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Jerry Pournelle on free trade

Thanks to his There Will Be War series, Jerry Pournelle was one of my biggest intellectual influences as a teenager. If you want to ensure that your teenage sons have an antidote to the progressive and globalist nonsense in which they are engulfed by the mainstream and conservative medias, you simply cannot do better than give them a book or three from that series; the educational aspect of TWBW was the reason it was my absolute top priority to get it back in print. We’ve got seven of the original nine back in print already, and we’ll have the rest out by the end of the year.

Now Jerry is turning his still-formidable intellect towards one of the great questions of the day: free trade. It is of particular import for conservatives:

One reason Conservatives are advised by Conservative leaders to disagree with Trump is his position on Free Trade. The problem for me is that I do not see Free Trade, particularly laissez faire Free Trade, as necessarily Conservative at all,

The advantages of Free Trade are lower prices for stuff. That means they are more cheaply produced. As the economist David Ricardo wrote, there is a principle of comparative advantage that coupled with free trade guarantees maximum profits for when there are no trade restrictions, and impediments to free trade are supposed to be mutually disadvantageous.

But do understand, what is conserved is lower prices. Nor social stability. Not communities. Not family life. Indeed those are often disrupted; it’s part of the economic model. Under free trade theory, it’s better to have free trade than community preservation, better to have ghost towns of people displaced because their jobs have been shipped overseas; better to have Detroit as a wasteland than a thriving dynamic industrial society turning out tail finned Cadillacs and insolent chariots and supporting workers represented by rapacious unions in conflict with pitiless corporate executives.

The theory of free trade includes liquidity: liquidity in capital flow, and liquidity in labor relocation.

What was conserved by turning Detroit into a wasteland? How was that conservative? Wouldn’t it be more conservative to argue that if everyone pays a little more for stuff made here, by people who work here, we are better off than having it made south of the border and inviting our people to go work there at their prevailing wages?

Go further. You don’t have to move. We’ll pay you for not working and you don’t have to move. Of course we’ll have to raise taxes on those who do work to pay those people no longer working, but that’s life. But after unemployment benefits work out – in my days the government would pay you $26 a week for 26 weeks – you’re in trouble. So much so that welfare benefits kept being raised. Food stamps, which became larger and bought more items. Negative income tax. And if you dropped out of the labor force – no longer looking for a job – you are no longer unemployed. The unemployment rate just went down. You stopped looking for a job. Of course you don’t have a job – you are certainly not employed – but you aren’t unemployed and don’t count toward the unemployment rate. I wouldn’t have thought that sort of lying to the people by government officials was a very Conservative thing to do at all.

Would a 15% tariff on cars have saved Detroit? It would mean that I would have had to pay about $5000 more for my 1988 Ford Eddie Bauer V8 Explorer I bought in 1999. I could have afforded that. And I suspect that I’ve paid more in income taxes sent to welfare recipients in Detroit than that. Is paying people not to work more Conservative than trying to keep their jobs – and manufacturing capabilities and potential here, bot dismantling it and leaving its former site to rust away – Conservative?

And is encouraging people not to work – at least making it easier and more possible – building a Conservative nation?

What, precisely, is being conserved here?

At the core of the intellectual case for free trade is the idea that Say’s Law somehow applies to labor, that the aggregate supply of labor necessarily creates an equal quantity of aggregate demand for labor. Hence the claims that since those who had been employed by technologically outdated buggy whip manufacturers found jobs working for automobile manufacturers, those who no longer work for corporations that went offshore will find them doing something else.

But this is a complete failure of logic. The buggy whip workers were able to go to work for the auto manufacturers because those factories were located in their home states. A Detroit auto worker cannot go to work for a Korean or a German manufacturer, or even for a US automaker who sets up a plant in Mexico.

Free trade is, in fact, intrinsically anti-conservative, which of course is why revolutionaries such as Karl Marx have historically favored it.

I should also mention that There Will Be War Vol. VI is now out in ebook, and Vols I and II are now available in a hardcover omnibus edition.

The Trumpslide cometh

CNN reports that Trump had the biggest post-convention poll boost since 2000.

We all expected Trump to get a bounce from the convention, although I don’t believe many of us expected it to be quite this big…

Donald Trump comes out of his convention ahead of Hillary Clinton in the race for the White House, topping her 44% to 39% in a four-way matchup including Gary Johnson (9%) and Jill Stein (3%) and by three points in a two-way head-to-head, 48% to 45%. That latter finding represents a 6-point convention bounce for Trump, which are traditionally measured in two-way matchups.

There hasn’t been a significant post-convention bounce in CNN’s polling since 2000. That year Al Gore and George W. Bush both boosted their numbers by an identical 8 points post-convention before ultimately battling all the way to the Supreme Court.

The new findings mark Trump’s best showing in a CNN/ORC Poll against Clinton since September 2015. Trump’s new edge rests largely on increased support among independents, 43% of whom said that Trump’s convention in Cleveland left them more likely to back him, while 41% were dissuaded. Pre-convention, independents split 34% Clinton to 31% Trump, with sizable numbers behind Johnson (22%) and Stein (10%). Now, 46% say they back Trump, 28% Clinton, 15% Johnson and 4% Stein.

The actual poll results are here in PDF format. Trump is already up between three and five points and Hillary hasn’t even taken the stage yet. It’s only going to get worse for Clinton and the Democrats from here.

The Trumpslide has already begun. Now it’s picking up speed.

UPDATE: Nate Silver is now calculating a 57.5 percent chance of a Trump victory, up from 10.8 percent one month ago.

5 Reasons Trump will win

Michael Moore explains 5 reasons Donald Trump will be the next President:

1. Midwest Math, or Welcome to Our Rust Belt Brexit.

I believe Trump is going to focus much of his attention on the four blue states in the rustbelt of the upper Great Lakes – Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Four traditionally Democratic states – but each of them have elected a Republican governor since 2010 (only Pennsylvania has now finally elected a Democrat). In the Michigan primary in March, more Michiganders came out to vote for the Republicans (1.32 million) that the Democrats (1.19 million). Trump is ahead of Hillary in the latest polls in Pennsylvania and tied with her in Ohio. Tied? How can the race be this close after everything Trump has said and done? Well maybe it’s because he’s said (correctly) that the Clintons’ support of NAFTA helped to destroy the industrial states of the Upper Midwest. Trump is going to hammer Clinton on this and her support of TPP and other trade policies that have royally screwed the people of these four states. When Trump stood in the shadow of a Ford Motor factory during the Michigan primary, he threatened the corporation that if they did indeed go ahead with their planned closure of that factory and move it to Mexico, he would slap a 35% tariff on any Mexican-built cars shipped back to the United States. It was sweet, sweet music to the ears of the working class of Michigan, and when he tossed in his threat to Apple that he would force them to stop making their iPhones in China and build them here in America, well, hearts swooned and Trump walked away with a big victory that should have gone to the governor next-door, John Kasich.

From Green Bay to Pittsburgh, this, my friends, is the middle of England – broken, depressed, struggling, the smokestacks strewn across the countryside with the carcass of what we use to call the Middle Class. Angry, embittered working (and nonworking) people who were lied to by the trickle-down of Reagan and abandoned by Democrats who still try to talk a good line but are really just looking forward to rub one out with a lobbyist from Goldman Sachs who’ll write them nice big check before leaving the room. What happened in the UK with Brexit is going to happen here. Elmer Gantry shows up looking like Boris Johnson and just says whatever shit he can make up to convince the masses that this is their chance! To stick to ALL of them, all who wrecked their American Dream!

 And now The Outsider, Donald Trump, has arrived to clean house! You don’t have to agree with him! You don’t even have to like him! He is your personal Molotov cocktail to throw right into the center of the bastards who did this to you! SEND A MESSAGE! TRUMP IS YOUR MESSENGER!

And this is where the math comes in. In 2012, Mitt Romney lost by 64 electoral votes. Add up the electoral votes cast by Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It’s 64. All Trump needs to do to win is to carry, as he’s expected to do, the swath of traditional red states from Idaho to Georgia (states that’ll never vote for Hillary Clinton), and then he just needs these four rust belt states. He doesn’t need Florida. He doesn’t need Colorado or Virginia. Just Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And that will put him over the top. This is how it will happen in November.

2. The Last Stand of the Angry White Man.

Our male-dominated, 240-year run of the USA is coming to an end. A woman is about to take over! How did this happen?! On our watch! There were warning signs, but we ignored them. Nixon, the gender traitor, imposing Title IX on us, the rule that said girls in school should get an equal chance at playing sports. Then they let them fly commercial jets. Before we knew it, Beyoncé stormed on the field at this year’s Super Bowl (our game!) with an army of Black Women, fists raised, declaring that our domination was hereby terminated! Oh, the humanity!

That’s a small peek into the mind of the Endangered White Male. There is a sense that the power has slipped out of their hands, that their way of doing things is no longer how things are done. This monster, the “Feminazi,”the thing that as Trump says, “bleeds through her eyes or wherever she bleeds,” has conquered us — and now, after having had to endure eight years of a black man telling us what to do, we’re supposed to just sit back and take eight years of a woman bossing us around? After that it’ll be eight years of the gays in the White House! Then the transgenders! You can see where this is going. By then animals will have been granted human rights and a fuckin’ hamster is going to be running the country. This has to stop!

3. The Hillary Problem.

Can we speak honestly, just among ourselves? And before we do, let me state, I actually like Hillary – a lot – and I think she has been given a bad rap she doesn’t deserve. But her vote for the Iraq War made me promise her that I would never vote for her again. To date, I haven’t broken that promise. For the sake of preventing a proto-fascist from becoming our commander-in-chief, I’m breaking that promise. I sadly believe Clinton will find a way to get us in some kind of military action. She’s a hawk, to the right of Obama. But Trump’s psycho finger will be on The Button, and that is that. Done and done.

Let’s face it: Our biggest problem here isn’t Trump – it’s Hillary. She is hugely unpopular — nearly 70% of all voters think she is untrustworthy and dishonest. She represents the old way of politics, not really believing in anything other than what can get you elected. That’s why she fights against gays getting married one moment, and the next she’s officiating a gay marriage. Young women are among her biggest detractors, which has to hurt considering it’s the sacrifices and the battles that Hillary and other women of her generation endured so that this younger generation would never have to be told by the Barbara Bushes of the world that they should just shut up and go bake some cookies.

But the kids don’t like her, and not a day goes by that a millennial doesn’t tell me they aren’t voting for her. No Democrat, and certainly no independent, is waking up on November 8th excited to run out and vote for Hillary the way they did the day Obama became president or when Bernie was on the primary ballot. The enthusiasm just isn’t there. And because this election is going to come down to just one thing — who drags the most people out of the house and gets them to the polls — Trump right now is in the catbird seat.

4. The Depressed Sanders Vote.

Stop fretting about Bernie’s supporters not voting for Clinton – we’re voting for Clinton! The polls already show that more Sanders voters will vote for Hillary this year than the number of Hillary primary voters in ’08 who then voted for Obama. This is not the problem. The fire alarm that should be going off is that while the average Bernie backer will drag him/herself to the polls that day to somewhat reluctantly vote for Hillary, it will be what’s called a “depressed vote” – meaning the voter doesn’t bring five people to vote with her. He doesn’t volunteer 10 hours in the month leading up to the election. She never talks in an excited voice when asked why she’s voting for Hillary. A depressed voter. Because, when you’re young, you have zero tolerance for phonies and BS.

Returning to the Clinton/Bush era for them is like suddenly having to pay for music, or using MySpace or carrying around one of those big-ass portable phones. They’re not going to vote for Trump; some will vote third party, but many will just stay home. Hillary Clinton is going to have to do something to give them a reason to support her  — and picking a moderate, bland-o, middle of the road old white guy as her running mate is not the kind of edgy move that tells millenials that their vote is important to Hillary. Having two women on the ticket – that was an exciting idea. But then Hillary got scared and has decided to play it safe. This is just one example of how she is killing the youth vote.

5. The Jesse Ventura Effect.

Finally, do not discount the electorate’s ability to be mischievous or underestimate how any millions fancy themselves as closet anarchists once they draw the curtain and are all alone in the voting booth. It’s one of the few places left in society where there are no security cameras, no listening devices, no spouses, no kids, no boss, no cops, there’s not even a friggin’ time limit. You can take as long as you need in there and no one can make you do anything. You can push the button and vote a straight party line, or you can write in Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. There are no rules. And because of that, and the anger that so many have toward a broken political system, millions are going to vote for Trump not because they agree with him, not because they like his bigotry or ego, but just because they can. Just because it will upset the apple cart and make mommy and daddy mad.

And in the same way like when you’re standing on the edge of Niagara Falls and your mind wonders for a moment what would that feel like to go over that thing, a lot of people are going to love being in the position of puppetmaster and plunking down for Trump just to see what that might look like.

Remember back in the ‘90s when the people of Minnesota elected a professional wrestler as their governor? They didn’t do this because they’re stupid or thought that Jesse Ventura was some sort of statesman or political intellectual. They did so just because they could. Minnesota is one of the smartest states in the country. It is also filled with people who have a dark sense of humor — and voting for Ventura was their version of a good practical joke on a sick political system. This is going to happen again with Trump.

It’s amusing to see how Moore can, despite himself, see some of the relevant issues, and yet fail to understand them. And it’s all so typical of an American liberal to vow one thing and then rationalize doing the other. But as wrong as he is about nearly everything, even Moore can see the Trump train barreling down the line; it’s a testimony to the herd-following nature of journalism that so few journalists have cottoned onto it yet.

Of course, there are at least seven reasons Trump will win, and Moore left out the two biggest, Immigration and Islam, which, though related, are two separate categories. Every time there is a shooting or an attack of any kind, anywhere in the USA or the West, Donald Trump picks up support, because everyone knows that Hillary Clinton isn’t going to do anything about either Immigration or Muslims in America.

Shooting in Fort Myers nightclub

Another Florida shooting:

At least one person was killed and 14 others injured in a shooting at a Florida nightclub. The incident happened at Club Blu in Fort Myers, police told NBC station WBBH early Monday.

The Fort Myers Police Department also confirmed that at least one person had been fatally shot, according to WBBH.

No word on who was responsible yet. Make that two dead. Sounds more like vibrants than jihadists, though.

The motive was unclear

As if they’re actually fooling anyone. Another immigrant murdering people in Germany today:

A Syrian refugee wielding a machete has killed a pregnant woman and injured a man and another woman in Germany before being arrested by police. The attack happened in the south western city of Reutlingen near a doner kebab stand in a bus station at Listplatz Square.

German media have been reporting that the motive for the attack in the city south of Stuttgart was unclear.

Angela Merkel needs to send every single invitee is sent back to whatever country they claimed to be from, then apologize to the German people and resign.

UPDATE: At least one person has been killed and nine others injured after an explosion struck a restaurant in Ansbach, Germany. It was a failed attempt to conduct a suicide bombing inside a music festival. The dead individual is the bomber, who the media widely suspect to be a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed Christian who played the violent video game GamerGate.

Hilbot needs a reboot

Now, some have claimed that Hillary Clinton is ill, brain-damaged, prone to seizures, or a Lizard Queen whose human skin suit doesn’t always fit very well. However, I think that what we’re seeing here is a simple bug in Google’s Hilbot-16, easily repaired by a simple reboot. Nothing to worry about, as Google’s finest engineers are on it.

Please continue not noticing all of the information about the Democratic National Committee being released by Wikileaks.

What only exacerbates the creepiness is the way that she immediately tries to laugh it off and change the subject, which means this sort of thing has happened often enough that she’s been trained how to try to minimize people’s reactions to it. This is probably why she hasn’t been giving any interviews or press conferences.

One wonders how they plan to keep her under wraps if she were to win the election. Perhaps they have in mind a system like the one Robert Silverberg imagined for Majipoor, where the Pontifex disappears into the Labyrinth following his elevation from Coronal, never to be seen again.

It doesn’t matter, really. Because Trumpslide.

UPDATE: Snopes tries to play defense, fails.

The fact that Clinton immediately repeated her initial reaction for humorous effect supports the hypothesis that it stemmed from a conscious movement and not an involuntary seizure.

No, it means that the seizures happen often enough that she has a go-to strategy to try to convince people they did not see what they saw.

The prophetic vision of Frank Frazetta

That’s pretty remarkable considering that it was painted back in 1968. Of course, the larger question is: did Frank Frazetta predict the results of the 2016 US presidential election in the painting entitled “Rogue Roman”. Think about it. Who was the roguest Roman of them all? Was it not… Gaius Julius Caesar?

The Frazetta Code. It could be Castalia’s first national bestseller.

Mind. Blown.

Now, you all know that I love Babymetal, and I thought it was pretty cool that they were playing “Breaking the Law” with Rob Halford of Judas Priest at the Alternative Press Music Awards. So, naturally, I had to check it out. But the last thing I expected was who was going to start playing guitar on stage….

Yui is only strumming along, but Moa can actually play, even though their guitars weren’t mixed very loud, if it all. And Su is obviously having a great time being on stage with Rob Halford.

#GamerGate was just the beginning

#DNCleaks is the next big revelation in media corruption:

WikiLeaks released over 20,000 emails on Friday allegedly sent from the accounts of U.S. Democratic National Committee officials, including dozens of off the record media correspondence.

Dubbed the “Hillary Leaks series” by WikiLeaks, the leak is comprised of a searchable database of almost 20,000 emails with over 8,000 attachments and photos from the email accounts of top DNC employees.

Some of the most interesting emails to read are those exchanged by DNC staffers as they decide how to respond to media inquiries, and then their off-the-record and deep background responses to numerous national media outlets. The emails contained off the record correspondence with reporters at the Washington Post, Politico, and the Wall Street Journal, among others.

Many emails in the database were sent from the email accounts of DNC’s Northern California finance director, Robert Erik Stowe, communications director Luis Miranda, national finance director Jordon Kaplan, finance chief of staff Scott Comer, finance director of data & strategic initiatives Daniel Parrish, finance director Allen Zachary and senior advisor Andrew Wright, among others.

The emails, according to WikiLeaks, covers the period from January 2015 through May 25, 2016.

Wikileaks said this is just part one of the Hillary Leaks series.

Some of this is really bad. It turns out that, in at least one instance, DNC officials were actually giving instructions to television executives to take people off the air because of what they had just said on the show being broadcast.

#GamerGate proved how the game media was operating in collusion, then showed how the mainstream media established and stuck by a false narrative. #DNCleaks is the first step in revealing precisely who has been establishing those false narratives.

No one foresaw it

It’s no wonder the SF-SJWs are always a few steps behind.

It had been believed that the slaters would lose interest if they couldn’t sweep entire categories, since it that would mean that they could neither get awards for their own favorites (since fans would No Award them) nor “burn down” the awards, since fans would have at least a couple of organic works to give awards to. No one foresaw the “griefing” strategy of nominating works whose mere presence on the finalist list would cast the awards into disrepute.
– Greg Hullender at File 770

They still don’t quite get it, do they? Rabid Puppies didn’t nominate “If You Were a Dinosaur My Love” or “Shadow War of the Night Dragons: Book One: The Dead City: Prologue” for the Hugo Award. We didn’t give a Best Novel Nebula to The Quantum Rose (Book 6 in the Saga of the Skolian Empire) or a Best Novel Hugo to Redshirts.

We’re not casting the awards into disrepute, we are highlighting the fact that the SJWs in science fiction have already made them disreputable. I wonder what they will fail to foresee next? That’s a rhetorical question, of course. I already know.

As an aside, I continue to find it funny that the SF-SJWs get so furiously upset about my dismissing so much of their concept of science fiction without the science as mere romance in space. I mean, everyone else clearly gets it, including the publisher.

Ascendant Sun is the direct sequel to The Last Hawk, in which Kelric, heir to the Skolian Empire, crash-landed his fighter on the Restricted planet of Coba. He was imprisoned by the powerful mistresses of the great estates–women who, over time, fell in love with him. After 18 years of living in their gilded cage, Kelric finally made his escape.


In Ascendant Sun, Kelric returns to Skolian space, only to find the Empire in control of the Allied forces of Earth. With little more than the clothes on his back, Kelric is forced to take work on a merchant vessel. But when that vessel enters Euban space, Kelric finds his worst nightmare realized: he becomes a slave to the cruel Aristos–humans who use torture and sex as the ultimate aphrodesiac.

Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, eat your heart out! Remember, Ascendant Sun, Book 5 of 14 in the Saga of the Skolian Empire, is the immediate predecessor to what the SJWs informed us was the very Best Novel in science fiction that year.