Tag: Commies

Size Matters

Business, Deep Thoughts, Politics

When I first visited these United States back in 1982, one of the immediate things I noticed was the sheer size of the market.

I don’t think that people outside the U.S. can quite comprehend the scale of industry of all kinds that native-born Americans pretty much take for granted, if they think about it at all.  After the Great Wetback Episode of ’86, I remember watching TV in Longtime Friend Trevor’s place, and snorting with laughter at some car dealer whose claim to fame was that he was “The Largest Chev-lay Truck Dealer in South-East Texas” or some such puffery, and wondering why the geographical area was so tightly defined.  As it happened, the dealership was a little outside San Antonio, and one evening I and a few others drove south for an evening’s carousing and passed said Chev-lay dealer’s place.

It was the largest car dealership I’d ever seen.  It seemed as though the lot contained well over a thousand cars and trucks, and I was completely gobsmacked.  By chance, one of the group was involved in a car dealership — I think in advertising — back in Austin, so I asked her how many times this guy was likely to turn his stock over in a year, thinking that it might take at least a year or maybe even two to sell it all.  When she said, “About four or five times a year”, I could not believe her.  That would involve selling about 5,000 vehicles a year, or roughly 15 vehicles per day, every single business day of the year.  And this was one dealer in a small town (as San Antonio was still back then) — and of course we passed dozens of dealers on our way into town.

Similar discoveries lay ahead — such as the fact that Jewel supermarkets in Chicago was larger in both size and sales than the national chain I’d just left in South Africa (OK Bazaars, for those with long memories) — and just about every week brought more and more.

I ran into a fellow consultant in Chicago, a Belgian who was making a very good living in South America by selling a piece of software he’d discovered in France, and whose franchise he’d purchased for the international (outside Europe) market, as the Frogs weren’t interested in selling outside their home territory.  It was the only one of its kind in Europe, so after setting up the easy business in South America, he decided that it was time to try and crack open the U.S. market.  He attended an industry conference in Miami, and found to his horror that not only did he have competition, but he had lots of competition from companies selling almost the identical product, and at several different points on the pricing scale withal.  He stood absolutely no chance of success, so he slunk back to South America, tail between his legs.

This country is enormous.  The scale of business and the size of the market simply boggles the mind, and it’s no surprise that when the Euros try to bully us into using metric, for instance, we can them them to piss off because outside the sciences and drug dealers, the U.S. market prefers to work with Imperial units, thank you very much, and the U.S. market is big enough for the rest of the world, in most cases, not to matter.

I told you all that so I could talk about this.

Via Insty, as usual, I read an interesting article entitled A Nation Divided, which bemoans the fact that not only are we facing a permanent political divide between Right and Left, but we run the risk losing our conservative voice by falling under a Big Tech monopoly as well:

Now, Apple, Amazon, and Google are teaming up to make life extra difficult for Parler, a right-leaning alternative to Twitter. Apple and Google are removing it from their app stores while Amazon, who has been hosting the site, is yanking their hosting.
Now, Parler will migrate over to someone else and be back up and running soon enough, but it’s still troubling. Especially with people being de-platformed and then some of the biggest in the tech industry doing everything they can to shut down the alternative.

I doubt that.  Remember that when Roger Ailes came up with Fox News, his selling point to Murdoch was the simplest ever:  “Half the market.”

At some point, the Left is going to run away with itself.  That outlets like Gab and Parler even exist in the face of a near-monopoly like Twitter shows that half the market is still there to be had.

Okay, to put on my marketing wizard’s pointy hat for a moment:  not quite half the market because conservatives have better things to do with their time — like holding down a real job — than to fuck around in a glorified chat room 24/7, but remember what I said above:  even a third of the U.S. market is a huge number, and perfectly capable of supporting not only a competitor to Twitter, but to Facebook, GoDaddy and [gasp]  even Amazon.  Think I’m mistaken about the last?  Remember when Kmart was the market leader in mass merchandisers?  Not so popular now, are they, thanks to Walmart.  Think Walmart is too big to fail?  Say hello to Amazon.

And if there’s one thing anyone can bet the house on, it’s that at some point a competitor to Amazon will arise, and put them out of business.  After all, General Motors was once the Big Cheese of automotive manufacturing, but as little as a decade ago, they required a government bailout to keep their doors open and since then they haven’t exactly gone back to their position of market eminence.

And apart from crappy financial management, the one thing that causes all big enterprises to fail eventually is losing touch with their market, whether in spirit or by the market changing to a different model.

I showed just the tiniest bit of this a couple of days ago when I talked about disentangling myself from Big Tech, Big Retail and Amazon.  Sure, I’m just one guy.  But let’s just think about what would happen if the 75 million Trump voters like me did exactly what I was doing — individuals and conservative-minded businesses alike.  I would also venture to suggest that when it comes to the conservative market, 75 million is a massive underestimation.

As  to who would actually fund all this… I would suggest that Elon Musk is not the only billionaire in town — hell, a bunch of old boys at the Houston Cattleman’s Annual Ball in Houston could probably buy the New York Times  with the change rattling around in their pockets, if they wanted to.  (FYI, if Mexico’s Carlos Slim wanted continued access just to the Texas market, he’d probably sell his share of the NYT  in a NY minute.)

Size matters.  There is sufficient size in this country, whether geography, population or commerce, to support two competing visions of America.  Would it be easy?  Nobody said it would be, but if there’s one thing I have faith in, it’s in that restless American spirit which once said, “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them…” and I think you know the rest.

Let me also offer the words of John Adams, who when he realized the immensity of the task ahead and the purpose and intellectual powers required, cried:  “We have not men sufficient for the times!”  Whereupon Jefferson, Madison, Hancock, Washington and several others said, “Hold my beer.”

We also have men sufficient for our time.  They just haven’t been motivated enough, yet.  But they will be.

Unlike the earlier men, though, the only impediment we face is not external (George III, Russia!!), but internal.  That would be when the Left attempts to prevent such a severing, or suppressing competition by passing a series of laws forbidding such.

Allow me then to quote, or rather paraphrase the words of George Washington when he was asked why he was preparing a number of boats to cross the Delaware at midnight on Christmas Eve:

“We are going to murder our enemies in their sleep.” 

Not So Sure

Deep Thoughts, Marxists, Patriotism

I’d like to believe this, I really would.

…but I can’t count the number of times I’ve been energized by some kind of conservative uprising — first with Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America, then when the Tea Party took to the streets and finally, during the Trump phenomenon.

Every single one of them showed promise, and every single one of them failed in the face of concerted opposition from the massed forces of socialism:  academia, the mainstream media, Democratic Congress, pretty much the entire legal establishment (activist lawyers, Soros-sponsored prosecutors, liberal judges, a supine Supreme Court).  And then we had the outright — and so far, unpunished — lawlessness of a fraudulent and stolen election, to end all hope of peaceful, Constitutional change.

(Incidentally, Jim Hoft has done an excellent job of putting this into context, with details.)

For the first time in my life, I’m starting to understand the appeal of a “strongman” dictator like Franco or Pinochet, because the Augean Stables that this nation has become seems to be both unworkable and irredeemable.

Maybe I’m just too old for this anymore.  So yeah, Mr. Sleeping Giant:  go ahead and wake up, for all the good it will do.

I’ll do whatever I must when the forces of evil come knocking on my door;  but until then… I’m kinda where this guy is standing.

Getting Real

Marxists, Two-Minute Hate

I found this linked SOTI (can’t remember where, sorry):

And it gets worse:

Now I don’t know who these people are, but they sound seriously unhinged.  I’m trying to see how any rational person could define supporters of a Manhattan businessman (and one-time Democrat) as a “conspiracy-fueled belligerent death cult”.  Taking each word in turn:

What conspiracy?   The only people who have been obsessed with conspiracy have been Leftists — Russia, Ukraine — and this despite the fact that the real conspiracy has been by ex-Obama staffers, the various intelligence services and government bureaucrats against President Donald Trump.  Sheesh, just the Strzok-Page email exchanges alone are proof of that, and there’s so much more that I barely know where to begin.  This does not exist in the imaginations of Trump supporters:   it’s all been exhaustively documented — and despite that, Trump has only fired a few of the more egregious offenders, and prosecuted not a single one, not even the most obvious transgressors like Hillary Clinton (having a private — and illegal — email server while Secretary of State) or John Brennan (leaking classified information).

Belligerent?  Who’s talking about gulags, about the State coming to confiscate guns from private citizens?  And who is rioting in the streets, demanding to “burn it all down” and “destroy America”?  Trump supporters?  I wish we were that belligerent.  Every single act of belligerence — from attempting to assassinate a Republican Congressman at a ballgame, burning and looting, and threatening the lives and livelihoods of people working in the current Administration — has come from the Left.  Who screams invective at restaurant patrons, demanding support for the self-confessed Marxists at Black Lives Matter?  Not Trump supporters, for sure.

And a death cult?  What fevered imagination came up with that one?  Where are the Trumpian suicide squads, the Trump-sponsored bands of thugs roaming the streets and beating up political opponents, the conservatives en masse bellowing “Death to Marxists”?  (Although sometimes I wish we would, if only to drown out these assholes’ endless screams for a minute or two.)

No.  All the above are activities engaged in by the Left.

Ask yourselves this:  are these people to be taken seriously?  I mean, it’s all very well for lone loonies like this David Atkins to call for mass “deprogramming” pogroms (taking a leaf from the Stalinists of the 1950s, who must be nodding their gray heads with satisfaction from that Great Collective In The Sky).  But didn’t a former Cabinet Secretary (the snarling dwarf Robert Reich) first suggest some foolishness like this?  Is this suggestion of Atkins about to become policy, if Biden ever becomes President?

Just the magnitude of such an undertaking is astonishing.  Let’s remember that upwards of seventy million people either voted for Trump, or else were motivated to vote against “whatever it is that you Leftists want to implement”:  open borders, high taxes, gun confiscation, wealth redistribution, “hate speech” (we already have “hate crimes”), civil unrest and all the other foulness that the Left has been supporting and threatening for the past fifty-odd years.

But when a massive segment of the population says in no uncertain terms, “We don’t want that, because such lunacy has caused death, destruction, poverty and misery in every single country it has been implemented”, then we — all 70 million of us — are the ones in need of “reeducation”?

These twerps are getting worked up into a frenzy — anyone who’s ever had to deal with a thwarted child’s growing tantrum recognizes this progression all too well — and this unreasoning hatred towards people who reject their political philosophy is simply setting up a situation for bloodshed.  As much as we conservatives are called “Nazis” by the Left, the plain fact of the matter is that this demonization of political opposition has its roots in the Left:  whether by the Jacobins of Revolutionary France or by Hitler’s own National Socialist Party, we all know from their example that the elimination of political rivals begins with dehumanization and demonization.

My biggest fear, and it is very much a fear, is that the Left have been building themselves up into a febrile frenzy, and at some point, it’s going to burst into mass violence towards us conservatives.

And while we may chuckle and load up our spare magazines, I’m pretty sure that few of us want that mayhem to actually come to pass.

But I think they do, because when fanatics see that they’re losing, they often choose self-sacrifice as an alternative to failure.

And we’re the “death cult”?

As Usual

Elections, Marxists, Third World

Following on from yesterday’s news about Chile voting to “change” their constitution — really, overturning the one passed into law by Augusto Pinochet and putting in a new, “progressive” (Marxist) one — the Left in Chile did the usual:

Violence, looting, and disorder erupted in Chile on Sunday evening after an overwhelming majority of people voted in favor of destroying the country’s constitution, replacing it with a new document more favorable to the nation’s left wing.
…
On the night of the elections, local media reported that police arrested at least 19 people for looting a pharmacy and a supermarket. In the commune of Melipilla outside Santiago, rioters attacked a police station, injuring eight officers, while also installing barricades on a carriageway to prevent the movement of traffic.

No doubt, this was all part of the “wild celebrations” that followed the vote result.

So just to be clear:  if the Left loses, they riot and loot;  and if they win, they riot and loot.

Something we can probably expect in the U.S. when Trump cleans their clock next week.  See the next post for details.

I think I’ll head off to the range as soon as it opens in a couple hours.  Handgun practice this time?  I think so.

Planning

Elections, Marxists

In the above post, I pointed out that whether the Left wins or loses, they riot and loot regardless.  So here’s a little preview on how they’re planning to respond to a Trump victory:

Under the guise of seeking to “prevent a constitutional crisis,” a massive network of well funded left-wing activists and progressive groups are training, organizing, and planning to mobilize millions of Americans should President Trump “contest the election results,” refuse to concede, or claim an early victory.
More than 80 advocacy groups and grassroots organizations have joined in a broad coalition calling itself “Protect the Results” and proclaiming that “we cannot ignore the threat that Trump poses to our democracy and a peaceful transition of power.”
The coalition is a joint project of Indivisible and Stand Up America, two left-wing groups founded in response to President Trump’s 2016 election and whose goals are “to organize and resist Trump’s dangerous agenda” and “to defeat Trump and his enablers.”
Seeking to “protect” election results by use of its millions of members, the coalition calls to “take coordinated action” and “prepare for a potential post-election crisis.”

Note that even if Trump wins by an overwhelming majority, they’re still going to “mobilize”, because  of the “the threat that Trump poses to our democracy and a peaceful transition of power.”  (See the Chilean example above.)  As Roger Kimball puts it, channeling Commiespeak:

But what if Trump, you know, actually wins the election?
He can’t. And if he does, it won’t count. Listen to this statement gathered by Pullman: “At some point in the days following the election Trump will almost certainly either attempt to declare outright victory or attempt to invalidate the results of the election. That is the start of the coup.”
So what happens next? “We need to show that we’re ungovernable under a continued Trump administration. … That can mean blocking traffic at major intersections and bridges, shutting down government office buildings … or blockading the White House.”

Nice.  So the plan is to create instability and sow fear and discord, and then… what, exactly?

See how clever that is?  If Trump wins and they start their bullshit, and Trump responds with some kind of police action like calling in the National Guard, then he’s the one opposing a “peaceful transition of power”?   I, for one, am curious to see what will happen if their “coordinated action” is met with resistance from either police action or “counter-revolutionaries” (that, in case anyone is wondering, is us — people like you and me).

In the above article, Kimball is quite optimistic, by the way, ending with:

But if, as I expect, he wins, there will be much wailing and gnashing of liberal teeth, but widespread peace and prosperity will dull the pain and transform the anguish into the guilty pleasure of histrionic self-indulgence.

Me?  Not so much.

Which reminds me:  I need to go and pick up my ammo order.  The Communists aren’t the only ones who can make plans.

King Midas In Reverse

Bad News, Marxists, Modernism, Two-Minute Hate

No, not the awful Graham Nash song.  This is a clear and concise look at how the Left has turned everything it touched — and eventually controlled — into shit.

The hard Left believes its mission is so critical, so morally superior, that all means can be justified to achieve its noble ends. And so almost every institution that the Left has in its line of vision is now petrifying.

Of course, Victor Davis Hanson is too much of a gentleman to say what I said, bless him.  But “petrified” means “turned to stone” (hence his title of the article), and academia, Hollywood, urban centers, sports and the military’s leadership have not been thus transformed.  Turned into stone — at any stage before, say, 2002 would have been fine;  but now it’s all gone to shit, and we have the Left to thank for it.

Read the whole thing.