Trump’s Acceptance Speech

I haven’t read it yet, but putatively, this is it.

I should note that I’m living in an empty house in Florida, renovating it for sale, with no access to media, other than over-the-air radio, tethering off my phone for Internet, and leaving garage door open in 90+ weather to hear Sirius on the rental-car radio. I feel like I’m living in the late 20th century.

[Update a while later]

I’m very interested in what Thiel says. I’m listening on NPR.

83 thoughts on “Trump’s Acceptance Speech”

  1. We didn’t have jetpacks when I went to school. We had to drive a car.

    “What’s a school?”

    1. Probably, but I pay for bandwidth when I’m tethering on my phone. I have a ten-buck AM-FM radio. I don’t really have to look at the Orange Swan. I’d probably enjoy looking at Ivanka more, but I’m not going to pay for it.

      1. Would you please Rand, judge the speech on it’s own merit? Your insight is valuable to your readers, but it’s poisoned when all you see is a con man.

        1. When I see him as a con man, based on his entire life history, and evaluating his life versus his lies? How can I evaluate it otherwise? How can I believe a word the con man says? Why should I?

          1. You were correct when you said this about Obama 8 years ago, and you are right again this time. Doesn’t matter that O is a Dem, and T is a Repub. Men with faulty character should not be trusted and should not be elected.

            Women that break the law, expose foreign policy secrets, and use their office to shake down people for personal gain should not be trusted and should not be elected.

            Catch 22

          2. Why should I?

            Because it’s not about Trump, con man or otherwise. When Trump becomes president, he won’t be the government.

            Is Peter Thiel just another con man? He’s saying the same thing Trump is. The state of our union is obvious to everyone but Jim. How many millions are seeing the same thing as Theil and Trump?

            I just can’t believe your dislike for Trump has blinded you to the bigger reality. Not just you, but everyone that’s trying to explain to us ignorant folk that these con men mean anything but never what they actually say.

        2. When someone keeps saying, “me”, and “I” as if the rule of law has nothing to do with leading, he has a tendency to look like a third world dictator. We hated it with Obama, but now it’s okay with Trump?

          I’m saddened by so-called conservatives rushing to a man without principles.

          Cruz’s one flaw was that his wife worked at GS. It pales to the flaws of Trump.

          It just tells me that human nature is human nature. People flock towards so-called alpha males when they feel powerless.

          1. Cruz’s flaw is that he’s a natural born Canadian and ineligible to run for POTUS, which the media would sit on until the Friday before the election, followed by a few days of “Is he even eligible” across the MSM.

            Also, he still has Cuban citizenship.

    1. Oh, wait! I could have done that?!

      Oh, I didn’t realize it was an app for looking for monsters in your neighborhood. Isn’t that what Tinder is for?

  2. Can I ask what people thought about Cruz’s speech? I thought the speech was reasonable and that he stood for his principles – I thought sound Republican principles , I was surprised he was booed and that he’s been so demonized, it was the sort of reaction I’d expect at a Nazi rally with a speaker hamstrung with a conscience congratulating but failing to endorse Hitler.

    1. Reagan never endorsed Ford in 1976. He wasn’t booed, that I recall. I think you’re right about the Nazi rally. These delegates remind me of the Brownshirts.

      1. But Mr. Reagan didn’t end his speech with “vote your conscience” or something to that effect . . .

  3. “In 2004, Mr. Thiel made a $500,000 investment in Facebook, the earliest big bet on what was then one of many social networks.”

    By sheer coincidence Thiel studied at Stanford and Facebook started at Stanford as well. But yeah college is useless.

    I am no fan of Thiel.

    It is not hard to find Republicans in California. They’re even a majority in SoCal.

    1. 1) Facebook is in Silicon Valley now, but it started at Harvard. You don’t have to be a fan of Thiel, but at least be a non-fan based on facts.

      Theil didn’t get an early shot at Facebook because he’s part of some Stanford Mafia, he got it because he’s very smart and very astute – just like Elon Musk. Facebook had much larger and better-established competition when it got started. Theil looked at Zuckerberg and then at the schleppers at MySpace and didn’t even have to be a genius to figure out who was going to come out on top. But it helped. Facebook was not widely regarded as any cinch bet at the time.

      Theil and Musk both got rich by being smart and gutsy. Then they both got even richer by being even gutsier.

      2) Republicans are increasingly scarce on the ground everywhere in California, including Southern California where they are certainly no longer anything remotely approaching a majority. Nor, it would seem, are ever likely to be again for the foreseeable future.

      Ever since Jerry Brown unionized the California civil service in 1975, the Democratic Party has been, effectively, a state-supported institution. The teacher’s union ruined the formerly good schools. The Greens put an effective end to expansion of state infrastructure. That substantially tarnished the Golden State for anyone who might formerly have been tempted to come here, as the phrase once had it, “to seek their fortunes.”

      At the same time, Brown administered a masive dose of steroids to the formerly quite modest California welfare state, opening the state wide to layabouts from the other 49 states. Many moved here. California now has three times the number of welfare clients per capita as any other state. They all know whom to vote for and they do.

      California used to be the fastest-growing large state in the U.S. Texas has long since taken over that position. California’s population is now growing at no more, and perhaps a bit less than, the national average rate. Texas may well surpass California as the most populous state if current trends continue for another 20 years.

      If it wasn’t for all the relocating welfare clients, California would be shrinking. Much of the ex-Californian population has gone to Texas. Much of that population – whom I’ve come to refer to as “Reverse Okies” – is Republican. California used to be reliably Republican and Texas reliably Democrat. Now it’s the reverse. Not so hard to see why.

      Even many of the illegal aliens who come over the border in California catch a bus to Texas once they’ve set foot in El Norte. Why wouldn’t they? Texas actually has jobs on offer and California, increasingly, does not.

      That $15 dollar minimum wage recently signed into law by Gov. Moonbeam is due to start seriously biting in a couple more years and is likely to make right now look like the Good Old Days by comparison.

      1. True. California’s prop 13, in conjunction with high property values make it an increasingly untenable place to buy a house for first time buyers. Existing home owners profit at the expense of the young. It’s a backward incentive system.

        You haven’t even listed off the industries that have fled the state. Car manufacturing, Aerospace, mining, chemical production, oil and gas and perhaps soon, farming.

        Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and cheap, illegal immigrant labor keep the state propped up.

        CA is a bailout waiting to happen.

      2. My mistake then. I mixed up the college Zuck attended to for some reason. I do remember that Facebook was popular in colleges around the US (inc. Stanford) before it went global though. That’s where the name comes from. Student year books.

        Regarding Elon, I’ve heard Elon and Thiel knew each other through Stanford connections though.
        IIRC Thiel used to be a derivatives trader at one point. He’s got degrees in Philosophy and Law so I don’t consider him to have tech chops like Elon. He may be more tech oriented than other people because of his parents and people he knows but I seriously doubt his technical ability. Then again I don’t know the man personally and most likely never will.
        Mind you I don’t think he’s useless. He was one of the main founders of what was an extremely risky business legal-wise (PayPal). He did see the market opportunity early (from what I heard Elon copied their idea, went after the same segment after hearing Thiel’s group was working on it, and later they merged efforts). Thiel probably also handled legal aspects even though he did none of the technical aspects that I know of. They could have failed though. PayPal could have been the next Napster. They were doing operations without a banking license, or without following the regulations, and a lot of the end-user transactions ended up being money laundering transactions. It could have easily ended in tears. Uber right now has much the same issues.

        Texas? I’m not certain about other sectors but, in the tech sector from Silicon Valley, everyone seems to be moving to Seattle in the last couple of years opening offices there. Many of the companies that existed in Texas instead collapsed and closed down. Most of the activities I hear being done in Texas are due to special needs like Elon does with his test site. California doesn’t have nearly has much cheap land where the neighbors don’t mind you testing rocket engines in.

        As for the housing problem I think it will correct itself eventually. But the prices will always be high. California’s got fantastic weather and its close to a lot of jobs and some of the best education facilities in the US. I think the prices could go down if the local government was more flexible though. I’ve read a bit about the drama Google’s had in Mountain View to get the space to do their new HQ and how they won’t let Google built vertical construction to house employees at the same time they claim they’re inflating house prices and making other people’s rents go up. Insane.

      3. I think Trump’s Wall has to leave California on the other side. That alone would be enough to save the nation.

      4. That $15 dollar minimum wage recently signed into law by Gov. Moonbeam is due to start seriously biting in a couple more years and is likely to make right now look like the Good Old Days by comparison.

        My prediction now is that it won’t appear that bad job- and wage-wise. People will move to where the jobs are, just like they have done with Puerto Rico. So we will still see rather high employment in California at that magic $15 per hour and slightly higher. They’ll be packed into places like San Jose or just leave the state for greener pastures.

        But Central Valley is going to look like someone laid a string of neutron bombs up I-5.

  4. So I just saw an web ad fundraising for Trump. The title “Aspire to Greatness”, it is square with a diagonal divider going top right to bottom left. In the upper left area, it has a picture of Trump in his “Make America Great Again” ball cap. In the bottom right; it has a picture of the Space Shuttle launching. Ugh. This is who we have up against Hillary?

  5. I was taken by Glenn Loury’s comment a few weeks ago (freely paraphrased): Trump should be spending 25% of his time from now to the election speaking to black voters. “You’ve been voting Democrat my whole adult life. What have they done that worked? Now we have had black mayors in all of our major cities. We’ve had black governors. And we’ve had a black President too. Are they racist? But what have they done that has helped the black community? What are they suggesting that was a new idea fifty years ago. More of the same. More of what isn’t working.
    Everyone is saying I’m a racist. Here I am; talk to me. I want to do things that work. I plan to end the deadlock that keeps underprivileged Americans in schools that don’t teach them. Because of the Democratic Party, schools can’t fire teachers, and most of the money given for education goes to bureaucrats in DC and in state governments. I plan to get our schools _back to where they were 60 years ago: where almost everyone in America (>95%!), white or black, who went to school – learned to read and learned math. Mrs. Clinton says she plans to send everyone to college for free. She can’t pay for it, but still: You know what colleges teach these days? Remedial reading, and remedial arithmetic. College is going to help these kids? Are they even going to graduate? You all know the answer.
    One of the pieces of legislation that Mrs. Clinton touts proudly is welfare reform. Do you all know that welfare reform was twice vetoed by President Clinton? It was actually passed by a Republican Congress under Newt Gingrich, passed several times till they could finally get it by the president. Now it’s one of the Clintons’ proudest signature achievements. Well, which is it? Democrats were screaming then that it was going to destroy our safety net. If they’re proud of it now, well, it was created by Republicans. If fixing welfare was a bad idea, why is Mrs. Clinton boasting about it?
    We need to start doing things that actually work. Work with me, and we can try to find real solutions. You can listen to the people who keep screaming that you can’t trust me because I’m a racist. The ones who make a living from the government, a deal they worked out with the Democratic Party – just keep blacks voting for us. Or you can make up your own mind.

    1. The black community can be turned right now. And Trump is enough of a iconoclast to be the one they might believe could do it. And that’s how he wins an election. Keep all your Never-Trumpers: if a significant fraction of blacks turns against their leaders and votes for him, it’s all over, landslide.
      But who knows what Trump is going to do.

      1. President Obama has 90+% approval from black voters. Why would they support someone who accused Obama of faking his eligibility for office?

        1. Maybe you’re right. Maybe they will all base their votes on this kind of trivia. Or maybe someone can convince them that it’s important who’s president and what their policies will be, and it’s time they stopped getting distracted.
          But you could be right. That’s what they’ve been doing my whole life: Look! Racist! I’m not sure, though. I think a lot of them are fed up.

        2. Because Obama was black, and Hillary is not black. Now that they have a choice between a white man and a white woman, there’s no reason to choose a white woman.

          Obama destroyed employment in this country. Black men were very hurt by these policies. They see Trump as a strong man to fix the problem.

          1. Obama destroyed employment in this country.

            Huh? We’ve had 70+ straight months of private sector job growth, the longest streak ever. Black male unemployment, like unemployment in general, is way down, from 14.9% in February 2009 to 8.2% last month.

          2. I knew you’d bring that up, but you are wrong. The job participation rate is the lowest since the Carter years.

            You are bringing up fudged statistics.

          3. @Jim “Huh?…”
            Heh. I think black people will make up their own minds on how awesome this recovery has been, and whether they’re employed. Bogus stats are good for people who don’t have to deal with the reality of job loss, even if you don’t count the ones who are no longer registered as unemployed because they’ve given up looking.

          4. “We’ve had 70+ straight months of private sector job growth, the longest streak ever. ”

            Only if your definition of job growth adds in new jobs but fails to subtract lost ones.

            In other words – if you live in fantasyland

          5. The job participation rate is the lowest since the Carter years.

            You’re absolutely right that the participation rate for people 25-54 has been falling. It fell under Bush and under Obama. I get the sense that economists aren’t sure why this is; this page has a discussion of some theories.

            Aside from the question of why so many people are dropping out of the labor force, it’s unquestionably a good thing that people who want to work can find jobs more readily today than they could seven years ago.

          6. even if you don’t count the ones who are no longer registered as unemployed because they’ve given up looking

            Those people are counted in the U5 and U6 unemployment rates, which like the general U3 unemployment rate have fallen significantly during Obama’s time in office.

          7. Only if your definition of job growth adds in new jobs but fails to subtract lost ones.

            No, we’ve really had 70+ months of net private sector job growth. You can look it up.

            And yet it’s the weakest recovery since the end of the Depression.

            Which isn’t all that surprising, given that it’s the only recovery from a global financial crisis since the Great Depression.

          8. Better than seven years ago is a bar that no one could limbo under.

            Maybe so, but recall that four years ago Mitt Romney was promising that with his policies we could get U3 down to 6% by the end of 2016. The prospect of 6% unemployment was quite tantalizing then.

            With Obama’s policies we got there in 2014, and then on down to around 5%. The performance you downplay in hindsight was not a foregone conclusion. If we’d had the exact same economy under President Romney, it’d be bullet item #1 in his case for re-election.

          9. Jim

            Part-time employment for economic reasons soared by 468,000.

            The unemployment rate declined to 4.7% because a whopping 458,000 people dropped out of the labor force.

            You can look it up here

          10. Jim, try this:

            http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm

            If your side hadn’t let the banks off the hook (Bush was responsible for TARP), and if you handn’t DOUBLED our national debt, we’d be in a much better situation.

            Glad all those bridges got built with that trillion dollar stimulus packages. Wait, that money went to the states’ public unions? What? OMG, we were fooled?

          11. “Huh? We’ve had 70+ straight months of private sector job growth, the longest streak ever. ”

            You are the perfect example of what people are totally fed up with in this country – and why Trump is the nominee.

            Lies, prevarications, dissembling, wordsmithing….trying to tell people they do not see what they so plainly see.

            You are to blame for Trump.

          12. Part-time employment for economic reasons soared by 468,000.

            Yes, that figure jumped by 468k in May. It then fell by 587k in June, so it’s now lower than it was in April (numbers in thousands):

            April: 5,962
            May: 6,430
            June: 5,843

            The month-to-month unemployment data is noisy, but the longer term trends have been steady or improving for six years now.

          13. people who want to work can find jobs

            You want fries with that? I’m sorry, I’ve just been replaced by a machine because I’m not worth $15/hr, says some guy trying to support a family before getting any real skills.

          14. trying to tell people they do not see what they so plainly see.

            Thanks, Gregg. Gaslighting by Jim is psychological abuse; using statistics the government has a huge incentive to lie about.

        3. 1) Because Obama isn’t running.

          2) Because Hillary is not Obama

          2) Because they are waking up:

          From the Washington Post:

          Still, polls show a gap between the positive feelings black voters have for Clinton and those they hold for Obama.

          A Washington Post-ABC News poll released last week found that 75 percent of African Americans thought that Clinton understood the problems of “people like you,” as opposed to 91 percent who felt that way about Obama in a survey last fall.

          “At least with Obama, he gave pride to our young men and was a good role model,” said Daniel “Happy Jack” Cobb Jr., 73, the owner of Happy Jack’s Grocery and Market on Jacksonville’s north side. “Hillary needs to prove to us that she’s genuine and really true. And I’m not even sure that would help. We’ve been snakebitten too many times before.”

          Prove that she’s genuine?

          MUWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!

          And note that they realize they’ve been snake-bitten…….

        4. Jim said;

          “President Obama has 90+% approval from black voters. Why would they support someone who accused Obama of faking his eligibility for office?”

          Jim I don’t often agree with you, but I certainly agree with you here. It is absolutely an apt question as to why Blacks would support the person who accused Obama of faking his eligibility for office.
          http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/8478044/Birther-row-began-with-Hillary-Clinton.html

          Or, for more blatant racism, what did the lefty Daily Kos post have to say about those pics and videos where Obama was both made blacker and his image widened to give him a bigger nose, lips, etc?
          http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/3/5/469677/-

          So, Jim you certainly do have a point… why should blacks, or anyone, support a racist like Hillary Clinton?

          1. Hilary wasn’t going after Obama over the issue of eligibility due to racism, but because he stood between her and power.

          2. “Hilary wasn’t going after Obama over the issue of eligibility due to racism, but because he stood between her and power.”

            Maybe true. But the important point, to me, is that is was Hillary who FIRST raised the eligibilty issue.

            Not the GOP which lefty liars try to convince is the case.

          3. is that is was Hillary who FIRST raised the eligibilty issue.

            No, she didn’t. Read past the headline of the article you linked to: the claim is that anonymous Clinton supporters circulated emails questioning Obama’s eligibility. Clinton herself isn’t responsible for that, any more than Trump is responsible for everything any of his supporters do.

            But Trump is responsible for what he did. He questioned, without any basis, the legitimacy of Obama’s certificate of live birth. He claimed to have sent investigators to Hawaii who “couldn’t believe” what they were finding (of course Trump never actually revealed what they found, or the investigators’ identities, so it seems likely he was lying about the whole thing).

  6. I read the speech…just reading it, the speech hits all the right marks. I don’t know how it was delivered because I didn’t watch.

    Whether or not Trump means what he says is an entirely different question. But the text was good.

    The only things he left out of the speech – that I would have added – goes something like this:

    “For 8 years you’ve been immersed in a fantasy land. You are admonished to not believe what you plainly see. And if you speak up about what you clearly see, then you are branded a racist, a homophobe, a fascist.

    No more:

    YES – the Fort Hood shootings were due to radical Islamic terrorism.

    We DO know the motivation of the Pulse killings – radical Islamic terrorism…

    (and I’d continue with every single event that Obama and Hillary deflected from radical Islamic Terrorism.)

    Hillary DID lie about the video being the cause of the Benghazi massacre – that massacre occurred because Hillary was incompetent or – more likely – simply didn’t care.

    Yes Hillary and Obama and Kerry did make a deal with the Iranians that gave them everything and extracted nothing.

    YES those three did bring the world closer to nuclear destruction.

    For 8 years we’ve watched various government agencies be weaponized and used against peaceful law abiding citizens. That ends on January 21, 2017. If you vote for Hillary – the weaponization will increase at an alarming rate.”

    In a speech like that, when you start listing the things that for years people have been told were not true yet they know them to be true, the crowd gets revved up.

    And since the list is so long the speech could have gone on much longer and the crowd could have been much more revved up.

    But no matter. Whether or not he gets to try to do all those things depends upon his campaign.

    1. Gregg, I think you’re right to add the caveat about not hearing Trump’s delivery. I read the speech and then watched it live, and I think it was a substantially different experience to watch it. Also, for Rand, I’m reminded that people who listened to the 1960 debate on the radio thought Nixon had won it but people watching on TV thought he lost it.

    2. Yes Hillary and Obama and Kerry did make a deal with the Iranians that gave them everything and extracted nothing.

      FWIW, Hillary Clinton didn’t make the deal — the formal negotiations started after she left office. She did help create the circumstances that brought the Iranians to the table by tightening sanctions.

      And it’s ridiculous to say that the deal “extracted nothing”. Iran has destroyed centrifuges, closed facilities, and submitted to new, more intrusive inspections. They are further from a nuclear weapon than they were a year ago.

      YES those three did bring the world closer to nuclear destruction.

      That is 180% from the truth.

      If you want to talk about bringing the world closer to nuclear destruction, what do you think of Trump’s statement that he wouldn’t honor the NATO treaty?

      1. And it’s ridiculous to say that the deal “extracted nothing”. Iran has destroyed centrifuges, closed facilities, and submitted to new, more intrusive inspections. They are further from a nuclear weapon than they were a year ago.

        Wow, what a wopper of a lie. This is beyond the pale. Sure, they can cut some of their centrifuges, just like we used to eliminate old nuclear weapons under the SALT treaties. Get rid of old, stuxnet-hindered centrifuges and keep the newer ones?

        Thanks to you Democrats we have a nuclear North Korea. Thanks to you again, we’ll have a nuclear Iran.

        1. According to the IAEA, Iran has eliminated 97% of its uranium stockpile, destroyed the core of its Arak reactor (which they could previously use to make plutonium), removed 13,000 centrifuges (2/3 of them) and halted uranium enrichment at Fordow. Those are all steps that put them further from a bomb.

          It is 100% false to say that we got nothing from the deal. Without the deal they’d be going full bore, with 30x as much uranium, 3x the centrifuges, plutonium from Arak, and no IAEA monitoring.

          1. Those are steps that put them further away from a bomb.

            But it still allows them to make a bomb! They are conducting missile tests that they agreed not to do.

            If you really think this is going to stop Iran, you are sorely mistaken. Making nice with a snake doesn’t mean you’re not going to get bit. Have you listened to their rhetoric?

            Thanks for North Korea, by the way. You’re naive posturing and anti-Western stance has made the world far more dangerous.

          2. But it still allows them to make a bomb!

            Would you agree it makes it harder for them to do so? That’s something, not nothing.

          3. Would you agree it makes it harder for them to do so? That’s something, not nothing.

            It’s nice to know there are condoms that are effective 90% of the time. I certainly would use those for birth control.

          4. “Would you agree it makes it harder for them to do so? That’s something, not nothing.”

            no i do not agree, More if your notorious gaslighting:

            They got rid of old stuff; never stopped shopping for new equipment, and German intel says they cut the time from a year to 6 months.

      2. “FWIW, Hillary Clinton didn’t make the deal — the formal negotiations started after she left office. She did help create the circumstances that brought the Iranians to the table by tightening sanctions.”

        If you think that the talks and dealings weren’t going on while Hillary was Secretary you are dumber than I thought.

        Iran has violated the agreement – German intelligence tells us that.

        Obama shrugs it off.

        There will be no snapback sanctions as we all predicted.

        German intel says they can get a bomb in 6 months – not a year.

        Iran with nukes.

        Yes Obama Hillary and Kerry have brought the world FAR closer to nuclear destruction than ever before.

      3. “If you want to talk about bringing the world closer to nuclear destruction, what do you think of Trump’s statement that he wouldn’t honor the NATO treaty?”

        First let me remind you I don’t like Trump either. Either one of those clowns will be a disaster for the country. So your weasely miserable attempt to show hypocrisy fails – as usual:

        You can’t make excuses for Hillary because Trump is the nominee. Well you can – if you are at a 3rd grade level.

        Secondly, one reason I don’t like Trump is that he says outrageous things and I’m not even sure he’s aware that he’s saying them. But to be fair to him, my take on his statement is that the NATO deal is going to be re-negotiated and Europe will be paying more of the freight.

        But as I say, with Trump you never know.

  7. “what do you think of Trump’s statement that he wouldn’t honor the NATO treaty?” Sounds like a good idea. The Soviet Union has been gone for a long time. If Europe wants protection from Russia let them do it themselves, or pay for it.

    1. Just four years ago the GOP nominee was describing Russia as our #1 geopolitical adversary. It’s quite a swing from that to Trump’s pro-Putin stance.

      1. “Just four years ago… quite a swing…” Yup. Good. Bill Clinton was the one who refused to reset after the Soviet Union collapsed, picking sides against Russia in Kosovo. There is no reason for us to be taking sides there any more.

        1. You wouldn’t take sides between Russia and Estonia? Russia and Poland? Russia and Germany?

          “Not taking sides” between Russia and NATO allies would be a revolution in U.S. foreign policy.

    2. Russia is a major adversary. But, that doesn’t mean we should continue subsidizing Europe’s defense with a blank check. They’re big boys. They need to shoulder their fair share.

  8. Peter Thiel (quoted in Jeff Foust’s First Up newsletter):

    “When I moved to Cleveland, defense research was laying the foundations for the Internet. The Apollo program was just about to put a man on the moon – and it was Neil Armstrong, from right here in Ohio. The future felt limitless. But today our government is broken… Instead of going to Mars, we have invaded the Middle East.”

    Odd for a self-styled libertarian to wax so nostalgic for massive government R&D spending. And Thiel surely must know that the candidate he was endorsing had called for and supported those invasions.

    1. He was referring to a time when the government worked. He’s pointing out that it is failing. Can you not see that our government has failed, and it has nothing to do with money?

      1. I’m genuinely curious: how can you measure how well the government is working? The government R&D that created the Internet was, I think everyone now agrees, money well spent. But there were lots of other government projects at the same time that did not have the same payoffs. Apollo was a milestone in human achievement, but it wasn’t sustainable. Who’s to say that NASA’s current spending on commercial cargo and crew won’t have a greater long-term impact?

        I don’t have a good overall answer. One partial answer I would point to is poverty: the fraction of the population without means is lower today than it was decades ago, and government programs are directly responsible for that. If one of your goals for government is to minimize the number of people enduring material deprivation, I think you can say that the government is doing a better job than it used to.

        You could also look at things like life expectancy, education levels, happiness, GDP, crime, addiction, productivity, leisure time, etc. Those things are affected by government actions, but they’re affected by other things as well. For the most part we’ve seen improvements in most of those areas the last couple decades.

        1. how can you measure how well the government is working?

          Simple; the more it works, the less well it works. Again, you use the favorite tactic of the left and lie with statistics.

          the fraction of the population without means is lower today than it was decades ago

          Let’s assume you aren’t being so slick as to include the great depression and just look at the last decade. Further let’s assume you are stating a fact. What does it mean?

          Incomes have gone down (about $4k this decade.) So by ‘means’ you are referring to less than they might have had otherwise. Obama’s father is the first I know of that proposed that 100% tax would work since the govt could provide everyone’s means. These fascists actually think this could work!

          What happens to motivation when you take everything away?

          What happens to motivation when you ‘give’ everybody their means?

          They becomes slaves… but that’s exactly the intention. Isn’t it?

  9. Well, you missed Donald Trump groping his daughter in front of a national convention and saying that the National Enquirer should have gotten a Pulitzer for reporting on Ted Cruz’s dad.

    But I’m sure Ken will say that all businessmen do that.

    1. An awful lot of NY businessmen do that and I do not approve. This is one of the reasons the mafia exists. My cousin had a problem with her boss. One call to some guy by my uncle and the problem ended the very next day. The guy he called had no relationship with my cousins boss and probably didn’t give it a thought after his minor action to solve the problem. The world has more going on in it than most people realize.

      When spending a week at a business installing a system, you wouldn’t believe the kind of abuse these two Brooklyn girl’s put up with from their boss. I asked them about it and they said it was the same everywhere.

      It’s the place.

        1. Not sure what fantasy you’re referring to. I do know that what is real is mostly beyond the experience of most people. Most people live small lives. They see the world with blinders on and think that’s all there is. I’m not claiming to have seen much more, but I do know there’s more to see.

          Thinking you know the truth is the real ignorance. Even physical reality has become ‘fantasy’ since discoveries in the 19th century.

          Are you suggesting the mafia and it’s influence are fantasy? I’ve not been at the center of it, but it’s as real as a heart attack.

          Perhaps the abuse I witnessed by employers to their female employees was a fantasy? Please Edward, share your superior wisdom and enlighten us.

          1. Not sure what fantasy you’re referring to.

            The bizarre notion that “an awful lot” of businessmen commit incest and your uncle and his mob friends are some sort of vigilantes cleaning it up.

          2. Edward, do you know the meaning of incest? ‘Groping his daughter in front of a national convention’ does not qualify. It would however qualify as behavior I do not approve of.

            So [“an awful lot” of businessmen commit incest,] mischaracterizes what I said.

            Speaking with most people, I wouldn’t have to be so careful with my word choices… but mischaracterization is a tactic I often see with some. I will be much more careful responding to you in the future.

            I was relating things I observed. I went all over the five boroughs installing hw & sw for about a week at each business, giving me the opportunity to observe things you might not otherwise. Many bosses treated their female employees poorly, even disgracefully.

            My cousin had a similar experience from a more personal perspective. One phone call ended it. That wasn’t the only time I’ve seen things fixed that way in that community.

            You call direct observation a fantasy. That does not speak well of your reasoning.

  10. In my opinion the major reason we have Trump on the ticket is due to Democrats like Hillary, Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and all their moon-batty acolytes.

    Their gaslighting for the last 8 years…telling us to ignore what we know, see and experience and listen to their lies … has infuriated everyone except the Big City lefties who never experience the ramifications of their votes.

    The latest incarnation was Obama’s appalling press conference about Munich – where he jokes around and makes it all about himself and his soon to be empty nest…. oh it’s nothing at all…….

    or “We may never know the motivations …” if someone who shouted “allahu akbar” as he murdered people in Pulse.

    Or you can keep your doctor

    Or it was a video that caused Benghazi

    Or “You have to pass the bill to see what’s in it…”

    Or how Fergusng turned out to be in the cop’s favor even though Holder tried as hard as he could to convict the cop through endless autopsies and more gaslighting.

    Or “I don’t know the facts but the police acted stupidly…”

    or any one of the thousands of examples which, if I listed them all here, would fill Rand’s disk drive…….

    THAT is why we have Trump.

    Because people are smart enough to believe their eyes and experiences and know what the 8 years of Obama has done…and how their monn-batty, kool-aid drinking, bow tied bum-kissing birkenstocked acolytes push the narrative.

    And they are royally pissed off.

    So you Democrat idiots:

    When you think about pulling the lever for yet another crooked lying, cheating, dishonest, grubbing moron, just remember what voting for someone like that gets you….

    Trump

    1. “Don’t you see how ideologically impure Trump is?”

      We do. What part of ‘we do’ don’t you understand?

      He’s calling a spade a spade. If you think I just made a racist comment, you’re an idiot. If you think I just made an un-PC statement, you’re right. What the American voter knows, that their betters don’t, is that PC, defined by the media arm of the left, is literally killing us. We are not going to be exterminated quietly.

      So we get Trump. Warts and all. We get bikers and gays united. We get those on the right fractured into totally opposing camps.

      We get conservatives uniting with the left (astounding, but revealing) because they don’t like Trump’s way of saying the truth, obvious to anybody that hasn’t thoroughly taken in the kool aid.

    2. I should add that the GOP has an equal if not slightly larger share of the blame:

      They lied, they told us they would hold firm to conservative ideals, in order to get elected and then sold out at almost every opportunity. The one time they hung tough was in not voting for that hideously destructive Obama-cide Bill.

      So the GOP elites did the same: lied; Tried to pull the wool over our eyes; Pretended.

      Which gave us Trump.

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