Put this up at the New Clarion a few minutes ago with a few additions.

Shumer and the Democrat's resistance.

Just after President Trump announced Kavanaugh for the SCOTUS, Senator Chuck Schumer announced he would fight the conformation with every thing he had.

This means Schumer had no interest in Kavanaugh's judicial philosophy, his past rulings or decisions. The knowledge that Kavanaugh was somewhat of a conservative was all the Senator needed to know.

Before Kavanaugh was named, Sen Schumer said then he would vote against any nominee by Trump. Justice, fairness, facts, evidence and reality means nothing to Sen Schumer
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So what does matter to him? Power. The power of legalized force he and his party want to use to force their collectivism on the rest of us. The entire Democrat Party in infected with lust for power.

Blind resistance to a reality that, in their minds, is not supposed to exist is all they have. Thus the ease with which they use wild exaggerations and outright falsehoods against Kavanaugh, Republicans and Trump.

They can't put together a reasoned argument against Kavanaugh because they don't know how and this is because they weren't reasoned into the beliefs they hold like collectivism and altruism.

They accepted on faith the notion that collectivism-the supremacy of the state not the individual-and the morality of sacrifice on which it is based, is the morally good.

So anyone who talks and acts in favor of individualism (even if inconsistently) and of self interest is the morally evil and must be destroyed. That in my view is what we are seeing today from the Democrats and their servants in the media.

More on their irrationality to come.

The Diverse Hatreds of the Democrats

 This is an insightful post on hatred. It hints at the fact that the leftist class's treatment of hatred as the cause of racism is backwards. Hatred is a consequence of racism not its cause. The cause of course is an idea, the idea that a person's bloodline causes what he thinks. No it doesn't. The cause is collectivism, the notion that a man's value is to be determined by some group (collective) to which he belongs.

The Diverse Hatreds of the Democrats

Kavanaugh Hearings.

I haven't watched today's hearings but did watch Wednesday morning and all day Tuesday. It was almost laughable the way the Democrats kept posturing as great defenders of justice while for the last ten years looking the other way as the DNC rigged the 2016 election against Bernie Sanders, as Hillary moved government documents from government servers to her own private server-a felony-as she had that server destroyed along with some cell phones while they were under subpoena-another felony-as she paid for the creation of a phony dossier meant to frame Trump and who knows what else.

It was obvious from the beginning the Democrats were only interested in delaying the hearings until after the Nov elections in hopes that Trump would be impeached and the Dems could then appoint a progressive judge to the bench. Several Democrats made motions to delay or suspend the hearings. Fortunately chairman Grassley didn't allow it. You can be sure the Democrats would never allow it if rolls were reversed.

Senator Feinstein tried hard to push the idea that certain weapons can only be classified as assault weapons and not as defensive. She has to evade a lot of reality to promote that notion. Common sense should tell anyone that any weapon can be used for assault or defense. What she is promoting is a very narrowly defined, out of context definition. It requires a concrete bound mentality that seeks to define something by focusing on only one of its essential characteristics, assault, while ignoring the other, defense. Thus it is a concept designed to deceive.

If a weapon can be reclassified as exclusively an 'assault' weapon in the mind of a public conditioned to use its eyes as tools of thought, then that public will be influenced by the notion that if assaults are to be stopped, then those 'assault' weapons should be banned. It should be obvious that banning such weapons is blaming the weapons for causing the assaults. Senator Feinstein is evading more than just self defense, She evading the human element. She ignores the fact that humans have free will and can choose to use any weapon for good or evil. It is human choice that is the causal factor in all assaults and defenses.

I don't think Sen Feinstein invented this invalid concept of 'assault weapon'. More likely it was thought up by some progressive intellectual. She heard it and bought into it completely because it relieves her of the responsibility of  asking why do people choose evil? That question requires a lot of heavy conceptual thinking for which most of our leaders are not equipped. I thought judge Kavanaugh handled it well as could be.

The Republicans offered heavy praise to the Judge citing his many accomplishments and endorsements. The Democrats seemed totally uninterested. If the hearing doesn't end today I might look at some of it tomorrow. Maybe.

Blogroll update

 I just added this awesome blog to my blogroll. It's by Peter Schwartz author of  the book "In Defense of Selfishness" and many in-depth articles on currant events from an Objectivist perspective.
http://peterschwartz.com/  HT https://www.hbletter.com/ Enjoy!

From freedom by right to tyranny by majority rule

Why is the Progressive left calling for no borders, abolishing ICE and the border patrol and demanding sanctuary cities?

Every nation needs borders if for no other reason than to define where its law enforcement authority starts and ends. Otherwise the Mexican government could cross our old, now nonexistent border and start enforcing its laws on what used to be American citizens. Conversely, our government could do the same to Mexican citizens. This of course would lead to chaos.

Now, I can imagine if all other nations adopted the principles in our two founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and the principle of unalienable individual rights,  then a borderless globe might be plausible, maybe. But wouldn't that mean a one world government? For me, a scary thought.

Or we could throw away our founding structure of a constitutional republic and just join all the other  "Democracies" practicing majority rule. We can ignore the fact that history shows us democracies eventually collapse into dictatorships or blind chaos of one kind or another (see Venezuela here).

This--the repudiation of our founding structure however--is the real goal of the progressives' call for no borders and sanctuary cities. Read any newspaper, any radio or television talk or news show and you will hear a steady refrain on how our "democracy" is in danger or how we must elect Democrats to save our democracy.

That America is and should be a democracy is now taught in our schools. In the public mind we are no longer a constitutional republic but rather, a democracy, a fait accompli for majority rule. Students are coming out of school unaware of the concept of a constitutional republic.

But some will say a democracy can have protections for minorities so it's OK to have a democracy. Not really. As soon as the government tries to protect a minority from some injustice, the majority will scream something like 'since when does a minority dictate to a majority? That's not democratic.'

You see, progressives understand that democracy is majority rule. In all democracies the people are forced to segregate into waring groups all fighting each other for control of government to get their group's needs serviced, usually at the expense of other groups through taxes and regulations.

It is for this majority rule that the progressives in the media, academia and politics lust. They can't force us into their socialist utopian dictatorship unless they become the majority. That's why we see the all out, no holds barred, anything goes assault on Trump and the public who elected him. And it is the public who elected him that is their main target.

In 2016 the collectivist left believed they were only inches away from their socialist utopia. But the voters saw something in Donald Trump they liked more. Perhaps it was Trump's willingness to punch the left in the mouth and keep on punching (with his tweets).

Or maybe it was an emotional response one feels at the sight of an image one has yearned to see for a long time, a man with a spine. For sure Trump is his own man and doesn't mind going up against all odds. This image has to be attractive to many voters. (Yes Trump definitely has a spine but is wrong on trade deficits and tariffs. He needs to read Keith Weiner at Monetary Metals and John Tamny at National review).

But thinking in images is not enough to save a nation or even a presidency. What's needed is a public that can think in principles, that is, general truths on which other truths depend. Our founders studied political philosophy. They could see the truth of democracy's failure in the history of Athens. So they decided to create a constitutional republic based on a set of principles.

A constitutional republic is one where the government is restricted to a set of principles, precisely what the progressives who now dominate the Democrat Party seek to destroy. Without principles people can only act on whims and feelings. They really do want to act on these. Remember Nancy Pelosi's "Can't we just deem the bill to be passed?" In other words, let's pretend. More recently, Maxine Waters' claim that "An impeachable offense is whatever congress says it is." So as a member she gets to act on her feelings! Reality will become what she says it is.

The Declaration of Independence was a document of principles by which the Constitution was to be written. Although the founders made some mistakes, their identification of two major principles made America's freedom happen. They were the principle of unalienable individual rights and the principle that the government gets its just powers from the consent of the governed. Both principles revolutionary in human thinking.

Today it is fashionable to regard the principles in the Declaration as having no legal import. This has lead to the implicit notion that legislators can ignore that document when writing laws. That they have consistently done so is obvious.

Slowly, Americans are waking up to the fact that our schools are no longer teaching students how to think in terms of principles, that principles don't matter, that one must act on the range of the immediate moment regardless of consequences ( Pragmatism).

If Americans want to save America from Progressivism and majority rule, they must attack it at is source, Progressive Education in our schools. It must be replaced by a rational philosophy of education.

For that I would recommend this course.

A valuable first step is to shut down the federal Dept of Education and turn education over to the states. This will do two things. First it will begin the process of decentralization which should continue within each state. Second and best of all, states will do things differently from each other. Best practices will have best results. Those results will be out there for all to see, debate and copy. What's not to like about that?

At least we need to write to our politicians and school boards and demand our schools teach the differences between a democracy and a constitutional republic.

Blogroll addition

I just added Judith Curry's blog Climate Etc. to my blogroll. I highly recommend her blog because she is another quality scientist among the growing number of critics of the catastrophic man made climate change politicization of science.

More Trump hatred.

I'm reposting this from the New Clarion FB page of yesterday.

Wow! The MSM is going all out to smear president Trump over immigrant families being separated at the border. Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post oped titled "Trump, Sessions must be proud of imprisoning kids" claims "The moral outrages from the Trump administration come so fast that they blur together, but this one stands out: The unconscionably cruel policy of ripping the children of would-be immigrants away from their parents at the border."

News slanting alert!

Mr Robinson is using a slanting appeal to emotions here by using the verb "ripping" which has a violent, negative, unwanted connotation. He could have used 'separated from parents at the border' which would be more accurate because that is what is actually done. But which doesn't elicit the frightening, condemnatory emotion he seeks. He's clearly appealing to his readers feelings instead of their reasoning minds.

From what I've read most of the children are reunited with their parents unless the parents are problematic in some way like being a criminal. I do think that immigrants making children walk through a hot, dry desert to our border approaches child abuse and the kids should be separated for their own good. In my view it is the parents who are being cruel.

I have seen many videos of immigrants crossing the border but have never seen little children with them. Until now. This has to be a new tactic that I suspect is financed by progressive sponsors somewhere. The use of children I believe, is to make believable the notion that the immigrants just want asylum.

But asylum is something we grant to people who are being persecuted, tortured and killed in their homeland. That is not happening in Mexico.

There is I'm sure, a deliberate campaign to swamp our entitlement society in order to collapse it. Then the progressives will declare--like the Nazis in Germany did--something like "we can fix this, we know how" and the American voters will let them back in to take over the dictatorship oriented justice system already put in place by the Clinton and Obama administrations.

And the media will celebrate.

Full disclosure:
I'm all for an open door policy but I think we need to stop considering immigration exclusively as a domestic problem. It is also a foreign policy problem and that needs to be addressed.
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To this I want to clarify that I shouldn't have used the word problem in the last sentence. Better would have been the word issue. I don't see immigration as a problem. The main problem we face is two fold: 1, we have allowed our government to set up a giant welfare state that politicians use to buy votes, and 2, we have to hunker down inside our borders because our leaders have neither the moral clarity or moral courage to completely destroy our enemies.

Hatred of the good because it is the good.

Right after congress passed the GOP led tax cuts hundreds of companies began giving $1000 bonuses to their workers. Former speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi called those bonuses "crumbs."

And now thanks to those same tax cuts the country is experiencing record low unemployment numbers. Ms Pelosi is now claiming that those numbers "mean little to families" hit by rising costs of health care under Trump's watch.

First of all, those rising costs were written into  ObamaCare to go into effect after the 2016 election so it's not Trump's fault as she is implying.

But why is she poo pooing benefits to American workers? Ayn Rand wrote about this in her excellent essay "The Age of Envy" in her book "Return of the Primitive." I will paraphrase paragraph 3 on page 131: "If a politician wants to do good for his or her constituents but is unable or unwilling to achieve it and begins to hate those politicians who do,"that is hatred of the good for being the good.'

What Pelosi really means is that workers who get $1000 bonuses are 'crumbs' to her. And workers who now have a better chance to get a job "mean little" to her. What's important to her is not that the workers are better off, but who is causing it. What she is against is benefits that have to be earned. She wants to appear to be the giver of benefits through various entitlements, the unearned.

This should give pause to all those who are thinking about reelecting her in the future.

Trump's International Art of the Deal

 Here is another insightful post from Mr. Greenfield.


Trump's International Art of the Deal

Big Banks Target the Bill of Rights

 The Democrat Party intends to get its socialist dictatorship by any means necessary. Government regulations are meant to replace rights protecting laws. They will eventually win because most people do not know there is a difference between the two. Sadly, even the GOP is ignorant of this difference.

Big Banks Target the Bill of Rights

The March to Our Demise

Danial Greenfield has a good post here on how the March for Our Lives is not really a youth movement.

He's right of course. As he explains, the March for Our Lives is actually a middle aged leftist attempt to recreate the pretense of an idealistic youth movement struggling against the injustice of the controlling adult establishment. These marchers are the prodigy of the hippies and beatniks of the sixties and seventies which led to the student rebellion.

I lived through those times and can assure you the student rebellion was anything but idealistic. On the surface it seemed a rejection of ideas and ideals as such.  Proclaiming their rejection of America's founding principle of individual rights, they carried signs saying "I'd rather be red (communist) than dead." Rejecting thinking is terms of principles, their signs unashamedly announced "If it feels good, do it" testifying to their new allegiance to hedonism and nihilism.

But that's the surface appearance. Principles were indeed involved, the political principle of collectivism known as communism and the moral principle of human sacrifice known as altruism were taught then and still being taught to students today.

It may seem ironic to see the Main Stream Media (MSM) championing the anti establishment protests in light of the fact that ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and MSNBC are the establishment media who have been promoting all the self defense-free school zones and other assorted government controls over citizens. But it's not ironic at all.

The MSM is safe for now. Theirs is not the establishment to be brought down by the protestors. The real target is the Constitutional establishment of individual rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Gun control/restriction/confiscation is the tool to do it. They know that if you don't have the right to defend your life, you don't have a right to life. That is the goal of gun control; your right to life in their hands not yours.