A Preference Cascade is Forming.

56 thoughts on “A Preference Cascade is Forming.”

1. He is a real threat to the ‘deep state’, who will most probably anoint Hillery as their choice. It will be very interesting to see how they play this.

   Everyone but him lies to me all the time. I may know, too much. ;) I don’t think he does not lie, but so far he seems to be largely truthful. not that I pay all that much attention to the debates.

2. Richard Fernandez gets it.

   The world has been safe for so long nobody knows how to open a box whose contents may be unexploded ordnance. But open it they must. Charles Dickens once saw taking chances as an act of faith. The character Sydney Carton, when asked what he saw as he mounted the guillotine answered with a vision:

   “I see Barsad, and Cly, Defarge, The Vengeance, the Juryman, the Judge, long ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on the destruction of the old, perishing by this retributive instrument, before it shall cease out of its present use.

   This is revolution. Let’s just hope it does not spin out of control. The hatred of Trump by the GOP elites might become dangerous. Christie may be the first to see it.

3. It is a wonder that someone as cocooned as Peg Noonan finally gets Trump’s preference cascade.

   This pretty much covers it —

   This is a terrible feature of our age””that we are governed by protected people who don’t seem to care that much about their unprotected fellow citizens.

   And a country really can’t continue this way.

   In wise governments the top is attentive to the realities of the lives of normal people, and careful about their anxieties. That’s more or less how America used to be. There didn’t seem to be so much distance between the top and the bottom.

   Now is seems the attitude of the top half is: You’re on your own. Get with the program, little racist.

   Social philosophers are always saying the underclass must re-moralize. Maybe it is the overclass that must re-moralize.

   I don’t know if the protected see how serious this moment is, or their role in it.

   http://www.investorvillage.com/smbd.asp?mb=296&mn=17577&pt=msg&mid=15791036

4. It seems that traditional English are self-segregating into smaller cities in the southeast that have sky high real estate prices, somewhat similar to Orange County prices in California. In both cases, I think they are islands of safety and traditional values in countries being over run by immigration and deteriorating urban cores.

   And this is why civil war or civilizational collapse is coming either for our children or grandchildren – that which is unstable can’t remain standing. Ask Yugoslavia who things are working out in their Federated Republic.

   From your quote, what happens to the Englishman who can’t afford to find refuge from the deluge? He’s been sold out by his leaders and now his world becomes a nightmare. How long until the UK adopts the American innovation of Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing and purposely sets out to diversity these islands of refuge by parachuting Muslims and Africans into those small cities and then forcing the residents to pay for the glorious diversity that Central Government has delivered to them?

   Voluntary segregation is a pressure release valve for those who can afford to engage but when that avenue of escape is cut off, when people are backed into a corner, then batten down the hatches because something serious is going to happen.

5. Yesterday, I took the river road to buy supplies. The road runs about 50 feet from the river, and it is a scrubland of trees and berry thickets.
   I have been driving this road on and off for 35 years. Yesterday I saw something I had never seen before, even in 2008. Between the road and the river, a series of homeless camps had been established, with their attendant middens. This is on the outskirts of a medium sized town. The tallest building in town may be three or four stories.
   I don’t get out much,so can’t compare, but my remarks to my passenger unleashed comments about how bad it was in the cities.

   I think we have a Potemkin economy. When a strong wind blows, all the leveraged cardboard facsimiles of prosperity are going to blow away, and it is going to look like Hiroshima after the bomb, with only a few debt free concrete and stone structures left standing.

6. I won’t vote for a liberal Democrat even if he is running on the Republican party line.

   NFW.

7. It used to be, of course, that the lower and middle classes were stuffy and constrained by social convention while the freethinkers at universities and in the ruling class got to experiment with unconventional ideas. If their experimenting got enough success, then it might eventually filter down to ordinary people. (The sexual revolution worked this way, more or less).

   I’m not sure this is correct. I think the lower class generally has had different social mores from the middle.

   I’m thinking of Albion’s Seed. While the Puritans were chaste and the Quakers were practically celebrate, the Scots-Irish practiced pre-marital sex on such a scale that almost all brides were pregnant at their wedding.

   Maybe this is the reason behind Trump’s support in the South and interior states.

8. I won’t vote for a liberal Democrat even if he is running on the Republican party line.

   NFW.

   Then vote for Trump, the only true conservative in the race. Conserve the people, conserve the culture, conserve the history. The other guys want to dump millions of Muslims into the US, millions of 3rd worlders who will destroy the culture, erase our history and dilute the people, but hey, at least they’ll give you lower capital gains taxes as they flush away the society that parents want to bequeath to their children. Trump the conservative versus the plunderers.

9. I’m convinced that yes, there is a preference cascade forming with regard to Trump, but it isn’t that people really believe that he is a true conservative or a free-market, small-government constitutionalism. They’re going out for him because he is a massive middle finger to those establishments who have been pouring contempt on working class and flyover-country Americans. Listening to pigs like Al Sharpton and the establishment media squeal about Trump convinces me of that. I’m not a Trump fan, particularly, but I am enjoying the crushing, the driving and the lamentations of their women.

10. “when people are backed into a corner, then batten down the hatches because something serious is going to happen.”

    I think this is it. I’m probably more objective about it because I was 78 last Sunday but I have children and grandchildren. Some of them get it, some are Obama supporters and some are still figuring life out.

    I’ve pretty much done what I could. All but one are college educated and several have graduate degrees. All have jobs and two own their own homes. I would prefer that all do so but I couldn’t do it for them.

    A lot of assets went in two divorces and my second wife and I are back together after 25 years and about $10 million poorer. Oh well, it’s only money.

    I don’t like Trump and think he has some similarities to Mussolini. The big difference is that Mussolini never made any money by commerce and did not understand economics.

    Prior to 1914 he was a keen supporter of the Socialist International, starting the series of meetings in Switzerland that organised the communist revolutions and insurrections that swept through Europe from 1917.

    More like Bernie. Anyway, I think the die is cast. Obama blew up the consensus on politics in this country. Clinton started to but wised up quickly and listened to Rubin and the bankers. His big mistakes were Osama bin Laden who he ignored in spite of a lot of provocation and the Community Reinvestment Act, which Carter began and which eventually brought down the whole housing economy.

    The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 sought to address discrimination in loans made to individuals and businesses from low and moderate-income neighborhoods.[7] The Act mandates that all banking institutions that receive Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) insurance be evaluated by Federal banking agencies to determine if the bank offers credit (in a manner consistent with safe and sound operation as per Section 802(b) and Section 804(1)) in all communities in which they are chartered to do business.[3] The law does not list specific criteria for evaluating the performance of financial institutions.

    Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac became leftist piggy banks and retirement funds.

    “What can’t continue, won’t.”

    Think South Sea Bubble.

    The South Sea Bubble was a complex event, the product of intersecting financial, legal, political, and cultural factors. This short history is just an overview, intended to provide a context for research in the South Sea Bubble Collection. For additional resources, please see the related reading section on the previous page on this site.

    The South Sea Company was formed in 1711, supported by Robert Harley as a Tory competitor for the Whig Bank of England. The company was promised a monopoly of all trade to the Spanish colonies in South America in exchange for taking over and consolidating the national debt raised by the War of Spanish Succession (1701-1714). The value of this promise, however, was closely tied to the outcome of the war.

    It got into speculation and government bonds.

    The South Sea Bubble was not an isolated bubble event in 1720. As the South Sea Bubble was developing, a general interest in joint-stock investment opportunities was also picking up pace. By the middle of 1720, sometimes known as the “Bubble Year,” the market was flooded with a remarkable range of new ventures, each creating smaller bubbles as the speculative frenzy mounted. South Sea Company stock benefited from the investor mania and by May it was at £550.
    

    Then came Railroad bond bubbles.

    This is just the latest and it is not over, as you may have noticed.

11. Gurray
    I’m thinking of Albion’s Seed. While the Puritans were chaste and the Quakers were practically celebrate, the Scots-Irish practiced pre-marital sex on such a scale that almost all brides were pregnant at their wedding.

    I don’t know about how celibate the Quakers were compared to the Scots-Irish, given my ancestral history. My father’s mother had some Quaker background. One summer when my father was a college student, he drove his Great Aunt Ida to California to visit some Quaker relatives [I wonder if they knew the Nixons.]. He told me the California Quaker relatives used “thou” and “thee.” Years later, my father wrote the librarian at Swarthmore college to see if the library had any information on our Quaker ancestors, who were among the founders of the town of Swarthmore. The librarian wrote back that he usually didn’t answer such queries, but he was going to make an exception in my father’s case. The librarian informed my father that the Quaker meeting had censured my great-ought grandparents for “fornicating,” though after they got married, they were back in good standing. And they weren’t Scots-Irish. :)

    Back to the Trumpster. What I like most about him is the way he thumbs his nose at the progs and libs. But a thumb in the nose is not a policy statement.

12. Preference cascades are not unopposed. We are seeing some interesting moves.

    Yesterday, Ross Douhat of the New York Times put out a Tweet celebrating his idea that the Trump campaign would be ended by an assassination. The tweet links to a video clip from the 1983 movie The Dead Zone, which features a character played by Christopher Walken attempting to gun down a political figure played by Martin Sheen.

    He put this out using his NYT address. When there was a reaction, he pulled it down saying it was a joke and that those who were upset had no sense of humor.

    Now if I was an employer, and one of my employees had put out what was a celebration of an assassination of a presidential candidate UNDER MY NAME; my happy-camper level would be minimal. Yet no reaction. Nor any in the media. Or the government.

    Imagine what would have happened if a columnist for ANY newspaper, using the newspaper’s own Twitter address, had made an identical comment replacing the word “Trump” with either “Hillary” or “Sanders”. The newspaper would be shut down immediately for investigation. That columnist would look like the character “Spook” in the comic strip Wizard of Id; chained to the wall of a dungeon; after a long and unpleasant series of conversations with heavily armed Federal agents who also have no sense of humor. Violence by the Federales would not be beyond the Pale for such an enemy of the State.

    Lack of the normal reaction would tend to indicate approval or foreknowledge.

    Similarly, yesterday Senator Lindsey Graham [GOPe/(expletives deleted)-SC] stated in a speech that if Ted Cruz was murdered on the floor of the Senate, the killer would not be convicted. Other than outraged bloggers, no reaction, no apology, no retraction.

    The Bipartisan Governing Party is under threat by this preference cascade. In a country that is functionally a one-party state, and where we have watched the rule of law extinguished based on politics and connections; more medieval political actions become the norm.

    I expect that in the next month or two, there will be attacks on either Trump or Cruz or both. “Lone wolves”, of course, who the government will not be able to trace.

    And SGT MOM has it right as to the basis of why people are rallying to Trump. And TANGOMAN has it right as to what happens when the safety valves are closed off.

    I am thinking about Calvo-Sotelo.

    Subotai Bahadur

13. I don’t like Trump and think he has some similarities to Mussolini.

    Every politician has similarities to Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Jesus. What counts are the goals and the philosophy. Hitler’s goals was to erase Jews off the face of the Earth. Lenin and Stalin wanted to erase the Ukranians and the kulaks and to create a classless worker’s paradise. Trump wants America to have borders. That’s entirely reasonable to most people.

    Obama blew up the consensus on politics in this country

    This isn’t Obama’s fault. This goes back to 1965. Multiculturalism has never in history shown itself to be a better model for structuring a society than monoculturalism. When you divide a nation into competing groups, then you begin the slow destruction of the nation. Obama made things worse, but the rot was longstanding and progressing. It’s like a beam in your house. The beam has a load capacity, and as you keep piling on load, the beam begins to deform. The beam will hold up the load until you add the last increment and then it buckles.

    America is faced with an irresolvable problem. White America wants an equal opportunity society even if this produces unequal outcomes by race. Such outcomes are intolerable to Minority America and they want an equal outcome society no matter how much totalitarianism is required to produce the equal outcomes. This is why the University of Texas, in a state with a large Hispanic population, is practicing Affirmative Action and giving AA advantages to the children of minority professionals and disadvantaging the children of white lower class families who OUTPERFORM the children of minority professionals, many of whom achieved their station in life due to these very preference schemes. Those minority professionals are going to move heaven and earth to pass their advantage on to their kids. It’s galling to watch the children of white lower class families outperform their own children who had the benefits of wealth and good education.

    http://i.imgur.com/ZHPbAs3.jpg
    http://www.jbhe.com/latest/news/1-22-09/satracialgapfigure.gif

    There is no way to resolve this problem.

    When America was 89% white, 10% black and 1% other, there was a 9:1 ratio of whites to minorities and this gave us a broad base to support an uplift movement. Today there are 5.5 whites for every black. The Hispanic population has grown in size, so too the Asian population. Asians are upset that the Ivy League is capping their admission rate, they want higher admission rates but they never specify which other group will have to give up a share because the presumption is that whites will have to do it, despite the fact that gentile whites are the LEAST under-represented demographic in the institutions built by their ancestors.

    All of this was avoidable and it all began in 1965.

    Trade is a problem, due to job losses, but it’s quite likely that the very same trade deals, and their job loss fall-out, would be acceptable in an environment which wasn’t degraded with the effects of the ’65 immigration act because if we remove 60 million 3rd world immigrants and their descendants, then the returns to labor wouldn’t have fallen as drastically as they have, meaning we’d have had a more robust labor market, fewer dead end jobs, a stronger middle class and a lower tax burden arising from needing to provide income supports to many of the 3rd world immigrants. So the efficiency argument associated with free trade would prevail and the distribution argument would be mostly moot in that distribution of wealth arising from free trade occurs through the mechanism of the labor market – labor scarcity boosts gains to labor and lowers returns to capital.

    The Community Reinvestment Act.

    Again we go back to the root cause – multiculturalism. If America today was still 90% white and 10% black, then the cost of the CRA in terms of uplifting blacks would be bearable, a 9:1 ratio, but when we get to a situation of 60% of the population trying to uplift the other 40%, a 3:2 ratio, clearly the costs become more burdensome. Our children are going to be facing a 50/50 society, a 1:1 ratio. Compare the burden of uplifting one person when spread on the backs of nine to the burden of uplifting one person when that burden is placed on the back on one single person. This can’t hold up.

14. LEAST under-represented demographic

    Should read as MOST under-represented demographic.

15. “Multiculturalism has never in history shown itself to be a better model for structuring a society than monoculturalism.” The Roman Empire ran rather successfully on a blend of Roman and Greek culture.

16. “The Roman Empire ran rather successfully on a blend of Roman and Greek culture.”

    Two points. Greeks were mostly slaves. All Greek physicians were.

    Second, Romans cared only about military matters and the rest was fluff.

    The Romans eventually got lazy and the barbarians became mercenary soldiers, just like the Turkmen did for the Arabs.

    The barbarians took over and wrecked Rome and its culture. The Turks did better since Arabs didn’t have much culture anyway. They became the Seljuk Turks, then the Ottomans.

    Harold MacMillan famously compared the British in north Africa in 1942 to the Greeks and Americans to the Romans. It was not a bad comparison.

17. The Roman Empire ran rather successfully on a blend of Roman and Greek culture.

    An empire is not a society. It as an agglomeration of societies, by definition. That said, the Romans adopted gods, foods, art and other things from the Greeks, Persians, and others, as all societies do.

    What made people Americans was acceptance of the American idea, based on respect for separation and limits of government power under the constitutional, free citizenry, a merit based society where success was rewarded and admired, and an invitation into the melting pot where even if your parents were Italian or Irish or Latvians, we are all Americans now. Welcome, here’s a hamburger fresh off the BBQ.

    Multiculturalism denies the existence of the American. In multiculture speak, America is just a place, and you are now and always were just a white European, a black African, a Hispanic, a Chinese, and all those other identity groups are your competitors. They may be allies or enemies in the competition for government doled largesse. The goal is preferential treatment, goods, money and services taken from others and showered on your identity group based on how much money and how many votes you deliver to the Left.

    It is the polar opposite of the melting pot. It is socially destructive. It is mean spirited, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It is cynical and designed for manipulation. It is an awful idea and awful policy. It should denounced and destroyed as an idea.

18. The Roman Empire ran rather successfully on a blend of Roman and Greek culture.

    Early America tried to implement the slavery component of multicultural Rome and we’re still dealing with the toxic after-effects centuries later. Elite factions want cheap labor and saddle the rest of society with the costs, forever after. This was true in Colonial America and it’s true today. Come the Robot Revolution what are we going to do with Mexican peasants in America?

    We’re either dealing with some variant of a caste society or with a totalitarian society which becomes necessary to buy peace through equal outcomes measures. As government ramps up totalitarianism, ethnic cleansing becomes more palatable. All of the liberty focused topics which are the central theme of this blog are wiped out, completely, in any equal outcome society.

19. It should denounced and destroyed as an idea.

    Liberals can foist a misguided policy on society and eventually normal people can reject and repair the society. That’s good as far as it goes, so your call to denounce and destroy the IDEA can be achieved if the people back the idea. What happens when the people, singular, becomes peoples, plural, and your people want to denounce and destroy the idea while the other peoples who coinhabit the boundaries of the United States with your people refuse to support you and instead pledge to maintain the idea because it enriches them?

    A PEOPLE can monkey around with ideas and implement and then reject and take a different turn, but once you divide the people, then all is lost. Minorities are NOT going to back your call to denounce and destroy that idea because most minority groups will disadvantage themselves by doing so, they benefit from totalitarian measures to create equal outcomes.

    So the question for those who love liberty is this, “what price are you willing to pay to restore liberty to your society?” The price is going to be very high.

20. What Micheal H. said.

    “The goal is preferential treatment, goods, money and services taken from others and showered on your identity group based on how much money and how many votes you deliver to the Left.”

    Do the idiots going all damp in their panties for this realize what will be the most likely outcome of this? Or are they all counting on us being brainwashed/gaslighted by so many decades of media propaganda, snapping the chains on our own wrists and trudging obediently off to the re-education camps? I guess they must be…

21. I am seriously concerned about an assassination attempt on Trump. I hope his security is better than the Secret Service which seems to have fallen off a cliff in competence under Obama. I suspect that the Obama family are as nasty and hostile to SS agents as Hillary was. It seems to be a common Democrat tendency. Rosalyn Carter was amazed that Nancy Reagan knew the first name of the SS agent on inauguration day.

    He wrote a very good book called, Riding with Reagan.

22. Do the idiots going all damp in their panties for this realize what will be the most likely outcome of this?

    Here’s a new piece of a puzzle playing out in Norway, first the Soldiers of Odin formed to patrol the streets and keep Norwegian women safe and now the Soldiers of Allah have formed in response. Real Norwegians arrayed against Fake Norwegians. This will be coming here to America in the future. That Beaver Cleaver America, that Bedford Falls America, those are gone because the population has changed. Now we’re heading towards and Escape from New York future. Thanks liberals and thanks Republican Establishment.

    Resources can buy peace, so too can segregation, but only for a while. Those resources are being borrowed from the debt markets and that’s eventually going to either tighten up or stop altogether. Remove the lubrication of bribery and then tensions mount, remove the “out of sight, out of mind” aspect of segregation and then tensions mount.

    Elites bring guys like this into the society but he is never living next door to someone in the elite, rather he gets dumped into some poor white guy’s neighborhood. The days of Archie Andrews and Veronica Lodge going to the same high school are gone. The class distance in physical space was much less back in the past than it is today. Like Mike K. noted Peggy Noonan seems to now be aware of this with her protected class formulation, yeah, they’re protected from the dysfunction that they drop onto society and because they’re so isolated they tend not to care what happens to society as a whole so long as their path is well greased.

    This was all avoidable, all we had to do was put liberals into straight jackets back in the day.

23. I am seriously concerned about an assassination attempt on Trump

    This is why Trump needs to pick someone like Kris Kobach as his VP. If Trump falls the VP carries on the reforms.

    I don’t know what happens if Trump falls. There is a strong sense of complacency in American society, so we might go back to business as usual, resulting in pressure building on society but now with the lid, temporarily, clamped back on. On the other hand we might see what we’re seeing in the middle east, destroy one movement, and like dandelion seeds in the wind, multiple new movements take root, so if Trump falls we might see various cells form which take out all sorts of prominent establishment figures. This still would not be a mass movement but it would be a real life battle, with real casualties, where the establishment seeks to harm Americans and now individual leaders of the establishment are being taken out. How much skin are they willing to put in the game?

    Taking out Trump doesn’t solve the problem, for Trump is simply giving voice to an issue. Removing the voice, the symbol, while a setback, doesn’t erase the issue.

24. “Taking out Trump doesn’t solve the problem,”

    Robespierre is always ready to take over.

25. Robespierre is always ready to take over.

    I don’t see a ready alternative to Trump but I expect that one will rise from somewhere. What I do believe is that if the elites believe that Trump is a problem now, they’re really not going to like what the future holds if Trump can’t solve the problems of the present.

    To pick one issue of many. Exit polls from NH indicate 65% of the voters don’t want Muslim immigrants, it’s 75% of SC voters. These are the feelings when Muslims are 2% of the population. Do the elites really believe that this problem will diminish as Muslims become 10%, then 30% of the population?

    It’s always better to nip a problem when it’s budding rather than allowing the cancer to metastasize.

26. None of the reform cells currently have the tools necessary to win. They just haven’t been made yet. It’s a thorny problem but fixable.

27. TangoMan – Yes, the “elite” will really hate life if Trump can’t at least stabilize the current issues because the next option after Trump is Anders.

28. “Greeks were mostly slaves.” Oh for heaven’s sake Mike: the eastern half – i.e. the richer half – of the Empire was run in Greek – it was the language of administration, trade and culture. Soldiers had to know a bit of Latin, but there’s good reason the NT was written in Greek not Latin.

29. “Oh for heaven’s sake Mike: the eastern half – i.e. the richer half – of the Empire was run in Greek”

    I was referring to Rome, not the Empire. Rome ruled through the roads and the Legions which could march quickly on the good roads. They pretty much left the indigenous types alone.

    I think the NT was written in Aramaic and Syriac but am not a Bible scholar. Certainly the Arabs used Greeks to run their empire. The “Translation Era” of Harun al Rashid and his son was a period when Greek “converts” did all the work. Arabs have never run anything. The terms “Levant” and “Levantine” were derogatory and used to describe the Greeks who ran the Muslim Empire for the Turks. Muslims have never been any good at running things that don’t have sharp edges and used to cut off heads.

    The Byzantines were an interesting story but Rome was gone by then. The “Roman Empire” was a myth as it was Byzantium, not Rome.

    Justinian was born in Yugoslavia and was “the last Roman Emperor.”

    Diocletian built his retirement palace in Dalmatia and the remains are the center of the city Split. That is in Croatia and I have been there. That was about 305 AD and is about the end of Rome.

30. “the Scots-Irish practiced pre-marital sex on such a scale that almost all brides were pregnant at their wedding”: that sounds like a misunderstanding of the old Scots practice of the probationary marriage. Men didn’t want barren wives; girls were reluctant to be bedded without the prospect of marriage (and might well have wanted their future husbands to be proved fertile too). So they undertook a probationary marriage, and then had a formal wedding when pregnancy was successfully achieved. Or so my father explained to me when I was young. Come to think of it, that conversation may have been the nearest thing to “sex education” I ever received.

31. “that conversation may have been the nearest thing to “sex education” I ever received.”

    Me, too.

    The practice of “bundling” in colonial times was also very common and beds were equipped with “bundling boards” so courtship could be conducted under the covers, so to speak, in houses with no central heat.

32. I have been a fairly strong supporter of Trump. I like his style more than his substance– in fact, I believe his style is a critically important contribution to the process all by itself. It breaks up the stranglehold the MSM has over the topics to be to discussed and the ways they are discussed. But he also said the right things on a few important issues, so with all that I was willing to overlook his lack of conservative bona fides. Up until Scalia died, that is. Then it got real for me. What sort of justice would Trump appoint? One with views like those of his sister, which he has praised and apparently admires? To the Scalia chair? Beyond that consideration, Ace has a nice treatment of the Trump phenomenon here. Read the whole thing, because it goes way beyond what the headline implies. Ace effectively deconstructs Trump’s supposed appeal to conservatives.

33. Ace effectively deconstructs Trump’s supposed appeal to conservatives.

    I believe that there are two types of Trump supporters, the first simply want to destroy the elite capture of the process and so don’t much care about any downstream effects while the second support Trump on some of his issues.

    The first are immune to appeal because the alternative is to reward a candidate who will perpetuate the corrupt system they want destroyed. The second is mostly immune but there will be people on the margin who weigh the value of their issue against the unknown possibility of Trump being a liberal. Within this group are many who believe that policies can be changed but the people of the US can’t. Even if Trump turns out to be Bernie Sanders in disguise, their agenda is advanced if Trump deports, or stops illegal immigration, or does something to alter the demographic trajectory that we’re currently on because policies can be changed but the people of the US is as close as we come to having to deal with a reality carved in stone. A Cruz who appoints the right people to the court and who advances favorable policy amounts to only a short term gain because some radical leftist or ethnic grievance monger will in the future capture the WH propelled into office by an army of voters, a good part of whom President Cruz legalized as citizens, and that new President will make it his mission to undo all the good work of President Cruz.

    The above shouldn’t be taken as a fictional scenario because it’s happening right now north of the border – chew on this:

    Liberals to pull back Tory citizenship rules ”” terrorism to no longer be grounds for revoking citizenship

    The federal Liberals are getting started on repealing some of the previous government’s sweeping ”” and controversial ”” changes to how people get or lose Canadian citizenship.

    But the Liberal plan promises to be controversial in its own right, since it would, if passed, restore the Canadian citizenship of Zakaria Amara ”” sentenced in 2010 for his role as a member of the so-called Toronto 18.

    Immigration Minister John McCallum introduced a new bill Thursday that, if passed, would remove terrorism or other crimes against the national interest as grounds for revoking citizenship from dual nationals.

    The legislation would also restore citizenship to anyone who has been affected by those provisions; Amara is the only person in Canada to have had his Canadian citizenship revoked under the Conservative law. . . . .

    The bill also shortens the length of time someone must be physically present in Canada before qualifying for citizenship, and allows time already spent as permanent residents to count towards the residency requirement.

    The Conservatives had also expanded who needs to pass language and knowledge tests before qualifying for citizenship; the Liberals are returning to the previous age requirement of 18 to 54. . . .

    The Conservative bill was attacked as setting a dangerous precedent and even challenged, unsuccessfully, as unconstitutional.

    When the bill was rolled out, there was particular concern in ethnic communities that, over time, the criteria to revoke citizenship would expand to include convictions for lesser crimes.

    The current law also has a provision that requires people to declare they intend to continue residing in Canada if granted citizenship. That raised concerns among some new Canadians that they could lose their citizenship if they moved outside of Canada. The new law would repeal this provision.

    Attacking the bill was a key element of the Liberal election strategy in heavily diverse ridings, and they promised to overhaul the law during the campaign.

    This is insanity on steroids. It’s a direct appeal to fake Canadians who are most interested in using their citizenship as a convenience, it’s a direct assault on those real Canadians who attach value to their citizenship and want that value shared across society.

    This example focuses on the question of citizenship, but substitute any other conservative value and you get the same dynamic. If there is a large constituency which wants a particular value some politician will work to deliver on the issue in order to capture the votes of those people. Neither Cruz or Rubio is anti-immigration. Cruz talks a good game but he parses so carefully that people recognize the groundwork being laid for a future betrayal, hence all of Cruz’s promised conservative policies will be vulnerable to repeal.

34. What would anyone expect Trudeau to do ?

    There is however, a bit of reality seeping out of the Trump campaign.

    The former Speaker of the House and 2012 presidential candidate was the last to lead a Congress that was willing to send to the president’s desk a balanced budget, and Trump appears increasingly interested in utilizing Gingrich’s considerable talent and know-how to keep his White House on task and on time in delivering the kind of change Mr. Trump’s millions of supporters are hoping for in 2017.

    Gingrich has recently been a vocal supporter of the Trump campaign, indicating a belief that Donald Trump might very well be the only one among all the candidates, Republican or Democrat, who has the fortitude to pull America back from the brink. He most recently warned the Republican Establishment it needs to begin to prepare for the reality that is a “Trump future” following the endorsement of the current GOP frontrunner by New Jersey Governor, Chris Christie.

    As White House Chief of Staff, Gingrich would be one of the primary links between the Oval Office and Congress.

    The cascade is growing into a flood. Jan Brewer is another former governor on board.

35. What would anyone expect Trudeau to do ?

    That’s the point. Harper enacted legislation that favored conservative principles and an election of a liberal, fueled by immigrant votes, leads to a repudiation of all the conservative gains.

    Any conservative gains advanced by Rubio, Cruz, Paul, Bush, you name it, will be undone when the Democrats marshall the votes of the immigrants admitted under a Rubio, Cruz, Paul, or Bush administration. The conservative message primarily resonates with whites. This entire discussion and the strategies which flow from it would be radically different if the minority vote was really a 50/50 distribution, but it’s not, it’s a 70/30 at best.

36. Oh Lord.

    “I think the NT was written in Aramaic and Syriac”: nope, scholars seem to be universally agreed that it was in Greek.

    “The “Roman Empire” was a myth as it was Byzantium, not Rome.” Nope; the “Byzantine Empire” was an expression adopted by historians in the modern era. At the time it was known as Roman, and its inhabitants as Romans.

    “That was about 305 AD and is about the end of Rome.” The end of the western Roman Empire is usually dated to the mid fifth century. The eastern Empire carried on until the Crusaders did it terrible damage in the thirteenth century, the weakened residue staggering on into the fifteenth century.

37. The Crusaders saved the Byzantine Empire and extended their existence for centuries longer then had they been left to their own resources. It was the Turks that ended the Byzantines.

38. ” that sounds like a misunderstanding of the old Scots practice of the probationary marriage. ”

    In the book it doesn’t seem like trial marriage but promiscuity. Life in the backwoods and frontier appears to have allowed for behavior not otherwise accepted in more organized communities and settlements.

    In the year 1767, Woodmason calculated that 94 percent of backcountry brides whom he had married in the past year were pregnant on their wedding day, and some were “very big” with child. He attributed this tendency to social customs in the back settlements:

    “Nothing more leads to this than what they call their love feasts and kiss of charity. To which feasts, celebrated at night, much liquor is privately carried, and deposited on the roads, and in bye paths and places. The Assignations made on Sundays at the singing clubs, are here realized. And it is no wonder that things are as they are, when many young people have three, four, five or six miles to walk home in the dark night, and with convoy, thro’ the woods? Or perhaps staying all night at some cabbin (as on Sunday nights) and sleeping together either doubly or promiscuously? Or a girl being mounted behind a person to be carried home, or any wheres. All this contributed to multiply subjects for the king in this frontier country, and so is wink’d at by the Magistracy and Parochial Officers.”

    … The sexual customs of backcountry, like those of the North borderers, were rigid in this respect. But in others, they were much more relaxed. An example was a sexual game called cockle bread, which were played by nubile girls in Westmoreland. It was described by a disapproving Victorian folklorist as a “wanton sport of young wenches,” who would “get upon a Tableboard and then gather-up their knees and their coates as high as they can, and then they wabble to and fro with the buttocks,” singing ‘Up with your heels, down with your head; that is the way to make cockedly bread.'”
    

39. “In the year 1767, Woodmason calculated that 94 percent of backcountry brides whom he had married in the past year were pregnant on their wedding day, and some were “very big” with child. He attributed this tendency to social customs in the back settlements”

    Might also have had something to do with the scarcity of preachers in the various frontier settlements.

    In Texas during the entrepreneurial period and for sometime afterwards, (during the Republic of Texas years) having a minister or priest on hand was such a sometime thing that I have read that a lot of marriages were performed by a justice of the peace — or by the alcalde, or elected mayor of a particular settlement. Then, when an ordained minister showed up, they did the religious binding, sometimes months or years later. YMMV, of course – subject to the time and place, always.

40. He does go on to explain that abandoning a woman after getting her pregnant was considered a violation of the woman’s honor and her families, and the crime would take place at great personal price to the offending man. Cash payments to the family were common, but obviously many just took the next step to marriage.

    They had adopted customs for the bride and groom that were expecting:

    a backcountry custom “adopted when the chastity of the bride was a little suspected, was that of setting up a pair of horns on poles or trees, on the route of the wedding company.”

    This looks like a form of Shivaree, which was a sort of big noisy parade by the family or community to nudge the couple to stop concentrating on sex and start concentrating on nuptials.

41. The crusaders pillaged the Byzantine Empire at the instigation of Venice. It’s all entirely well-known history and not at all contentious.

42. That was nearing the end of the movement. Most of the actions by the Crusaders at the point can be thought of in the same light as fighting retreats. With extremely poor operational conduct in the case of Constantinople.

    Local politics and regional rivalries aside, the establishment of Latin State enclaves preserved Christianity for centuries against the Islamic onslaught, which was ultimately responsible for the fall of the Byzantine Greeks. If they weren’t taken over by Franks, it would’ve been Turks.

43. “The end of the western Roman Empire is usually dated to the mid fifth century.”

    That is subject to debate. The date I offered was the date of the last real “Roman” Emperor.

    The Crusaders did pillage Constantinople. I was shown how they stole gold mosaics thinking they were real gold. Venice did stir up the crusaders who were, after all, illiterate Frankish soldiers who had lost to the Saracens.

    None the less, Byzantium may have believed the fiction that they were the “Roman Empire” but they were not. They were Byzantium with Byzantine politics.

    Some were quite colorful such as Basil the Bulgar Slayer who blinded all his prisoners but left one in each 100 with one eye to lead his fellows back to Bulgaria. This may be the origin of the saying “In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.”

    I think Diocletian was a more realistic end to the history of Rome.

44. “Most of the actions by the Crusaders at the point can be thought of in the same light as fighting retreats”: oh come now. Even wiki gets this right.

    “The Empire recovered again during the Komnenian restoration, such that by the 12th century Constantinople was the largest and wealthiest European city. However, it was delivered a mortal blow during the Fourth Crusade, when Constantinople was sacked in 1204 and the territories that the Empire formerly governed were divided into competing Byzantine Greek and Latin realms. Despite the eventual recovery of Constantinople in 1261, the Byzantine Empire remained only one of several small rival states in the area for the final two centuries of its existence.”

45. Yes, the mortal blow was dealt by a few Frankish mercenaries looting churches. The Seljuk hordes slicing up Asia Minor like a butchered cow had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

46. The sack by the Franks was a serious blow but there was also The Plague of Justinian which devastated the entire eastern empire. I did quite a bit of reading about it for my book on medical history but there has been new information obtained from the tooth pulp of victims of the plague. Yersinia pestis cause such intense bacteremia that Yersinia DNA can be found in tooth pulp of skeltons 1000 years old. When I wrote the book, the method allowed identification of Yersinia DNA in Black Death cases but not yet Plague of Justinian cases.

    The number of deaths is uncertain. Modern scholars believe that the plague killed up to 5,000 people per day in Constantinople at the peak of the pandemic. The initial plague ultimately killed perhaps 40% of the city’s inhabitants and caused the deaths of up to a quarter of the human population of the eastern Mediterranean.[16] Frequent subsequent waves of the plague continued to strike throughout the 6th, 7th and 8th centuries, with the disease becoming more localized and less virulent.

    Recent research using better methods shows that Justinian plague victims also had Y pestis dna.

    Our findings confirm that Y. pestis was responsible for the Justinianic Plague, which should end the controversy regarding the etiology of this pandemic. The first genotype of a Y. pestis strain that caused the Late Antique plague provides important information about the history of the plague bacillus and suggests that the first pandemic also originated in Asia, similar to the other two plague pandemics.

    Killing 40% of the population weakens the state considerably. The Black Death changed Europe and especially England where it ended Feudalism.

47. Richard Fernandez is now writing about preference cascades.

    In his book Private Truth, Public Lies, social scientist Timur Kuran argued that people, under pressure to conform by culture leaders often told public lies to get the pollsters and thought police off their backs, even as they nurtured a largely undetected private resentments inside them. Over time two divergent perceptions would emerge: the public lie would determine how the regime thought about itself while the private truth contained the real, but hidden data.

    This is bigger than Trump. We may be seeing the calling of the Estates General.

    The Estates began their meeting at Versailles on May 5, 1789 and quickly entered into a power struggle. The Third Estate soon declared itself a “National Assembly” that was representative of the people. This new National Assembly expressed its desire to include the other two Estates in its deliberations but also made it clear that it was determined to move forward without them. Louis attempted to shut down the National Assembly, but on June 20 its members declared that they would not disband until they had written a new constitution for France.

    I’m not even sure Trump will be in command of this preference cascade by the end.

48. The response of the crowd to Rubio leads me to think that Trump’s bombast & threats have engendered a similar response. Crowds have felt unable to say – and found his opponents weren’t – what they wanted to about him

49. Jeff Sessions has endorsed Trump.

50. > Jeff Sessions has endorsed Trump.

    Sen Sessions is the gold standard of resistance to GOPe Open Borders illegal immigration for the GOP grassroots.

    IOW, Game over for Cruz and Rubio.

    We are now in the “Après moi, le déluge” stage of the election where the GOP’s billionaire donor class tries to get its political functionary pawns to blow up the GOP to block Trump.

    This is where the GOP consultant fools blow themselves up, and the GOP consultant class con men make a killing.

    The smart GOP consultants are telling the billionaires donors they can spend a lot of money, but they would still lose and leave a GOP Nominees and possibly a Pres. Trump p**sed off at them forever afterwards.

51. “p**sed off at them forever afterwards.”

    I’m not sure they are telling them that as it would close a nice source of income for lots of them.

52. Hugh Hewitt, who I admired as an interviewer and speaker (prior to stating that he felt Hillary would be the next contestant) has also apparently reversed course and now will go with Trump.

    Still believe the Wobblies have more mayhem planned. Cleveland could go hot. I’m with Mike on this, he better have Blackwater style back-up with those Federales.

53. Why is GOP so racist???

54. Nancy Reafan was a Hollywood blow job specialist to keep puppets happy.

55. “Why is GOP so racist???”

    The loonies have arrived.

56. SSS, Mommy will be back soon with your medicine. Now get your crayons and coloring book and stop playing on her computer.

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