that often forced them to liquidate the business to pay. No more. Nothing will revive American Agriculture like this will.
The Bill also cut Corporate Tax rates by 14%. The Left has been focusing their ire on this particular aspect of the new law. But this because they don't understand Economics. The Sanders supporters were always complaining about wealth disparities. The reason that so much wealth was being hoarded was because it cost too much to invest it. In other words, this is Reaganomics, though it will flow rather than trickle down, since Trump's cut is much higher.
Another major change is doubling deductions on personal taxes. This is going to have a major effect on reducing consumer debt. More money will be available for personal use.
An economic issue we've spoken of much here is the need to strengthen the US Dollar. The effects of tax cuts will be short-term unless the Dollar-value reverses inflationary tendencies. It will take some time to see whether or not the Dollar rises. Both Trump and Treasury Secretary Mnuchin seem to favor the floating dollar, so it will be dependent on the market moreso than policy. However, as Trump pointed out in today's speech, the new reforms will go a long way towards eliminating outsourcing. One of the Bill's features is a 100% deduction for Fiscal Year investments. This is called expensing, and it provides a huge incentive for businesses to invest domestically. Administration estimates are that this alone will return $3-5 trillion from overseas investments.
Investors have already been moving towards America again, even before the Bill was signed. The Market should---in theory at least---respond with higher Dollar valuations. The Dollar right now is about 97 cents below Base Year 1913. What will help our economy long-term would be that if these---and future---tax reforms lead to price deflation.
The two riders on H.R.1 were outstanding achievements as well. One of these terminates the individual mandate for Obamacare. Although Obamacare wasn't repealed in toto this year, one of its worst features was repealed. What this repeal basically does is stops forcing people to take Obamacare over better plans, while leaving in place its availability for those who can't afford health insurance. Even some Liberals originally supported this over Obamacare. It effectively simply extends Medicare to all indigents instead of forcing it on everyone.
The second rider opened ANWR for oil exploration and drilling. This issue has been stalled most of our adult lives; and probably no readers under 30 or so even remember what it was all about. Huge oil deposits were discovered below the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge and it was proposed during the Energy Crisis of the 1970s to free up this government land for oil. The proposal was stopped during the Carter Administration and Reagan was unable to get approval from Congress to start it again. Bush Sr. more or less gave up on the idea and it really hasn't surfaced as a political issue since. But the oil is still there; and now the political will is there to go for it again.
ANWR has been stalled for so long that there aren't any up-to-date statistics on how much of our foreign oil consumption it would reduce; but in the 1970s and 1980s estimates were very high. Some speculated then that the Alaskan Peninsula is about as oil-rich as the Arabian Peninsula. Time will tell; but opening ANWR can't but help in this regard.
So saying: Merry Christmas and a Prosperous New Year in 2017 actually sounds like we mean it again.
