BLOG ON SEMI-HIATUS (Sticky Post)

I have left St. Louis for job in the Rhine-Ruhr Region of Germany.

This blog is in a state of semi-hiatus, as of September 4, 2018.

I’ll write posts here every once in awhile, just to update you all on how I’m doing, and my thoughts on whatever big news breaks. Our favorite doggy will chime in every once in awhile with his own guest posts. Other than that, expect posting around here to be sparse going forward.

Reading material:

My Labor Day 2018 farewell post — My final post from St. Louis for awhile, perhaps ever.

My post from July 26, 2018, announcing my departure.

The preview of my Summer 2018 travelogue that I’ll probably never get to write in full.

My long and frequently updated post on my condition and recovery — If I experience any significant progression or regression in my recovery, I or our favorite doggy will let you know, and this post will be appendaged. As of the time of my moving, my cognitive functioning has mostly recovered in full, but my physical functioning is still far from it, I’m still in a wheelchair during waking hours more often than not, and if I can stay upright on two feet, it’s for an hour at the longest, usually less.

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Rubbing the Dog’s Nose In His Own Poo

Washington, D.C.

If you didn’t hate me after yesterday, what you’re about to read in this post will clinch it.

I’ve heard it stated often in our sector that, presuming that the farces known as “elections” as part of the farce known as the “democratic republican system” are desirable things at all, that the franchise should have property and/or income delimiters of some sort.

Those of you who think that are like the dogs in housebreaking training that just shit on the carpet.  And with that, I’m rubbing your noses in your own shit turds by presenting you this article and infographic.

Long and short here is that the same kind of people that were cool with Romney style Republicanism in 2012 but not with Trump style Republicanism in 2016, well to do white (and even some non-white) suburban voters, became even less cool with Trump style Republicanism in 2018, enough to swing control of the House.

Property and/or income delimiters for the franchise would only mean even more power for these kind of people.  And for the ownership, capital and rentier class in general, a group that has too much power already.

Now here’s where I floor you all and make the scant few of you that haven’t started hating my guts yet start doing so:

Just as public policy should put labor and production on an equitable footing with the ownership class, I think the power of the franchise should be inversely commensurate with socioeconomic status.  Instead of taking the franchise away from people that don’t own land, it would be better for our cause and the better Hobson’s Choice that we take the franchise away from people that do.

 

The Interesting Thing About Google Germany

Berlin;  Hamburg

The story that Hard Right linked to as a comment.

I saw it earlier today, but didn’t think much about it.

But the more I think about it, the more I think of it.

Not so much for the content of this story.

Here’s the interesting thing about Google Germany:

It believes itself to be way more of a media business than a CSIT-STEM business.  The reason I can tell is that Google Germany overall is based in Hamburg, which is, among other things, a media town.  If it thought itself a CSIT-STEM business, it would have planted itself in a CSIT-STEM town, such as Dresden, Nuremberg or Aachen.

You’re All Going to Hate Me After This

Berlin

To commemorate the upcoming centennial of women’s suffrage and women receiving the franchise in Germany, Mama Merkel wants affirmative action for women in the Bundestag.

I’m about to floor you all:

In democratic republics, there would be significantly more women elected officials if women weren’t allowed to vote.

That’s because women have a really keen way of finding flimsy hen house reasons not to like other women in their domestic and personal lives.  In the business and political world, the main impediment to women climbing the ladder are other women exerting either queen bee syndrome or reverse queen bee syndrome.  Those things scale well to electoral politics.

There would be many more reasonable and rational women in elected offices, except what holds them back are enough women voters who won’t vote for them for some catty reason.

 

Here Versus There

Sassuolo, Italy

Yeah, that’s something I’ve noticed since at first vacationing in and then not long later moving to Germany.

A difference between the official professional sporting and athletics cultures of the United States and Europe.

Here in Europe, there are constant non-stop official public moralist preening campaigns against “racism in sport.”

In the United States?  Not so much.  Sure, we’ve got the occasional dork in Orlando with a fax machine.  But that’s it.

That begs the question:  Why the difference?

I think the answer relates to the concept of necessity.  In the United States, nobody has to instruct white sports fans never to take their own side in a political debate, because they’ve willingly surrendered their racial courage, because the nearby sports team, college or pro, needs to win games.  Meanwhile, and in contrast, here in Europe, professional sports, especially soccer, and the way they’re organized from the ground up, the grass roots up, serve as an easy conduit for the development of populist-nationalist politics.  (Here and here, and also most of the street protesters in Chemnitz several weeks ago are also soccer hooligan types)  Even if the soccer teams themselves have rosters that are half non-white.

Europe’s obsession with “racism in sport,” therefore, is nothing more than an attempt to cut off the ability to use locally organized soccer clubs as a base for organization/recruitment on behalf of populist-nationalist political parties.

Back to this article, there’s this:

When you go to Germany, you see the people go on the street. There are maybe three, four thousand racists walking on the street and have the right to walk on the street and put their arm up and do the Hitler sign.

That’s news to me.  There are all sorts of vigorously enforced laws about displaying public support for, as it is officially termed in German public parlance, “unconstitutional organizations.”  My reading of my German news sources indicates that it’s about a once a week thing that someone’s catching a case for something like that.

Kevin-Prince Boateng has a more famous brother with the same surname, whom I have discussed in this space in the past.

Bitch-Made Testosterone

Spokane, Washington

Truer words:

“For boys, talking about the depression spectrum and then violence, these neurotoxins are attacking not only cells but they’re attacking testosterone. Male testosterone levels have gone down a little over 30 percent in 30 years.

“Lowered testosterone is one of the reasons that we have so much violence.”

I saved this AR comment from quite a few years ago, and it explains this paradox:

Blacks have average testosterone and are mentally defective, not just “less smart” than other races.

The myth that high testosterone makes a person violent comes from so called “roid rage”. What is the mechanics of the anger, depression and mood swings associated with steroid use? It has to do with the fact that male and female hormones are the same thing, just shaped differently. And “steroids”…artificial hormones and the like are changed randomly in a person’s body. You know what happens to a steroid user who doesn’t use special anti-cancer drugs that work by blocking specific hormones? They grow breasts (bitch tits). That absolutely does not happen if you consume real testosterone by say, consuming goat testicles (like the Greeks did) and the like or, more likely, consuming lots of precursors to testosterone (ie meat) and let your body create it naturally. Steroid users and “roid rage” are essentially experiencing PMS…..just like a pimply teenage girl, growing breasts and other signs of being a woman….cough.

Men who have high testosterone, for real, are calm, cool, collected and feel empowered. It’s little bitches who fly off the handle, feel small, threatened and “dissed” over the smallest things.

Quite frankly, you’ve been brainwashed. You think, blacks are larger, stronger, more virile and have larger penises than you (all lies). The TV tricked you into thinking you are less of a man. Then it tricked you again into thinking part of the EVIL blacks do is related to being manly….especially being sexual or sexually potent.

Figure it out.

***

Armistice Centennial

Compiègne, France

“The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month”

Precisely a century ago from the moment I am uploading this post.  I actually wrote it three days ago for upload at this precise time, 11 AM CEST, November 11, 2018, because, by the time it goes live, I’ll be in Compiègne for the centennial observation.  If all goes well, I’ll be back here in France, and namely, Omaha Beach, for the 75th anniversary of D-Day, on June 6.

Onward and upward.

Efforts like these or movements like these aren’t complicated at all to explain, especially in the German context.

The war that ended precisely a century ago was a clusterfuck based on a flaw in the European paradigm of secret treaties as a deterrent to war and a deterrent to future Napoleon wannabes.  That paradigm really kicked into high gear after Napoleon.  The theory behind secret treaty-ism was that it was supposed to prevent national-level invasions — A won’t invade B, because A doesn’t know which other countries B is strapped up with, while B knows which countries B is strapped up with, and knows that A doesn’t know.  For the same reason, A has confidence that B won’t invade them, because A knows which countries A is strapped up with, but B doesn’t know, and A knows that B doesn’t know.  Sort of a Nash Equilibrium applied to big time military geopolitics.

Well, we all know how it went wrong.  In an overall general sense, it made all of Europe suspicious of each other and paranoid about each other, precisely because every country was looking sideways at every other country, even ones with which they were secretly allied, because nobody ever knew of the other countries’ secret side arrangements.  Which is why many forward-looking clairvoyant observant people in the decade leading up to the start of WWI openly stated that Europe was stinking from the stench of the predication to major warfare.  Specifically, because some minor royal in a place that Bismarck himself stated the whole of which wasn’t worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier got assassinated, and that started a domino effect of calling in secret treaty obligations, ending up with Europe being at war with itself, and eventually the United States entering because the American elite of the time basically bet on England, which means they influenced Wilson to goad the Germans into torpedoing an America-to-England boat with both American civilians and illegal munitions.

We know the history of the rest in terms of the German context:  Defeat in the “Great War,” end of the monarchy/-ies, near-breakup of the unitary German nation-state, brief Communist takeovers in Munich and Hamburg, impossible reparations, hyperinflation, depression, Weimarism, Hitler.

Many centuries from now, historians will consider World War I and World War II to be the same war, with a barely more than two-decade intermission.

The people seeking to “rehabilitate the German Empire” in an intellectual historical sense, and the people who form rural marksmanship clubs and pine for the Deutsches Kaiserreich aren’t really trying to rehabilitate the German Empire and really aren’t pining for the Deutsches Kaiserreich.  What’s really going on here from a psychological sense is rather simple:  Absolving Imperial Germany for the blame it never should have gotten for World War I means somewhat absolving Germany for World War II, and, eventually, giving modern day Germans a mulligan on the chance to be an international superpower.

My advice to Germans so dreaming, especially as someone living here as an expat from another superpower and at the same time has a supermajority ethnic constitutional heritage from this country, is this:  Be careful what you wish for.  Empires aren’t so great, even for most citizens or subjects of the imperial country’s proper territory.  Or, you don’t know how good you have it now, and that the grass is actually browner on the other side.

Scattered Thoughts On Yesterday

Your Blogmeister’s German Desk

Like I promised, here are my thoughts, none too extensive or detailed as they may be, on what happened yesterday back home.

* Like I said, I was mentally checked out of caring about Claire for revenge or score settling purposes, because I’ve already gotten what I wanted in the long run in a roundabout way.  Even though it cost me a whole lot and took longer than I thought.  Yet and still, I’m surprised Hawley beat her by a comfortable margin.  I would have thought it would have been razor close and could have gone either way at that.  That’s what all the polling I saw from back home suggested.

* Speaking of that, I only need one word to explain why in most of these statewide races, the red team did better than the polls and exit polls suggested they would, the one word explains why enough red team voters were, as the lawyers would say, at some level less than perfectly honest, with the pollsters:

Antifa.

* The Democrats have won the House based on “Republican gerrymandered” Congressional districts.  Remember, the 2011-2021 Congressional district map was largely drawn on Republican favorable terms by state legislatures that were largely Republican based off the 2010 red wave.

Does this mean the Democrats and the left will now realize what even the NYT admitted, that gerrymandering largely doesn’t matter, and now STFU about gerrymandering?

* And speaking of the House, let’s do something I haven’t done in awhile in this space, and fire up the Blogmeister Hot Tub Time Machine.  Let’s all jump in, (no skinny dipping, this ain’t no German spa), and dial the thing back to just about precisely eight years ago, 2010, the aforementioned red wave.

That season’s results were pretty much the photographic negative of this season’s.

Which means that the blue team is about to learn what the red team had to learn the hard way from January 2011 to December 2014 — That having the House and nothing else amounts to, as my grandpa would have said, exactly two things:  Nothing and shit.

The power of the purse?  Obama bullied House Republicans into accepting Continuing Resolutions or otherwise take the political blame for a government shutdown.  Subpoenas?  What’s the punishment for ignoring a Congressional subpoena?  Something that has to be enforced by the men with guns that the President controls.  Impeachment?  Everyone remembers 1998-1999, unless they don’t.  Presidential nominees only need Senate confirmation.

I’m sure Trump realizes all this by now.  I fully expect him to say something something “pen and phone” within the next several months.

* The biggest disappointments from an immigration patriot standpoint from yesterday are Kobach, Brat, Barletta, Corey Stewart.  The danger in those losses is that Trump could start paying more attention to Jared Kushner rather than Stephen Miller on immigration policy.

* Blue team saw Gillum lose in Florida when all the polls thought he’d win, and Abrams lose in Georgia even though that was somewhat expected.  I think the lesson they’ll take from that is to tell Kamala Harris and Cory Booker to sit this one out, read the Riot Act to their identity politics SJW/BLM militants, and run up a pale stale male in 2020.  Notwithstanding my prediction about 2020.

* Illinois Governor:  Not surprised at the outcome, very surprised at the margin.

It means the state will go bankrupt sooner rather than later, and I hope that when they stick their hands out to Trump asking for a bailout, for all of the problems Chicago caused him, I hope he tells Illinois what Gerald Ford told New York City.

Alternatively and in better news, it could reinvigorate the Southern Illinois statehood movement.

* Texas: Abbott won by an easy margin, which means that Cruz’s narrow win has a lot to do with Cruz. Cruz won narrowly this year for the same reason Trump won Texas two years ago by a margin lower than a typical Republican wins the state — Because Trump and Cruz taking potshots at each other when they were the last two standing in the Republican Presidential primaries in 2016 soured each one in the minds’ eyes of devotees of the other in the state, meaning enough Cruz diehards passed on Trump in 2016, while enough Trump diehards passed on Cruz yesterday. Yet and still, both won, in climates where a win is a win no matter what the margin.

* I wrote this as a comment in our favorite doggy’s open thread, but I’ll post it again here for entertainment purposes.

I’ve written here several times that German as a language has a way of mashing up simple words into long compound words whose proper contextual translation has almost nothing to do with the literal translations of the simple words so combined.

Here’s a word that the German media used a lot in the last few days and are using today as they cover the American midterms (shilling for Democrats, of course):

Halbzeitwahlen

Halb = Half

Zeit = Time

Wahlen = Choosing

Okay, so what is “half time choosing?” After the first half, coach sits the starting QB for the second string rookie?

Really, the word means “midterm elections.”

Realizing that there’s really no need for Germans to have such a word for their own political culture, because there are no such things as “midterm elections” per se here or in most countries. Two of which I’ve already experienced, state government elections (Landtag), which almost always occur not during the day of Federal elections, are interpreted as “in between” referenda on the Federal ruling party and Chancellor, and of course what happened in Bavaria and Hesse was bad news for Ang.