Category: Uncategorized

The self-serving revisionists

It’s more than a little amusing to see these Republican immigrants, who are US citizens but are not Americans, attempting to present their self-serving revisionist histories as not only genuine, but deterministic:

Avik Roy is a Republican’s Republican. A health care wonk and editor at Forbes, he has worked for three Republican presidential hopefuls — Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, and Marco Rubio. Much of his adult life has been dedicated to advancing the Republican Party and conservative ideals.

But when I caught up with Roy at a bar just outside the Republican convention, he said something I’ve never heard from an establishment conservative before: The Grand Old Party is going to die.

“I don’t think the Republican Party and the conservative movement are capable of reforming themselves in an incremental and gradual way,” he said. “There’s going to be a disruption.”

Roy isn’t happy about this: He believes it means the Democrats will dominate national American politics for some time. But he also believes the Republican Party has lost its right to govern, because it is driven by white nationalism rather than a true commitment to equality for all Americans.

“Until the conservative movement can stand up and live by that principle, it will not have the moral authority to lead the country,” he told me.

This is a standard assessment among liberals, but it is frankly shocking to hear from a prominent conservative thinker. Our conversation had the air of a confessional: of Roy admitting that he and his intellectual comrades had gone wrong, had failed, had sinned.

His history of conservatism was a Greek tragedy. It begins with a fatal error in 1964, survived on the willful self-delusion of people like Roy himself, and ended with Donald Trump.

“I think the conservative movement is fundamentally broken,” Roy tells me. “Trump is not a random act. This election is not a random act.”

The conservative movement has something of a founding myth — Roy calls it an “origin story.”

In 1955, William F. Buckley created the intellectual architecture of modern conservatism by founding National Review, focusing on a free market, social conservatism, and a muscular foreign policy. Buckley’s ideals found purchase in the Republican Party in 1964, with the nomination of Barry Goldwater. While Goldwater lost the 1964 general election, his ideas eventually won out in the GOP, culminating in the Reagan Revolution of 1980.

Normally, Goldwater’s defeat is spun as a story of triumph: how the conservative movement eventually righted the ship of an unprincipled GOP. But according to Roy, it’s the first act of a tragedy.

“Goldwater’s nomination in 1964 was a historical disaster for the conservative movement,” Roy tells me, “because for the ensuing decades, it identified Democrats as the party of civil rights and Republicans as the party opposed to civil rights.”

Of course, white nationalism is, quite literally, the raison d’etre for the U.S. Constitution and was signed into law by George Washington in the Naturalization Act of 1790. This factual history offends Arik Roy, because he is not white and he is not an American national, therefore he has to revise history and transform it into something that allows him to redefine the definitions of “conservative”, “Republican”, and even “America”.

I’ve yet to see any liberal or left-winger make a statement more unequivocally equalitarian than Roy: “Until the conservative movement can stand up and live by the principle of equality, it will not have the moral authority to lead the country.”


Once more, we see that if you scratch a “conservative intellectual”, you find an anti-American. It is equivalent to stating that there is no moral authority outside of a mindless devotion to equality.

This sort of revisionist nonsense is where intellectual defenses of the proposition nation concept inevitably lead. There is no alternative, because it has no basis in history, fact, or logic. The propositional equality of “Americans” is every bit as conceptual and delusional and nonexistent as the economic equality of socialists, the herd equality of unicorns, and the animal equality of Animal Farm.

Some pigs always somehow end up more equal than others.

That being said, both the conservative movement and the Republican Party in its previous form are going to die. They will be replaced by the American nationalist movement and the American Party, which will claim the moral authority to govern the nation on the basis of actually representing the nation.

Tor doubles down

This is fantastic news for Castalia House and all readers of Blue SF. PNH has been anointed Tom Doherty’s heir and will be running Tor Books in the future.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden has been named Associate Publisher of Tor Books, effective immediately. This award-winning 28-year veteran of Tor has brought numerous prestigious and bestselling authors to the list, including John Scalzi, Cory Doctorow and Charlie Jane Anders, to name a few. His vision has been instrumental in the development of Tor.

Devi Pillai, who led the US division of Orbit to its position as Tor’s fastest-growing competitor, will be joining Tor, also as Associate Publisher. “I’ve watched Devi’s work with admiration for a long time now; her qualifications are outstanding, and she’ll be a great addition to our team,” said Tor Books publisher Tom Doherty. “As we continue our 35-year commitment to adult SF and fantasy, Devi and Patrick will work alongside each other to oversee our numerous editors who work primarily in these twin genres,” he continued.

It’s as if Lincoln promoted Custer to replace McClellan instead of Grant. In 28 years, PNH has brought a mediocrity, a tedious didact, and a no-talent transvestite to Tor. That’s the best he could do? Castalia House will be announcing two better, and better-selling, authors than any of those three in the next six weeks alone.

Tom Doherty should have fired PNH and Irene Gallo last year, but he was too old and infirm to find the courage to do it. Instead, he merely muzzled them while he could. With this promotion, however, PNH will have the opportunity to return to what is literally a bully pulpit.

This promises to be entertaining. When the Tor ship goes down, it should be PNH at the helm.

What he doesn’t understand is magic

Jonah Goldberg is defeated and depressed, but he’s still not willing to admit that he chose the wrong side:

Personally, I thought Trump’s stentorian address was awful, albeit with a few effective bits, particularly at the end. There was no poetry, no arc, no uplift or modulation. It was like he spent 75 out of 76 minutes shouting the final conclusions on one PowerPoint slide after another. Over time, the sentences seemed to be getting shorter and more blunt. It looked like he might even devolve into just barking random vowels and glottal stops. His delivery reminded me of that old SNL newsroom skit when Garrett Morris’s head pops up in an oval and he just re-shouts everything Chevy Chase says for the hard of hearing.

Thematically, it was an anvil chorus minus the melody. There was plenty of conservative boilerplate, some of which I agree with. But the message last night had nothing to do with conservative litmus tests or checklists. No, the desired takeaway was, “Behold this Man of Strength! Cast your gaze Trumpwards, plebes, for our new Caesar is here to bring a New Rome (or restore the old one) through force of will.”

Nowhere in his speech did Trump give any sense that he knew — or cared — how he would get things done through his “sheer force of will.” That’s the thing about magical thinking, you don’t need to explain it. The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For get it, and everyone else never will.

All Goldberg manages to demonstrate here is that he will see what he’s determined to see. Trump’s speech was too long, but it was otherwise extremely effective. Poetry, arc, uplift, and modulation are merely tools of the orator, the objective of a political speech is to give the voters a reason to vote for you. Trump’s speech did that, and the polls have responded accordingly.

As has long been the case, Goldberg, the good conservative, is focused on HOW a politician does things rather than WHAT he is doing. These conservative tone police are happy to vote for collective suicide so long as the politician promising to kill everyone does so in well-modulated, gracefully-composed tones while dressed nicely. Goldberg’s reference to “magical thinking” is pure cuckservative projection given that he is one of the many conservative fools who thinks 61 million post-1965 immigrants were transformed into Real Americans through the application of Magic Dirt, and believes a 19th century poem is the Zeroth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Goldberg’s complete lack of business experience also shows glaringly here. The CEO doesn’t tell you HOW something is going to be done. That’s not his role. Steve Jobs didn’t introduce the iPhone by explaining how it was going to be manufactured in China, who would be writing the operating system, and how much RAM it would take up. If he had, it would have failed. The CEO’s job is to establish the vision and inspire others to embrace it. That Trump has done, extremely well, with his Make America Great Again, which is the best campaign vision since Reagain’s Morning in America.

In fact, Goldberg even admits that he is babbling and denying the evidence of his own eyes and ears, as this passage shows: By the normal rules the speech should have been a disaster. But as we all know the normal rules do not apply. I am fairly certain Trump will get his post-convention bump. I am less confident Trump is a guaranteed loser come November. In other words, it was not awful, it was effective.


But the deeper theme of Goldberg’s piece is his shock and despair that so many people are refusing to buy into the Noble Conservative Who Knows What is Good For You schtick anymore.

I hate everything about this year, politically and (not counting some great TV) culturally. It’s clear many of my friends on the pro-Trump right are giddy with resentment-justifying glee at the alleged comeuppance of Trump opponents. One need only listen to quite literally anything Laura Ingraham or Sean Hannity say about Trump critics to see how large a role spite plays in the now-unbreachable divide between the new nationalists and the old conservatives….

But the truth is conservatism has become shot-through with a kind of vindictiveness that reflects poorly on everyone, friend and foe alike. I hate that after 20 years of fighting what I believe to be the good fight, so many can’t muster the will or generosity to consider that I’m doing what I think is right.

I hate that after 20 years of fighting what I believe to be the good fight, so many can’t muster the will or generosity to consider that I’m doing what I think is right. I’m entirely open to the argument that my analysis and judgment is wrong. But I am resentful, furious and, most of all, contemptuous of the lazy and self-justifying assumption that my motives are malign.

That’s just it, Jonah. You didn’t fight the good fight. You fought the wrong fight. As a conservative opinion leader, you didn’t manage to conserve one single damn thing, and even more damning, many of your opinions changed over time with the progressive tide. Now you’re choosing to side with the globalists and the progressives because you were never on the side of Americans at all. You fought the wrong fight and now you’ve chosen the wrong side.

Through your open opposition to America’s nationalists, you have revealed that your motives and your objectives are, at the very least, opposed to the interests of Americans and the United States of America.

We don’t care that you think what you’re doing is right. We care that you have declared yourself to be an enemy of those who are trying to make America great again. We care that you have openly declared yourself to be an enemy of the American identity.

Frankly, I’m very disappointed in Jonah. I genuinely thought he was smarter than this. I defended him many times from those who regarded him with suspicion on the basis of his (((heritage))) and who considered him nothing more than a typical neocon. Unfortunately, when the time came to choose between America and his imaginary proposition nation, he chose the latter.

The failed case against the Trump-Putin conspiracy

The #NeverTrump crowd is increasingly panicked by Trump’s rise in the polls, and now they’re attempting increasingly unlikely disqualification attempts. Jeffrey Carr fact-checks Josh Marshall’s claims about Putin funding the Trump campaign:

A fact is defined as a “true piece of information”. How many of Josh’s facts were true?

  1. Trump’s debt load was a Bloomberg estimate, not a fact.
  2. Trump is highly reliant upon money from Russia. Open to interpretation, not a fact.
  3. Trump Soho took investment money from Russian criminals. Fact.
  4. Trump’s campaign manager used to work for Viktor Yanukovych when he was running for Prime Minister of Ukraine. Fact.
  5. Putin could put Carter Page, Trump’s foreign policy advisor, out of business at any time. Not only not a fact, but untrue and ridiculous on its face.
  6. Putin has aligned all state-controlled media behind Trump. False.
  7. The Trump Camp only cared about softening the platform on arming Ukraine. False.

For the record, I despise Donald Trump. I can’t imagine a worse candidate for President and I’m shocked and appalled that he is the Republican nominee. However, there’s no need to invent Russian conspiracies to make the Trump boogeyman appear worse than he is.

Two for seven. Not exactly a closed book. The irony, of course, is that we KNOW Putin is funding the Clinton Foundation. As usual, the very worst case against Trump that can be conceived is to claim he might do something Hillary Clinton is already doing.

I assume the claims are false simply due to the unreliability and irresponsible nature of the people making the charge. They’re desperate, and their claims are going to get increasingly weirder. But even if they were true, so what?

We already have 60 million foreigners interfering with the US elections. That’s why we have so many Democrats still in office. What is one more?

Conservatism in ruins

Andrew Klavan’s first thoughts on rebuilding conservatism:

The conservative movement has collapsed and is in ruins. Its vehicle for political expression, the Republican Party, is now in the hands of an authoritarian nationalist who has never read the Constitution and does not believe in free expression, free trade or the separation of powers. Its central vehicle for expression in the news media is in disarray as Fox News becomes embroiled in scandal. Even its defenders on talk radio and in the blogosphere are severely at odds as they are forced to choose whether to defend Trump as the lesser of two evils or to stand fast with the founding fathers against both terrible sides.

The conservative movement has collapsed and lies in ruins. And it has done so due to the deceit and dishonesty of conservative commentators like Andrew Klavan, who apparently feel the need to make provably false statements about everyone from Donald Trump to the Founding Fathers.

Let’s look at the three false statements in this one diagnostic paragraph alone:

  1. Donald Trump is not an authoritarian.
  2. Fox News has never been a central vehicle for expressing conservative views. It has, rather, pushed neoconnery as nominal conservatism while serving as a politically moderate alternative to the hard progressivism of the ABCNNBCBS cabal.
  3. The Founding Fathers believed in trade protectionism and a white America. Whether he gives a damn about the US Constitution or not, Donald Trump has as much or more in common with the Founding Fathers as the conservative movement does. The Constitution exists only to safeguard the unalienable rights of white Americans who are the posterity of the Founding Fathers, that is its sole purpose.
Now let’s look at Klavan’s proposal for rebuilding conservatism, which strangely enough, he provides without ever considering just why the movement is in ruins.

1. There is no substitute for victory. A political philosophy should be an outgrowth of moral values but it is not a moral value in itself. Its purpose is not to be good; its purpose is to be as good as it can be and still win power. A Christian may count it a victory when he is devoured by lions for his faith, but a conservative who is repeatedly devoured by the opposition in elections is just a self-satisfied schmuck. I am completely opposed to those — like Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam — who essentially argue  that conservatives must win by becoming watered-down liberals. But clearly, the methods by which we have been selling our philosophy to the voters have not just failed but failed utterly, and we should rethink them.

True enough, and yet Klavan observably knows so little about the history of conservatism in America that he doesn’t understand that conservatives have never had a philosophy proper. He obviously hasn’t read Russell Kirk, anyhow. That’s why they can’t sell conservatism to anyone anymore; it doesn’t even exist as a coherent self-contained philosophy. Conservatives have never been much more than philosophical parasites on the Left. Klavan should read Cuckservative; if nothing else it would bring him up to speed on the intellectual inadequacies of conservatism.

2. Win what minority types we can with the truth. The opposition likes to point out that too many conservatives are white men. They’re right — but only because blacks and women have been successfully sold a destructive bill of goods in leftist racialism and feminism. The facts are: black people are not oppressed by the police, women are not underpaid for the same work, white privilege is a destructive and racist myth, and true freedom means people you don’t like are going to say things you disagree with in ways you find offensive. These are hard sayings but they need to be said, and they don’t need to be said by conservatives to other conservatives, they need to be said by conservatives to blacks, women and sexual off-beats of all stripes. The Democrats have co-opted these people with destructive lies that make their lives worse. We can’t win them back by jumping on that bandwagon. We need to proudly, unapologetically (and politely) tell it like it is — to them, in their neighborhoods and organizations. We won’t win a lot of them. Not at first. But facts have a way of getting through over time — if you speak them courageously without being a jackass about it.

This is remarkable. And it’s a tactic doomed to failure; conservatives like Klavan can’t win anyone with the truth for the obvious reason that they don’t know the truth. They religiously subscribe to the idiotic lie of the Proposition Nation and they attempt to win over minorities that will never, ever, be won over in significant percentages by the alien ideals of 18th century whites. Klavan can’t explain historical anomalies that puncture his precious Ellis Island myth like the 1790 Naturalization Act, which means he can’t tell it like it is because he doesn’t actually know what it is.

The alternative is that he does know what it is and he is knowingly deceiving his fellow conservatives. But I will give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he is merely ignorant.

3. Fight the culture wars in the culture. The culture wars are problematical because too often conservatives come across as anti-freedom or bigoted. That makes victory tough. I feel passionately about some cultural issues and indifferent to others, but I believe all of them should be fought on a cultural and informational level rather than a political one. For instance, I believe that abortion is the taking of a human life and that government therefore has a right to forbid it. But just speaking bluntly and honestly, I don’t think I can win that fight in the political arena right now. Happily, the truth may do what politics cannot. The truth is on my side and the more the truth gets out about what abortion looks like, how it’s done, and who the people who support it are, the more the public will know that it is unacceptable. Then we can win politically. As for sex issues, I confess I care not at all about other people’s sexuality (I’m so deeply immersed in my own), but I do care very deeply about religious liberty and the freedom not to participate in what you abhor. That’s a fight we can win and we should argue it everywhere as a freedom issue.

Correct concept, inept execution. Winning the culture war is NOT getting the truth out. It is rhetorically convincing others what the truth is. This is why the arts are the most vitally important battleground in the cultural war.

4. Some class occasionally would be nice. Conservatives have been all but banned from universities, the news media and show business. In response, we formed our own media in blogs, talk radio and Fox. Those are great venues for informing our own, but we could use some outreach to open-minded Democrats. I’ve wasted too much breath trying to convince conservatives that art is good and can change the world over time. They just won’t believe me. But could we maybe agree that screaming at people and calling them evil and talking like a belligerent loudmouth know-it-all is not always the best way to bring them over to your side? No, huh. Well, it was just a thought.

For fuck’s sake. He’s another hapless tone policeman. This is why the Alt Right is going to win; because we don’t give a quantum of a damn about “class”. Someone once told me the important thing was “to win with grace and style”. No, the important thing is to win, even if you have to get bloody and dirty in the process. Klavan, like a good conservative, is far more interested in going down to noble defeat and surrendering while wearing a nice clean uniform than he is with winning.

It very much looks to me right now as if Trump is going to lose this election on pure incompetence and mean spirit. That might actually make it easier for conservatives to regroup in the ruins of the Republican Party. If he wins, we may need a new party of our own. But whichever way things go, I think we need to open a discussion about how conservatives can not only remain conservative but also win elections in modern America.

Is he even watching the political conventions? This sort of wishful thinking is why no one should bother paying any attention to a cuckservative like Klavan now or in the future. Conservatism is dying. Its diseased remnants are flocking to the progressives, as we always knew they would. And we watch them go with dry eyes and a grim smile, because we don’t need a bunch of useless cucks and moderates who were always happier shooting at their own side than the enemy.

I have never been a conservative. I will never be a conservative. I am delighted to see the conservative movement crumbling into dust. Conservatives conserve nothing, accomplish nothing, and stand for nothing. They will not defend the Church, they will not defend America, and they will not defend the West.

The Alt Right will. Join us, if you have the steel.

The Gold Timers

Far too many Baby Boomers didn’t give a damn about their own children, let alone their nieces, nephews, and grandchildren. We can hardly expect them to care about the fate of Western civilization after they’re dead, gone, and presumably, burning in Hell:

It’s ironic that we spend our youth wanting to be older, and our middle age wanting to stop the clock. But I’m not going to wallow. On the contrary. For my birthday, I’m treating myself to a Vivienne Westwood frock, a haircut by Nicky Clarke and dinner at one of London’s finest restaurants, Le Gavroche.

I’m not wealthy. I’m just representative of the so-called ‘Gold Timer’ generation – people in their 60s who are spending money now, rather than leaving it in their wills….

Surely I needed to leave my house to the next generation of my family? I surprised myself by my adamant response, but then I began asking myself why.

My parents, who were married in the Forties, believed in leaving as large a legacy to their four children as possible and, once they’d reared us, they continued in their thrifty ways, refusing to spend their savings on luxuries they deserved.

Growing up in Somerset, it was a necessity to have holiday jobs as a teenager. After my father’s death, my mother took up the mantle of austerity, despite constant urging by us children to spend. By then, we were earning far more between us than our parents could have dreamt of.

My mother, Jean, did dip into her savings, but only in a modest way; she took a coach trip to Paris and bought a Chanel lipstick – I still wear Chanel lipstick in her memory. I admired both my parents tremendously, but so much has changed from their generation to mine. My siblings all have comfortable lives, and their children are unlikely to need a helping hand from Auntie. Unlike them, I never married and I don’t have children.

I’d always thought I would leave everything to my half-a-dozen wonderful nephews and nieces. But now, suddenly, all the guilt I felt about spending my own inheritance has gone.

That’s amazing. Suddenly all the guilt I felt about euthanasia for the elderly has gone too!

At the very least, it’s a convincing case for eliminating Social Security, shutting down all the bankrupt pension plans, and letting millions of literally useless old Boomers rely upon the children they didn’t have.

Fortunately, their sense of narcissism and entitlement is such that they can be relied upon to self-euthanize once they can’t afford to eat in fine restaurants anymore.

State polls and date relevance

DH has been resolutely predicting a Clinton win on the basis of the state polls, which correctly predicted Obama wins in the last two elections.

The state by state projections as of today including all most recent polling still indicate a Clinton win with around 312EV. Trump has not altered the road map at this point. Including polling changes that could happen between now and election day, Sec. Clinton is cruising towards victory. 

Although I respect DH’s acumen and take him very seriously with regards to anything that involves data analysis, I am nevertheless predicting a Trumpslide, a win of even bigger proportions than 312 Electoral College votes for Trump. How is it possible for me to do that considering the supposedly reliable evidence of the most recent state polling that DH is citing?

The reason is pretty straightforward. While the state polls have been pretty good predictor of the election results, my suspicion was that this is only true of state polls taken in the last week prior to the election. Before that, they tend to bounce all over the place. Unlike the national polls, they don’t always tend to favor the Democratic candidate, then fall more in line as the election approaches; the state polls appear to be less corrupt than the national ones.

Allow me to demonstrate. I looked at the results of the McCain-Obama race, since that one was more similar to the current race given that it also lacked an incumbent, in all seven of the states identified as key “battleground” states. In each case, I listed the following:

  1. The earliest date that any state poll got the correct result.
  2. The latest date that any state poll had either a) the wrong candidate winning or b) a tie
  3. The RCP average of the final state polls from the last week prior to the election
  4. The actual results.

PENNSYLVANIA
Rasmussen 2/14 – 2/14 Obama +10
FOX News/Rasmussen 9/14 – 9/14 TIE
RCP Average: Obama +7.3
Final Results: Obama +10.3

VIRGINIA
SurveyUSA 2/15 – 2/17 Obama +6
Mason-Dixon 9/29 – 10/1 McCain +3
RCP Average: Obama +4.4
Final Result: Obama +6.3

FLORIDA
PPP  9/27 – 9/28 Obama +3
FOX News/Rasmussen 11/2 – 11/2 McCain +1
RCP Average: Obama +1.8
Final Results: Obama +2.8

OHIO
Quinnipiac 9/5 – 9/9 Obama +5
Mason-Dixon 10/29 – 10/30 McCain +2
RCP Average: Obama +2.5
Final Results: Obama +4.6

COLORADO
SurveyUSA 2/26 – 2/28 Obama +9
Denver Post/Mason-Dixon 9/29 – 10/1 TIE
RCP Average: Obama +5.5
Final Results: Obama +9.0

NORTH CAROLINA
Rasmussen 10/8 – 10/8 Obama +1
Reuters/Zogby 10/31 – 11/3 McCain +1
RCP Average:  McCain +0.4
Final Results: Obama +0.3

NEVADA
Associated Press 10/22 – 10/26 Obama +12
Politico/InAdv 10/19 – 10/19 TIE
RCP Average:  Obama +6.5
Final Results:  Obama +12.5

So, as early as FEBRUARY there were three battleground polls that correctly predicted the result, but in four other battleground states, there was not a single poll among the dozens that were taken that correctly predicted the result until October, or in two cases, November. Since none of the three correct polls were performed by the same company, and since in one case, that same poll went on to incorrectly predict a result that was off by 10 points, it’s pretty clear that these results were random and therefore unable to serve as the basis for a predictive 2016 model.

Not only that, but there are no February state polls comparing Trump to Clinton, because back in February, Scott Adams, Mike Cernovich, Helmut Norpoth and I were about the only individuals publicly going on the record and stating that Trump would be the Republican nominee.

Now let’s look at the latest date that a state poll incorrectly predicted the winner. Even in a state that Obama won by 12.5 percentage points, there were polls in October indicating a dead heat. Mid-September is the earliest date of an incorrect poll; in North Carolina, which was close, even the RCP average had McCain winning right up until the election took place.

Taken in sum, this means that it makes no sense to pay much attention to the state polls until September. What we can before then, however, is the general trend from one candidate to the other; in many of these battleground states, the gradual shift from McCain to Obama, or from leaning Obama to strong Obama, is apparent.

And what do the state polls show in this regard? At the moment, they are too much in flux to clearly read a trend, but they appear to be gradually following the shift from Clinton to Trump already seen in the national polls. So, I see no reason to revise my prediction of a Trumpslide.

Priest beheaded in France

There is a hostage situation in a church in northern France:

Two men armed with knives took several people hostage in a church in a town in France’s northern Normandy region on Tuesday, a police source said. The source said between four and six people were being held by the assailants in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray.

I figured it was only a matter of time before the immigrants began attacking the churches, as they often do in Egypt and Pakistan. Assuming, of course, it is Muslims again. We don’t actually know that yet.

UPDATE: Two hostage-takers at church near Rouen shot dead.

UPDATE: “Islamic State Attackers Behead Elderly Priest”

In not-unrelated news, it is turning out that Muslim immigration is not good for the economy.

The Belgian economy lost close to €1 billion as a result of the March 22 Brussels terror attacks, according to a new report, local media reports. An economic impact report commissioned by the government suggests Brussels’ tourism and shopping industries were hit hardest in the aftermath of the attacks, newspaper De Morgen wrote Tuesday. The Belgian capital recorded a €122.5 million drop in sales in the second quarter of this year, compared to the first months of 2016. Belgian Finance Minister Johan Van Overtveldt earlier estimated a decrease in federal tax revenues of €760 million, which represents about 0.1 percent of GDP, bringing the total loss to nearly €1 billion.

I doubt they included the cost of repairing the airport either. That won’t be cheap.

John Scalzi, political pundit

McRapey analyzes the Republican National Convention. Incompetence ensues.

The convention, generally, was the worst-run major political convention in a generation, and that should scare you. How is Trump going to manage an entire country when he can’t even put on a four-day show? (The answer, as we found out this week, is that he has no intention of managing the country at all; he plans to foist the actual work onto his poor VP while he struts about as bloviating figurehead.) Trump lost control of his convention and his message twice, once with Melania Trump’s clumsy plagiarism of Michelle Obama, which ate up two days of news cycles before Trump’s people found someone to be their chump for it, and then second with Ted Cruz, that oleaginous lump of hungering self-interest, who rather breathtakingly took to the stage of a nominating convention in order not to endorse Trump, in the most public way possible. That bit of low-rent Machiavellianism ate up another day of news cycles.

In the end, all the GOP convention has coming out of it are two massive failures of message control and Trump’s cataclysmic nomination speech.

And Nate Silver of 538 observing that Trump’s chances of winning the election have rising 40 points from a month ago. And Mr. Trump taking the lead in several national polls, including those from CNN and the LA Times. But while we’re on the subject of badly-run conventions, have we ever seen a national party chairman resign the day before the start of the convention?

Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Scalzi?

But that’s the Trump shtick: He doesn’t have policies or positions or plans

No, no positions at all. And who could possibly know what his policies on tax reform, healthcare reform, immigration, foreign policy, and trade could be? Of course, one should keep in mind that John Scalzi is an SJW, and what is it that SJWs always do? I seem to recall someone wrote a book about that.

Trump is still not likely to win — after everything, he’s still trailing Clinton.

Only in the polls taken a month ago. He’s doing rather well in the new ones, so much so that the media is now attempting to discount the very sort of “convention bounce” that we were previously told doesn’t exist anymore.

However, the best dismissal of John Scalzi’s worst attempt to engage in political punditry since his famous “I’m a rapist” post is from a Hillary Clinton supporter, who notes a certain irony about McRapey’s attack on the Republican candidate for President.

In a post about how Donald Trump’s modus operandi is to scare people into voting for him, I count *ten* instances where you tell us that Trump (and the Republican party more broadly) should scare/terrify us, that they’re dangerous, that they’ll bring disaster/tragedy to the country, and so forth.
– Brian Greenberg