Hammock Dream

In a hammock side by side,

Head to toe, toe to head

Watching you watching me.

Speaking of you, me, us.

Touching your foot, ankle, calf.

The soft, sheathed strength beneath my hand.

You ask a question. I smile: "no".

It doesn't matter where we go.

On Art

Written to an artist friend.

Any creative person confronts the need to balance the muse inside with what other human beings need and value. Both the creator and the consumers of the created are free to do as they please. At some level a 'creation' only becomes 'art' or 'literature' or even a 'product' if a another human being values it enough to consume or collect it. Sometimes this transaction occurs easily and immediately resulting in fame and fortune, sometimes it occurs sequentially and fame arrives later, even posthumously. For most writers, artists and creative entrepreneurs it does not come at all. That is the burden of freedom. The right to do what you will encompasses the right to do that which no one else  understands or values. And the right to keep doing it even if it never pays off. That's why artists have muses and not investment managers in their souls. Freedom is a two edged sword, red with the the blood of its adherents.

The Democrat's biggest problem

Throughout my life the left has dominated comedy: they defined what was mock-able, what was funny. It's helped Dems sweeten their increasingly authoritarian "eat your peas" agenda so voters will swallow it.

But now the Great God Identity deems most humor to be blasphemous. And without it what is left of the left is mostly  stridency and hectoring.

It's not a good look. 

Did SNL really do a funereal lament for HRC's defeat? What a....non joke.

Republicans have become the insurgents the anti-establishment

https://ricochet.com/535983/the-left-gives-up-on-comedy/

The Cultural Marxism underlying the NYT's latest Trump Critique

Read this NYT editorial. In particular note the following sentence:

"Just a few hours after President Trump doused expectations of extracting any confession from President Vladimir V. Putin on Russia’s election meddling when they meet on Monday"

​I imagine a meeting of the "Hard Ones Club": Stalin, DeGaulle, Churchill, Golda Meir and so on. The NYT Editor in chief is there and he says the above. They start snickering, then giggling, then guffawing, they bend over, put their hands on their knees trying to catch their breath, the tears streaming down their face. Harold MacMillan catches his momentarily and says "but my dear boy, stealing each others secrets and meddling in their affairs is what nations do".

Then the sweet 27 year old naif who 'literally knows nothing' continues:

"his own Justice Department issued a sweeping indictment of 12 Russian intelligence agents for hacking the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton presidential campaign." to renewed peals of laughter and "please, please stop, you're killing us boy!".

Stalin wipes the drool from his mouth and says "Imagine that! Indicting your enemies, Rooshvelt!: you should have sued Tojo for all he's worth! FDR shoots back "Yeah and old Adolph would have been a nightmare of a deposition, har, har!". 

It is really hard to take seriously anyone who thinks like this.  In the real world one expects one's adversaries to do what they can to discover your secrets and discomfit you short of a shooting war. It is the responsibility of the 'adults' to take precautions to ensure that that result is minimized. Something that the DNC, John Podesta, Hillary Clinton and BHO did not do. Adults when confronted with the Russian actions would have never admitted them....running around squealing 'we got an owie from that mean man!". They would have worked on countermeasures and payback.

But there's more to this than simply a childish response to serious nation state contention. The whole "Trump colluded" imbroglio is fundamentally a post modern event.  Think about what's going on in our Universities: it has been a long time since there has been any meaningful amount of traditional racism, misogyny or homophobia yet the obsession over such has never been more hysterical. Of course there's lots of racism and female and gay hatred on these campuses but it's done by people who are considered victims so it can't be anything evil. Which is so very post modern. Recall that Foucault and the other postmodern literary theorists asserted (and have been swallowed hook, line and sinker by Academe) that the meaning of texts (words to you and me) is defined by the audience, not the writer/speaker. I used to get so upset about this because it was used to pervert the messages that great authors had sent us but I wasn't thinking nearly big enough.

You see the Foucaultian revolution in language and thought means that crimes are only crimes if I - meaning the established power base - conclude they are. It's the foundation of the Critical Legal Theory school of law so heralded by Harvard. Harvard said: isn't it outrageous that the powerful define what is evil and illegal and with crocodile tears their administration and the  minions of the State said "oh yes, so sad".

Which is how you can get Halloween costumes mocking hillbillies while banning sombreros. You see one is a funny critique and the other a moral crime.

And I think it is this Foucaultian revolution or more accurately inversion that has bubbled up into the ranks of the Times and the elite of your Party. The inversion of words and deeds. In a world where there is little or no physical conflict among the privileged, words become more real than deeds. The fact that BHO and the Dems negligently allowed the hacking is less significant than the words that Trump uses to denounce what after all is the nation state norm.

I'm sure you've seen the black clad Antifa protesters doing their thing. What strikes me about them is how many women are in their ranks. Because in any real violent confrontation blows that would level a man will maim or even kill a woman. Yet they pretend that there is no difference. I was at a French Caribbean bar called "Under the Volcano" for Bastille day. I was with - among others - a young Nigerian Data Scientist from Church, she was describing to me how she was taking Karate and how her Sensei was emphasizing that violence was to be used as a 'last resort'. 

I'm afraid I'd had a couple drinks so I was a little blunt. I said: "But you're a woman, your upbringing and biology lead you to always treat violence as a last resort, indeed your normal response to violence should be to flee it. Your challenge isn't restraining your violent impulses or some lack of technique, it's the difficulty (absent having a child to protect) you have in generating a violent response when that's what's needed. You have no experience with violent confrontation. By contrast I grew up in a world where violent confrontation between boys was common: I haven't fought since I hit my mid teens but I know what I would do and know that I can do it if I were put in a situation needing it. Frankly no matter how much training you have in Karate, my real experience, social and biological predisposition and superior muscle mass and density would almost guarantee me a first punch victory."

Yet she is constantly told that she doesn't need to even consider men as she goes about her life, that she can go where she likes, dressed as she likes and if any man takes advantage of that it's wholly his fault. There is a great old Bachrach piece called 'Wives and Lovers" it's a man giving advice to a young wife that she needs to try to keep the attentions of her Husband because 'men will be men'. We used to have an entire infrastructure to restrain 'men being men' it was imperfect and in some ways oppressive to women but it recognized the fundamental biological reality. Today we've swept all of that away and in it's place we have college seminars to fight "Toxic Masculinity" as if biology can be rectified by lecture.

But that's what so much of what passes for social discourse has become. It's cultural Marxism. Recall traditional Marxism: it attempted to reorder economic relations to fix socialist theory resulting in immense chaos, waste and poverty, not to mention mass murder. So we've jettisoned it. In its place we have cultural Marxism which has its own religious set of beliefs such as Men and Women are equal unless in our Postmodernism it benefits women to be different.

I interpret this Cultural Marxist academic world to be a place where the real risks and contention in biological and geopolitical world are superseded by the local battle for political power.  And as I've feared, the triviality of academic political discourse has seeped into our 'End of History' geopolitics. The piece you sent me was a Cultural Marxist masterpiece:  the enemy in the Editors of the NYT's mind is not and never has been Putin or Russia - for if it was they would have vigorously criticized BHO's supine response (indeed his open mic grovelling to Putin's lackey) to Russian aggression. But they did not - they've spent 18 months screaming "we've got an owie! and it's that bad man Trump's fault".

Nor did they hold BHO and co accountable for allowing the 'hacking'****. Their goal isn't protecting the nation from Putin, it's deposing the current occupant of the Eagle throne. This assumption that there is no world out there worth worrying about and that all the real action is in Washington is very late Roman Empire. Because of course it was all of the chaos and damage from battle after battle for control of the center that progressively destroyed the Empire's ability to fight off mass incursions into its domains. Eventually the incursions became migrations and were so great that the migrant groups became active participants in the dynastic contention. At that point, stripped of it's economic and military dominance and having no cultural coherence, the Western Empire fell.

History doesn't repeat itself but today's news sounds a whole lot like that Roman Funeral Orchestra tuning up.

May God have mercy on the United States of America.

And that's what I think about that.

****And How in Hell can the FBI know there was Russian  hacking of mail servers that it never examined? Because the Dems never let the Feds have them to examine in first place. The Feds never charged anyone with obstructing justice for destroying Hillary's campaign or the DNC's servers. Destroyed them while loudly claiming that partisan crimes had been committed on them. 

The Federal state's lifeblood is credibility. It is bleeding out rapidly. Perhaps this is Jeff Sessions and Robert Mueller's goal: pretend to be saving the beast while surreptitiously opening more veins.

Sad to see Mike Hayden humiliate himself.

Someone who lives him should intervene.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/michael-hayden-one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-other/

Why is Bill Clinton still a headliner? Power worship.

Dems would get a lot better hearing from social conservatives if Willie 'Lolita' Jeff Clinton wasn't still humping his dessicated body all over the fruited plain.

But the party of state power worships  power. So Willie's Willie runs wild with no consequences.

What a dick.

https://nypost.com/2018/05/19/its-time-for-bill-clinton-to-take-a-walk-in-the-chappaqua-woods/

More Evidence of California Gnosticism

The Gnostics were a loose group of (mostly) ex-Christians and Jews who believed that the key to spiritual enlightenment was the discovery of special hidden knowledge (Gnosis) inside of each of us. It tended to lead people in strange and irrational directions, following their internal urges rather than dealing with external reality.

It seems that the 'progressive' movement and it's leading American polity: California has a bad case of Gnosticism. The CA legislature keeps passing policies that viewed economically are insane. One is its mandating of 100% 'renewable' electricity generation - primarily wind and solar. The result has been constantly escalating retail electricity prices (by contrast Texas, CA's biggest competitor has retail rates around 7 cents).



And the tragic (but for a conservative like me, funny) thing is that careful economic analysis in Germany (which is also beset by wild energy Gnostics) shows that the 100%  goal is unachievable. Well at least by an economy that wishes to remain 'advanced' and 'wealthy'. This is in spite of the grand announcements that 'renewables' are getting cheaper than even natural gas. The problem of course is that 'renewables' aren't reliable. So to deliver reliable electricity every MW of renewables must be backstopped by a MW of quick starting natural gas generators. Or many MWs of even more wildly expensive and environmentally dubious 'storage'.

But why let reality invade the fantasies of Coastal California? Where electricity is probably less important than any other place in the world. Warm winters and cool summers seem to breed madness. Or at least self centered cruelty.

California doubles down on crazy with a solar panel requirement on all new homes

Aaron Renn explains just how crazy California governance has gotten.

California, where a modest, burned-out home in San Jose just sold for nearly $1 million, well above its asking price, is in the throes of a housing-affordability crisis. The state’s latest response to the housing crunch: a mandate that builders install solar panels on every new home in the Golden State.

It’s tough to overstate the high cost of housing in California, even relative to the state’s high incomes. In San Jose, the average home costs 10.3 times the area’s median income, according to Demographia’s International Housing Affordability Survey.

This high ratio is not due to some local bubble—it’s 9.4 in Los Angeles, 9.1 in San Francisco, and 8.4 in San Diego. Elsewhere in the country— even in relatively prosperous cities with high growth—housing is more affordable. In Columbus, Ohio, and in Atlanta, for instance, home prices average only about three times the median income. Even New York City, considered “severely unaffordable,” scores just 5.7.

Policy gnosticism is a rapidly spreading disease that will flourish until the God's of the Copy Book Headings return. But the rich Lord's will not pay for their folly, only the poor bystanders will.

At least 70% of the most important scientific "findings" can't be replicated

The National Association of Scholars has issued a report that shows the immense scope of the scientific reproducibility crisis. Academe and the scientific establishment have become so corrupted by the huge sums thrown their way that they've abandoned the focus and humility that earned them society's approbation in the first place.

It will surprise no one that the masses of corrupting money come from Uncle Sam and our children's futures.

Governments are terrible producers

This just in: The corrupt and incompetent regime in Venezuela has almost destroyed it's crude oil industry, resulting in spiking oil prices.

Perhaps the most underrated reason for the surge in oil prices after 1973 was the fact that most global oil production was nationalized on or around that time. "National" companies whether they be steel mills, banks, airlines or oil companies, are terrible at producing. So the result was long term supply shortages as corrupt and incompetent apparatchiks in dozens of kleptocracies did what they do best: obstruct, steal and destroy.

"How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for feminism among the worst exploiters of women?"

With apologies to Samuel Johnson who first coined the phrase as:  "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?"

Scneiderman, Spitzer and Weiner Oh My!

State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman called his Sri Lankan girlfriend his “brown slave” and wanted her to refer to him as “Master,” the woman says.

And when you recall libido in Chief Bill Clinton moved to NYC as soon as he left office it hits you: NYC "progressives" are sure regressive when it comes to their sex lives.

That's the male celebrity left in general, something on the order of 99% of all the credible #metoo charges out there are against men (and the occasional woman) of the left. (Eric Greitens the new, embattled Governor of Missouri seems to be the lone exception - well then there is an almost 40 year old accusation against Roy Moore made during an election campaign).

But the real question is why did all those supposedly "feminist" women tolerate so much abuse from so many powerful people for so long? Why were feminists willing to overlook the obvious abuses (including all the time  Bill Clinton spent on a convicted and imprisoned pedophile's  Lolita Express and Lolita Island)?

Power. I have long argued that the Democrats have ceased being the party of the "little guy" and in fact are simply the party of state power. And the deal for the party of State Power is that the powerful people that congregate there get what they want.

Indeed Donald Trump was a long time Democrat until his lust for power (and pornstar sex) combined with circumstances to cause him to flip and run as a Republican.

To my way of thinking the reaction of Dems towards his victory is more than just anger at losing, it's the rage of a party against the traitor or apostate. And the paradox is that the rage has driven Trump - a natural wheeler dealer power maven - to betray his natural constituency.

And where are Republicans and conservatives? As Bush partisans used to chant "home in bed with their wives" and with their modest, power-lite agendas.

But can you blame all these men for choosing to be Democrats? Until recently it offered them a shot at power and sex with few constraints or downsides. And becoming a Republican? Booooring. Because if a Republican trips up or hurts or heaven forbid kills a woman (Ted Kennedy) there will be no prestigious feminists to shout "it's just about sex". And the press, my God, the press will crucify you.

"How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for feminism among the worst exploiters of women?" Isn't it obvious: "that's the way you get the most action".

Lord forgive me but I find it all so very funny. Schneidermanpalooza here.

"UNEMPLOYMENT HITS 3.9% UNDER TRUMP AND, RIGHT ON CUE, HERE’S SLATE: “The unemployment rate is meaningless."

The lack of self awareness among our press is epic. Then again most of them are ”27 year olds who literally know nothing".

Hattip: Glenn Reynolds

California SC Kills Gig Economy in CA

Historically California's legal regime has facilitated its amazing success in generating new world beating businesses. But now the states rapid turn towards anti capitalist 'progressivism' is beginning to bite into that edge. The State Supreme Court has found that independent contractors are actually employees, eliminating the flexibility that small, nimble companies have used to get to velocity quickly. This makes it much harder for these small companies to do business in CA. Our software company already avoids doing any development out of our Cupertino office.

Other states are hungrier. And less arrogant. We Texans look forward to another prosperous decade feeding off of the beached whale that CA is increasingly becoming.

Brass Balls Barry had to send pallet loads of cash....

"BREAKING: North Korea has released all U.S. detainees at the request of President Trump."

Brass Balls Barry had to fly pallet loads of small denomination terror cash to the Mullahs to achieve this.

Even after he'd already removed sanctions, "paid back" money for arms the Shah ordered and unfroze 110 billion in assets.

I guess some people just aren't good negotiators....

Dershowitz on Mueller's sordid FBI history

If he were a mobster Robert Mueller  would be the target of a major investigation. Unless he was working with the Robert Mueller FBI. Then he'd be safe.

"Respected" doesn't mean what it used to mean. At the link.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/alan-dershowitz-maybe-robert-mueller-should-be-investigated

Run Yankee Run - How migration patterns contradict the "Narrative"

There is a mainstream press 'narrative' about the various US states and regions that has been sharpened by the election of Donald Trump. It goes something like this:

The states that voted for Donald Trump, particularly in the south, did so because they  are living in the past. Their economies moribund, their values hateful, their personal prospects poor, they cling to their guns and their bibles. By contrast, Clinton voting states are the future: their cities are 'booming' filling up with the young and the educated, they are egalitarian, wealthy, sophisticated. 

So how could one test this claim? You could go through a whole litany of statistics and data and compare the two sets of states along all sorts of dimensions - sort of like US News does for colleges or other 'best of' listings. But that's susceptible to what I call "League Table Manipulation". The people doing the rankings tend to pick criteria that are important to them and it turns out that the entities that they are rooting for do well against the criteria that they picked. It's artificial, academic and easily manipulated by whomever is creating the rankings.

The best way to test the attractiveness of any service, entity or country is to see how the 'customer' responds to it - what economists call a 'market test'. You don't evaluate the success of a church by its doctrine but by it's attendance. You don't proclaim a product  great based upon statistics, you do it based upon sales. This is because it's only when people deploy their time and money that they reveal their true preferences. You can survey people all day long but you'll never get the truth until you see what they actually choose when no one is watching (if you don't believe me, ask President Hillary Clinton).

This is particularly true when they make choices about moving to a different city or state. People make these moves based upon a complex set of calculations that vary from person to person. They balance wages, job opportunities, the cost of living, the quality of public services, the attractiveness of the physical environment, taxation levels, how welcome they feel and so on. There is no way to create a set of ranking criteria that could reflect this complicated decision. In fact most people couldn't even describe their true decision process to you.

And among all the moves people can make within the US, the most powerful statement of preferences is when people move from one region of the US to another. It is very expensive in money, time, relationships and disruption terms to move your family far away from where it has been established.  It's also a differentiating behavior: the US is filled with the descendants of people who when they looked at their lives in the "old country", found them wanting and did something about it. Which is one reason the US is such a dynamic country: the people here are (in evolutionary terms) 'selected' for independent initiative and effort.  The same, on a smaller scale holds for domestic migrants from one region of the US to another: they tend to be more aggressive, more dynamic, less willing to tolerate the status quo. Which I suppose is of benefit to the regions they move to.

So I decided to look at the US Census' Domestic Migration statistics between the four regions of the United States: Northeast, South, Midwest and West to see what that reveals about the preferences of Americans. If the 'narrative' is true then we should see the young, the educated, minorities and non natives flocking to the Northeast and the West where virtually all of Clinton's support comes from. After all, if these places are 'the future' wouldn't people flock that way? And people should clearly be flooding away from the South which the 'narrative' holds is the most backward, religious, gun loving, bible beating part of America. This was certainly true for the century between 1865 and 1965 where there was a constant flow north and westward.

But we don't. In fact we see the opposite. Below is my transformation of the domestic migration statistical breakdown into ratios. Ratios less than one indicate that there are more people with those characteristics leaving a region for other parts of the US than are moving to it. A 1 indicates balance whereas a 2.0 would indicate that for every person that leaves a region, two people are moving to that region. I've colored negative ratios red. You can find the original data that I used to calculate these ratios here. The chart has some problems on mobile screens but you should be able to see it well horizontally.

Observations

• Just looking at the colors tells the tale. The South is virtually all positive migration while the other regions are a sea of red, negative net migration statistics.  Overall 1.5 people move to the South for every one that moves away. The Midwest and West both have similar net out-migration losses and the Northeast is hemorrhaging people at the same rate that the South is gaining them. People really, really want out of the Northeast.
• The argument "the south is the most racist" is rather conclusively refuted by the fact that African Americans are migrating to the south at a higher rate than any other racial category and their rate of flight is highest from the 'woke' Northeast and West.
• OK, I admit it: there is one racial/ethnic category where people are migrating away from the south: "All remaining single races and all race combinations". It turns out that Eastern Rite Samoans and Radical Sioux don't like the South. And the mixed race Orthodox Jew/Sharia Arabs are leaving too.
• When it comes to the education level of immigrants, the 'narrative' can claim one partially accurate statement: More persons with graduate or professional degrees are moving to the west than are leaving it. The Northeast can take solace in the fact that it's losing these high earners at a rate lower than any other category tempered by the fact that the backward, deplorable South beats them decisively. The Midwest can take no solace from the fact that they are the big winners of the migration sweepstakes for....high school dropouts. 
• The single most skewed to the South migration category is that of international immigrants who have become citizens. Typically people immigrate to gateway cities like NY or LA but over time as they become more prosperous and more familiar with the country they leave the Northeast and West. Some head to the Midwest but overwhelmingly they go South. And since this group has no long historical or familial ties to any region, their migration pattern can be said to reflect the purest expression of the relative attractiveness of the regions. It's also another massive refutation of the supposed 'xenophobia' of flyover country - perhaps it's the coastal Valhallas that have the real racial problems - driving mass flight by 'people of color'. 
• Finally income level. There's a bit of good news for the west: it is holding its own among those neither poor or near poor. Although the poor and near poor flooding out of the Northeast and West give lie to the 'narrative's' claims that the coasts are more 'compassionate'. I'm afraid the Midwest's news is all bad. It is winning the battle....for the poorest Americans and losing tax base Americans decisively. The Northeast continues their "Run Yankee Run" theme while the South, well you know.

I have a few more thoughts at the bottom but here's the data. 

United States Domestic Migration 2010 to 2015	Ratio of Immigrants to Outmigrants
	Northeast	Midwest	South	West
TOTAL 5+ years	0.66	0.83	1.51	0.90
SEX
Male	0.66	0.86	1.47	0.91
Female	0.66	0.81	1.55	0.90
RACE AND HISPANIC ORIGIN
White alone	0.67	0.83	1.50	0.91
Black or African American alone	0.62	0.73	1.82	0.67
Asian alone	0.65	0.80	1.51	1.20
All remaining single races and all race combinations/1	0.83	1.29	0.90	1.00
White alone, not Hispanic or Latino	0.68	0.81	1.49	0.95
Hispanic or Latino/2	0.73	1.07	1.39	0.74
White alone or in combination with one or more other races	0.68	0.84	1.48	0.91
Black or African American alone or in combination with one or more other races	0.61	0.81	1.70	0.71
Asian alone or in combination with one or more other races	0.65	0.78	1.42	1.26
EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT
Not a high school graduate	0.53	1.45	1.41	0.68
High school graduate	0.73	0.90	1.44	0.79
Some college or AA degree	0.57	0.88	1.66	0.78
Bachelor's degree	0.63	0.70	1.70	1.00
Prof. or graduate degree	0.94	0.60	1.18	1.39
Persons age 5-24	0.59	0.93	1.55	0.85
NATIVITY
Native	0.67	0.83	1.50	0.91
Foreign born	0.65	0.89	1.57	0.87
Naturalized U.S. citizen	0.44	1.10	2.19	0.67
Not a U.S. citizen	0.81	0.80	1.30	1.02
POVERTY STATUS
Below 100% of poverty	0.60	1.23	1.57	0.61
100% to 149% of poverty	0.54	1.25	1.37	0.75
150% of poverty and above	0.69	0.73	1.51	0.99

1/  Includes American Indian and Alaska Native alone, Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone, and Two or More Races.

2/  Hispanics or Latinos may be of any race.

"-" Represents zero or rounds to zero.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, 2015 Annual Social and Economic Supplement

Parting Thoughts - The 'Narrative'
As we've seen every single kind of American catalogued by the Census Bureau - educated or not, white or minority, young or old, immigrant or native, rich or poor - are flooding to the most 'deplorable' region in direct contradiction of what the 'great and the good' have been telling us. How could the 'narrative' be so wrong? I think there are a couple possibilities:

• Cosmopolitan Parochialism: the media and it's academic allies live in the parts of America that lack ideological and intellectual diversity. Most of them attended the same colleges and live in neighborhoods that voted 80 or 90 percent for Clinton. They don't 'get out' much and when they do they tend to flock to places with more people like them. Occasionally in their jobs they have to go out and rub elbows with the 'Great Unwashed' but they tend to approach 'the other' anthropologically - as "Gorillas in the Mist" so to speak. In other words, they're ignorant.
• Confirmation Bias: Relative to earlier decades many of the major cities that the 'narrators' live in have undergone significant renaissances. Since they don't spend much time in southern cities like Dallas, Austin, Miami, Houston, Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville they don't realize that the progress they see at home is eclipsed by these much faster growing, more dynamic cities. They just can't conceive how the 'deplorable' rubes of their imagining could achieve such things.

Either way it's a tragic testament to how lost our so called 'intellectual elites' are. And a good indicator of why their politics will likely continue their bumpy downward trend. The first key of intelligent politics is 'confront reality' and they just can't seem to do that.

Parting Thoughts - Regional Balance of Power Changes

The South is by far the most populous region and is gaining more than half of all the US' population gains with the pace accelerating as the coastal cities' self inflicted real estate and budgetary crises intensify. I don't really think that many of the 'narrative' producers understand the true correlation of forces and how fast it's changing.  But they'll find out - even if trapped in their echo chambers, they're the last to know.

2017 US Regional Population Statistics

Region	Population	Percentage	5 Yr Change	Percentage
Northeast	56,471	17.3%	909	7.9%
Midwest	68,179	20.9%	697	6.0%
West	77,411	23.8%	3,716	32.2%
South	123,659	38.0%	6,212	53.9%

Note on International Migration
What about international migration?  Immigration certainly is a statement of preference for the US over other countries but what does it say about the specific places in the US that immigrants migrate to? In my opinion foreign immigrants move to the US with relatively few options and very little information. They tend to move to the place where others from their country or culture have settled before, usually immigrant gateways like LA, New York, Chicago, or more recently, Miami or Houston. Then as they get established, learn about the country and have more options they make domestic immigration choices. It is those choices that reflect their true preferences between US regions.

The So What? Response
"So there are more rubes piling into poor states. The Northeast coast and west coast are far more affluent and isn't being well off more important than crowds of poor people pouring in?  If it were true, you'd have a point but by and large it's not. Median wages are indeed higher on the northeast and west coasts but the cost of living and levels of taxation are even higher still.  So states like NY, CA, OR, VT and HI are actually 5 of the six poorest states in terms of real, take  home median pay (WV is the other). And CA has the highest poverty rate in the nation. These of course are big reasons why more people leave than come to these states. They can do the math too.  My analysis that demonstrates this can be found here.

Note on Regional Diversity
Obviously these regions do not reflect completely the "Trump vs Clinton Schism". The Northeast includes Trump state PA (and one district of ME), the Midwest includes Clinton states MN and IL, some of the states in the west are Trump but the great majority of the people live in Clinton states CA, NV, OR, WA, CO, NM and HI. The South is the most monolithic with only DC influenced VA going for Clinton.

There is also a temptation to treat these statistics as proxies for the biggest states in each region. But it's important to understand how those states perform relative to their regions.

• New York performs significantly worse than the rest of the NE as a whole, with the highest level of domestic outmigration of any state.
• IL performs significantly worse than the rest of the MW as a whole, currently the only US state losing population
• California performs significantly worse than the rest of the West as a whole. 
• Texas and Florida perform significantly better than the rest of the South as a whole (although states like NC, SC, GA and TN are performing as well).

Note on Choice of Years
I chose the 2010 to 2015 timeframe because that was the latest multi year data that the Census had available that was also after the Great Recession, although the trends identified here appear to be accelerating.