2019 Hopeful Headlines.

 On most New Years I like to look at the passing year's main events and then ponder what headlines I want to see in 2019. There is an awakening going on but since people wake up to reality at different times and stages, these are in no particular order except the first one which I hold most important.

1. "Public Schools going Private" People are waking up to the fact that government controlled education is destroying education by replacing learning with socialization which always teaches obedience to government force.

2. "Gun Confiscation Legislation Defeated" Citizens are also waking up to the fact that if they don't have a right to defend their life, they in fact don't have a right to life, for how can you have a right to something you are not allowed to keep and defend?

3. "George Soros and Tom Stayer both told by their CFOs they are broke" It won't change much but it's a feel good headline.

4. "Michigan Governor Whitmer switches parties, becomes Republican, pushes privatization" I know that's a stretch but, well, I'm in a wishing mood.

5. "Trump orders more ports of legal entry placed in wall" President Trump offers migrants 4 year path to citizenship via a green card and no voting or entitlements for that time. Steals immigration issue from Dems.

6. "Fed raises rates, crashes economy, blames Trump" People can now get interest on savings. Since all productive investment comes from savings, market rises.

7. "Trump returns dollar to gold standard" President Trump declares dollar to be worth one 1200th of an ounce of gold, lets float from there, economy spasms then booms.

8. "Mass arrests of pols announced" Large numbers of past administration and current bureaucrats indicted for crimes ranging from fraud, obstruction of justice, sex crimes, and even treason.

9. "Trump declassifies documents" Many pols flee country. Mueller promises to end witch hunt. Trump doesn't accept.

10. "Trump, AG> ABA must revoke Mueller and Comey law licenses"

11. "Trump offers China zero tariffs" Today President Trump offered to reduce our tariffs to zero on their goods in return for zero tariffs on ours. Xi considering.

12. "Trump does fireside" The president begins a series of televised evening chats with people explaining the why behind his policies with heavy amounts of evidence.

13. "Airports cancel contracts with CNN, investors flee" CNN files for bankruptcy.

I'm keeping it at 13 because it's already a bit long. My readers are invited of course to add their own. Who knows, maybe these will be more pleasant than counting sheep. Have a happy new year and stay optimistic.

LA Doubled Homeless Budget, Doubled Homeless Crime

 The fruits of government enforced altruism.

LA Doubled Homeless Budget, Doubled Homeless Crime

Reply to Robinson oped

In my last post I said I would respond to WAPO writer Eugene Robinson's editorial which appeared in my county paper the Macomb Daily on 12/6/18.

Mr Eugene Robinson was way over the top with his promotion of the ridiculous scaremongering reports from the G20 meetings and the Katowice, Poland meetings. He states:

"We don't have to wait for history to prove how utterly, stupidly wrong Trump is on this existential issue.

 "We have baked ourselves into an era of superlatives--the rainiest storms, worst    floods, deadliest fires, most punishing heat waves.

The hottest years on record.

The highest levels of atmospheric carbon in hundreds of centuries."

There is only one problem: There is no evidence to back up those claims. They are just that, baseless, arbitrary claims. And all those things he claims--storms, floods, fires, and heat waves, are weather, not climate. No, the "utterly, stupidly wrong" person is Mr Robinson, not Trump.

I recommend The Inconvenient Blog which has great reports the truth about the number of fires here and other articles contrary to Robinson's and the UN's claims.

To see what Robinson's future America might look like, see today's France

Just Another Hobgoblin

My local county newspaper of 12/6/18 the Macomb Daily featured Progressive Washington Post oped writer Eugene Robinson dutifully championing the latest climate change scaremongering report from the Group of 20 meeting in Buenos Aires.

And this on the heels of the United Nations conference in Katowice, Poland which recently issued the most threatening, dire, catastrophic, doomsday forecast ever for us humans. Ever, ever! I will critique Robinson's oped in a following post. For now I just want to focus on its aim.

This doomsday oped is just another of H.L. Mencken's hobgoblins which governments use to keep its citizens "frightened and thus clamoring to be led to safety." All said hobgoblins of course being imaginary.

When I graduated from High school in 1960 it was acid rain that was going to wipe out the human race unless we humans changed our evil ways and modified our industrial way of life.

That was followed by global cooling which would, yes, kill us all by freezing unless we gave up our evil industrial ways.

At about the same time another hobgoblin "population explosion" was introduced which would see us all die from starvation because we wouldn't be able to feed ourselves, unless of course, we gave up our industrial and technological ways.

Following that was global warming caused by carbon dioxide emissions which would result in the  melting of the ice caps and drowning us all unless, again, we get serious about doing away with our industrial society.

Well that didn't come about so global warming had to be morphed into another hobgoblin: climate change. Now they've got us coming and going. Any change in earth's average temperature up or down automatically portends disaster. And, according to these scientists, only the government, an institution with a legal monopoly on the use of force, can save us. What a dream come true for power hungry politicians and money and fame hungry professors and scientists.

Do you see a constant pattern here? Give up our way of life. Relinquish our freedoms. Surrender our rights. Sacrifice.

The Progressives are in no hurry though. These hobgoblins were used to prod the populace into giving up just a little of their freedoms at a time with the creation of government regulatory agencies like the Dept of Energy and  the EPA just to name two. These have issued  myriad of regulations restricting our freedoms and rights.

Unfortunately, Congress has placed all of these regulatory agencies into the Executive branch which means they are not answerable to Congress. Sure, Congress can hold hearings and even hold individuals in Contempt of Congress. So what? Do those guilty of contempt go to jail? Not that I can see. There is no teeth behind such hearings.

This fact is revealed in the excellent book "Deep State"  by Jason Chaffetz former Congressman from Utah. In it Mr Chaffetz shows how the regulatory state pretty much ignores Congress, it's subpoenas, inquiries and even its threats to hold persons in Contempt of Congress.

New to me though is the brazen act of the State Dept requiring a State Dept plant to be present at every meeting between a Congressman and regulatory staff. His job was only to take notes of what was said and report back to the State Dept so they could put their own spin on it. Amazing!

So what does all this mean? To me it means Congress has by piecemeal legislating itself out of existence by abdicating its responsibility to write rights protecting laws in favor of an unelected bureaucracy writing rights violating laws which is what most regulations are.

It also means that all of the controllers that a totalitarian dictator would require to become the next fuhrer or chairman are in place now just waiting for him or her to arrive. It almost happened. Trump's election put a temporary hold on that. The question is, how temporary?

(I deleted a link that did not work)

A Brief History of Leftist Political Violence in 1 Year

 "Hatred of the good for being the good" is the motive of the progressives identified by Ayn Rand

A Brief History of Leftist Political Violence in 1 Year

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
.
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.