I wouldn’t have guess the Irish, but the Irish would notice.

“Has anybody ever seen the movie ‘Gangs of New York’? ” Vance queried at a press conference held at the Milwaukee Police Association. “That’s what I’m talking about.

“We know that when we have these massive ethnic enclaves forming in our country, it can sometimes lead to higher crime rates,” Vance stated. “What we want is an American immigration policy that promotes assimilation.”

This is what happens when you base your policy on what movie you’ve seen. The facts are a bit different, though.

However, studies have indicated that migrants are no more likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. The fictional film is set in 19th-century New York and centers around a feud between rival gangs of different backgrounds. The protagonist is an Irish immigrant seeking revenge for his father’s murder, reports the Journal Sentinel.

The Danes better watch out if he ever watches The Salvation.

Or maybe he’ll center immigration policy on a viewing of Alien: Romulus.

This weird.

Even if it’s just pretend, this is a gross concept.

A trio of economists, Card, Angrist, and Imbens, won the Nobel Prize in 2021 for a natural experiment that showed that a commonly held belief about the relationship between the minimum wage and unemployment wasn’t always true. That seems reasonable to me — economics is basically about human psychology, and psychology sometimes gets strange. One strange psychological aspect of some economists, though, is that they have the notion that economics is as robustly mathematical and predictable as physics, and questioning the reliability of economics is heresy. Some economists were furious about an experiment that called their assumptions into question.

Their research didn’t conclude that an increase in the minimum wage would boost employment in every circumstance. Far from it.

But it challenged the view that an increase in the minimum wage would always lead to unemployment.

However, their findings weren’t welcomed by the establishment.

In fact, they sparked an emotional debate in the economics profession.

American economist James Buchanan, a Nobel Laureate himself (in 1986), was scathing of the suggestion that a core “law” of economics might not be universal after all.

“The inverse relationship between quantity demanded and price is the core proposition in economic science, which embodies the presupposition that human choice behaviour is sufficiently relational to allow predictions to be made,” Mr Buchanan told the Wall Street Journal in 1996.

“Just as no physicist would claim that “water runs uphill,” no self-respecting economist would claim that increases in the minimum wage increase employment.

“Such a claim, if seriously advanced, becomes equivalent to a denial that there is even minimal scientific content in economics, and that, in consequence, economists can do nothing but write as advocates for ideological interests.

Cool. Keep in mind, Buchanan is defending economics with that statement.

Also worth keeping in mind: Buchanan was a Libertarian with a capital L, a senior fellow of the Cato Institute, and has been called The Architect of the Radical Right. But as we all know, conservative politics is totally apolitical, so his strong advocacy for ideological interests doesn’t count.

An additional comment: it turns out that considering evidence counter to dogma is the behavior of whores.

“Fortunately, only a handful of economists are willing to throw over the teaching of two centuries; we have not yet become a bevy of camp-following whores.”

He sounds like a fun guy.

Oh dear. I replied to a question on Threads, which was asking what to do with a collection of right-wing media. I suggested that it ought to be burned.

Note: this is very different from denying others the right to read these books — no one is obligated to preserve every item a deceased parent once owned, and that includes books. I’m going to have to clean out my mother’s bookshelves, and she used to be a regular reader of books, mostly detective stories, murder mysteries, that sort of thing. They’re all getting tossed, one way or another. I know well that irrational feeling that every item the loved one touched should be preserved and passed on to generation after generation, but I don’t think my children, or my children’s children, would actually be grateful to someday inherit a few houses full of old stuff.

Here’s a completely different situation:

“Hundreds of New College of Florida library books, including many on LGBTQ+ topics and religious studies, are headed to a landfill,” Sarasota Herald Tribune reports.

“A dumpster in the parking lot of Jane Bancroft Cook Library on the campus of New College overflowed with books and collections from the now-defunct Gender and Diversity Center on Tuesday afternoon. Video captured in the afternoon showed a vehicle driving away with the books before students were notified. In the past, students were given an opportunity to purchase books that were leaving the college’s library collection.”

Purging a library of every book on certain topics is a whole ‘nother ball of wax. Traditionally, they ought to have all the jugend gathered around a bonfire.

By the way, I have a bookshelf full of truly awful creationist books, and I’m not sure what to do with them. I’d leave them to a library as a historical resource, but not if they would just check them out to readers who might consider them validated because they are in a formal collection. I’ll probably suggest that they be incinerated or placed in a landfill.

Working hard to focus on the only electorate that counts.

Trump campaign spokesperson Caroline Sunshine said Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz “never held a real job in his life” — despite his years of teaching and serving in the National Guard.

During a Wednesday interview on Real America’s Voice, host Terrence Bates complained to Sunshine that reporters were not questioning Walz “on his repeated lies about his military service and every single other thing that seems to come out of his mouth.”

“Tim A. Walz, as I like to call him, because when Tim was asked to, you know, answer the call to service and deploy and fight for our country, he chose to step down and run for Congress,” Sunshine replied. “He’s never held a real job in his life, by the way. He spent all of his life running for Congress, running for office or in office.”

Terrible. He could have been a lawyer, or a venture capitalist, or a real estate speculator…you know, a real job. I’m ashamed to say that I’ve been a failure my whole life, ‘working’ as a teacher. My daughter is a researcher at a university, my middle son is a major in the Army, not real jobs, obviously. Fortunately, my oldest son rescues the family reputation, since he does financial stuff in a law office (don’t ask me what, I lack the ability to comprehend real labor).

As a professor, I’m not just a lazy slacker, I am the enemy.

My wife does have a productive life…oops. Nope. There’s only one thing she’s good for.

So…the Republicans are doing their best to alienate teachers, men in the military, women, and everyone in congress. Can they win the presidency on the backs of just white male lawyers who haven’t held political office?

I’ve read a few reports about it. It started 40 minutes late; Musk blamed the technical problems on a denial-of-service attack, a peculiar one that only affected the interview and not any other service on Twitter. Can we just admit that Musk is an incompetent manager? Trump got lobbed nothing but softball questions, and delivered the same old lies. Meanwhile, Roger Stone’s email account was hacked, giving bad guys access to lots of campaign information.

All the dim duo accomplished was more mockery.

he failure to launch of Elon Musk’s planned audio live stream on X with former President Donald Trump quickly became the subject of online mockery on the very same social platform, including by the official campaign of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

“BREAKING: Twitter,” the pro-Harris account @harris_wins posted about 20 minutes after the stream was supposed to start.

While Musk claimed the malfunction was due to a massive denial-of-service attack, other prominent X users weren’t so sure.

“so the guy who makes cars that randomly crash and burst into flames is interviewing Donald Trump, and the interview crashed and burst into flames?” wrote self-described “internet loudmouth” Jeff Tiedrich. “holy s—, how did we Nazi this coming.”

“LOL the Elon-Trump space is broken no one can get in apparently,” wrote professor and attorney Seth Abramson. “This app is a flaming poop salad.”

“I’m in the historic Musk Trump twitter space and all you can hear is heavy breathing and the occasional fart,” quipped Cyanide and Happiness co-creator Rob DenBleyker.

Novelist Paul Rudnick pondered if the interview crashed because “Trump kept talking into the remote,” or “Elon got distracted by a squirrel.”

I feel no desire to watch the recording.

Project 2025 is pure electoral poison, as everyone except the goons at the Heritage Foundation are becoming aware. Kevin Roberts, the guy behind it all, has authored a book to promote it titled Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, but its release has been delayed to 12 November 2024 — gosh, that’s after the election! I wonder why. I don’t suppose it has anything to do with the fact that Kevin Roberts is fucking weird, would it?

Media Matters got their grubby progressive hands on a copy.

A review found Roberts rails against birth control, in vitro fertilization, abortion, and dog parks.

Dog parks? What’s wrong with dog parks?

On page 69, Roberts targets the Swampoodle dog park in Washington, D.C., for having too much room for dogs to play and not enough for children, blaming this on the antifamily culture shaping legislation, regulation, and enforcement throughout our sprawling government.

Roberts is a Catholic who is obsessed with reproduction. Ultimately, his opinions seem to be driven by a pathological need to compel everyone else to get pregnant.

He says that having children should not be considered an optional individual choice but a social expectation or a transcendent gift, and describes contraceptive technologies as revolutionary inventions that shape American culture away from abundance, marriage, and family. He labels reproductive choice methods as a snake strangling the American family.

You’d think that with that insistence on baby-making he’d approve of IVF, but no. You see, IVF gives women the option to not be pregnant at inconvenient times — they’ll waste their god-given fertility by going to college or working outside the home, instead.

Once you understand this pattern (individual choice masking cultural upheaval), you will see it everywhere. In vitro fertilization (IVF) seems to assist fertility but has the added effect of incentivizing women to delay trying to start a family, often leading to added problems when the time comes.

So it’s really about controlling women. Abortion and birth control are bad because once upon a time not being able to end an unwanted pregnancy or avoiding pregnancy in the first place protected women, and also kept the men in line.

As other kinds of contraceptive technologies spread, abortion rates went up, not down. Why? Because technological change made having a child seem like an optional and not natural result of having sex and destroyed a whole series of institutions and cultural norms that had protected women and forced men to take responsibility for their actions.

I think you can see why the Republicans want to keep their nefarious agenda in the dark while they’re trying to get elected to office. After they have convinced the citizenry to give them power, then they can reveal the iron boot.

The New Republic has also lucked into getting a copy. They find some nuance in what they’ll do after they’ve got everyone pumping out babies: prayer.

This repopulation will take time, of course. In the meantime, what weapons do we have at our disposal to fight China? I don’t think we will succeed without the return of a practice absolutely antithetical to everything CCP and its Uniparty sympathizers stand for: widespread prominent public prayer.

Yes, that’s right: Prayer is going to be an essential factor in fighting globalization. For Roberts, the path back to economic independence involves putting public prayer

in a place of prominence—to take a moment for prayer before football games, to have prominent leaders including our president not just issuing the occasional prayer proclamation but actually publicly taking a knee before almighty God (as Washington did), to begin school days again with prayer (enabled by school choice legislation)—would be to once again properly acknowledge our gratitude to God and humbly seek His assistance in our struggle to restore vitality to our nation.

This appears to be the best strategic policy advice Roberts has to offer, a literal Hail Mary against China.

Again, it’s all about sex, procreation, babies. Everything boils down to banning birth control and abortion, and making everyone get pregnant if they want to have sex. It’s an attitude I associate with a certain kind of creepy, regressive Catholic, the kind of weirdo that Kevin Roberts, and JD Vance (who wrote the foreword to the book) are. They think the only reason someone might oppose their primitive beliefs is if there is some conspiracy theory driving misinformation about their plans. If that’s the case, why hide the book away? Please do announce it everywhere.

Childless societies, Roberts claims, are decadent and nostalgic, but of course it is Roberts who is decadent, with his $675,000 D.C. think-tank salary, and nostalgic, with his beliefs that globalization can be undone if enough people read Xenophon and take Sunday off. He seems to be arguing that it’s possible to undo the twentieth century and recapture the time of Benjamin Franklin and the Boston Tea Party (without all that violence against Catholics, presumably)—a time when the U.S. had a frontier and it was violent and lawless, a time when having many children was a necessity because several would likely die young from poverty or inadequate health care.

But Roberts is convinced that the broad unpopularity of many of his proposals is due to conspiracy. The decadent tone and posturing of Dawn’s Early Light, with its refusal to understand what Americans want and what gives them value in life, leads him straight to paranoia. Having watched culture slip away from his draconian values, Roberts fishes for an endless series of shadowy cabals to explain this state of affairs. He opens his book hinting at a trillion-dollar conspiracy against nature; he decries birth control as a eugenicist plot and claims our current educational environment is … the result of a hundred years of plotting by progressives who want to create generations of obedient drones. Surprising literally no one, George Soros is repeatedly invoked, usually as the puppet master behind soft on crime California district attorneys like George Gascón and Chesa Boudin.

I think the Democrats are on the right track. These people are out of touch, bizarrely ideological, and just plain weird. Not amusingly idiosyncratically weird, but nasty creepy weird.

This is quite possibly the dumbest anti-Walz meme* yet.

They’re calling him that because he…signed legislation to supply free feminine hygiene products in public schools.

Sure, present that as a terrible crime if you really want to lose more women’s support.

*The campaign is young. I expect even worse memes to emerge soon.

Here’s Sarah Huckabee Sanders signing an Arkansas bill to make more kids eligible for child labor.

Look at those kids!

Here’s Tim Walz signing a Minnesota bill to provide free school lunches to kids.

Look at those kids.

Which one is the party of family again?

To underscore the point, here’s some news from Tex-ass.

Lawyers for the State of Texas on Monday tried to convince a U.S. appeals court that it should not be fined for failures in investigations of abuse and neglect of intellectually disabled children.

I’d show you photos of the children’s response, but it’s hard to smile with a broken jaw.

One investigation into a child called “Child C” was delayed a year. The same child was once dropped off at a hospital by staff of C3 Academy, where she lived, with a broken jaw. That was just one of several incidents that the child endured, according to court documents.