It appears Ted Cruz has seen the writing on the wall and dropped out of the presidential race this morning on Twitter.
Seems legit.
#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
Happy Super Trumpsday, everyone!
Today we bathe in the tears of the GOP establishment. The salt must flow!
#SuperTrumpsday
A good performance today will confirm Donald Trump as the Republican candidate thanks to the GOPe’s desire to stack the deck and force “electable” moderates on the party’s conservatives.
Memo to Republican leaders: Be careful what you wish for.
Hoping to avoid a repeat of the messy fight for the Republican nomination in 2012, the party drew up a calendar and delegate-selection rules intended to allow a front-runner to wrap things up quickly.
Now, with Republicans voting in 11 states on Tuesday, the worst fears of the party’s establishment are coming true: Donald J. Trump could all but seal his path to the nomination in a case of unintended consequences for the party leadership, which vehemently opposes him.
“Trump has significant advantages, and that’s the way the system is designed,” said Joshua T. Putnam, a political science lecturer at the University of Georgia with an expertise in delegate selection. “It’s right in line with what the folks designing these rules wanted. It’s just not the candidate they preferred.”
No wonder the GOP has been losing the political and cultural wars for 30 years. Their elite leadership is strategically incompetent.
As the previous game of S23 ended as quickly as I’d expected – Ender’s last German platoon didn’t manage to take out the gun or make it across the street before being broken and I didn’t even need to reveal my squad in L8 to stop them – we decided to tackle something bigger. This time he picked S26: Last Ally, Last Victory and gave me the challenge of attacking the village and taking nine of the multi-hex buildings with the Germans.
It’s a late-war 1944 scenario set in Hungary, so the Germans are outgunned despite having two Tigers at their disposal; the Soviet main armaments range from 76L to a nightmarish 122L although their armor can’t compare with the 26 To Kill of the Tigers’ front armor.
It’s a complicated setup, with two German formations coming in from the east and west, and Soviet armored reinforcements arriving from the north. As the German commander, I had to decide which group would enter in Turn One and which in Turn Two, SchwerePanzerAbteiling 503rd platoon in the west (top) or a company from the 1st Panzer Division in the east(bottom) prior to the Soviet setup.
I assumed the Soviets would focus on stopping the larger, well-led company, plus the open fields gave them the opportunity to set up a deadly killzone to the east, so I decided the focus of my attack would have to come from the west and thereby decided to make my Turn One entry and subsequent push for the village there.
I decided I’d use my armor to screen the platoon, but kept my Panthers out of the line of sight of the anti-tank gun and lone T-34 by daring them to take on the Tigers and their massive front armor. The Panthers took up positions to the north, where I hoped to slow down the coming Soviet reinforcements and prevent them from disrupting the infantry before they could reach the safety of the stone buildings. So, there was virtually no fire exchanged during the first German turn, which ended like this.
I was a little surprised by the placement of the two Soviet platoons in the woods to the north, which gave me some degree of encouragement that I’d be able to quickly take the two multihex wooden buildings with the 1st Panzer when they entered from the east on Turn Two. My armor wasn’t able to take out the one T-34 defending the western approach, but with two 88Ls and one 75L trained on it, I was confident it wasn’t going to survive for long, after which the big cats could turn their attention to the single platoon of the 6th Guards and give me easy entry to the village.
Mike Cernovich says that one ought to thank ten different people every day. So, I thought I’d get a few months out of the way all at once and thank each and every one of you for taking the time to visit here, read here, and comment here this month.
The reason is that I was rather pleased to observe that the blogs passed the two-million-monthly pageview mark today; Google reported 2,041,464 for February 2016. It’s more than a little surprising to finally crack two million on a short month, but apparently this Leap Year was propitious. I always enjoy surpassing the traffic levels McRapey used to lie to the media about having. Truth is so much more satisfying than fiction and one big advantage of simply telling the truth and not exaggerating is never having to worry about being caught out or keeping your various stories straight.
Strangely, despite having more than four times his site traffic, neither the New York Times nor the science fiction media ever describes me as “popular”, or calls this blog “influential”. I wonder why that might be?
In unrelated news, this was a pleasant surprise. I was at the gym, reading Do We Need God To Be Good, by anthropologist C.R. Hallpike, between sets, when I came across this passage.
It is surely rather naive, then, to think that religion is uniquely prone to generate mass slaughter and violent persecution, rather than being just one among a number of such factors that also include politics, race, social class, language, and nationality. It was these, not religion, which produced the wars of the last century, the most violent in history, and the belief that if we removed religion we could remove the main cause of human conflict is clearly incorrect. Indeed, many wars in history have had nothing to do with group hatreds at all, but have simply been the result of kingly ambition and the desire for territory, power, and plunder. Religion has actually been calculated to have been the primary cause of only about 7 per cent of the wars in recorded history, half of which involved Islam (Day 2008:105).
The main thing is for the ideas to circulate, of course, but it’s still nice to see that Dr. Hallpike got the citation correct. I’m about one-third of the way in and it’s a pretty good book, complete with a ruthless beatdown of evolutionary psychology from an anthropological perspective that borders on the epic. One might almost characterize it as Post-New Atheist, as the author takes a firmly secular approach while recognizing that science and religion may not always be in harmony, but are also very far from enemies, let alone opposites.
This is both pathetic and a naked attempt to inspire the useless entryists by giving them credit for trying to impose a Code of Conduct on a project. Techno-virtue-signaling at its finest:
Recognize all contributors, not just the ones who push code
This is a specification for recognizing contributors to a project in a way that rewards any and every contribution
whether or not it be code. The basic idea is this:Use the project README (the most public part of most projects) to
recognize the contributions of members of the project community.People are giving of themselves and their free time to contribute to open source projects in so many ways. It can be a real
time sink sometimes and so they should be praised for all their contributions (code or not). Use this project as an example implementation of the all-contributors specification (see the Contributors section below.
After all, where will we be if the contributors who don’t contribute anything feel bad about themselves? That would be like the Holocaust! You know who else didn’t give proper credit to non-coders? That’s right, Hitler.
As Martin van Creveld observed, immigration is war.
A crowd of migrants has burst through a barbed-wire fence on the Macedonia-Greece border using a steel pole as a battering ram.
TV footage showed migrants pushing against the fence at Idomeni, ripping away barbed wire, as Macedonian police let off tear gas to force them away.
A section of fence was smashed open with the battering ram. It is not clear how many migrants got through. Many of those trying to reach northern Europe are Syrian and Iraqi refugees.
They are resorting to violence in order to force their way past the borders. How is that not war? And why is the West refusing to defend its borders with its very expensive militaries?
If the USA is not going to defend its borders anyhow, then let’s simply shut down the military, lay off all the soldiers, stop buying tanks and planes and bombs, and cut everyone’s taxes by 20 percent.
Reconquista 2.0 is coming, but it isn’t coming soon enough for some. Did the West learn nothing from the previous Muslim invasions?
Horror in Moscow as burka-clad babysitter ‘decapitates girl in her care’ – then walks through streets carrying her severed head and shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’
The victim was a girl identified as Nastya M – and the child’s 39-year-old nanny Gyulchehra Bobokulova has been arrested. The woman was seen pulling the severed head out of a bag and walking around near the entrance to the metro station as police moved in.
The source in the Investigative committee told TASS: ‘She waited until the parents with the elder child left the flat, then for unknown reason she killed the child, set fire to the apartment and left the scene.
Beheadings in London. Beheadings in Amherst, New York. Beheadings on Oklahoma. Beheadings in Moscow. What do all these things have in common?
It’s time to see President Trump elected, to start respecting the immigrants, and to begin the long, arduous process of making the West safe and civilized and Christian again.
UPDATE: The murderess had been working for the couple for 18 MONTHS! She’d known that little girl for nearly half her life before she murdered her and desecrated her remains. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if even last week, the poor parents would have sneered at anyone who cast a skeptical eye at them hiring a Muslim for a nanny and called them racist.
After all, they KNEW her. She was practically one of the family….
Revealing the alien philosophy it concealed. It only took a few hours for the Transamerican School of National Identity to declare that disenfranchisement of actual Americans in favor of Ameriboos was desirable.
accordingtohoyt
This is VD’s bullshit. I can see it taking several generations to being fully civilized because part of it is a genetic selection thing, but in THAT case we’re all about somewhere close, myself included. Several generations to be fully American? Oh, take a powder. You need to be an idiot to believe that.Amanda
I will take Sarah and all those like her who want to come to this country, who do so legally and who take all appropriate steps to become a citizen any day of the week over someone who looks down on them because they were not born here. Right now, Sarah looks much more “American” than you.thewriterinblack
“The immigrant becomes a citizen. The immigrant lays claim to now being American. Only by law, Sarah.”This statement demonstrates that Sarah is more American than you are. Because she believes in what makes America, America. And you don’t.
Stephen W. Houghton
My paternal ancestors have been here since before the war of independence. I say Americans are those who take the oath and stand with us. Traitors, those what ever their blood who do not…. Go and lick your Donald’s hand, may your chains lay lightly upon you, and may our posterity forget that you were our countryman.Randy Wilde
Meh. She’s more American than many people born in the U.S. She actually believes in the ideals on which the country was founded.Paul (Drak Bibliophile) Howard
Nope and by my standards, you’re not a Real American and Sarah is.Nicki
You’re a fucking moron, and you don’t DESERVE the citizenship of this great nation.jccarlton
Here’s the thing, Vox, YOU don’t get a say in who’s an American, not anymore. You’ve given that up for a villa in Italy. I imagine that you enjoy it, that means that you no longer have to deal with America’s problems. All your problem are the problems of Europe and you are welcome to them. As for REAL Americans, I would rather have some of the people I’ve had the pleasure of knowing over the years than somebody who is as childish and cowardly as you, Vox. You ran from America’s problems and then had the unmitigated GALL to say that Sarah isn’t good enough to be an American.
My, these transamericans are certainly entitled, aren’t they? Not only can they tell Americans what Real Americans are and are not, but they are going to kick out everyone who doesn’t think like they do, no matter whose posterity they happen might be! Nations aren’t genetically-related peoples, after all, but mere collections of similarly-minded groupthinkers.
Notice that I never said anything about Sarah being good enough to be an American. I never said anything about being American being something good, or even desirable. What I stated is a simple fact, one no more controversial than Sarah being female. She is Portuguese. She is not American. Becoming a U.S. citizen is paperwork; the mere fact that one has to become a U.S. citizen is sufficient to indicate that one is not an American. As it happens, I even know a few Americans who are not U.S. citizens.
Amongst all the emoting, hissy-fitting, posturing, and outrage, only one commenter, Ironbear, was sufficiently perspicacious to note how “the proposition nation” is not only ahistorical fiction, but in practice, must be intrinsically opposed to the genuine Rights of Englishmen on which the original Anglo-American nation was founded.
Is there a way to maintain and defend a nation of ideas without disenfranchising those who demonstrably don’t share those ideas, even though they be born here?
Saying that “We were able to sustain a nation of ideas as long as America remained a melting pot,” is true, but not useful in that context. The America that was is dead dead, and toxic ideas introduced, propagated, and made colour of law and custom by our supposed fellows murdered it – using the power of the vote, among other weapons.
I find Mrs. Hoyt’s concept of a prospective nation formed of ideas, ideals, and based upon shared experiences and principles to be aesthetically pleasing. I also see it as being extremely vulnerable, and demonstrably difficult to defend – unless one is willing to go all the way to the walls in eradicating ideas that are toxic to it, which our relatively recent ancestors didn’t. (I strongly suspect that they didn’t truly see the danger and the toxicity of Marxism until it was too late, or even really recognize what was killing us even then.)
The extremes required to protect those ideas from those who would destroy them with toxic ones are unpalatable as well, and not the least bit aesthetically or otherwise pleasing to me. I find that to be depressing, and without hope of a resolution that is not borne of fire and blood.
He is correct to be dubious. Their “proposition nation” is not even theoretically possible without the sort of thought police that their self-definitive ideals must reject. Defining a nation as a proposition is as intrinsically absurd and self-negating as feminism or communism or open-borders libertarianism. These transamerican idealists consider themselves to be intelligent and well-educated, and yet they have observably failed to even begin to think through the necessary consequences of the very values they erroneously claim makes one American.
And that, my dear Sarah, is one thing that you really should learn from me: ruthlessly thinking through the logical consequences of your foundational assumptions. As it stands, her core position is fundamentally illogical. On the other hand, at least she does seem to have changed her mind about my finally understanding Europe.
He’s become European through and through. He doesn’t wish the US well (doesn’t take much reading to see him gloating at potential destruction of the US. And all I have to do to attract his attention and unhinge him is say the US will survive, even though I don’t direct it at him.)
Under those circumstances for any American to follow his lead on things like presidential nominations is insane.
I don’t wish VD any harm — in fact, he’s pretty much irrelevant to me, in any way our paths intersect — and his ideas might yet win out in Europe. For America they’re a poison pill and as bad as Obama’s.
(Spreads hands and smiles.) Unhinged? Quite the contrary. Sarah and her commenters have beautifully demonstrated exactly what I intended from the start. Their naive USian ideals are fundamentally and functionally antithetical to the historical American ideals they ape so clumsily.
Depending upon how one reckons it, we stand on the verge of the fourth America. I count them as follows:
America 1.0: Constitutional America 1789-1865
America 2.0: American Empire 1865-1913
America 3.0: Republican US 1913-1941
America 3.1: Early Imperial US 1941-1965
America 3:2: Latter Imperial US 1965~2033 (est)
America 4.0: Post-US~2033
Sarah and her defenders are confusing America 2.0 for America 1.0, and are completely unaware that they living in an America 3.2 that is rapidly laying the groundwork for the Post-US. And while I still value the ideals of America 1.0, with a very few exceptions they simply don’t exist in the USA anymore. As for what Sarah calls my “ideas”, they will win out in both the USA and in Europe for the simple reason that they are not my ideas, they are simply my observations of what is already happening.
It is easy to know that I am much more likely to be correct than they are. Lacking imagination – ironic given how many SF writers are there – they assume the future will be the status quo extended into the future. And it will not be. Whatever it will be, it will most certainly not be that, not after the largest invasion in human history.
The general impression is that this endorsement should finish off Ted Cruz once and for all:
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) endorsed Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Huntsville Sunday evening. Sessions promised a “Gang of Eight” type of immigration reform bill would not will be passed in a Donald Trump presidency.
“There is an opportunity this year, Tuesday, and we have the opportunity — we have an opportunity Tuesday. It may be the last opportunity we have for the people’s voice to be heard. You have asked for 30 years, and politicians have promised for 30 years to fix illegal immigration,” Sessions said.
“The American people have known for years these trade agreements have not been working for them,” Sessions stumped. “We now have and will soon have a vote on the Transpacific Partnership TPP), Obamatrade, and it will damage America. It will create a commission that undermines our sovereignty, and it should not pass. Donald Trump when he gets elected president will see it does not pass.”
Sessions said Trump is not perfect, but nobody is and endorsed the candidate.
“This movement, he doesn’t take money from political groups and lobbyists. He is committed to leading this country in an effective way. You know, nobody is perfect. We can’t have everything, can we, Mr. Trump? But I can tell you one thing, I think at this time in my opinion, my best judgment, at this time in America’s history, we need to make America great again!” Sessions said, repeating Trump’s campaign slogan.
“I am pleased to endorse Donald Trump for the presidency of the United States,” Sessions endorsed.
Given that Sessions is supposed to have written Trump’s immigration plan, this is hardly a surprise. But combined with Christie’s endorsement and Maine Governor LePage’s endorsement, it means that the preference cascade among officeholders has started and it’s only going to increase.
All of the conservatives nattering and bitching about how Trump isn’t a conservative are behind the times and missing the point. It doesn’t matter what your national policies are if you don’t have a nation. First things first. Sen. Sessions recognizes that.
Does that mean Trump can be trusted to build a wall, to deport all the illegal immigrants, and severely reduce the flow of immigration? No. But a) he’s the only candidate who might, and b) he’s the Republican nominee.
Deal with it and decide if you prefer President Trump or President Hillary. Because those are now your two choices.
The only reason gun rights aren’t being swept away with everything else in the cultural wars is that the NRA did not give in to its moderates:
The moderates felt rejected by both the NRA hard-liners and the Washington elite. “Because of the political direction the NRA was taking, they weren’t being invited to parties and their wives were not happy,” says Jeff Knox, Neal’s son and director of the Firearms Coalition, which fights for the Second Amendment and against laws restricting guns or ammunition. “Dad was on the phone constantly with various people around the country. He had his copy of the NRA bylaws and Robert’s Rules, highlighted and marked. My father and a lot of local club leaders and state association guys organized their troops.”
Theirs was a grass-roots movement within the NRA. The solution was to use the membership to make changes. The bylaws of the NRA gave members power on the convention floor to vote for changes in the NRA governing structure.
“We were fighting the federal government on one hand and internal NRA on the other hand,” Aquilino says.
In Cincinnati, Knox read the group’s demands, 15 of them, including one that would give the members of the NRA the right to pick the executive vice president, rather than letting the NRA’s board decide. The coup took hours to accomplish. Joe Tartaro, a rebel, remembers the evening as “electric.” The hall’s vending machine ran out of sodas.
By 3:30 in the morning the NRA had a whole new look. Gone were the Old Guard officers, including Maxwell Rich, the ousted executive vice president. The members replaced him with an ideological soul mate of Knox’s named Harlon Carter.
Never, ever, permit a moderate in a position of influence, let alone leadership. They will ALWAYS bollix it up for one reason or another. Always. That is the fatal mistake the churches have made, and it is the reason the Republican Party is undergoing its present meltdown.
If you believe your role in the organization is to temper or restrain others in the organization, that’s fine, there is a need for that sort of advice, but understand that you CANNOT be a leader. You are not suited for it. You will make a hash of it.
That doesn’t mean that the most extreme individual will be the best leader. There will always be competing visions. But “making nice” and “finding common ground” are not strategic visions. They are nothing more than tactics that may or may not be relevant at the moment.
It’s a bit ironic, but most people understand that someone who always wants to surrender or to fight is not to be trusted in leadership. And yet, somehow, they readily fall for the idea that someone who always wants to split the difference is a reasonable person to follow.