KRISTOR writes at The Orthosphere:

Immigration of millions of unskilled workers reduces the price of labor. So for that matter does the entry of women into the workforce. Men used to be able to earn a wage sufficient to support a wife and children. It stands to reason that if you double the supply of labor by adding to it almost all women, you will cut the prevailing wages for most jobs – not perhaps by half, but to such a degree that it will thenceforth take almost two workers to earn the income that had once taken only one.

On the demand side, the regulatory and labor environment in the US is so completely whacked, irrational, cumbersome, and costly that it is better, easier, and cheaper, all things considered, for a manufacturer to produce in China than here. So the jobs are going to China. To the far side of the planet, where they speak a different and unrelated language, use a completely alien and wildly inefficient form of writing, and are culturally comfortable with fraud and corruption and cheating and adulteration – with harming their customers.

This is nuts.

All these massive distortions in the labor market that crush wages happened as a result of stupid government policies. The solution is not to add another layer of policy to correct them, but to delete the problematic policies, root and branch – and, where necessary (not very often) replace them with something rational – so that the labor market can right itself naturally in such a way that the minimum wages anywhere being offered ad libitum suffice for a family to live dignantly thereon.

This is simply done …  [cont.]

Kristor offers real solutions. Unfortunately, there is zero chance of them being implemented under our current political system.

COLIN McKAY writes:

Even people who imagine they have no debt, do, because the cost of debt (“interest”/usury) is embedded in prices.

AT the Basilica of Saint Mary of Minneapolis, Aztec dancers join in Evening Prayer. Not that it is any worse than this.

Here is the M.C., who wears the grin of a game show host:

Read More »

ALAN writes:

To glorify the Communist future, one must first blacken the American past and demonize the white men who built American civilization and defended it.  That is why American patriots and heroes are now routinely demonized by the Fascist Left and their well-trained agitators.

John Wayne was an American patriot, exemplified masculine authority, and upheld a code of chivalry in his portrayal of heroic men in many motion pictures.

Those are some of the reasons why he is being demonized by the Left:  Not for his faults, but for his virtues.

Public officials in California who were not yet born when John Wayne was earning the respect and admiration of millions of Americans were outraged that some people wanted to establish a day to honor John Wayne for his life’s work. Why were they upset? Simple:  Because Mr. Wayne had the temerity to imagine (a) that he was living in a free country, (b) that he had a right to express his views, and (c) that he had no obligation to get the approval of Communist-trained agitators before expressing those views. Read More »

A scented geranium

THERE is a certain type of older woman. She is not very noticeable in a crowd and typically has not done anything much of worldly importance, but she is someone whom I’ve always admired. She usually has gray hair (rarely dyed hair) and something about her matronly face that is distinctive. There’s a visible peace about her — a peace and nobility that is rare in this frazzled world. She is an aristocrat of the earth. After many years of working in the garden, she has acquired a knowledgeable intimacy with plants and a confident dominion over them that together suggest an overall wisdom about life, as if she herself is rooted in place. But then who could be lost or alienated with so many friends — friends who disappear in the winter (except for the few brought inside) and then always, without fail, return in the spring. There is never a spring without them, never a May in which they cannot be counted on to assert their remarkable individuality and mute tenderness. Everything else may change. Other friends die and never return. Other friends move away. But these always return, often different plants, it’s true, but always the same nevertheless. Their loyalty is positively shocking. Read More »

THIS AD may be a perfect illustration of our fraudulent monetary system, which renders what is fertile infertile and what is infertile (money) fertile. Jamie Dimon, president of JP Morgan Chase, will be paid $27 million this year for, among other things, increasing debt peonage. And as if that isn’t enough, his company psychologically castrates American men by promoting “transgenderism.” (The commercial is ambiguous, but everyone knows the subtext. And don’t bother writing to Chase to complain. They don’t give a hoot what you think.)

It is often said that usurers — those who charge interest on loans — deserve payment for their loans because of the opportunities they lose by not using money in another way. But that assumes that they would make their money increase another way. It also assumes they have actual money to lend.

In fact, most bank loans are made with money created through the accounting deception known as double-entry book-keeping. As Colin McKay writes:

All of the ‘money’ that we believe ourselves to own, and that we circulate daily among ourselves in payment for goods, services, and investments, is neither ‘money’ in true substance, nor are we the owners of it.

The reality of the system is this. Bankers create IOUs out of nothing. These digital tokens represent our IOU to the bank. Then—by a clever accounting trick—they let us borrow their IOUs as ‘money’.

Usury is money magick, as McKay argues. It’s an inversion of values. It destroys the natural order. The inversion of male and female follows as night follows day. In the manufactured chaos of sexual confusion, the indebted may never realize they’ve been robbed. Read More »

A READER writes:

A cell phone is a Satanic device for sucking the soul and all traces of a personality out of the body of its user.  The user becomes the adjunct of the device.  All young adults are users of the device. Read More »

PATRICK BUCHANAN wrote in a recent column:

No matter who wins in November, there is no going back for the GOP.

Can anyone think the Republican Party can return to open borders or new free-trade agreements like NAFTA?

Can anyone believe another U.S. Army, like the ones Bush I and Bush II sent into Afghanistan and Iraq, will be mounted up and march to remake another Middle East country in America’s image?

Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom are history.

What the Trump campaign revealed, as Republicans and even Democrats moved toward him on trade, immigration and foreign policy, is that Bush Republicanism and neoconservatism not only suffered a decisive defeat, they had a sword run right through them.

They are as dead as emperor-worship in Japan.

— Comments —

George Pal writes:

The death of Bush Republicanism may be a hankering in search of a desire.

Communism hadn’t died in 1989. The baton or gavel (or hammer and sickle) had merely been passed on to other brigades (cadres) in the instance of cultural Marxists who had sapped their way into education decades (many decades) earlier.

What may seem, at first glance, a cadaver, is more likely a zombie – like Schrödinger’s cat, dead and living; and like the modern though not yet, seemingly, fully evolved anthropocene leech – blood sucking. Golems and trolls (and neocons – whatever their moniker de jour) are never gotten rid of – never. Short odds that the greatest likelihood is a re-branding and a younger hip (hep) cohort steps up as vanguard – meaning Establishmentarian Republicanism may be sacrificed in name only and an ilk, or three, of Bill Kristols exiled – otherwise, SNAFU.

Never one to stand in the way of progressive nomenclature I might suggest, up from Neoconservatism – Meliorism. Who could not stand proud and puffed as a Meliorist? Read More »

IAN FLETCHER, author of Free Trade Doesn’t Work: What Should Replace It and Why, comes close to endorsing Trump in the liberal Huffington Post:

MICHAEL RUSKIN writes:

U.S. President Barak Obama recently released information giving insight into the type of appalling behaviour the Russians are carrying out in Syria. Following the liberation of Palmyra, St. Petersburg conductor, Valeri Gergiev, thought up the idea of taking the Symphony Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theater there to perform a concert of Bach, Shchedrin and Prokofiev in the Roman Amphitheater. This was the first performance at the UNESCO site since the theatre was used by ISIS to hold public executions.

“I can assure the public we would have brought in Madonna and Beyoncé to perform instead. There would have been a  strong insistence that the music for such an event should  reflect the values which we think are important and worthy of promoting. It’s why we are invading countries and starting coups and wars,” Obama [should have] concluded while speaking from the White House.  

When a reporter asked how the U.S.A. could have liberated Palmyra as it was surreptitiously backing Daesh through its Saudi Allies, the president [should have] said that it didn’t matter, “What’s important is public perception and we’re good at manipulating that.”

FROM Henry Makow:

DR. THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

The bathroom wars are not new. In the mid-1980s, I studied comparative literature in the graduate program at UCLA. The Comparative Literature Program was housed on the third floor in UCLA’s iconic Royce Hall, modeled after the Cathedral of Saint Ambrose in Milan. Although Royce Hall was one of the four large structures of Royce Quad, the original 1929 campus, its third floor was a fairly remote place. It might have been that remoteness that made it a place of rendezvous for campus (and undoubtedly for many off-campus) homosexuals, who, then as now, apparently get a “kick” from performing pornographic acts in public places. Read More »

FROM LifeSiteNews:

“What we are really talking about is the abolition of sex,” Stella Morabito, senior contributor to The Federalist and an expert on cults and propaganda, told LifeSiteNews.  “And it is sex that the trans project is serving to abolish legally, under the guise of something called ‘the gender binary.’  Its endgame is a society in which everyone is legally de-sexed.  No longer legally male or female.  And once you basically redefine humanity as sexless you end up with a de-humanized society in which there can be no legal ‘mother’ or ‘father’ or ‘son’ or ‘daughter’ or ‘husband’ or ‘wife’ without permission from the State.  Government documents are already erasing the terms.  In such a society, the most intimate human relationships take a hit. The family ends up abolished.”

“A sexless society is ultimately a totalitarian society because it erases in law the most basic human relationships,” said Morabito, “particularly the mother-child bond.”

Pro-family advocates have for years warned that the weakening of family bonds leads to a weakened society and greater government involvement in the individual lives of its citizens.

FROM an article by Frank Ching:

Much has been said about China’s growing nationalism but little attention has been paid to its increasing assertion of something akin to sovereignty over ethnic Chinese who are citizens of other countries.

While this is particularly noteworthy in Hong Kong, it is also true in the United States, Australia and other countries.

What China wants is for foreign citizens of ethnic Chinese background to be loyal to the “motherland” – meaning China – regardless of their citizenship and to work to further the interests of China.

This was disclosed in the People’s Daily a couple of years ago when it encouraged “more and more overseas Chinese to participate in the local political life”.

FROM an article in The Daily Caller by Emmett McGroarty and Jane Robbins:

Headmaster John Vallance pronounced the billions of dollars spent on classroom technology a “scandalous waste of money” that “distracts” from quality teaching. “We see teaching as fundamentally a social activity,” Dr. Vallance said. “It’s about interaction between people, about discussion, about conversation. We find that having laptops or iPads in the classroom inhibits conversation – it’s distracting.”

Dr. Vallance identified a related problem with technological “personalized learning” – when conversation is removed from education, the students find themselves confronted with a uniform point of view. “The digital delivery of teaching materials across Australia has had a powerful normative effect,” he observed. “It’s making it quite difficult for children to learn how to disagree, how not to toe the party line, because they can’t question things – the possibility of questioning things has been taken away from them.”

So according to a prominent educator who has seen the results in the classroom, digital learning increases the likelihood of, well, indoctrination. Bill Gates, who through his vast wealth pushes his well-known political and cultural predilections, apparently sees no problem with this. Parents might disagree. [emphasis added]

MIKE KING uses some strong language to comment on the West Point cadets who posed in a pre-graduation photo last week flashing the raised-fist, Communist salute:

As controversy over the photo emerged, the terrorist-sympathizing skanks in question quickly shifted into that “I dindu nuffin” mode that works so well for them — assuring detractors that the clenched fist pose was only meant as a show of sisterly solidarity, not cop-killing, bigotry or revolution. This explanation is, of course, a lie — itself an expellable offense from honor-based West Point. The clenched fist salute stands for Communist Power and/or one of its evil spawns, Black Power — and these catty cadets with scowls on their faces damn well know it! Read More »

YES, Capitalism is just as oppressive as Communism. In that vein, Stephen Turley has an excellent article at The Imaginative Conservative on corporate support for laws mandating unisex restrooms:

Predictably, the so-called “bathroom bill” was greeted with sweeping denunciations from the political left. What was surprising was the volume of outcry toward the law leveled by corporations such as Apple, Starbucks, Kellogg’s, and PayPal who, along with more than 100 CEOs, signed an open letter urging the repeal of this “discriminatory and radical new anti-LGBT law.”[1] Even the NBA suggested that it would move the All-Star Game if the law wasn’t repealed.[2]  Such tactics echoed earlier threats by Disney, Intel, Dow Chemical, and the NFL to boycott Georgia if its governor signed a so-called “religious freedom” bill, which would allow faith-based organizations to deny services to those who violated their religious beliefs.

But why on earth do CEOs care so much about this? Why do they act as if they have a dog in this fight? Why are they so adamantly siding with such a small percentage of the population?

I believe that the key to understanding this corporate solidarity with transgenders is to see it as part of a mass process known as globalization. Considered the defining trait of modernity, globalization involves what is in effect a worldwide social system constituted by a capitalist economy, telecommunications, technology, and mass urbanization.[3] What is crucial for us to observe is that globalization involves a social dynamic known as disembedding, which is a propelling of social and economic factors away from localized control toward more transnational processes. For example, think of your local mall: In one sense, the mass shopping complex is in fact local in terms of its proximity to consumers; but notice that the retail outlets that comprise the various stores at a mall are not local but rather national and international chains and brand names. This is especially the case with the latest releases at the movie theater or the offerings at the food court. This is disembedding: from the ubiquity of “Made in China” imprints on our products and consumables, to the mass influx of immigrant labor, both legal and illegal, and the ever-increasing “Orlando-ization” of our urban and suburban landscapes by chains and franchises, our lives are increasingly defined and interpreted by translocal economic and social processes.

Globalization is the inevitable outcome of an economic order that puts profit above all else.