"That's our boy". Political success has many fathers.

Trump is surely right when he says, " "I think they are warming up. I want to be honest, I have received so many phone calls from people that you would call 'establishment,' from people -- generally speaking conservative Republicans --that want to come in our team,”

Of course they do. Success has many fathers.  "That's a my boy, Trump".
He likes the stuff that other rich people like and he's winning.

Democracy, if necessary, but not necessarily democracy.

What an uproar with Trump and Sanders to our south!  Candidates popular with the people might get the most votes.  Today the National Review has rounded up pundits for a special dump Trump edition.   The common people (the usual translation of "demos") have the power to elect in Canada and the States. If you don't like it, make your case for another candidate but don't be a scold.  A lot of people think they are the cream afloat upon the voters' milk and believe it's their duty to make us vote for cream.

I used to milk a Jersey and put it
(the milk, not the cow)
in just such a jar.

Maybe the popular vote is not the best way to select leaders.  There's always the option of picking the first thousand names in the phone book for high office and contrariwise, the option to bid cash for high office.   There's the option of pre-qualifying voters by education, IQ, income or property. You can have public service exams to select the prime minister and his ministers.  You can always fall back on genetics and pick family members as we seem to have done with Trudeau II.  (Clinton II, Bush III).

As long as democracy by popular vote of all adult citizens is the law of the land, I suck it up when I don't get my way.   2016 is the year for more homogenized milk and less separation of the cream and the skim.

Copy Palin And Get Yourself Some Canadian Media Presence

Grumpy because media folk are locked to the left and think they are the only reasonable ones? I've seen a lot of advice to invest in media, not politicians.  Guess who did that?  Sarah Palin.

Glenn Reynold's advice:  "Don't waste your money on campaign donations. Want more influence for your buck?  Buy a liberal media outlet or better yet a women's magazine."

Palin didn't buy "Elle" but she became an entertainment celebrity. She's now being trashed as a sell out but she's moving votes successfully.  Copy her, rather than mock her, in our own Canadian way.

She takes flak for being an entertainment personality.  That's better than the Obama strategy to get invited onto other people's personality shows to chill out and win "likes".  Our voters are part of a culture, not cadres in a party structure.

"For most people politics is about personality, identity, and group loyalties. This is more like rooting for a sports team than support for particular ideas, ideology, or policy. It's always has been this way and probably always will be."

It's always going to be that way.  Now that everyone can publish their opinion cheaply ( and that includes me), popular populist politicians are going to be the norm.  Politics is changing and for the better because more players are in there trying to move the market in their favour.  That's competition.

Trump is pertinent to Canada because our PM is on record mocking him and the "mother country" has debated refusing him entry to Britain.  We can't operate in the American sphere without walking that back.  My mother would be shocked at such rudeness.

Trump Gets Credit For Iranian Prisoner Release?

I've been thinking this and Trump has now claimed it.
A prisoner swap is small potatoes but Obama had kept it off the table until suddenly now.
My interpretation:  Iran thinks Trump may be the next American president and they don't like the prospect of going from Obama softball to Trump hardball.  Wiping out one of Trump's planks while getting something for themselves, makes sense.

Every story is complex and the specifics of who is being released matter.  The impulse to release the prisoners, the proximate cause, may well have been triggered by Trump's ascendancy.   Remember, this was the same week Iran took American sailors at gun point and humiliated Obama.  Obviously Iran doesn't mind being disliked.  They're getting some hackers back and the US is getting some civilians back.

The Great Canadian Threat

Cruz is the "Manitoban Candidate", Goldberg observes, "hiding in plain sight until he can impose the metric system on our children and make us all passive-aggressively polite".

Source

He makes two memorable points:

"The issue (natural born citizen) remains unsettled because it matters so little",

and 

"Even less plausible than Cruz’s not being a natural-born citizen: that Donald Trump actually cares about this."

Dolts to the left of us, Dummies to the right. Which party has the smart voters?

Two studies show it depends on the topic.  One study found complex and nuanced language for topics that differ by party.

"Conservatives exhibited more complex thinking on ... open-door immigration, smoking, castration, and easy access to birth control. Liberals were complex when discussing organized religion, abortion on demand, making racial discrimination illegal, and being assertive".

A second study found dogmatism common to both left and right but the topics differed. 

The researchers report, "Conservatives are indeed more dogmatic on the religious domain; but liberals are more dogmatic on the environmental domain." 

Where are the populist candidates? Canada's behind the curve

The digital revolution means Jane and John Doe voters will publish more opinion than party poobahs.  The unintended consequence is more democracy.  The insiders' table is getting crowded by the "wrong sort" of people, but not in Canada.   "Feel The Bern" Sanders and "Build the Wall" Trump are crowding the top of the charts to our south.  Farage, Wilders, Le Pen, and various "evil right wing fringe groups" get traction elsewhere.

Pre-approved

The common element is populism, saying what a lot of voters really think.    The closest we come in Canada is Elizabeth May who is a narrowly-targeted populist, speaking to the vegetarian tin-hat brigade.  How come "This Man Is Approved By The Party" describes the leaders of the only three Canadian parties that count?  I envy the ferment across the line in the US of A.

LOL:   Don Cherry for PC lead?  
Change is on its way.   Remember, to "reform" something is simply to change its shape or form
and doesn't mean "improve".

There's more where this came from

Canadian example that Trump will win big

Four months ago, my colleague at work was choosing to vote Liberal or NDP.  Yesterday he tells me, "Trump makes a lot sense, he's the only one who tells it the way it is".  If the Canadian centre left is this easily wooed, be sure that the crossover vote from Democrats will be YUGE.  Left-to-right is not the only voting dimension.   Straight talk-vs (doublespeak and dissimulation) is a voting dimension.  What's true and workable is a third dimension but no one appears to be offering it and I probably wouldn't know it if I tripped over it.

Christianity Better For Atheists

Dawkins prefers Christian culture.   "Christianity might be a bulwark against something worse" he says.

Your Grandkids Won't Have Relatives

Big Government is baked into our future, thanks to cute babies, one per couple.

The math isn't hard.  After two generations of one-baby families, the kids of your kids will have no sisters or brothers, and no cousins, either.  And no uncles and no aunts either.

Big Government and Big Data are the new ties that bind.  They will grow and not shrink and so will the dependency on support from strangers who don't love you.  Politics is grooving to the left, fueled by demographics.

I don't see "The Waltons" or "Cheaper By The Dozen" making a comeback, but with  pink-tinted glasses, I see networks forming through social media, networks that meet needs kin groups used to meet, networks that leapfrog right over Big Government and make such top down governance a teentsy bit obsolete.

Anti Theft Device For Car

This device targets Millenials, since most active thieves are younger types.

Software counts emotions

EMOTIENT  guesses and counts the emotions of the people being recorded in real time.  Think "angry crowds"  "shoppers"  "students"  "focus group"  "negotiators".  APPLE bought this startup recently and the demo is impressive.
 
Emotient Analytics in Action from Emotient on Vimeo.

If we were out of the hole, CPP or education funding could be doubled

Don't pooh pooh interest payments on the national debt.  The Fraser Institute puts the spending together for both levels of government in Canada and the debt burden is horrifying. 

One infographic:

Better yet, let the people
who earned those billions blown on borrowed bucks, keep those billions.

Insane crowding on earth.

People are insanely crowded into small patches of earth.  See map.  The north fringe of India, the environs of Beijing, southern Indonesia and a little patch at the mouth of the Nile account for most of world population.    If labour is wealth, China and India are top of the heap.

Breaking: Hillary disguised email to remove security classification

Smoking gun at Hot Air.
Hillary e-mail instructs aide to transmit classified data without markings
Email conversation chain reproduced at link.

“If they can’t, turn into nonpaper w no identifying heading and send nonsecure.” That’s an order to violate the laws handling classified material. There is no other way to read that demand.

Gun deaths: Black murder and White suicide. Men first and Women last.

Culture channels violence inwards for whites and outwards for blacks.

AND
Culture channels violence from men towards men.

This story was picked up by the Washington Post but left out the sex chart.  I'm guessing that deaths by gender make women look favoured and men look like victims, not the flavour du jour.

Men don't like men who don't like sports.

There's an awkward hush when they learn I don't know who's playing in the Stanley or Grey Cup this year.  The Power Line comment hits it:

"Here’s a fact of life, men don’t like men who don’t like sports. If you want to have influence on other men you have to be able to talk about sports knowledgeably.  .. Treat it like homework."     (more at the link)

Tale of Two Stacked Townhalls. UPDATE

Compare and contrast:  When there's not enough seating, stack the room with supporters.

Obama is doing a town hall tonight with CNN.  Admission by invitation only.
Trump is doing a Vermont town hall tonight but only lets supporters in.

Re Obama:  "Staged propaganda session" with enough seating for a soiree.

Re Trump: Seating in Vermont for 1400 but over 10,000 tickets given out in Bernie Sanders home town. Pick your headline:  "Donald Trump Bars Undecided Voters At Vermont Rally" or  "Donald Trump says he's "taking care of my people".

UPDATE:   Obama said nothing but cleverly.  Trump supplied red meat that addresses a problem and doesn't create more government:

From Obama's townhall, Thomas' Sowell's review:

 It was beautifully choreographed, like a great ballet, and performed with consummate skill and understated eloquence.    As for the substance of what Obama said, there was very little substance, and much of it false.

From Trump's:

“I will get rid of gun-free zones in schools — you have to — and on military bases on my first day. It gets signed. My first day – there’s no more gun free zones,” Trump told supporters as they cheered wildly.   Trump pointed out that gun-free zones were dangerous because they attracted people considering a mass shooting.

PS. A commenter at HotAir explains the 20,000 tickets:  "When the rally was announced, protesters said they would round up all the tickets in advance and then not show up…..their goal was to make
trump look bad speaking to an empty venue. Trump responded by making 20,000 tickets available"
 

Moving money from poor to rich: Your Government at Work.

"The government monopoly of money leads not just to the suppression of innovation ...inflation .. but to inequality too.    Opportunities in finance ripple outwards from the Treasury.  The state spends the money before it even exists;  the privileged banks then get first access to newly minted money and can invest it before assets have increased in cost.  By the time it reaches ordinary people, the money is worth less. 
  This outward percolation is known as the Cantillon Effect - after Richard Cantillon who noticed that the creation of paper money in the4 South Sea Bubble benefited those closest to the source first.   

Money creation by an expansionary government effectively redistributes money from the poor to the rich. "


Excerpt from The Evolution of Everything by Matt Ridley.  A good read.