#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
This is an open thread to discuss the results of the Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Maine primaries. Decision Desk has the live results.
Looks like a split. Cruz takes Maine and Kansas, Trump takes Kentucky and Louisiana. Rubio didn’t even make it to Florida.
One would think the GOPe would learn something from the repeated failure of their anointed ones. After Bush, Dole, Bush, Mcain, and Romney, they don’t have much in the way of either support or respect any longer.
The 2016 Home Grown Food Summit is coming up in just a few days. It features a bunch of presentations by expert gardeners, farmers, herbalists and homesteaders, including Castalia author David the Good, who decided to use the opportunity as a chance to directly demonstrate some of the crazy composting methods in Compost Everything by creating Compost Everything: The Movie.
No word on whether he actually demonstrates the use of human corpses to feed his zucchini or not. But if you want to find out, sign up and see the all the presentations for free.
A lifelong conservative Republican informs the conservative media why he is no longer a conservative:
Let me say up front that I am a life-long Republican and conservative. I have never voted for a Democrat in my life and have voted in every presidential and midterm election since 1988. I have never in my life considered myself anything but a conservative. I am pained to admit that the conservative media and many conservatives’ reaction to Donald Trump has caused me to no longer consider myself part of the movement. I would suggest to you that if you have lost people like me, and I am not alone, you might want to reconsider your reaction to Donald Trump. Let me explain why.
First, I spent the last 20 years watching the conservative media in Washington endorse and urge me to vote for one candidate after another who made a mockery of conservative principles and values. Everyone talks about how thankful we are for the Citizens’ United decision but seems to have forgotten how we were urged to vote for the coauthor of the law that the decision overturned. In 2012, we were told to vote for Mitt Romney, a Massachusetts liberal who proudly signed an individual insurance mandate into law and refused to repudiate the decision. Before that, there was George W. Bush, the man who decided it was America’s duty to bring democracy to the Middle East (more about him later). And before that, there was Bob Dole, the man who gave us the Americans with Disabilities Act. I, of course, voted for those candidates and do not regret doing so. I, however, am self-aware enough to realize I voted for them because I will vote for virtually anyone to keep the Left out of power and not because I thought them to be the best or even really a conservative choice. Given this history, the conservative media’s claims that the Republican party must reject Donald Trump because he is not a “conservative” are pathetic and ridiculous to those of us who are old enough to remember the last 25 years.
Second, it doesn’t appear to me that conservatives calling on people to reject Trump have any idea what it actually means to be a “conservative.” The word seems to have become a brand that some people attach to a set of partisan policy preferences, rather than the set of underlying principles about government and society it once was. Conservatism has become a dog’s breakfast of Wilsonian internationalism brought over from the Democratic Party after the New Left took it over, coupled with fanatical libertarian economics and religiously-driven positions on various culture war issues. No one seems to have any idea or concern for how these positions are consistent or reflect anything other than a general hatred for Democrats and the Left.
TL;DR: He is an American nationalist who rejects cuckservatism.
For many years, people on both sides of the political spectrum have repeatedly tried to label me a conservative. If you look back to the very beginning, to my first column on WND after 9/11, I have steadfastly resisted that label because I have always known that I do not share an outlook with those who proudly wear it.
I am a nationalist, I am a traditionalist, I am a Christian, and I am right-wing, but I am most definitely not a conservative. I never was and I never will be.
The reason is this: conservatives are nothing more than progressives in slow motion.
The author, a veteran, proceeds to address the neoconning of conservatism, as reflected in conservatism’s newfound enthusiasm for violently exporting what it deceptively calls “democracy” around the world:
Third, there is the issue of the war on Islamic extremism. Let me say upfront that, as a veteran of two foreign deployments in this war, I speak with some moral authority on it. So please do not lecture me on the need to sacrifice for one’s country or the nature of the threat that we face. I have gotten on that plane twice and have the medals and t-shirt to prove it. And, as a member of the one percent who have actually put my life on the line in these wars movement conservatives consider so vital, my question for you and every other conservatives is just when the hell did being conservative mean thinking the US has some kind of a duty to save foreign nations from themselves or bring our form of democratic republicanism to them by force? I fully understand the sad necessity to fight wars and I do not believe in “blow back” or any of the other nonsense that says the world will leave us alone if only we will do that same. At the same time, I cannot for the life of me understand how conservatives of all people convinced themselves that the solution to the 9-11 attacks was to forcibly create democracy in the Islamic world. I have even less explanations for how — 15 years and 10,000 plus lives later — conservatives refuse to examine their actions and expect the country to send more of its young to bleed and die over there to save the Iraqis who are clearly too slovenly and corrupt to save themselves.
The lowest moment of the election was when Trump said what everyone in the country knows: that invading Iraq was a mistake. Rather than engaging the question with honest self-reflection, all of the so called “conservatives” responded with the usual “How dare he?” Worse, they let Jeb Bush claim that Bush “kept us safe.” I can assure you that President Bush didn’t keep me safe. Do I and the other people in the military not count? Sure, we signed up to give our lives for our country and I will never regret doing so. But doesn’t our commitment require a corresponding responsibility on the part of the president to only expect us to do so when it is both necessary and in the national interest?
And since when is bringing democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan so much in the national interest that it is worth killing or maiming 50,000 Americans to try and achieve?
Devastating. Absolutely devastating.
Some of you will recall that I have repeatedly urged everyone here to stop posting pictures of your children on social media. I consider it to be a reprehensible violation of their privacy and an abrogation of one’s parental responsibilities in two ways: it robs them of the ability to make their own decisions and it risks exposing them to unwanted attention and potential danger. Worse, it does so for nothing more than to feed the short-term attention-seeking fix of narcissistic parents.
This is not a new subject. Back in 2009, I wrote:
Never, ever, put pictures of children up on the Internet. Not on Facebook, not on invitation-only Live Journals, and certainly not on public blogs. It’s not only reprehensibly stupid, it is completely disrespectful of a child’s right to make his own decisions about his public profile in the future. True, sometimes this is unavoidable, such as when a child happens to be in the news for one reason or another. But barring that, no responsible parent should ever upload a picture of a child to the Internet, no matter how proud one might happen to be.
I repeated that again three years ago:
Don’t put pictures of your kids on Facebook or Instagram. It’s stupid. It’s obnoxious. It’s thoughtless and self-centered. And it’s their life, not yours, that you’re putting on public display.
And, of course, there is absolutely no excuse for ever putting a picture of another family’s child on social media, for any reason. So, you can’t say you weren’t warned, as it appears the law in some countries is finally beginning to catch up to the obvious privacy violations involved.
French parents are being warned to stop posting pictures of children on social networks in case their offspring later sue them for breaching their right to privacy or jeopardising their security.
Under France’s stringent privacy laws, parents could face penalties as severe as a year in prison and a fine of €45,000 (£35,000) if convicted of publicising intimate details of the private lives of others — including their children – without their consent.
Eric Delcroix, an expert on internet law and ethics, said: “In a few years, children could easily take their parents to court for publishing photos of them when they were younger.”
Grown-ups who sue their parents for breaching their right to privacy as children could obtain substantial compensation awards, according to French legal experts.
I won’t have any sympathy for the parents who find themselves getting hoist by their own narcissistic petard in the future. They will whine and cry about their ungrateful children, who will rightly respond: “why should I harbor any concern for your financial interests when you demonstrably didn’t give a damn about my legal and moral right to not be put on display to the world like a pet or a trophy?”
“I don’t know what I would have done if I was sitting in Cruz or
Rubio’s shoes. I can’t say it that way. If I were on the
stage, I would have said, ‘have you been listening to him tonight? Have
you been listening to what I say about him? I believe these things. If I was close enough and had a knife, the stabbing just wouldn’t stop.”
– Glenn Beck
Dear Mr. Beck,
Have you ever seen Deliverance? Yeah, that’s your fat piggy ass for the rest of your life if you try to stab Mr. Trump.
Sincerely,
America
Trump is merely one harbinger of nationalism rising across the West in response to the traitorous globalist elite:
This side of the Atlantic, Donald Trump tends to be portrayed as something of a unique event. He’s broken every rule, slaughtered every sacred cow, and defied every political prediction: He’s stronger than ever. To explain him, many American commentators, particularly his critics, have suggested that the Republican presidential contender has latched onto some specific quirk in America’s national psyche, or identified an inherent weakness in the U.S. political system or failing on the part of its current political parties….
But from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, the Donald Trump story looks very different. From the perspective of many anxious op-ed writers in Western Europe, Trump isn’t an anomaly. Instead, he’s part of a dramatic populist surge occurring across Western democracies at the moment, on both the political left and the right.
“From Spain to Sweden to Poland, populist protest parties are spreading,” wrote Josef Joffe last month in the German newspaper Die Zeit. All that differs is the terminology: “In America the ‘mainstream media’ is the enemy. Here it is [called] the ‘Lügenpresse [lying press].’ Here they rage against ‘those at the top,’ there against the ‘elites.’”
“In nearly every European country they are on the move now, the little Trumps,” declared Evelyn Roll in Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung, warning against the dangers of nationalism.
“We have Marine Le Pen. They have Trump,” agreed Le Monde’s Alain Frachon. Le Pen, who heads France’s Front National, often draws these comparisons, given her similar nationalist and anti-immigration posture. But others point to Viktor Orban in Hungary or the politicians in Germany’s “Alternative for Germany” party, a group opposed to immigration and the European Union that is expected to gain ground in the next election.
Of course, not every European observer is anxious as a result of these developments. My concern is that they are too little, too late, and that the allied elites will be able to use the anti-democratic rules of representative democracy to stifle the nationalist rise.
Because, as I have repeatedly warned, if the nationalists can’t succeed through the rules of representative democracy, the ultranationalists are going to succeed through force. Because open nationalist dictatorships in the interests of the nations will be vastly preferred by the various publics to hidden globalist dictatorship in the interests of the international elite.
And if the nationalists are stopped, that is the choice that will be presented to the nations of the West.
Mike Cernovich explains how the pro-American mask has been stripped away from the globalists formerly known as conservatives:
Nationalism v. Globalism: The Death of Conservatism.
Trump’s rise has been met with cries that he is not a “true conservative.” The once-prestigious National Review devoted an entire issue crying about Trump. Called Against Trump, the issue brought in attacks from pro-war neocons and even the mentally-unstable Glen Beck.
What attacks on Trump failed to do was define conservatism. No one has been able to explain why waging wars on foreign soils or increasing federal spending more than any president since Lyndon B. Johnson, as George w. Bush did, was conservative. No one has explained how socialized medicine, which Mitt Roney enacted as government of Massachusetts, is conservative.
Question begging aside, Trump is not a “true conservative,” and in fact conservatism in the U.S. is dead.
Trump is a nationalist, which is a loaded term worthy of definition.
Nationalism derives from the root nation. A nationalist puts the interests of his own country, and by extension countrymen, above the interests of other nations. A nationalist puts America first. Nationalists will work with other countries, but only when in the best interest of the United States.
You’d think that the President of the United States would by definition be a nationalist. Nation is in the title of the job description. Yet mainstream conservatives have drifted away from nationalism and towards globalism.
To a globalist, Americans are no different from a Nigerian. If someone in a foreign land is able to do a job much cheaper than an American worker, then those jobs should be offshored. Americans, according to globalists, do not deserve to exist as an identity.
Globalists thus favor open borders, even though increased immigration lowers the wages of native-born Americans while increasing crimes. Marco Rubio, the darling of conservative elites, even sought to open America’s borders.
As part of the Gang of 8 (so named because 8 United State senators joined forces to bring a new world order to the U.S.), Rubio also sought to increase the number of migrants from Syria by millions. That the migrants from Syrian tend to be overwhelmingly men of prime-fighting age means nothing to Rubio or other globalists. America has no right to exist as a nation under the globalist worldview.
Trump rejected globalism with a powerful statement: Build the Wall. By building a wall, Trump meant the U.S. must erect a border between the United States and Mexico, as illegal immigrants, including drug dealers and even Islamic terrorists, poured across in the tens-of-millions. Building a wall is a powerful representation of nationalism.
“A nation cannot exist without a border,” Trump declared. A nation is it borders because a nation is its people. When you allow people who hate American values like freedom of speech, free enterprise, and tolerance for religion, you change the nation for the worse.
Mainstream conservatives, again, are globalists. They believe Americans do not have a right to exist as a people, and that America does not have the right to exist as a nation. Some my call that statement extreme, but if you do not define your borders or control who comes to America, as they do in Israel, how can you claim to be pro-America?
There is more, considerably more, there. A fair amount of it will be familiar to you if you have read Cuckservative: How “Conservatives” Betrayed America, but Mike puts his uniquely energetic spin on the matter. Read the whole thing.
And then ask yourself, how can any American, real or propositional, claim to be conservative when he actively opposes the conservation of America?
Now that the second pincer of the German attack has entered the map, this is how the battlefield stood after the German Turn 2. The first turn.
The Soviet commander divided his tanks into two squadrons, sending four to deal with the Tigers from the 23rd Panzer Division shielding my assault on the village in the west (top) and three to bolster the infantry preparing to meet the company-sized assault from the east (bottom).
The Panther on the northern hill was destroyed right away; in retrospect this position was a foolish decision on my part. However, the Soviets lost the T-34 defending the approach to the village in an exchange of fire with one of the Tigers, and more crucially, a Stalin to a timely critical hit as it charged past a Panther in an attempt to get a shot at close range on the exposed side of the engaged Tiger. Despite being buttoned up and having to swivel its turret, the Panther managed to take out the heavier tank at a range of 120 meters.
However despite the assistance of the other Tiger delivering suppressive fire, the Panzergrenadiers were unable to dislodge the platoon of Soviet Guards from the building near the hills. And in the west, the T-34s and Stalins wreaked havoc on the 1st Panzer Division.
I’d set up a death star of a platoon with both medium machine guns under my best leader, a 9-2, and advanced them into the stone building at the bottom of the map, thinking to use them to suppress the Soviet infantry and permit the other two platoons to advance. A single shell from a Stalin’s 122L killed most of them and broke the survivors. That allowed the Soviets to concentrate their fire on my second-best platoon, who also broke under the pressure.
My only success was rushing one squad of engineers armed with a demolition charge into position where they would be able to claim the first of the nine buildings the Germans require for victory. Also, a pair of squads managed to make their way towards the village on the south side of the map, although it will be another two turns before they are able to reach it.
At this point, I have to admit that it doesn’t look good for the attacking Germans. I needed to break that Guards platoon to give me access to the village before the carnage in the west permits him to start falling back and reinforcing the troops he’s got there. Also, I made a serious mistake in exposing the side of one Tiger to the anti-tank gun in the village, which is quite capable of punching through the monster’s relatively light side armor. I am going to need some luck to stay in this one.
Donald Trump obviously understood that his supporters did not like his reply to Megyn Kelly on highly-skilled immigration, which they took to be a flip-flop on the H-1B visa program. He immediately clarified his position after the debate:
March 04, 2016
Donald J. Trump Position on Visas“Megyn Kelly asked about highly-skilled immigration. The H-1B program is neither high-skilled nor immigration: these are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay. I remain totally committed to eliminating rampant, widespread H-1B abuse and ending outrageous practices such as those that occurred at Disney in Florida when Americans were forced to train their foreign replacements. I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first for every visa and immigration program. No exceptions.”
That is about as clear as it gets. Whether you support Trump or not, the fact that he might have slipped up once when under attack from three sides is not indicative of his true position on immigration. Especially when there is sleight of hand involved in the question, substituting “H1-B visas” for “highly-skilled immigration”.
Trump’s general principle on immigrant labor remains clear: he does not support importing foreign workers to lower the wages of American jobs.
It’s all but over for the Republican campaigns:
Republicans gather for their eleventh debate on Thursday amid growing consternation from those in the GOP establishment that Donald Trump is unstoppable.
In the hours since Trump’s Super Tuesday romp, Republicans have intensified their push to defeat him, with GOP groups digging into their bank accounts for an air assault in Florida. Top operatives are laying groundwork for primaries on March 15, perhaps the last chance to defeat the billionaire mogul. And Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, under growing duress, are getting ready to deliver harsh attacks on the front-runner in Thursday’s primetime debate in Detroit.
The flurry of activity underscores what many concede is a central reality: The window for halting Trump may soon be closed for good.
“Trump is the presumptive nominee,” said Christian Ferry, who served as Lindsey Graham’s campaign manager. “I think anyone who cannot see that today needs to start working through the stages of grief.”
Operation Mitt was a bust today, so it should be interesting to see if an overstressed Rubiot implodes on stage. This is an open thread for live-commenting the debate, if you are so inclined.